I recently convinced Brad to get on the phone with me and talk about everything from product launches to email marketing and everything else having to do with selling premium content online.

Listen in as I put him on the Interview Income hot seat and demand great answers about the best ways to launch an information product, promote it via email and maximize both profits and customer happiness with their purchase.

3 ways to listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here

3) Read the transcript below

Related Links:

- Brad’s site: Financial Marketers & Publishing Group

Transcript:

Tim: Hello, everybody and welcome to my interview here today. I’m talking with Brad Stafford. I’ve worked with Brad and known Brad for a few years now. He has been an affiliate manager for a big financial company in the past and done really well with that. Now, he’s out on his own doing his own marketing firm where he’s helping people who create content make money with it, monetize it in a lot of different ways.

I wanted to get Brad on the phone. We’ve talked to him before but he’s just really an expert in teaching people and showing people what works and knows what works when it comes to creating money out of the content that you’re working really hard to create. So Brad, first of all, thanks very much for joining me on the phone today.

Brad: Absolutely. It’s the least I can do. It’s always good to talk to you, Tim. That’s for sure.

Tim: All right. Well, so there’s a lot of questions that I had that have come to mind over the past few months as I’ve been trying to kind of play with different things in monetizing our content. I know our listeners are always looking for what’s going to work best, what can I work on to make money from the content that I’ve worked so hard for produce? And the first thing I want to kind of attack right off the bat is this product launch versus just constantly putting out drifts of content out there and converting people as you go.

And one of the things that I’ve noticed over the past few months is that A, everybody seems to be doing launches and they seemed to be getting longer to me. They seemed like before a launch just maybe three or four emails. Now, it’s like people want you to send six or seven emails out for their launch. And my sense is that the reason that’s happening is because launches have kind of lost a little bit of their shine and I’m wondering maybe if I’m wrong there or what are your thoughts on that?

Brad: Well, I mean, I think first of all, you know, the launches over the past couple of years have done extremely well. I think that product launches have been done in many different niches. I personally think that the financial world is one of if not the best at it. We have the most rabid audience. Really their ability to buy products is just overwhelming. But yeah, recently, the launches have been sort of hitting a wall and affiliates or affiliate marketers who have the launches that they’re managing are asking more and more and more.

And you asked if it is sort of hitting a wall in getting done. Yeah, I’m not sure 100% if launches are done. I think certainly the economy has thrown a significant ranch in that. I mean, when people aren’t trading, they’re not going to be buying products so it’s becoming more and more difficult to sell to them.

But I also think a lot of leads and a lot of the people who are buying these products and involved in these launches from a customer site, they’ve seen so many. I for one, I’m always signing up to pretty much any email list that I can get myself on and it’s just the number of launches that are coming out on a regular basis. It’s almost like the leads know what’s coming and so they’re, “Well, you don’t really have it.” Okay, you know, I get this then I get this then I get the webinar then I get the pitch, then okay, there’s only a certain amount of time left. So I think a lot of people are sort of they’ve seen that.

There have been some recently that have worked and have worked well, but I think for the most part, the launches are becoming more difficult. And when affiliate managers are asking you to send more and more, it’s because they’re wanting to basically use your relationship with your list and your audience to solidify their legitimacy and their product even more and more and more. So the more that you can send that, the better that they can hopefully convert that lead down the road.

Tim: Now, I know in the internet marketing space, just in that general kind of make money online, I know the launches maybe have really kind of maybe they’ve seen the top of the bell curve and they’re heading down in terms of usefulness. Perhaps in a niche that hasn’t seen this type of promotion, it would work really well, and the financial folks have been doing this for a little while so maybe we haven’t reached that apex yet, but maybe that’s coming.

In the launches that have worked, is there anything that you’ve seen that they’ve done to kind of differentiate themselves from everybody else doing launches?

Brad: Well, I mean the first thing that really changed the launches and how people set themselves apart was doing the webinar. I mean, that was big, that was huge, that was interactive, and it did really well for the leads and for converting the leads. I think the webinars are still very important. You have to be able to close on the webinar. But then, there are still that need and that desire to build that relationship with that lead, and again, the whole launch cycle is you got to create a significant problem and then this is the only solution or this is one of the best solutions.

There have been challenges of okay, we presented too many problems and too many solutions or too few problems and too few solutions. There’s got to be a good mix of okay, here are the problems that are significant that are pertinent to the current economic state that we’re in or really whatever is going on the market. And then here, the solutions really can’t deviate too far from those solutions.

Tim: So if the first set of the product launch was it was text articles that you’d get, maybe second was podcast and then it was video, now it’s webinars, anything you see out there in the future that might be the next big thing here as part of the product launch content?

Brad: Boy, I don’t know. I mean the more interaction that can be done, I think the better. I mean the more that you can interact. I mean there’s contests that are done. Again, my big thing is I’d like to create a relationship with that lead, and with the launch process, it’s very — you put what takes a long time to build a relationship and you squeeze that into a two or three-week process. So the more that you can build that relationship within a shorter period of time, I think that’s going to be better. I mean the more interaction that you can have, the more “Hey, this is what I’m all about. Let me personally connect with you — webinar, video, phone call, whatever.” But as far as like the next technology, I don’t know, you know. Squeeze the relationship build into a two-week process, then that’s what’s going to be the thing.

Tim: Yeah, we’ll see what that’s going to be. It would be interesting to watch. Now, what about for people that are just regularly sending out content? It’s kind of like a perpetual launch. Their product is always available and they’re sending out good content just to grow their list. I mean, one of the things that I do like about the launch is that it creates urgency and I know for a fact that the best content in the world won’t sell itself. You’ve got to create that urgency. So how do you that when you don’t really use the launch model?

Brad: There’s really a number of different ways to do that. I mean, you can go to the coupon where it’s a discount for fill in the blank of whatever is going on at the time. One of the guys that I’m working with now, we did a November 2nd sort of like an Election Day discount and that actually converted really well. Take advantage of it while the economy is just sort of playing on what’s going on.

