Never Before Seen Insights into Website Project | In conversation with Daniel Scocco | Ask Avi Arya

That's fine. Probably if your passion is has also some market value that is the best of both worlds because you're going to invest in it. You're going to be writing about something, you know, like sharesale.com for example and many others where you can join, check what is available in the marketplace and then you sign up and start promoting anywhere. The commissions more Our case. We started to realize that you cannot rely on paid advertising. I'm talking about mobile apps exclusively. But products is something completely different. You can sell a product just using paid advertising. That's totally fine. If the numbers are there, it's fine. But for a mobile app, and especially if you want to grow it as a company, right, As a startup that's going to grow and to be sustainable, you cannot rely.

What would be your strategy to get more app downloads?

App downloads?

Hire Ronaldo.

It's a good strategy if you can afford.

Hey guys, this is Avi Arya. Father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet moguls. Welcome to my channel.

Pretty good. How about you?

I'm very well, thank you very much. Thanks for taking the time out for this, Daniel. Really appreciate it.

It's my. My pleasure. How do I pronounce your name? I always like to get names right.

You pronounce it perfectly. Avi.

Abi. Perfect. Sounds good.

Perfect. So Daniel, you know, like I said, I'll give you a little bit of an introduction about myself very quick. So on the 29th of October next month, I'm going to be 44 years old. But the story that I'm going to tell you is when I was 18 years old, born and brought up in New Delhi, all I wanted to do in life was to race streetcars. I thought I'll become a streetcar racer, maybe go abroad to study streetcar racing. But one day my dad called me to his office and he said, son, I've lost a lot of things in my business. I don't have the money to send you abroad. He had a small 27 room motel. He said, start working with me in the morning, otherwise you leave the house, you know you can't live with us. And all of that in one night. Everything changed. Very next morning I found myself working with my dad in a small motel. We didn't know what to do. We were working with Indian guests. One day a foreign tourist walked in and he paid us in Dutch guilders. And that turned out to be double of what an Indian client pays us. Now my 1819 year old mind is saying what if I can get all international tourists to come into my hotel, then I can get more money and I'll become more revenue and I'll become a star in my dad's eyes. So with that intention I started searching. Around during that time, late 90s, early 2000, there was a new phenomena on the market called the Internet. And the Internet was allowing you to connect with people around the world. The only problem was in Delhi there was Internet only in two places and both of them were five star hotels and they were very expensive. After six months or a year, I saw an ad in the paper cyber cafe in your, you know, in your premises. So I applied and I got a cyber cafe. Now Daniel, I had 24 hour access to the slowest Internet on the planet. I used to open one part of the website, the other used to open after lunch. But I still started chatting with people, understanding how this works. So somebody said get a website, somebody said do SEO, somebody said put a toll free number, somebody said have a query form. I didn't know how to do all of this. Next six, seven, eight months I started learning all of these things, created a website and we were one of the first ever Indian companies to have small companies to have a website. So we got lots of business and that completely changed the way that our family started doing business. Once I understood how to do this, then I started making multiple travel websites. I had almost hundred websites by the age of 25. Four of them were doing extremely well. By 2009 I thought I should now branch out on my own apart from my dad's business. So I launched a digital marketing agency in 2009 with a four member team, no funding, bootstrapped completely. And the 10 years we were able to grow it to about 200 people. And after doing digital marketing, I realized that I'm spending too much time in my business. My wife, my daughters, my dogs, everybody's getting neglected. So I started getting into the coaching and mentoring space. I got into, I started coaching people, I started doing webinars. Then Covid happened and after Covid with this, 75 webinars in 75 days, we grew our email list to 136,000 people, grew our Instagram following to 83,000. Covid change and webinars changed everything for us. Now I teach and coach entrepreneurs. We have a small school, online school called Micro Video Mastery where we teach entrepreneurs from all over the world on how they can use videos to be able to interact with people, to get known, get Leads and get sales. And the first thing that we do is we tell people that the shortest distance between two human hearts is a story. You tell somebody a story and you connect with your hearts. However, the Internet is very impatient. So the shortest form of a story when you put in your Instagram video, is what we call the hero introduction. So Daniel, when we start now, the interview, I'm going to tell you my hero introduction and we request you to tell us yours.

