339: How To Make 6 Million Dollars Affiliate Marketing With Larry Ludwig

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I my good friend Larry Ludwig on the show. And Larry is one of the most successful affiliate marketers that I know in the personal finance space. And he’s going to teach us how to maximize your affiliate revenue earnings for your blog. But before we begin, I want to thank Klavia for sponsoring this episode. Businesses are always the most successful when they own their own data, customer relationships, and their growth.

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So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S C R I P T dot I O slash Steve. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have my longtime friend Larry Ludwig on the show. Now Larry is someone who I met, I want to say back in 2013 at FinCon and we’ve been in the same mastermind group for many years now. Larry is one of the most successful bloggers that I know and he recently sold his personal finance blog Investor Junkie for a, Larry am I allowed to say? You can say it’s public knowledge. So. Okay. Oh yeah. So it’s a mid seven figure sum. I won’t even give exact numbers.

02:45
Not only is the man tech savvy, but he’s also a master of stats, SEO and affiliate marketing. And today we’re to learn more about his story and how he managed to grow such a profitable blog. And with that, welcome to show, Larry. How are doing today, man? Very good, Steve. Thank you for having me. Larry, first off, I apologize for taking so long to have you on the show. I just wanted to first ask, how is retired life doing for you? Well, I don’t think I think I’m working harder now, but I’m unquote retired than I was before. What do you got going on right now? Are you still blogging or?

03:14
Well, have my own personal blog at LarryLittlerood.com, but more importantly, I want to help others. think there are lot of business owners that just don’t effectively monetize both affiliate and otherwise. think my passion has always been helping other business owners really be successful. So that’s kind of where I’ve been doing now is doing consulting and offering my own courses on the subjects. So give us a quick background on how you got the idea for Investor Junkie and how that blog actually came about.

03:43
Yeah, that’s a great question. mean, the thing is interesting, right, Steve, is I started, you know, I’ve been owning my own business for geez, over now 20 years. So I started with my own web development, web hosting business. And in 2009 got really burnt out from it. It’s a really, it’s a horrible business to be in web hosting, especially. It’s such a commodity and really no one, I think, respects the time and effort you put into it, especially at the level we’re trying to make sure stuff was secure and kept up 24 seven.

04:12
So I was looking at other opportunities and noted that I was having quite a few other successful blogs under my belt. I developed for them or hosted for them. And I’m like, well, why can’t I do this? Why can’t I build a blog and monetize it myself through affiliate marketing? And on top of that, noted a website or blog called Bankaholic that sold about like a year before this.

04:39
after the switch well million or something like that and was like one guy and was all through affiliate marketing and s e l s you know search engine optimization and what will what can i do that i’ve that i know that’s the for ready so i’ll talk about wanted because i was a lot of people don’t know this i actually created a site sort of in that same field bank a halt was really to cd’s and money markets and savings accounts and i created a initial site back in two thousand nine that i’d you know based on the interest rates at the time of the fed

05:07
they’re being lowered to zero michael this is a horrible business again to right now no way in hell we’re make money at you know uh… with banks that just charging very little interest so i decided well what other topic that now we don’t have passion interest in but also you have to do some market for it is not enough competition and that’s where i kind of look at investor junkie trading investment blocks was really just investing only investing where a lot of others the personal finance

05:33
and i’d really want to just focus on investing because also on top of where i was personally i was like you know getting out of bed and talking about that is just old hat for me right i decided to take this blog on investing and really grew it from there i mean it initially took about a year and a half two years almost before start taking off and one point i almost decided to quit and from that just understood i’ve really at the time was writing about investing but topics that interest me as opposed to writing for others i think that was the the real key pivot point

06:03
where I realized that I can’t write a blog that’s just purely for myself. It needs to really help others. So that’s kind of where I decided to write more about reviews, but also realized reviews could be a great way to monetize the site as well. Let me ask you this, and just to get this out of way, I remember we’ve had this conversation in the past. On Investor Junkie, when you owned it, I don’t think your face or anything was on there at all. Why do you decide to remain more anonymous as opposed to making more personal? That’s a question.

06:32
believe it not that was on purpose as well. I initially did, I decided at one point to try putting my face on the blog and actually got the idea from Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income. And I noted from my own testing, so what may work for one site, this is definitely another key takeaway, what may work for one site may work horribly for your blog and brand. And I noted based on putting my own bio and information on the page, no one clicked on it or had interest in it. I’m like, okay, that’s interesting. Maybe I should not go that

07:02
So I really wanted to be about a creative brand into itself. On top of I also noted a few other successful blogs sold around that time as well. like, well, okay, if I was a potential buyer of a blog like Investor Junkie, would I want to buy a blog that’s tied around an individual or really around a brand? And consciously said, okay, I really want to make it about a brand on top of I didn’t want to be the center of attention. guess based on also me individually, I didn’t want to be proposed to be the guru.

