Larry Ludwig - Selling an Affiliate Site For $6 Million

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Yeah. All right, so today we're talking to Larry Ludwig, and Larry is an affiliate marketer ninja. In fact, do you know how big of an affiliate marketer Ninja he is?

$6 million. Exit big.

Yeah, he built a blog with affiliate links on it and sold the blog for $6 million.

An affiliate site without any fancy, you know, crazy opt in paid traffic, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's content. That's him and a handful of people.

That wasn't even selling like or other products. It was purely affiliate marketing, which in our industry is sort of unheard of.

Yeah, I mean, and we brought that up and he was actually kind of surprised. He's like, hey, wait, what? There's a lot. And he started naming websites that sold for 30 plus million.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Which that's again, perspective change for us. And, you know, we all have these blind spots, so there's potential here.

Yeah. So in this episode, we spend some time covering his affiliate marketing strategy that he used on that website. We spent some time talking about how he actually drove traffic to that website through SEO. It was mostly focused on SEO. He talks about some of his favorite tools to make sure that his affiliate marketing is way more effective than other people. We even touch a little bit on software development because on his website, he made some cool little software things to make his website even beefier.

Oh, yeah. And Larry, actually. So what's really cool with Larry, he is kind of like a hybrid marketer investor, but also coder. So he kind of has this cool perspective of things that it's a different type of human. We're bringing on the podcast here to ask him questions. So we literally went through affiliate marketing, SEO tech, and then we even got into, okay, now that you have sold your business, investor junkie was the website. Is the website still. And making his, you know, his exit there. He now he actually broke down his investment strategy, too, and how he's transitioning to new things, because that's. We find that kind of fascinating because it's a complete different perspective at that point. When you're building something for so long, it's like, you know, as an entrepreneur, you're getting pulled in these directions, and then you're like, oh, wait, I don't have to do anything. Yeah. Wait, what? And that's good and bad, obviously. So it's cool to hear his perspective. He'll talk all about it.

Yeah. And over@larryludwig.com he's actually got some courses on some of this stuff. So if you want to kind of go even deeper and learn even more of the strategies of how he ramped this business up and sold it, you can go to LarryLudwig.com and if you use the coupon code, Hustle, I believe use the coupon code hustle. He's actually got a 20% little discount for you. We're not affiliates or anything. It's just, you know, we love what he's managed to do, and we think you will too. So he's given you guys 20% off if you want to go grab his courses.

Larry's the man. He's hooking you up. So go check it out@larryludwig.com. we'll link it in the show notes, use Hustle at first courses. And of course, we got them notes for you. We do got them notes.

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So what we realized is there's a lot of people that listen to podcasts while not at a computer.

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It's kind of weird. Cause I, like, never listen to a podcast at a computer. Yet we're telling people, go to hustleinflowchart.com comp to get these comps, these companions, which you still can. Go to hustleandflowchart.com comp and get these comps. But there's another way to do it. If you're not at your computer, this.

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So hustleandflowchart.com comp or 38470, type the word comp, send it to that number, and we'll hook you up either way. Let's go chat with Larry.

Larry, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, we've been riffing for a while now and you and I had a chat and we got it introduced by our fellow investor buddy over there at Investor. Our sorry, college investor.

College investor, Yep.

That's. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I feel like there's a lot of probably similar talks that we had with him. Dear God, I'm blinking on his name.

Robert Farrington.

Robert Farrington. I went to middle school with him and everything. Told you so long.

Passed out.

Long day. Yeah, but he, like, we had him on the show and he opened up our eyes to some amazing things he could do with content, with affiliate marketing, traffic.

Oh, yeah, he opened our eyes to Reddit. We, like, literally did nothing with Reddit. We talked to him. We talked about Reddit on that episode with him. And ever since, Joe and I have both been semi obsessed with Reddit.

I know, it's amazing that platform, it's still underutilized. I mean, same thing with Quora, like he mentions as well in this podcast. I think that's fascinating is those, I mean, as far as marketing and advertising, I'm definitely not. You kind of want to go to spaces that are not overcrowded. Obviously Facebook and Google Ads are kind of, at the moment least overcrowded. And you got to find whether what other opportunities are out there.

Yeah. And there's so many of them. We were chatting about being multi channel multimedia repurposing. There's so many of those things that we're constantly talking about, but a lot of folks just don't know what the power is or how to do it. But let's, let's talk about you because you come from that investor background, you know, the fincon world, all that.

Give us a little bit of your history. You sold a business and now you're transitioning into Something new. So give us that little backstory.

Well, I started in 1994, so I worked for an ad agency back in 94, really helping develop some of the first websites. I mean for brands such as like Chase, Minolta, Hero, Price, ing, Bank and really was. I knew the future of the web was really unlike traditional media, like direct marketing back before that. It really had the ability to measure and track stuff. Unlike traditional media. I definitely was realizing even back then it was the tools available you pretty much had to build yourself. There was nothing really out there to.

Just buy off the shelf like a WordPress or anything like that, where Google Analytics didn't even exist at the time and you had to really build everything from scratch. But I knew the capabilities were out there. So I started with that firm. I left there, went to bounce around for a few other companies, went to A startup called CommerceOne in 99 after that, finally ventured off onto my own business and started developing websites and hosting websites for about 10 years. And then from there, back in 2009, I got really frustrated with the business. You want to go into a crappy business, a really shitty business, go into web hosting. I can definitely give you that. Do not go into web hosting. Avoid it at all costs, no matter what you say. Yeah, I would know. Unfortunately it sucks. So I did a web hosting business and got really frustrated with it and wasn't really appreciated by the clients I had at the time. I figured why not? I got a little light bulb off my head. There was a website called Bankaholic that sold in 2008 for I think it was 15 million grand total. Wow. And it was one guy, he monetized via affiliate marketing.

I already knew about affiliate marketing with my web hosting business because I sold SSL certs and sold domain names and that was a decent part of my income. And I knew that was meaning I didn't offer it myself. I sold it through a reseller. So I knew that was a way to definitely grow my business and supplement my income. I thought why not do something similar to Bankaholic? I initially started doing something with savings accounts and CDs and at the time 2009 when I first started Investor Junkie, I just knew it was just not going to take off because of bank rates were at zero and there was no point in really doing that. But I felt investments were really underutilized. So I drew Investor Junkie to just promote and discuss reviews of investment products. Around that same time, a few years later, they actually grew into things like Robo Advisors and All the affiliate programs really started popping up during that timeframe and make a long story short, grew that to a multimillion dollar business and sold it in 2018 for 6 million.

Nice. And that's where. Yeah. And now you're transitioning into new things, or maybe not totally new things, but like you were saying, more personal, branded, affiliate marketing focused.

Yeah, I mean, in retrospect, I built out Investor Junkie and really built it as a brand and knew it was going to be separate. Ironically, this is a story I don't think I've told fincon, the financial conference that you mentioned before. It's a very popular conference, been there, been going since 2012. In that first conference in Denver, I saw actually three friends of mine, now, J.D. roth, Harlan, and who was the third one, a Jim Wang, and they were on stage discussing how they too sold their businesses for multimillion dollars. And I'm like, well, shit, why can't I be that? Why can't I get in that same situation? And sure enough, what is, I think six years later, six years later, I sold the business as well. But I also knew at the time you really had to brand, like building around a website around yourself. I don't know who would really want to buy it. So I wanted to really focus on a brand and I did just that. But in retrospect, I didn't build up in parallel my own personal brand as well, which I should have done in retrospect. But it is what it is. So I'm in the process of doing that now.

