What would YOU ask a top Super-Affiliate? (51)
If you could sit a top affiliate marketer down for 30 minutes, what would you ask them?
Let me know - because I'm planning to sit 'em down and ask them for you!
Now that the Getting Started Guide is complete, I'm working on new projects for STM.
One of the things I'm planning is a regular series of interviews with top people in the affiliate world, talking about the state of play in 2013/2014. What's changing, what's new and exciting, what they see people doing right and wrong.
And I'd love to know what you'd like to ask them.
So - if you had the opportunity, what questions would you want to pose to the best affiliates in the world?
Obviously, "tell me what campaigns you're running now, in full detail, and please provide creatives" isn't going to fly - but anything reasonable, I shall try and include and get answers for everyone!
Also, let me know if there's anyone specific you'd like me to quiz, and I'll see what I can do about arranging an interview!
If you could be brilliant at one skill in affiliate marketing and terrible at every other skill, what would that one skill be?
A couple:
Your best tip at how to make the jump from mid level affiliate (1-9k/day) to high level (10k+/day).
What all do you outsource and what do you do yourself?
Thanks!
From my experience, once you understand a category of traffic source, the greatest individual element that will make the difference between a huge campaign and a small campaign is the offer and how well it converts in a given market. Presells, creatives, etc can make a huge difference but without a key offer, they are nothing. AMs on standard networks are often good at telling you what the herd is pumping but much of the time these offers produce lower margins and are shorter lived than the hidden bombs. What is your process for discovering those proper gem offers?
1.Top 10 things that they wish they knew in their first year full time.
2. Productivity hacks and daily workflow systems.
3. How to mitigate burn out.
4. Tricks to working remotely or in another country.
4. Best ways to structure your business/ set up offshore corporations to avoid getting screwed by the tax man.
If you were starting out fresh today, and had to pick one traffic source to start working with. What would it be?
Would like to know about how they legally minimise or even avoid taxes - such as becoming a Perpetual Traveler (no tax obligation to any country) or living in Singapore (no tax paid on revenue generated outside SG even if paid into a SG bank account) or Dubai (no income tax) etc. Want to hear stories or other things, how they cope with loneliness if they choose to move around, how they deal with women, friends, family. ..
Originally Posted by redrummr
What are the essential most needed skills to create high volume, big campaigns 5-6 figures daily? And fastest way to acuire those skills?
If someone took all your money today, and you have to start from zero with the skills, that you already have describe the exact process on how you will go from 0$ to $7 figures in your bank account 
How are you?
if he's seen molly
Originally Posted by 1eliotpapageorgio
Originally Posted by Smaxor
What were your 3 biggest time sinks and how did you turn them around?
what's your skype?
How do you approach a traffic source with a ton of volume but generally low quality? Do you keep networks with "pristine" quality and push for exclusive bumps and segment your "meh" quality elsewhere, or is it generally better to mix it together?
How long did it take you to really "get going" when you first started out. What were your biggest struggles as a new affiliate?
Awesome questions keep them coming, covering a lot of bases here!
How to best capitalize on the Holiday months when consumer spending goes up
How to deal with gold diggers, and women that are just interested in your money.
Which tips/hints would you not publicly out in questionnaires like this :P
Originally Posted by Smaxor
Originally Posted by Mr Green
Which event or factor, outside of traffic sources and offers, set your business on fire. Examples could be lightbulb moment ideas, getting an office, hiring a specific person or people, going to a specific conference, meeting a like-minded individual etc etc etc.
Loads of brilliant questions - thanks, everyone!
Keep 'em coming!
Will you adopt me? If not, what's your account number?
On a serious note though, how old were you when you first started out and did your success come gradually overtime or was it relatively fast-paced?
I think we need to have "Ask Jason Thread". I hope he's on your list Caurmen.
Originally Posted by Smaxor
How long do you last in bed? 
1. When starting out and trying to become profitable, what's the 20% I should focus on that will provide 80% of the result? Paretor principle
Originally Posted by paulis1
I really enjoy answering questions.
Most of my focus at this point is fairly high level. So not sure how valuable that is to newer pubs. Tricks for traffic sources isn't where I live anymore more trying to build core knowledge into scalable operations. If that's interesting let me know and I'll start one after this one has complete.
How would you start again if you lost all your money and you've left only $ 700 in your pocket. How would you turn that $ 700 into a nice cash flow again. All you have is the knowledge and everything else is lost! Short step by step explanation (traffic source, strategy, plans, etc.)
Originally Posted by swissfactor
The biggest thing you need to focus on in the beginning is building the cash flow, cash flow is MASSIVE in all business but especially aff marketing, nothing is more painful then having to pause successful campaigns simply because you can't float your traffic payments waiting on a network to pay you.
There are not to many sources that will work in your favour with $700 (mobile/PPV/mediabuys requires a considerable amount of money put into testing, adult requires a much larger cash flow to handle the lower ROI's, FB well, it sure is a viable option, but unless you know what you're doing you don't wanna push your luck with these guys and ban accounts/motivation) except POF. The brilliant thing about POF is that you can still make high ROI's with very limited cashflow. You could be spending $10/day and netting $50 back if you run tight niche campaigns, and you have a great deal of control over creating your own micro niches.