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guru or expert in investing. I’d rather have others write the content and or offer their opinions as well more than just me. So those were kind of key distinctions that I did that on purpose and that was I think also lend itself very well to be sold eventually as well. It just it lends itself where if you have one expert or one guru that’s the figurehead or you know the one speaking on said topics for them to then for someone want to acquire that blog that just makes it very hard for them to transition to someone else.

08:00
Yeah, the reason why I asked you that is a lot of people ask me this question, like, do I actually have to be the face of my blog? And you’re the clear cut example that you can run a successful blog and not be in the forefront, I guess, of the blog. Well, the one thing I could add to that, right, Steve, is it definitely hurt in certain media, like for SEO, if you’re focusing on search engine optimization, doesn’t really, people don’t really look initially at who’s speaking on that said topic, but stuff that’s very personal mediums like email, video, podcasting.

08:28
you do need to have someone that is speaking for that said you know uh… cd someone at least it doesn’t have to be you but someone you hire does have to be that you represent the brand so you’d some point you do have to have personalization that was i just one of the weak spots for best junkies i didn’t really have of ways on the newsletter so our open rates were ball one up bad they were not great either compared other your personal blogs so

08:55
I want to ask this also, so now you have LarryLudwig.com which seems like the complete opposite of Investor Junkie. What’s the rationale there? Well, on one level, since I’ve sold, I’ve met that goal, I’ve been there, done that, I can create a personal brand and not have to ever think about, I don’t have to sell it. A great example I always use is Tony Robbins. Well, a great businessman has a great business. He could never sell his own brand. I mean, imagine him going out and selling it. To another 6’5″.

09:24
giant. Exactly. That’s not going to happen ever. that’s I think that’s the key issues. I want to create a personal brand because I want to be able to have something what I do regret not doing is building a parallel, a personal brand as well as the corporate brand. So I should have created both. therefore, you know, when I start something new, like I did now, I sold investor junkie, it’s much easier transition not only for people who knew who I was, but it was also something I can have already the gears running, so to speak, and something moving.

09:54
where I’m literally starting from scratch for this brand. People outside of say, Fintech really don’t know who I am. So that’s one of the hurdles I’m trying to deal with now. Okay, all right. So Investor Junkie, was it purely a blog or did you have any other content generating assets aside from just text? Email as well. I didn’t have a podcast. I mean, did traffic through SEO and some search, search engine marketing. So we did some paid traffic, but mostly a blog at the time. mean, probably now.

10:23
I’d be much more multimedia. I mean, that’s kind of what I’ve been doing is more getting on podcasts as a guest, but also video as well. It’s something I eventually plan on doing for my own personal brand. All right. And then what was the original plan? Were you just following the Bankaholic blueprint essentially? No, I mean, initially, like I said, I wrote stuff that interests me. I wanted to write about topics about investing and the more I got into it, not only what I didn’t want to do was be another investment newsletter site.

10:52
There’s so many out there. There’s so many ones that do that. I felt that was a crowded market. What I did note was there are not a lot of investment sites that talk about the basics or talk to the average jail on investing on top of review all these services out there. This is really when sites like or services like Betterment, a robo advisor, were really becoming popular. So I decided to really capitalize on that and really discuss these various services. And that’s kind of really where everything took off. deliberate were you?

11:22
in selecting the topics to write about in terms of SEO? Initially it was not, probably two, three years in became very deliberate. we would plan out, because initially it was just me, but eventually I hired an editor and then eventually hired writers as well. And became very deliberate in the topics because if we want to make sure we covered, let’s say going back to RoboAdvisors, do the whole divide and conquer. We would go out and discuss RoboAdvisors at every level of RoboAdvisors. So therefore,

11:52
Google would look at us being an expert in that said topic. We would talk about tax loss harvesting. We would talk about all the different services in comparison of one or the other. So we’d make sure we cover not only the very direct brand keywords like for betterment review, but we would cover what is tax loss harvesting, what is a robo-advisor, and make sure we would really cover those articles in detail and then link to other articles in our site and would create much more engaged audience. you know, it would cause that

12:20
Click on one article and then read another one and then read another one. mean, that’s what Google really rewards is the whole on-page results. No different than YouTube. When you first got started with nothing, how did you get that initial traffic? mean, SEO is a long game. mean, it takes, at least in my eyes, at least six months to a year at minimum before you get measurable results. where you pay traffic, I mean, back then I wasn’t really as experienced with it. But if you’re really wanting something to get quick, paid traffic is definitely an option.

12:50
But long game, you should really focus on SEO, paid traffic, social media, really mix the two because of being relying on just one source of traffic could be really the death of your business. So when you were starting, I guess it just sounds like, and I’m just kind of reading between the lines, that it took a while for you to get some traffic and it was mainly SEO traffic in the beginning. You were not running paid ads when you first got started. No, I mean, no, keep in mind Facebook was really just starting. I should have done it back then in retrospect because I had friends who also did social media for other

13:19
other businesses and was killing it through Facebook ads. Kyle? Yeah, well, yeah, like Kyle. mean, there’s others as well, some of other friends. But it’s amazing. mean, amount of business that people did through Facebook ads was at the time, the cross-border click was so cheap compared to now. I it would have been foolish not to, but just, at the time, was focusing on SEO. Because of, I mean, one of the things with affiliate marketing is you kind of limited, can’t buy branded keywords. You can’t buy betterment.