Yeah. And I think it's very smart and it's good to have both because both can support each other and one lives on with you to wherever you want to shine that light in the future.

Exactly.

One of the things I always wrestled with with Investor Junkie was I didn't want to be the face of the brand. But in the same notion, there's certain mediums like email, video, podcasting, which sort of mentioned offline by very nature, has to be personable. You want some talking head discussing that topic. And I kind of avoided that, unfortunately. So in retrospect, you kind of have to build out in parallel those two brands, and I sort of avoided that.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So with Investor Junkie, you know, most of your revenue, or if not all of it, I'm not sure how it was split up, but it came from affiliate marketing mostly, Right? Or was it all affiliate marketing?

It was all affiliate marketing. I mean, that's definitely unique. I mean, it's A double edged sword, of course, I'm sure you're well aware of that. On one hand you know, you don't have any products and services, which is great. On the other hand, you don't have any products and services. So with that said, yeah, we did all affiliate marketing, it was all SEO based. So those are the two major risks as any Affiliate marketing is SEO, you know, search engine optimization, you're relying on Google search to find you and affiliate marketing, it's not your own products and services. And I guess one of the reasons I sold the business is, you know, at the time I grew the business to what I thought would be the ultimate peak. And really to grow to that next level, I knew it had to be a different business, meaning I would have to monetize it via other ways like courses or membership site or something like that. And just knew, well, I had an offer at the time and why not take that offer and just take that money, lock in those gains and do something different. That's where I am today.

Gotcha. With the affiliate marketing, what was the sort of play behind it? What were you promoting and how were you promoting it to get the affiliate commissions?

It was mostly reviews and comparisons. So we definitely tried to. With the reviews we really took stance was we could say anything we want and not have any guidance by the merchant. So the merchant really had no say other than if the products and services were incorrect. Like if we made a mistake on a rate or functionality, we missed out so they corrected us on that. But we had total freedom to say whatever we wanted and in the end we monetized just really based on those two major features. Reviews and comparisons are really far on really down the funnel. And one of the last steps before people decide to purchase something and they're really looking towards an expert like ourselves to say hey, we recommend this product or not this product or here's at least the features and functionality and go out and do all that research and then look at us to be that expert to say we recommend this because of this reason.

Yeah. So was the offer, was it mostly like credit card offers and like loans and things like that?

No, I mean we purposely, I know the new owners added credit cards, but we've. I purposely stayed away from credit cards because of one is compliance. They're a pain in the butt. And the other reason is. Yeah, the other reason is being an investor junkie. I really wanted to be different than a lot of the other personal finance sites. College Investor, for example, really covers a much wider gamut as an example I didn't want to cover. I wanted to be purely the expert on investing and only investing. And ironically, it's on one hand good, but it limited the size of the audience by very nature because there's only so many investors out there. And added things like savings and CD accounts to the site eventually. Just because if we want to expand that net, we wanted to be the. I can consider savings accounts and CDs, bank CDs to be like the gateway drug towards investing. So their first step before they decide to go out and invest in something. And ironically, many of the very robo advisors we discussed and reviewed finally added that same thing on their own sites because of they need to have a bigger audience.

Yeah, I think you and I chatted about that. Like things like Wealthfront added in their own high yield savings account. So it's a simple way to be like, oh, and while you're at it, throw some money in an IRA or whatever it might be that they control.

I think they realized the time and they expected certain growth rates and they just didn't get it. And from that.

They realized, well, again, savings accounts is again that gateway towards investing. And edit for that reason.

Yeah, makes sense. How did you deal with the lack of control? Or maybe you did have more control with. Well, there's two sides. You mentioned affiliate marketing, of course, because it's not your own product and you're dealing with regulations, I'm sure in finance it's kind of insane. And then you have SEO. Obviously this is completely two different questions here because you're almost dealing with these two elements that you don't really have a ton of control. You have some.

Meaning. Like, I guess. What's the question you're asking?

Yeah, the question would be like, you know, like when an offer changes, for instance, and you have content built around it, how did that look like to your business on the affiliate side? Because that's where we've experienced some, you know, revenue can change a lot if, say, an offer changes like the actual. The offer itself, or maybe it goes away.

Or goes away. Yeah, I mean, that's obviously a risk with anything in affiliate marketing is one minute you're getting a shitload of money from that affiliate and next minute they're gone.

Exactly.

So like that's happened. Yeah, many times.

Well, let's just stick on the affiliate thing for a second. We'll circle back around to SEO in a few minutes. But like with the affiliate offers that you're promoting, I think one of the things that we run into promoting A lot of affiliate offers ourself is we don't, you know, like, if you're selling your own product, you can put tracking throughout the whole thing. So we know exactly how many people came from this traffic source and turned into a sale. For instance, with affiliate marketing, you kind of lose a lot of that data. Or, you know, maybe you don't. Maybe there's some way. We don't know. But, you know, my thoughts.

No, I mean, the thing really I definitely focused on investor junkie was treating the actual affiliate products or the merchant products as if they were own products and services. That was definitely something unique that I did. We had trackbacks for pretty much everyone. And if they didn't, we requested some sort of pixel or something be able to get that conversion information into our system.

You had a lot more data.

We had a lot more data data than most websites. And it's funny, the ironic thing, as I get into the digital marketing, Internet marketing space, it's the plumber's plumbing. I'm finding that there might be experts in digital marketing, but when it comes to affiliate program, their affiliate programs really suck. The tracking, or lack thereof, is really bad. And I'm definitely going to make sure with any merchant I work with is say, look, hey, if you want us to do like advertising or any ad spend or anything like that, I need tracking. There's no way in hell I'm going to do paid ads to something. I may have a guess I'll be ROI positive or not.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And you're right. In the affiliate marketing space, a lot of what we promote is, you know, software tools that various marketers would use in their business. And most of them have pretty weak tracking. You know, you can add a sub ID to the end of a URL and that's about the extent of the tracking they offer.

If that.

If that. You're right. So that was where I was going with the lack of control, at least in the tracking part of things. But it sounds like you were circumventing that and maybe partnering up with the right folks, you know, and just saying nope to the ones that you had no control over. Because you're like, well, I'm not going to do much.

I mean, yeah, I mean, for organic SEO, you don't care when you start paying for the traffic in any way. You do care. And again, the. From your end, I guess if you're promoting a product, you say, look, you know, we won't promote that product via paid ads unless you start giving us actual tracking Capability. So one way or another, I mean, I know you guys use click magic and they do offer an option for a pixel. I would say, look, you need to install this pixel or else I'm not going to do paid ads with you for Facebook, Google, what have you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we've actually gotten some of the affiliate products that we promote to do that. But you know, it's some do, some don't.

And it's a one on one kind of conversation. Yeah. It's not a widespread ability, typically in our space at least.

And then the other area that we kind of lose a little control is with the actual sales message. You know, we're driving them over to somebody else's page and we actually had a very specific scenario where we were driving traffic to one person's offer and it was just, you know, killing it for us. Like every day we were just generating a lot of sales for it. One day we woke up, logged it, went to their website, they completely overhauled their site and our conversions just tanked.

Yep. Yeah, I mean people. Yeah. I mean, you kind of know, I mean the question I often get asked is how do you know ahead of time if an affiliate program, you just, I mean, you guys sort of know the same way you just kind of know new affiliate program is going to suck or not. And you kind of look at. Well, they send us to the homepage. That's big issue number one.

