Podsum

Back to the boards: Scaling Offers to $400k per day, Media Buying & AI

Transcript

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  1. Carter's origin story

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    John with my co-host today, Mr. Akatif and Spooky Carter York Marketing. I'm saying that because it's in your Google Meet name. Carter, my man, you're the headline. You're the reason why people signed up today for this. Who are you? How'd you get started doing this? What brought you to today?
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    Carter Yeah, thanks for the short intro. So, I mean, like most people, I think I stumbled in affiliate marketing just by happenstance. I don't think anyone really set out to join the affiliate marketing space and just found it through word of mouth or something like that. This was like in January 2020 or so. I was basically working a job selling subscriptions to physical newspapers. which obviously fucking suck because everyone already either had a newspaper subscription or was digital at that point. So I spent all my time Googling like how to make money for yourself, be your own boss, work online, et cetera. I found some random posts on Reddit from a guy saying he was making a thousand dollars a day from affiliate marketing.
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    Carter and i was basically like well that guy's making double in a day what i make in a whole week so i started messaging random guys on reddit saying like hey man uh you don't know me i don't have money to give you i have a lot of free time i have a lot of ambition i'll work for you for free just let me look over your shoulder um and i'll do any work you don't want to do just let me see how you're doing this and eventually i found a dude that said yeah i'll gladly teach you but i'm moving to thailand next week to bootstrap my business i'm starting an agency i'll teach you but it has to be in person in
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    Carter thailand so i sold like the little i had at that point um bought a one-way ticket out to thailand stayed there for a while very much like a mr miyagi karate kid come up soy um and that guy kind of got me into the space um and i think where things really blew up for me was around that time i was noticing no one wanted to share anything everybody was super skeptical about giving away information especially at that time the only guys talking to me were making a hundred dollars profit day on one thing and they didn't want to give away their one you know income source and so i started sharing everything i could with everybody else and i think the
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    Carter differentiator for me was i realized um well i only know how to make a hundred dollars profit on this one thing but if i can get a hundred different people on a call and share this one thing with them i can get back a hundred different things in return just through reciprocity so it's very much like the old story you've heard of like a guy who started with a red paper clip and over a year like traded up to a house i did the same thing just with information um and over the course of a few months started sharing with bigger dudes that were willing to talk to me because then I was making a thousand profit a day and after you know
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    Carter six months it was like 10,000 profit a day and by like October 2020 which would have been 10 months into my journey I had my first like six-figure profit day um and I mean everyone was kind of dumbfounded by how quickly I did it but it it wasn't that I was really a genius or figured out things other people were doing i was just trading all this information with other dudes um and just using everything i learned and basically copy and pasting things other people gave me um so it blew up really really quickly for me um from there basically ran the affiliate game three or four years did everything from lead agenda bsl offers i was number one affiliate on
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    Carter clickbank a couple years ago for bsl offers specifically in like the bizop space um you can't really see it but it's like a little gold or a little glass plaque for number one affiliate on clickbank back there um and then finally pivoted into like owning our own offers and brands and kind of doing everything internal and mostly out of the affiliate space for now. But I mean, I still have a pretty good pulse on everything that's happening from all the connections I've made over the years, but that's kind of where I was and where I am now. And we can always talk about where I'm going in the future if people are curious, but that's kind of the long and short of it.

  9. Three principles of success

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    John Before we start taking questions and have this chat flood. what what do you you met a lot of affiliates you've been you've been affiliate you've been in this space for what like seven plus years at this point what's what do you believe gave you the success you've you created for yourself versus like the vast majority that doesn't reach anywhere near the numbers you've hit yeah it's a mixture of two things i think number one as a kind of
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    Carter touched on was like networking for sure um if you start going to conferences you're going to realize the top 50 to 100 people in this space you're going to see them at every conference you're going to see them in the same circles once you start like building relationships like that affiliate marketing becomes pretty easy like it very much does become like a rich people's club I think that's what I really loved about this business model was you can go have a conversation at a bar at a conference with one of these dudes and they can tell you what they're running, where they, you know, what network they got it from, what creatives they're running.
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    Carter And if they're generous enough to share that with you, you almost have their entire business model right there just from a few sentences of a conversation. So I always helped people without the expectation of getting anything in return. just helping people felt good. So I did that, but it always came back tenfold for me. I can't tell you how many times someone came back six months later who I did a call with them where they had never run an ad before. And I spent an hour on a call helping them, never expecting to hear from them again. They come back months later saying, Hey, I'm making 20K profit a day now on something.
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    Carter um you're so helpful like i'll show you everything i'm doing here it is you can just paste in and have money um because you just never know who like the next guy is that's going to come up there's always new ways of dudes or women making so much money in this space um so networking is by far the biggest thing i harp on constantly um and then the other thing i think that a lot of newer and mid-level guys kind of fail to do is um when you ask bigger questions you get bigger answers so like when i first started out my question was always how can i make a hundred dollars profit a day and you're gonna probably get an answer
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    Carter for that but then when you start asking yourself how can i make a hundred thousand profit a day or do you know eight figures profit a year or something like that you're gonna have to come up with a far different solution than something that's just run ads by myself pasted um and by just like you know setting a higher standard for myself and wanting to be a lot larger than most of the other people sometimes i wouldn't reach my goals but i'd always reach a level much higher than if i set lower goals um so i think that's super important like at this point i'm always asking myself for a new business like what would i have to build in
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    Carter And whether I hit it or not, I'm going to have a far more successful business than the guy who's asking how he can make a hundred grand a year with affiliate marketing. I think those two things alone will get you extremely far in the space. I guess number three is don't be a dick. Like it's, I'm sure people have touched on this, but the space is very small, despite most people's beliefs. And it gets smaller, the higher up you get.
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    Carter if you're someone in the space doing well like i either heard of you or i know somebody who has heard of you and you can bet i'm going to ask around before i work with somebody new on what their reputation is and if you're churning and burning through relationships and affiliate networks um you're only going to get so far most of those guys last for a year or two they fizzle out they go bankrupt or no one wants to work with them and that's just the case