The other way is raise the price. There’s nothing like creating urgency like I can’t save this much money anymore. Then there’s always the just deliver more value, deliver more content, just taking it up a level, whereas okay, it’s just going to be this daily newsletter, oh, then I’m adding video. Oh, they’re adding video. Man, I need to take advantage of that. Oh, they’re doing this to their site. Oh, they’re adding this. They’re adding more value to make it more desirable.

But with a lot of the people that are doing the free content, one of the things that’s a challenge is giving too much away for free and sort of creating that delicate balance of providing a ton of content, providing reasons above and beyond what normal people provide in that space to help educate, but then reeling it in enough to sort of whet the appetite of somebody to buy the next product. So that’s another way as well.

Tim: Now, one of the things I’ve always also said is that you should do whatever you can to sell your product first. You’re going to make as more money selling your own content and your own product right away. If you don’t convert them in your initial period, then start sending them affiliate links, right, because even if say your product is not a fit, that’s fine. Maybe somebody else is a fit for them better and I can still make some money from my list that way.

I know that some people, when they’re asked to do affiliate marketing, they won’t send out an email to their list until the product is on sale because they know that most affiliates want to kind of drain their list and make it their own and market to them down the road too.

So what do you think is the best way to make money with affiliate marketing and monetize my list for people who haven’t bought my product or even have bought my product but still keep my list and don’t dilute it so much that I’m just giving it away every time I market for somebody else?

Brad: I would say it’s relatively easy and that’s don’t sell to them. I mean that sounds kind of simple, but think about it like this. The email list that you have, the people that are on there, you have a relationship with them. Treat them as you would really want to be treated. A lot of the different affiliate marketing companies, they’ll give you different people in our space or wherever. They’ll say, “Here’s the swipe copy. You know, copy and paste this. Here’s that. Here’s the lead link. Do this.”

When I’m working with affiliates and encouraging them to market, it’s very simple. It’s the old I guess we can say the old American Idol. Make it your own. There’s nothing like taking a lead link that’s obviously affiliate track to you, actually watching or reading what’s on the next page and telling your audience what really you think about it. I mean, it takes five minutes to rewrite or analyze something that a company sends you for you to then remarket.

I mean, it’s easy to just do a copy and paste sort of blindly, but as far as results on the front end with selling and generating leads for that other company but also maintaining your relationship with your list, the more that you can personalize it and show people that “Hey, I’m actually reading this. I’m taking time to think about and analyze what I’m sending you. If I want you to opt in to something, you understand that I’ve already opted into it and that I understand and believe in it,” that makes the world of difference. Does that make sense? I mean, it’s just…

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. I’m huge with that too. I never send out just a copy that they’ve sent me. Some of it is great. Some of it is not so great. But I always put my own personal touch on it at the very least, and at the very least I change the subject line and almost always I change a lot of the body as well.

Brad: And that’s simple to do — change the subject line. If anything and what I’ve seen and had a lot of success with is just write a two-paragraph info. If you’re selling or promoting a video by another affiliate or promoting an article, watch the video, read the article, give your audience your two cents. I mean, that’s why they’re there. That’s why they’re on your list. They give a crap about what you’re saying and taking two minutes to write a paragraph, “Hey, I just watched this video on forex and the newest robot. I personally think robots are a piece of joke and… but here’s this video explaining why they’re not. Take a look at it. Enjoy.”

That takes no time and it creates a buffer between you and the product, because if the product stinks, then you can say, “Well, this was my opinion.” Your opinion is your own but it’s an added value for the company that you’re marketing for. They put a lot of time, they put a lot of money into that swipe copy, but I know personally that I would rather have nobody send the swipe copy and everybody send their own stuff. It’s going to be much higher conversion.

Tim: And then of course the question you always get and it’s a $64,000 question and there’s probably no right answer for it, but I got to ask it anyway. How often should I email my list with my own content, with affiliate offers? What do you think?

Brad: Oh, man. I mean, it really depends. In depends on the content that you’re producing. Like with you for example, when you have a new interview, put it up. I mean for me, when I write a new article for my site, I usually send it out twice. I send it out as soon as it’s done then I change the subject line on an email, write it a little bit different and send it again. Whenever I produce new content, then I send it out.

If there’s an affiliate opportunity to send out something, the best way is to send it out in a way that doesn’t seem like you’re sending it out all the time like, “Oh, here I’m making money on this. Here I’m making money on this.” If it’s a “Hey, I just came across this. I wanted to let you know,” you know, recognizing that your list is probably busy doing something else, but you’re busy but you’re taking time to share this with them. So if it’s a way to introduce that and share affiliate material with them in a way that doesn’t really look like your heart-selling them and that you’re thinking about them above and beyond your normal email sequence, they’re going to see that as beneficial.

Tim: Right. And with the interview too, I’ve tried to create content around that you may not be able to get a webinar, a full webinar for your audience with the person who has created the content or who you’re affiliate marketing for, but if I can get them on the phone to do a 15-minute interview and send that out as piece of content, “Oh, by the way, here’s their affiliate link,” I find that that’s so much better received as well. So trying to create some content. Yeah.

Brad: Absolutely. It’s just going above and beyond. I mean, it’s just providing — the more value that you can provide, the better it’s going to be. I mean a lot of times, the problem really in a lot of internet marketing is it’s so short term. It’s so short focused. It’s okay, I got to get this now. I got to do this now. I got to do this now. Whereas a lot of times, you’re not thinking of your lead as a lead that’s going to be with you for multiple months, not just, okay, they’re going to be with me for a couple of months and then I got to make as much money off of them as I can.

If you take the mindset that I’m going to treat this person like they’re going to be with me for five years, then they’re hopefully going to be with you for five years if you do it right. If you treat that person as I got to get them sold as fast as possible, then you better have a good lead source ’cause you’re going to need a lot of new leads coming in on a regular basis.

Tim: Right, to replace all those unsubscribes. Sure.

Brad: Mm-hmm.