13:49
Right. Because Betterment doesn’t want you to compete against them. So therefore you’re kind of limited what keywords you could buy. And at the time I didn’t really have the tracking or the ability to track conversions. So I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on paid ads and then not know, well, am I ROI positive or not? And that was one of the things that I also built technology to do just that is make sure we can measure that stuff. Well, so let’s do this in steps. So can you walk us through, like when you’re going to write a blog post for Investor Junkie, for example,

14:18
What is your process? Well, mean, first was determining who the audience was, who, what are we writing about, what topic we’re going write about and who are we writing it for. You know, like are they a beginner investor? Are they advanced investor? Are they, you where are they in their life’s journey? Are they just having a child? Are they getting married? You know, that’s, that’s really the major trigger points of what, and again, it depends on the industry, but at least in investment space, people don’t really focus on investing.

14:47
until they have some major life event, know, getting married, having a child, death in the family, new job, loss of a job, you know, getting prepared for retirement. Those are usually the major trigger points. So we would make sure we cover around those trigger points as one method, but also just in terms of, you know, reviews, we would talk, make sure we talk not only about betterment review, but like I said, we would talk about what are robo-advisors, we would make sure we cover what’s tax loss harvesting, we would cover every topic in that said niche eventually.

15:14
So that took time to build that. planned that out months in advance. And I always looked at, I looked at investor junkie no different than Money Magazine. If you looked at Money Magazine, I noted over the years of subscribing to it, it would kind of repeat the same topics over and over again. And the life cycle was around two years. And I guess that was, I was guessing that was probably the average lifespan of a Money Magazine subscriber. So therefore I kind of looked at the same things, like maybe every year talk, in April we’ll talk about tax season.

15:43
September back to school and in December maybe planning for end of year tax, you know, filings or where to or January where to invest now, you know, really cover make sure we cover all those topics and that became more as we advanced with our editorial process down the road. But initially it was just very haphazard as I realized the trends and looked at not only the data, but more importantly, what other what other industries or what other, you know, magazines like in our space were talking about, I made sure we

16:13
try to cover them electronically as well so in terms of keyword research in seo that was your process well seo uh… would use tools this is proxies are really before h refs before a trust would use tools like google’s free keyword research not just use google itself i mean google has really just the search results themselves leave all sorts of clues and look at what’s ranking what how did the style that content with the intent was it was less more less so back then but intent is even more important nowadays

16:42
where what i mean by that is example i was uses what is a mortgage compared to what’s the best mortgage rate there much different intent and you gotta make sure your article matches that intent so if you’re going to bombard a no person with your rate table mortgages on what is a mortgage you’re really not making the article helpful for that reader so therefore google will penalize you for that so you gotta make sure your articles are in line with what the keyword the people searching on

17:10
So we didn’t take into account competitiveness of the keyword at all? Back then there was no easy way to determine that. With tools like, now with the Ahrefs, it’s very easy to do that. So nowadays, yeah, you should be using a tool like Ahrefs. If you’re serious about anything with SEO, tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs, should definitely be using because of the insight they give you just saves you loads of time. But back then, what I would use is Google Trends.

17:36
which is also a free tool. So at least understand the popularity of the keyword. wouldn’t show you how difficult it is, but you’d least maybe get some indicators in Google search of how many other web pages are out there. So you could at least use that indicator. But again, that’s not a totally accurate determination of how competitive that keyword is. Yeah, because I noticed that you were ranking for a lot of very competitive keywords, right? And so how were you able to actually rank for some of those? Well, we didn’t buy backlinks. I mean, that’s the thing that I noted with

18:06
bankaholic and over the years is that what they’re as became more experience of seo noted that the we’re definitely doing some shady things to get that site the right and now we that but uh… i’m sure we both can discuss this but they were various other bloggers in our space they would say you know if you would trade lanes or would get you into sort of some sort of private you know network and you buy back links to cheese or share back into each other and i kinda just decided that that’s

18:33
you know i can see right off the uh… the writing on the wall who will eventually figure that out and sure enough they did so i didn’t do any of that stuff i mean in the end believe it not i didn’t do any really actual purposeful backlink strategies until i hired an seo firm and that was really two thousand sixteen and before that i just focused on the content really made really focused on what i could control and that was my on page experience the content and making sure people kept engaged on my site

19:03
It’s interesting that you mentioned you hired a firm. What was your experience? Good in the end. I also knew, I mean, based on my background, it was more because of time allocation. I knew what I was looking for. I knew various firms in the space that were full of crap or really knew their stuff. And I hired a firm that I knew based on their background was really understood and alignment was what my knees were. So I made sure I hired a firm that really gelled with my belief in my philosophy as an SEO. What did they do for you exactly? Did they do any content writing or was it?