Yeah.

Then the affiliate offer, you send them a good lead and then they send it right to the homepage. That's mistake number one. The other is when you start really talking to the affiliate manager or if they don't even have one, you just know that's another mistake. They don't really have a dedicated person or team to really understand how this stuff works. Again, it depends on the company size.

Very good point.

Some company sizes or, you know, they can support that.

Yeah, that's very true.

With that said, I don't know, I mean, there's not much you really can do. I mean, if they send it to, they change their whole design. You can say, look, we've seen now decrease in conversions, you know, we'd outdo something. It's really, really. In the end, it's. That's one of the shitty parts about affiliate marketing is you can have, you know, the best, you know, on your side the whole funnel leading up to a conversion on your side, but they just drop it on their side once the handoff happens. There's really not much you can do about it. I mean, you really try to. There's one merchant I worked with quite a bit and said, look, we're sending you great leads, why can't you give us more data? But more importantly, let's help improve the conversion process because we both win and some get it, some don't, unfortunately.

Yeah, it's like at least a custom landing page or something that we can kind of collaborate on that piece together. Definitely.

Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, it helps. I know our experience has been personal relationships. Usually we can get that done, but you know, when you're trying to go on scale with a lot of offers, it gets a lot more tricky.

Yeah, I mean, I hired a person dedicated just for the management of the relationships for that reason. Because if it was just a full time job.

Oh yeah, I could see it.

I believe it. Now, when it comes to the content, I think I already know the answer. But were you creating most of this content yourself? Did you have a content team? I imagine every tool or product that you were promoting, you weren't going and using it all yourself. Or maybe you were. I'm just kind of curious, how did that content process work to create these reviews and comparisons?

Yeah, when I first started, it was all me and the only team I had was other employees from my web hosting business. I had a tech guy to actually help with support and just making sure the stuff was working. And then I had an accountant just do the building, a bookkeeper. But outside of that, initially it was all me, so I wrote all the reviews. So obviously I had to have domain knowledge and investing, which I did, fortunately. So I had really a passion. I traded investor junkie. One was because I saw the gap out there. The other was I had an active interest in it ever since I was probably 21. I was a finance nerd or geek, really had an active interest in this stuff and so that really helped. So I really was able to speak on the domain knowledge space really well after that. Yeah, I did hire an editor. I hired writers for actually writing the content reviews. But really in the end I was the managing editor, or the editor in chief, I should say, and really helped make sure the quality of the content was up to par. And with that also SEO. So there's really a lot of steps involved. I mean, obviously I'm simplifying it for a podcast that discusses, but there's a lot of steps involved and a lot of things happen behind the scenes. Make sure. My ultimate goal from a review perspective was making sure the content was the most up to date as of the date of the person visiting the website. So therefore nothing's worse in my eyes. Reading a review that's say six months old. And you know that they introduced this new feature like two weeks ago. Like what the hell, guy? You know, you need to update your content and that affects SEO. So you know much more poor user experience for the user.

That's right, yeah. So the customer journey for you or it sounded like. So they would find you mainly through SEO through content was this blog posts and then you lead them down some other custom pages until that conversion point. Is that kind of the.

I mean, more or less. I mean we had other art. So we had reviews and comparisons and we actually created an actual comparison tool. So the beauty of it was, you know, let's say we created, I really created a whole system and this took a few years to build is not only to make sure we manage all the review data in one spot. So all the metadata for that review was handled in the review itself. So let's say for example, Betterment changed their rates or fees. We would change it in the review and it would affect the whole entire website automatically. Instead of having to go to five different places on the site and update that content, it just handled it automatically, which was great. It made it just a maintenance nightmare before. Made it simple. And not only that, but it was easy for the actual editor or writer to update that content very easily. Instead of me having to get involved and go, well, did you remember to update in these five other areas? Oh shit, no. And it just looked bad. I mean that's the thing you wanted to make sure the content is updated and current. So that was one thing we did. And then made a comparison tool to make it easy to not only create these auto generated pages, meaning like Betterment, let's say a new Robo Advisor came out. It would instantly allow us to do comparisons for all the other services out there instantly. So it made it very easy to do a comparison without having to go out and write these. And the pages would be created automatically as well. So it was pretty advanced and it allowed us for much longer tailed SEO.

And so was your company the only company that had access to this software that was making the comparisons?

Yes, I mean the actual merchants did not have access to. It was really just my staff and I.

How cool is that?

Yeah, no, I mean where my brain is going is like I wonder if there's a market to sell that software for like a. Very obviously I'm sure it went with the sale of your business, but yeah, that Part did.

I mean, one of the things that I thought was a value add that most companies didn't really think there was a value add to was the whole affiliate tracking. I developed the whole system to track every step of the way. Again, when you did a paid ad, organic search, social media, what have you, where that source of the conversion happened, and then track it from every step of the way. So I created the glue to really piece all these different tools I used in place. We talked previously, Joe, about. I used Click Meter. I'm really a big fan of their service over Click Magic just because of the whole API and ability to then push that data into other services. And then I used on top of that UPRA to really show not only at the aggregate, unlike Google Analytics, only shows you really aggregate data, but down to each individual user who where the source of this person came from. Did they come from a Facebook ad? I did. And if so, when did they convert? They convert on the first touch. Or is it like five times later? I had all that data. So really my goal was to build out this data and my new business and actually some consulting I'm doing now for others is the same thing where we'd actually help build out this information either through affiliates or your own products and know every touch point along the way. That's really, I think, key. It's definitely fascinating how many times it takes before someone converts. And we, again, we talked about this with podcasting, how really shitty podcasts, as great as they are, they lack the tracking ability. And there's really. For something so advanced, you think it would have much better tracking ability.

Yeah, it's definitely. In the podcasting world, you have like the old, you know, the crew that the original podcast and then you have the newer marketing folks and the older crew is kind of. They don't like tracking, they don't like analytics and all that, or data, you know, or, you know, all the stuff that Facebook does really well. And pixels.

It's bizarre in my eyes. I mean, again, coming from a more direct marketing background and understanding how this works, it's. Why not. I mean, you want to have. I know you guys are doing very effective what you can do with podcasting, which is great. You know, I find that fascinating. And not many other podcasts are doing this, but you need to. You need to have some way to monetize and track your audience and get them down this funnel, because that's the goal. It should not be just purely, you know, the shits and giggles. Do a podcast. You need to have Money. If it's true business, you need to figure out a way to make money at it.

Yep. Yeah, we're not going to sit around and carve out a couple days a week just doing this for shits and giggles.

Yeah, it is interesting. In the podcasting space, there's kind of this, like, old guard and the new guard. And the old guard is all the people that came out of the broadcasting world, all the people that were on, like, radio shows and things like that, those are the ones that are really, really fighting data and statistics and things like that. And, you know, they talk about things like all the data breaches that have happened and, like, privacy and retargeting pixels being bad and all that kind of stuff. And that's sort of like the old school podcasters. And then there's like a new wave of podcasters that are coming up that are like, no, fuck that. We want to know our numbers. We want to know how this is going to turn into sales. We want to know exactly how many people are listening and where they're listening from and how many of them are turning into sales of our products, and we want to know all of that. And so it's just been interesting because there's, you know, from an outside perspective, people that just tune into podcasts don't realize that this exists. But there's a divisiveness in this industry, and it's very bizarre.

