Stephen Esketzis — Affiliate Marketing Using Epic Content

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and float. Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf.

Rolling.

We're rolling.

Go, Matt.

Rolling, rolling, rolling.

Keep those doggies rolling.

All right, so you know what we should start doing?

No.

Recording our intros earlier in the day.

No shit, Sherlock. I've been trying to say this for a while.

Well, first of all, it's kind of the middle of the night. We're recording these intros after doing, like, marathon of podcast episodes. And by the time we finally record these episodes, our brains are fried, which is why we always sound so loopy and like.

And your wife is knocking at the door saying, dinner's ready. And then I feel awkward. And this happens every damn time we do this. I'm like, matt, I've got a freaking. But your wife looks at me.

We're like typically, like four deep in of podcasts, where we're recording like an hour long podcast episode. So we've done. We've been talking to people for four straight, and then we're like, all right, let's go record these intros. And then the intros we just start talking about weird shit like rubbing peanut butter on people's names and stuff. I don't know, there's an explanation there somewhere.

That's a reference to a memory course by Jonathan Levy, who was on the podcast.

Joe just likes to rub peanut butter on things.

That's it.

So who are we talking to and what the hell are we talking about today?

So today we're talking to Steven Esketsis. I'm sorry if I'm butchering your name, but it's Steven Esketsis. Joe's laughing at me because he knows I'm probably not saying the name right.

I'm laughing because he was pronouncing it so perfectly right before we hit the red button. And now he just.

Anyway.

Sorry, Stephen. Steven is awesome. I love Steven. So we're actually going to be hopefully meeting up with Steven here at Traffic and Conversion Summit, which will have already happened by the time this episode was released. But so on this episode, we talked about a lot of the commonalities we have in our two businesses. And I think this is why Joe and I really, like, really nerded out on this episode. Because what Stephen's doing is he's creating really, really killer content on a blog, and he's seoing that content, and then he's promoting affiliate offers and software and his own courses and things like that. And it's legitimately the same model that we're Going after. In our business, where we create a lot of content, for us, it's mostly through podcasting, and we promote affiliate offers, so we really just kind of like shared notes, and he just kind of blew us away with all the stuff that he's doing that we realize are sort of holes in the way we're doing things. And, you know, it's. It's great. You're gonna learn about SEO, you're gonna learn about affiliate marketing. We talk about webinars a little bit. We talk about advertising, growing TikToks, growing.

This team in this system where it's like, this guy can scale like crazy, and he's using just very, very simple tools and systems, and it's done in such a lean way. Like, even says he's like, I'm super cheap, but he is willing to spend on smart systems and tools and people. Yeah.

And he's a tools guy, too. He's a lot like us, where he likes to promote tools and test tools and experiment with different tools. So we do talk about quite a bit of different tools, and a whole bunch of new ones popped onto our radar that we'd never even heard of that were excited to play with as well. So lots and lots and lots of really good stuff. If you're into SEO, if you're into affiliate marketing, if you're into traffic, all that kind of stuff we touch on in this book. And if you really like traffic.

I do.

We also have a free traffic book we want to give you.

Yes.

It is called the Evergreen Traffic Playbook. And, yes, I had to turn to my left to read the title just to make sure I get it right.

Yeah.

Because we have so many traffic books out there.

Yes. Out of all the traffic books we've written, it's my favorite.

Mine too. That's ironic, don't you think?

Yeah.

Yeah. So this. This book basically lines out a lot of the strategies that you'll hear us reference pretty much all the time. So. Yeah.

On your wedding day.

Oh. Oh, he's singing.

Yeah. So our traffic book. Evergreen Traffic Playbook. Evergreenprofits.com this is already late. Traffic book.

You're screwing up our sponsorship promotion. All right, well.

What was that? URL.

Sorry.

Our sponsors are gonna hate us.

Our sponsors are gonna hate us. Evergreenprofits.com trafficbook. Go there. We're gonna give you a free copy of our traffic book.

Is there a hyphen between.

No hyphen. Just traffic book. Just pretend. Traffic book is all one word.

And it's. And it's. Happening behind the/from evergreenprofits.com.

Correct.

Okay, that's a URL backwards. Have you ever heard that before?

No.

That's getting confused when people have a greenprofits.com trafficbook.

That was the momento version of our URL.

That was good. All right, let's get the hell over to Steven because get your thinking caps on and think how you can start selling some stuff with affiliate products, because let's be honest, it's a pretty cool way to do it.

And I gotta go drive Joe home and then eat dinner.

Thanks for telling us your to do list. Good job.

That's why we should end this recording and just jump straight over to Steven.

That's where we're going.

Let's go.

Hey, Stephen, thanks for hopping on the show with us.

Hey, how's it going?

Good, good. And this is feeling. This is going to be good because we walk a similar vein when it comes to our businesses and how we're monetizing stuff. Affiliate marketing. So this is going to be kind of a fun conversation here.

No, I'm excited about this one. I was just kind of chatting with you before we hit record about how I first heard your name. We were at Trafficking Conversion a couple years ago talking to the affiliate manager for ClickFunnels, and he mentioned your name as the number one top bestselling affiliate for ClickFunnels. And since that time, Joe and I were like, we gotta talk to this guy someday. And here we are two years later, because Travel Conversion's coming up next week and we're finally chatting with you some days now.

No, it worked out well. Good timing.

Yeah. And I know we both share.

Yeah.

Mutual buddy James Schramko. He loves to listen to a lot of these, so I'm sure he'll hear this. Hey, James. Yeah, man.

Cool.

So can you give us a little bit of. Of your backstory? Tell us a little bit about how you got into marketing and, you know, started going down the routes that you went down.

