Dan Brock — Earning A Living With Affiliate Promotions on YouTube

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf.

Joe Fear.

Hey, yo, yo. Welcome to another podcast episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. This is Joe Fear.

Matt Wolf here.

I say podcast too much. You do. Sorry, I get too excited. I'm on recording. Okay, so today we have Dan Brock. He is nicknamed the super Sorry deadbeat Super affiliate. Yep, he has quite the image. If you ever Google his or if you see him looking at our show.

Notes, he's always in a bathrobe.

He's in a bathrobe. And it's funny because his feet always had these socks that have like another foot hanging off of sock. And like, literally he showed up to some of our, like, brewing events in San Diego dressed like this. I'm just like. Everybody's like, who the hell is this guy? Don't worry about it. So in this episode, I mean, this guy's like a YouTube ninja.

Oh, yeah.

And we're not talking YouTube ads or any of that scary stuff. That gets complicated. Literally, he's just shooting simple videos. And then guess what? He's not even selling his own products. He's selling affiliate products.

Yes.

And it's amazing. And you're gonna learn step by step on how exactly he does this with literally step by step and specifics. So get ready to take some notes.

Yeah. This is literally a tutorial on how to create really simple YouTube videos and earn affiliate revenue off of them over and over and over again. And Dan is just killing it doing this. He kind of gave us some behind the scenes numbers and holy crap. He's doing some big numbers doing this stuff. So exciting, Stu. And he breaks down the entire process, literally. The generous dude teaches you basically a masterclass on this in this call. So let's go ahead and dive in with Dan Brock.

All right, Dan, thanks for copping on hopping on. I'm first one of the day, man. First podcast.

Joe hasn't had enough coffee yet. How's it going?

What's going on, man?

What's up, guys? Joe and Matt, thanks for having me on your podcast. Really ready to.

I was taking a nap and I heard their Skype message pop up and I was like, oh, crap. We got all. We got a podcast today. Awesome. Let's do it.

Well, you had a different response, but we won't see what that response.

What's your brand name again?

Oh, yeah, my name is Dan Barack. The Debbie Super Affiliate. So.

So the Debbie Super Affiliate kind of, you know, it fits right in there.

Yeah, you know, napping and all. So it's good, it's all good. It's all good.

So what time do you start your day, Deadbeat?

You know, I've been pretty good recently. I've been waking up around 11am I'm doing good. And you took a nap for 2pm is like my typical, typical day.

Nice. And then you're napping after that. I mean actually you're ahead on your nap schedule today.

Yeah, usually I wake up, eat breakfast, do a little bit of work, take a nap and then just repeat that cycle.

Nice, I would love to do that.

What are your guys cycles like?

Well, once you have a wife and kids and stuff, things change a little bit.

So that's the caveat. Yeah, I'm usually up and going at around 10. Well, I mean I'm already up by then, but actually work mode, 10 o'? Clock.

Yeah, I'm usually up at about 7am at my computer. About 10am, in bed by about 10:30 or 11.

Dang, you guys are hustlers, man.

Well, old men.

Well, I don't think he's working the entire frickin day. That would be bad.

Oh no, no. When I say in bed by 10, I'm usually done working like 5:30 or 6 and then just watching Netflix or something until 10:30.

Matt's a nerd though. He's always kind of working in some, some fashion.

Yeah.

What do you guys think of those dudes that wake up like 4 and 5am?

I'm kind of envious of like a morning person to be honest. Not that early though. That's just ridiculous. That's like my stepdad. That's like real work when you have to go to a job like.

Nah, yeah, I wouldn't do that by choice.

I'm cool with six if I can get to bed early, you know, but I don't know man. Yeah, it's different scenarios for everyone I guess.

Important topic though, morning schedule when you wake up. That routine is important for sure. As an entrepreneur.

For sure.

Yeah. I mean that's brilliant because I mean.

We'Ve had episodes about our morning routine and Yeah, I mean we're pretty routine. It's just we, we get up, you know, we don't, we don't get up at 11, unfortunately. I wish I still could. When I was in high school that was like my weekend schedule. I'd get up at 11 and then stay up till 2am Hell yeah.

That's what's up.

Oh man.

No.

Yeah. Part of me wishes I could do that. But I'm like, man, I like the morning though, because like, no one's awake. And then you're just like. It's freaking quiet.

Yeah, but that's why I like the middle of the night. That's why I work till like 2am because that's what. That's the quiet time for me.

I know it is. I debate.

Yeah, I like the 2am hour.

Everything's clear minded and all that.

You're more clear at that time than. Well, you've taken so many damn naps. So it makes sense.

That's what I'm coming around the peak productivity around 2am at night, just ready to go after all those naps and all.

I mean, that makes sense. So you're a deadbeat during the day, but I mean, at least it seems that way. But you're hustling, dude.

Well, let's.

Yeah, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Well, let's go back to how you actually got into marketing and business and kind of tell that story real quick.

Yeah, well, I've been doing this for a long time. Started in 2000. So there. So I don't know how many years ago that was. Whether it be like 18, 20 years ago, whatever that is. Yeah. There was this video game called Diablo 2. Are you guys familiar with that game?

I definitely am. Yes. I was.

There was a item. There was this. You remember that boss, Mephisto?

I don't remember like the details of the game, but I do remember playing the game.

So there was one boss in there where if you geared, if you geared your sorceress the right way, you could kill that boss single, single handily in Hell mode and that boss would drop crazy gear and I would get. I would go and do these Mephisto runs and I would collect that gear and sell it on ebay. Oh, man. $50. You know, some of those helmets and crap that would drop like 50 bucks, 60 bucks each. So each run would be like on average $100. Would take like 15, 20 minutes.

You know, a little longer sometimes. But that's how I got started. So I started selling on ebay. From there. I started a web hosting company that did pretty well. I screwed that up because I was, you know, it was really successful. But I was like 17 at the time. And I was also doing like high school that I would be at high school full time there. So I just kind of burnt myself to the ground, you know what I mean? Because you don't have so much time in the day.

