(Transcript continued from the Episode 101 show notes and audio podcast)
Talking with Andrew Hansen About Affiliate Marketing and Constant Profits Club
Mark: Andrew, you’re one of these location-independent entrepreneurs. Last we spoke you were within sight of the Thames River somewhere in London or something. Where are you exactly right now?
Andrew: This is true. Right now I am in London, but you only just caught me. We came back from Australia a couple weeks back. We still have family and friends there and we went for Christmas to spend time with the family and we ended up staying a couple of months there, which was really nice since we escaped the winter here and we were in the sun over there. It was happy times. In London right now, though.
Mark: You have the micro human in tow now when you go internationally, he’s a year old now. What has that been like?
Andrew: He’s a year old. Before we had him everyone was saying, “You guys have been traveling so much these last few years, when you have the baby I assume you’ll have to slow it down a bit and settle down.” People said it so many times and I got so frustrated by it, it kind of made me feel stubborn like I’m going to show them and we’re going to do exactly what we did before we had the baby. I can’t tell you whether this was a good decision or not yet, it’s still developing.
In the first year of his life we had something like five overseas voyages. He flew 24 hours first from the UK back to Australia. A little after that we flew him to the states, which is like six hours back and forth. Shortly after that we flew him to Bali where we went to a friend’s wedding. Then it was only two months after that we were back in Australia. His whole first year was just travel and chaos. I have to say that obviously it’s hard, traveling with kids isn’t easy or fun for the most part, unless you’re a Zen master, but it is nowhere near as difficult as people told us.
Mark: This can be survived. It’s different, it’s way different, but it’s totally doable. People do it all the time. I saw pictures of the wedding in Bali, that looked totally epic. Was Bali cool? I’ve never been there.
Andrew: It was our first time there as well, actually. Without getting into a rant, personally I felt that Bali was kind of overrated for what people had told me about it. Especially if you’ve been to places that are a little bit similar, like nice beach side towns where things are cheap and people are friendly. It was okay, but Bali itself to me was a bit overrated.
This wedding that we went to was absolutely unreal. There was a villa that was perched on a cliff, something like 100 meters above the ocean. You looked out over this cliff, down a drop, and the ocean was there. A private beach with no one on it was there and then the ocean was there.
They didn’t spend anywhere near as much money as what you would have done if it was in Australia or the U.S., or somewhere else, but they had a designer layout the whole floor plan of it and they got married in a glass chapel. There’s this glass chapel that’s sitting on a body of water that is on a little pool on top of the cliff that is on top of the ocean. I couldn’t put words to describe how picturesque and ridiculous it was, but it was absolutely the best wedding that I probably will ever attend in my life.
Mark: It makes really great Facebook pictures, too.
Andrew: There were a countless number of them.
Mark: Everyone listening to this interview, as interesting as Bali is for everyone, to tie that back all of this international travel of course is paid for by the internet marketing that you’ve been doing since 2005, around there?
Andrew: Yes. My very first beginning was 2005, but that year was mainly just losing money, just failing and doing things poorly and learning expensive lessons. A lot of 2006 was exactly the same. It was somewhere towards the middle of 2006 that some things clicked for me and started coming into place, then it grew from there. But, yes, that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
Mark: My listeners are very familiar with you, I think this might be your fourth time on the show. One of the reasons I wanted to have you back today is because you have a new course coming out and we’re going to talk about that. What I wanted to do was extract a couple of things. There’s a reason for this course, it’s different than anything you’ve ever done before and it represents at least a couple of really important insights that you have had.
The first one that I wanted to talk about and that I want to ask you some questions about is I know one of the challenges that you have had and I’ve had – because I’ve been in most of these course with you trying to help people get along – is that people pay for internet marketing courses, especially new people, they spend money and they’re looking for results. Most of the people that call me and talk to me personally are looking for results quickly because they need to get a return on their investment. Over the years that has been at odds with building a sustainable business, because building businesses on the internet that are sustainable in general takes time. There are all kinds of get rich quick things that come and go, but the real businesses, the ones that last for years, take time to build.