19:33
outreacher that they did that this outreach that was not the first part is that i also need help really at the time i had a hit with uh… google in terms of rankings i thought i was a had a negative seo attack and make a long story short without bombarding the reader listeners with what negative seo is but basically you can have a lot of links your site that are not helpful in fact you know sites like from photographic or or spam sites google will look at that as a uh… a possible issue

20:03
other SEO hackers would point links to your site on purpose to help or hurt your ranking. So I had a massive amount of backlinks to my site in a very short period. within, geez, three months I had probably over thousand backlinks that would be considered bad links. with that said, it hurt my rankings. And I guess I wasn’t at the time aware, according to official Google policy that’s like, well, that won’t affect you. And definitely it did.

20:33
I can definitely say at the time it was done on purpose. I kind of knew who it was, but in the end hurt my rankings and had a really, you know, I wanted a higher firm that not one is because I was getting so busy helped me focus on that. But more importantly, you know, me insights that where I didn’t, was only one vertical, one niche, you know, investing. They’d be able to understand much more broad SEO strategies that I probably wouldn’t be able to understand. And that’s one area that definitely helped me understand.

21:03
curious what did they do to get you out of the hole? In terms of really analyzing the pay well one is we went through the process of did we think this is some sort of negative SEO and I think we both came to agreement yes so they definitely helped assured my thoughts on it and more importantly what can we do to improve the rankings one to prevent this from ever happening again the other is making sure we focus on the things we again we can control we can control stuff like user intent and help me really improve

21:32
the whole non-page experience. That’s not to say my experience was bad before, but help overcompensate, like I removed ads, banners on the site completely. Did you use a disavow tool? Oh yeah, we had these, like, 700 links in there. Wow, okay. So, significant. So, with that said though, they helped with just, literally, weekly strategy meetings, weekly reviews of what’s going on, are we getting more on the mark, are we falling behind, and all, was a consistent

22:02
Progressive improvement with the site over time where they definitely helped, you know again because I was focusing on some of the other things as well They able to execute and implement the stuff that I just didn’t have the time to do. Okay So basically they helped you get out of a whole lot and had nothing to do it Content really you were making all the content. Yeah, they didn’t I mean there were some suggestions Maybe the content but that was really minimal part of it. It was really It was really suggestions from a technical SEO perspective that just helped

22:29
give me better insights on what can we do to make the experience better. The only reason why I’m asking all these questions is I get questions all the time like Steve, who should I hire? And I’m like, hey, you know, ultimately, they’re not it’s not magic. They’re not going to just magically get you to rank. It’s ultimately going to be about your content. And, you know, I’m always a little hesitant on SEO firms, which is kind of why I asked you about the detail. I agree, Steve. mean, not for anything. I think most SEO firms are horrible, to put it nicely. I think they stink for the most part.

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there are very few that I recommend and trust. And on top of that, because of my background, I knew what I was looking for. You know, if you just, I mean, if you don’t know anything about SEO, I think you’re really in a rude awakening when you just hire some firm that says, we’ll guarantee results for the first page or 50 days or something stupid like that. And you’re, you’re going to be in a world of trouble if you do that. So to my point, I would recommend most people

23:24
is really learn about SEO and understand how it works before even thinking about doing that because I think you can do much better. You know your business usually better than anyone else. at minimum, understand the concepts of SEO and then maybe at some point, like I did, hire an outside firm to help you.

23:41
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now, what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

24:10
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

24:39
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. All right, so Larry, let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about affiliate marketing. So just for the people listening out there, there’s affiliate marketing, and then there’s like what super affiliates do, like the ones who make seven figures. so Larry, I was hoping you can give us some insight about what are some of the special things that you’ve done.

25:07
to make money in affiliate marketing that kind of go beyond just basically putting a link in a post. mean, the biggest issue, and I talked about this in my course, is the lack of tracking. This goes back to my thought with Investor Junkie was to treat the stuff as if it was our own products, in terms of tracking, not in terms of like we owned it outright, like our reviews were very objective, but in terms of the tracking of conversions and the source of conversions, really getting that level of detail was critical to me.

25:36
especially if we started doing paid traffic, which we started to do while I owned it. A lot of people out there actually don’t even know that you can track affiliate offers, right? Cause you put a link there. How do you know that someone actually signed up for it outside of maybe getting an email saying that you converted someone? Depends. Well, first and foremost, it depends on the affiliate system they use. mean, most of the major networks do support some sort of tracking, whether you realize it or not. So if you’re already currently doing affiliate marketing at some level, the first I always look at is like, you have to, it’s like the levels of

26:06
people from infant to adult, you have to learn how to I’m sorry, you sit up, crawl and walk. And that’s kind of the same thing with affiliate marketing. You can’t just instantly usually go out of the gate and run. You have to figure out first how to walk. And I think with affiliate marketing, the first issue is just tracking your existing clicks and tracking your, and managing your links effectively. So something like a pretty links, which is very popular WordPress plugin. You should be doing that at some level first.