What do you do with that? Company, you just let it die, Sell it.

Yeah, it just kind of died out, you know, at the peak it was so awesome.

Really just grew too fast. I learned that lesson on that everyone wants to explode overnight, but that's really not a healthy thing. Especially when it comes to like a web hosting company where you have servers, you need staff. All that needs to be done systematically. So it just blew up. It was literally like overnight, within a month period. It went from like 500 customers, like three. I think it was like 250 customers. This is a while ago, so don't quote me on the specifics. It was like I had 250 paying customers and all of a sudden the thing blew up. You know, within a month I signed like a 1500 new customers within a month. So that's a lot of growth. That's a ton of growth. It's like five, I think it was like seven new servers. I had to buy. I had to hire two tech support people. I didn't know how to handle people as far as, you know, working online. It became a cluster f. Yeah. Pretty quick.

Damn. In high school. That's blowing me away right now.

Yeah, well, there's like so many. That's not. Because nowadays there's like 10 year old kids are dropping off programs and video games like nothing. So it's like we're almost, we're. We're like dinosaurs compared to the new crop of kids coming up.

We totally are, man. Yeah. All right, well that's a. I mean that's, that's crazy. I didn't know that's how you got into it all. Yeah.

No, I love the story about the Diablo thing too. I mean that was some big money. I mean I think still to this day that's big money in like World of Warcraft and shit, right?

Yeah, I think so. They have like the Counter Strike gear I think is what's hot now. I don't know, I haven't really been in that scene, but there are these big network sites that they sell this gear. I forget the name of it. It's Counter Strike I think is what it is.

Yeah, but they have like whole farms of people like over in like China and the Philippines and stuff that like that is their job. There's just like a hundred people in a. Almost like a sweatshop type environment playing video games and collecting shit.

Yeah, they were saying that there was a jail. A jail forced their prisoners to do it kind of off the. Off the. Off the record record. So there's jail set, these computers up and had these Chinese prisoners do it.

Damn. I guess it's better than lifting rocks.

And, you know, working on a chain gang. I'd rather play video games in prison than work on a chain gang, let's be honest.

So what happened after the hosting company? I don't like to say it failed, but I don't know, I guess you let it crash and burn.

Yeah, crash and burn. Yeah. I would say failure would be a pretty good term for it because you know, that was a tough failure going from, you know, when you're so young, man, that one win, you just feel like the world's your oyster. And going from that to. It took a while for it to decline. It took about a year for it to go down.

That, that was tough. Going from that to that. So the next two years I just kind of cruised off of the. Because that hosting recurring money comes in for a long time, like years, a matter of years. It's not just like, it just doesn't. As long as you do a decent job, a lot of people forget about the, you know, it's $5 a month. So they sign up and they totally forget about it.

Sure.

So like that, that, that comes in for years. So I was, I was coasting off that for like two years. I was just kind of casually.

Learning. I didn't, you know, my mind was pretty shattered at that point. Because that's funny saying that, like as a 17, 18 year old mind was shattered. But. Yeah, you know what I mean? When you come off of a big loss, you just kind of lose confidence. You kind of sit around aimlessly for like a year or two.

Yeah.

You guys not know what I'm talking about. You guys win win all the time or.

No, I, I hear it, man. You like, your mind's like in a fog, you know, and you got fog.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Maybe just not good to talk about that stuff. It's probably a good strategy.

Dude, I totally relate. I had, I had a good year where I was in a business that was doing really, really well. I got really burnt out on the business. I actually sold the business, so I actually put some money in my bank because I sold the business and then literally had like a year where I just like wandered around aimlessly not knowing what to do next. So I mean, I'm like right there with you. I've, I've had that experience before.

All right, good. I thought it was like some kind of freak or something.

Not alone.

All right, good. Yeah, but you know, you know that, you know what I'm talking about that, that, that.

Going from so high to so low. That is. That drop so freaking painful. I don't really put it to words like articulate this into like a cohesive thought, but freaking sucks.

Yeah. Well, how do you had. You had to kind of mull out and then figure out your next steps.

Yeah, exactly. Like take a step back and kind of analyze. I think is. It's kind of almost like a crucial thing. It's almost like a required thing that you have to do, in my opinion. So, yeah, after that, did the hosting, there was like a two, three year period where I was just like, ah, shit, can we cuss on this podcast?

Yeah, do what you gotta do.

I was like, oh, dang. Like, oh, man, I just screwed all that up. So that's when I got into affiliate marketing because I noticed that some of my hosting customers were doing that because as a web host, you have to kind of go through the sites every once in a while, make sure everything's up and running. So I saw a couple of the customers were doing. It was clear to me what they were doing. And I was like, I wonder if they're making any money. So there were a couple customers that would just keep buying more and more hosting plans. And I was like, damn, what are they doing? So this was just a mental note at the time. So I was like, all right, affiliate marketing, that seems like a little bit less stressful in the sense that you don't have to do customer support, you don't have to ship anything. All you have to do is focus on selling. Selling stuff. That's one of my strong suits. So doing all like, the gear, the gears and the, you know, the daily monotonous stuff of keeping a business, the ship running straight. Yeah, it's really not my. Wasn't really my strong suit. I think most entrepreneurs can kind of founders and entrepreneurs can kind of relate to this. It's fun doing the new stuff and not the maintenance work.

100%.

Yeah. That's a discussion, Joe. I think, and I have had so many times about how we get like, so excited and empowered by like building shit, but then once it's built, we get bored quickly.

Yeah, yeah. The depression of that sits in. I know I usually get depressed when I. Man, we're going so negative so quick here.

We're talking real, real talk, man.

I mean, I think people can relate, though. I think that's what's important.

So is your audience is semi experienced entrepreneurs?

I'd say so, yeah. I mean, we've got a Wide range of complete newbies to very, very, very advanced people.

