158: Promote Affiliate Offers, Build Your List, and Create Your Own Products with Top 100 Clickbank Affiliate John Lagoudakis

Robert Plank: John Lagoudakis is one of Australia's leading internet marketers and back in 2007, he stumbled across affiliate marketing, and within two years was able to go from zero dollars online to being one of ClickBank's top 100 affiliates worldwide.

He's been featured in the New York Times best seller, Get Rich Click, list for his book, and has authored several books and has a long running internet marketing podcast.

Today, John helps businesses to get more exposure online, more leads, and to make more sales.

How are things today, John?

John Lagoudakis: Great. Thank you, Robert. Appreciate you having me on your show today.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I'm glad you're here and I'm sure that having you on, we'll be able to fill in the gaps for a lot of people. Your whole business and everything you do is through this process called ClickBank. Is that right?

John Lagoudakis: That's how I got started. It was a great place to start. There's many ways to get started online. I chose ClickBank. That was really big back in 2007. A lot of people were making good money from it. You didn't have to have your own product. You can promote other people's products, their commissions, excellent. Anywhere between 50 to 75% of the sale is yours. Sometimes even 100%. That was rare.

It was easy to promote, too. Back in 2007, you could go onto Google AdWords. You had heaps of traffic. It didn't cost you too much back then. You could do it back then. You can't do that now. It was just very easy. I opened up a Google account, promote the ClickBank products. You could see your commissions instantly. I was totally guilty of this. I think many people are guilty of this. We log into our affiliate accounts and want to see, have we made a sale yet? Have we made a sale yet? It was a fun, easy, way to get started and I had success with it.

Robert Plank: Awesome. A couple of things about that, one is that I'm kind of hearing that a few times you're mentioning that maybe in this day and age, is ClickBank still a good option for people to use nowadays? What's changed in the past 10 years or so with ClickBank?

John Lagoudakis: ClickBank is still a fantastic place to get started. How you promote your ClickBank products is very different today. As I mentioned, you can't use Google AdWords as an affiliate. You can create your own... Sorry, I should clarify, too. What I mean by that is, I was sending people from Google that would see my ad, that would click on my ad, and they would go straight to the product sales page on ClickBank. It was just my direct affiliate link. You can't do that today, but what you can do is send traffic to your own website where maybe you're reviewing products or you're an authority site and you're recommending products. Whether through your email list or directly on your website through links and banners. You can do it that way, send traffic to your own site and then from there, send them to ClickBank.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. What you're saying is basically, just to make sure everyone is all on the same page here, ClickBank is this platform where anyone who wants to sell anything, make a website and then take payments and deliver a product, can deliver that in ClickBank. The power of what you're saying is that they have a huge network of affiliates. If anyone has something to sell on ClickBank, then there's all these affiliates already ready to promote, already plugged in. Then from the point of view of anyone who's first getting started, looking to make that first dollar online, they can register with ClickBank as an affiliate and promote something there.

Having said all that, what you're saying is in the past ten years or so, there's a few extra hoops to jump through. One of those that you're explaining is that it used to be that if you found a weight loss product or something, you could go and find it on ClickBank, grab your link, set up a Google ad, and then just be running, keep refreshing your stats, and see if you're getting traffic, if you're getting sales, then that would be it.

What you're saying is now, there are more rules in place than there were before. Now if someone was looking to do that method, they still could target Google traffic and Google ads and send people to a site, but now they have to have their own site. Now they have to send that Google traffic to an authority site, to a blog, or maybe they're making reviews on this weight loss product. Then, once someone clicks from Google onto that person's blog, then they can click on those affiliate links, and then go to the site and then buy. It's similar but there's a few steps and rules nowadays it sounds like.

John Lagoudakis: Yeah, exactly.

Robert Plank: Cool. ClickBank's great, selling on ClickBank is great, being an affiliate on ClickBank is great. As far as John Lagoudakis goes and ClickBank, what makes you stand out as far as the other ClickBank sellers, and as far as other people teaching about marketing on ClickBank?

John Lagoudakis: I used to teach people about ClickBank and how to do that, but because things have changed and I've sort of moved away from that myself. What happened was, knowing that Google was going to stop allowing affiliates to promote ClickBank products the way I was doing it, I decided to move onto something more stable where I wasn't relying on one thing, putting all your eggs in one basket. What I started doing, Robert, was email marketing. You have more control over lists. The problem with sending traffic straight to, whether it's your own product or someone else's product, straight to a sales page, the problem with doing that is that you're going to make some sales, yes, but what about the 98% that don't buy? Typically on a sales page, a good one converts at around 2%. You'll make 2% of the sales. The other 98% of visitors, you lose them.