I would ask your favourite couple of networks for some dating offers that are very niche, you don't wanna go broad here you literally want to hyper target for the biggest CTR's you can get with a niche offer you can do 200-500% roi still if not more, I have always suggested this to people with limited cash flow and it still works someone I speak with is in a very similar boat to your question and he is making those ROI's daily. I am talking very targeted, you might only spend $5/day on 1 campaign, but the idea is to have many micro niche campaigns churning in nice ROI's. BenPOF posted a video of some dude I think had 1000 (something tells me its much bigger then this), campaigns going at once for some unreal ROI's.
You can cut the guess work with this forum, there is a WEALTH of information on every source, especially POF! this will save you money
I would also make sure I am working with a reputable network who will pay weeklies on $500/week as you're going to want to keep your cash flow coming in. I would spend 1-3 months doing this, reinvesting everything back into the business trying to build my budget into the mid $xxxx's. From these initial months you're going to have a decent lock down on campaign creation, you will know the technicalities of tracking, the process of finding an optimising images, you will know landing pages and whatever other basic tools you need as an affiliate.
I hope in this timeframe you also find yourself 1-2 mentors and friends in this industry, support has made the world of difference to me.
From here you will have an alright budget to take your next step into the lands of bigger opportunity. Facebook, Mobile, Adult etc
I would also keep a part time job (if you're full time keep it), during this process as you want to keep your lifestyle funds flowing in keeping the stress at bay! and you won't need to spend 8 hours a day on this initial stage (if you are, then you're most likely procrastinating)
I would submerge myself into only 1 vertical and learn everything I can about it, THEY ALL WORK, and you don't wanna be jumping ship at this point and wasting 50% budget here and 50% there and being back to square one. With a trusty process of campaign creation and work flow you will most likely get into positive ROI with in your budget, opening the world of credit cards (if you're not into getting them in the beginning) to your to keep the campaign flowing.
Thats just my 2 cents, but I know it works, its worked for ALOT of people I have tried to help along the way.
Awesome answer!
The phrase "Micro-Niche" is the key here. I see a lot of people targeting broad on POF, or maybe targeting one large angle, like "older people" - "tightly-focused" means much more tight than that.
Originally Posted by swissfactor
Since you are living in Switzerland, take advantage of your country's ridiculously low 1% unemployment rate and insanely high wages and get a job and save up some more emergency money for 6 months before you go down this route. Du musst immer die Ochsen hinter dem Wagen spannen.
who were you going to ask these questions too??
I agree with you. I think that you should have some kinda source of income and be prepared for a series of failures until you make money with AM consistently... unless you're lucky or super talented or both. I've seen someone who isn't so experienced, yet makes thousands of dollars after 3 months because his friends are helped him out. Realistically most people aren't that lucky. Get a part-time job and learn AM after work.
I'd be interested in learning if there is an exact criteria to determine who is and who isn't a super-affiliate? For instance, is this determined by how much revenue generated, how much profit made on a daily basis etc. Just interested in where the cutoff mark is to get one's status from affiliate to super-affiliate, if such a cutoff exists.
^^ There is no such cutoff. Some people call themselves super affiliates if they are running $500 a day. Others say 1 million a month. It's really a terrible term.
Come to think of it, I'm pretty super.
@dynamicsoul - I'm going to be organising a series of interviews with super-affs in the New Year after ASW. Obviously, the guys I'm going to be interviewing are pretty darn busy, so it'll probably take a while to get set up, but look for them then!
^^ Defining an affiliate by revenue generated really only works for a network.
If an affiliate is trying to get a gauge on a how big an affiliate is then $1,000,000/month rev could mean $50,000 profit/month or $500,000 profit/month.
It's actually an interesting topic. I do think there needs to be something to differ between new affiliates and successful affiliates for quite a few reasons. The only way to do that though is to plug into affiliate accounts globally, which ain't going to happen.
Personally, I would be super curious as to what the hurdles are that they are facing at their level in trying to grow. Especially which ones they find hardest to tackle.
What is your workflow to setup a campaign?
- What are your reasons to test an offer or to ignore it?
- Which grunt work do you outsource? What do you do yourself?
- How many campaigns are you testing each day? How long does it take you to get a complete campaign live?
with a good company being the secret to success, and with so many people faking it till they're making it..How do you make friends in the industry, i mean how do you guage the real biggies from fakers ??
I think you will find on STM, the majority of members are very grounded. They will say when they are doing shit, and then when they are doing well.
We accept everyone started at ground zero. We also accept that you're not always going to have good months or good years.
You can easily find the fakers. They are the ones who will never admit their faults, bad months, and they will never take advice, or take the position of a student instead of a teacher. They may have had some success in the past. But they are the ones who will get taken over by affiliates actively learning without the ego.
I still can't code a HTML/CSS website. All trackers still confuse the shit out of me when creating multi step landers (I'll blame the trackers :P). I learn from STMers every single day, even the ones who have been doing AM for 1 month.
My apologies if that came off a little ranty!
Besides what new skills and habits you had to develop to be this successful.
It would be interesting to know what you had to let go of?
To go from your former unsuccessful version to the version you are today.
Originally Posted by Mr Green
Id ask them what does the fox say
Originally Posted by Mr Green
I've never used anything other than notepad++
admittedly , ill rip a lander, open it up in notepad++ then modify the hell out of it. I like having some template to start off with. Although its something I am completely garbage at, its good learning experience
EDIT: stupid phone
Originally Posted by sean3
Picking your friends well is one of the most important things you can do to lead a positive and meaningful life. In Internet marketing, just as in life, there will be a very small number of people who genuinely care about you, and plenty of others who are just trying to sell you something or take advantage of you or use you to gratify their own ego or inadequacies.
Pick your friends well.
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