So, okay, so I'm trying to just to phrase this in a way to, to appeal to the mass audience here. So, yeah, after that we did affiliate marketing. Then I was like, that was with Amazon. So I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. Amazon affiliate marketing is great in the sense that you can just leverage Amazon. Amazon's really good at selling things, that their whole network is just a buyer audience. So pretty much when everyone goes to Amazon, they know that they're going to buy stuff because that's just the way it works. So the good thing about Amazon affiliate marketing is that you just literally just get people on the site and it does all the heavy lifting for you. So that's what I started with. Then I went into creating my own products. This is kind of like the standard journey of a digital entrepreneur. You start, you figure out the method and then you start teaching it. Building up your school and you go from there.

Yeah, yeah, that's.

I mean, I feel like, yeah, we all drive to teach.

Yeah.

I don't know what the hell it is. It's like this digital marketer thing. It's like, we gotta teach what we just did. Yeah.

It's like, oh man, we're making all this money. Why not go teach it? But why would you teach it if you're making all this money?

Why not do that shit?

Yeah, but it's weird. Like, we've been the same way. We've always wanted to turn around and teach what we've learned. I think it's just like, it's an excitement factor. We get excited about what we learn and we go, oh, this is great. We got to show others this stuff. Because it's just, we get excited easily. I think.

Yeah, there is a passion element to that. Also the fact that you get paid a bunch of money. That doesn't hurt either.

Well, it's interesting because we actually took almost a reverse approach where we were selling a lot of our own products before we actually became affiliates of Stuff. And then once we became affiliates of Stuff, we stopped selling our own products. So now we don't actually sell any of our own info products. We're only purely affiliates now. So we actually took like a reverse approach to what the. I think the common path a marketer takes is.

I think there's a good. I think that strategy, honestly, nowadays is probably the best thing to do because you can focus on building up your audience. Having your own products is great and all, but if you can just focus on building up an audience and delivering good content about whatever your topic is. I think that's where the future is going. And obviously it helps to have your own products, but if you can just laser focus on the audience, build up aspect of it, you're golden. So that's just my opinion.

That's our opinion too. So I like your opinion.

Cool, that's good to hear.

So keep talking about the Amazon thing. Yeah. Because Amazon's badass. Can be badass.

Yeah, Amazon's badass. So I eventually found out that.

There.

Are products on there that are on Amazon, but they also end up having their own third party affiliate programs. So there was one that I noticed was selling really well. So I was like, all right, let me see if I can find like a affiliate program for this. So I found that program and I was like, oh dang. Like, you know, Instead of a dollar, $2 a sale, I'll get 50. So I went, I went to that. And not to say that Amazon's still great, I love Amazon. It's just that if you go and start looking for those third party affiliate programs, some exist, some don't, but with a lot of products, a $50 payout is much better than a $2 payout. Obviously you gotta be a better salesman for sure in order to get those things to convert, but it can be more profitable if you find the third party affiliate program to go along with it.

Sure, that makes sense. Yeah, I guess Amazon's kind of cool because you could just send people to the site maybe with one product and you might scoop up a few products in that person's order.

I've had people with Amazon that they'll click on a link to just a book or something and then the next thing you know you got a commission on a flat screen TV and you're like, oh shit, that's awesome.

Yeah, the weirdest thing I got was some dude bought like a horse mask and some rope.

So I was, I was thinking for about a month of what it possibly could be doing with a freaking horse mask. And the horse had a cigar in its mouth too. Just to make it even weirder.

Imagination for that.

Yeah, yeah, we'll leave it there. It's good stuff. So you got bored of Amazon? I don't know why you would, because you're seeing orders like that.

But.

I didn't get bored of just. The truth is that those third party affiliate programs are freaking nuts, man. Like, it's just, you know, Amazon's great for side income and when you're starting off as a beginner as far as, look, you don't know how to, you don't have to know how to sell stuff. So, you know, like we were saying, just send people there and they end up buying all this other crap. But with the third party stuff, you definitely need to have some copyrighted skills. You need to know how to, you need to know how to step people along the buying process. And that takes time to learn. So that's why I usually recommend when I train people to start with Amazon, start making some money to build up your confidence and, you know, your confidence to get traffic, make sites, you know, learn and earn at the same time, and then slowly learn the process of converting higher ticket sales into affiliate commissions, if you will.

Makes perfect sense. You need that marketing stuff, the copywriting you need to figure out to drive traffic, all that stuff. Yeah.

So when did the whole deadbeat Persona come about?

That was like 2009. That's when we started on it. At that point, you know, like this is just a little, you know, a little secret. Not a secret, but high school, I was a hard worker, you know, because I was doing this, I was doing full time school and then I was running the full time business. Like in, I would do my tech support during school because I was in computer programming class. I was literally working like 16 hours a day. That messed me up somehow. So after that I was like, you know what, I'm not doing that ever again. I'm going to stick. I'm going to just focus on all the crap that could make me money. It doesn't take a lot of time. That's why I went with affiliate marketing. And since I had that experience, I boiled it all down to like two hours a day. In work of work, obviously when you start up, start up, the business is going to take like three to four hours a day just by the nature of it. But you know, you start, once you start getting that sweet spot, you can start carving, carving off a lot of the excess fat there.

I love it, man. I think you're, you're throwing out some numbers that people listening are probably like, what?

We've been doing this for 11 years now and I still haven't figured out how to get it down to two hours a day.

So it's definitely a skill that's like, that's the one thing I'm not good at much, but the one thing I'm good at is being like super productive in a small amount of time.

So let's start talking about that then. What was that shift? And I guess talk about maybe some simple strategies that people can try out.

Well first. So right now your big thing is you're doing most of your work on YouTube these days, right?

Yeah, I have a YouTube channel. Yeah, that's where I have multiple YouTube channels.

The one that people know me for is obviously my Deadbeat super affiliate YouTube channel. It's where I teach everyone affiliate marketing, make money online. I have a lot of niche channels too in various health and home remedy. And I have one guitar channel, acoustic guitar channel. Interesting. So, yeah, YouTube's great. YouTube's great. Is that where we want to go in podcast?