It is. I mean, prior to the Internet, for traditional TV spots or radio spots, you go, okay, we had an increase in sales. Oh, it must be because of the actual radio spot we just had broadcast on this radio station. Like, you kind of guessed. He didn't really know. There was no, like, direct. It was some correlation. I mean, that's just bizarre in my eyes. Like, you want to know, okay, I did this ad at this time, and this amount of people converted, you know, down, like, down to the, you know, Zach person. And podcasting doesn't really have that. Which, again, it's ironic now that with podcasting, with Google, that is. Google's really starting to realize there is some options there, especially with SEO. You can definitely start thinking about SEO as a game with podcasts. And I think more analytics will be down pipeline, which is a great thing for us.

Yeah, they will be, and they already are. They're trying. It's just, yeah, you get the pushback on some folks, but it's going to break through. It's an evolution.

There is an element of, like, the podcasts are so splintered as well. You know, you've got some people listen on itunes, some people listen on Spotify, some people listen to on Stitcher or Overcast. You know, there's, there's a hundred apps out there and everybody has their favorite preferred app. And I believe that is where the biggest struggle has been in, in dialing in all the tracking is it's so hard to pull it in from all of these places.

Yeah, yeah. But we'll get there. We'll get there. Yeah.

I kind of want to switch gears a little bit into, into talking about traffic and, and SEO and you know what, what was your process like? Like how did you decide what your next article was going to be about on your site?

That's a great question. I really did the whole divide and conquer. So we build out sections at a time. In other words, like we would finish building out Robo advisors and really go down that expertise in that funnel, if you will, and discuss every aspect about Robo advisors, be it the actual services themselves, be it comparisons, be it certain features and functionality available for those services and really go down deep in that one category and then go on to the next one. Is the way I built it. And I think that was really the best methodology for at least my site was to build out section by section because there's just so much content out there. In the end wound up having a very big site because there's just so much content in investing in all the different categories. But we became very much an expert in those said topics and try to be a little bit ahead of the curve as well. In other words, look, the whole Wayne Gretzky quote is know where the puck is going to and being an expert or discussing like real estate services before they became popular, stuff like that. Because if we again because of my background kind of knew that ahead of time. Those definitely one of the keys I think for my success was knowing really what was the trends in the industry. In other words, stuff like Ahrefs I know you guys discuss all the time is, you know, little plug for them. Great service. The ironic thing is it can't tell you. It's only backwards looking, you know, you can only know what's going on behind what's happened. You don't know the future trends, even Google trends themselves. You can't, you have to kind of have domain knowledge in that space and that's really something you have to understand. And really just pure SEO, technical SEO. There's no way, there's really no way to know that.

Yeah. So. So your approach was more. I've got These sort of buckets of things I want to write about. So you weren't starting with a keyword and then going and creating content to match these keywords that you found. You kind of had like a bucket of things you want to talk about and you just started building off of those buckets.

I mean, we did keyword research too, of course, but I mean first and foremost is let's define the categories, the high level stuff we want to cover and then do more research as it progressed and then really get down to keyword specific. So it was really much high level topics or categories and then getting down to keywords, what's available in that category and then even getting more specific and much more longer tailed and see what type of traffic. Is it trending upward? Is it trending downward? What do you think is the future trends for that space? So much more looking at the future of where again, things are going in that space, especially for Robo advisors because they kept adding new features and functionality every few months.

That's true. And that becomes more of the power of that software that you developed as well. So you can update things very quickly.

On multiple pages at least. How about.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. What did you do? Did you do anything in terms of amplifying the content anywhere else? So you had social media or, sorry, SEO, that is, did you do anything like repurposing of these content on other platforms?

No, I mean that's definitely. Yeah, I mean that's definitely one of the things. If I still own a site now, would definitely start thinking multichannel. We had did very little remarketing, but I did more traditional ads with some success. I mean, so we did paid ads to get, you know, audiences to various pages and if anything, I would do more of that. More remarketing that I know you guys do a lot of. I see, see your ads all the time on my Facebook page.

They're working.

They are working. Yes. I've also bought. Yeah, but your stuff too.

So thank you.

Thank you. Anyway, yeah, the. But the point is. Yeah, I mean I would do more of that stuff. I do more YouTube, podcasting, really getting to the multiple channels. Just be everywhere all the time.

Yeah, yeah. And that's. That was kind of going to lend to something of like, you know, question of like, what would you do different? What do you learn? And yeah, the multi channel, the repurposing, it's definitely an undertaking. It sounded like you had a great system but you didn't have a large team. So, you know, you can't really.

Oh no, I mean we had a skeleton staff. I had really so I had myself, I had an editor. I had about five or six writers at the time. I had a person handling specifically the merchants as far as the relationships and then had SEO company. I wound up hiring after I had about with issues with SEO with Google. And I think I believe negative SEO hit the site in 2016.

So I had to handle that and really just wanted to have an outside source to say based on their domain knowledge of more than other sites besides Investor Junkie, what do you recommend doing? And they helped along the way. So they also did more keyword research and also helped me do.

More of the backlink strategies as well, where I also then also hired a design firm as well. So it was really a skeleton. True compared to NerdWallet, one of my biggest competitors. I think at the time they had like 70 employees or something like that. Some crazy amount of employees. Granted their revenue was much higher than mine, but I knew based on because they're mostly about credit cards and debt and most of their revenue comes from that. I mean, one of the lessons I learned on one hand with Investor Junkie, I focused on one niche. But on the other hand, debt definitely pays more or is a much bigger space than investing. Just by very nature, more people are in debt than can invest.

Yeah, the net of the audience or the audience is much wider. Your net's huge.

So they were a big competitor, but they had much bigger staff.

Right now, is there anything along the timeline of your business of Investor Junkie? Is there anything along the timeline that you can see? This is where things started to take off. This was like the pivot point that made the difference.

Yeah, good question. I mean, I started. So I started in 2009 and really for the first year and a half, two years, it was really. There was actually one point I was even considering quitting and just didn't. I mean, I already had the other business, the web hosting. I was just not happy with it. I mean, I was generating a decent amount of income, but I wanted something different. And so I again looked towards this site as not only to figure out affiliate marketing, but also SEO as well. Before this, I knew SEO, but I was nowhere near an expert. I was today. And again took me about two years before I started generating income. Where I go, yeah, this is definitely possible. And from that really the turning point was, yeah, I could definitely grow this into something bigger than I ever expected. And it did.

Did you have issues with trying to keep your focus on this path or are you Just like in that, did you have an end game in mind and stay on that path the entire time or were there pivots happening along the way?

Well, when I first started, it was much more about my personal advice about investing. And I again saw the opportunity that really reviews and comparisons were the biggest opportunity out there. There were not many other sites out there doing it and doing it well. And being my background in programming realized, hey, let's start figuring out a way to automate this and make it more scalable so I can add more reviews and make it more systematized, make it a way to just make it easier to manage. That was really key. I mean, to me, SEO is much more than just purely content play. I think nowadays, especially with all the content out there, there's only so much you can, so many different ways you can write. Like for example, I always use the what is a mortgage? Or what's the best mortgage rate. There's only so many ways you can write that content before you're copying or mimicking what other people are doing. And to me, the key nowadays is much more about functionality. What can you add to your site functionality wise, be it a calculator, be it some comparison tool, some way to really add engagement and interactivity that will make you different than the other sites out there. Otherwise you're just another. Me too.

