This blog is far different than any of the other Internet Marketing blogs. The first big difference is that we are not professional bloggers. This is our only blog. We aren’t trying to wow you or convince you to buy any of our marketing services or products. We aren’t trying to make ourselves famous. We aren’t going to be writing really long posts to show you how good of writers we are (we aren’t professional writers either) we are just 2 successful Internet Marketers that want to share our profitable secrets with you to help you make more money (and hopefully you want to network with us and pass around our blog address to friends!).

In a nutshell, this is the blog you can come to daily and get really interesting tips and theories that will really get your mind racing on how you can take that idea and make money with it. Often times, we post on simple yet powerful techniques that are frequently overlooked. We aren’t going to waste your time and write 12 page posts with all sorts of useless information unless we absolutely think its important.

I will ask you for one thing, if you like something on the blog, click one of the social bookmarks below the post (Facebook, Twitter, or wherever you have an account) and post it to your feed.  That will help others see the posts and help us get the word out. It really helps. Feel free to add us on your Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds as well.

Interview: Brian Evans

• Published April 16th, 2010 in Affiliate Marketers by Jonathan Volk

Brian Evans is a young & successful Internet Marketing prodigy. He blogs at DailyConversions.com and has a training site at ListPlaybook.com. He started his first Internet business in 2003, selling niche (home produced) products on eBay. This began his first venture into online marketing, finding different ways to drive traffic to these eBay listings after he tapped out all of the existing eBay search traffic for relevant search terms. He began running PPC ads, leveraging referral marketing, creating viral videos and various other guerrilla marketing tactics in order to increase sales. After making substantial five figure sales on products never before marketed online (while attending college), he sold off that business and moved on to strictly online ventures with no physical products. Brian was so adamant about not having any products he began creating highly SEO’d websites and making deals with existing high traffic websites then placing/selling ads on the websites. Brian generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in under 2 years using this strategy and ultimately led Brian to the discovery that there was much more money to be made as an affiliate rather than dealing in clicks and CPM, in most cases. Brian attributes his success in marketing to his ability to find ways to build relationships (email) and keep his visitors always interacting with something. Brian is also a highly sought out SEM/PPC/Social Media/SEO/List Manager, running traffic, building lists and generating leads/sales for some of the biggest names & companies in Internet Marketing as both an Affiliate and a consultant. Brian is about to begin teaching his powerful strategies of building recurring customers (for affiliates and product owners alike) over at ListPlaybook.com, to a limited first come first serve audience.

Tell us a little background info about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? How long have you been working in this industry?
I’m 25 years old and grew up in Massachusetts. I’ve been involved in Internet Marketing since 2003. Prior to Internet Marketing, I sold TVs (and gained invaluable experience learning why people make the decisions that they do when presented with many similar options—It applies directly to Affiliate Marketing and many people don’t even realize it).

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
I’m just proud to be able to say that I’m a part of the Internet Marketing community because our community is one of the best communities in the world. We are paving the way for what a community can be and it’s proven by the huge number of people we see going to industry conferences, visiting forums and the fact that guys like you and Shoemoney have thousands of people following you on Twitter. Cough, cough, I too have a Twitter and it is @DailyConversion (with no S). P.S. There is now a Meetup202 Boston and I hope to see a lot of you there. I’ll be Co-Organizing it.

How did you come to learn about this industry? Why did you choose this career? When did you first realize the full potential in affiliate marketing? When did you first “hit the big time?”
This is actually a funny story, don’t make fun of me. So, I was running banner/contextual ads on literally dozens and dozens of high traffic websites. I was making big money at the time and I was all about scaling up and scaling up. At one point I said to myself, I really don’t see how I can scale this up any more (when I was dealing in ad space). I’ve tweaked every ad on this page 100 times and have constant split test rotations that change depending on the time of day, day of week, season, stock market and weather (ok maybe not the last two) and I just don’t know what else to do to make another cent off of these sites I have. Of course, I could scale up by buying/building more and more sites but at this point I was looking at these websites like video games and just trying to figure out how to “win” with these websites that I already have. I saw it as a personal challenge to not say “Hey I’ve done all I can, I’m done with this one” … The thing was, I basically put a block in my mind that “I will not sell any products” because of my eBay business where I was putting parts together 14 hours a day and running a sweat shop in my garage. I kept saying to myself, I really don’t want to do any products so I put a block in my own mind when it came to products. I didn’t even consider for a minute that, hey, I could probably make more money by cutting out the middle-man and going directly to some of these products and getting a % or CPA payout when I send them customers. Sure enough, I was right, and that led me to discovering affiliate marketing. I realized that the exact products that were advertising on the contextual/banner ads that I was putting on my websites actually had affiliate programs (and so did their competitors) and I could actually get paid more money via a % of the sale or CPA instead of a few cents a click or monthly contract. I did out the math real quick and tried to guess what the conversion rate must be for some of these products. I thought that I’d make more money based on my math and signed up to a bunch of affiliate programs and networks and ultimately started getting companies to compete against each-other on payouts. I setup affiliate ads and opt-in lists my own way and hoped for the best. Well… I was way off. My estimates were totally wrong. I made much more money than expected. It’s been a wild ride from that point and I’ve had years of successful results in many different projects (with many, many failures along the way).