So there has always been this tension between “I just spent all this money on this course,” and “when am I going to see results.” This new thing that you’re building relieves some of that tension. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Andrew: Yes. You summed up the problem pretty well perfectly. It had been frustrating me when I was doing coaching programs with people for three years from when I first had this feeling that I would tell people if you finish this set of steps and you get your site to this point there’s not really many ways that it can’t make money, it must be profitable if you finish those set of steps. To finish that set of steps you need a little bit of patience.
If you want to do this properly you can’t use that set of techniques, you have to use this set of techniques. What that means is you’re not going to make money in the first couple of weeks. For this to get up and establish itself it might be a couple of months, it might be three months or even longer. I told people just be at peace with that from the beginning. If you can just be patient and just keep following the steps for that few months until you cross this tipping point, then things will take off and you’ll forget that three months ever happened, it will be insignificant in your memory.
The problem was that I can tell people that but it’s just really hard to do. Just like you said, when you’ve invested the money and you really want to make this thing work, and you see other people achieving certain results, it’s so hard to keep going forward with something when it appears on the surface that there is no progress being made because in your mind progress equals money. If you’re not making a dollar from the first couple of weeks, you’re not making progress – that’s what people think anyway.
I got to the point where I thought there has to be a different solution, I have to be able to do something better than just tell people to be patient. I should have appreciated it sooner because I am the most impatient person that there is and I understand that feeling as well as anyone possibly can, and there was me telling people to just be more patient and it will be fine and work out.
At some point I started thinking, “What else could there be?” How else could we put a business model together where people didn’t have to wait that first couple of months to see their first income? What if they could start earning income straight off the bat but do so in a way that was legitimate and real, and that actually leads them in the direction of being able to build a really high quality, long lasting business that will earn them income for years into the future?
That’s what this course is about.
Mark: I think one of the other things that goes with this is there is also pressure coming from another direction, that is that at one point it really was possible to put a website up overnight tonight and make money tomorrow, sort of. While there are still some things you can do with paid traffic to do that, doing that with organic search and sustainable stuff is different now. Right?
Andrew: These two goals are fundamentally at odds, that’s what people need to understand. The things you need to do to create an income stream in the next week are a totally different set of things than the set of things that might build you a $10,000 a month business by the end of this year. They’re just different.
Like you said before, real businesses don’t make money from day one. I was using this example before; think of anyone you know who is wealthy from business. Mark Zuckerberg; Did Facebook make money from day one, did Facebook make money online fast?
Mark: Absolutely not.
Andrew: Obviously it didn’t. The biggest businesses take years before they turn a profit. That’s a whole other conversation. The point is that those two goals are opposed.
Any time that you spend pursuing one of those strategies that is designed to make money as quickly as possible, even when it works – and 98% of the time it doesn’t because those strategies are just scams created by crazy people who are trying to take your money – even when it does work it’s only ever going to be a short term solution. It’s not the same thing that is going to build you an income that works for the future, that grows over time, because it can’t possibly be. It has to be short term, it has to be fly by night, otherwise you wouldn’t make money with it quickly.
Mark: You threw out a number that is a very popular number and I want to ask you about that number. A lot of people carry around the number that you threw out, $10,000 a month. It’s a nice round number and it results in a six figure per year income. I know a lot of people that are listening to this show are having trouble imagining $100 a month, much less $10,000 a month. Is that still real, with affiliate marketing can you really still do that? Even in 2016 is that something that can be achieved?
Andrew: It is something that can be achieved, yes. We’re seeing it more and more. The last group of people who I’ve taken through my strategies, it’s funny they’ve kept coming out of the woodwork. I probably don’t do enough to follow up with people who go through our programs and check in with where they’re at, and I put a little bit of the blame on them as well because they don’t always contact me when they’re doing really well. At the beginning they need the most help and they’re always in contact. Then when they start doing incredibly well, I never hear from them, so that’s a challenge for me.
It is possible. To talk to the people who you are describing, the reality and something that a lot of people don’t realize is very few of us actually need $10,000 a month. For most of us, the things that we want to do in life, the things that are important to us and the kind of life that we would like to lead doesn’t require anywhere near $120,000 a year. I love talking about the capacity to make smaller amounts of money. In the webinar (that we’ll probably talk about shortly) there are three or four people who got within a relatively short period of time to the level of $2,000 a month and beyond. They talk about how that has totally changed their lives.
