Last week I flew to Las Vegas, NV for Affiliate Summit West 2017.

Thousands of online marketers were there to do some networking (and lots of drinking) and see the show.

I documented most of the trip for my Youtube Channel. So instead of writing out everything that happened, I’m going to post the videos here as well.

Highlights

A few highlights were:

1. The “MADS4DOUGH” party with MadSociety.net and A4D.com
   About 100 people showed up for the event. A4D locked down a huge, panoramic suite for us and provided free food and drinks. I DJ’d the party from my phone using a cool USB PA speaker they brought in for me. Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Lana Del Rey and Black Sabbath could be heard all night long. If you were there, thank you for coming!
2. Getting to see my old friends
   When you work online, you don’t get to see your friends and colleagues much. It’s always nice to get some face time with some of the industry’s most successful and prolific players.
3. Picking up Insider Information
   One night I sat at a black jack table and listened to a group of advertisers talk about how much French diet their affiliates were doing. (400+ day in sales each.) They talked numbers (loudly) and made fun of their affiliates for being too secretive. I didn’t say a word. I just played cards and smiled.
4. Learning new trends
   A lot of people were talking about the INCREDIBLE e-commerce stuff that is going on. I heard HUGE numbers from the arbitrage guys too. I also heard that many major traffic sources may soon ban Arbitrage completely, so enjoy it while you can. E-commerce is probably safe until the end of time.

Overall Impression

My overall impression for this year is that the game is still going strong. There is no fear of affiliate marketing going away. That’s nonsense.

The game changes, but never goes away.

Right now there are people doing bigger numbers than the biggest affiliates of the past. I heard several stories of people doing $1Million+ a month selling inexpensive products with a mark up through Shopify stores.

It’s easier than ever.

If you’re interested in jumping into the game, there’s never been a better time than now.

Affiliate Summit West 2017 Videos

I didn’t record much of the actual event. For people like me, it’s not really a good use of my time. I go more for the networking, dinners and parties.

There is no video for Day 3 because I mainly hid out in my room and recovered from the lack of sleep.

Pre Party

Affiliate Summit West Day 1

Affiliate Summit West Day 2

Get Me Out of Vegas!

For more videos, be sure you’re subscribed to the Youtube Channel here >>

Thanks for visiting and I’ll see you in the future…

MAD

I didn’t know it at the time, but deciding to lose all the money I had was the best decision I ever made.

I’d run at a loss all through that first month, but I’d learned many things about affiliate marketing along the way. With every dollar I lost, I got a little better at tracking, writing ads, optimizing and making landing pages.

Through that trial by fire, it had turned into a decent little campaign with lots of potential.

So on the first day of the next month, when I turned the campaign back on, it was breaking even or making money right away.

Paying My Tuition

Some people would say that continuing on an idea that had lost $3000 in it’s first month is crazy. But what I realized was that I had basically put myself through college in the first 30 days.

It was my tuition for a degree in what not to do. I’d paid heavily for this education… why would I throw it away?

Armed with the lessons I’d learned and a willingness to lose all my cash I started making progress right away.

From day one I was breaking even or slightly profitable at $150/day spend. That consistency gave me the confidence to raise my budget higher, to as much as $500/day.

Now I was getting data 10x faster than I was in my first month (with a $50/day budget) so I learned faster and faster. Each lesson I learned help the campaign a little more.

By the second week I was making steady profits. At first it was $70/day. My affiliate manager congratulated me on cracking the code. I was jumping around my apartment with joy because $70/day would pay my rent and bills.

I was going to be free!

I had picked up a few freelance web design clients in LA and was so distracted by my campaigns that I wasn’t making any progress on their jobs. And can you blame me?

They had paid me $3000 for a job that was going to take three months and I was on the verge of making that much every week… every day, or every hour.

I kept progressing and by the end of the month I had profited in the high 4-figures ($x,xxx). It was WAY more money than I needed to get by.

I fired all my clients. I sent them their files and refunded them 100% of their money with a note to never contact me again. Now, I could really focus.