I think so, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think we should talk about YouTube now. I'm curious, when you do the YouTube stuff, you said you're in the health niches and guitar niches and stuff like that now, is that actually your face and your brand and your name on that stuff?

No, those ones I don't. Those ones I. That's the great thing about YouTube. People think that you have to be able to like be on camera and do all this crazy crap. Like, you know, I don't know if you guys know about like Logan Paul and everyone knows about Logan Paul at this point. Like, you don't need to do that crazy stuff at all to make money with Amazon. A lot of my channels are just PowerPoint slides or whiteboard videos. Those style videos really. Just kind of like a. I like to think of it as those school presentations that you make. They made you create back in, you know, high school and college or whatever. But now like you can take those, condense it down and actually make money from it. So it's the same thing. It's really not much, much different.

So a lot of what you do now is like slide presentations, PowerPoint keynote kind of things where you're just kind of walking people through something.

Yeah, Screen capture tutorials. Screen capture works really well. Usually what I literally just do is I fire up PowerPoint, I make the slides and then I'll do like use Camtasia or Obs is a free one. And just I record the pane, the PowerPoint presentation window, pane it with the software, just go through the slides one by one and just narrate it.

Very cool.

So talk about. Because that's, that's all like I built my business doing that kind of stuff too, you know, but selling stuff to clients, not affiliate. What's your flow? Like, do you have kind of like a flow for these videos?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's. There's a formula to it. That's, that's what took me a while to figure it out. Yeah, when I first started on YouTube, I was like, man, this YouTube shit just does not work. It's just like I'm getting views, I'm not making sales. So it took me a while to hone in there. There's like a specific formula that you have to follow from A to Z to not only capture people's attention but, but like take that attention and step by step, convert, convert them over to wanting to buy stuff. So there's a way to do that. Excuse me. Coffee's getting to me. So you, you, the, the formula, that's what you're asking is you open up the video with a real catchy hook. Almost like it's pretty much just like a sales page but bolden down to a video. You got your headline for the video. Usually something very like curiosity based or you know, like this is some. I usually go from the angle like, you know, you watch a lot of videos. But what I'm going to show you here today is something that you probably don't know at all. Blah, blah, blah. So I go from there, the hook.

So let me, let me rewind. So let's say the topic is, you know, let me just pick a random topic here. Yeah, so let's just go with like wart removal. Work removal is one of my channels.

Okay.

It's a smaller one, but the work, the work removal will be like, the video will literally open up and be like, all right, so if you're here right now, you probably have warts on your finger and you've tried pretty much everything. And, and what I'm going to teach you here today is probably something that you don't, that you haven't learned yet. But it potentially can work pretty well depending on, you know, how bad your word is. So with that said, get ready. Here we go. That's why I drop out the tips. So it'll be about two, three minutes of tips or so. And at the end of that, that's when I do my call to action to go to the website, which is usually it's either an opt in to go to an opt in page or it'll be a product review page. So either one of those works. What you want to, if you're the question a lot of people ask is like, when do you go for the opt in versus when do you go for the product sale? Yeah, it depends on the niche. But something like the way I look at is something like Wart removal. And you can argue this too that this is not, this is not the case. But something like wart removal, since it's an embarrassing problem and it's not really passion based. Like no one's gonna subscribe to work remove three years. They might, but.

So I. With that situation, I'm usually like, let's just go for the sale right off the bat. And I don't really, you know, obviously like you can make sales with the follow up, but with those type of niche markets, I don't really care about those. I'm just like, let's just make money.

I get it. I mean it's an immediate problem someone's trying to solve.

Yeah. Especially when it's something they want done. Like done right here and now.

Yeah.

So yeah, that's just that passion based topics. Anything where someone's gonna. Lifestyle type thing like acoustic guitar for example, people will, you know, some very passionate people with hobbies, any hobby thing like that. You totally want to build a list because they're gonna, they're gonna. There's gonna be a continual interest in that for there could potentially be the rest of their life.

Yeah.

So that's just my thoughts on that.

Very cool.

You said that you'll list out your tips on for example, wart removal. You'll list out a bunch of tips that'll help people out, then send them over to a product. Now where do you actually get these tips? Are these things that you're actually an expert on or do you go in and research a bunch of tips, make a video around your research and then go off that or do you pick topics that you're already knowledgeable in?

Yeah, it's a funny thing. So if you go to upwork, weirdly enough there were. There are actual like doctors on there that must just not be good with their money or something. So they need like cash constantly.

Yeah.

So I've hired doctors before to create the tips, nurses and stuff like that. So they're out there. So I was really surprised. Like I put, I remember I put an ad out there to get one of my. Usually I start to rewind here. Usually I start with like getting the ebook made and I just break that down in the videos. This way you can repurpose it and use it forever. You want like we want to create like an Amazon Kindle book which I've done in the past. That works. So yeah, just do that. It's crazy. I guess they have some kind of. Just because someone's a doctor doesn't. And they Make a lot of money doesn't mean they're good at like managing their money. That's one thing I've noticed. So although, you know, doctors are very, very smart people, so. But it's not really about intelligence, more about discipline and emotional state. Managing money is. So some people just, I guess, you know, they haven't learned how to do it yet. So then they end up on upwork, like pretty much close to broke and they need cash. So.

So you'd go on upwork and you, what would you do? Would you like call them up and interview them or we just send them a list of questions or, you know, what do you do once you find someone on upwork that's knowledgeable about that?

Yeah, usually what I do is I'm just like the little cover job. I post what I want the job and I say I need someone with experience, either like nurse, nurse, somewhere in that field or I just say someone that has a lot of experience with like say your personal. If you have, you know, some kind of issue with something and you, and you, and you've, and you have experience with it, then I'll consider you for the job. And you don't really know for sure. But then sometimes the doctors will apply and they'll be like, all right, so what are some examples of things that you've done? And then they usually post articles of medical articles of things they've written so you can verify it that way. Unless I guess they've stolen the doctor's identity, which is definitely a possibility because you don't really know for sure. But you can tell by the quality of the information.

