Interview with a Pro Affiliate: Brent Dunn

[Morticai]

I know this struggle well. I played Counter-Strike competitively for about 5 years (4 years in college and 1 year after). It was a lot of fun, but I made more money almost immediately after I quit lol

I agree! This is something I have to figure out. Badges sound awesome though We literally have hundreds of lurkers a day already

Pre-Suasion is a fantastic book! I need to reread it. It was one of the 23 books I listened to in 2016

I think this is fantastic advice. I will have people who are brand new who will ask me "I want to make $1000/day", "how can I make $200/day?", etc. I like ambition and think setting goals is good, but it's important to stay grounded. If affiliate marketing was so easy I could explain to someone in an email how to make $1,000/day .... do you think I would be wasting my time answering your email?

Setting goals for learning the steps it takes to be successful. That makes way more sense. Great advice.

It's actually amazing to me how many of my big AM buddies all have been competitive in Counter-Strike, Halo, etc. I played CAL in high school myself. Ironically video games is what sent me down the path of wanting to make money. So I could just game all day lol...

Yeah Pre-Suasion is quite interesting. Understanding human psychology is a huge advantage in this space. So if you ever have any recommendations I'll definitely check them out. One way I find good books is use Blinkest which is basically the cliff notes of a book in audio / written form. If the notes are good then I'll buy the entire book and read it. Books that are 95% of back story to make one point kind of tilt me so I really just enjoy books with a lot of meat.

In terms of monetary goals I had those way back when I first was learning about IM but I didn't make any money ironically until I stopped worrying about it and just focused on growing myself. It may sound like some BS but it's the truth and I've had many friends say the same.

 

[Luke]

Yeah Pre-Suasion is quite interesting. Understanding human psychology is a huge advantage in this space. So if you ever have any recommendations I'll definitely check them out.

I've been keeping a list of books I've been listening to somewhat updated here: https://afflift.com/f/threads/what-books-have-you-recently-read-or-listened-to.165/

The one I recommend from that list based on what you said is probably Brandwashed. Hoping to put together a blog post of the 20+ books I listened to in 2018 soon

In terms of monetary goals I had those way back when I first was learning about IM but I didn't make any money ironically until I stopped worrying about it and just focused on growing myself. It may sound like some BS but it's the truth and I've had many friends say the same.

Not being concerned about money is definitely an advantage.

 

[artron]

Yeah Pre-Suasion is quite interesting. Understanding human psychology is a huge advantage in this space. So if you ever have any recommendations I'll definitely check them out. One way I find good books is use Blinkest which is basically the cliff notes of a book in audio / written form. If the notes are good then I'll buy the entire book and read it. Books that are 95% of back story to make one point kind of tilt me so I really just enjoy books with a lot of meat.

I'm thinking of a million questions for you, Brent...and one that comes to mind is offer analysis and action.
For instance, say you talk to your favorite aff manager, and they mention this offer is killing it, and you should try it.
What do you do to go about testing it? Do you test direct linking vs lander? Do you try testing various forms of lander?
I'm guessing you are pretty good at picking the right funnel based on the offer.
What spaces do you like most? Is it finance stuff? Binaries, gambling, crypto mainly?
Have you worked health+nutra at all? Male enhancement? Relationship products? Would love your thoughts on the top 3 segments...

 

[Morticai]

I've been keeping a list of books I've been listening to somewhat updated here: https://afflift.com/f/threads/what-books-have-you-recently-read-or-listened-to.165/

The one I recommend from that list based on what you said is probably Brandwashed. Hoping to put together a blog post of the 20+ books I listened to in 2018 soon

Not being concerned about money is definitely an advantage.

Haven't read that one I'll have to grab it. Thanks for the suggestion!

I'm thinking of a million questions for you, Brent...and one that comes to mind is offer analysis and action.
For instance, say you talk to your favorite aff manager, and they mention this offer is killing it, and you should try it.
What do you do to go about testing it? Do you test direct linking vs lander? Do you try testing various forms of lander?
I'm guessing you are pretty good at picking the right funnel based on the offer.
What spaces do you like most? Is it finance stuff? Binaries, gambling, crypto mainly?
Have you worked health+nutra at all? Male enhancement? Relationship products? Would love your thoughts on the top 3 segments...