Sounds good. How long should that be?

So I'll tell you mine and then you can see how long you want yours to be.

Sounds good.

Okay. So, Daniel, My name is Avi Arya. Father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet Moguls and the Micro Video Mastery School where we teach entrepreneurs how to get known, get leads and get sales using just their smartphone and wi fi connection.

Over to you, Avi. I'm a programmer and entrepreneur based in Sao Paulo, Brazil and I started building my first websites back in 2005. So I have been doing it for a long time as well. And over the years I built, bought and sold over 50 websites. And more recently I started working. Well, not so recently. From 10 years or so to the present day, I started focusing more on developing mobile and web applications and that's pretty much what I do today. We have a mobile app that's starting to grow a lot here in Brazil. We are starting to raise money from VCs and that's kind of a new chapter for me.

Excellent. So tell us about how did you come up with the idea of this website and who does it serve?

I guess I'll start with the latest project with the mobile app that I said we are building. I guess the easiest way to describe it, it's yellow pages for WhatsApp. And since you live in India, I'm sure it's the same as in Brazil. WhatsApp is very popular, right? It became the default communication platform. Yet at least in Brazil last year when we launched, you didn't have any easy and quick way to find the WhatsApp number of professionals and businesses. Let's say you need a plumber you want to talk to, chat on WhatsApp. Yep. How do you find the WhatsApp number of plumbers in your city? It's hard. You don't have an option. And then my co founder and I, we identified this gap and we said let's, let's do it. We did some research. We could not find anyone Doing exactly that. So yellow pages for WhatsApp. Not in Brazil, not anywhere in the world. And then we decided to launch and feedback was great. So we just kept moving. And just over one year that we are working on this app, we have around 600,000 downloads in Brazil and over 400,000 monthly active users. So that's my current project, my current focus today, if you want, we can talk about past projects as well. I have, as I said, over dozens of websites that I launched over the years. Some worked, some didn't. I have many, many stories.

So tell us about this current project of yours. What's it called again?

It was called Agenda Zap, but since Agenda Zap is not an international name, Agenda means contact list in Portuguese. Recently we did a rebranding and now it's called Az Pop. So Az means you can find everything and Pop, because it's young, it's fast. So Az Pop.

Nice. So azpop allows me to go, I'm going to download the app right now. I can download the app and I can search for a category of service that I'm looking for and I will find their WhatsApp and I can start communicating with them right away.

Exactly. You are not going to be able to download because it's only available in Brazil. Sorry about that. But soon enough, we want to get you to India. Our development team is in India, in fact. But yes, let's say you need a plumber. You type Plumber search. It lists all the plumbers in your city that answer through WhatsApp. And with a single click, you start the WhatsApp chat with that professional or business. You don't even need to save the contact to your contact list, which is takes a lot of time and is bothersome.

Right. So tell me when. So for all the audience who's listening to this interview, how come up with the idea? You did validation, you found a team in India, all that difficult stuff you've done, and you developed an app. You have 400,000 downloads, people already using it. How do you market an app to people around the world?

Right. And I believe this is very related to what you are doing because a lot of the focus of your courses are video, right?

That's right.

And for us, we rely heavily on video to promote the app. We have made experiments with images with links on Google, for example. But by far the most efficient channel and medium for us has been video, so video advertising. And we do that on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube. So over the months we have tested several options. Once we identify that Video is the format that works better. We have tested several video formats and now we have one that by far outperforms the other. So it's a 60 second video advertising that we run on those platforms, basically explaining quickly what the app does, explain the benefits and inviting the users to download the app.

Got it. So what would you say? Daniel is the. So there are two things. One is the brand and one is the father of the brand. You and your co founder, you're the parents, you made it happen. You gave birth to that idea. How important do you think it is for you to be on video and talk about your backstory and how you develop this and all of that versus just one explainer video?