  17. Conferences

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    John yeah those three things i think are probably the three main staples i would say in this uh for my success for sure oh and i'll i'll be with you on number one first man like i remember i still remember almost three years ago to this day you hopped on and called me and asked for nothing in return when i jumped into aca like just bleeding money having no clue and
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    John you're getting paid pennies like what the are you doing and yeah i went and found someone that paid me more and started the work man so uh what one a lot of guys go to conferences but i think it's still almost like an 80 20 maybe even 90 10 of people that are actually like doing a majority or like a higher volume versus the guys that are like dabbling what what's up go deeper into your experience at conferences of how how you found like the best use of your time at conferences i get out i get asked this a lot too and i might have a different answer yeah i mean the very first one i went to is literally january 2020 um
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    John i knew nobody i showed up with the one friend i met online that was teaching me how to run abs and
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    Carter It's funny because at that time I was making like $200 profit a day and I remember walking around the conference floor looking at all these guys in suits. I'm like, look at these broke guys. They don't realize I'm making $1,000 profit a day. Like I'm so huge. But like I think the biggest thing is the first one or two conferences are going to be awkward, especially if you don't know anybody. But I would still urge people to go out there by yourself.
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    Carter some hands regardless of who you meet it very much snowballs like all you have to do is get in with one or two people that are willing to talk to you maybe they invite you to the chandelier bar afterwards or a party or something like that and from there you just meet more people and as your circle grows it's very easy just by association or intros to get more people
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    Carter but it's it's just time investment like anything else like every year I'm meeting new people bigger people it's it's a very long-term investment but it's it's probably the most crucial thing for sure but I think getting the ball rolling by just putting yourself out there the first time and not knowing anybody and still being willing to to show up is really what it is I mean every business 90% of it's just showing up and doing the stuff other people are afraid to do and i mean the conferences are really no different and most people are very willing to share with you if they see that you're hungry and you're actually you know want to put into practice like what they're telling you
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    Carter because no one wants to admit this but everyone's favorite topic to talk about is themselves um hence why i'm on a call right now for free with 100 people just sharing for no reason like people people love to talk about what they're doing especially someone that's actually interested in listening so what's the next conference you're
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    Carter dude we rarely go anymore because like we're kind of oh no brands and offers and internal um we're kind of getting more in like the ecom space and things like that so i mean i still go to like affiliate summit west and things just to see like all the friends and everything but um it's actually kind of exciting that we're branching out to going to like stuff like ecom conferences and actually more legitimate branded conferences um because i'm a small fish in a big pond again like i can't just default to finding other people that i already knew um i have all these conversations and most people are tentative to talk to me because they don't know who i am and they think
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    Carter i'm some small dude and you know i have to work my way back up the food So, I mean, it's mostly e-commerce conferences now. I'm sure we'll be at Affiliate Summit West, probably some of the affiliate worlds, especially because I just found out this year there are e-com events at these affiliate conferences. And I had no idea because like we never did them. But so it's kind of similar conferences to before, but going off to like the different parties and offshoots of the conference I haven't been to before.

  27. Affiliate vs offer owner

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    John How's your life change going from affiliate to offer owner?
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    Carter - Consistency, man. Affiliate, as good as the money is, probably every year, two or three months of the year is 90% of the profit I make over the year. You just kind of have to keep showing up and eating shit for a bit till something works again. And then you make a ton of money and whether the offer dies or whatever.
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    Carter um i can touch on that more later i also didn't have a good team infrastructure automations in place at that point so i think it would be more consistent now but um affiliate uh revenue every month looked like this and with owning our own brand it looks like this it's a lot slower for sure um we spent 12 straight months eating and not making any money and didn't take my first profit distribution until month 12 but now we're know we're netting eight plus figures a year now at this point and it goes up every month it hasn't once went down over like the 13 uh over the 18 months we've been doing this um so the consistency is great but i think investing
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    Carter all the time and spending spend the longer you invest time in something before you're like reaping the rewards of it typically the rewards are going to be higher towards the end of it So that would probably be the biggest change. And I'm learning a lot. We never had to make funnels before for affiliate marketing. So that was the biggest hurdle for sure. We'd run traffic straight to offers that are already proven and tested by good funnel guys. So that was for sure the biggest bottleneck that we had to get over. But consistency for sure is far better now.