The better strategy is to get people onto your email list and then start promoting your products, and not just promoting your products, but it's a better way to create a relationship with people, too. When they're on your email list, you can give them great content as well, create that goodwill, as well as promote products. Not just once, but for as long as they remain an active subscriber.

I took my focus away from promoting products again as an affiliate just straight on Google AdWords, two, building my list and email list, and then promoting products. Then I took it a step further and I started creating my own products and promoting those first. For those that weren't interested in my products, then yeah, I could promote related affiliate offers as well. That's definitely the way any business needs to go. It doesn't matter which business you're in, you need to be building your email list. Sometimes an SMS list is appropriate, especially if you have a local business. That's a must also, as well.

Robert Plank: Is this the correct order someone should be going in? Would a good plan for someone who is looking to make a new income stream, should they be doing it in this sequence? First, they promote an affiliate offer, then they look into adding on the email marketing piece, then if they're having success there with some sales and with some subscribers, then they should move on to their own product? Is that a good, logical step-by-step sequence for people?

John Lagoudakis: That would be a good strategy if you're not sure if the offer that you're going to promote to your list is going to convert well. You don't want to go through the trouble of creating an email marketing campaign, meaning setting up your landing page and setting up an email campaign, writing up the sequence, and then sending it to an affiliate offer, if you didn't know it was going to convert well.

However, because we know which products convert well, the great thing about ClickBank and other networks like JVZoo today, if you're promoting physical products, like Commission Junction, is that you can go in and you can see how each product is rating as far as an affiliate is concerned. You can see in an instant how many affiliates are making sales with a product today. What I tell people, what I tell my clients, is if you're going to promote affiliate offers, go into the networks, pick the ones in your niche that are selling the best because you know that they're going to convert well. They're typically good products and products that sell. The conversion rate of the sales page is really good.

Knowing that, having that information before hand, what I tell people when they're starting out is start building your list right away. It's the most important thing. The number one regret of most successful marketers have is that they didn't start their list earlier. Right from the beginning, I say, start a list and then once you get people on your list, and even immediately, you can start. When someone ops into your list and subscribes to your list, you can send them to an offer straight away. That could be a "Thank You" page, if you like. It's not like you're delaying the sales process or anything, but it is so important to start building a list. It's the most important thing you'll do in any business that you have.

Robert Plank: I like that advice. I also wish that had been my advice starting out. If you think about it, there's all these products plugged into ClickBank, and these are all products that someone took the time to make the product, whether that was recording videos or whatever, to make the sales letter, to change it over how many years to make it to convert, to reduce the refunds, to add all these up-sells. What's cool about starting as an affiliate is all those things are already done for you.

If an affiliate focuses just on building the list, then that's a lot of steps taken out of the process. They only have even an hour or two a day to focus on building their online business, well then that doesn't have to be. They spend an hour writing emails and making products. They can spend an hour setting up ads, or they can spend an hour getting new link backs and things like that. It sounds like because of ClickBank, and because of affiliate products and affiliate networks, and especially that these networks show how well these things are selling, that people can just hit the ground running. Is that right?

John Lagoudakis: Definitely. You'd be surprised just how long it takes to do all those things you mentioned, Robert. Picking a niche, creating a product, a sales page, everything that's involved with having your own product and selling it, there's so much involved. If you don't have a product that you want to sell online, one of the worst things you can do is spending a lot of time creating a product and then trying to sell it. Definitely being an affiliate first is so helpful because what you learn in the process is which products sell. By being an affiliate and looking at what's the highest converting products, you learn a lot about your market.

If you don't do that first, if you just come in and say, "I'm going to create a product," not only is it going to take you a lot of time to set that all up, but many times, you're not going to create something that the market really wants. Unfortunately, what necessarily we think will be a good product is not necessarily what the market wants.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense, and it makes me think of all kinds of historical examples where like some car came out that everyone hated, or everyone hated tablets at first. It seems there's all these cases in history or in businesses where businesses spent millions and millions of dollars, and they still got it wrong. Even if Apple or Microsoft or Ford can't get it right, even with their millions of dollars of research, then I don't think I'm going to get it right just by guessing. The only way I can really trust it is, like you said, promote some stuff and see what makes sales.