Good point. First, I think it's very important and we are starting to realize this more and more recently. In fact, Fernando and I, which is my co founder, we decided that we needed to be more transparent about what we are doing. So not only just have explainer videos, but ourselves get in front of the camera and put some videos on our Facebook page, on Instagram, to have a more direct interaction with our customers, with the users. And we believe there are several benefits to doing this. First, it creates a more personal aspect about the brand and about the company so the users can see the who is behind it, so it makes more relatable. Second, it's very positive to have this notion that we are building in public, that we are transparent about what we are doing because people are going to understand that it's people after all, behind it. So they will understand if we make mistakes, if the product is not perfect, they will understand it more. And finally, it's also a good way to get feedback, to get more real feedback from our users. So one idea that we are implementing right now is that we created a WhatsApp group for our users, for the power users, let's call it, for the users that really love our product. And then Fernando and myself are going to get in front of the camera on Instagram, Facebook and we're going to invite those users that really love our product, our brand, to join us on that WhatsApp group so that we can talk, they can ask us questions, they can suggest new features, they can say what they like, what they don't like. So yes, answering the question, very important. And we are realizing now more than ever how important it is for us to get in front. And then a second point related to this is that as I said, we made several experiments regarding what video format would work better and curiously enough, the explainer video. So we Paid a professional agency to do a very professional video. So everything is good looking voiceover actor, the image effects are perfect. Yet it performed much worse than just us talking in front of the camera and just explaining what the product is. So it was a surprise to us because one of our investors said, hey guys, you need to get a professional video, explain your video. We said, okay, let's do it. But the results were very, very bad. It looks like having someone in front of the camera, it brings much more results. And it's like people capture the attention of people. Drawings, not so much, right?

No. I love what you said because that's what we teach in our program. As we read, people want to do business with people, not the logo of a company. So put the people in front. So there are three strategies that we tell people. One is the founders of the company, the father and mother of the company. They go and tell their stories, why it happened. My name is ABHI Arya, father of two girls. I was a hotelier, streetcar racer, all of that. I tell my story before I start any conversation. Even when we go on a pitch, a client pitch for a digital marketing project. We tell our clients, this is my story. You have to listen to it for five minutes and I'll give you them the entire story on how I came to the stage of running a company which is digital marketing. And so then they connect with me. After that they can listen to five other pitches. I don't care because I know that I have left a mark because they remember my story number one. So the founder story number two, we tell people. Tell stories of your team members. Who are they? Where did they come from? Why do they believe in this product? Where did they come from? So all people. And thirdly, stories of my customers, you know, so what happened with them and these kind of three video aspect stories and we've seen has changed dramatically. The like you said, the power users come together and they're like, I love this brand, I love that guy, I love that story. That person is me. And that's how 2020 brands are created, through videos. So I like that you sort of validated that. So it helps our audience to understand the power of micro videos. My next question, you have built and sold so many websites now. Lot of people now because of COVID and all of that are sitting at home. They're developers or they think like a developer. They can hire somebody in India or Brazil or wherever. What is what? What should somebody do if they know how to build and rank and get traffic on a website? What's the what? How do you make a website and sell it? How did that model work? Can you tell us about it?

Yes. First, one point before I get to our question. These days you don't even need to know how to code to create a website or even a web application, be it a mobile or a web app, because there are so many tools you can use that pretty much automate this process and becomes pretty much like a visual editor where you just need to drag and drop and then boom, your app is created for you. So even if you have no technical skills whatsoever, I believe is a great time if you have ideas and if you have the drive to put the effort and do the work. Because after all, it's not the idea but the execution that's going to bring the results. But if you have the drive, if you have that, you don't need to have technical knowledge to create a profitable, a popular website or application, then in terms of selling the website, I guess that's what you want to know. Selling the project, obviously, after, if you want, we can talk about how to get to a point where you can sell, how to grow it.

Sure.

But if you have something that's working, that's profitable, you certainly will be able to sell it. You just need to understand the kind of numbers that people use if you want to sell fast. Okay, first of all, the website needs to be profitable and needs to have an upward trend, so at least it needs to be stable. It's very tough to try to sell a website that's declining. I say that because I've tried to do it several times. Potential buyers that are going to be skeptical, you either are going to have to charge a very low price, which probably is not going to make financial sense to you, or you're not going to be able to sell. So that's one point. Good point. A mistake I did several times, which is for the projects where I was not so passionate about, I should have sold at the peak and not waiting for it to start declining.

There's a project you're not passionate about and you feel that you don't want to put in more time and energy when it's going well, sell it and do. Yes, but it's something that you like to do everything and it gives you money, then you may want to keep that. Okay, understood. Good point.