  32. Money, wealth and tax

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    John I'm going to ask one more question, and then I want to spin it over to Jason for whatever questions he has before we go to Q&A. What were your principles or habits around money as you started to make significant amounts of money on the affiliate side? How did you grow your wealth, your money stack, your assets? It doesn't need to be super specific, but general principles. I see a lot of people fuck this up.
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    Carter yeah um so i can't tell luckily like well two things one i came from the midwest where you know we've it's just not a very flashy place so like i wasn't in circ that status from having money was really a thing so my lifestyle didn't really change I think that helped a lot I never really bought anything expensive or flashy I just invested pretty much every dollar I got I tell people this all the time like that first million dollars or so like that you make make sure you have like a million dollars or so invested for passive income if anything blows up in your business you're pretty much good where a lot of guys make the mistake of when they make their
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    Carter first you know six figures or so they immediately blow it and then succumb to lifestyle creepwear
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    Carter they have a much more expensive apartment more expensive car and then especially in the affiliate marketing space as everyone knows like you could think the money's never going to dry up and eventually it always does at some point um and so i kind of was lucky that i was in circles of guys that i saw blowing the money like that so it already helped me not do that um but in terms of like the wealth building and everything that's probably the first thing i would say um I don't follow Grant Cardone that much, but he did have some really good advice on this that I thought resonated well with me, where he said, if you can't afford to buy something with the passive
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    Carter income from your investments and you can't afford it. So if you want that Lamborghini, you better be making $40,000 a year in investments for that car payment or the Rolex or whatever it is. And I think that's a really good benchmark to think about.
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    Carter and then obviously tax strategy is really important so the other thing that was big for me especially when cash flow was more tight um once you start making six plus figures like your tax rate could be you know 40 so what we started doing was finding ways that we could just like put a band-aid or take the can down the road for um paying taxes and what worked for us you know back then was in december we'd basically wire all of our money out to agency account providers just somewhere else so we could write out that money as prepaying for ad spend for the following year and as that revenue and money comes back in in january now you don't have taxes
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    Carter on that money until the end of that year it works for like a year or two eventually you're gonna have enough where you're not gonna trust sending millions of dollars out to an ad account provider or something like that but um it really helps you scale when the time comes where you had a couple hundred k and you had to go pay them 50 60k in taxes um your cash flow is just gonna be way more tight and you're not gonna be able And by the time it came to pay taxes, by then we had enough time to basically get some tax strategies in place with investments. And then I'm using similar investments and tax strategies to what you're doing now.
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    Carter As you know, we use the same guy these days. yeah but i mean don't spend don't spend your money until you have a lot invested would probably be my number one advice um and a good mindset for that to know if you should be spending money on it this is i don't know if i read this anywhere if i just came up with it but um whenever i saw myself like looking at something flashy to buy like a lamborghini or something like that I would always stop myself and ask if if nobody knew that I had this thing, like, would I care that I still had it or would I still care that I had it?
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    Carter And for me, I'm like not a car guy, really. So I realized like. yeah you're right like i only want this because i want someone to see that i have that and it's not a great reason to do it or like people fly private and if they couldn't post it on instagram they probably wouldn't be flying private um most times um so that was a really other good mindset to have i think is just ask yourself that question
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    John guys let's uh start dropping questions in the chat for q a and did we lose active i saw him freeze i think he might have oh no that's oh did someone else join we could always kick someone out i didn't let anyone else in no unless he's unless he's still here i don't see him in the
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    Carter um i don't see him on the people know he might have bounced well it says a hundred still unless one's like a note taker or something no i didn't i didn't cue anyone else there's one note taker um in the in the meantime i can ask i can answer these questions while you're working on that um uh jason williams why don't i leave a review for this user experience you can send that to d's nuts um What else did we ask? Best tax strategies that you found. The number one thing I just mentioned was probably the wiring the money out for the agency accounts. I don't know if that's necessarily a thing as much anymore.
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    Carter And you kind of have to have a good relationship with the agency rental people because number one, you need to trust them that you can send that money out to them. And they're actually going to let you spend on ads and not run off with it.
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    Carter yeah i mean i don't know how how strict they are with that anymore um it worked really well the main things we're doing now for tax strategies is um and i don't know how accessible this is depending on like what your net worth is because most of the investment guys we've used in the past for these strategies they typically only want to work with you if you're have at least like you know 500k to a million a year in uh in liquid income that you have to know divert taxes on but typically without getting too in the weeds on it it's investments that have a return but double as like a tax write-off so for example buying you know a warehouse equipment
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    Carter or something where you're putting money down for a loan and the the principal loan balance basically can write that off of the tax deduction um and then you rent them out to you know warehouse facilities or something like that i've done some plays where a solar play um i'm not going to begin to pretend like i'm really smart with tax stuff i just pay people that are smarter than me to worry about it so i'll try to explain
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    Carter the solar one essentially i think we're buying solar panels and for other people and then we were able to use the tax credits for our income so if you had like 100k in taxes at ul for example um you could basically buy 50k worth of solar panels and then you could write off 100k worth of taxes so it just cut your tax rate in half um but again depending on like what level you're at
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    Carter probably default to just finding ways to get the money out of your account for a business expense where it comes in the following year to start um but on a higher level note if anyone in here is doing you know seven plus figures a year in profit and income i do have people like i'd be happy to introduce you to um where they can effectively get your tax rate down to you know 10 to 15 depending on how aggressive you want to be with it
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    John I'm still problem solving with Agatef. Let's keep going.