Yeah. So I'll give you a quick back. So basically, a while back, started a mobile app called Megal. Like, this was straight out of high school, while I was at university, launched this mobile app trying to get people into nightclubs. And I found that was, like, at the time, that was a problem I was facing. And then we kind of figured out how to grow that with a friend of mine, figured out, had no idea about marketing. Looked into Facebook ads and things like that and kind of found that more interesting than the actual app world. So Dived into the marketing world a bit more and then from there, yeah, just explored Facebook ads and things like that. I actually, this was 2012, I think I was actually somehow ended up on a live stream with Gary Vaynerchuk, like on Spreecast, some random platform that was out back then. I don't even know if it's still around. This is before kind of anyone even knew about him. And then he's like, yeah, check out this thing called Facebook ads. Like, you know, it's the shit. Like, that's where everything's going. So I dived into that and then from there learned, like, what funnels were and kind of stumbled upon all the Internet marketers that you guys know and, you know, a lot of tnc. And then, yeah, ended up just, you know, doing my own content, launched my website, started doing consulting for sales funnels and helping people build their funnels, whether it was a book funnel or physical product or lead gen or whatever. And then I started doing a lot of content marketing through my site. And then at that time, like, I think ClickFunnels launched just around that point. So it was kind of like early on, I was using ClickFunnels as software with my clients, but I really hated client work. I'm not a big fan of taking clients. I just find it's a headache and pain in the ass to deal with. And I was like, no, I gotta get out of this at some point. So I started promoting clickfunnels early on, did really well with that. And then a lot of it was through content marketing. So then as they launched, this is, I think when the first year of, when they were around, Russell and his team reached out to me and said, look, we love what you're doing. Would you be interested in doing content marketing for us? Like kind of the contractor, you know, handling all that content marketing. And I said, yeah, look, I'm writing content anyway about it. May as well, you know, get paid to do it and have a bigger audience. So it sounds great. Let's chat more about it. And we took that. And then, yeah, I started doing a lot of their content marketing. I was the head of content marketing for about a year and a half, two years, I think. And then, yeah, I was still an affiliate throughout that entire time, was promoting a whole bunch of other products as well. And then at the end of that, I started moving into building my own brands. So we start like now. My main focus has really been between now and then for the last probably three years, I'd say building our own Websites and authority sites. So we build these big media properties in different niches. So we've got a big one in the health space, a couple other ones, one in gardening, one in living room and lifestyle furniture space, and we just write heaps of content. We do tons of SEO. That's been the backbone of all our growth. We've got a writing team in the Philippines, we've got writing teams here and in the U.S. you know, altogether about 25 people. And then, yeah, we monetize it through affiliates, putting together our own offers, driving our own traffic through SEO and paid. And that's kind of been what we've been up to lately. And then more recently, about six months ago, we've. Sorry. About a year and a half ago, we started doing these monthly events in Melbourne here in Australia, because one big problem I had was I'd be coming to all these US conferences that were freaking awesome, but it's a pain in the ass to travel. Yep. 20 hours to get there one way. Just to go to an event for three days and then come back another 20 hours.

And you're about to do that.

Like, we really need something. Yeah, you guys are really fortunate with that. You don't have that problem. Well, we'll see you soon. You're like, oh, look, I gotta go across the road to this huge conference. What an issue. And I'm thinking, damn, I definitely like 30 hours just to get here for three days.

Yeah, we do definitely feel like jerks a little bit because we're like, let me just roll out of bed and go down there.

To get to TMC. It's a 15 minute Uber ride.

Yeah, yeah, it's a joke.

So I was like, oh, even my friends there were like, oh, dude, I had to drive four hours and bring the car over. I'm like, are you serious? You're complaining about that? It's like. Anyway, so it was this huge issue and I was like, one year. I remember, I think I went to about eight conferences or seven or eight conferences in one year that were in the States. And it was just a huge pain in the ass financially. You got to pay for it all in accommodation. It's just a time sucker.

Yeah.

Mixture of all that crap. So I was like, look, there's nothing here in Australia and I know we've got a lot of talent, you know, James and a few other marketers. So. So last year and a half, we put together these three monthly events and we just had someone come and speak every month on a different topic. And then about six Months ago, I was like, no, we need to make this official, launch a conference. So we're launching this conference in March 18th and 19th called Digital Marketers Australia. So I brought together like 20 speakers. We're gonna have about 500 people there. We're already sold out. It's gonna be a big event. So, yeah, that's kind of been more recently. It's just been focusing on putting together this huge event which we're gonna host next month. And yeah, that's been pretty much it. So balancing in that events company and then the media properties we've been building as well with all these brands, that.

Is amazing and very much similar to kind of what we're doing and the continuing fate. Not really the event side, but when you're talking about the affiliate stuff, for sure.

Well, Joe and I were actually kind of quietly laughing to each other as you were talking because of how similar the path is that you took, because we kind of came across that same approach. I don't know, it's maybe been two years now that we decided let's focus on being a media company. Let's focus on putting out content. For us, it's mostly in the form of podcasting, but we do have a handful of written blog posts that we put out as well, like maybe once or twice a month, but it's mostly podcasting. And we decided let's build this media company, monetize the audience that we're creating through things like sponsorships, affiliate marketing. We sell some T shirts and books and we have a couple of our own courses that we sell. But our whole goal is just build up the media properties. Build up the media properties. And the second media property that we ever built back in 2007 was in the health space. And we still have that media property to this day and we're still, we're still running it. So, you know, you were talking about your, your, your big site in the health space and what you're doing, and it's just like, it's just so similar. So that's, that's good.

Yeah, it's funny, like, one thing that I kind of picked up out of the whole, you know, funnel world from spending so much time around people building funnels and things like that. I mean, I think a funnel is kind of like a, like a profit generating machine, right? Like your product you're selling or service, you pump ads into the front or, you know, whatever that traffic is, you make money. But one thing I notice is like, once you're done with the funnel or while it's running. You can't sell it. It's. Unless you're building your whole business around one funnel, it's not a sellable asset.

Yeah.

Whereas when you're building a media side or property, I wanted to really turn around and say, awesome. Like this company does. X amount of revenue. Now we've got, you know, this is the brand, this is everything around it. We've got all the different traffic sources, we've got the funnels linking to that brand. But now when I'm ready to exit it, there's going to be a nice multiple on that and I've built the brand and it's like, packaged and ready to go, essentially. I kind of wanted to build an asset rather than just a funnel, because the funnels, like, it should be a part of the brand. It shouldn't just be a standalone thing.

Yeah, that's so smart.

We're big fans of basically building our ecosystem. And like Matt said, a lot of it's a podcast, but inside of there, we're segmenting like crazy based off of what. What people are listening to. Obviously, if they're on the show notes page, you know, tons of retargeting, all this stuff happening. These buckets, they can fill like email chatbots and yeah, monetizations are products or courses or, you know, affiliate stuff compared to what they came in on what they consumed. So it's, It's. It's way easier to sell. We found. Doing it this way.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Like, you know, it's just. You've got, like, you know, there's tons of different channels and you've got to be kind of across them all. But you want to have strengths with certain ones. Like, obviously, podcasting is huge for you guys. I'm pretty terrible at it. My podcast, if anyone goes to my website and you check it out, it's literally just me turning on the phone, hitting the record button, and then I just talk while I'm driving about marketing and then stop record and it gets uploaded and a VA will upload it to itunes and away it goes. Like, it's pretty. It's pretty sloppy, but, you know, you just got to work to your strengths. Sure.