Yes. Because if you don't soon and when it starts to work, the numbers are good, that the revenue is coming, you kind of assume that it's going to keep like this forever, but it never does it never does. Unless you keep working like crazy. Competition is going to catch up. Google is going to update its algorithm. They are going to get you sooner or later unless you are so passionate that you keep working hard. So if you are not that passionate, as soon as the numbers are good, sell it. I have many, I have this regret on many, many projects. And then going back to the numbers, I believe if you want to sell fast, you probably are going to be able to get anywhere from 24 up to 36 times the monthly profit, the monthly earnings. So for example, website that earns $1,000 per month, probably you're going to be able to sell for easily for $24,000. If you negotiate more. If you go after the right buyer, you might get $36,000. If the website is really stable, has been online and is stable or growing for many years, five years or plus, if it's on a popular niche, popular segment, you might be able to get a number, a multiple as high as 48 times the multiple of the monthly earnings above that is much more difficult. I have not seen so many deals in that number. And then how do you do it? There are a couple of ways to start that process and to sell. You can get in touch with website brokers. There are many of them. In fact, if you type on Google website sale broker, you're going to find many of them. It's the easiest way. But they are going to charge anywhere from 10 to 20% commission. So you need to factor that in. Alternatively, you can go to websites where people allow you to list your website. Flippa.com is perhaps the most famous one, but there are others. There are some specific for specific types of websites. For example, software as a service websites. You have websites that only list those types of websites. You can go to them. You list. Usually you just pay a fee to list the property. And then they do not guarantee that you are going to sell or not. But the potential buyers are going to make offers and then you go from there. That's how I would approach it.

Got it. That's a very good strategy. You said you can go to Google and type website brokers. Find the right company, negotiate with them between 10 and 20%. They will help you get the right buyer, provided you have the right numbers. It's on an upward trend. They will look at all those things. Number two, you can go to Flippa and Flippa will allow just with a monthly fees list your site and then it's between you and your audience. So tell me a lot of people because this show, I want. I want people to listen to your message, to be able to say, I can do something on my own after Covid. Some people want to write about mobile phones. Some people want to write only about mobile phone covers. Some people want to write about glasses. Some people want to write about race car jackets. Some people want to write about neon signs. Some people write about, you know, superheroes. By the way, which one is your favorite?

Out of those, I would say Iron Man.

Okay, so people would like to, you know, sort of. So people have various. My daughter wants to write about horses. My elder daughter wants to write about bullying. You know, in school when you bully people, and she wants to write about that. So when somebody who's listening to this, they want to start a website project. You know, it could be content, blogs, videos, whatever they're trying to. How should they start? Should it be a passion project or would you say, I don't care about passion. Just go to Google Keyword Planner, look at the top search keywords, look at what's trending on Google Trends, find out everything, validate proof of concept, go after what is trending, make your website, go there and then sell it. Or do you think. No, create a website which you are an expert on. For example, if you were a doctor and now you're not, or you were a nurse, now you're not. Maybe you were fired from a restaurant industry now, or you're fired from, you know, you were a camera person and now you don't have a job, or you were working in airlines and you don't have a job today. You can write about hotels, airlines, whatever you want, or make videos around that so other people can learn how to get a job there. How should I start? I mean, how should I start building my website?

If you asked me 10 years ago, I would say that you have to start something about topics you are passionate about. I had that view today. I no longer hold this. True. I believe pretty much all options you described can work. Okay, so if you have a particular passion and you want to write about it, you want to create a blog, a website around it, that's fine, probably, if your passion has also some market value that is the best of both worlds. Because you're going to be passionate, you're going to be writing about something, you know, and there is market value for that. Okay, what topic?

Sneakers.

Sneakers. Sneakers can be very profitable, by the way. Very profitable. Yeah. I'm not sure in India, but there are many places around the world where there's a complete ecosystem of People that buy and sell sneakers.

In fact, I interviewed a 14 year old kid from India who started a Kickstarter campaign and he got money and he developed a website where he does sneaker trading. 14 years old.

