Regular readers of our blog know that in our prior lives “working for the man,” Emile was a software engineer for a USB device company and I was a police officer for LAPD. Both of us took the red pill and exited the job matrix – I in 2000 and Emile a few years later – because we both wanted complete control of our futures.
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.
affiliate program, online entrepreneurs affiliate marketing, Affiliate Summit, Jeremy Schoemaker, Shoemoney.com
Brad Stafford was the affiliate marketing manager for one of the largest financial membership sites on the web for many years. He’s now launched his own company, helping financial website owners learn how to sell their content with great email copy and honest-to-goodness solid content.
The Interview Income blog is written by Tim Bourquin and Emile Bourquin, brothers and owners of Ideas For Download. The Interview Income Blog is your front row seat to see what we've done that worked and failed in selling content online. Thankfully, we've been pretty successful but we promise to always show you the reality of building an online business.