26:36
Can you explain what that plugin does? Just people probably don’t know what it is. Okay. Well, if they don’t know, pretty links is just a link management system. It allows you to say, let’s use, I don’t know, let’s say Bluehost, you know, a very popular web hosting company. It allows you to type in yourdomain.com slash Bluehost as the link and it redirects to a page on Bluehost site that has an affiliate link. So therefore you get credit when people click on it. So it just allows you to easily manage and more effectively store your stuff in one place. Okay. And then from there,

27:06
How do you know that… We’re going to get into this a little bit about ads, but how do you know that someone’s converted as a result of a specific link that you’ve posted? Well, with PrettyLynx, you don’t. That’s the big limitation. So that’s the first issue is you decide to throw away PrettyLynx and use something else. In my case, I use a service called ClickMeter. So ClickMeter has the ability to pass a special ID, a unique ID, a random key…

27:33
every click happens on your site. when someone types in that or clicks on that Bluehost link, it’ll pass a unique key to Bluehost to denote this click came from this person at this time. So when the conversion happens, it passes that same key back to ClickMeter to denote the conversion and then therefore you know who clicked and who converted. So the affiliate system has to support ClickMeter though, right? Well, there’s other systems besides ClickMeter to do that.

28:03
But out of the box, Clickmeter is just, it’s not really Clickmeter in itself. really, it has to support, the terminology in the industry is what’s called a sub-ID and post back. That’s usually what most people know in the affiliate marketing space. a sub-ID is some thing you can stuff into their affiliate system. Some, again, some ID or some information. And then the post back, which is just a way that the affiliate system sends that data back to, in this case, Clickmeter, and you pass that sub-ID back information back to them.

28:33
So it’s a round loop that the outbound click passes some unique ID, the affiliate system stores that ID when the conversion occurs and then passes it back, in this case, to Clickmeter via what’s called a post back. So without getting too technical, the base just is you’re passing some unique ID back to yourself after a conversion occurs. So it really then allows you to then note the actual source of that conversion via paid traffic, organic search, what have you.

29:03
So does Clickmeter uniquely tag like every single link on your blog or every outbound affiliate link on your blog? It’s not by default, but yes, it can do that. So you have it set up then. So let’s say you have a blog post on, I don’t know, personal capital or some investing site. You will tag all of those links with a Clickmeter tag? Correct. Okay. And then what happens when someone actually makes a purchase? How do you…

29:31
register so to speak or know about the conversion because in in case of personal capital is talked about them since I’m familiar with them they use affiliate system called tune tune sends that data back to click meter based on what’s called a post back so it’s just literally sending data from tune back to click meter uh-huh and then from there everything lines up within click meter it knows okay we’ve seen this the conversion the click happened two days ago the conversion happened today

30:00
We then tie the two together and note again, when they, you know, what’s the source of this conversion, where it happened. Is that tracking information stored on ClickMeter or can you get it into analytics or? Or you can do all sorts of stuff on top of that. I mean, we talked just before the podcast of other systems like Wooper to get that data, but ClickMeter by itself is just purely a link tracking, link management system. Okay. Where you can then, yeah, you can actually store additional data to actually then push it into other analytics tools and know literally

30:30
the full history of that person like where they came from what the opened up email if they click on this link if they did a push notification if they ordered from your own products you can literally do all sorts of stuff again my goal was to treat it the tools i want to be using is actually the same tools if you’re doing your own e-commerce store i would recommend using as well so the goal was to again like i said treat as if it was our own product but so therefore the tools i want to be using are usually using e-commerce stores

31:00
So walk me through, like it’s one thing to get data, because I know a lot of people gather data, but they never look at it. What would you do with all this data and how would you use that to improve your conversions? Well, in the end, if you’re with paid traffic, it’s without question. It’s a no brainer because you’re spending actual dollars and you want to denote, you know, you want to make sure you’re ROI positive because the stat that always blows my mind, I forget the source of the stat, but they say Google ads, what is it? Ninety-five percent of Google ad campaigns are negative.

31:30
ROI, just blows my mind. This is again, not just affiliate marketing we’re talking about as the whole, which is most cases someone’s product. So most, it tells me most people when they even have their own products don’t properly track. Is that really that high? That sounds okay. Yeah, I forget the source of it. think it’s, I forget this word, something or other, but the, it’s just, yeah, it’s a stat that just blows my mind. I’ve seen it a few times and it, but going back to affiliate marketing, that’s

31:57
the obvious cases you started to pay traffic one make sure you’re tracking those conversions because again you’re spending real money anyone make sure it’s not you’ve got putting in more money and getting out of it sure sure the second those s e l so with s e l you can drill down to level detail of what button on a page converted better like if you have a link multiple times was on page you really want to know which one of the money-making link which was the button that cause people to convert or or which offer for that matter

32:28
where with something like PrettyLinks, going back to that initial service we talked about, PrettyLinks will tell you the clicks, but it won’t tell you the conversions. Just because you have more clicks on a page doesn’t necessarily mean there’s more conversions from it. It may be the case, but a lot of cases I noted goes back to the whole issue with intent with SEO. If someone’s looking for the best mortgage rate, they’re much, much more likely to convert than say, is a mortgage rate?