Yes. Yes. So I guess both can work. The only thing that I guess it would be hard to work is if you decide to write or to do a project about your passion. And your passion is too small. It's a niche that no one else care. So let's say, oh, my passion is 1800 stamps about blond haired kings. Like no one else likes that, then it's going to be hard. That being said, if your passion is somewhat popular that other people share the same passion, I believe you should be good to go. And even if you are not passionate about a specific topic, but you recognize after doing some research that that topic is underserved, I believe it's totally possible to make a profitable project there, even if it's not your passion. Especially because you don't need to be the one creating the content. You can outsource the content creation. For example, one of my websites, one of my websites that did well in the past, in fact it's one of the few that I still own is a website about English tips. And I created it because I wanted to improve my own English. So it's called DailyWritingTips.com and so the first five or ten articles I wrote myself. But after that I realized that if I wanted the website to grow and to be popular, I need an expert to create the content. And I'm not an expert in English. So I hired an English PhD and she started creating all the content for me. And the website grew a lot. It became very popular. I believe at its peak it was receiving a couple million visitors per month.

Wow.

Yes. Today is down to 1.1.5. But I'm not an expert in this topic. I have someone that creates the content. I just manage. I just manage it. So that's possible as well. You don't need to necessarily to follow that.

I'm going to be putting. Because this is going to be edited like online course, like a tutorial. So all your amazing points, how to start and all of that, we're going to have a ticker running so people can keep going back and say this is what I wanted to learn. My next question is I don't have money or I have very little money and I need to start making money. I'm writing content. Either I'm doing it myself or I'm outsourcing it. I need to start making money. I can't wait for a million users to come in. At what stage can I start going and asking people to advertise on my site? And how does that work?

The number in question is going to depend on the segment on the niche. For example, a website that talks about credit cards or investments probably only need 10,000 visitors per month or so before you can start charging for advertising, because each of those visitors is very valuable for a potential advertiser. If, however, you are talking about, let's say, Pokemon or some other online game, then you might need 100,000 monthly visitors before you can start doing advertising. That being said, when I say advertise here, I'm talking about going directly to the companies and asking them to sponsor the website. If you decide to go with Google Adsense, then you can just copy and paste the AdSense code in your website and you are going to see a number that's going to reflect whatever traffic you have. If you have 1,000 visitors, you're going to make $20, $30, and that might be enough to keep you working to pay for the hosting costs. Then once you grow to 5,000, it's going to become 150, $200. So AdSense allows you to grow that advertising revenue gradually. And one point related to this and also related to growing websites in general and making money online is that to get started these days you don't even need a website. My uncle, a couple of months ago, he came to me and said he wanted to start selling. He produces guitars, right? For this, handmade guitars. And he said, I want to sell those guitars. What kind of website do I do? Shopify, what do you recommend? And I told him, no website, only Instagram. All you need to get started is Instagram because it's so popular here in Brazil, I'm sure in India as well, pretty much anywhere in the world, that all you need to get started is an Instagram account. You start putting some content list, whatever you have for sale there and put a link to your WhatsApp. So if people want to buy or want to learn more, they start chatting with you on WhatsApp and you close the deal on WhatsApp, you send a payment link and then after that you worry about the website. I agree that going forward, website is essential, but to get started, to like, to start feeling the market, to talk to the first few customers or interest potential customers, you don't even need the website. It can be the second step, right?

I've got one more idea for your uncle. He can go to azpop and register himself over there.

Good point. Yes, very good point. Very good point.

Okay, so when I'm creating this website and I'm building my traffic on it and I'm reaching out to advertisers and potential people and all of that, I'm thinking aloud right now as I'm talking to you. Should I run a paid. If I have the budget, I run a paid campaign with a big contest, a big giveaway or something, or use a tool like Up Viral, where I say, you come in here, we'll help you run a contest, something so that you get 2,3000 people to actually come and experience it. You run a festival or you run a webinar, something coming to your website and all of that. And at the end of two, three hours or a full day webinar, you give four or five brand ambassador or power users, you give them some kind of an award and you say that. So some, you know, how do I build fast engagement? Because if I keep on writing content and waiting for it to come up, it's going to take time. If I have some dollars on paid marketing and using something like Up Viral or a contest app, you know, can I do all of that and instantly tell there are hundred famous people? Or secondly, do you think it's a good idea if I have a small niche, thousand, two thousand people, whatever. I reach out to Mashable or TechCrunch and all of that and I say, you know, can you feature me? It's a good, great story. You know, I believe in superheroes. Last night Hulk came in my dream. Or, you know, or I have six dogs and they're my co founders. I don't know. People make crazy types of stories to reach out to the press, to tell the press that this is a story you need to feature. So I'm just trying to find a faster way to success. Is there anything like that?