There’s this guy Nathan and I found out under similar circumstances when he asked me a random question by email and I decided to check in with him and ask how it was going, and he said his site is up to $2,500 a month at the moment, he’s mainly using Amazon affiliate program and I think one other. He was saying how this totally changed his world; suddenly he has all this additional time on his hands, he talked about this great vacation that he was able to take his wife on.
It reminded me of this point that $10,000 a month is great, it is a nice round number and it is a nice goal, but life can completely change with a whole lot less money than that. So I’m really into the idea of getting people to that lower milestone. The cool thing is that the same principles apply.
The thing that gets you to $2,000 a month with a site, getting to $10,000 a month for most people is only doing more of that same thing, or finding a way to automate some of the processes that got you to that point, or finding new ways to do what you did with the content on that site, new ways to promote the same things that you promoted, other things that you can promote to the same group of people. From $2,000 to $10,000 is usually just scaling and strategy stuff rather than all the hard work it took you to go from $0 to $2,000.
Mark: That’s a really good point. I know a lot of people that listen to this show are trying to build internet businesses alongside their existing job which is generating money. In that context, $2,000 a month is an enormous amount of additional money that can be used to pay down debt, pay medical bills, buy cars, take vacations, whatever it is that really puts you over the edge and gets you to the next level from a lifestyle perspective.
Andrew: Absolutely. Especially when you don’t have to spend all of your time on it. If you work eight hours a day and you can generate $2,000 a month and it takes you an hour a day after work in the evenings, that really is game changing.
Mark: That sounds like late night internet marketing.
Andrew: It sounds very much like that, you should trademark that.
Mark: I should. So I have an incredibly embarrassing funny question to ask you. I’m going to reveal something about you that few people know and I’m going to ask it in the context of internet marketing.
It is a true fact, I know this for a fact, that you used to have at least one website selling hemorrhoid cream. True or false?
Andrew: Yes, definitely true.
Mark: Now you’re outted. What has changed since you were promoting these single product kind of hemorrhoid cream landing pages to what is really working and is super effective now?
Andrew: I’m not glad that you brought up the subject of hemorrhoids, which I should make the disclaimer that I have no experience with or knowledge of.
Mark: Just to be clear, you went into the hemorrhoid niche wasn’t out of necessity.
Andrew: Mark, I decline to say on this occasion. I am glad that you brought it up in the sense that it’s interesting to me because despite the fact that a lot has changed since the time when I was making small sites that promoted individual products like hemorrhoid cream, hemorrhoid cream itself and even affiliates who promote hemorrhoid cream, I would be very doubtful, in fact it’s almost impossible, that those people are making less money than they did back then. All that’s different is that it’s a different group of people making the money.
People didn’t stop looking for hemorrhoid cream, that’s one. People didn’t stop buying hemorrhoid cream, that’s two. Again, not me, just people. People didn’t stop searching for hemorrhoid cream, that’s three. And the price of hemorrhoid cream didn’t change. Not even that, they didn’t stop looking for reviews of hemorrhoid cream, they didn’t stop needing the information that they need in order to decide whether a certain hemorrhoid cream is for them. None of those factors have changed. What changed is which people now are able to service the need that those people searching for hemorrhoid cream have.
Where previously it was people like me who used to make these tiny mini sites and be really clever and aggressive with link building to be able to inflate our search rankings who dominated the space – and honestly, in certain spaces like this some of that stuff does still exist, some of those guys still do okay, but it’s extremely up and down and you wouldn’t want to follow that business model anymore. But somebody still does make money serving those people, it’s just different.
Now typically it’s people who are more authoritative in their markets, it’s bigger sites. Somebody still writes the reviews, but now because trust is so much more of a factor for Google, who they decide is trustworthy enough to supply the information on those hemorrhoid creams to their searchers is different. That to me is the biggest change for content marketers and SEO people in the last five years.
Mark: Previously we might have sold products like hemorrhoid cream on a three to five page site. Now these things that you’re calling authority sites, and I know this varies all over the place, what sort of page counts are you talking about? Are these 10 page sites, 50 page sites, 100 page sites?