So, yeah, speaking about that. So if we go to your strengths and, you know, it sounds like you have a lot going on now with a team, 25 people or so. So if we go back in time when you were to, say, start this all over again, maybe now that you've done it, how would you go and approach this? Like, what would be the first steps to get this thing kind of going.

So you mean how would I approach building like the brands building a media site?

Yeah, let's say you're building your first media property. What would you do different, knowing what you know now?

Well, I think, like, it depends where you're at. So if you're a listener, listen to this. I mean, it depends. You've either got two options. You've either got a lot of time on your hands and not much money, or you've got a bit of money to spend and you want to, you know, save time and speed that up. So you got to kind of first of all decide which bucket you're in, depending on your budget and what your lifestyle is and everything like that. Obviously, as we grew, we obviously started making more money and we wanted to save on time and grow more aggressively. But if I was starting right now, what I would do is for us, we started a lot of a big focus on SEO. So everything for us, we started off really going hard on SEO and that was our one traffic source that we wanted to rely on and build on.

So for us, we just did content. We did content really well and link building really well. So what I learned in my time with SEO is all the funny tricks and tips and keyword optimization and this and that, they work. But it's kind of. That's the 10% that gets you over the line. The 80 to 90% of the results come from aggressive link building and aggressive good content. So that's where we spent most of our time. So we hired writers because I don't know a thing about health really. Like, I'm probably not the healthiest person in the world right now. I just finished eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

I'm jealous.

I'm not the healthiest person in the world. But we've got writers who have backgrounds in dietitians and nutritionists and this and that. So we found people who know their stuff. And then, yeah, we started doing our keyword research, finding the keywords that we want to rank for and opportunities in the market. So tools like Ahrefs or Semrush are really good for things like that. And then, yeah, we started putting together some really long style content. And when I say long, we're doing like five to 8,000 word articles.

Wow.

On every single topic. So we can really dominate and be the all in one resource for that topic. So if I was to do it again, that's exactly what I would do. I'd pick your niche. Doesn't have to be health. Could be paintballing. You can do the top 10 keywords for paintballing, put them all in, write some incredible content, and then once you've got that content that's literally the best in the world, it's very easy to start outbound emailing, try to get links to that content from other website owners and webmasters. And then we built some systems around how we can aggressively outbound email people and prospects people to get backlinks. And that's literally all we did for probably the first 12 months. Not one thing different. We didn't work on the ui, we didn't work on the brand design, we didn't work on any ads, we didn't work on any products. We literally just focused on that. So I was fortunate enough to have other income streams to be able to support that. But, you know, that's if you've got the ability to do that. We probably should have monetized earlier so we can start putting affiliate offers out and, you know, building our list and sending more emails earlier. But for that business, we just did SEO hardcore for the first six to 12 months and it paid off in spade. So two years later, after doing that, I think we're at three and a half million visitors a month. So we're getting a lot of traffic and a ton of that is from SEO. And then you get a lot of byproduct of that as well. So I would literally, if I was doing it again, go 80, 20 on the one traffic source that, you know, well, for us it was SEO, and then figure that out and just put your head down and do it.

Well, I love it. And now when it comes to writers, because I know you're not writing everything.

How does that kind of look? So if you have a writer that's knowledgeable on the topic, let's just start there. What's the process look like then, to hire a writer? So I would say the writing process, hiring, I guess there's a ton of ways you can find someone who's an expert, but once they, you know, you find a keyword that you want to hone in on. So a gap in the market for that niche. What kind of process do you then have that writer do to actually create that article?

Yeah, so we go through a whole step by step. We use Trello initially to kind of map this all out. Now I think we're using Jira Atlassian's product. But basically what we do is we start from keyword research. So finding out we'll have another so everyone, when I say va, that's our team in the Philippines. So we've got a whole bunch of different VAs. We've got one team that does keyword research and they'll figure out exactly which keywords we want to go for and you know, how competitive they are and what the volume is on those keywords. And then we'll get that list and then we'll pass it off to the next person and I'll say, awesome, here's the list. Now go find all similar articles that are relating to this topic so we can see what's already out there on the market. So we know, you know, Dr. Axe might be publishing one thing. Then, you know, verywell.com might have another article on the topic and X, Y and Z. And then our writer will have all the research already ready to go for them. And then they'll just start being able to write on new topics based on their own research alongside improving on what's already out there. So that way when someone gets to our page, they'll say, awesome. It's kind of everything in one. I don't need to go anywhere else to get this information. Really well structured content, really well written. And then it'll go, once it's been written, it'll go to our editor to make sure it's been edited and makes sense. There's no errors and things like that. And then it goes to another stage, which is our formatting team, to make sure that it's formatted correctly and looks good and readable and everything like that. And then it gets scheduled for publishing and then we'll hit publish and then it goes into the syndication stage, which is how do we get it? Eyeballs to it. So that's Pinterest, that's Facebook, that's Twitter, that's sending outbound email, prospecting for it, everything like that. So that's kind of our step by step from start to publish.

That's awesome.

Cool.

Now with the articles, are you, do you put any sort of like persuasive, like sales copy type elements into the actual articles to try to persuade people to buy, you know, the affiliate products you're promoting? Or are you just purely focused on getting good content out there, getting the SEO and then, you know, maybe selling people once they get on the list and things like that?

Yeah, so we don't do too much salesy content in the content itself. Most of it. I mean, this content is, you got to think like, especially our health site, it's very much like people are just looking For a solution to their problem they have right now. So it's how do I get over a cold quickly? That could be the keyword. So they just want to literally know, here's a few different remedies I can try. You know, this is one thing, I can give it a go. Like, they're not going to go out and say, oh, I want to buy this ebook on 8 Ways to get rid of a cold. Like, it just doesn't make sense. So we'll usually get them on an email list and then from there off a different, you know, lifestyle improvements. It could be, you know, how to feel fit and healthy. Could be fitness books, could be physical products. So we'll usually focus further down in the funnel to do push the sale.

Mm.

And then the top of funnel, we're just hardcore driving traffic. So we just want to acquire as much traffic as we can with good content. And then the further down the funnel we go, the more salesy, I guess, or more, you know, we push towards a sale.

Got it. That makes sense. Okay.

Wow.

Everything's SEO. Okay. Have you. And so there's not really any paid traffic elements to this. It doesn't sound like. Is that correct?

