Home > Success, Wins, Achievements > Success Stories

---

The first Million is always the hardest (38)

---

I read somewhere that the key to success in our business was threefold:

Matching the hottest offer with the hottest creative with the hottest traffic source.

I'm not really smart enough to get all three so I just went with the first: getting on the hottest offer. With a tip from Josh and some buzz on the other forums I built my offer which went from $0 to over $1M in less than 4 months.

I feel grateful for the success I've enjoyed and though I'd share some of the insights I learned along the way.

These are the gritty details:

Skills Required to Run an Offer (on your own):

- Merchant account setup
--- This is the lynch pin
--- Triple check your monthly volume caps. I still have 5 figures being held with 2 MID's for going over cap
--- Integrate with a gateway like authorize.net

- Fulfillment setup
--- If orders aren't shipped within 24 hours, you will lose your MID

- Coding and Design
--- Learn basic PHP/MySql. 90% of what I know I learned from tizag.com and from dissecting populated code from dreamweaver datase/binding/server behaviours and components
--- Built own CRM to handle orders and shipping
--- Setup dedicated servers and optimized with CDN for fast loading of rich content landing page
--- Designed first LP from a very basic $7 template, later hired a designer to send PSD's which I coded into php/css.
--- Learn basic Photoshop. Do not get to caught up advanced photo editing. Just learn how to manipulate layers and add blending effects.

- Customer Service
--- Used fiverr.com for my voicemail greeting and tollfreeforwarding.com for my IVR which forwarded to a skype number and recorded voice mails which could be reviewed online.
--- Answer as many calls as you can
--- I hired my single employee once customer calls became a full time job
--- Used zendesk.com to handle support tickets
--- Refund people when the asked to be refunded. A bad customer will quickly become a nightmare if not satisfied.
--- Use customer feedback to optimize website
--- Use specialtyansweringservice.net to answer calls when my employee wasn't here taking calls
--- Employee hired was energetic and excited to have a challenge at work

Optimization
--- Ran internal traffic so I could have a better understanding of what affiliates were facing.
--- Each increase in conversion rate by 1% increased profits incrementally by 25%
--- If in the right offer, you will think conversion rate is great.. Its falsely inflated by demand for the product. Optimize always. Even if you're getting 5% CR you should probably be getting 10%
--- Learn sales. Everything I know about 'selling' a product I learned from selling home security systems door to door for two years. I wouldn't trade that education for a PHD.
--- Integrated with getclicky, leftronic, newrelic and hasoffers and visualwebsiteoptimizer.
--- Get 3 monitors to keep up with your realtime data.
--- Keep running new variations of LP to find the one that works best for your traffic

Business End
--- Use profits as leverage to outsource and manage key tasks. I hired a team to manage my internal campaigns, code API's that were over my head, do my accounting
--- Keep growth as your #1 focus but don't lose track of where you are wasting money. It becomes to easy to justify expenses once you are profitable. Make sure you are using your capital prudently.
--- Since everybody will ask about my margins, they are about twenty five percent.
--- Hire an accountant. I've used wave accounting for awhile. Having a balance sheet and income statement will be crucial to getting more volume for your merchant accounts. I used wave accounting starting out and it worked very well. When it comes time to pay your taxes you'll want a pro to help you navigate the process.
--- Hire a lawyer. Since my offer is in the diet space I paid two different lawyers to dissect my LP's. You can make all the money in the world but it means nothing when you have to turn it all over in a settlement. Success can make you feel invincible but you will likely become a failure if you are violating the law. There are countless examples of guys in our space that went from jets to taking the bus.
--- Pay your affiliates always.
--- When you find a market, work hard to fill it while it lasts. Another thing I learned from this forum; the market for your offer will not last forever and you will kick yourself in the ass if you did not do everything you could to scale and match market demand.
--- On that note, keep your soul. This requires a shit ton of work. At some point you will have to take a break or you will become dull and useless. Take time to reset when you feel you need it. You will always come back stronger, more effective and will make more money.
--- Don't do rebills unless you make it explicitly clear it is a rebill and the customer is likely to stay subscribed. You will not be successful in the long run.

Those are the basics! Experience is the only true teacher and you won't make serious income until you've made some serious mistakes..