Tim: Well, so for our listeners who are looking for some expertise, let’s pitch your company here at the end here. How do I get in touch with you and tackle and got some of your expertise in launching my product or figuring out how to monetize what I’m doing?

Brad: Well, you can shoot me an email, brad@fmpgllc.com, that’s Financial Marketers and Publishing Group llc.com. You can go to my website, fmpgllc.com. And really, you know, I just love to talk to people and I answer all emails as quickly and as accurately as possible. If there’s any questions about marketing or copyrighting, I do all of that stuff. And as Tim can hopefully attest to you, I’m a pretty easy guy to chill with and I like to introduce other people around. So, you know, just email me or check out my website.

Tim: Yeah, thanks. And in a time when there’s not a lot of integrity in the internet marketing or there’s not perceived to be any way, that Brad is definitely one of those guys who will give you straight answers and not give you all the B.S., and the truth about what it takes to make this work and do it with integrity ’cause I think you and I both believe that internet marketing can be done in a way that you’re truthful and you provide value and you’re not just trying to collect as many dollars as possible.

Brad: It’s the best way to do business. I mean, think about it as a long term. If I treat you right now, we might not be able to do anything right now, but in 10 years, in 15 years, maybe there’s a huge deal that we can do regardless, you know. You never want to burn bridges. You never want to cheat somebody because the niche that you’re in, no matter what it is, is a small world and word gets around fast. So it’s easier just to stay above the fold.

Tim: No question. All right. Of course, listeners, we’ll link to Brad’s website in the transcripts, but fmpgllc.com, right, Brad?

Brad: That’s it.

Tim: All right, thanks.

I loved being a cop – it was a tough decision to leave the department just months before I would have been promoted as one of the youngest detectives in the LAPD. But the company I started in my free time had grown to eight employees and having the founder out chasing bad guys all night was starting to cost more money than my modest civil servant salary brought in.

Now I have the best of both worlds. Emile and I own a successful company together where we get to do pretty much whatever we want all day and I still throw on a uniform two or three times a month for a 12-hour shift of chasing bad guys as a Reserve Police Officer (kind of like a volunteer firefighter, but with a Glock and body armor).

The mission of our small company has always been simple: Make money doing whatever works. That means if we thought we could make a profit selling vodka-infused caramel apples with Pixy Stix handles, we’d give it a try.

Over the past few months, Emile and I have been spending a few hours each day working on affiliate marketing. Our membership sites are doing well and it has allowed us to step back and look for other opportunities that can add to our bottom line. I haven’t talked about it until this point, because I didn’t think talking about it before we knew what the hell we were doing was worthy of your time. But a blog contest, coinciding with the fact that we’ve actually made some money doing it, has made it the right time.

Before talking about why I think affiliate marketing will help me take this side of the business to a new level, I’ll talk about why we’ve been working so hard on it since August. When Emile and I talked about giving it a try, I was skeptical. Could we really make enough profit that it would be worth diverting resources (namely time and money) from our paid content and membership sites? Did we really want to be in the same business as the “Cincinnati stay-at-home mom makes 5K a day with Acai Berry miracle cure!” crowd?

We found out there’s a lot more to it than Acai.

One of the things you’ll learn about us is that we don’t spend our days reading hundreds of blogs, reading long sales pages and books, and generally wasting time trying to figure out the best way to do something. The best way to figure out how to do something is to just freaking do it. We learn best by diving in and taking action.

We also don’t do anything “half ass” so let me start by showing our gross earnings in our main affiliate network account since we started in September:

As you can see we had some “beginner’s luck” in September, dropped back down after we thought we knew it all (and spent way to much money to earn way to little), and are building it back up to that first month. We’ve been very profitable every month but there is still something missing… more on that later.

I find myself comparing the internet marketing world with law enforcement all the time. This may sound a little odd, but I find ways to correlate the two after almost every 911 call. While my partner updates our log, I find myself looking for ways to relate the call to something in the business world. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how one specific incident relates to affiliate marketing.

I’ve made you wait far too long already for the payoff from the title of this post so here it is:

A while back my partner and I were on patrol in one of the rougher areas of the city around one in the morning. The in-car computer (where we get the details of the 911 calls) and the radio (where they initially broadcast the calls) was eerily quiet so we were looking for stolen cars by running the license plates of vehicles. The newer cars have license plate readers that can automatically run thousands of plates you pass by each shift, but we were doing it the old-fashioned way, by me calling out the plates and my partner typing them in the computer.

When you get a match, the computer gives you a very specifically-formatted message that looks different than a regular message return. It says: INQUIRY MATCH: STOLEN VEHICLE in big bold letters at the top of the screen and it makes your heart stop for a second while your mind catches up to your eyes and you realize you’re following a stolen car.

Any cop who says they don’t LOVE seeing that message is lying – because it means the next few minutes are going to be very exciting.

I’ll cut to the chase (literally). As we pulled in behind the vehicle and turned on our lights and siren, the vehicle accelerated and the pursuit was on. About 90 seconds into the chase as we turned a corner I heard a loud “pop.” It sounded a lot like what it sounds like when you run over an air-filled grocery bag with your car.

Ok, I’ll admit, the next part is a little…embarrassing. I turned to my partner and said, “Did we just run over something?” My partner leaned over and very “matter-of-factly” said, “Dude, he just shot at us.” All I could muster in response was, “What an asshole.” I thought I had said it just to myself in my head, but I later learned from my partner that I had said it out loud.

The passenger had leaned out the side of the vehicle and fired back at us. Because I was the driver officer, I didn’t see the bright muzzle flash from the right side of the vehicle my partner saw when it happened.

Long story short, after a few more blocks, the stolen vehicle pulled into a dead-end park where a very short gun battle of good guys vs. bad guys ensued. Needless to say, I’m still here (and so is my partner) and the parolees (who recovered from their wounds) are doing time in prison for attempted murder of a police officer.