John Lagoudakis: Yeah, and what a lot of email marketers do that's a great idea as well, as you build your list, ask your list, too. Send them an email and say, "Hey, I'm looking to create a product and I want to know your feedback. What is it you want?" You don't even have to say you're going to create a product. Email your list and say, "What's your biggest frustration?" Then find out. What is their biggest need? What's their biggest desire? If you see a trend, especially if there's no one in the market providing a solution for it, then that is where you want to be.

Robert Plank: I like it. I'm thinking and looking at the ClickBank market place right now. I like to go to ClickBank to get ideas about different angles of things and that. What's cool about ClickBank products especially is that it's not like the highest selling weight loss products will be just about generic weight loss. When I think about a ClickBank product for weight loss, I think, okay, there's a ClickBank product for how to lose man-boobs, or how to lose a belly, or how to remove cellulite. I think about all the products that you always see in the top ranking. That's kind of cool. It's almost like they've blazed the trail before all of us. ClickBank was going after that with that approach. People have a problem, they have a need. The ClickBank products, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the ClickBank products are really geared towards these desperate kind of problems, right?

John Lagoudakis: Exactly, Robert. That's exactly right. You don't want to go too broad and say, "Weight loss products." You want to break it down to a sub-niche. You want to get rid of your man-boobs is one. Do you want to get rid of your thighs for women. Exactly. By doing that, as well, you can create specific demographics. For the man-boobs one, you can gear your sales copy, and your images, and your colors, and the title of your product towards men rather than trying to capture men and women's interest with a generic weight loss product. It's definitely a great idea to break it down to a specific sub-niche rather than trying to sell to everyone. That doesn't work.

A good way that someone put it to me, recently, was it's harder to catch a small fish in the sea, than it is a big fish in a small pond. That's what you're trying to do, when you're targeting sub-niche.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. The other thing that's great about the internet and affiliate marketing is that you're not limited to just one product. If someone finds, like you said, they find the weight loss product for the man, if there's a weight loss product for the women, and so on, then those are different funnels and things like that that an affiliate could set up.

John Lagoudakis: Yeah. One of the biggest mistakes, Robert, that a lot of people make when they start out with their online business, I've definitely made it in the past, I don't know if you have, Robert, but is that we get excited with all the possibilities, and we have too many projects going on at one time. The counsel I always give to people is, pick one area, one niche, get the marketing right for it, be happy with your sales form and make sure it's profitable. Once it's profitable and you're making money with it, if you want to go to a different area, a different sub-niche or a different niche all together, then great, go for it.

Until you do that, don't have more than one project going at the same time because there's so much involved in getting it right. If you're working on two or more projects at the same time, it's very hard to have success. Then you get discouraged because you're doing a lot of work and no particular project is gaining traction and making sales. Definitely encourage people, when you're starting out, pick one strategy, whatever clicks with you, find someone that's having success with that strategy, learn from them. Do everything they say to the T, until you are having success. Once you're having success and you're making at least a full time income from that one strategy, until you're doing that, don't move on to another one.

What I've also found is there's just so much with even just one niche or one sub-niche, it's better then to go deep. Once you're having success, go deep. Create a funnel where you can sell even higher end products in the back end so you can make more money with that niche rather than going into two niches. It's a better way to go anyway.

Robert Plank: I can totally relate to that. I see a lot of people where I'll give them an idea for a website or a landing page or whatever that they should create, and then they're response is, "If I could make one, I'll make 50." I think well yeah, like you say, get the one working and then maybe get to two. I think we've all had to go through that phase. You have, and me especially, I've gone through that phase for sure, early on where I said, "I'm just going to make 10 landing pages. I'll make 10 opt-in forms. I'll make 10 sequences." I'm pushing the goal post too far out and I'm delaying the amount of time it would have taken me to get to the money making stage. It might have taken three months or it might have taken a month before hand, but how I'm pushing it out to nine months or a year, or probably never, because having to switch all those gears and have all those half finished things. Super discouraging. In addition to what you said, a lot of time, a lot of effort, and no money yet because the focus is too split.

John Lagoudakis: Exactly. Again, I made that mistake when I started out. We get so excited. I see a lot of people making it.