32:57
and what’s the best mortgage rate is the the case where the convert more but you may get a lot of people clicking on those links and what is a mortgage rate but doesn’t mean necessarily they’re ready to per so that’s that’s a key distinction is you can know which pages are really your money-making pages and it’s interesting now i’m doing consulting for other companies as well i’ve seen definitely the trend of the the whole eighty twenty rule that about twenty percent of their pages generate eighty percent of revenue from affiliate marketing

33:25
and it seems to hold pretty true. let’s say you figure out that this page is converting well, then what? What do you with that information? Well, I’m all about the 1 % improvements over time. Obviously, you have to have some volume. If you’re just starting out in affiliate marketing or just starting out as a blog, your first goal is you should just be trying to make any money and try to just build out your content and build out your brand. This really obviously applies to people that are generating least five figures a month.

33:55
affiliate marketing. So if that’s the case, then you can really start moving the needle by making these 1, 2, 3, 5 % improvements in your site. So if you know where most of your income is coming from, you know those are the pages you should really start improving on. And there are other tools even outside of Click Meter or Rupert for that matter that really you should be using as well. That really applies again not only to affiliate marketing, but to really any e-commerce site and tools like Hot Jar, Crazy Egg,

34:24
that really show you heat maps of where you what buttons people click on what people click on a page where they’re getting cold on the page all that data really helps you determine where you know where they were the click on whether not interested with where the their phone off on the page and really again guru rewards you for user experience you want to get people on the pages not as long as possible and really interact with that page now is one of the things i did for message on key we created all sorts of widgets

34:53
like comparison tools, showed certain, like didn’t overwhelm the reader by showing too much data at once and showing like a limited amount of data. All that was on purpose to really improve the user experience. And that’s something like a crazy egg will show you. So I know that for you, especially, you always create like these calculators and little widgets, right? How do you quantify like the effects of those? Time on page, whether, how much they engage in that widget that we created.

35:23
you know whether or not it led to more conversions in some cases it did so therefore that was also net positive so it wasn’t necessarily all monetary based but it was all about the user experience what can we do to improve time and page decrease the bounce rate increasing clicking on other pages you know stuff that really mattered not only for us as you know the blog owners but also google as well google really reward you for that so you want to make sure the beauty nowadays is everything

35:52
In my eyes, everything’s in alignment for all three major parties for affiliate marketing. The readers, course, the blog owners who create the content, but also the merchants you’re working with. Everyone gets rewarded by creating the best user experience. How do you balance creating more blog posts versus hammering down and optimizing a single page? Believe it or not, mean, this applies to any niche.

36:17
With Investor Junkie, would have to say probably 70 % of our content was just updating and improving the existing content we had on site. So a lot of the effort was on improving the existing content. One is because of there’s constant improvements or updates in the various services we reviewed. On top of people, I wanted to make sure we were as accurate as up to date as possible. To me, nothing’s worse than going to a review that’s, six months old, yet

36:45
Today they announced a new feature or functionality that I was looking for. So on top of that, stuff like that’s especially timely like CD rates or savings account rates. Nothing’s worse than going to a site that literally the content is five weeks old when it needs to be updated today or show the current data today, especially if you’re clicking on an affiliate link no less and seeing then the rate is different. That to me leads to a very poor user experience and Google will eventually penalize you for that. Doesn’t just anyone clicking off your site is in that

37:15
kind of inherent in affiliate marketing in the user experience? Well, not for anything. Google, this is something definitely learned in my experience as well with becoming really good at SEO. Google does not like affiliates. Does not like, they even know nowadays, they obviously rank a lot of sites that have affiliates income on their sites. They do not like affiliate marketing as a whole. And what I mean by that is, and this is really the overall outlook from organic traffic from paid traffic.

37:45
Google wants to see you add value for SEO. So they want to see you, you know, having content, having functionality like widgets, having a calculator, having some sort of value add to the reader where you can’t just go for the kill and go for the transaction. You know, this is be it your own affiliate products or your own products that you have. So you need to add value in some way. With paid traffic on the other hand, Google will allow you to be fully transactional. You can go really…

38:12
for the kill and go for a call to action or lead or actually purchase that product. Where you can’t do the same thing for Gannett. So that’s the key issue. Usually that means then you can’t put a call to action or sign up for that affiliate right above the fold, right in their face. Where we had that previously, we purposely pushed any call to action much more below the fold. So therefore we would have more content and more engagement, more time and page and quickly bouncing off to somewhere else.