Yeah, it's like you want something sticky, something that's useful, utility that they want to come back to have value on its own. And the content is serving to attract the folks. But ideally you want your own audience, you can then obviously sell them a lot more. It's a lot easier once you got them and give them that trust once.

Yeah, I mean, again, the content was. The content's easy to replicate. That's why all these big companies are now acquiring all these sites or just doing the same thing. They have a shitload of staff writers and all you do is pump out content and it's hard to compete against that. So how can you be better than that? And it's really functionality that's really the next step in my eyes with SEO is more than just purely writing good content. It's about how can you improve your user experience, be it functionality, apps or services.

Now, how would you recommend somebody approach that? Let's say there's a listener here that's seeing their website as kind of a commodity website among, you know, millions of other sites doing the same thing. And they want to add some sort of tool to their thing. You know, what, what advice would you give them to do that, you know, where would you send them? What? You know, I'm not totally sure what.

I'm trying to ask here, but concept of that thing and then how to get it done.

Yeah, well, don't do Amazon Associates.

No. Yeah, yeah, they don't pay anything.

Yeah, they don't pay shit. Definitely try. You know, I always use that as the last resort. So I mean but I guess most people under monetize their sites and I think that's an affiliate marketing that is, I think most people don't realize they the capabilities you can do to properly monetize. I mean I really tracked every level detail to where the placement of a button to, you know, how people engage in the page and really took it to nth level and figure out ways where can we better monetize without also changing the review or affecting the content in any way. We really looked at ways to increase the engagement on the site and from that helped with SEO. I mean to get to your original question, I guess.

What advice would I give someone?

So let me sort of like reframe it. Were you a developer yourself or did you hire a developer to build the sort of software element behind what you were doing?

Both. I mean I was a stickler. I was a pain in the ass to my design team because they would write me code and I would adjust stuff as they submitted it to me. Like, this sucks. I mean, let's fix this. So I mean both. So I hired a development team and they did a great job, don't get me wrong. But it was really I had the skills and knowledge to figure out, okay.

This stuff can be automated. And really you took it from that perspective.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I feel like everyone can kind of identify something going back to what you were saying, Matt, if they're in a commodity type thing, if they're just a me too affiliate marketer or whatever business out there, identify whatever that maybe it's a time savings thing, something that can automate some of the stuff they do constantly. It's like figuring out what is that that valuable piece that you can give them.

Yeah, I mean to me SEO, you're having to Google rewards people when they add value. How are you adding value? And again, most people think of it just purely as a content play. And in my eyes it's more than that. It's really like I said, other functionality. So that's really the key. If Google will reward you going back to SEO, if you're adding more value than the competing sites.

Yeah, yeah, Google's mainly looking at what time on site, how many pages they're going through, how, you know, how often maybe they're coming back, return visitors, all these different aspects.

I mean, even more so I look at them not only but clicking on links on your page or any buttons. They're looking at the total engagement of the site. They're looking at what are you doing? Are you just sitting there and bouncing off to go somewhere else or are you actually engaging some level and Google? Of course with SEO you don't want to have be too transactional. I believe what I learned out of decrease in SEO or ranking with Google was it's definitely possible to be too transactional. Google ultimately hates affiliate marketing websites. They fucking hate it. They want you to be.

They hate to see that they send you to a website and then you're now immediately bouncing to somewhere else. They absolutely hate that. They want to see you add value in that some process. So if you're an affiliate marketer and you're selling someone else's products on your site by putting a link at the very top of the page right off the bat, that's a sure sign you're not going to rank very high in Google. You need to have some sort of content, some way you're adding value to the reader and then eventually pitch them for the link to whatever merchant you're just promoting. So you can't just put it right smack dab right in the middle of the page above the fold. That's a really recipe for failure.

Yeah. Now the way you say that, that makes a lot more sense for folks probably listening here is there are so many review type sites out there that just go for that quick, quick sale. You know, it's like content sale, content sale. And I'm sure some do very well. But yeah, like the approach we take is we like to see it as more of a maybe we go deep into one specific product. Well, we're going to create a ton of content around that product so, you know, different features for each blog post or video, whatever it might be. So we're interlinking, we're trying to get that engagement on multiple pages. And then of course you have an email list and ways to keep engaging with them. Many chat, text message type stuff. We were doing all of that stuff we still do. And I think that's what's really helped us not only rank better because we had the consistent content and all that, but also just the communication. We're always talking with folks in different ways that most affiliate marketers don't think about. They're not going that deep with.

Well, I think. I think in our space, when it comes to affiliate marketing, I think most affiliate marketers are impatient. They want to get the sale immediately. And I feel like the thing that's differentiated us and made us more successful with affiliate marketing is that we don't even try to make the sale on the first touch. On the first touch where even with paid traffic, we're sending them to content first because we know that we can retarget people. We know we can capture some of them on our list. You know, we. We know we have other ways to get back in touch with these people. So let's just impress them with content first and then go for the sale tomorrow. Like, that's kind of been our philosophy with affiliate marketing, and it's worked really, really well for us. And I just think so many affiliate marketers are just impatient.

I totally agree. I mean, that's not just in your space. It's also financial space, too. I mean, people want to just go for the kill, you know, instantly. And I mean, again, with reviews and product comparisons, you're at the final stages or one of the final stages before people do convert. And so you're at an advantage if you do have a review site or comparison site. With that said, don't have it right above the fold buy now. People don't want that. Again, Google will not reward you for that. For my findings from an SEO perspective, they want see you again adding some sort of value. And I purposely removed on the site any call to action above that fold on purpose. And it worked really well for us. And I suspect really from my testing, it still should work. Well today.

Yeah, Matt just pulled Investor Junkie up, actually. And I know you don't control it now, but yeah, we're just like, oh, and that's what I'm curious about this actually, how. And I don't. If you don't need to answer this, actually, because I don't know if you can, but do you have. You don't have any say with Investor junkie at all anymore, right?

No, I mean, we. I mean, we had the relationship and I had a commitment for a certain time frame and as I said, hey, no, I do. I do not. Nothing against the new owners. I mean, I just. It was something where I want to have a clean break. I mean, one of the things that I've seen with some other, you know, people selling their websites is have this, like, oh, well, I'll have some, you know, say in the site during the period will be like partnership and I guess, yeah, from my eyes, that's just the recipe for failure. That's like, like being half pregnant. It just doesn't work. And you need to have some sort of, I don't know, you need to have either you own it outright and you have the total authority over it. Let someone else take it over, you know, have it where it's your. A lot of people consider their baby and you want to keep working on it, it's just not going to happen. I don't know. I'd rather just have a clean cut and do something different.

Sure.

I mean, that's not to say that I couldn't work with them again. Who knows? I mean, I never say never, but right now it's a complete clean cut, I should say. And I can do whatever I want.

Yeah, I think that's amazing. And just the fact that you obviously have your investor background so you know what to do after you exit a company, which is amazing.

And the clean break thing is probably great for just mental space in general too. For all the future stuff that you've learned from this experience, at least what it sounds like is this is a very profitable learning experience and now you can transition and do things where maybe it allows a little bit more freedom or just shoring up the things that you were blind to at the moment.

Yeah, I mean, definitely. I look at it as like the sales where I locked in my gains and now I can do something different and I can do the long game with my new stuff. I don't have to worry about again, short term profits, I don't have to worry about. I can do things over years in terms of your timeframe. So to your point, I'm definitely about that long game where a lot of affiliate marketers, again, they want that instant sale. They need that revenue. They need to make sure every year, every month you're restarting from zero. And that's one of the bad things about affiliate marketing too is every month the dial resets back to zero. So you're having to start up income again. And if Google changes their algorithm or affiliate leaves or just in general something changes your revenue once. Great. Could be down in the gutter.