So what we. Yeah, initially we started full on SEO and then quickly realized that it probably wasn't the smartest idea because we didn't diversify our traffic in case Google screwed us over or whatever. So we started focusing more then on paid ads as well. So with paid ads though, rather than going straight to content, will go straight to the offer. So if we build a product, whether it's physical or digital, we can go from ads straight to the product itself and then build an email list or just acquire buyers straight on the front end. So that way we're building a list through paid while doing the content SEO side. And then once we've acquired an email list through paid ads on Facebook, we can send people to content through our email list as well. So we're also generating that traffic to our content that we've written. So it's not, you know, we're not just getting the list and away we go, but we're actually using it to build the brand overall too. So we're doing both now. Initially we weren't though, and I would recommend doing both from the beginning because you don't want to have all your eggs in one basket, especially being at the mercy of Google or Facebook or whatever the platform is.

Yeah, yeah.

So from an SEO perspective, when you start doing this, when you make this content, let's start with like the on page ranking factors. Is there like a. What's like the 80, 20 of things you focus on on page?

Literally on page. We haven't touched the site and I know it probably pains me to say that, but we need zero, zero on page. I'm talking like hardcore zero, like literally open WordPress, you hit publish. There was no on page aside from putting in the keywords and we managed to get to 3mil traffic. So that just shows you how much you can do. Now we've been smart enough to bring in a team that actually is good at on page. So we don't hire in house for that. We get a contractor and they've been handling all our on page stuff because we're not very good at it yet. But hopefully that's the next project is making our on page actually structurally sound. The only thing we've really done with on page is kind of structured our content silos, I think they call it. So you've got your topics and then your topic pages link out to your longer form pages. But in terms of moving link juice around on the page, we've done none of that. And that's been our biggest weakness, I think in terms of building these sites up until recently. So the next step is really cleaning up our on page. But we're just beasts at the off page link building and content.

Got it. So what advice would you give for off page? Because I'd say that Joe and I are sort of the reverse of what you just said. We're really good at the on page optimizations and we actually have somebody on our team who's constantly getting in there and tweaking it and adding links to old articles and doing all that kind of stuff. Where we've been notoriously not the greatest at is going out and really focusing on getting a lot of backlinks. Other than, you know, almost all the backlinks we have are just like organic people linking to our podcasts that they listen to or you know, we've had some mentions and some articles and things like that, but it's, it's. We've never actually pursued the off page stuff. So I'm curious, what, what's like the kind of like 80, 20, like best advice for off page that you can give somebody?

Honestly, it's not that like crazy, you think it's some ninja tactic, but it's literally just. We just do the basic outreach campaigns and mix up the copy. So what we'll do is like skyscraper campaign, which for those of you who don't know, it's literally just finding other people linking to content and just telling them, hey, our content's better, check it out, update your link or add a link or whatever. Like it's pretty straightforward.

We actually had, we had Brian Dean on the show a few months ago, maybe two months ago.

Yeah, he was.

So he breaks down that whole skyscraper strategy on that episode. So we'll link to that in the show notes too.

Yeah, check him out. Like he's got some awesome content on that. And then we just, I don't know, we just done a whole bunch of, we just tested a whole bunch of different campaigns for us. We actually one big step we took about a year ago is started investing in software to help us not scrape, but like work with finding people who would be more likely to link to us based on other sites that we're linking to. So we work with a development company and said, look, we really want to scale our outbound prospecting, then we're going to have to build some custom software that no one else has got and that gives us the competitive edge over everyone else building these sites. So we did that. You know, we integrated a whole lot of databases, like WHOIS database and some of you familiar with like Hunter IO, they've got like, you know, finding your email addresses of different website and domain owners. So we implemented all that. We put in email verification, we put in, you know, best time of day to send emails, we put up follow ups, kind of all this different stuff. So we've got this software now that we use internally to really find prospects, send them an email and then we've got a team that's in the inboxes replying to things and saying, building the conversations, trying to acquire that link and then other things we might say, oh, we'll give you a share on our social media or we might do a link exchange if it makes sense. A whole lot of different strategies in terms of how we can actually acquire a link.

But you've got to keep emailing. The biggest thing is consistency. I think we were very consistent and you know, one point we've built it up now to a really high volume of emailing with sending thousands of emails a day. But initially we just sent 30 a day, like 20 or 30 a day. And you got to start somewhere. So you've got to just keep doing it consistently, turn it into a system and then work on that system and just have someone execute it. Because it's not something that I enjoy doing. But now that we've systemized it, I'M not in the process anymore. Yeah. So, you know, it's done. It's kind of like, you know, it's something that you really don't like doing, like your accounting or whatever it might be. But as soon as you've built the system that you said, all right, like, here's what we're going to do every month, we just have to do this one thing and then it'll be good to go. It's similar with that, I guess.

Yeah. No, I'm just, like, smiling so big over here because I'm like, man, this is like, perfectly. Because you now have all these, like, teams, you know, these groups of people who are working. It sounds like everybody's remote. Is everybody in the Philippines?

That's right. Yeah. So we've got about 90% or 85% of the team's remote. Then we've got a few people here in the office as well.

There you go. So, I mean, like, everything has its place. You have a process. It's very predictable, it sounds like. And you aren't in the mix of it now, obviously, when you start, it sounds like, yeah, create the system and go. And, yeah, just from experience, like, reaching out. We haven't done a lot of that, but every time I've ever done that for our content, it's like 100% we get that link added. I'm like, man, why don't we do more of this?

Yeah, We've actually found it to be easier than I think we anticipated. Anticipated it to be. When we have done it yet we have some sort of mental block where we just don't do it as often as we know we should.

Prioritized it. But, yeah, it's simple.

It's one of those things. I mean, like, we had. We were doing it and then I think I remember the first time we sent out, we sent like 40 emails out. We got three replies. Two of them were, like, super aggressive. Like, no, get lost. Like, you shouldn't be emailing me. Like, this is whatever. And then one of them was like, yeah, I'd love to link. So at that point, I'm like, all right, well, what if we send, like, triple that amount? Are we going to get three, like, three links and six people that don't like us? And pretty much exactly what happened. So it's literally a game of numbers. Like, people are just. It's the Internet. You're gonna get trolls, you're gonna get a lot of people who hate you. One thing I can tell you, if you're gonna start Doing it at high volume. Like us have a blacklist where people say no, you can't keep emailing them because it's actually against the law, but have some sort of system where, you know, they go into a list where you don't email them again. That's why we've had to build the software, because we found most people. Yeah, it's hard to kind of do this at a big scale.

Yeah.

And then the people that link to you, you know, you might have a new article and say, oh, by the way, like, this is another article. I know you linked to the last one, but, you know, you might be interested in linking to this one as well. Yeah, and they've already said yes, so they're probably more likely to say yes again. So you start building relationships with other websites and whatnot. So, yeah, it's just, you know, take it a step at a time. You don't have to have 20 employees, but next week it's just one thing that you kind of build systems into.

So if we're talking systems, what's like a good CRM tool or I guess any kind of tool you're doing for this follow up? Does your team use a specific process.