  50. Capabilities that were missing

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    Carter Yeah, no worries. Okay, there's a lot more questions in here. You're from affiliate to offer owner. What capabilities did you realize were missing? Okay, yeah, this is a great question. Managing a team and actually building like a good team structure was by far the biggest one for me. I had a really hard time. With hiring people, because I would hire people, I'd wait a week. And if they weren't as good as I was after doing it for years, like I would just get frustrated and be like, well, I don't need an employee for this. I'm going to do it myself. And you can't really grow a business when you have your hands in basically every section of the business.
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    Carter So for me, I'm going to be honest, I still don't have the mindset. or the skill set to do that. All I did was I partnered with somebody who was much better at doing that than me. He's far more like an engineer-brained, operational-focused person where I'm more like... I guess the way Apple, Apple's book, like Steve Jobs and them, they described it as like most businesses have two partners and one's a visionary and one's an integrator with a visionary and more be like the Steve Jobs role where they, you know, they find the ways to make money. They find like the new things that they want to do.
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    Carter but you need like a much more operationally savvy person to actually build out the infrastructure to do it um and i was lucky enough to find someone that was great at you know hiring a team setting up the processes getting all the project management in place where it was all running you know like a well-oiled machine without me um that was the biggest capability that i was lacking for sure um and patience and like um What I've noticed with pretty much all the top guys in the space, if you pay attention, they are doing one thing for a long fucking time.
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    Carter Like all the biggest dudes I know, they're either doing Medicare and have only done Medicare for seven years or they built like call tracking platform like Ringba and spent six years before it was like really blowing up. Where affiliate is, you know, if I'm not making money on something new in a week, like I'm basically saying. you know forget it um so the patience was the biggest thing for sure i was lucky to have enough you know capital and income coming from affiliate while we were building this and it wasn't as scary
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    Carter uh like i said in my introduction like we spent 12 months like i i went negative 500k in it before i even recouped my investment on building this um and now it's netting a lot of money but like what i realized from that was patience on like building stuff like that it's it's super important to get
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    Carter especially i mean the other added bonus is most affiliates suffer from is if someone can just go on the ad library and rip your video and link and have your whole business then the way adam young told me about that he's like you don't have a business dude you have a cash machine but if someone can just copy and paste your business in 10 seconds you don't have a business so um that was definitely the two biggest factors for sure i do know enough about the team building structure now if anyone wants to hear about it um i didn't build it myself but i at least saw how to please definitely do it yeah okay okay cool so um the biggest things for

  57. Building a creative team

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    Carter like affiliate marketing specifically like we have we have more roles than this now because we have other moving parts but i think for affiliate like a constant influx of creatives is the biggest thing most people are lacking in um like when i'd have a video that worked i would beat that thing into the ground for months and months and months just like having my media buys throw a new hook on the front of it like 100 different variations of the same video the only reason we're doing that is because we didn't have any other you know winners to find um but all of our videos at the time were me filming them myself as most people in here probably recognize my face from
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    Carter you know the ad libraries that back in my affiliate days um having a team infrastructure on creators was by far the biggest and the way that we finally did that again because someone much smarter than me was partnering with me doing this we would just hire a bunch of video editors i kind of touched on this a bit in john's yesterday but we would just go on upwork build a short list of all the good candidates by looking at the job experience their work portfolio from like past videos they've made and we'd hire five sometimes seven or eight at a time and we throw them all in a slack channel together and we would give them all the same task and basically let
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    Carter them know like they're all being vetted against one another and anybody who's up to a certain caliber is going to stay on the team and i think that was a big unlock for us because like most people i'm assuming in here i used to do the method of i'd find one guy i would think oh this guy looks pretty good i would ask him to make some videos like the videos would suck he wouldn't like turn his work in on time all these things and i'd have to ask myself
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    Carter is uh this guy bad or am i giving the wrong direction am i giving the bad instructions is it my fault but when you have seven or eight people it's so much easier to compare apples to apples with all these different people um and it's not like you have to hire them off like a full-time position it's we just hire them all for the exact same task and we basically give them an example video either of a winning video we've made or a competitive video that we know is scaling and we just grade them on different factors like one of them being turnaround time aka how fast uh they you know they turn in their work after it's assigned to them how
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    Carter well they followed instructions how much they varied from the the source material we gave them for making the creatives um because a lot of people will just you know they'll change one clip out of it or make an identical video and that's not what we want we want people to actually Be free thinkers coming up their own ideas And then lastly we'd paste them on an ad account whichever one got the best play from Facebook I don't care if the video looks like shit if those ones are making more money than the other people like that's the guy I'm gonna hire
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    Carter but I think the big thing with the video editors that we did separate from other people is instead of just hiring an editor that only edits videos and then having like external people like copywriters and stuff passing the scripts over to them we told the video editors that we expect complete autonomy from them so they would actually go do research on angles do the copywriting themselves mostly using ai but they would actually be pass with generating all the scripts uh generating like the voices in 11 labs or like an ai voiceover tool finding b-roll clips off youtube to mix and match with it um and by doing that like they're pretty much like a self-sufficient person in your business and that's
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    Carter very easy to hire one or two good guys like that and not have to go build the pieces around them to find a good copywriter at the early stages now you're wondering if the copywriter sucks at scripts the video editor sucks at whatever um and you are going to have to pay a little bit more for quality but i mean a va like shitty va is what like a couple bucks an hour a good va still only 10 12 bucks an hour so like you're not paying that much more but the difference is very high
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    Carter where it actually costs you more to pay people less in the long run from what i've seen like we'd rather just find the highest quality people um so that was basically it and the other thing with like hiring editors like that is give them very strict ground rules on expectations because if you just give them free reign they might go and submit one batch of videos a week but we tell them we expect this many videos a week of this quality this many different angles for the videos, et cetera.
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    Carter If they have very strict guidelines like that, then they're not going to take advantage of you because most VAs, if you give them a loose leash, like they're probably taking five or six other jobs, juggling all of them and not dedicating their work to you. And then the last thing we did, which was pretty smart on my business partner's idea.
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    Carter was we have a chart that actually the way we're labeling the ads and like the ad accounts we have like the editor's name for each ad so the bot is actually showing how much ad spend we're getting from each video editors videos divided by how much we're paying them and you can see on like the line chart week to week which editors their lines trending up or downwards so it helps us keep
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    Carter the performance we're getting versus like the money we're putting into them so if we have more expensive guys but they're getting five times more ad spend their their their data points are still higher than the other people and it makes project management very easy because you can see which people are slacking or making lower quality videos in that regard um and you could probably quantify
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    Carter you know tasks or messages center whatever it is um that's just a really good way to track progress and if they're improving or slipping or whatever um that's probably the best thing i would say is just hire multiple people for that same role in higher fast and firefast because with vas you're gonna you know you're gonna you're gonna find probably one really good one out of like five typically um but the