As is my usual routine, I couldn’t help but think about how that incident related to affiliate marketing:

1) Affiliate marketing, like finding stolen vehicles, is a numbers game.
One of the things I learned early on is that you have to “run” a lot of cars in the computer to find the “G-Ride” (Grand Theft Auto aka G-Ride) as we call it. The more cars you run, the more likely it is you’ll find the car you’re looking for. It’s the same with affiliate marketing. There are literally thousands of offers out there to choose from. Some won’t make you a penny and others are pure gold if you can find the right target audience to go with the right ad. You have to try a lot of them to see which ones are going to fly. Once you find a winner, you spend as much money on it as you can.

How we’ll improve this year: We’ve gotten good enough at this to know that if we spend $100 on something and don’t make at least $75 right away, it’s probably not going to work. If I can make $75, I can probably tweak the ad or the targeting enough to put it over the edge and make it profitable. But it takes us way too long, in my opinion, to do this for every ad we try. I need to learn how to quickly test an ad with laser-like focus and spend as little as possible to see if it’s a good one. This year we can learn how to do a much better job of testing offers quickly and without “shooting in the dark” (pun intended) as we sometimes do with an offer by spending way to much, too quickly, only to find our target demographics were off.

2) The guy who shoots more accurately under pressure wins.
We all had guns that night. Our team had just trained harder for that moment. There’s a lot of money at stake in this industry and we know we’re competing with some very, very talented marketers. We’ve made some very nice coin in the four months we’ve been at this, but we’re small potatoes compared to the real players in this space. If we want to piss in the tall grass with the big dogs, we need to get a whole lot better at this. The real pros in affiliate marketing are calculating machines who know with crazy accuracy exactly how much every penny spent is going to earn. Like Gordon Gekko, they cut their losses quickly and let their winners run. I need to meet those people and attend those workshops.

3) Too much confidence can be a very dangerous thing. In the police academy you spend eight months learning how to deal with some pretty scary situations. What you learn very quickly after graduation is that when something happens fast and when you least expect it, you immediately fall back to your training. The most dangerous place to be in is the one where you think you have everything under control and nothing can surprise you. Affiliate marketing is about spotting trends and nuances before most everyone else and then spending as much money on that offer as you can before others figure out what you’re doing. What separates the top 5% from the other 95% is knowing that you always have to keep up with the latest trends and hot topics and never resting.

How we will improve this year: In affiliate marketing, I KNOW I still have a lot to learn. Sure we’ve had some success, but the day I decide I’ve learned everything is the day I’ll probably take a huge loss. In any industry you have people who feel like there is nothing left to learn – that there is nothing new that can be tested. That’s not true and I’ve always felt that if I don’t learn something from every conversation, seminar, workshop or conference I attend – that’s my fault – not the conference. I’ll go in with an open mind and know that the information is there for the taking – I just have to be willing to see it. Spotting a trend before the rest of the crowd is one thing we’ve been pretty good at. It’s very subtle and you won’t see it as the title of any conference keynote. But if you listen to what people are talking about and have just a little bit of vision to think two steps ahead, you CAN spot those trends.

4) Good writing makes all the difference
I’ve always been a decent writer. As a cop you do a lot of writing but it’s all about exact facts – with no exaggeration. There’s a little bit of persuasion – but not much. You state exactly what happened and what is known – without embellishing – because those exaggerations will come back to bite you in the ass in court when a good defense attorney begins their cross-examination.

Transitioning to writing affiliate ads was a bit of a shock to my system. Instead of “just the facts, Ma’am” writing, which can often be boring and dry, I now had to write in a way that was irresistibly interesting to the reader. Writing to get “clicks” and ultimately a sale is a lot different than police reports – and a lot more fun. Yet both types of writing are similar. You need to get your point across quickly and in a way that there is no confusion to the reader.

The best affiliate headlines I’ve written are those that get people excited to find out what’s on the other side in less than 4 or 5 words. The best police reports are ones that get the D.A. excited because they know they have a great case that makes sense, meets the criteria of the law and tells a story the jury will understand.

How we will improve this year: Great writing is something that can always be improved and some of the best headline and copy writers in the country are going to be at Affiliate Summit. Getting people to click because of 4 or 5 words is an art. Sure, it’s easy to write fake crap that people will click on, but if it doesn’t convert on the other side, all you are doing is wasting money. A headline that says, “Naked Brittany Spears Pics” will have a killer click-through-rate (if you could even get that headline approved) but your conversion to a sale on the other side is going to be garbage. The great writers know how to get people to click without them feeling like a fool on the other side.

5) Persistence Pays: “Never give up.” It’s the first thing my tactics instructor in the Academy said on day 1 when he walked into the classroom. No matter what kind of hellish fight you’re in with the bad guy, you never give up – EVER. Most people who try affiliate marketing give up way too soon because testing, re-writing and testing again with different copy, different images, and different headlines is work and at first it’s frustrating. You read all these blog posts about people making more money than Trump in affiliate marketing and you think to yourself, “What the hell am I doing wrong? I’m not the brightest guy in the world, but I know I’m at least as smart as that moron over at XYZ blog.”

But then something happens along the way. Suddenly one of your ads starts to take off and it clicks. You realize you CAN make this happen and it’s surprising how deposits into your bank account can make all the frustration and late nights worthwhile. Then it becomes a matter of how many credit cards you can max out on those ads before you get paid by the affiliate network. It’s a good problem to have. Finding the next winning ad actually becomes fun. When you match the right ad with the right target market, it’s a helluva lot of fun to refresh your earnings for the day and see that number grow every few minutes.

How we will improve this year: We’ve made some money and enjoyed some success. But we’re nowhere near where we want to be. Our small company is very close to breaking through to $1,000,000 per year in affiliate marketing. Our persistence is going to payoff. The motivation I’ll get from talking to other successful affiliate marketers is tough to quantify, but I know it will make a big difference in our revenue. 2011 is going to be the year we crack this nut and make it to the top 1% of all affiliate marketers.

I’ll keep you updated on our progress and I plan to share a few “lessons learned” over the next few months.