Or tool around that for the email follow up?

Yeah, like the blacklist stuff, you know, all this stuff you're talking about, that kind of coordinates a lot of this communication.

So with the email outreach, we use Mailshake, which is a great little tool. We've been using that for a while, haven't had any problems there. They've been really good, really solid. Okay. And then for the blacklist stuff, we literally just used Excel until we built our own software. So it's not that hard. You just do like a vlookup and make sure there's no.

You know, similar email. I'm trying to think what else to use. Yeah, we used. Used to use Trello. Now we use Jira for our system building, for project management.

What else was there? Oh, one thing that was really good for us. And I learned this at TNC probably four years ago. The first one I went to five years ago, I don't remember, but Perry Bellinger was talking on stage and he shared that they have an internal team wiki. And what a wiki is literally just a WordPress website. We just bought a $50 theme from ThemeForest and then applied to the website, put a password on it, and now we have like a knowledge base for our internal team. So everything we do more than once that's solid. We'll get Them to do a video recording and then document it and then that goes into the wiki and it costs us like nothing essentially because it's the theme and the hosting for that website which we're paying for anyway. So like we just do that and then yeah, that's kind of everything you need. And otherwise you just use Google Apps for your email. WordPress we use for all our sites. That seems to be going pretty well so far. And Slack for our live chat.

Love it.

That's so smart. That wiki thing is so smart.

I remember that, I think from tnc because we were, I mean we've been in TNC every year. But yeah, I remember the internal wiki idea for SOPS processes, all that stuff. That's duplicatable.

That's so smart.

That's cool.

And it's just easy, like it's cheap. I know you can do it through Google, some people use Google sites, some people use this, you know, proper softwares out there that you can do it with as well. But I'm kind of bit old school and like I'm super cheap when I build things. Like I like to, you know, go super lean and grow super quick on a super lean budget. So you know, obviously the only thing I like paying for a lot of the time is tools that'll help us save time and staff who are really talented. They're probably the two exceptions to my cheapness. But otherwise, like, you know, I don't think, I think a lot of people blow out their budgets buying all this stupid crap they don't need. And then you know, the stuff that actually brings you results, like the content, that's where we spend a lot of money on content or the link building and the staff that are in the emails that are sending those emails. That's where we spend a lot of money or software or we're building something to leverage and grow for the next two years. That's where we'll spend money. But don't waste your money on. We do a regular probably quarterly check on tools that we don't need, that we've got subscriptions to just to go through and cancel things. There's easy ways to kind of trim the fat around the business.

Yeah. And we do the same exact thing actually. Yeah. Because it's so easy to add this tools to your tool stack and then you're just like why the hell did I buy that? How does that fit in into this overall strategy? And ideally you keep it simple. That's how you can maintain consistency. Like you're doing.

I love it now. So you were the, for the, for a long time you were the number one affiliate for click funnels. And I think before we hit record, you mentioned that you'd be willing to kind of share how you managed to be the number one affiliate for click funnels. So I'm kind of curious about how that all played out.

Yeah, I think I was the number one for a while until like guys like Grant Cardone came along and then he put Russell on stage. I think they closed like 3 mil on stage or something like that. Like, so there's a few balls in the room. So keep in mind I've got like a zero lift at the time when I started that and I became top affiliate and I like 21. So my strategy to get there was pretty much, it was a bit unique I think, like given that I had no experience in, you know, no list. Sorry. You know, when I was doing all this, mine was a. I built a custom survey funnel plugin in my website. So it's still there actually. If you go to stephenaskensis.com you go to the top right and you go to build a funnel, you'll see it. So I had a developer I worked with build like a custom survey funnel where. With clickfunnels. If you build a funnel in clickfunnels, you share it with someone else. The value of that funnel is quite expensive. Like it takes a lot of effort to build a funnel. So I was like, well, how can I leverage this share funnel concept into my affiliate site? How can I build up affiliate. So I built out like 50 funnels, you know, all these different types and I think the best ones. And I said, all right, I want one webinar funnel, one opt in funnel, one free plus shipping funnel, one whatever funnels there were. And I wanted to put, make it like, I had this idea of making it like a restaurant menu where if you go to a restaurant, you got a three course meal you can pick. All right, I want the appetizer, the main meal, the dessert and this is how they're going to go together. So similar to that, I was like, well, what if I do that with funnels? Where I want my webinar funnel, I want this email sequence and I want this lead magnet and I want, you know, and I use this traffic source and then I get it delivered to me on a silver platter. Wouldn't that be cool? So I was like, how can I do that digitally? So I worked with my developer, we built this custom WordPress plugin and designed around the site, made it look really cool, super easy, good on mobile, all that kind of thing. And then it pretty much was, if you go there, you'll see it'll say, you know, you want a webinar funnel. Then it'll say, all right, now what email sequence do you want? And you'll have the webinar funnel email sequence. And they're all templated, like, really good templated. So you just plug them into your order responder and you're good to go. And then there's a lead magnet template to give away, like do you want to work checklist or a worksheet or a quiz or whatever it is. And then the next one is what traffic sources do you use? And I'll link to the best traffic source guides. And then I think after that there's like, oh, I did. So I was a huge. About three years ago and probably still do it occasionally, built this huge database of Facebook ads, just literally screenshotting ads that I like, where I have like 800 plus of them. And then I was like, oh, you can get access to my Facebook ad swipe file. And then I give them access to that and then they'll opt in and then they'll actually get access to all these share funnels and details and things. So then I drove traffic to that survey, I call it a survey, but I drove traffic to that. People went through it and then, yeah, they started using the share funnels and creating accounts. And that's been my method of doing it.

That's cool.

Yeah.

What I love about what you do too, when it comes to affiliate marketing. You have a similar approach to affiliate marketing as we do. I mean, this is my assumption. I actually don't know fully, but when we do affiliate marketing, we have a small core set of products that we like to promote, but we like to go really, really big when we promote those products. So at any given time, we're only promoting five or six products, but we're running ads to them. We're creating webinars around them, we're creating blog posts around them. We're interviewing the creators on our podcast. We've got this whole multi tiered strategy for a product that we promote because we don't like to go wide and spray and pray with hundreds of affiliate products. We like to go deep with a handful of, like, core affiliate products that we know are going to be around for a while and that, you know, the customers get a lot of value out of. And it seems like you take kind of a similar approach with affiliate marketing.

Absolutely. 100% clickfunnels. Look, I was, I'm gonna say I was a bit fortunate cause I was in the right place at the right time when it launched. So I was early mover with that one.

Yeah.