Sure.

That they kind of know what they're talking about.

And then you would, you would hire them and then what? Interview them or just email them questions or what's the next process step once you find the right person?

Yeah, I do recommend that you. I call it like a Skype role, a Skype Rolodex. And I just kind of segment my Skype out by different types of outsourcers. So like some of my Skype, you know, when I add the person to Skype next to it, I'll just give them a grade after they do a job. So it'll be like C plus, C plus programmer. And here's his talents. He. He's unreliable but cheap or he's rely. I like people that are super reliable. Just going on a tangent here. So like reliability and speed and turnaround is more important to me than quality of the, of the stuff they make, in my opinion. Obviously, there's exceptions to the rule, but. Yeah. So I build up a Skype roll deck. So if I find a good author, if they happen to be like a doctor, I'm like, all right, let's get Skype info. And with upwork, you're not technically supposed to do that, but.

So, yeah, like, don't take this as an official tip here, but it was with upwork, they're kind of like, you know, keep all the conversation on UPWORK itself. So the problem with their voice chat thing is it sucks. It's really hard to stay in communication with people.

Yeah.

So usually what I do is I set up a voice call over their platform and I get their Skype or their email from there and then connect outside. So it's not like there's no paper trail that. But you shouldn't be taking this as like, you know, this is just things that I do, you know, every year, every. Every once in a while, so to speak. So the rules on upwork is you have to keep it on upwork.

Right.

And it's not the end of the world. Like, I've. I've got. They've. They've sent me a warning before, but I think it's, you know, it is what it is. Maybe I shouldn't be recommending this.

Well, you got to be careful too, because I know they kind of read or they like have triggers for messages and. And stuff like that. Yeah, so. Cause I used to do that back in the day. Yeah.

I've seen stuff where if, like, if the word email or Skype pops up in one of the messages you send to something, like a little warning will pop up saying, hey, just wanna make sure you're keeping it on upwork, dude.

It's same thing with Airbnb is when they don't want you to start calling homeowners and doing deals on the side. So I've. Like, when I rented a place in Chicago, she had to code it. The symbols on top of the numbers on your keyboard, she's like, look at your keyboard. This is my phone number. Hashtag number, sign.

That's so funny.

Yeah, it's clever.

Hey, I did that in Maui too, actually. We went around it, but. Okay. Anyway, another question about the YouTube channel. Do you typically use a pen name when you do this, or do you. Do you not even bother with the name? Just like a channel name? What do you do there?

Yeah, for the channel names, I put my keywords in there. I typically do that with my niche sites with my debit super affiliate One, obviously I'm always in that personally. Other ones I use pen name usually. Hey, let me back up to the upwork tip. I just want to, like, just make this clear. I always do all my work through upwork, even though, like, when I do conversate with my outsourcers outside of it, I always run it through upwork anyway, so it's not like I'm. I'm ripping them off. You know, they're still getting paid the same exact they would for sure. For sure. Well, now that that's out of the way.

So I just do pen name.

You don't have to if you don't want to. Just some people are afraid to, to be on there. So I usually just use my first name anyway. So like Dan Waters. And I'll just change my last name on some of those. And the only reason I do that is because I don't want people. Since I have a public Persona, I don't want people tracking down my niche campaigns and ripping them.

Yeah.

So I usually use a pen name for that reason. Makes. That's the only reason.

Totally. I get it. What? I'm just curious now. Okay, so we're talking about YouTube. Do you have. Well, you know, let's see. Take a step back. So we're talking about YouTube. That's your channel for basically traffic, right. Are you doing organic traffic?

Purely.

Are you doing any ads?

It's all free traffic. I'm starting. I'm finally like starting to do ads. Yeah, you. The great thing about YouTube is you can get insane amounts of high quality free traffic. That's like the main benefit of YouTube and it's pretty freaking easy. So I've not done any paid traffic up to this point, but I am, I finally have got my. In order to do paid traffic, you have to have a freaking business, a massive business set up in the back end there to, to, to recuperate the ad costs. So it's not like, you know, oh, let's just do paid ads today. You know, you have to have, you have to have stuff set up, and that takes a while to set that up. So that's why I haven't done it up until this point.

Got it. So what I want to kind of do now is I want, I want to sort of step all the way back and let's say somebody's listening to this and they're like, this is great. I want to go and try to sell some stuff using, you know, affiliate videos on YouTube. Do you have any recommendations or tips on, on just that initial setup of a YouTube channel, like what sort of process should they go through? How should they set it up to set themselves up for the best chance of success?

Yeah. When you're, when you're starting out, I recommend that you go super niche market. Just a good example of this would be instead of.

Trying to think of something on the top of my head instead of like for toddler, here's a good example. Instead of doing for top, like a generalized photography channel which by the way is a great niche on YouTube, you could do a photography for income or like making money with photography, you know, it's more, it's more niche down. I guess a better example of this would be instead of how to lose weight, you know, how to burn to get rid of fat under your arms or something like that. Like a very, very small segment of it. As a beginner, I recommend that simply because you'll get results faster, you'll get to learn the ropes and, and you can totally segment, you can totally segue out from there. Like that six pack abs channel. Have you seen that shortcuts? Yeah, they all started with just six pack abs and they worked their way out from there. So you want to kind of spearhead, I guess what I'm saying, in a specific niche, sub niche. And then once you get your, once you get some territory from there, just kind of like in the game of risk, you kind of slowly but surely move your way out to like adjacent territories.

So if you're going really small niche like that, let's say like the wart removal example, you know, how many, how many videos could you make on, on wart removal? It seems like, you know, you'd have two or three videos and then that would be the whole channel.