  70. Media buyers vs creatives

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    John the good ones are really good for sure what was your win ratio for media buyers like like i'm going through a hiring phase right now and i'm finding like we're testing six or seven at once all the same offers same creatives just like a unique tracking link and dude yeah they all interview well and then two of them already like just had no idea what the they were doing out the
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    Carter yeah i mean i think the i we we're not very media buying heavy so this might be a better question for jason but like from what i found at least in recent times is often the creatives are so much more primary and media buying secondary like we don't have any media buyers on our team we just have the video editors and then we have bots or you could use vas to basically upload the the ads to the campaigns and then maybe 20 minutes a day we'll go look through those campaigns and basically just cut the losers and scale the winners but the other thing is like i feel like a lot of media buyers unless they have specific like lead gen or affiliate
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    Carter backgrounds like those agency level media buyers like their media buying strategies just don't really resonate they're not You're basically interviewing 10 different people that are going to throw up an auto bid CBO and a retargeting campaign identically. But I think you have media buyers on your team, right, Jason? You might be able to answer this better than me.
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    Jason Yeah, I do. And there's a few things that you've said here that like a lot of words, which are great words. And then there's like the ethos or the principle underneath it.
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    Jason uh and this is what i think people miss a lot right like they're like oh i do these things this way but what i hear is a i hire a bunch of people i try them out and i know some are going to fall out that's an amazing strategy b i put them all into a group together to work together and and when you hire in groups you get such better output uh outcomes than if you hire solo right because you've got one person coming into this whole group of people that know each other now if you hire them in groups they all know each other um another thing in general uh for those of you that did have small teams don't have
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    Jason teams or new to teams I hate meetings, but meetings are the most important thing you can do, right? And specifically, there were two things you mentioned in there, a board with accountability on it and a meeting to look at that board. And if that's only 15 minutes twice a week, always have a project management board that comes up. Here's what our goals are. And then always. hold whoever accountable for that on that project management board hey jim you said you were going to get this done lisa you said you were going to get this done are you on track now they're they're you're not like hold it you're not going to them and saying hey you got to do your
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    Jason you're basically in front of their peers they're committing to do what they agreed to do so they don't want to look bad in front of their peers later on and i found i i used to hate meetings i never wanted to be in meetings but you know meetings where you can bring these people together hold them accountable as a group they'll start to perform as a group and then you actually don't even have to do it nearly as as much anymore um on the media buy side i think the uh i think your media buyer has to be a creative strategist right like they um and i think the best creative strategists were media buyers and because a great creative strategist looks at
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    Jason data and and a lot of creatives don't right they just are like i build creatives tell me whether i did good or not but like when i look at a creative strategist i want them to have media buying skills but also be a great art creator or you know what editor or whatever they are so i when i think of media buyers i think of them as as creative strategists i also they typically are heavily on