And I knew the people behind it as well, so that was really good. I had a really good relationship with Russell and Todd and their team and so, you know, that helps. And then obviously I start working with them directly. So you know, went to their office, went to Boise, all that kind of stuff. So I was really fortunate and they're an awesome team to work with. But yeah, you do want to work with someone that's gonna be around for a while. Like I never promote any, you know, products that just come and go. Yeah, we only do, you know, software, you know, affiliate stuff because I have a recurring payout as well, which I really like. I don't want to, to have something which is just a one time affiliate commission. And ClickFunnels is one of the, probably the best payouts in the, in the business. I think they do 40% recurring. I think LeadPages was pretty similar. And then who else was it? I mean a lot of activecampaigns. Another one I'm an affiliate of and they've only got I think 10%. But when you get someone on there with a big list, it makes it pretty easy.

Yeah.

So like, you know, it's. I kind of look at it as the core things that you need to build your business. And you want something that's super sticky too, like click funnels. If you're building your business on that, you're not going to be leaving so you're going to be staying there for a while. Same with your CRM. But if you're using some video tool or some random plugin that can come and go. So you want something that's going to be core business, good recurring revenue, great payout and a good team behind it. So if they get acquired, like if ClickFunnels sells one day then and the new owners decide to get rid of the affiliate side, that could be a pretty heavy blow to a lot of affiliates. Especially if you've built your business on that. And I've thought about that as well. I'm like, crap, if this happens, you know, what's the backup plan?

Sure.

But that's why, you know, I diversified really early in terms of building other businesses and things. So yeah, it's just something to keep in mind. Affiliate marketing is a really interesting one. Like I think it should be Supplementary to your income. I don't know if I would rely on that purely to live on all the time. But I think it's a really good way to get started in terms of building cash flow until you can build your income directly for your own list or whatever it might be.

That is exactly how we see it as well as affiliate income is amazing because you can kind of get in and really start marketing almost immediately depending on how you kickstart traffic. As long as you're giving great value and we do the same thing. A lot of tools, automations things with recurring is always ideal. It's not always totally possible with the tools that we have, but it just makes life easier. But you literally nailed one of the questions I was going to ask you is this whole thing of I don't actually own the business. Obviously you own the media property that you have. But yeah, your income is kind of dependent on that product owner or if they get acquired or shut down. I don't think a lot of people think about that before they get into the mix typically.

Especially as you scale up as well.

Obviously when you say if you're only making a couple of grand a month and obviously it's nothing to go crazy over, but if you start seeing some serious money, which you can from affiliate marketing, then you got to kind of think about and how to diversify and you know, look at the long term. I think Internet markets in general are super short term thinkers. Everyone just wants cash quickly and you know, oh, like how do I promote this to make really quick money? Or I want to do this webinar, I want to launch it and you know, see a quick result from it. But I think I've got a little bit of been the other way. I'm trying to think, all right, cool, we're going to build a brand or build this media site, but you know, what are we we going to exit it in 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years? Like what's the plan and what's the path for it? I think it's just something to think about before you get into all this. Is this a long term play, a short term play? What happens if this happens? And kind of have a bit of a think about it before you just jump right in.

Yeah, I'm actually curious, have you done research on multiples for this style of business? I think you mentioned that earlier if you ever exit, you had some idea of what the multiple looks like for a media property like this with affiliate income as that monetization source?

I've Looked at it a little bit, but I haven't gone deep enough yet. I'm just about to because we're going to sell one of our media properties after we do this conference. So that's something I'll be able to probably report back on. But from memory, I think you can do a 25 to 35 of month profit. I think that's what the one I read it was. And I think people who have information on that would be like Empire Flippers. And I think there's another company that does it, but I can't remember their name. Those are kind of media property companies and depends how big you are as well. So if you're a huge company, you're doing like 10 mil a year on media and publishing, then you might get purchased by an even bigger media company. But if you're only doing 500k to a mil to 2 mil, then it's going to be hard for someone to kind of buy you. It depends who your buyer is. So I think there's a few things just to kind of keep in mind. Depending on the size of the company, I think then the multiple probably changes a bit. But I haven't looked into it too much just yet.

Gotcha. Okay.

Yeah, so this is sort of a shift of topic a little bit. But you know, we've got some notes here. We actually have somebody go and do some research and give us some notes on stuff to bring up in the conversation. And one of the notes she made was about doing webinars and unique ways to fill webinars. I'm actually not sure where she pulls this information, so hopefully that's relevant.

But trying to dig in places that we, we probably wouldn't be looking.

So I'm curious, do you have advice for people on growing webinars and filling webinars?

I mean, webinars is an interesting one. We've done a few of them. Probably not as much as a lot of other marketers out there. But what I would recommend now, Facebook's a great traffic source number one for webinars. But number two is it's getting way more and more expensive to fill a webinar straight to a webinar offer. So what I would start looking at now is shifting the offer type and then putting the webinar on the thank you page. I think that's working a lot better. One thing that we've started doing a lot more of as well is pixeling people and really working on getting people pixel with the Facebook pixel at a super low amount and Retargeting with the webinar, that's something which is probably what I'd recommend. So use a really valuable piece of content. You might want to do some sort of advertorial as well. Something a bit clickbaity just to capture attention. Maybe it's just an article or something, just to get the click and then retarget with the webinar on the same topic. So you might do eight ways to. Depends what your webinar's on, obviously. But if your webinar's on fitness or it might be on some health gut problems, you could send them to an article on 12 Ways to Solve your gut problems and then retarget them with a webinar office saying here's the gut problem webinar, and then send them to that webinar using the retargeting strategy. But I think it's just getting so expensive on Facebook to do it that it's a lot harder than it used to be a couple of years ago. Even so you really have to have a really strong offer, convert really well and have a good follow up series as well. I think a lot of people, they get slack on the follow up with emails and things like that. So make sure you've got a really strong follow up series in place for people that drop off throughout the process.

Yeah, I like that. Now, when you say retarget on Facebook, have you ever experimented with putting the whole webinar on Facebook? I know Kurt Molly was saying, I haven't done it.

I heard some people have done it with mixed results, but I've never done it myself.

Yeah, no, we haven't tried that. But I know Kurt Molly's been on the show and he was like, dude, this is something to try. You know, if you kind of back out the math, this could be something that's way more profitable. So maybe something we experiment with.