What do you think it takes to be successful as an affiliate?
I don’t think it’s about the what. I think it’s about the why. It’s not about what a successful affiliate is made up. I’ve met hundreds and hundreds of affiliates through events, forums, and various projects and I don’t think anyone can honestly say “this is the formula to be a successful affiliate” or “this is what your qualities need to be”. There really are no common work ethics that are present in every successful affiliate or Internet Marketer. I know successful guys that have really strong work ethics and I know guys that are lazy you know what’s. People learn about this industry and how to be successful in all sorts of different ways. I know guys that have all sorts of varying beliefs and techniques regarding making money online. None of this can really be linked up to any degree of certainty. It’s about the WHY. Why do they want to be an Internet Marketer? Why do they want to make money online? Why do they want to support their family through this means? Why do they want to live this kind of life? Why do they want to do this? What do they REALLY want out of it? Keep asking yourself “Why?” until you can’t answer anymore and I think that’s what it takes to be a successful affiliate, the ability to really know yourself as a person and always, always follow your own instincts. Worst case, you guessed wrong and found another way that doesn’t work (as Einstein would say).

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
My biggest failure is not a huge monetary loss because of a simple mistake (although I’ve had my share of those). Rather, my biggest failure (and also my biggest frustration) is not following my own instincts at times, even though I preach that to others. Being a hypocrite at times too. You always have to be true to yourself and listen to yourself. Not following your own instincts is the biggest mistake you can make and certainly has always been mine. I’m finding that the more I teach others through blogging and some training sites that I’m starting (ListPlaybook.com), the more I learn about myself as well and redefine how I think about marketing and success/failure. Teaching others really helps you get past those past failures and frustrations when you explain those specific failures later on to others (when you’re less emotional about them).

What is the single toughest problem you’ve had to face, and how did you get through it?
At one point, I was running a number of projects of my own plus I had consulting and traffic management contracts. I became overwhelmed and quickly realized the power of saying no. I had to start saying no and being selective about what I’m working on, even if I’d stand to make less money by doing so. I found that multi-tasking too much is a sure way of lowering your quality. I’ve learned to be much more focused and be selective about projects, traffic management and consulting engagements. I’ll only work on something that I think is truly exceptional almost regardless of how much money I stand to make.

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
I hate trying to do graphics, with a passion. I’m a very visual guy and it becomes frustrating that I can’t just do a logo or graphic as fast as some of these designers. I’ve become known as the guy that will draw something out by hand, scan it and tell a designer to make that a landing page. They then proceed to laugh in my face at my napkin drawing of a landing page. Luckily, I’ve found a nice regular group of designers that I use for different things that kind of understand what I like and dislike and they know how to use my napkin drawings as guide’s rather literal translations. One time I actually hired a guy that misinterpreted and made a napkin landing pages with a bunch of ink lines on it. The even crazier part was that it actually worked when I added my opt-in form to it and it increased my opt-ins over my old landing page for a while.