Robert Plank: As far as what you're doing with ClickBank, I know that you said you promoted stuff as an affiliate at first, then you built a list, now you create your own products. You're a top 100 listed seller on ClickBank. What is your setup? Are you all in one niche? Is it spread out? Is it some vendor stuff, some affiliate stuff? What do you have setup on ClickBank?

John Lagoudakis: There might be confusion. Definitely, I achieved the 100 ClickBank affiliate status very soon after I started with internet marketing, but I no longer sell a lot of ClickBank products. My focus is on my own products. What I do today is two things. I help people that are getting started online, and definitely I'll point them to networks like ClickBank and JVZoo, where they can promote other people's products, but also, Robert, I help people, and this is the biggest part of my business today, is helping other businesses. People that already have a business, they're already selling products. They maybe have an offline business that they're struggling to get online, or maybe they have an online business and might purely be online and they just needed to take it to the next level because they're not making many or not any sales yet. They just want that help getting traffic, leads, and sales. That's where I focus my time today.

Robert Plank: What you're saying is that where you focus your time on today is with coaching clients? Is it more coaching clients and less of selling your own stuff?

John Lagoudakis: It's a bit of both. You have to be doing it yourself as well to coach other people and to keep up to date. It's always changing. I have a business that is not internet marketing, is not in the internet marketing space, if you know what I mean. It's separate to my coaching business. I have actually two businesses that is not IM related at all. That allows me to, again, keep up to date. Keeping myself in the real world where I'm promoting those businesses and making sales in those businesses. Then I have the coaching business where I'm able to help people, again, anyone that's just starting out online, or those that have businesses that want to improve them.

Robert Plank: Nice. What I've been hearing all through our discussion today is that when you find something that you want to do, and you do what's practical, and you get it set up and you grow it, and then you get it to the point where there's a next logical step to get to. You started with the affiliate marketing with AdWords, then when the game changed a little bit, then you started building your own list and your own SMS list, so that way you can build it up. Then you started making your own products. Now, you're diversifying into these other businesses.

That's what I've been hearing over and over again. You're not locked into one money making strategy. You're not locked into one particular platform, but you're also giving it a chance to work out. Right? You're having enough focus where back when you started with ClickBank, you spent those two years building that up, then when maybe there were other alternatives to ClickBank, or there were other ways to make money. Some of us might get bored with a certain way of getting a income in. Then you kind of transitioned or you diversified and tried out different ways of making money, as opposed to just being stuck with ClickBank, which might have limited your income as the rest of the world changed around you.

John Lagoudakis: It's definitely not good to have all your eggs in once basket. While I tell people, especially when you're starting up, focus on the one niche. What happened to me, I'll sort of give you an idea of the logical progression. When I first started trying to make money online, I found out about affiliate marketing, about ClickBank. I was using Google AdWords, mainly, to promote the ClickBank products. Then, I started using Yahoo and Bing as well, because they had their PPC platforms, that was while Yahoo Overture was still around. Most of my sales were coming through Google AdWords, about 90% of my sales because that's where most of the search engine traffic is. Then, Google changed their policies. That was, I started in 2007. 2009, around the middle of 2009, Google changed their policies and they said, "No, we're not going to allow ClickBank affiliates to promote products online with direct affiliate links."

Overnight, Robert, I tell you it was shattering. Overnight, my income dropped like 90%.

Robert Plank: Oh no.

John Lagoudakis: It really hurt. However, I knew it was coming so I already started building an email list. Then I spent my time focusing on building my list and promoting my products to my list. Then I decided, instead of promoting someone else's products, I'll promote my own products. I created my own product. It's called the List Marketing System, where basically I set up list building sites just like I've created, for other people. I knew that's where I felt people needed the most help. People coming along wanting to make money, they knew they needed to build a list, but it's so hard to get started. Learning email campaigns and setting up high converting squeeze pages and sales funnels, so I just did all that for them. I set it up for them. I did that and I promoted that mainly through webinars.

I got people onto my list. They went to a webinar and I taught them in the webinar, how to build a list, the importance of building a list, why they need to do it in their business and then how to do it. At the end, I said, "Look, you can do all that yourself or I'll create it for you." That's what I did for a while there.