Andrew: We could talk about what’s needed to rank in any particular market, but it’s tricky without specifying some market because it varies from one to the next. The way I like to look at this is that it’s not as much about the size of the website, it’s about the approach of the website.
One of the things is rather than having a site that just provides people with product reviews, really successful sites look outside of that and they look at their audience more broadly. “Here’s a group of people who have hemorrhoids, what do they really need? What full set of things do they need?” Sure, maybe some of them are looking for these creams, so that’s the thing that they most need. Chances are it’s a big group of people and there are a lot of things that they need. At various times they’re searching for different kinds of information, different kinds of products.
The people who build sites thinking in that way, thinking about their audience more holistically, are consistently being more successful. I want to say they’re more successful in search, but really they’re more successful on the internet, period, because it’s those people who have the potential to capitalize on new forms of traffic. It’s those people who have the potential to even just rank for so many more keywords in the search engines, to bring traffic from different places, to diversify their sources of revenue more broadly, and as a result of that be much stronger, be much better placed to last in their market for longer and ultimately make more money.
Mark: That’s pretty clear. I know because I’ve had a peek at this product that’s coming that these new evolving revelations are at the core of what you’re going to be teaching this time. I know you’re going to have a webinar and I want to ask this question. Should people attend the webinar even if they have absolutely no intention of buying anything, is there going to be real content for people in the webinar? Maybe you can take us through what you plan to cover, when the webinar is, and what’s going on behind it.
Andrew: If you’re looking for entertainment there are YouTube videos that are much funnier than I will be on this webinar. If you’re asking will people get content, the answer is definitely yes.
Mark: That’s definitely what I was asking. What’s the content of this webinar?
Andrew: What I’m going to try to do in the 60 minutes that we have for this presentation is to break down this set of steps. Sara and I put our heads together and came up with this set of three steps that can allow somebody to make their first income legitimately and in a repeatable fashion from pretty much the moment the webinar is finished.
You’ll see on the webinar there is a lady who did this and she made her first dollar three hours after the webinar. It took her three hours of trying and she had generated real money in her bank account. That’s a real thing that has happened, that’s possible for people and that’s the first step in the process. I’m going to try to show you in as much detail as I can how people have done that and how you can do it.
The next step they’re going to look at how they can take that income and take the things they learned in generating that income and turn it into a passive income, their first bit of income that they didn’t have to work for. That comes via selling other people’s stuff and earning a commission.
From there they’re going to see how to take the passive income and turn it into a lasting income, how to take it to something that over the course of a year can build up to that figure of $10,000 a month.
Each of those steps has in it a strategy. For each step I’m going to try to show you the strategy that people used in order to do that. Some of the cool content things on there are I’m going to show people a tool that is extremely underused, a website actually, for finding really high end products that they can promote. I’ve not seen anyone else in internet marketing talk about this particular tool.
I’m actually going to find a product using that tool live on the screen, dig out the affiliate program, do some research on it and show you exactly the process of how I do that, which is really quite different. I’m not talking about Amazon, Clickbank, Commission Junction, or anything like that, it’s something totally different outside of that.
In the third step, I guess I’ll give it away. Talking about quality sites and doing really incredible things, there’s a guy who I emailed a couple of months back who had taken my last program and had been working on his site all through 2015. I found out that he is now making $24,000 a month from his 30 page website.
Mark: Is this a Rankings Institute guy or a Forever Affiliate guy?
Andrew: Rankings Institute guy.
Mark: $24,000 a month?
Andrew: Yes. Not kidding. The screenshots will be in the presentation. More importantly, some of the email exchange I had with him will be in the presentation, which is most exciting because we talk about how it has actually impacted his life and he has a really cool story.
The reason that I’m showing that is I’m going to talk about some of the things that he did with this site and how a 30 page website could make that kind of money. It’s an authoritative site, it’s an incredible site and he’s done really well with it, but it still is only 30 pages, it’s still a WordPress blog, it’s still selling stuff as an affiliate. Some of the things that he did, namely in finding the products that he promotes on that site and finding the keywords that he used to target those products, and that he did with his backlinking strategy, I’m trying to break that down on the webinar to help people understand exactly what is working for getting quick traffic to those high commission, high income products so that people can replicate that in their own businesses.
