Jonathan Volk Interview

Affiliate Marketer Jonathan Volk was kind enough to take a few minutes and do this interview. He also sent me a photo of his petty cash (kidding).

Here we go:

Keith: I realize that networking and/or partnering is effective in this business but is it 100% necessary in your opinion? (besides the obvious networking with affiliate managers, etc. I’m talking about other marketers)

Jon: Networking with affiliates is not needed to be successful. I’m sure there are quite a few hermit crabs that make way more than I do. In fact some of the big guys I know OF who are making $50,000+ per day are not even known in the industry by the masses.

That being said, I am a strong believer in networking. It can often provide you with that little edge you need to put yourself over the top and open up more areas of income. Overall, I believe the people who end up on top are those who know the people in the industry.

Keith: If you could only do one thing to generate traffic to your sites (with your affiliate offers), besides PPC and word-of-mouth what strategy would you use?

Jon: I would do my best to use SEO / Article Marketing. There is a lot to be made in article marketing and it yields pretty quick results generally. While working on my articles, I would also work on my SEO since it takes a while and can REALLY make you a TON of money.

Keith: What technical skills, besides standard computer use, do you feel, an aspiring affiliate marketer should possess at an absolute minimum to not be held back?

Jon: Honestly, I think most affiliates should have the basic designing skills and coding skills. I’ve been coding for a while (for 9-10 years now) so it has helped me know exactly what I could do as far as technical aspects of the landing page went. It also has helped me not to get ripped off when outsourcing since I know a rough estimate of how much work it would take. Other than those two skills, I also think it would be good to have a general knowledge of websites in general (domain names, DNS, web hosting manager, cpanel, etc)

Keith: What do you feel is considered "old news" or old techniques to make money online that people are still mistakenly wasting their time doing? How can a person know if what they are reading is really going to work and is not outdated information or that they are being mislead? Besides trying it out themselves to see if it will work...is there any other way to validate the information that you know of?

You pretty much know a technique is outdated or more accurately, “old news” when it get’s published into an ebook. A good example is the spamming craigslist ebook that went around in January of ’08 I think it was. I know of people who had been spamming craigslist for many years and after that ebook came out and the cat was out of the bag, the technique became next to impossible.

All the “Free Google Adwords,” and all the majority of these ebooks which were made in 2005-2006 are all fairly outdated and are not worth your money.

The only way you can tell is really by testing. I have tested so many hundreds of ways to make money online since 2004 and many were valid ways to make money but I simply could not get them to work for me. I never would have found affiliate marketing if I didn’t keep trying! Just keep pressing through and you’ll eventually get to your goals.

Keith: When you started to really earn money on the Internet did it turn from a small amount of money to a tremendous amount of money in a very short period of time or was it slow and steady?

I think in the first couple months I hit $5000 which to me at the time was an amazing feat. I thought I had arrived. In fact you can look into the archives of my blog and see how excited I was!

The next couple months, I doubled commissions to $10,000+. Man 5 figures! I thought to myself, THIS IS THE BEST JOB EVER! After that, I continued to double every couple months up to the point where I am now at $140,000+ for April 2008 and should surpass that in May.

As you continue to grow in affiliate marketing, things actually do get easier. You don’t have the guess work of knowing how to setup a campaign, which ones are making money, etc. You learn of all the resources and utilize them to make the most of your time and campaigns.

It may not be this way for everyone though. See I was fortunate enough to have a good amount saved where I left my job and was able to be at home full time trying to make the most out of my opportunities. I’ve been working full time on affiliate marketing for just over a year now.

Keith: Can you describe to us the feelings and the situation when you started to really see huge earnings with your affiliate marketing? Were there certain realizations that you had, things that you wasted your time with that you finally realized were a waste of time? What about things you realized you should spend more time doing?

Large sales days are always exciting. When I see a good day coming, I always give my Dad frequent updates. “I’m up to $10,000 already,” I’d tell him as he’d laugh and go, “GREAT JOB!”

The biggest thing that I wasted my time on was trying to build a bunch of small campaigns making me $100 or so a day. Now, if I don’t think the campaign cant make me more than $1000 per day, I don’t want to even bother. Why waste my time making a $100 / day campaign when I can spend a bit more time and make $1000 per day or more!

The other thing I am still working on is finding a reliable person to outsource my work. I need to spend less time designing and coding and more time marketing which is what will make me money.

Keith: Although I am an affiliate of your PPC program, I will not use the link in this interview but I'd like to know, has there been a lot of money being dished out by you to any of your affiliates so far?

Not really. The PPC Program was actually sort of a flop. At first it did well but now the only people I get who send me a lot of traffic are the ones who spam the link and or just send me traffic from some proxy website for example.

Keith: With so many methods to earn money online, what is your favourite?

Affiliate marketing. Although I have about 4 websites lined up which will allow affiliates to promote so I’ll become an advertiser instead of the affiliate. Being an advertiser is not something I have done before but with good enough products I think I could make a good amount that way as well.

Keith: With so much information available to us, when a new affiliate marketer finally sits down to take action, and the inevitable feeling of “what if this project is going to be just a big waste of time”, how do you handle that and persevere, or has that ever even happened to you?

Trust me, I have felt that many, many times. I am a fairly positive person. I always try to remain positive and have faith that my campaign will work. If it doesn’t I only wasted a couple days and I can move on to the next one.

Keith: Chad from CDF Networks sort of threw us a bone by suggesting we use PPC marketing to promote our offers to the Spanish population . Can you throw us a bone, something that you haven't even mentioned on your blog that very few people are doing?

99% of affiliate pages don’t capture emails. Capture emails and cross market products to those emails in an automated string of emails using Aweber . Increase your profits so that you can dominate the keywords. I offer some more email capturing information here: http://jonathanvolk.com/internet-marketing/email-capturing-information.html

That's it! Hope you enjoyed it. Jonathan does consulting as well for anyone interested. I'm going to be spending a couple hours with him shortly.

Thanks for the interview Jonathan.