Sure.

So where do you see yourself going from here? Do you see yourself setting up more affiliate sites and kind of duplicating the success you've had? I know you're going to focus a little bit more on the personal brand side of things, but do you have some intentions to kind of recreate what you've created once already.

I mean, well, for example, if I was to have a non compete until next year, I mean for me to just go out and restart investor junkie would be stupid. I mean from my end just create an exact replica of that.

Right. But you can go to other verticals.

Right.

Like if you didn't want to do investor related, you could go into.

I'm sure there's other verticals where you could kind of duplicate the same success.

Yeah, I mean Internet marketing or digital marketing I have interest in right now. On top of that. Yeah, I've thought about other verticals. I've kind of done some basic research. Yeah, I haven't had anything committed just yet. I guess right now my goal is to just build out, you know, do my consulting, practice my courses and really that's it at the moment. But maybe, I mean one of the things that I hate in digital marketing, and you know this very well too, is the. It's very meta, meaning people will go, here's me selling a course on me selling you how I did my course.

Yeah, you call it meta, we call it incestuous.

Yeah, we just cut right to it, man.

It is though. It's very incestuous. It's too. Yeah. I mean come on, let's, let's actually showcase another site. So my goal is to create another site as well.

Yeah.

I haven't decided exactly what yet, but that's something I'm definitely considering because of again not only because I have an interest in it, but it's again not showcasing something else other than my own site.

Yeah, I think it's such a cool position where you're at there, where time is your friend. You have this space and I'm curious to hear about how your thinking goes because after sale of a business you have investing background. I'm sure you have a lot of Runway making all the right moves. You're not rushing into this it sounds like, but how does it feel in your brain? It's like you obviously can't stop. You're an entrepreneur, we talked about that. How's the feeling now when approaching a new project? I guess. What's the thought pattern behind it?

Well, I can say definitely first and foremost it's very weird. Not you're relying on your investing all your investments for income. So it's a very weird scenario. I'm right now what, 48 and it's just very weird. I don't plan on ever formally retiring but it's just a weird feeling that relying on your Investments to generate income for you. So that's definitely first very weird for me because I've never been unemployed my whole life. So it's very odd right now that I'm, quote unquote unemployed. I mean, again, I have my new business, but it's just in the very beginning phases. So with that said, in terms of investments, do you want me to talk about more how I approach my investing?

Yeah, I mean, that could be interesting actually, now that you bring it up. Yeah, actually, if you're open to it, how do you. Yeah. What do the investments look like? Or at least your strategy where you're at right now?

I mean, it's interesting. So normally, without getting too much detail.

Normally I'm a 7030 asset allocation. So that means 70% stock, 30% bonds. Right now at the moment, I'm actually the exact opposite. I'm actually 70% bonds and 30% stock. And eventually I plan to get to the reverse. But it's really again, I had this large cash inflow and just slowly taking. Like you said, I'm not in a rush to do anything. Don't make any, you know, haste decisions and don't get it, you know, jump into anything too quickly and really taking this slowly. And believe it or not, in general, I believe in taking more risk in my business since I have more control over it. And then investing in the stock market or I mean, that's not to say at the moment I have one real estate property, I've had it for many years, but I don't have. I'm really slowly getting into other investments. Really again, taking it very slowly on purpose because there's no rush. There's no reason to. Based on where at least I see the valuations of the stock market at the moment.

Right now, sequence of returns. Risk is a big issue for someone like me because of. In other words, let's say the stock market corrected tomorrow and if I was in 70% stocks, that's a huge cut in my net worth where I've won the game. So why take a risk right now where I don't need to? So that's one thing I definitely could mentioned outside of that, again, I believe I'm much more about keeping that money as again my just generate income off of it and really invest in my businesses and grow it that way. I really believe in you have more control over a business and do better at it. And especially the way I look at where current interest rates are, it's very hard to generate any decent amount of income. So therefore I Think the best return of your investment is your own self in business.

Yeah, it's true. And you bet on yourself, you know, yourself and your business. You have the control and the most control you can have.

Exactly.

That's great.

Cool.

Awesome. Yeah, I mean this has been amazing and I mean, I don't even know what to. I think we covered so much.

Yeah, we did.

Coverage swelling right now.

A couple sort of last questions to round up. You know, you're into tech and you've had websites and SEO and you've done all that kind of stuff. Do you have any tools that you, that you would recommend to other people? I know you mentioned Ahrefs earlier. We use Ahrefs in our business. Are there any other tools that are like have been sort of instrumental in creating what you've created?

Yeah, I mean definitely clickmeter. So clickmeter.com Woopera, which is a weird name but a great tool. W O O P R A dot com.

Now what, what does Woopra do again? I know you mentioned it earlier, but I didn't quite GR grasp what that one did.

So you have Google Analytics. Google Analytics I actually hate. I mean it's great as far as a free tool, you don't have to pay for it and it's great as far as offering some basic analytic information. What I do hate about it is lack of what's called PII or personal identification information. You cannot store any data in there, like email address, name, what have you.

Right.

Which really sucks in my eyes. I mean you're trying to attract people through your site. You want to establish some sort of relationship with your, the audience. But Google's terms forbid this. So that's a big issue on my end. And the other is, I mean not really really. Until recently they lack the functionality of really tracking down to the individual level. So you really looked at the aggregate. In other words, you looked at, okay, you had 10 people visit this webpage or you had 10 people go through this funnel. And that was really it. You know, you really could not drill down to the level of detail where Wooper really allows you to not only again show the aggregate, but but it allows you to drill down to each level of detail. And also unlike Google, it's like a database once it gets into the system and once you're properly tracking it via your UTM codes or whatever you actually have. And not only that, but the other issue too is Google is primarily web based. Now this is web centric, where I really have all this data from these other silos. I have email, I have push notifications, I have website, I have.

I want all that data in one system and Wooper allows me to really push it into one system and know each step along the way a person, the various touch points they've hit my site or various other services. So I know this one person, Joe over here not only visit this webpage five times but they also opened us email over here too and then they've also clicked on this link over here. They've also ordered this service. So I have it all tied into one system so I know all the data in one place. Where before you had to go to like five different systems. Really get the picture of that user.

Yeah, yeah, I mean we use a tool called Wicked Reports right now and Wicked Reports is, it's pretty good. I mean it gives you a lot of the identifiable information. I can look at any one of our customers and see their entire path that they traveled, but it's fairly useless for affiliate marketers.

Yeah, that's the issue because I looked at them too. Wooper on one hand is great because it's fully customizable, has an API. If you can do API calls and all that good stuff, you're good to go. So you can definitely push stuff in there any which way you want. You can create your own custom data types. It's really powerful. Again unlike Google Analytics where you're just really knowing, hey, you had a click for this affiliate, great. I want to know the actual conversion, how many people converted for this service. And I had that. I actually had visualization of a funnel for each merchant we worked with which was pretty amazing. So you actually knew again comparison to a treating like your own product. So I actually knew every step of the way. So I knew they came from this search or from the social media click. They then went to this review and then they converted and what the conversion rates were through that whole funnel, at least on our side.

Man, that's cool. So you're, you're super advanced affiliate marketer and tracking.