Mark: I’m sold based on that. When is this webinar and how can we sign up?
Andrew: It will be on March 8th at 5:00 PM Eastern. I think it’s LateNightIM.com/CPC.
Mark: That’s exactly right, LateNightIM.com/CPC, which stands for Constant Profits Club, the name of the product. I think the reason for that name is there really is this process where you can get in and if you need to make a dollar in the next 24 hours that’s actually possible. Then you can go forward from there and grow your business from that point.
Andrew: That’s exactly the thinking behind the name. That link will get you registered for the webinar. We really want to try to provide as much value as we can on this live session. I really prefer to interact with people and have them asking questions because it does something totally different for your learning of the material and your inclination to actually do something with it.
Mark: Very good. We’ll see you there. I will be there on the webinar, I’m really looking forward to it.
One last thing. I don’t know much about Sara Young and we didn’t really cover this in the beginning, but she’s your partner on this product. I’ve seen some of her material, I did a little research on her prior to the show, but maybe you could give us a little background about how you know Sara, what her expertise is, and why you’re excited about having her on the team.
Andrew: It’s hard to know where to start in telling Sara’s story. For those who don’t her, she got into internet marketing building businesses online as a mother of seven children. She has a big family, so as you could imagine she got started as a person who didn’t have very much time on her hands. As a result of that, she came upon a set of strategies for people who do have that really urgent need to get up and making money quickly. Not only that, but for people who even after the fact just don’t have the large number of hours in the day. She has developed a lot of strategies that are trying to answer the problem of how to make as much money as possible when you don’t have a lot of time to spend.
Her background has a lot of different parts, but the cool thing is that when we started talking about the methods that we were using ourselves and that we were teaching our students we saw that there was this incredible confluence where if we put some of these things together and combined some of the things that each other were already doing, having success with, and that our students were having success with, this kind of alchemy took place and there was something that came out the other side that was greater than the sum of the parts. It’s that information that is in the three step process that we’ve put together and that we’ll be talking about on the webinar.
I certainly encourage people to come along. Sara will be there on the webinar so you’ll get a chance to talk to her and ask her questions as well. You’ll basically be getting the sum of our knowledge. She has been doing this for nine years, I’ve been doing this for 10 years this year, there’s a lot of experience and knowledge there, and we’ve tried to cram as much of that as we can into this presentation.
Mark: Congratulations on your 10 year anniversary online, that’s very exciting. Mine is coming up next year and I’m excited about that as well. It’s been quite a journey. I’m really looking forward to Constant Profits Club because I’ve committed to building a site in front of my audience this year, so I’ll be using a lot of the CPC thinking and methodologies and we’ll see how that goes. So it’s kind of exciting for me too.
Andrew: That is exciting. I’ll be very interested to see how that plays out.
Mark: Well thank you very much, we really appreciate it. I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day.
Andrew: Thanks for having me, Mark. It’s always a pleasure.
Mark: Awesome. Thanks.
Wrapping Things Up
If you’ve checked out that link you’ll know that by the time I got the interview on the air the webinar had already come and gone, but the replay of the webinar is available at that link; LateNightIM.com/CPC. If you go to that link right now you’ll either find the download for the webinar if it’s still available, which I hope it is because it’s an excellent webinar full of exciting and motivational information, or you’ll find the sales page to the course, or you’ll find that the course is closed, one of those things.
It doesn’t really matter which. If you’re excited about affiliate marketing, I can tell you that this is a fantastic course. I’ve already been through most of the material. If you’re not, that’s fine too, you should watch the webinar just because there is so much interesting information about success stories that Andrew has observed and what it takes to build a successful affiliate site these days.
One the things that I’m most excited about is there’s also information in there about if you need money today how to make money right now today. It’s not get rich quick stuff, it’s how to do work and make actual money today, how you could do that maybe even by this afternoon. I’m not talking about hundreds of dollars by this afternoon, but you could start a new business and be making actual money, actual cash that you can have in your hand, by this afternoon.
Check that out at LateNightIM.com/CPC and I will see you soon.