I very rarely direct link. A landing page is one of our primary advantages in AM. The intent of the user prior to seeing an offer is extremely important. A landing page allows us to change the users intent by testing various hooks on their desire.

In terms of testing, if I have traffic I know is doing well in a particular vertical I usually test the campaign on that traffic. When first starting out you don't have this luxury but it's important to always have one variable that you know works. If it's a new offer for example, even if your AM tells you it's working that variable is still an unknown to us. So if we have traffic that we know is working on similar offers and the new offer we are testing bombs, then chances are that offer wont do that well on fresh traffic. The reverse of that is, once we have an offer we know works, it's much easier to test new traffic sources because we have a proven variable. The same is true with banners, landing pages and even device targeting (OS, ISP, Browser version, etc).

Different styles of lander are great to test, but the most important part is testing different hooks first. Once I find a winning hook the I'll try to adapt that hook to different styles of landers, 1-pagers, quiz's, rules lander. The style really depends on the payout of the offer as well. Higher payout offers are higher payouts for a reason. The higher the payout generally the more a visitor needs to be pre-sold on your offer.

My largest verticals have always been dating, home services, apps and content billing in that order. Home services / my own leadgen properties is where I focus most of my time.

But lately I've been learning push so when I'm learning a new traffic type such as push I default back to "wide audience offers" sweepstakes, app installs, work from home, etc.

While I have tested nutra I don't run it with any meaningful volume. Right as I was getting heavy into AM was shortly after 2009 when a lot of affiliates go owned by the FTC here in the states, so for the most part I avoided it.

In terms of relationship products those work great if you can fit it into your dating funnel. Most people overlook the power of capturing someones email because you already know their intent. In this case finding a relationship. By creating your own database of people looking for a relationship you can actually make a lot more money in the long run selling relationship products while also selling them as a lead to various dating sites.

 

[zeratul]

Glad to see you here Brent!
I have been reading your blog for some time(about half a year) and learned a lot from it.
As of 9 month experience into affiliate marketting, i still can't make many profits, $x per day is common, and $xx in good days. but sum it up, the total amount of spending and earning nearly same from the beggining.
Still, I found it's very hard to run pops traffic. Do you suggest keeping working on it or change to other traffics like native or facebook?

 

[Morticai]

Glad to see you here Brent!
I have been reading your blog for some time(about half a year) and learned a lot from it.
As of 9 month experience into affiliate marketting, i still can't make many profits, $x per day is common, and $xx in good days. but sum it up, the total amount of spending and earning nearly same from the beggining.
Still, I found it's very hard to run pops traffic. Do you suggest keeping working on it or change to other traffics like native or facebook?

What are you doing with your profits? If you're making money then stick with it, but use your earnings to test other sources / verticals.

There is no "magic" traffic source. Each one has it's own unique quirks. Which has a bit of learning curve to understand and profit from.

What kind of offers are you mostly focusing on?

 

[zeratul]

What are you doing with your profits? If you're making money then stick with it, but use your earnings to test other sources / verticals.

It's simple math, $x per day, the total money in a month can't afford the spending, such as trackers, spy tools, hosting....

I tried scale up, the countries I'm running in only have small volume, I tried many traffic sources, but can't get more traffic.
Maybe i need to learn how to get more traffic, I'm mainly working on PropellerAds, only small profit. sometimes with zeropark i can make more money, but it's very unstable, the targets converts better seems always gone within a few days.

Also i tried Tier 1 countries with big volumes, it's very hard for me, burn a lot of money without conversion, so i'm a little scared to run in tier 1 now.

What kind of offers are you mostly focusing on?

mainly sweeps and pin submits.

Thanks for your kindly reply ;-)

 

[MrRizi2020]

Very very impressive information brent thanks