It's hard, it's hard to accelerate this process. Some points here. First, if you do have the time, if you can wait, I believe that SEO is a great strategy. So keep building, keep working on the content, keep getting links from other websites. And then over time, Google is going to start sending you more and more visitors. And if you have the time, why do I say that's great? Because pretty much your investment is going to be your time. So you don't need to have money, you just have to have time. And second is SEO. I like SEO because once you put that initial time to create the content, to optimize your Website once it starts ranking on Google. Google is going to keep sending you visitors for years. For example, my writing tips website, it's been more than a decade, right? More than this is going to 12, 13 years and Google keeps sending month after month. Google is going to keep you sending those visitors pretty much free of charge. So over the long term, if you make it work, is a great return on investment, better than paid advertising. But the downside, as you said, is that takes time for a brand new website. Usually I say that you need to wait at least six months until you start seeing good results. So a good number of visitors and probably need to wait six to 12 months before start making good money. Connect it to the video strategy that I know you like and I love video as well these days. I believe video is very important. These days. Whenever I have a website to promote using SEO, be it the blog of my company, for example, of our mobile app, be it the other websites I have. The best content strategy I use these days is what I call a hybrid strategy where you create a video, right. And then you launch that video on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and then you transcribe that video and you create an article, a text article based on that video. Why is that good? First, because we're going to reach all the channels, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Google search. Right. In fact, if I ask you, well now I already gave away the answer. But if I asked you what's the largest search engine in the world? It's Google. What's the second search engine in the world? YouTube. Exactly. It's incredible how much traffic you can get from that. And it's much less competitive than Google, than the Google search engine. So that's the main benefit. And the second benefit is that you're going to only have to create one piece of content, which is this initial video can be a video tutorial. Whatever it's that you do, you create it once and you're going to have the two formats ready to go, the video and the article that you're going to transcribe. So it's very, it's very effective in terms of time, timing and not.

You can create a video yourself and send it to your content writer and they can do all of the other stuff as well.

Exactly. In fact, there are even tools that are going to do that automatically. That going to transcribe some work. Okay. The result, the final article is acceptable. You could use that automated process and publish it. I don't think it would be bad. If you have time, you send to someone and they are going to give the final touches on the formatting of the text. But that's a very good strategy. I try to use whatever.

I like that, I like that, I like that. So when it comes to, when it comes to this, you know, you built 100 plus websites and you sold many and kept many. So like, you know, they say place your bets, some will work, some will not. So should I start four or five websites together and see which one works?

Just one small correction, not hundred. I would say 50. 50 for sure. But I'm not sure if I crossed 100 websites, but 50. Yes, it's a good question. I would say yes, it's okay to do that in the initial period. So let's say you, after Covid you lost your job or maybe you are on lockdown so you have time available, you want to do something online. You don't know what. I believe it's totally fine to start two, three, maybe four and monitor how they go for one, two months. And then you track how much you like to work on each of those projects and what kind of feedback you are getting from visitors. But after some point, and you are going to be the one to decide if it's two or three months. But at one point you're going to have to decide and focus on one of them.

Got it.

Because by far one of the largest mistakes I see other people making and that I did a lot in the past as well, is lack of focus.

Okay.

You need to have focus on at least on the project at hand that you want to grow. And after it reaches a certain critical mass, I guess you could maybe put it on autopilot, get someone to manage it to create the content and you can start launching new projects. That's totally fine. But in the early days it's going to require most of your attention. Otherwise it's not going to have a good chance of becoming a successful project.

Perfect. That makes so much sense. So if I what about a lot of people today want to become like a website which is like a publisher site. So I talk about on my website. We're creating a new website where we're talking a lot about because we talk about videos and digital marketing through videos. We are interviewing the founders of all the tool companies video and transcribing it and talking about the features, plus an added bonus because the founder of the tool company is talking about it. We talk about the features and then we put an affiliate link and then we are using, you know, whatever SEO and paid to bring people over here Doing webinars to bring people to the website. You see the website, they get free trials for most of these tools. So what, how, what do you think about this kind of model? A lot of people are saying I'll do a website about mobile phones and then I'll promote Samsung or Nokia or whatever and then they'll give me an affiliate commission. What do you think about that kind of stuff?