I think one thing, one skill that I wish I probably learned earlier is being really good at just media buying myself. Like I'm good at it and I'm like, for example, the conference and stuff we've done, I did all the Facebook media buying. But if you can become a strong media buyer on Facebook for like proper offer media buying, you know, as an affiliate, let's say as a performance marketer, I think that's a strength which will last with you forever no matter what it is. If you can learn to master a traffic source or how to do marketing itself and then use a third party product as an affiliate, whatever it might be, like click funnels you can drive traffic and then send it to that and then know what your payouts are going to be. I think that's going to be a strong skill to have moving forward. As things start changing with all the platforms, you know, Facebook will start changing. I think I heard recently they're going to turn into Instagram Facebook. Everything is going to be in one app or they're all. They're trying to like consolidate everything. So there might be an opportunity for something there. But I think the key is just being good at knowing the fundamentals of marketing and media buying.

Couldn't agree more. Because that's basically the backbone of our business. And yeah, we're always trying to experiment with new platforms, platforms and ways to bring them in and then leverage that retargeting pixel. Like you said as to do kind of we call it the cleanup crew, but that's doing the heavy lifting for us. That's where the sales are really made on that back end.

Yeah, no, but I love the concept too of this building that pixel. We spend so much time in our business focusing on getting as many people pixeled in as possible because that's like a new. In our opinion, this was something that sort of of when we had Kurt Molly on the show a few weeks back or months back, he was talking about you can actually use your Facebook pixel, almost like a mailing list and kind of deliver sequential content to people based on when they got pixeled in. And he was kind of breaking down all these strategies and you know, right now when we go into our Facebook and I and I look at like a 30 day range, we get in front of 200,000 people in any like 30 day window on Facebook. Well, that's 200,000 people that I can be putting any piece of content I want in front of at any given time and I can sequentially like drop stuff out to them. So we've been in that mindset really of like just grow that pixel. Grow that pixel. And then once you've grown that pixel, that's just a whole nother audience to put stuff in front of.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So where do you see yourself going? I mean, are you going to. What's the game plan for you personally and your company? Is it more of the same and just keep growing same and steady to the course or. I know you have your event coming up here, so that sounds like something new.

Yeah, I mean like we're going to run the event. That'll be a big one for us off that event. We're going to be launching a mastermind. So we're going to be doing the mastermind for Australian digital marketers, which would be exciting. So that's one thing coming up. Then we've got the event and then after that we're going to be focusing on we're going to sell a couple of our media properties because they're at that point where they're probably ready to exit and. And from there it's just a matter of either consolidating or we're gonna either build a new brand. I think one thing I want to test out is maybe try the Shopify route as well. See how we can mix in the brands from the content. The content and an actual Shopify store with suppliers and building a brand around a product. I think there's a big opportunity there right now because the market's at the point where it's really familiar. Buying products on Shopify and you know, that kind of a market. Look, it's kind of hard to say. I think the most important thing that we'll be doing the Next, you know, 12 to 24 months is still building brands. I think it'll be building brands in one shape or another and then whether it's using a funnel or using like an E Comm Shopify store or something like that, or content SEO, I think it'll just be just building more brands and going more laser targeted around. Yeah, getting that brand equity up alongside the events company. So yeah, I guess it's more of the same.

Yeah, it's.

Nothing too crazy is going to change. I think it'll be. I'm really, I'm just waiting to see how Facebook and all these platforms are going to adapt. You know, costs are going up in terms of, you know, media buying and things like that. So it'll be interesting to see how everyone adapts, even like click funnels, companies like that and all these CRMs. I think it's getting more and more competitive out there if you're a software provider too. And people have seen a lot of the same offers, you know, click funnel webinars and people have seen a lot of activecampaign and this and that. So I feel like it's kind of getting to this point where everyone's competing against the same kind of features and things like that. So I've got a feeling, I don't know what or how, but I think there'll be a bit of a disruption happening in the next year or two about some sort of software company that'll come in and take it by storm. But we'll see. I'm not really sure.

Yeah.

Now you mentioned that a couple of your media properties, you think they're ready to exit from. I'm curious, what makes you say that? How do you determine, like, okay, this one's probably one that I'm ready to exit from.

For us it's like it's hitting a certain amount of revenue. So for us, if we can get it, you know, in that seven figure range of revenue and then like it's a, it's a property that I also, it's not core to me, like it's not something I've got a passion for either. I think then it's just ready to take off my shoulders and you know, we'll take the revenue from the purchase and it takes a little while to prepare it for an exit because we've got to, you know, get it ready for the buyer. We've got to go through that process of, you know, speaking to a broker and then finding buyers and everything like that. But I think it's just going to be now that I've got a little bit less time because we've got the events company, it's going to be, you know, working on one or two bigger ones offloading more the other ones that we've got and just focusing a little bit more so we can grow that company and the media properties too. It's just a matter of an 80, 20. I guess if you've got too many things on the go just gets a bit chaotic.

Totally, yeah. Now I love the idea that you said consolidate potentially because this whole thing of building the media properties and the brand reminds me of we had Roland Frazier on the show and yeah, not too long ago and he was kind of explaining how they just sold part of TNC to an events company and how prior to that point he didn't really think about how he can really splinter off these kind of like mini assets. Even though TNT is huge, but you know, these different assets under the digital marketer brand and you know, Roland's a smart guy, owns like something like 30 businesses or something. But that's where he was like, oh, and this kind of relates to like a media company. Okay, well you're tired of one or it hits a goal. Cool, let's sell that off. Obviously those funds can go to maybe build something larger. Maybe it's your events company and it's.

Absolutely like, it's funny that you say that. Like I'm in their mastermind. So I'm in Warren.

Yeah.

So I get to Catch up with Roland pretty often and he's a super sharp dude.

Yeah.

Like, and one thing that, you know, they always talk about, and I learn a lot from Roland, Perry and Ryan is the way that they integrate each company into one another. So like they've got their events company which pays, you know, which digital marketer pays the events company to put on the event and they're all both owned by the same people but you know, they're separate entities. And then you've also got, you know, TNC which you know, Digital Marketer pays to sponsor at tnc. And then, you know, it's just kind of like Digital marketer also does the advertising for tnc. So TNT invoices, digital market invoices, tnc. And like it's just so much crossover and it's such a smart way of doing business because you've also then compartmentalized the company. So that way when they got bought out by, you know, they got bought by some of Clarion, then they can, you know, obviously still keep DM and they can keep War Room and they can keep all these other entities and. And now they're still making more money from that other company. Regardless. I think it's my way of doing business and that's something we've tried to integrate more and more of with our media properties. Is how are we going to structure this? If we sell the company, are we going to still be involved in any of that or is that going to be in a contract or are we just going to sell the whole lot? What happens to the ip, all that kind of thing?

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. And it kind of gets fun because in Roland even told us he kind of stumbled into it. It wasn't like he pre thought all this through, but yeah, and he said they still control the content at tnc. They basically just offloaded the part that they weren't the best at, which were the event coordination and now they can even expand all around the world so, you know, you'll get some events closer to you pretty soon. Sounds like.