And for those readers who worry we are moving our focus away from paid content and membership sites with interviews, don’t. It’s still the bulk of our business and we plan on expanding that area of the company as well.

It also takes a lot more than just paying great commissions to entice high traffic bloggers and sites to sign up. You have to be willing to do more to help your affiliates become successful – in their own sites and in your affiliate program.

One of the best affiliate programs around for content is INO.com. Brad Stafford was hired just over four years ago to jump-start their affiliate program and it has been a huge success. I wanted to get Brad on the phone and talk to him about what he did to make their affiliate program such a powerful force in their overall marketing program.

If you are a large content company or a single site owner, you’ll find tips in this interview to help you increase sales through a well-run affiliate program.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Transcript:

Tim – MemberCon.com: Hi this is Tim Bourquin. Thanks for joining me for another interview from membercon.com. The whole idea of these interviews of course is to give you something to think about in doing your own membership site and selling your own subscriptions and so I wanted to talk to somebody who really knew the affiliate side of the game and somebody who could also just talk about marketing a membership site. So today I’m talking with Brad Stafford, he’s the marketing manager for ino.com, i-n-o.com. It’s a financial website so I knew him from my other website that I do, Trader Interviews, my membership site but Brad does a terrific job of basically getting affiliates recruited, motivated and just marketing the site overall so I wanted to get him on the phone and have him talk to us about how he does that. He has generously offered to do that with me, so Brad thanks very much for joining me on the phone.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Hey no problem. With an intro like that I think I’ve a lot to live up to so hopefully I won’t let anybody down.

Tim – MemberCon.com: It’s good because I get your emails all the time and you really do a fantastic job of using affiliates to promote this site so I wanted to talk to a little bit about how you got started and did that. First of all, how long has INO been a membership site?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well ino.com was originally launched in 1995 almost as an Amazon for the financial world selling books and as time went on I think at around 1999 is when we originally launched Market Club which is our premier membership site and we’ve pretty much been membership since then. We do operate another arm of the business which is just advertising and lead generation for when membership slows down, advertising is there to pick it up and vice versa.

Tim – MemberCon.com: That’s good. I want to definitely get into that lead generation part of that because I think that’s important for our membership site owners as well.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah absolutely.

Tim – MemberCon.com: At what point did they decide to start doing affiliate marketing as a way to generate more memberships?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well I’ve been here for almost 4 years now, 3 years I’m not sure but they started basically I would say 6 to 8 months before I came along and it was just I don’t want to say in shambles but there wasn’t much attention paid to affiliate marketing and to be honest with you I had zero experience with internet marketing and anything along those lines, I had a sales background. I’ve known Adam Hewison, the president, for years. I mean I went to elementary school with his daughter and he brought me on and basically said here’s what an affiliate program is, make it work make it happen and what I wanted to do is just change the way the internet and internet marketing worked from a business side where a lot of the affiliate programs that you deal with and whether it’s Commission Junction or whoever. There’s a huge blinding wall between the company and the affiliate themselves and so again what I wanted to do was to break that down and to make each affiliate a personal relationship. I did sales on a large scale and dealing with those interpersonal relationships hey how’s your dad doing? Hey, how’s your mom whatever the comment is, whatever the personal interaction is but that’s what I would say has made us so successful as we’ve grown to be.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Okay so initially there were hardly any affiliates or if there were they weren’t creating any memberships. What percentage of the memberships these days come in through your affiliates?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: It’s a good question. Right now I think we’re probably close to about 65 to 70% of our memberships, of our paying memberships are coming through the affiliate program, the affiliate network.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Wow.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: The free offers, the leads that we’re driving into our database I would say 80% are coming through the affiliates.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Wow that’s huge so it’s obviously a big part now of the overall revenue for the whole site. So how did you get started with this? How did you go out and find affiliates initially to approach and say hey how about promoting ino.com?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well I mean the thing that I have in favor of me is we have a huge reach at INO. We have over 500,000 on our email list, we have millions of visitors every month and what I wanted to do was to go to each person, essentially you’re asking people to give up an advertising revenue, you’re asking them to bet on the com. You’re putting up our banners or posting our videos or whatever it is, is going to make you more money than your advertising a bird in the hand is better than 2 in the bush. Well I’m trying to convince people that 2 in the bush is better than 1 in the hand and one of my ways that I’m able to do that is to say in all reality how can I help you? Whether it’s using my knowledge, using the tens of thousands of dollars that I know is spent educating me to pass that on to you or whether it’s how to harness some of our traffic and get it to your way. If people realize and people know that it’s a 2-way relationship it works much better and again I’d rather work on that kind of a level than just hey sell for me, sell for me, sell for me. What can I do for you and again it really takes their mindset off okay here comes another salesman as opposed to hey here comes somebody that wants to help me out and I legitimately do.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Yeah one of the things that I know a lot of people do with their affiliate programs is they just put it out there and they hope the affiliates will click on the link on their site …

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Right.

Tim – MemberCon.com: … and just get signed up and start promoting but obviously it’s not that easy and one of the things you do that I liked was you pay for a lead so even though somebody is getting something for free that I direct them too you pay me money for everybody that signs up every legitimate lead so they don’t have to buy something to earn money …

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Right.