38:42
Google does not like that. Interesting. So let’s talk about paid ads and are you driving? So first of all, how are you running these ads? Are you driving them to blog posts? Cause you’re not allowed to advertise obviously directly your affiliate link or you’re not allowed to bid on keywords that are representative of the brand, right? I mean, you usually can’t most, yeah, most merchants won’t allow you to buy bid the brand keywords, but some do. I mean, if the ones that do those are really great.

39:09
Basically, one of the many that allow you to actually off the top of my head, but I like to think of one is the ThriveCart as a good example. ThriveCart doesn’t do much marketing themselves and they like to have the merchants or the I’m sorry, the affiliates do that, that bidding for them. So therefore you can bid on the keyword ThriveCart, but most to your point. Yeah. Yeah. Most want to do the marketing themselves. They want to control and don’t want to pay out all that, you know, affiliate revenue to some third party. Okay. So where are you driving? Like what’s the landing page look like? Or is it literally a blog post?

39:38
it depends i mean that in the end you know i was a always been about the data and some cases like a minor testing for one client and told me creating a dedicated landing page which usually works best but in this case they actually converted so far less with a dedicated landing page when i mean by that is remove the top navigation you’re involved sorts of distractions so doesn’t look like in you know uh… editorial or editorial equal and it actually what

40:06
hurting their conversions. in this case, again, it depends on, you have to test it out. In the end, usually it’s best to have a dedicated landing page because if you don’t want distractions, go somewhere else. But that may not always be the case. The audience may respond better to something that looks more like an article. So this dedicated landing page though, is it literally like, can you just walk me through an ad that’s worked well with you rather than just, yeah. Well, I mean, actually in my case, one that worked really well was a

40:33
of an ad for uh… of virtue i worked with those an actual articles i didn’t have a dedicated landing page goes back to the whole test so i did really well that because of there’s a man as a i’m not going to name the names of the companies but there was one company and personal finances just didn’t people were not happy with his personal finance out that people are happy with and from that uh… i’d took that content that actual contention or issue with that service and promoted another competing service from it

41:02
And got really people since they very emotional and that said service and how they much hated it They were really looking for some third party or alternative service So I capitalized on that. How did you skirt around not naming any of the services in the ad? Because you can buy you can bid on the keyword and Google ads will lie to but bid on the keyword You can’t display that trademark in this case. There was trademarked brand. Okay, so I couldn’t use the actual name

41:30
in the ad itself, but you could buy the keywords. So could say, like, looking for an alternative, know, click here. I see. Okay. You can kind of stir around that issue, but you can, Google does allow you to buy, some other ad networks do not even allow you to buy that or bid on that keyword. Right. So you would talk about the pain point, I guess, without mentioning the company in the ad while bidding for people searching for that company. Because yeah, they’re searching for that keyword already. So therefore you can bid on that keyword and then just, you know, it’s an alternative. So therefore they’re like,

42:00
they’re looking for either either the currently looking for that potential service and not sure yet so it goes back to the whole intent issue they’re looking for that service not sure whether or not it’s for them yet or you can search for other ones that they currently are existing customers and absolutely hate the service and looking for something else you can bid on like keywords like alternatives or this service verse that service or you know potential other options you know what is you know are or is even the word sometimes suck you know does this service suck and that you can

42:29
literally buy that keyword and actually do pretty well with it too. So I can understand the model that you just proposed, but how would the landing page model work? So for example, if you’re trying to get me to sign up for another, for a service, for example, and I go to a landing page that isn’t a part of that service, what does that landing page look like? Well, this goes back to, we sort of talked about this before the podcast. There’s, there’s things you can do. I mean, I was somewhat restricted in the investment services space.

42:57
Like I can’t do much in terms of value add or add-ons. I mean, what I could have done, and I didn’t get down to this point when I an investor junkie, was like offer like a walkthrough, how to walk through Betterment as an example, like how to use it, how to maximize the functionality. So you add some sort of bonus or add-on that’s not available by anyone else. But I am at the time mostly focused on exclusive promotion deals through the merchant. we’d get a special discount or special promotion because we sent already a lot of customers.

43:26
It would do it through that paid traffic as well. we would do it, to most other industries and most other brands and probably more of what I would do today is offer some exclusivity that you can’t get through another affiliate and offer the value added on. like sign up, like I’m right now testing with not good success with Bluehost is getting a free course when you sign up through Bluehost through me. that’s one, in other words, you offer some exclusivity, some exclusive value adds.

43:56
that you can’t do through anyone else. The problem to your point probably, the next question is then how do you track, how do you know when the conversion happens? And most people do as a manual, like let me know when you convert and I’ll send you the free bonus material. But going back to the whole conversion tracking, you can actually measure that and know, especially if they sign up to your mailing list, know when the conversion happens and then automatically fire an event when they do convert. So it goes back to the whole idea of treating it as if it’s your own product.