The next month, profits tripled.

Now I had the campaign optimized and profitable. I had been receiving regular payments from the affiliate network so I felt comfortable spending more money per day and I started flooding them with traffic.

In the beginning I was doing one or two sales a day, then two a day, then ten a day. Now I was doing 50–100 sales a day. The affiliate network gave me a higher payout, so my ROI went even higher.

I was killing it.

The Conference

By now, I was fully immersed in the game. It was all I did. The outside world had completely disappeared.

I’d been reading a few forums and had found some new affiliate networks.

Remember, I had only worked with one network from the beginning. I had no idea there were more networks out there.

I was doing a tremendous amount of sales per day now, so I had to find a network that could handle it.

I contacted a few networks and talked to some reps. One network told me they had a different version of the offer I was promoting, but theirs converted better and paid $10 more per sale.

I signed up, split their offer against the original network’s offer and my jaw hit the floor. They were right! Their version paid more and converted almost twice as much!

My profits exploded again! I switched all my traffic to the new network and the numbers just started piling up. I was a higher level player now so the new network rep invited me to meet him at a conference called Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas.

I was hesitant to go to the conference. Remember, my whole life had just crashed and burned. While all of this marketing stuff was happening, I was hiding out in my apartment completely alone.

The thought of a huge social event gave me panics, but soon I agreed to go and booked the flight to Vegas.

Mansion Party

He invited me to a mansion party that he said would be full of huge advertisers that were doing gigantic numbers. He’d be there as well and would introduce me to a few people.

When I arrived at the Mansion Party I was blown away. The place looked packed. It was really loud, music and screaming. I walked around the house 3 or 4 times. I almost left several times.

Finally, I got my courage up and texted the affiliate network rep. He said he was in the kitchen with some big players and would introduce me.

When I walked inside, the place was packed. Hundreds of peole were there drinking bottles of expensive champagne and liquor. Music was blasting. Gorgeous women wearing cocktail waitress outfits carried drinks around to all the different rooms.

The entire Mansion felt like it was rocking in the wind.

I made my way to the kitchen and found my affiliate manager. He greeted me with open arms and introduced me to four or five guys who were doing the same stuff I was doing.

They were all pretty drunk and I was completely sober. So as they drunkenly talked about what they were doing, I pulled out my phone and started taking notes.

At one point – one of the guys asked me how much money I was making. I told him and he looked kind of surprised.

Then he asked me how many keywords I was bidding on in my campaign. I told him the truth.. I said “about eight”.

He almost spit his drink out.

He put his arm around my shoulder and said “Look, the key to this thing is to get huge volume. You can bid on every keyword in the English language. My campaign is bidding on about 500 keywords right now.”

This information blew. my. mind. I had never even considered bidding for words that weren’t directly related to the product. I was only bidding on eight words!

We talked for about two hours and exchanged our information. It was getting late and I was excited to try his tip on my campaign so I raced back to the hotel.

Before I went to bed, I added a big list of new keywords to the campaign (that was killing it by now). Then I went to sleep.

The next morning I woke up and couldn’t believe my eyes. The campaign had made so much extra money over night that it paid for my entire trip to Las Vegas. Flights, hotel rooms, everything.

Now the numbers were coming in faster than I thought possible and my profits were higher than I ever dreamed they’d be. I was bidding on eight keywords before, now I was bidding on 100.

By the time I got home from the conference, I was a new man.

I talked to my affiliate manager every day. Me and the guys I met at that party formed a group and started meeting every week or so to discuss new ideas and opportunties. All of us got better and better.

I ate, slept and dreamed marketing – I took no breaks. I just kept cranking along, trying to double my numbers week to week and month to month.

I had no employees and no offices. I woke up, made coffee and started working. When I was too tired to continue I’d go to sleep – then wake up and do it again.

By the fifth or sixth month I was a blazing fireball. The $3000 I’d lost in the first month was laughable now. It had seemed like such a huge amount of cash back then, but now it was a rounding error on my daily revenues.