I gotta be looking into Wooper. That sounds like right up our alley.

It doesn't come cheap. It comes about $1,000 a month. But again the data and getting all the stuff from the various services you have, you know I, I created a custom link to thrivecart for example. I know you guys use that, you know, it allows you to really track. I've done this for one of my customers as well is you know, you create a whole membership site, you want to know then what's your lifetime value and Track each user so you can add all that stuff in there. You can do this is the really, the cool thing about Wooper too is you can actually do a push notification to the user based on certain criteria. So let's say you want to have an event happen. Let's say they visit, they open up the email, they click on a webpage, you know this person's actively engaged. You can then send a push notification via pop up and have it show up on their web browser the next time they visit your site. You can do all sorts of really custom shit and you can send this data to Facebook or say a custom audience through Google Ads. You can do all sorts of stuff that really is just not possible in other systems I found.

Wow. Yeah, it's like your central hub of everything. Tracking and.

Exactly.

I've always said it this way. Obviously Facebook and Google know a shitload about your audience. I want to know as much information, if not more. And then I own that data. As opposed to having Facebook or Google owning that data. I don't want them owning that data. I consider that the value add for my end. As an affiliate marketer, I want to know more about these customers than my merchants do.

It's a very good point. I mean, like Google and Facebook.

They definitely see all that data. It's like, okay, well if you're the one paying for it, you're doing the work. You're building this whole business and this place they want like, okay, so let's have some of that data.

They have you by the volume they have you. I mean, so what I want to do is I want to selectively send certain information, certain custom audiences to Facebook or Google. Look, you know, if I'm going to do remarketing, there's certain data that Facebook just can't have or doesn't have. There's no way for them to know it. And I want to send that information to them to say, create a lookalike audience, let's say for my one customer. I suggested they haven't done this yet, but that's the next step for them is let's say, you know, based on the current history of these people, they're actively engaging and watching your videos for a course. They're really using this course. And so you want to create, you know, look like audience through Facebook. There's really no way to do that within Facebook to really. So you can send this information to Facebook if you want to.

Yeah. You're basically calling an event that's happening inside your domain somewhere or membership site and then you're saying, yo, Facebook or Google, follow these people around or give them more value at this next step, whatever. Remind them to take rest of the course even.

Well, that too. You can do that too. I mean, you can do all sorts of custom events like that. It's really cool shit. And Wicker Reports kind of is great for the beginning part of a funnel. The actual conversion, they were all about conversions. After that, they're like, who'd care less? And that's, I think, the biggest limitation in Wicker Reports. Granted, they're much better than most people have, which is nothing as far as tracking is concerned. But my eyes, I want the full picture. If you have a membership site or a course site of any which way, you want to know every. You want to know not only what took them to convert, but you want to know these actively how engaged are these people? And if they're not engaged to your point, maybe re up them and say, you know, hey, we've noticed via email, but it could be also through a Facebook campaign remarketing campaign. Hey, we haven't seen you log into your membership site recently. Why don't you check it out again?

Yeah, incentivize them and do whatever you got to do. Yeah, exactly. I like that. Any other tools or. I know the last time you and I chatted that one you went off on like, so I can. Obviously it's important.

It is important. I mean, because of it. Well, the downside is you've really got to know then how to program stuff or hire someone. But I mean, there's out of the box a lot of API calls or hooks into their system, which is great. So that's definitely helpful. But if you want to take it to that next level like I do, if you want to take it to 11, you got to definitely know how to program at some level. But with that said, no, there's really the two major tools I think really differentiated. My site was we really knew the customers really in detail. And I think that's the next game in affiliate marketing. I think as SEO is really becoming a crowded space, you got to figure out other ways to monetize. And obviously the ironic thing is there's a whole sub niche of affiliate marketing I was not aware of until really two, three years ago of just purely marketing through arbitrage, if you will, doing through Facebook ads or Google Ads and just sending it to a landed page and convert and really not doing any value add, where I always did the opposite. And it's ironic they're Sort of converging, converting back. Converting back to or conversing back to one where you want to do more traditional ads or remarketing of people through affiliate marketing. I think that's the next phase of this. But you need to measure it. You need to monitor those people and need to track them. And you need a tool like Wooper and Click Meter, no less, to track all that.

Yeah, no, that's super. It's true. And that's the only downfall that at least we've run into is all the tracking. But maybe there's a solution here.

Definitely. I mean, pushing at minimum, if you're working with a merchant that doesn't have it. Give them, tell them, look, we need a pixel. Give me something.

Yeah.

Now is it something that if you had like Zapier, it would sync up through that or is it more advanced than that?

I mean, Zapier works at some level with Woopera. I know they have a connection to it. It depends on the tool. I mean, it really depends on what data they have on their side. I mean, in the end it's all API calls. And if one system doesn't have the options to. Let's say most people track via email address. That's really the key is in order to identify a person via. Nowadays you have multiple touch points. For example, more and more people are using not only their web browser on their desktop, but they're going to their mobile phone and email is the way to uniquely identify that person.

Yeah, it's the consistent factor.

It's a consistent way to track that person. And that's definitely with campaign. What you guys do, I know, is using email to definitely make sure they visit your site via email. I'm sorry, via web browser on their work computer. Then they go home and visit from another computer. You can easily track that same person, right?

Yeah. Cross browser, cross device, all that stuff.

Cross device, yeah. Well, very cool.

I like this. We're going to look into Woopra again because I know, I think I sent it to you, Matt, and yeah, this is the better picture. I'd like to hear from Larry.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, we love more.

Deeper on affiliate marketing, but you know, with affiliate marketing, our biggest issue is just, it's always been for us, attribution. That's it.

Yeah. Again, I think that's the next. That's the next future or next phase of affiliate marketing. You have no choice. You have to do attribution or else. You know what I mean? The beauty of SEO is you don't have to Pay for it. But when you start paying for any type of traffic, you need attribution.

Oh yeah. And again, and like you said, a lot of people aren't even. They don't know how to go about that traffic and what to do with it. So you're kind of in this whole open area that everyone else is competing in SEO and that's almost like gravy for you. It'll still happen, but you know, you can rely more on the paid side or whatever these other channels are.

I mean I always say that. The funny thing is I think most people are just happier than a paid in shit with just getting a report saying hey, we've had five conversions this month and they're happy with just that. They don't even know what's the source on your website of those conversions. I mean, come on, you need more information than that. This review over here is helping. Is this promotion you're doing which button on a page really getting to that level of detail. And I think that's really what made. Based on the traffic, I can't give out specifics but based on actual revenue numbers, I definitely. It was off the charts compared to competing sites because we just much more effective in our conversions.

Yeah, I'm sure. And then I'm sure that's why you demanded 6 million for the site with the multiple of purely affiliate revenue. That's what's so cool too is like you didn't even have a product, you just created content and you had badass systems.

Well, I really think a lot of what we talked about is going to open some people's eyes to what's possible with an affiliate business. And I think even before this discussion I didn't even consider the possibility of building an affiliate blog with the potential of an exit. You know, so that's just opened my eyes to the possibility that you can exit from an affiliate blog.

Most people poo poo that idea like immediately. But really we're seeing.

Why is that?

Well, I think you could sell it, but I think it's for a substantial amount. I mean we don't need to discuss multiples here or anything. But yeah, it's the fact that it is something that's not totally in your control. These are things that we've heard, you know, other people telling us taking affiliate marketing forward because it's, you know, it's part of our business, but it's not the main thing. But the fact that it was part of your business still is and you sold it for that, that amount.

