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3 Comments

I have a 3-5m/year infoproduct biz. AMA

Hey all. I'm building an software for local ads (https://marketingtech.io) and have a side-business selling a training on how to do affiliate marketing that makes 3-5m/year gross sales.

Ask me anything.

Heres a bit of my timeline:
2016 - Wrote a forum post in StackThatMoney (niche forum for affiliate marketing, 2k members) looking to hire people (I had a few people working for me as media buyers at the time). Got too many replies. Got affiliate software (HasOffers) for $99/m, then rebrokered a bunch of offers, and sold access to all my internal company trainings in a google drive for 5k. Most people paid without even a conversation (I had 'clout' in that forum at the time) and got our first 50 customers within a month.

2017 - Created a webinar and a funnel and started doing facebook ads. I copied a webinar I saw that was working well (Sam Ovens') and replaced a few words to make it more applicable to the business model I was teaching. 1.2m in sales on 360k in adspend (youtube ads). Initially sold at $47/m.

2018 - Increased price to $997. Started doing 5x Youtube videos (not ads) per week. Sales grew to 3m, on roughly 1m in adspend.

2019 - 5x yt videos per week. More focus on courting affiliates to send traffic to my training course funnel. Traffic moved up to 300k-1m uniques a month (about where it is now)

2020 - Shifted focus to doing tv infomercials (for my infoproducts) during the pandemic. Infoproduct business still brought in 7figs, tv infomercials did 2m.

2021 - Cut tv infomercials due to declining tv viewership (lockdown orders easing off). Stopped daily youtube videos because of personal life stuff. Shifted focus to youtube ads again. Infoproduct biz doing 300-500k/m. My focus is 80% on building our software.

Tech Stack:
Clickfunnels (funnels), Wordpress (course, wishlist member), Infusionsoft, Sendgrid, Zendesk, callloop.

Revenue: 1/3 youtube ads, 1/3 youtube organic, 1/3 affiliates.

Best,

  1. 2

    Thanks for the AMA. Your results are impressive.

    As I understand it, a lot of techniques (pop-ups, squeeze pages, lead magnets, etc.) have found their way from affiliate marketing into online marketing more broadly. So is there anything that affiliate marketers are doing today that the rest of us should learn from?

    1. 2

      Yes, theres a ton of tactics affiliates use that might be helpful, but understand that every product/service is different and will do best with a slightly different funnel.

      • Optimization: Looking at every possible data point to get feedback on, and optimize a funnel. Heres a few metrics that lots of affiliates look at, that most marketers dont: ISP, IP, device, model, browser, browser version, carrier/wifi connection, etc.
        --- You might see a horrible CR if you just segment out users with a carrier connection. Maybe you have huge images or a video that autoloads, It may look great on your monster monitor and fast connection, but not so much on actual users' screens.
        --- You might notice a lot of traffic from gov or education ISPs; this may mean you're getting some WOM in that sector and may want to double down there
        --- you may notice your users using a certain device or browser version or screen size arent converting very well; another chance to increase conversion rates with zero added costs.
      • CDNs. Most affiliates use a CDN to increase page load speed; super easy way to increase conversion rates and usage
      • Advertorials, 'rules' landers, native ad traffic.
      • Modeling funnels after your competition. Most affiliates model their advertising after what already works. This doesnt always make sense for SaaS beecause we're usually creating something new, but that said, taking elements from similar saas products can be extremely helpful. For instance, we saw a horrible conversion rate of users going through our onboarding/training sequence; we completely redid our onboarding and modeled it closely after mailchimp. Same content, structured differently, increased our conversion rates over 50x. We modeled a different part of our onboarding sequence after Yelps, and saw another massive increase in usage, in a different part of our app.
      • Modeling targeting after the competition & spending tons of time researching the competition. We had massive breakthroughs in understanding our target audience by simply spending a few days researching our competition in-depth; from this, we found that our closet comparable saas strongly utilizes app marketplaces like wordpress, weebly, and wix to get their users... theyre not investor funded, have a very limited front-end site, and arent featured on any of the startup lists/databases/forums. This provided us incredible intel; we were able to read hundreds of reviews of their app to discover what was lacking and what users liked the most. We were able to see exactly how their support responded to users' questions, and could likewise use that as a model for our own support SOPs. We got an understanding of what our best users look like. And by looking at their website, we also found a few 'hidden' app marketplaces that are fairly unsaturated and we will be able to develop for and hopefully get some easy, fast traction on.

      I hope that helps!

      Best,

      1. 1

        I appreciate your answer. A 50x increase in conversion rates is quite something, so kudos on that.

        What you said about the technical parameters (carrier/wifi, TLDs, etc.) is interesting. I tend to discount those kinds of analyses in favor of focusing on targeted traffic and copywriting, but that probably translates to my leaving some money on the table, so I guess I should reconsider.

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