Thank you to all who have shared their success and insights.

I hope you all continue to stay on your grind and eventually get YOUR gold.

---

Congratulations on your success Kieler

---

This has gotta be the biggest success story yet! $0 - $1,000,000 in 4 months is bawse! Congrats my man.

---

Wow. Well done Kieler!

And thanks for the great post with your tips & lessons. Essential reading for anyone thinking of running their own offer. Theres so much gold in here that im not sure which ones to highlight. Its all important.

Couple of questions if I may:

1) £1m - revenue is assume? (note: yes it is & margin is 25%)

2) willing to share your profit margin?

3) what was your upfront investment & how long did it take for you to hit your break even point

4) revenue split between internal & affiliates

---

^ ^ ^ Would like to know this too. Thanks and congratulations to your success!

---

....

---

Incredible!! Hats off to you man

Banking, Banking, Banking.. keep working on those banking relationships. Look into offshore mids (laiki..) You will need them sooner than later.

---

Kieler, thx for sharing and making us all a part of this.

(In the future, when people ask me about this Legendary Story, I will be able to state "Yes, I was there.")

---

Wow Ryan. I guess you've had a good summer! Congrats man. I love how you were able to scale so much with your bare bones setup. Thanks for sharing.

---

I remember when you posted about starting your offer. Amazing ride. Bravo!

---

Awesome!

Reminds me of the joke I tell people when they ask how business is going:

"I'm working on my second million . . . . I gave up on the first!"

---

Great job, now go on vacation

---

If vBulletin had a like button, this comment would be liked

---

Couple of questions if I may:

1) £1m - revenue is assume? (note: yes it is & margin is 25%)

2) willing to share your profit margin?

3) what was your upfront investment & how long did it take for you to hit your break even point

I started on a shared hosting account I already had, upgraded servers twice once sales started up. I built everything myself so my only investment really was my time.. In dollar value, it would probably cost about $5,000 for the work I put in.. I also relied on affiliates for the first month which was fine but I wasn't seeing the volume I wanted. I started my own campaign once the grunt work was out of the way and had to tap about $2500 of my own money to get the ball rolling. After that, positive ROI funded campaigns.

4) revenue split between internal & affiliates

75% internal

---

Cool overview and congrats on making it work.

I have to play devil's advocate a bit and break it down for any affiliates that are thinking of changing their game plan and going out and getting mids and trying to become advertisers.

$1Million in revenue is great. But let's look at the numbers.

If I read the story correctly:
The campaigns ran for 4 months
made $250k profit
you kept 75%, so an actual profit to you of around $187,500

And you had to:

• create a product
• hire attorneys
• hire accountants
• have the product made and bottled
• talk to banks for MIDS
• put your name on everything
• do all the programming
• build the site
• hire the employees
• etc. etc.

In 4 months you profited $187,500.
That's about $47k per month
That's about $1500 a day

If you ask me (and I've had my own offers). Any good affiliate can make $1500 a day (if not 5-10 times that) promoting someone else's diet offer. And they don't have to do any of the upfront work, or have employees, or deal with customer service, or make sure the shopping cart works, or be responsible if the authorities ever knock on the door and want to see clinical trials and testimonial verifications and all that.

I would much (much) rather be an affiliate and knock out a few grand a day promoting a network diet offer than run the offer myself.

Advertisers do have extra benefits, upsells (by the way, if you're not offering upsells during checkout do yourself a favor and test it) and the list data and can make great $$ with those, but as a guy who's done both sides (affiliate and advertiser). I'd much rather stay an affiliate.

---

Well to be clear the margins were after all costs including affiliate payouts. But, I'm going to agree with you on the rest.. If you're good at building strong campaigns and can clear 4 figures/day then don't compromise that by thinking the grass is greener and trying the other side. I firmly believe that neither the advertiser or affiliate has a stronger position. Both positions come with a price and a reward. Your checklist is accurate.. It's no cakewalk

---

Congrats on your first million! Like you said, the first million is always the hardest to come by! Once you've hit it (apparently you've hit that), then the 2nd and 3rd million will come a lot easier as you already got your fundamentals solid! Amazing result within a period of 4 months! Bravo to you mate!