Tim – MemberCon.com: … which is great for me as the affiliate. I’m wondering for a smaller company is that a possibility? When did you decide to actually to pay for a lead rather than pay only when they bought something?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well the lead revenue and I sort of have to take a step back and address another side of our business where we have ino.com is a free site. It’s charts, quotes, news and more and it’s an advertiser supported site. We’re able to take advertisers’ offers and specifically target them to our users which are leads in our database. So we’re selling leads but we’re obviously using the advertiser’s free offer to drive that lead and we know what that value is, we know when X person comes in we’re able to, because of Dave Maher our tech director and his I would say just wizardry with the formatting of our database, we’re able to see specifically how much each user is worth. Where that source came from and then how much that person’s worth to us in the long term and it was about 2 years ago that I came up with the idea to launch Trend Analysis which is one of our free offers. Trend Analysis, right now we pay $3 per first name and email address that comes into our database through an affiliate. Over I guess the course of a year and a half the Trend Analysis email list is about 125,000 and 85 to 90% came through the affiliate network. Now what we did with that is we took those leads and obviously tried to up sell them into one of our paid services but if we weren’t able to do that that person went into the general sort of bulk INO database where then we could make up that $3 hopefully within a 6 to 8 month period. Thankfully because of the quality leads that affiliates are driving because we are paying so much for those leads, we’re able to turn that revenue around within a month. An old term in car sales is you rolled over in your car well we never rolled over in our leads which is a good thing because every asset that comes into our database is a valuable asset to us whether it’s $5000 over the course of a year or $5 we don’t care as long as we’re in the black.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Okay.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: So that’s sort of where we’re going.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Okay so you through a formula decided how much each lead is worth and then decided to pay affiliates based on that. I think a lot of people who have been listening to this might worry that, well how do I keep somebody from just throwing emails and mails at me that they just make up and create Yahoo accounts for.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Sure.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Do you kind of monitor how good the quality of the leads are from each affiliate?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Absolutely and the first thing is not only with the leads that affiliates drive us are they getting paid for that lead but we’re able to, again with Dave Maher’s help, we’re able to tattoo that affiliate code onto that person’s registration so when they order Market Club or when they subscribe to Market Club or INO TV Premium that affiliate’s getting credit. Now with regards to the quality it is a I don’t want to say never-ending battle but it’s always a back and forth. We don’t and I know and a lot of other affiliate programs are different but we don’t allow affiliates to run pay per click or any external marketing. Reason being is we had an affiliate who basically is just using our search words to drive in leads. Their commission check went from I would say a healthy $5000 to $8000 every month to $25000 where we took a step back I called him and I said hey what are you doing? Oh I’m using this, I’m using that. Well we don’t allow that and in digging more into that person’s leads we were able to figure out that he was either spamming or he was the owner of the most prolific Nigerian trading database in the world. So we had to put a couple of internal monitors in place where we’re able to track which affiliate and what their revenue per lead is so if it’s $8 per lead that’s coming in that’s good we’re making money on that person. But we also implemented a 30-day lag on the payments so an affiliate comes in and any affiliate sales for example in September that were made by that affiliate, those leads aren’t paid in October, it’s paid in November because what we’re able to do on top of just the basic tracking of revenue we’re also able to track how active that lead is. And again, a lot of companies are able to do this but a lot of them aren’t. I would encourage really anybody that database management is crucial and so what we’re able to do is say okay X affiliate sent in 50 leads and of those 50 leads 2 have actually opened an email, 2 have actually visited the website so we’re able to go into I contact that affiliate and say listen how did these leads come in? Oh they came this way and 9 times out of 10 they’re using something else either they’re going on forums to drive leads or whatever it is and so we are not liable for those leads. We’re basically able to say these 50 leads or 48 leads are now dumped from the database. It’s again an ongoing battle because we do we really are one of the only affiliate programs that pay for leads and pay for them in volume …

Tim – MemberCon.com: Right.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: … so it just sort of comes with the territory.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Now do you track an affiliate cookie or that tattoo forever? It seems like sometimes it’s 90 days anything they buy within 90 days. Sounds like you’re a little further out than that.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: We do and again the biggest thing when I came in and I guess I was in a good situation because I didn’t know business as usual so my mindset was, why don’t we pay these guys for much longer I mean their value to us is so high why not pass that along to the affiliate. I mean if we can pay affiliates $5000 every month versus $5000 and then $500 I’d rather pay them more over the long term and so our cookies are 365 days and again with the tattooing we’re able to, on our backend keep even more intricate track of that because the cookie system, it’s hard because it’s flawed but it’s not I mean you know.

Tim – MemberCon.com: It’s imperfect for sure.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: And so again one of my things was I would have affiliates contacting me and going hey I’m getting thousands of clicks and only so much recurring or so many conversions and through digging into that and this was about I guess about 2, 2½ years ago I sat down with my tech director and I said listen we need to get this solved and he’s like it’s going to end up costing us a lot more money and sort of saved sales or saved affiliate payments but I said listen it’s the right thing to do and he agreed and we put a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of effort into making sure that a lead that’s driven to us is attached to that affiliate and that affiliate’s going to get paid whether it’s $3 or whether it’s $180. We want to make sure that they’re getting paid because if you’re making money then you’re obviously going to continue work us. It just makes good sense in the long term.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Right. It’s like any business relationship, it’s built on trust. If they don’t trust that they’re going to get credit for that they’re going to stop promoting.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Exactly and there’s no reason. I’m relatively young when I came in and I want to develop long term relationships. I want to be in this industry because I love it for 50 more years hopefully doing more than what I’m doing now and with more success but I want to know you Tim in 50 years. I want to know everybody else that I know in 50 years and be able to look them in the face every day and say I did everything I could to make you as much money as I could.

Tim – MemberCon.com: How about the software that you’re using? Is it something you built in-house?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: No, actually we currently are using a third-party service called Direct Track and Direct Track it’s been good I mean I think with anything that you use whether it’s Microsoft or whatever whatever affiliate program management system you use they’re going to have things where you’re like hey I wish I could change that, I wish this could work a little better. But overall I’ve been happy with Direct Track. They give us the ability again to if we’ve got problems I can sort of burn the phones up enough to get it solved relatively quickly.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So one of the things you do is you go out and you contact these affiliates and you say, look we can make you money but one of the things you also do different is you say if you promote us, we’ll promote you. You’ve got a very popular blog that you allow people to do guest posts on if they promote for you so it’s more than just you’ll make money if you promote us, we’ll help promote you too. Has that been a big factor in getting affiliates?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Absolutely. with INO our services are not $5000 courses you know. They’re low-priced courses because we want to hit every trader. We want to provide the highest quality service possible but we don’t and especially now in this economy we don’t want to break people’s trust by saying okay it’s $10,000 when we know what it’s really worth and that’s sort of a disadvantage to me because there’s other affiliate programs out there that can go out to new affiliates and say hey if you promote our affiliate program you make 10 sales you make $1,000 a sale, that’s a pretty good chunk of change. With our service it takes a lot more to get to that point so and again with me what I want to do is build that relationship of I can help you in more than just sending you a $1,000 commission check every month. I can help you learn more about marketing. I can work with you to help improve your email marketing or whatever it is and absolutely, the guest blogs have been very popular with affiliates it’s a great place to get exposure for them and it also benefits us because hey it’s great content for our site so it’s really a win-win.