  79. AI and the end of media buying

  80. share
    Jason you know landing page stuff like that much more so than putting ads up and adjusting budgets that's maybe 10 to 20 percent of the job in my opinion at this point in time and i i had said something in in one of my groups the other day that like i just don't believe media buying is going to be around in two years from now the ai is progressing so quickly um it's just there the ai is going to be better than us i don't know how many of you pull reports out of facebook or google with an api key um but you can just have it pull the stuff out tell you what to do and then you're like could you just do
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    Jason it and then it just does it right with some human in the loop there um like i run some google campaigns it looks at quality score what negative keywords all that right just does it now i'm in the loop in two years from now it's going to be better than any human um in my opinion and so that it's it's like lean into creative here for another period of time they they aren't there on the creative yet i think it'll take them a little bit longer um but i you know if i were all of you i would be thinking about everything after the click or after the call right like how do you how do you build stuff there like carter said
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    Jason you know stability i think philly it's a great place to start i think it's the most amazing place in the world to get your chops you don't have to worry about the back end you don't have to worry about customer support you don't have to worry about building software or anything else but it you know most of you should have
  83. share
    Jason not not just the creative and media buying but after the click and maybe that's you're really good at listicles maybe that's your you know really good at finding uh cracking place or traffic sources that have never worked before but just i remember when i came in and it was uh i was like oh i'm gonna run payday loans on google and i went in and i put in payday loan keywords and i sent it to an affiliate link and i got slaughtered right like that's what media buying is going to be like on facebook and google in my opinion in two years maybe three years you guys in this room like jordan who's just automating all his creative putting you know pumping it
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    Jason in there i don't know if andre is here you know there's guys out there already fully automating these systems and if if some affiliate can automate these systems you've uh traffic sources that are the have literally all they care about it that's their whole business is making money on ads and they have the ai and they have the money so you know it's uh foregone conclusion in my opinion yeah i mean for the most part like our media buying is all done by ai too because ryan's been building all those media buying bots for us and the training of them is
  85. share
    Carter scary fast on how good they can get because you can really just plug the a system user into facebook with an ai tool and if you have like a well-established account they can just go through all the edit history of your campaigns and basically see what time you're making decisions on what and basically just deduce like what you're thinking was for why you were doing certain things and you can have like a fully trained media buying buy within a couple of days by just following those systems so um yeah i agree i mean that's that's why i think craven offers is so much bigger now is Media buying is very much going to become secondary soon if it hasn't already.
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    Carter So I totally agree with all that.
  87. share
    Jason I mean, everything that we're doing is, you know, we're involved in mass tort, but all the way to the retainer signing, right? Insurance, selling direct to the broker, you know, whatever, right? It's like software lead router, like owning the software platform like. i uh does that not mean you can make money as an affiliate you definitely can the opportunities will always be there right like but are you going to be able to scale as a pure affiliate uh if on facebook and goo i'd say facebook and google in particular because there's a lot of other platforms that there's opportunities that they are not sophisticated like these people
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    Jason whether that's Reddit or Snapchat or connected TV or I don't know, whatever other I've been hearing lately and whatever the other platforms are that people are talking about out there, those opportunities will be there. But I think Facebook and Google platforms are are going to go away or not that the opportunities are going to still be there, but they're going to be there for the people that like on the offer and If you're just sending links to a click, I think that business is going to go away on Facebook and Google sooner rather than later. And I've been in this since 2003, and it's been a long time.

  89. Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Google

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    William I got a quick question for you guys. How do you sell the same product between Facebook and TikTok? How do you change the creatives?
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    Carter uh i i don't think i really changed it that much to be honest the only difference is like facebook we can still go pretty heavy on images and they're just gonna flop on tick tock um tick tock's very much more like ugc focused as you you probably already knew um but for the most part i mean like the first thing we're doing to test something on tick tock is i'm just pasting the same videos in going off of like what the tick tock data shows me like any new product or offer we have working i'll just paste it identically over to tick tock um their algorithm seems to dial in a bit slower so we're still kind of manually doing bids and stuff
  92. share
    Carter like that but um and their algorithm in my experience is a lot more creative heavy where the creators fatigue faster so i'll load a lot more creatives in one campaign it seems to do better
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    Carter i i've never really scaled tick tock crazy high like at my best i've maybe spent like 10 grand a day on there um when it's good it's good but like i i don't hear about a lot of guys really scaling like crazy on tick tock unless you have like a kind of tick tock focused um product what i've noticed actually that's really good on places like tick tock and snapchat is most people have a you an idea that it's just younger people on there but people 55 plus 65 plus are going on those platforms so when we're running more like older people focused products on there it's a smaller demographic base than like facebook but nobody else is advertising to them on there
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    Carter so just going against the grain for older people on there has been really good for us um but yeah i mean it's the same concept as facebook in my opinion it's just pasting a ton of creatives let it rip and don't question why something's working why another thing's not just like follow the data um but yeah i mean i'm much more quantity towards carter so it's like youtube shorts yep you're doing uh it's good i mean google's so big that i mean honestly i think we just run performance max campaigns where we just give it every placement but youtube shorts is probably kind of um we have some managing our google i haven't run a lot of google myself truthfully but um i
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    Carter think the harder part with google is there's so much stricter stricter on like the creatives in the algorithm process um you're not going to be able to get away with as aggressive creators on google they'll flag it immediately so you kind of got to run cleaner but um i mean the skill opportunity on google if you're good is monstrous because they're what like 10 times bigger audience than facebook i'd imagine um but it's it's never been our biggest platform but it's definitely a pay-to-play platform for sure like facebook you can paste a creative in and either works day one or a dozen uh on youtube like we'll let something run seven days and go negative and it just gets better over
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    Carter time because their algorithm i think does what they advertise it is doing where facebook says let it run seven to 14 days and it'll get better and typically it's not always the case um so google it's it's definitely we just go way more in the hole on burning money before it gets good but i will say google is far more consistent it's never been our biggest scale but once something's doing well it does well every day for months like we had a we have a friend um
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    Carter Justin Gacina, who might be on this call, he runs Google search campaigns and he was telling me he had a Google search campaign for calls that he didn't open it for a year and it still net him like 800K profit that year. Like once it's good, it's good on Google and you don't have to look at it, but it just spent a lot of time getting it to that point.