And I believe profitable was just trying to point out the whole picture in a deeper way. Most people see things at their surfaces only. He made a very clear picture for people who wanted to jump around after reading this success story that either way, there are challenges to be faced and it's not so easy after all.

Either affiliate or advertiser, there are risks to be faced. Just pick your game and be master of it.

---

Nice perspective, profitable, thanks for that.

I think it's a matter of skills/personality as well, not everyone feels like starting 10 campaigns a day every day, some people are more comfortable doing more standard business-building.

---

All of us indeed have our own preference to choose where we wanna go and stick with, at the end the most important thing is the longevity and stability of the chosen business model.

---

What vertical was the offer in? Congrats

---

Boost, it was health/diet

---

2 questions came to mind :

1. you jumped onto a hot new trend and I think you were one of the early players, how have you seen the marketplace evolve in the last few months as (presumably) more people jumped into it? What are the changes eg other offers being launched, more competition in ads, and how does it affect you? Are you seeing the return dwindling already?

2. You did not address the product production, I think you never launched a diet product before, can you talk about how you went about doing that? Sourcing the manufacturer etc...If I'm not mistaken you managed to do it all in a short time frame.

---

u don't have to answer, but was is a rebill product? that ppl can promote on flogs/farticles? or was it more of a legit/whitehat?

Personally no matter what it is, i commend you for having great success an execution. I'm just curious because i know most of the rebill products are super hard to create.

---

kieler: It was good to see you at ASE and hear things have been going so well for ya -- keep up the good work man!

PS -- Don't attribute any of your success to me bud, it's all you; a whole lot of people read my thread, but you're the only one who took action. Congratulations and again, great job.

---

Wow! love to hear this!

congrats & thanks for sharing, I know when I do well in something, i tend to forget to share with others to inspire!

Thanks again!

---

Yes, Ketone is very saturated now and the demand has slowed. Being able to turn the momentum into other products and offers has been my primary goal. I entered into the campaign thinking it had maybe a month and was surprised it lasted about 3.

I actually did run a health supplement a few years ago and had relationships with a few manufacturers.

---

It started as a rebill with explicit terms but still had issues with people not reading and causing headaches. I switched to straight sale, CR's actually remained about the same and I haven't looked back.

---

That's awesome that the CR is the same:

So let me get this straight:

1.) OG offer was "free trial + shipping + rebill"?

2.) After headaches, offer was "enter your info + single price (probably 1 bottle, two bottle, three bottle option?) and the CR on that was the same? (very good on you if that's the case you got the same CR from a free offer as a paid up front -- awesome.

3.) I don't know if this is sharing too much info, but do you mind sharing your average value per customer?

4.) Kind of related to number 3 there -- did you have upsells at the POS (point of sale)?

Either way great job!

I don't know the post that Joshogle was talking about? And I missed your first post about you starting this venture -- but great work.

Did you sell all the names (email leads) or are you monetizing that data now on the backend yourself?

Good job again, feels good to have a "victory" thread don't it?

---

Now that is inspiring and amazing.

---

More like, free shipping, cost for bottle. To be FTC compliant you can't claim the product is free if you charge their card anything.

It was pretty close.

I value all my customers equally

This is something I slacked on for a bit but once I started adding upsells the results were a pretty respectable portion of my bottom line.

With privacy laws it's tricky selling your database straight out. I've mostly done internal promotions and discounts to my customers.

---

"--- Learn sales. Everything I know about 'selling' a product I learned from selling home security systems door to door for two years. I wouldn't trade that education for a PHD."

So true!

---

Damn I've never seen this thread thanks for digging it up!

---

I'm new to affiliate marketing but as someone who has brought supplements to market hundreds of times (getting them actually on a shelf), it's enlightening to see how you've done it.

Keep hustling - amazing work!

---

Awesome job man.

---

Hey Kiel,

Way to go man on the first million! That is definitely a great accomplishment and a huge milestone since so many never get to that point and especially in such a short period of time. It shows that hard work and determination really does pay off, keep it up man!

---

great work

---

Hats off Kiel - going from zero to one million in just four months is insanely impressive. Keep up the good work and hope you can add another zero to that number soon

---

Wow, very inspiring!

---

Home > Success, Wins, Achievements > Success Stories