Yeah, that's, that's the, that's kind of like where the creativity aspect comes in. So what I'll do with that, I also forgot to mention that I'll also hire a fiverr like video presenters to do things. So I'll literally just take the script for my PowerPoint videos and have a video presenter literally just pretty much say the same thing back but a different, a different style of video. And you'd be surprised. Like all the, all my, all my niche channels have like at least 10 to 20 videos on them. So some of them repeat some of the info. But I don't really think it's that big of a deal.

Well yeah, and you got to think people aren't usually watching every damn video in your channel. They're going to find you all different ways.

Exactly. Yeah. I don't mean to cut you off there.

No, no, that's super cool. So I wanted to go back too with. So you have your channel set up and all that stuff. How do you actually get some traffic? So you said free traffic's easy. Obviously you're not just throwing videos haphazardly up there. Do you have some tips there for SEO and grabbing some traffic with keywords?

Yeah, definitely. The base of getting YouTube traffic is definitely mastering SEO. So for all the people out there that master Google SEO, it's still, it's very similar. It's not quite the same, but it's pretty damn close. So if you have any generalized SEO knowledge of network keywords, you need to know how to find long tail keywords.

That's one of the keys there. So that's one of the keys. You want your keywords in the title. Obviously making a catchy title is important so you have to learn the art of blending the keyword and into the title but at the same time making a catchy headline. So it's not generic like oh like you know how to play acoustic guitar. You know you do something like how to play acoustic guitar like the pros, you know, add something catchy in there.

Yes.

So that include the way YouTube works is it's all about kind of click through rate there. So thumbnails are important. Catchy title, kind of edgy title.

A lot of, a lot of the results come from a video that gets a lot of clicks. So that's kind of half the battle. The other half the battle is making sure that you're able to keep your users attention throughout the whole video. So you want like a 50% on average, let's say a thousand people watch the video. At least 500 of those need to stay till about the 50% mark. So okay, yeah, that's crucial. So there's skills that, that's kind of like a skill. But there is a systematic way to do it. It's just that it's something you hone in over time. Just like a martial art, for example, like the, the, the teacher can teach, show you how to punch but like you have to make a bunch of videos to, to where that's really honed in but you can still base it off the right form and have a huge advantage of that. But a lot of, there's a lot of little subtle things that you kind of pick up over time.

Makes sense. No, that's killer.

And so I mean that comes down to kind of like a lot of Copywriting stuff. Right. Just kind of using wording that makes people want to know kind of what comes next. Right?

Yeah, exactly. If you have a good grasp of SEO and copywriting, you pretty much have like 95% of the equation.

That's cool.

Very cool.

That's why copywriting is important as a skill.

Now, you mentioned thumbnails. Do you have any tips on making thumbnails that, that stand out? I mean, what sort of things have you seen that have worked to make people want to click on a thumbnail?

Yeah, that's the thing about thumbnails is that it's kind of like an ever evolving thing because usually there's trends with the thumbnail. And like, the key to getting a good thumbnail to really work is to have it be the opposite of what everyone else is doing. So right now what's working is words in the, in the headline. So I mean words in the actual thumbnail. So you definitely need to have words, only a few words, not like a whole sentence. You want, you want just like the main, whatever that gist of your video is about. Bam, right there. You want text on there. So that's what's working now. But I, I, my, my guess is that once every, once everyone catches on to that, which I, which are starting to, it's about, I'd say 40 of the videos are now doing that. Once it starts going to the other side, let's say you got 70 using words, it'll probably flip flop to where because those will, those will then start blending in and the ones that don't follow that scheme should then stand out. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's always evolving.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I see a lot of videos on YouTube these days. Maybe it's just like me, the types of videos I watch, but I see a lot of videos of like with women in bikinis. And then you click on the video to watch it and there's like literally no women in the entire video. It's like a video about like stock exchange trading and stuff.

I'm just imagining Matt, like scrolling through the video. He's like, all right, where's that shot? Come on, let's find it.

No.

Well, I watch a lot of videos on trading and investing and stock market stuff because I'm a nerd about that stuff. And there's a lot of videos in that niche that it's like how to Day Trade X and the screenshot will be like a woman in a bikini. And I click on it because the title grabs me and because there's women on a bikini. But I watch the video and it'll be like, the whole video is a screen share video. I'm like, what the.

That's proven strategy.

It's click through rate, bro. Come on.

All by the click through rates. Yeah, that would technically, technically be against. That's called clickbait. But what they. If you want, if you want to avoid that, what they should have done is just had a quick little image of that girl on the. In the thumbnail. Just have her pop up like, hey, if you want to get good at stock market girls love dudes that are good at stocks. Exactly.

Oh, yeah.

With like a little word bubble or something coming out of her mouth.

Yeah, tie it in there.

Got it.

Yeah, it has to. Has to be in there. Like, that's considered clickbait. If they don't do that.

Makes sense. Some people that I follow are going to be in trouble soon.

Eventually. That. That does catch up to you. What happens if you clickbait? The video gets removed. So, yeah, you got to be careful. It would suck to have how many views are on that video? Like a couple million, probably.

Oh, I don't know specifically. It's just something that I've seen a few times.

So it sucked to lose that video. Those videos are assets, so you have to be careful about that.

So I guess talk about your assets really quick. I was just thinking about that. So you have all these videos. I mean, I'm sure that's like 90% of your assets. You obviously have some landing pages. It sounds like review pages. And then what? It's the affiliate offer, right?

Yeah. If you want to keep it simple, that's the best way. That's usually what I recommend for beginners. Obviously. There's a huge advantage of building an email. Email list when I train people, though, since I'm going after the super beginner. Since everyone here is kind of on the podcast, probably like intermediate. Intermediate. Or at least they're not quite beginner.

Yeah, Our average listeners probably then that intermediate level is probably the average. Yeah.

Intermediate. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I guess because podcast is kind of more of an intermediate type thing.

The.

The. Where is it going? Oh, since my YouTube channel is like, primarily geared towards beginner to intermediate level, I do teach. I do teach a wide. I pretty much teach anything I can think of. But where I'm going with this is like, when I teach beginners, I want them to just start making money as soon as possible without all the, without all the hurdles along the way. So things like setting up email lists, doing email stuff, while that's very powerful and, and the way eventually you want to go. I think my main goal is just to start building up confidence in people by making them get their first sales. Even though it's not the most.