  98. Native advertising and reps

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    John What about native? Have you had any success on native?
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    Carter The closest to native we've gotten is Newsbreak. I mean, that's so technical and split-testy that, like, the way my mind works, that's just not going to be conducive for native. But, like, we've looked into hiring media buyers. That's a good point to, like, what Jason was talking about is, I mean, all these new guys default to Facebook and TikTok. Where native, it's mostly, like, OG guys. But, like, there's still a lot of money to be made on there.
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    Carter i haven't ever made money on there but i haven't really tried but i mean it's a huge platform um i couldn't i don't know the ins and outs of the media buying strategies on there but um i mean that's another good one to diversify too if you can find somebody to launch ads for you because it's just a platform no one's thinking to touch anymore at least the newer generation guys
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    John I was at a dinner here for the event and like smaller circle telehealth guys and I was sitting next to this guy he was telling me I was just like dude yeah telehealth's tough man like I'm just like in and out of profitability like for months now and he's like man like we were crushing with one that like dollar Brazilian method everyone was using he was hitting on meta like like 10 20 30k days spend across accounts with that and then as soon as the method died up he started losing money he pivoted pivoted native this guy's been in the space for like 15 years pretty low-key he's spending like 50k a day now on native and he said it's easier than
  103. share
    John doing the fucking dollar method to squeeze for all those months he made money scaling on uh meta what is
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    Carter native is like basically image at so if you're browsing a news article and you see those like banner images on the side that are basically saying like you know if you're browsing forbes or whatever website it is it's like the little side images on articles essentially it could be videos too i guess or gifs or whatever but basically when you sign up for a native platform like taboola they have a huge network of place like msn.
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    Carter com espn things like that so when you launch an ad you're basically popping up on like all these large news sites um okay very low cpms very low cpc conversion rates way lower um but you still make great money because the costs are so cheap um the one the one thing we do use native for i will say is like we'll use native for spy tools for finding things because
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    Carter one like as i said it's so much more split test heavy so if i'm finding like advertorials or landing pages or something to replicate on native i'm much more confident that those guys have spent a lot of time dialing that in perfectly where facebook they could just threw up anything and same with their images where they've split test so many images so when i'm taking those over from like native to facebook the the hit rate on those is far higher than if i get something from facebook to facebook um for that reason and also because i think a lot of guys on native might not necessarily be on facebook for their stuff um so it's like a newer creative and landing page that
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    Carter hasn't already been saturated on there but that's really the extent of my knowledge on native yeah i guess actually the other thing i will say about native before i move on to like another question is um their reps are far more accessible like these newer or less volume platforms like snapchat's not newer but still smaller volume i'd say like snapchat to some extent tick tock native like their reps are so much more hands-on with helping you launch campaigns targeting things like Or like Facebook, you're going to be hard pressed to find a rep that's going to get on call with you and help you with anything. So I think for that reason, it makes it a lot more accessible.
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    Carter But if I was going to do native, I just basically ask around in groups to find a rep at a native company like Taboola or Outbrain, and they'll actually get on calls with you and teach you how to set the campaigns and everything.
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    John Have you found success meeting reps from other regions? Like I was at, I'm obviously here still in Cancun at the event. I met the Latin America, Google team. They had a booth from, from like, like multiple, uh, countries like Mexico, Brazil team. So I don't know if you found any benefit of working with like all like alternative offices. Um,
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    Carter most of my reps have been us-based just from the intros i've got from friends but i have heard that like each each region does have a specific quota they're trying to meet so like if latin america for example is reaching lower numbers in like united states they're probably going to be a lot more motivated to you know to help you scale up and maybe give you some other strategies and everything like that but um So for the most part, I haven't done that. But I mean, I know some guys that have done that, but yeah, I mean, not, not my experience.
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    Carter I mean, we don't really use reps for anything much anymore besides Google to get us more business managers, but yeah, I mean, I have heard that sometimes they're more motivated because their quotas aren't reached as often as the U S grab some.