I went through a rough period. I went through a divorce back in 2011 that was the worst thing ever. You wouldn't wish it on your enemies. You know what the great thing was, while I was going through that, because I had automated a lot of my business, I automated a lot of the way I got the traffic. The webinars were automated. They were evergreen webinars, they weren't live webinars. Even while I was going through a tough period, around two years while I was going through that divorce, my mind was so gone I couldn't really focus on my business at all. The beautiful thing is, because I had set up what I had set up in my business, I was actually having the income coming in. I was just doing the things that I needed to do to keep it running. I was able to have my full time income coming in while I was going through that rough period in my life.

When I got out of that, when things started to pick up for me, mentally anyway, and I could focus again, I got approached by a friend of mine who was starting a business in a different niche. He wanted someone to do the online stuff, like take care of the website and do the traffic generation, generate the leads. I went into partnership with him. That's how I started my first non IM business.

Recently I started a second one because of a need. I had another friend approach me, needed to get leads for his business. I started generating leads for him mainly and then that's sort of grown from there because other people in the industry in other areas of the world are having that same need for those kind of leads. That's how the second business got started.

At the same time, while I was working on those two businesses, again, being out of the IM, Internet Marketing, niche, being outside of that, learn a lot in those two niches as well. I thought I've come back and I said, "There's a lot of businesses out there that need help with their internet marketing." Someone like myself that's got experience, been in the industry many years, eight years full time now, eight and a half years, I've come along and I thought, you know what? I should start a consult and see where I basically help these businesses. Yes, there's a lot of people out there, a lot of Internet marketing consultants and agents and agencies out there.

What I have noticed, Robert, is a lot of them, it's like a mechanic. We dread taking our car to a mechanic because, especially if we don't know much about cars, if we don't know the mechanic, it's 50/50 really. Are you going to get the job done properly? Are you going to ripped off? Unfortunately, in the IM industry, Internet Marketing space, it's the same thing.

That first friend of mine that approached me about his business and wanting me to help him out, for example, he had just recently hired an SEO company that were doing work for him. They'd been on board with him for three months. When I joined my friend as a partner, I had a look at their initial proposal and the keywords they were targeting for him. They'd chosen 20 keywords for him. They said, "These keywords we're going to work for you and if we rank on the first page of Google, this is how much traffic you're going to get."

I looked at those keywords, I did the research. The number they'd given him were a total lie. They were saying he was going to get tens, hundreds of thousands of views for these long tail keywords. I did the research. He was lucky to get five, ten views per day. Actually, it was even less than that. It was less than five views per day if you ranked for those key words.

Robert Plank: Oh no.

John Lagoudakis: Yeah. I saw that. He's not the only one. I've hear many horror stories like that. That's where I come in. I figure, look, I'm going to come to this space because there's a lot of good that I can do. I only do work for clients that I know is going to get results. Actually, I give my clients a guarantee. I say to them, "If the leads I generate for you, if you're not making at least enough sales in profits to cover my expenses, don't pay me."

Robert Plank: Nice.

John Lagoudakis: Again, there's that need, that's why I've come back into that space as well.

Robert Plank: Cool. If people were looking to hire you for something like that, or even just see what you're up to, what website could they go to find out all that stuff?

John Lagoudakis: Thanks, Robert. The website, it's just my name, which it's not easy to spell, but I'll spell it out. It's JohnLagoudakis.com.

Robert Plank: Awesome. We'll also toss that link in the show notes. That way even if people don't have time to write all that down or didn't get all that, we'll link to the John Lagoudakis site.

John Lagoudakis: Great. Thank you for that, Robert.

Robert Plank: No problem. Is that the only website? Do you have the Get Rich Click book? Or is that not being promoted right now?

John Lagoudakis: I was a guest in that book. I think the last edition they did of that was back in 2011. It might have been updated 2013. You can get that from Amazon still. My main site, JohnLagoudakis.com where you can find out more about what I'm doing. You can get in touch with me. Also on my website, I do have something that may interest your listeners, Robert. That is, I have a Platinum Online Business Coaching Program. What it is, it's video training I've done myself, step-by-step video training on how to go from choosing your niche all the way through to creating your sales funnel, and even driving traffic and making sales online. All of that's free. Anyone, you go to JohnLagoudakis.com and you click on the banner there, follow the Platinum Online Business Coaching Program, you can get free access to that right now.

Robert Plank: Awesome. They should all go there right now. One more time, it is JohnLagoudakis.com. Thanks for being on the show today, John, and sharing your unique insight and your story, and all that kind of cool stuff.

John Lagoudakis: Thank you, Robert. Appreciate you having me on.