I like, I like the affiliate marketing model very much. I have done it, I have used it in the past. I guess it can work. As you said, it needs to be in a niche where you are going to have affiliate offers available and good affiliate offers available. But these days you have several marketplaces, like shareasale.com for example, and many others where you can join, check what is available in the marketplace and then you sign up and start promoting anywhere the commissions. In fact, if you think about it, you could even use such marketplaces, such affiliate marketing marketplaces to get an idea for a potential project. So let's say you want to do something online, you don't know yet what you want to do. Let's see what are the top performing affiliate offers? Maybe it's a diet course, maybe is a mobile phone repair course. Find someone that is working well and those marketplaces, they will tell you which is the conversion rate of each offer. So find one where the average and they even give you the average EPC earnings per click. So they kind of estimate based on all the traffic they see, they can estimate how much you're going to earn for every click you refer to that company or to that product, you pick one that is large enough where the conversion is good, the number is good, and that you know, that you might be able to send those traffic because maybe you know the topic or you know someone who does and then you start the project. On top of that, I believe it's a nice idea to get started.

I like that. You know. Were you a teacher ever?

No.

Because you put everything in such bullet forms. It's easy to understand and it's easy to go through the interview, you know, or maybe you understand the question and you know, you bring it out very clearly. It saves me a lot of editing.

Right. I guess maybe it's because I'm a developer and I like to think in very structured.

Yeah, okay. So when it comes to, you know, a lot of people I've spoken to, they've said there are tools on share or sale or whatever which are which give 100, 300, $500 as commission. So they are able to run paid campaigns on Google and they're still profitable. And yeah, so. So yeah, that's a good, that's a good thing to keep in mind. I'm going to make a note of it and talk to my team.

One point, if I may, Avi, about affiliate marketing. One common mistake I see people making is to, for example, either run the campaign, right? Let's say you are going to run a paid advertising campaign. They send those clients straight to the landing page of the product. Why is this a mistake? Because you are spending money. A couple of reasons. Two reasons. First, you are spending money, but you are not retaining those customers. You are sending the customer away. If you are spending money, keep the customer for you. So first, send to your own landing page. Get the contact the email address, for example, and after that you send to the product. Because then you try to make money and build an email list at the same time.

Got it?

Right. And the second benefit is that if you just send the customer, the potential customer, straight to the landing page, we can say that it's a cold lead, right? You are not trying to sell that person. Maybe the landing page is not great. But if instead of doing that, you first enter your website, sign to your email newsletter, and then you, for example, by using a video, why not you explain to that lead why that product is great, you're going to increase drastically the chances that he's going to buy it.

Got it.

So if you're going to do affiliate marketing, keep those customers for you. Also, because once you grow your list, maybe you stop liking that product. You find one that's better, you can switch because the customers is yours first. We're referring them to product A. Now we said, hey guys, forget product A, I just found product B much better. So buy here, you have the customers. And second, because you start developing that relationship, you explain why you like that product and you have much higher chance of convincing them to buy if indeed it's a good product.

That's a fantastic idea. So what you said, instead of selling, sending him directly to their landing page, their website, send them to your landing page, add a video, explain it. Because then the value is coming from you and they're more likely to buy from you. And you're building your email database and you can then you own the customer and then you can sort of sell products further and somebody's already bought something from you, they're likely to buy from you again.

Exactly.

So when it comes to building an email list, what are your top best strategies?

First, first and foremost, you need to give something away of value. If you just ask, hey, give me your email address because I want it in the future, I'm going to send you good stuff. It's not going to work. I mean, you're going to get some subscribers, but your conversion rate is going to be low. So you need to give something of value, hopefully of a lot of value right away. So it can be a e book, it can be a course, an online course, it can be an email sequence where you are going to teach him, explain him something that you know that's valuable for that potential subscriber. So that's a must. Otherwise your conversion rates going to be low. Second landing page matters, so it needs to be at least some.