Yeah, I Mean, the personal finance space has a lot has. I mean, jeez, there's been a bunch of them lately. I mean, Student Loan Hero, for example, sold for 60 million. Oh, wow. Wirecutter sold for I think 30 million. Was it? I think it was 30 million. And that's now owned by New York Times. Now those are pure affiliate plays.

Yeah. And really this just comes down to our ignorance of that market. You know, I just. In our market, you know, Internet marketing, a blog that promoted a whole bunch of affiliate products I think would probably have a hard time selling in the financial market that you were in. It seems like, you know, that's actually semi common that people build up these kinds of blogs and sell them. So it's just, you know, it's just two different worlds. And so this episode has been eye opening for us that, you know, oh, this just. It opened up a new potential that I'd never really thought about.

Yeah. I mean, definitely from my end. It's ironic again, coming from my background. I'm getting now into digital marketing and it's definitely a different game. I mean, my wife initially thought like, well, it's going to be the same as what you were doing before. I'm like, no.

Yeah, much different. You need a new challenge.

I mean, the funny thing is, I think I find fascinating as you look at some sites out there, some of them don't really monetize with SEO at all or very little. I mean, it's much more about your audience and much more about your personal brand. Hence why I'm kind of building that up as well. I think that's. I find that fascinating is there are a lot of people not focusing on SEO. I mean, Pat Flynn, I like his site, I like him a lot, but his SEO game really needs to be upped, I think. Yeah.

Which is interesting because in the early days of Pat's blog, it was like really SEO heavy, really focused on SEO.

He did a lot of affiliate marketing then too. That was probably part of it. But yeah, we all have our blind spots. Can't do it all, but I love that. Yeah, you're exposing. These are blind spots. I mean, there's blind spots that you had that.

Oh, yeah, definitely had.

We didn't have. It's interesting. It's really cool.

Yeah. I mean, again, my mistakes were where I didn't really build out, you know, a personal brand and. Or I didn't really do multi, you know, multiple medias. I didn't do video, I didn't do. I did email. It didn't really do very well ironically in digital marketing. That's really the, you know, the mainstay for most people.

Yeah. Well, this is awesome, Larry. Well, let's wrap it up with. Yeah, man. What's. Let's envision. You had to go run and grab a book in your house. It's on fire. You're like, oh, man, I gotta.

I love how you word this every time.

Yeah. I took it from Justin Brook, a previous guest. I'm like, I like it. It's like you get one book, maybe.

Two, your house is on fire. You got to grab one book out the door. What book are you grabbing?

Yeah, I mean, I knew you were going to ask this question to me, so I thought about it ahead of time.

Take it.

I would have to say MJ DeMarco's millionaire fast lane.

Oh, that's a good one.

That is a good one. Yes.

And I think because of its. I mean, I would if it wasn't that I want to be Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I think both. I mean, Rich Dad, Poor dad is really good basic of just getting you to think differently. If you're really starting from nothing, where MJ DeMarco at least gives you a foundation of here's the concepts you need to apply and here's some good businesses and some bad businesses. Yeah.

Love it. Yeah. I mean, Rich Dad, Poor dad was literally the book that got us into entrepreneurship. That was the book that sparked the. You know, that was the spark that lit the fire.

Perspective changes. That's all it took. We're like, oh, that's possible. Okay.

It is. It's eye opening. I mean, it definitely. I mean, lack of details obviously is the bad part of it. And does actually the Rich dad actually exists is a whole nother story.

Yeah.

But I mean, outside of that, it's great for inspiration.

Sure.

And again, MJ DeMarco's book, I think and both books actually unscripted is pretty good too.

Yeah.

It's basically a repeat. Oh, yeah.

Oh, is it? Okay. Got it.

More or less. Yeah. But it's both good, though.

Cool, man. Awesome, Larry. Well, where should folks follow you? Go check out some of your stuff. I know you're in transition mood, so who knows? Yeah.

I mean, so if you want to go to LarryLoodWood.com I do have for. So I have a course right now. I have SEO for writers and I'm going to be working on other courses as well. SEO for Webmasters, ironically and affiliate marketing course. Those are still in development. But the SEO for writers course, as of this minute is live. And actually I have a. A discount if they're interested, a 10% discount if they end enter the promo code Hustle.

Nice.

In my site, but if you go to LarryLoodwood.com all the stuff is there. My social media, my email. It's just easier to point someone to one site instead of, well, you go to my Instagram account, you go to my Twitter account here. No, just go to my website. Larry, good.

Call Larrylodwig.com and get the courses. Use Hustle for anything you got there. And we'll link it in the show notes, of course. Larry, appreciate your time, man. This has been great. Thank you.

Hey, thanks so much for tuning into that episode. I hope you loved it as much as we loved recording it. Now, before we wrap this up completely, I want to give a quick shout out to our, our supporters of the show. These are some companies that have really helped us and have supported the show, and we just like to give a big thank you to them. And they also are offering some cool free gifts for you as the listener. So, number one supporter, Podcast Magazine. Podcast Magazine, the preeminent publication covering podcasts, podcast culture, and the podcasts that fans love. It's launching in January of 2020. Prior to launch, you could grab a free lifetime subscription over@podcast magazine.com that is a free subscription. A free lifetime subscription to Podcast Magazine, where they are talking about everything. Podcasting, podcast culture. The podcasters you love behind the scenes of podcasts, they're ranking and reviewing podcasts. And guess what? Joe and I are actually going to be regular contributors to Podcast Magazine. So if you want to hear more of our insights around podcasting and the shows that we're listening to and some insider tips about what's going on behind the scenes of our show, we're actually going to be one of the featured experts inside Podcast magazine. So if you love podcasts, if you're a podcaster, or if you just want to stay on top of what's going on in the growing medium, subscribe now, because you can get the free lifetime subscription until it launches. So make sure you do this early. So once Again, go to podcast magazine.com free subscription to this magazine. Go do it. Get on that. Now. Another supporter that we really, really want to thank is Easy Webinar. Now, this is the webinar platform that we tend to use when we run webinars. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle, you can actually try Easy Webinar for free right now. And what I love About Easy Webinar personally is that it's got both the live options. So you can just go live with a webinar like you would normally. But it's also got automated webinars where you can make a webinar feel like it's live, but it's happening on a recurring basis. Then they have what's called, you know, hybrid webinars, where portions of it are live, but then it goes to a prerecorded and then you do encore webinars. I mean, they've got pretty much every feature you can ever want from a webinar. Now, you probably know that webinars convert better than any other marketing tool. But if you thought, you know, webinars, easy webinar is going to surprise you. So with live, automated, all these different functions of webinars, you're going to be using the best onboarding customer platform. You're going to be able to create automated courses. You're going to run automated sales funnels. So much cool stuff that you can do with Easy Webinar. It is our preferred choice of platform for webinars. So make sure you check out Easy Webinar. You can get it for free right now. Get a trial of it over@easywebinar.com hustle and check out our episode with Casey Zieman, the founder of Easy Webinar, where we dive into a lot more cool stuff that you can do with webinars. So check it out again. Easywebinar.com hustle to get a free trial, go to podcast magazine.com to get a free lifetime subscription. Both amazing products, both products that we use, we're subscribed to and we support and can't thank them enough for also supporting our show. So go check those out. We appreciate you and thanks for tuning in to Hustle and Flowchart.

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