If I had quit when I was down, I would have never seen the other side.

I branched out into several different traffic sources and quadrupled the amount of traffic I was getting. I was doubling my net profits every week. It was crazy.

Soon I was controlling a firehose of traffic and sales. The volume was ridiculous.

I signed up to several networks that had similar offers. This way, when one network told me to stop I could just switch the firehose to another network and keep going. Sometimes I’d max out five networks a day.

Her Call

One day, I applied to a new affiliate network and started drilling them with traffic right away.

My affiliate manager freaked out and called me on the phone. She thought I was sending a bot attack at their network. The sales were coming in so fast she couldn’t keep up.

I just laughed – – – and said “it’s real”

She panicked and called the CEO of the company. A few minutes later he had me on a conference call and told me to turn the traffic off until he could figure out what was going on.

I told him “if I turn it off, it’s not coming back on”.

He looked at the numbers, swallowed hard and said “Okay… let’s do it”.

Then I drilled them with sales as hard as I could.

The same affiliate manager called me a few days later and said “You know what? You’re hands down the biggest marketer I’ve ever seen here… in fact you’re probably one of the top affiliate marketers in the world…”

And you know what?

She was right.

< / the end >

So as I was saying in the previous post, when the first few clicks came into the affiliate network, my heart almost blew out of my chest.

I had no idea what to expect, but I knew I had a chance at doing something really big. I was paying for traffic now, so I didn’t have to wait for results. They were coming in live.

Keywords: I started with just the most common keywords and phrases related to the product. Just the name and a few no-brainer phrases. I checked the Google Adwords Keyword tool and used a few of their suggestions as well.

Ads: I wrote some really basic ads using the main product keyword in the title. I’d never written an ad before so I just stuck kept it simple.

Landing Page: I was sending the visitors to this super designed, amazing landing page that I had created earlier. I thought it was the best landing page in history and would make me rich.

Bidding: I set my bid high, somewhere around $1.00 per click. I’d read online that it was best to start your bids high to get good CTR (because you’re in the #1 ad position). Later, you could drop your bid. But for now – I could get 50 clicks for $50 bucks and let the chips fall where they may.

The 50 clicks came from Google really fast. But when I checked the affiliate network stats, there were only one or two clicks. That meant only two people clicked my amazing landing page.

I Made Zero Sales

After the traffic came in I checked my affiliate stats and saw that I had made zero sales. I knew it could happen, but part of me was thinking I’d make 10 sales and just start printing cash right away.

Zero sales was a nice reality check.

I started to assess the disaster:

My landing page sucked! Out of 50 visits I only got one or two clicks. People hated the landing page, or didn’t know how to use it. Looking back it was way too fancy and had no Headline or Call To Action. It was just a cool looking little page. Apparently PPC clickers don’t give a damn about your design.

And I didn’t have any tracking setup so I had no idea what had happened. All I could see was $50 had been spent and $0 had been earned.

I told my affiliate manager what happened and he asked me what tracking tool I was using. I said “what’s a tracking tool?” He laughed and told me to check out Tracking202, a free PPC tracking tool that was popular at the time.

I spent the rest of the day installing it and setting it up. Now I could track keywords, and get all kinds of info about my visitors in real time.

I could see where they lived, what kind of browser they used, what OS they used and most importantly, I could see the EXACT keyword or phrase they searched for to find me.

This kind of intel changed the game and gave me real insights into what was happening. The affiliate marketing rabbit hole kept getting deeper and deeper.

The Campaign Is Not The Problem

Over the next few days I spent $50 a day, and prayed for a conversion, but none came.

I started to lose faith but my affiliate manager assured me the offer worked, so I should stick with it.

I started posting on affiliate marketing forums about my problems and complaining about the offer not preforming well.

One of the responses I got really pissed me off, but looking back – it was some of the best advice I ever got.

A guy said: “99% of the time, the problem isn’t the campaign… it’s the affiliate marketer.”

He was blaming me – and that really pissed me off. But then it hit me. He was right! The campaign wasn’t the problem… I WAS THE PROBLEM.