The 100% proper way to do it. My main goal is to start making money right off the bat. So that's why I recommend just doing. If you want to keep it super simple, make your YouTube video, send it to a review page and then let that do its work.

Okay, so do you pretty much. You never really send straight to an affiliate link from a video. You kind of send them to a review page first.

Some people do that. It's just a little bit in the gray area as far as YouTube terms of service is concerned. They have a mention about affiliate links in there. It's not, I think they purposely keep it gray so that they can do on a case by case basis, use that against you. So that's why I typically send to my own site first.

Now what do you use for those intermediate pages, those review pages? Is it just a WordPress blog? Do you use something like leadpages or what do you use for that?

Yeah, so.

Sometimes I do a custom made squeeze page or you can just use getresponse squeeze page. Or if it's a straight up affiliate review, we use WordPress.

Okay, cool.

Simple. I like to keep it simple. I think this is the best way to do it.

Yeah. So I guess, is there anything. And I know you have a whole course on this and we'll drop the name of that after we're done here of course, or wherever you want to send them. But is there anything YouTube related that you think you just want to get off your chest right now to something we might have missed or glossed over?

Oh man, there's a lot of stuff. Let's see here.

First thing that comes to mind. That's like I would say we've been.

Talking about the PowerPoint videos. It's really easy to underestimate the power of that style of presentation. I mean I've tested this before and typically the PowerPoint videos do just about as good as the in person videos, if not the same. So it's pretty damn close. Obviously, like there's a benefit of being on camera. You build up your personal brand, people get to know your name a little bit more. You can start building up a more of a personalized and that's an asset to that personal brand that you built up. That's an intangible asset. But the PowerPoint videos are pretty freaking, freaking powerful and they convert really well. Especially I think Joe, you're, you said you're, you've done, you've done videos for me in the past. So you're, you're all too familiar with that style of video that I'm referring to, right?

For sure. Yep.

Now, yeah.

So they work. They freaking work. Well done. Right. And yeah, it's just all about the copywriting as far as keeping people's attention. You have to have the words on the screen. That helps a ton. I could go on and on about this.

Now is there, is there an ideal length of video that you found?

It depends on the niche. You know, some people just some, some topics, they want like a 3 to 4 minute video. Just like here it is, here's how it's done. Let's get it on. And the, what I found though, in general, if I had to put a time frame on it, about 10 minutes is kind of like the sweet spot.

Got it. Okay.

Yeah, it's one of those things you don't want to make it look overwhelming if you're just trying to remove a wartime. But you don't want a two minute video where it's just some hack job, you know, video that just got thrown up there.

Do you leverage Facebook advertising at all in your videos? Like do you make any money from the YouTube?

YouTube?

Not Facebook, the YouTube, like ad. Adsense stuff.

Yeah, that's, that's a good, a good question. I found with the style of markets that I go into which, which are like the non entertainment like you look at Logan Paul, he's killing it with Adsense. But even still I found that Adsense is like less than 10% of the money that you can make off of YouTube. It went so a lot of creators. I went to VidSummit, it was like three months ago and this one person had, she had one. I don't want to like give to get to, into specifics here just for the sake of it. She had like 1.5 million subs and she was making like 6,7000amonth off of Adsense. I was like, geez, my God. Like you have no idea how much your money that you, you could potentially. You're. You're literally wasting by not not knowing these other tactics like using affiliate marketing or selling your. Building up, building your email list and all that stuff.

She could 10x that easily.

Oh yeah, for sure. That's probably like 10x easily. Exactly. Yeah, just 10x easily.

If you were selling your own products versus affiliate products. You pretty much use the exact same process, right?

Yeah. It doesn't change the same thing.

All right, so you teased us earlier. I know Matt, this is probably in your head too. But you work two to three hours a day and obviously this is a big part of your day. What are like a couple of productivity tips? Because you said you're a productivity or effective monster. You can just get shit done fast in a small amount of time.

Do you have some ways of how you work? Obviously the strategies, tactics. Some of the YouTube stuff does a lot of the legwork for you. Anything that you can drop there for the listeners?

Yeah. Key number one, if you don't, if you get this wrong, you're pretty much, you're not gonna be able to pull this off. You need to focus on things that have scalability. Just a good example of this, like especially with YouTube or a lot of content marketing, essentially the more that you do, the more it stacks up. And with YouTube say you, you make one video. That's what's really the main reason why I went to YouTube. Because it fits this criteria. Let's say you make one video month one. Since that's. That video can potentially drive. From my results, I've seen videos get traffic still like five, seven years later. So that means that's going to continually stack up each video that you do. So you need to, you need to focus on types of businesses that allow you to create that snowball momentum. So something like that, it fits that criteria. Another thing that works really well for me is setting deadlines. Like if you get. What I've realized is that when I have a deadline of.

Or let me rephrase this. So there's this thing called a bucket, a YouTube, a YouTube video. Buckets. A lot of creators like to do this where they fill up that bucket with like 10, 20 videos so that they pull from that bucket and they continually refill it. I usually just do it on a day to day basis because that's. That that small amount of stress of having to do it that day really, really helps me cut out all the non necessary stuff. And whenever I have six months or a year to make a project, that project usually really sucks. When I have a week to do it, it just comes out like magic. It's just like, I guess I'm really good at doing it like that. I don't. It's a skill. Didn't really put it to words as in now I've always been like the last minute, you know, in the school days, you wait the night before to do the project. I've always been that dude. Oh yeah. So I guess I've turned it into like an art. Figured out how to make it work.

We systemized it and like you said, you're, you're using scalable assets that compound friggin whatever, sales views, all that stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I think Joe and I are kind of the same way too. We tend to like, we know we have deadlines, we'll wait till three hours before the deadline to frickin crank it out. And usually we get our best work done under that kind of pressure.