What is the future of marketing?
The future of marketing, Internet Marketing in particular is all about quality, authority, content and relationships. It’s going to become more and more about creating a recurring customer base (yes even for Affiliates). Creating a recurring customer base (even in Affiliate Marketing) is certainly possible. If you brand yourself as the authority or the guru in a particular area you can certainly keep on making money from customers as you keep giving them quality content & products time and time again. The future is not in 1 hit wonder rebill campaigns where you just send all your traffic to landing pages with hidden rebill terms so you can get a high 1 time payout, the future is in honesty, authority, quality and content. This all comes back to creating real relationships with your customers (hint: email) and treating Affiliate Marketing or whatever type of marketing you are doing as a true business rather than just trying to get someone to buy some junk product so that you can get your $42 payout. I don’t know about you but I certainly rather make $250 over a few months on a customer who I’ve built a relationship with on my opt-in list rather than making $42 instantly and having that person pissed about a low quality product. I’m actually starting a members site called ListPlaybook.com that shows affiliates how to make money off of those same visitors over and over again without spending another dime.

If it’s possible for you to share, are there any particular niches that you currently favor? Or that you aren’t necessarily in right now but that you would recommend?
I will say this. Facebook is big right now, for several reasons. Facebook has officially more traffic than Google now. They are making a few billion a year (Facebook) yet Google is doing something like $22 billion. What does that tell you about the level of competition on Facebook? Facebook is also (debatably) easier to target because you are getting exact accurate demographic information. I can go on Facebook and target a campaign by someone’s exact age, location, school attended, profession, exact interests and a number of other very demographic specific selections. Google can really only guess at this stuff, Facebook HAS it. The other nice thing about Facebook as I posted in a tutorial on my blog (DailyConversions.com), is that you can setup a landing page or opt-in page ON Facebook! Authority? Hello! Facebooks Ads to Facebook hosted landing page anyone!? It works.

What niche has worked best for you?
I’m big on promoting products that actually help people in their lives. I have a quality threshold before I’ll promote something. I don’t promote useless stuff and for that reason I’ve probably made less money than I could have if I were to have jumped on some of these trends and bandwagons we’ve had over the years. However, I will say specifically that I’ve made a LOT of money with Wealth/Internet Marketing type products and I’ll attribute that to actually knowing what I’m talking about and building quality opt-in lists where I actually ask for their opinions about products and promote only the better products.

Which methods of promotion do you favor?
Social/Demographic targeted traffic works really well for me. There’s just something about being able to target by a demographic that really makes me think its better quality than just a keyword, in many cases. Facebook, Myspace, Linked In, depending on the niche. And, of course I also like SEM (Adwords,Yahoo/MSN) & SEO. I’m also big on direct Media Buying & Placements. I’m releasing a competitive research tool to aid in Media Buys, in early May (MediaBuySpy.com). I’m also a big advocate of legit Pay Per View traffic and I think that it and other forms of interruption marketing can be extremely profitable due to the low cost per view in most cases.

How have you made those promotion methods successful?
I’ve spent far too much time sending traffic to landing pages and later finding out that the page/traffic didn’t convert and then saying to myself “hey dummy why didn’t you capture that persons email address so you could try again?” It’s weird to think of it that way because you are actually having them complete more steps in order to get them to make you money. I challenge you to an experiment and I challenge you to build a quality Opt-in landing page and send your visitors to that instead of directly to an offer page. Your next goal is to create a relationship with them via email and make more money off of them then you would have if you just got that 1 initial CPA (which you may still get). Then figure out how to expand that and make it work for more and more traffic/niches. If you have any questions get on my email list on ListPlaybook.com, you’ll get some really cool strategies for free and the email list is open to Q&A.

Do you think anything particular in your past prepared you for this industry? Your education? Jobs you’ve held before?
Selling TVs, over 7 years ago, was kind of my “ah-ha” moment, in learning why people do what they do… which has also helped me tremendously in this industry. Something really cool that I learned was that it can be completely irrational when it comes to the decision making process. I use that lightly because what’s rational to one can be irrational to another and I guess the one thing you need to know, that I have learned is that everything is way more relevant and related than you may think, in all aspects of your Internet Marketing and ventures.

What are your greatest strengths?
Knowing (or thinking I know) the reason WHY I’m doing everything that I’m doing (on a deep level). My overly simplistic and sometimes extremely complex approach to marketing has served me well. I’m both a leader and also an extremely insecure person. We are humans and we have many faces and masks that we use on a daily basis. We are not one dimensional, none of us. And I’d say my greatest strength of all is in knowing myself as well as I do.