Tim – MemberCon.com: a lot of companies out there kind of put affiliate marketing into the same vein as just general marketing. A lot of times it gets thrown into the lap of just somebody else who’s probably got a ton of other things on their plate already. Do you recommend hiring somebody just to dedicate only to affiliates and that’s all?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: From personal experience if you want to have an affiliate program that makes more than 50 bucks a month you’ve got to have somebody that’s working more than 50 hours a week. I’ve worked with too many people that go, oh yeah help me learn about affiliate marketing and then they’ve got 18 different things on their plate and can’t focus on it. I mean if you want to continue to get more affiliates every week, if you want to continue to build those relationships, add more sales, add more revenue it is a full-time job. I work, no lie, between 60 to 70 hours a week just making sure everybody’s happy, making sure I’m staying in touch with people. So you really can’t realistically expect oh get an affiliate program put it on Commission Junction or Clickbank and we’ll roll along. That might happen but it won’t happen for long and you won’t have much success.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So you’ve probably tried a lot of different things in your approach to a brand new affiliate? What works what clicks when you say when I pick up the phone and I call or I email here’s what typically works for me to get them interested?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well I mean the big this is with me again integrity and honesty is first and foremost and when I go to a new affiliate, before I pitch them on the affiliate program I basically say, listen I’ve got some services, I’ve checked out your site, which I do, I’ve followed you on Twitter, I’ve checked out your Facebook whatever it is, I come to you for a reason it’s not only because you probably have decent traffic but you are good at what you do and what I want to do is have them look at our services because it’s just like the car salesman who sells Volvos but drives a Honda. You really can’t believe somebody is going to put their name behind something that they don’t like so before and affiliates say well I don’t like Market Club but I like INO TV for example and I want that honesty. I want affiliates that tell me like it is. I don’t want just marketers who are like; oh I can sell 50,000 of these. Great but where is the integrity behind it? So what I do is say, listen let me give you a staff membership to our services to check them out because if you’re not willing to check them out, look at them as quality services then you’re not going to be a good affiliate long term for me because you’re not being honest. You might say oh this is a great service but you’ve never actually looked at it, you’ve never actually checked out our charting package or anything along those lines.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: So with me I like to take that to him and say look at it first then we’ll figure out what we can do from there.

Tim – MemberCon.com: And how about who you accept into the affiliate program. It’s easy to put a link up there again and just let any blogger pick up an affiliate banner and post it but do you kind of concentrate on that long tail of a lot of bloggers with a little bit of traffic that add up to a lot I mean or is it the 80/20 rule that 20% of your affiliates give you 80% of the revenue.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: We market different. There are services that market on a large scale where they basically gather up all their affiliate reach and then over the course of 2 weeks send out emails, do blog posts, just selling the product and what we do is market more on an informational basis. We have the Market Club educational videos where we’ll teach about Apple and diversions so something along those lines and so we require a huge reach and bloggers are by far the biggest for us. There’s 2 things; one, I’ll take a blogger that makes 1 sale a month because they’re excited, they’re easy to work with you get back and forth emails real fast and more often than not they’re good genuine people. I’ll take that versus a huge Bloomberg deal because you spend so much time wasting trying to get to the right person, trying to do this oh we got to get this approved or we got to get that approved. It’s a matter of valuable time and sure Bloomberg could make 10,000 sales but in the time that it would take them to get those sales for me I can get 100 affiliates who would make a sale a month for me and I’m fine with that and I don’t have the headache so I love the bloggers because they’re just so cool they’re interesting people and again they’re the majority of our business, they’re the reason our videos are getting 50,000 views at a pop.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Yes, speaking of those videos one of the things you guys also do really well is you create a lot of free content to give to your affiliates to give to their list which drives traffic. So how would you decide how much content to give out for free to kind of spur those affiliates to keep talking about you?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well again with Market Club the videos are really the connector point that we have with our audience and the affiliate network is a big part of that. Again, most of our affiliates are bloggers or educators in some realm and they don’t want to continue to sell a service but they’ll post free content it saves them a blog post, it saves them a tweet whatever it is and they’re able to say, hey here’s some free content, I looked at the video, I thought it was interesting they give their 2 cents about it whether they trash it or whether they praise it doesn’t matter to us I mean you’re giving your honest opinion and that’s what people want that’s what your visitors want as a blogger, as an email list owner is people want your honest opinion about something.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So do you push to have them put an actual post out about a piece of content or is a banner ad on the blog the most effective. What works best?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: banner ads, maybe I’m skewed but the only thing that banner ads are really good for is branding. I mean the way that you’re going to connect to an audience is through harnessing that blogger’s or that website owner’s credibility in your favor. when I go to a blogger and I say you can put up banners and that’s great but I really want you to use the service and watch the videos because your word is worth more than 100,000 impressions because 100,000 impressions might get 50 clicks but 1 blog post might get 1,000 might get 500 and that’s much more valuable not only to them but to us and so I would much rather have email blasts go out and tweets and Facebook updates and blog posts than everyone go well I’m just going to do the banners. I mean the banners are great. They’re going to make some money for you but they’re not going to be as effective as a personal interaction with your visitors.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So then, do you give every affiliate a free trial to all the services?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: I give them a lifetime staff membership.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So they can access everything they want forever?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Everything.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Even the smallest traffic blogger affiliate?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: I don’t care; it’s all going to work out for the better. Here’s a perfect example. When I first, I guess it was about 2 years ago I had really just stumbled across the blog and I’ll hold the name off for now but heck of a nice guy, emailing back and forth, had great ideas about markets and a very, very intelligent guy and had very little if any traffic. He is now one of my biggest affiliates because he had that staff membership and he’s grown where Market Club is almost intertwined with his website so the visitors that come to his site they go, hey I relate this with Market Club, I relate this guy with Market Club because he’s been there so long. So if I just said okay so and so, I’ll give you a 1 month trial, let me know what it is then where we are now where he’s making $8,000 to $10,000 a month without even trying that would be hurtful for both of us. So, I look at it as you’re going to benefit from our services in one way or the other and all the updates that we make we update to real time and add the UK markets and we go in to Australia with Market Club, that’s all going to be included. Again, the big thing is integrity from me and if somebody likes the service then they’re going to be a much better affiliate than somebody who says, oh yeah it looks like a good service, you’ve got some good marketing material but they’ve never actually opened the webpage.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Well that definitely sets you apart and I suppose it’s nothing you couldn’t take away if you’ve given somebody a membership for a year and they haven’t given you a single lead, there’s nothing that says that you can’t turn it off because they’re not active anymore …