44:25
I see. with that promotion that you were just talking about, someone will sign up for Bluehost and then you’ll get alerted of that and then you’ll fire off that course and deliver it directly to them. Exactly. I see. Will reviews work? Like, can you drive Google traffic to like a reviews page? Or I guess that’d be really hard to bid. You can’t, you you can’t bid on a keyword. mean, what usually works is the best of pages, like the best robo advisors or the best CD rates or the best bank account now.

44:54
or some sort of, those type of keywords usually work. So it gets around the issue of you can bid on them, but not worry about the trademark. You can’t bid on the brand name. So it’s usually like comparisons or best of pages or. I see. And at that point you’ll have many affiliates on that same page and you don’t probably really care what they convert for. Yeah. I mean, you should be clear. Obviously a lot of the stuff you presupposes you’re clear in your monetization to the reader. You have to per FTC guidelines.

45:24
But yeah, you can definitely monetize through all the different ones. And whether or not you do it through objective means or you purposely say, the one that pays me the most is I’m gonna put first, you have to disclose that. So. You ran a personal finance blog and you’ve been in affiliate marketing for many years. Would you say there are certain industries that pay out a lot more? Like I know PF is one of those industries that pays out a lot, but are there other industries that are more conducive to making a lot of money with affiliate marketing? Because I know for physical products like

45:54
the affiliate payout is very low and you have to sell a ton, right? So what would you say are the best industries to make a lot of money with affiliate marketing? I I look at the three areas of transformation. People are always looking for health, personal finance, and just overall relationships, it love life or otherwise. To me, those three factors

46:19
are the ones that really move the needle to the people always have problems in personal finance people always have problems with their health people always have problems with the relationships and always look in some way so more self-help development area i think is the key that’s why personal finance i think does very well because this it’s a universal issue you never can be you know you never can be too thin and never to be too have too much money the classic uh… analogy so i think it’s true with the you know affiliate marketing is you really you really

46:48
You cater to those needs. To me, the problem is obviously you got to niche down from it. You just can’t do just general personal finance. That’s, I think, recipe for failure. You need to do something like I did with investing. You specifically niche down to a specific service or specific sector and really focus on adding value there. Let’s switch gears. Larry, what are you up to now? Because we talked a lot before this interview actually started, and you are actually doing a lot of stuff post-retirement, so to speak.

47:17
you want to think i would just uh… right off into the sunset but you did buy a porcini yeah i thought what portion of the the i mean i thought that those one of things that’s like a camp just to spend the money on just one thing and that’s but i think you obviously car by any means but in the end i mean the thing the thing that motivates i think most entrepreneurs i think you’re with your audience to relate to this is what you have some sort of success

47:45
you want to not only help others but you want to continue doing things you are you you have a restless mind you constantly thinking of new opportunities out there and that’s just the nature of the space around so with that said i think i really kind of melted those two together is really not only helping others but keeping in the digital marketing space i think really helping others with how to better monetize how to better now with refilling marketing but their own your products and services you know i i do consulting not only for

48:15
other bloggers but also people have their own courses their own services i think it just makes sense because of most i think under monetize i mean my whole argument spin i think every business should do a philip marketing at some level you if you sell your own products because of you can’t be everything everyone but you can and then now g i was used or example i was used is let’s say you sell car restoration parts right you sell to your classic cars you you sell to you using algae of an old

48:44
Nova I had a 1970 Nova and I’m looking for resto parts for that car but yet you don’t sell tires or rims but yet your audience definitely has a need for that and that comes into where you tire rack a very popular online website does have an affiliate program so you can easily recommend a tire and rim combination for a Nova or any other classic car for that matter and you get paid for it you don’t have to have inventory you don’t have to have stock on it you don’t have to do anything other than

49:12
give out a recommendation for here’s this best tire rim combination and you get paid for it. So it’s a no-brainer on top of you create a stronger relationship with your audience. So I think that to me is a key thing that I think any business owner should do. They’re goals that help improve the relationship. On top of it, you can even use that as a test bed to perhaps add new services in your space that you just instantly fire up an affiliate program that you don’t offer currently. But let’s say down the road, you could offer your own tire rims.

49:42
on your own site. So I don’t want to pimp you out, Larry, but so for the, for the listeners out there, Larry is super good at instrumenting sites where you know, like every step of the customer journey along the way and exactly what contributed to that conversion because he did a lot of these things. So where can people find you Larry? The easiest place is my own site, larryledwood.com. So have a SMS you can text. You can text, Larry podcast, all one word, Larry podcast to three one

50:12
996 and you’ll get your sign up for my newsletter that way as well. Ah interesting will it be delivered via text or email or what? No it’ll be via email you just sign up through the SMS so it’ll tell you you know come back to you with a response saying you know what’s your email address and then says you’re subscribed. Nice nice well Larry thanks a lot for coming on man. Thank you Steve.

50:35
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now in case you’ve ever wondered if blogging is dead, it most certainly is not dead and you can make life-changing money from it. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 339. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

51:04
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned cart sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog. If you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

51:33
head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.