And if I’m the problem, I can fix me. In fact, “I” was the only part of the campaign that I had control over. So I started working on MYSELF.

Fixing Myself

If the campaign was going to work, I had to fix myself and so I decided to become the best affiliate marketer on Earth. I asked myself what would the best affiliate in history do with this?

I was getting clicks from my ads just fine, so I decided to leave my ads alone and work on the landing page. I was getting almost zero click throughs from the page. I couldn’t get sales without click throughs (because they’d never see the actual offer).

So I chose a single goal: Find a way to get more clicks.

I started trying different landing pages. I didn’t know how to spy or copy back then so I did things from scratch… but nothing really worked. I tried page after page… I was getting a few more click throughs now, but still couldn’t get a conversion.

One day, out of frustration I decided to just take a blog post page from my personal blog and swap out the information on it. I’d use it as the landing page and see what happened.

The next morning, I crossed my fingers and hit the “Play” button on the campaign. The new, ugly little landing page was ready for a test.

To my shock and surprise I got A LOT of click throughs on my new, simplified and ugly little blog landing page.

I checked the affiliate network and my jaw dropped. I had SALES! I’d been spending $50 a day for a week or so and had made back ZERO dollars. So getting a sale was huge for me.

By the end of the day I think I had three sales. $105 revenue on the $50 spend. I’d made $55.00!

And now that I had some sales, I could see which keywords were used to get them. I could also see which keywords spent money and didn’t make any sales… and I could pause them.

Now the game really started to take shape.

I spent the next several days tweaking the campaign. Tracking202 let me split test multiple variations of my page and the CTR and conversion rate got a little bit better over time.

I tweaked my ads and started finding weird keyword phrases that were making money. I split these phrases into their own campaigns and let them run on their own.

I wasn’t making money every day.

It turned out the three sales I got that first day were a fluke. Some days I’d get zero sales, another day one sale, then nothing, then three the next day.

Overall I was losing money but I was getting a little bit better every day.

When I could consistently break even on a weekly basis I’d increase the daily budget by $50. Within a few weeks I was spending $150 a day. I was still losing or breaking even but now I had more traffic to analyze and I was learning faster.

This went on for four weeks. And at the end of the month I decided to take a closer look at the numbers to see what was going on.

I was having the time of my life! It was so fun to watch the numbers coming in… but I was losing money and I needed to see how deep in the hole I really was.

When I did the numbers, my heart sank.

In my first month, I’d managed to lose $3000…

• Spent: $5000
• Earned: $2000
• Net Profit: -$3000

I was devastated.

With the savings I had, I could survive in Los Angeles for about ten months. I had just lost two months of money on the campaign in 30 days. At this rate I’d be broke in a few months.

But the game was so fun… And I was getting better at it!

I saw this huge opportunity in front of me and I knew other people were making it work. All I had to fix was me… if I could do that, then this thing could work for me too.

I told my affiliate manager what was going on – and he said it was up to me whether or not to continue. But he saw my progress as well, and urged me stick with it.

The Decision

What happened next is one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

I was confused about what to do. I was losing money, but I was having fun and could see a big opportunity.

If I played the game and lost, I’d be broke and have to go out and get a job. And that was the LAST thing I wanted to do.

I had just stopped drinking, my relationship had blown up, I didn’t know anyone and I had no idea how to handle the real world.

I thought and thought about it. Then I thought about it some more.

• Can I really do this?
• Am I out of my mind?
• Is this thing even really real?
• Is the affiliate manger lying about the other guys?
• Am I sabotaging myself here?
• Is affiliate marketing even real?
• Am I gambling all my money away?
• I’m having so much fun, could this be “my thing”?

At the end of that thinking session I asked myself the big question.

“Am I going to give up? or keep going?”

I paused for a second and then answered myself out loud, by myself, into the air.

I said:

“F#CK IT MAN, LET’S LOSE IT ALL”

I laughed… and sat back down in my computer chair and turned the campaign on again.