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Sure.

Tim – MemberCon.com: … but it’s just that I like the idea that, I think most people that want to start an affiliate program come from it as they’re not to be trusted, they’re going to try and screw us, they’re going to try and make money. You come from it as, let’s give them everything they need to sell and don’t burn a bridge because you never know what somebody’s going to turn into you know, I like that.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah it is and again I’ve had a couple battles with the partners here because of that reason. I said I want to give it away forever. Well we can’t just do that and a bunch of umming and ahing and they’re on board making sure that I give out 50+ memberships a month. So yeah it’s worked.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Okay so if you had to go back from day 1 and talk to yourself and say here’s what’s worked best out of all these things we’ve tried some worked some didn’t work. What I’m getting at is tell our listeners what you think was kind of the most valuable thing that you have learned that you wish you had known that first day when you started.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Oh boy, the first thing that, to be honest, what I would do is tell myself, figure out how you can help them first because if you can help them with something they’re going to help you and that’s by far proven to be the most successful I guess sale pitch for me is saying listen, I want to figure out what I can help you with. If I can help you accomplish your goals then I can work my goals into your goals.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Excellent.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: That’s it, that’s it.

Tim – MemberCon.com: That’s great Brad. Well hey I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today. I think our listeners will get a lot out of this.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Great.

Tim – MemberCon.com: And listeners, if you want to go check out how ino.com does their affiliate program, it’s i-n-o.com. Actually, is there a better place to send them Brad, to take a look?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yes actually, ino.com/insider and that’s our affiliate only blog so that’s a private blog. Also shoot me an email, brad@ino.com and tell me that you heard my interview from Tim and we’ll go forward from there. I’ll get you a staff membership, if anything I’ll get you a staff membership.

Tim – MemberCon.com: I appreciate that Brad and oh one other thing I forgot to mention that I thought that you do really well is you develop a separate list and separate marketing altogether for your affiliates versus your customers which a lot of people don’t do. They don’t see the affiliates as somebody they need to have a whole marketing plan around directly.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah again it comes back to the personal interaction. You’re not going to send the same email to your users that you would your affiliates because I go to my affiliates in a personal way and say, hey let me open myself up and ask you to help me and ask you to post this and ask you to do this you know. I don’t expect anybody to do it. I always give myself a thumbs up like hey great, so and so posted this or so and so tweeted that. I look at it as little wins and every person on that affiliate list needs to be managed differently than your main user-list so absolutely keep them separate keep in touch with and do everything you can to help them.

Tim – MemberCon.com: That’s right. One other question I forgot I …

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah.

Tim – MemberCon.com: … need to ask you in my notes here. Contests, do you run contests every so often for affiliates to see who can sell the most and are they effective?

Brad Stafford – INO.com: We do and the contests are effective it’s again I think with us and I mentioned it previously is we don’t pay out a lot. We pay out 40% per sale but the sale price is not $8000 so the contests are a good way not only to get the affiliates excited about something cash prizes whatever it is but it also gives me the ability to open up a little more of myself and tell it like it is. The last contest we had we did a drawing where my now 2-year old son pulled out the winners and everyone had a good time, laughing about him, joking and all that stuff but the contests are a good way you just have to I’m still learning the contest thing because we do things a little bit different. It’s not a performance contest, it’s a participation contest. So if everybody participates you get an entry and so then we do random drawings from there.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Okay so it’s not about who can bring in the most leads in a month.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Well it depends. We don’t do it like that just because that doesn’t fit with our model. Other affiliate programs do where they say okay here’s a lead contest, whoever does the most leads but what I found is again because I’ve got so many of those bloggers I would instantly blow them out and they would go, oh great here comes a contest where these 5 guys are the only top 5 who have a chance whereas I’d rather have somebody who made 1 entry win something because then he’s going to be like, hey look at this I won something I just got 1 entry. sometimes it pisses the people off at the top but if they’re at the top they’ve already made 15 grand or whatever in a commission check versus the 500 that the 1 guy with the the 1 entry made.

Tim – MemberCon.com: So a good idea yeah maybe mix the 2. Maybe a company may have a performance one then next time you get 1 lead and you’re entered into a random drawing. I like that too.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: Yeah and again you’re hedging yourself with we’re able to hedge because we have advertising to back up so if that person just drives in 1 lead for us we’ll make money off of that person. Will we make the $5000 or $2000 prize back? Maybe not for a couple of years but we’re able to back that up so the performance might work better for the smaller affiliate with really just that focus to go on to reward the high performers and to essentially keep them coming back.

Tim – MemberCon.com: Excellent Brad, hey thanks very much for your time, I really appreciate it.

Brad Stafford – INO.com: No problem. Hey thanks everybody for listening, appreciate it.