Well, they did a TNC Australia once, didn't they?

I think it'll be. Yeah, it'd be good to have something on the 15 hours away.

Yeah, well they did TNC Australia, I think they did one time and then it didn't come back.

He said they're going to do Singapore.

Potentially one in Sydney like five years ago. But they partnered with an Australian company that weren't the best at doing events, I think. So there's a bit of a sour relationship there. But I know that, you know, I was working with them about it. We might do something together at some point. They were just waiting for their deal to finalize with tnc. So, yeah, we'll see how we go. Like, there's, there's a lot of opportunity there for, you know, partnerships and things like that. It's just, you know, a lot going on.

Yeah, yeah, that's the key, man. Hone it in and consolidate. And yes, don't try to, Don't. Don't have too many things on the fringes or, you know, your core plan is going to get distracted.

Yeah, it's pretty much just this constant. I mean, at least from our perspective in our business, it's just this ever fluctuating, constant expansion, then contraction and expansion. Add stuff to the business. Add stuff to the business. Add stuff to the business. Get rid of the stuff that's not serving us as well. Add stuff. Add stuff. Add stuff. Get rid of stuff. Get rid of stuff. And it feels like that's pretty much what we've been doing for like 12 years now, but stay in the course.

Yeah, that's cool.

You have to, though. I think that's. It's awesome.

Yeah, it's really good. Sorry, man. I think. Is there anything else you wanted to hit on before we kind of wrap it up? We have a couple of questions for you.

No, that's it. I think you guys covered it pretty well and it's been awesome being on the show. Thank you so much for having me on.

Of course, man. Well, yeah, so some we ask is what's a book that you often recommend to your audience, Some friends of yours? It could be, you know, business book or something completely outside of business. Something that really impacted you.

Good question. One audio book that I listened to a little while ago and for some reason this particular one stuck in my head. It's called Smart Hacks. I don't know who it was by and I can't remember, you know, budget. I remember who wrote it, but the content in there, remember, was really good. Just talking about how to make smart decisions, like big results. It's kind of like what levers you can use in your business or career or whatever it might be to. To get a lot out of it. Like, I'm a big kind of growth hacker and leverager. You know, whether it's relationships or work or, you know, projects and whatnot, I think that's something that you guys can definitely recommend. I would definitely recommend in terms of having a listen or read to. Cool. You'll probably be able to link to it if you find it if you do a quick Google. But yeah, Smart Hacks was the book that I like. Right on.

Yeah, we'll find that and link it up for sure.

So this isn't a question that we normally ask guests, but I want to ask you because I think you'll probably have a good answer. But is there like one or two tools in your business, like software SaaS type tools that you just can't live without? This is kind of like something that maybe not enough people know about, but it's such a cool tool for people to use.

One that I found recently. So I was a big fan of workflow, the to do list. Keep things simple. And I can put a to do list in. But one that I found recently, which I've moved almost my entire business over to is notion. You haven't heard of that. It's got a mixture of knowledge bases to do lists, kind of like a mini Excel in there, like a database management all in one. And it's super simple to use. It's really awesome. That's probably the best one I really like. What else we use? Click funnels. We use for funnels and things like that. We did our event like, you know, audit form and stuff through clickfunnels. They're great. What other tools we use. I'm just looking down at my computer to see what ones we've got saved down here. That's really it. Dashlane is really good for password management. Slack we use for speaking with the team. Other than that, there's nothing too much that I use in terms of like tools that really ninja.

Yeah. Actually what I will plug while I'm on here is I created this free app like a little while ago and I highly recommend it. I'm going to be the reason why I created is because whenever I go to an event, it's usually business cards. You got to take this one. The information, right. But one thing that I thought about and thought it'd be really cool if we could do this and worked with a developer on. It's a mobile app for iPhone only. So if you got an Android, we're not there yet. But it's totally free app called Lazy Contact. All you do is get the app, download it totally free. You put in your information, name, email, phone number, website, whatever, and it just creates a QR code on your phone. You open the app. When someone's got someone else has an iPhone, you just hover the camera over that QR code and it'll pull up a little push notification thing and it'll say, do you want to add this contact to your phone? You hit save and you're done. It's literally as easy as it gets for, you know, connecting with people at conferences and things. So I'll be probably flashing that around TNC a little bit. But yeah, I definitely recommend it if you're a network, as we will too.

We'll be flashing that around there.

So does that app, when you take a picture of the QR code, does the picture taking portion take a picture?

Nothing. It's just literally you open the camera app, you hover it over the QR code and you're done.

But does that portion work on Android? Like, I know the app that you put your contact details in is only iOS, but the actual like getting the contact information, does that work on iOS and Android?

Last time I checked, I don't think it did, but it may have changed. Maybe there's an update. I don't really know. It's literally, I think it's like a V card or something. It saves it.

Gotcha.

I don't know, I'm not too techy on that front, but it literally just comes up as a little notification that hits save and then you're done and you've got them all their details and you don't have to give them a card.

That's amazing.

Check it. It might work on Android. You might be surprised. The app itself is on iOS but the actual photo thing might work on Android. I don't know.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah, no, we'll definitely use that. We both have iOS and we're about to go to two back to back conferences, so that'll probably come in handy.

Perfect timing. Thank you very much, sir.

Yeah, hopefully it's a little tidbit.

Yeah, of course. Now where should folks go learn more about you and really dive into more about what you got going on.

Yeah, I appreciate it guys. Thanks so much for having me on.

Of course. Well, is there any. Do you want to direct people to social media? Anything of your website? Obviously we got lazy contact there. If you're an iOS person.

Yeah, if you want to reach out to me, you can just add me on Facebook. It's Steven Eskedis Esk, E, T Z I s Or if you want to shoot me an email, it's just Stephen stephensketsis.com but otherwise, yeah, feel free to just reach out. You can head to my website. I don't keep it updated as much as I'd like. To anymore because we're working on a whole bunch of other projects. But if you're in Australia more than welcome, come to the conference. We're sold out, but I can probably fit you in somewhere somehow. And if you're in San Diego at 10C, let's. Let's connect while we're there. It sounds like we're gonna have a lot of fun.

Oh, yeah, man.

Definitely.

That'll happen. And we'll get out to Australia pretty soon. We haven't been down there yet, and I know Sramco does have been.

You guys have to come to here. You got to endure the pain that I've had to endure.

I've done New Zealand twice. Haven't made it all the way to Australia yet. Brutal, too.

It's not too bad. It's not too bad.

All right, Steven, well, thanks for your time. Has been great. I'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, guys.

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