What are your greatest weaknesses?
I tend to get bored working on something 100% by myself. I like human interaction and someone to bounce ideas off of. After years of being a self employed Entrepreneur I find that I work harder when I have someone else with motivation in the particular project that I’m working on. I’m not saying I’m lazy, I’m far from lazy, but a weakness of mine has always been trying to find motivation to do something other than money. And, if there is no reason other than money, it becomes boring. I like new, exciting, cool projects that have a purpose and help people in some way. Lately, I’ve been discovering how to say no and that has helped me tremendously so that I’m not overwhelmed with too many projects. You can’t be successful if you’re trying to do too much at once especially if the only reason you are doing it is for money.

What motivates you?
I’m motivated by helping people, teaching people, making them laugh, making someone’s life better even if just for a minute. When I started my blog at DailyConversions.com, I said to myself, I want to make a blog where I can post something interesting just about every day. I don’t want to be one of those guys that only posts once a month and writes 30 page gigantic case studies that bore you to death, I want to be the guy that you can go to his blog and find at least one “ah-ha” moment each and every day. If nothing else I hope that someone will have that “ah-ha” moment and then go and do something amazing after reading one of my posts – even if all I did was motivate them or give them a cool idea.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
I always find a way to see the softer, lighter, better side of things no matter how bad a situation might seem. I’m almost always positive and a BIG time dreamer. Secondly, I’ve been taught to create my own success and not wait for anybody. And, I really follow that. I think it’s very important to not let yourself drag behind in some kind of holding pattern because your business partner is away or w/e the excuse may be not to get to work. Don’t let someone else dictate your success. Make your own.

Who has impacted you most in your career, and how?
The people around me on a daily basis impact me the most. The biggest impact is coming from the people that support me on a daily basis and allow me to do what I do with encouragement. I’m motivated by people that do good quality products and motivate people to actually use them to help improve their customers’ lives. Those are the people that impact me the most; I’m not big on naming names. You know who you are.

What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with? Any good stories?
I have a problem working with people that are just interested in money and truly don’t care about anything but money. It’s very rare, because a lot of guys will say that they do it for money but if you dig really deep and keep asking them why then they will start to open up and talk about family or life experiences that they want the $ or freedom to allow them to do. It’s almost never truly about the money, although when it actually is, you better run the other way! I’ve worked with a number of what I would call “money-bags” that honestly don’t care about anyone or anything besides money and will stab you in the back in a heartbeat if it makes them a dollar. Not fun, but I don’t let it get me down. When something happens, move on and pick up the pieces, find humor in it. Don’t get revenge; they will eventually get what’s coming to them anyways.

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
I don’t think I can say that X amount of dollars per year would be “ok” with me because I’m constantly thriving to meet new goals. If I were making $1 BILLION dollars per year, I would probably want to make $2 billion so I could give that much more money to suffering people & animals. I’m big on animal rights just as much as human rights. I have dogs and If anyone ever hurt them I would go just as crazy as I would if it were a human I knew that they hurt.

Where do you want to be ten years from now?
Physically, I’d love to live near Hollywood in a custom built mansion with secret passageways and all sorts of cool stuff like an indoor basketball court. Other than that I’d love to be doing everything I’m doing just on a much bigger scale to allow me to affect more and more people.

How do you like to spend your free time? What does work-life balance mean to you?
Work-life balance, to me, is all about finding ways to do what I’m passionate about in life as well as spending as much time as possible with loved ones, friends and family. I don’t look at Internet Marketing as work; otherwise I probably wouldn’t be doing it. I like doing it and it pays me, I do “work” (very hard at times) but I don’t consider it work (if that makes any sense).

If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
I think as far as paying the bills go Internet Marketing has served me very well. If I could start over with the knowledge that I have today, I would focus on doing nothing other than creating long term sustainable businesses, teaching other people about Internet Marketing and making movies (see below).

What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
My greatest achievement outside of Internet Marketing has been my success in making movies (both as an actor and producer). You can check out some of my stuff over at my site, http://briandevans.com/?p=67 (Brian D. Evans is my alias as an Actor) unfortunately not everything I’m doing these days can be legally displayed online, however you can see some of my short films there. Here’s one I starred in and had a role in production as well. This short was made in 48 hours for a film contest called the 48 Hour Film Project, here’s a link: http://briandevans.com/?p=67 that one in particular already has over 50,000 views just from viral traffic.

P.S. I encourage anyone reading this curious about anything I mentioned in this interview to contact me at brian(at)dailyconversions.com or brian(at)briandevans.com depending on what it is in regards to, I respond to every email (just give me time!)