100%. Yeah.

Yeah. It's funny how that works. I know some people like the ace. The ace students in life who, you know, you know, I'm talking about the people like prepare like months beforehand. Like some people thrive that way. Yeah, I don't think most entrepreneurs are like that. At least the founders and entrepreneurs is kind of an erratic bunch, I think. Not all, but we're very erratic and need that.

We need that challenge and that, that stress to keep us in line.

Yeah, I agree. No, because we get bored, man. And if we don't, we're gonna move to something else that feels like our backs are against the wall or we just got to get shit done, you know?

Yeah, yeah, back against the wall. Exactly. Yeah. Put your back against the wall. Figure out a. That's the perfect way to put it. Like figure out a way to get your back against the wall. I think it just. Personally it works better for me.

Now are you, are you a big reader? Do you read a lot of books?

Yeah, I have been over the last like two, three years. I like economics, investing, stock market, finance and all that boring stuff. I like that stuff.

You sound right in line with me. That's pretty much. That's the stuff I read. I learn about technical analysis, fundamental analysis. I study SEO. Pretty much all the most boring technical topics you can think of is like what I get nerdy nerd out on.

So what's a, what's a good go to book that you'd recommend there?

I mean, I've been reading Ben the one. The ones I'm reading now are Benjamin's Benjamin Graham Security Analysis. That's a hard one. That's been hard for me to read just as a weird style of writing. I just bought Adam. It's Adam Smith's wealth of Nations. Wait for that to come in. That's a huge one. I just finished up Thomas Sawwell's Basic Economics. That was pretty good. As an entrepreneur, I think those things are important to know, even though they don't really relate to making money online. I think business wise, it's kind of like, you know, where they say, musicians, if you learn to play the grand piano, it just makes you a better musician. I think that's like, say you play the guitar, it's like, play the guitar and learn to play the freaking grand piano on the side. Because that increases your overall, like, musician caliber. I think that reading these books is the same thing.

Yeah, I agree. Now, are there any books that are very super relatable to the type of stuff you do that you can recommend maybe on specifically YouTube or SEO or copywriting or anything like that that you found have really helped with the stuff that you do?

Be honest, say, just because the style of this industry moves so fast that the books. I guess there are some decent ones, like Russell Brunson has some good ones. Brian G. Johnson has a book on doing a YouTube channel. But the nature of our business, it just moves so fast that I think learning through YouTube, like YouTube videos, you can learn a lot from those, especially in our space in network and networking events. If I don't recommend people go overboard with the networking events, but at least to pop in every once in a while to figure out, you know, what's working for everyone. Yeah, I think those are the best strategies.

Agreed. Are you coming out to San Diego next month?

I think for trafficking conversion? Yeah, I've been contemplating it. I was going to do it, but, man, this, this, these, this. I get thrown off my game. I make all my money from my own activities online. You know, there's really not much of a. An immediate benefit of doing the networking for me right now.

Yeah.

I don't know. You think, you think I should come?

Well, we'd love to see you again. You know, we live out here, so we're. I mean, we don't have tickets to the event, but we're going to be around at the hotel every day.

And I think we're holding another beer event, too, and we're putting on another.

One of our overtime beer events.

So I know you really like the brew that we made, so.

Yeah.

All right. Sold.

Nice. All right.

Yeah, I think I'm going to come. Yeah, just pop it. The trafficking conversion usually is a pretty good event.

Yeah, it's fun.

So. So last kind of. Couple of questions.

What.

What's the YouTube product that you have right now that. That teaches all this stuff and really dives in, in depth with it?

Yeah. So I do have a YouTube business system basically teach you A to Z from everything I talked about here. You don't have to show up on camera and everyone's afraid of that. So that's obviously you can if you want, if you want to have. If you need that kind of, you know, that gratification. Some people like that, you know, I personally don't, but if you want to show up on camera, you can, but you don't have to. I have all the strategies, the templates, everything you need to build a YouTube business from scratch, regardless of your experience. Very. And the good thing about YouTube, it's one of the few online business models where you can essentially do it for nothing. You know, obviously you need things like 50 bucks to pay for. You need like an autoresponder. You don't technically need it, but it'll make your, your life a lot easier. So a 15amonth autoresponder service, you need like a domain name. That's it. It's really all just intellectual capital. So that's the one thing I like about YouTube. And with that said, even though there is, you know, it's good to be in a business that has a barrier of entry, but it's not too high for the average person to get in. The thing about YouTube is a lot of people have this misconception that's harder than it really is. So that's what keeps out the average person. So yeah, I teach out all my tube tycoon system. That's tube tycoon.

Nothing left out everything. Regardless of your experience, if you're a lot of people like, oh my God, I'm ugly, bro, so I can't do videos. Doesn't matter what you look like. You don't even have to really speak English that well either. So that's true.

Or you can hire people on Fiverr for cheap.

Yeah, for sure. Fiverr is a great resource.

Still is.

And what's, what's your main YouTube channel that you like? Like to send people to watch?

Yeah. So my, my, my debate super affiliate. It's Deadbeat super affiliate. You can just get there by going to YouTube.com deadbeat super affiliate. So that's where I teach everything from affiliate marketing. Make money online, do a little bit of copywriting stuff. I know you guys are much more into copywriting than me, so maybe we need to do like collab or something. We can do that.

We'll be a special guest shows up.

Every now and then. See, I'm down. If you guys want to come in, I can.

That could be fun.

Yeah.

All right, cool. Let's do it.

Nice. I'm writing it down.

Thanks for having me on, guys. I appreciate that.

Yeah. And we'll link up all this stuff in our show notes too. So if you, you know, you search for Dan Brock or deadbeat super affiliate on our website, you'll. You'll find his show notes and find all the links to this stuff as well. Yeah. So thanks so much for joining us and it's been. It's been awesome.

Yeah, man.

Thank you, Dan.

Thank you, guys. Alright, buddy, see you.

See ya. All right. Thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. So go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you.

You did that.

But you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.