  112. Starting from zero today

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    John on the chat too uh here's an interesting one if you were solo again with your current knowledge what's the one thing you'd stop doing or or start doing i'm not sure what you mean by that uh if i was solo starting if i'm assuming you mean if i was starting from scratch with basically no money again i mean yeah the first thing i touched on like was networking for sure
  114. share
    Carter Like, I'm pretty confident I could probably join any other industry and within a few years I'd be successful at it, whether it's real estate or something else, just because I know the order of operations for getting in circles and going to conferences and talking to higher level dudes. But if you're solo, I mean, to what Jason touched on, like affiliates, such a great thing to start on because you really only have to focus on getting good at making creatives and media buying.
  115. share
    Carter have to focus on all the other things like finding buyers um you know making funnels things like that and the other thing i would probably start with is i would do some very low payout type offers such as personal loans or auto insurance because when cash is tight it's a lot harder to test creatives on something like a bsl offer that your break even points 150 bucks if you're running a
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    Carter what's up our tour yeah our retainers on tour right it's it's pay to play for sure but yeah if you run like personal loans are you getting two bucks a lead it's so easy for you to mass test creators without breaking the bank like you're gonna get feedback loops so much quicker and i think that's gonna allow you to dial in without wasting as much money probably the biggest thing. The other thing is if you could try to find a job, if cash is like really tight, I would just try to find a job media buying for some other affiliate on a profit share basis so you can spend their money while you're learning. and getting some money in the space.
  117. share
    Carter And then they're also going to probably provide you creatives and offers that maybe you didn't know where to get or where to get access to. That's always a great thing to do too. Unfortunately, as we discussed, media buying is kind of becoming secondary. So it's a little harder to find a job as a media buyer in the affiliate space, but you can do that. I mean, that's a free education and you're going to learn
  118. share
    Carter looking in accounts from some guy that's already you know successful versus starting from yourself um on the third thing i mentioned i didn't mention earlier back when i was like networking my way up is i would find circles of guys and women that are at a similar level to you and i would just kind of form like a little tribe with them so what i started doing was posting in groups finding guys
  119. share
    Carter i would make a group chat with like five or ten of those dudes i found to dig calls with and now you're kind of 10x in your output because you guys can test 10 10 times as fast with 10 people you're spending 10 times less money and you're also kind of sharing everything that's working with one another i would just make sure you don't let the group get too big because then the the value of it typically goes down anywhere from like 5 to maybe like 12 to 15 people at most And kind of all work on, you know, one vertical together or similar verticals. And that's going to make you go way faster and spend less money.
  120. share
    Carter And then as you get bigger and meet larger guys, you can just keep repeating the cycle with larger groups of guys running it. And that's exactly what I did. I just started with 10 small dudes and then I got a bigger group of guys doing a thousand profit a day and then 10,000, etc.
  121. share
    Carter and this business can get really lonely if you're doing it solo like there was times i wouldn't see anybody i wouldn't talk to another human for a week i'd have to go sit at the library and you know just be around people while i was working and like so having a group chat and having some camaraderie like it makes it so much more fun and you form some lifelong friendships that But those groups are super powerful. They can get a nice tribe of people.

  122. The industry as a tribe

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    Jason Carter, I think I wouldn't be here without it. Back in the day, it was forums and a chat thing called ICQ, right? I bought a biz op that said I could make money on the internet, and it came with some scripts. It was a Black Hat SEO thing. And then... and then access to a forum and it was just like there were other guys and they're talking about making money every day and that was enough it was like one thing to just be sold a bill like oh i'm selling this business off you can make all this money but like there are people actually talking about their strategies in this forum now this is back in 2003 keep in mind no no facebook
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    Jason and then that turned into wicked fire and then that turned into stm and then it's just like if you're gonna do well in this business i i think it's just so important like you were talking about earlier you know yeah meet meet a tribe online that you hang out with but then go to the shows and meet them in person too right like yeah i remember the first time i walked into affiliate summit and i was just like
  125. share
    Jason this is real i have five years i was in the business i never saw another human being uh and then i went to affiliate someone is like no this is like a real thing there's like boosts here granted it was like eight booths it was there was nobody there it was in vegas and but i was just This was like a real business. Holy shit.
  126. share
    Jason You know, and I think that aha moment, if you're in this space from, Hey, I, I somehow stumbled on this because i uh i i bought an ebook or i was reading reddit or whatever it might be to like go into a real industry show and meeting people and seeing it i think it totally changes perspective i know a lot of the guys on here i know them already and they've been around a long time but for those that see this and those that haven't you know i think it's one of the most important
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    Jason yeah absolutely the information game right it's all an information game like yeah stuff's changing every day uh and i talk to you carter i talk to you john all the time i talk to tons of other people in this group like we're we're trading information here's what i'm seeing here's what i'm seeing what are you doing right because like when it's going well for you and you've like give it away because i'll tell you right now you will not be on top forever you're going to be on the bottom at some point and you're going to need somebody to call you and say hey i'm going to help you out figure out how to make some money yeah remember that
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    Carter important yeah i saw i saw a good quote about that that said every hand you refuse to shake on the way up is attached to an ass that you'll have to kiss on the way down essentially so like if you uh yeah that's great like if i was lost all my money i was broke now i have two 300 plus people i could message and ask for help on what what's working and like they would just tell you like i mean there's obviously a idea of reciprocity where you've probably helped them in the past if they needed something but like it goes back to what i said about don't being a dick like pretty much all the guys like i'm great friends with
  129. share
    Carter everybody that i would ask for help like regardless of business or not, like the people I'd hang out with and like get a beer with or whatever. Like there's some really cool people in this space. There's also some people that suck, but that's every industry, but there's really cool people in this space that like, I like just as people, not because I've made money with them or anything. Like I'd hang out with them regardless. So yeah. Adjacent point, definitely go to the conferences that, that kind of kickstarts everything. You can get one. Yeah.
  130. share
    Jason oh i was just gonna say i'll also tell you like i go to all kinds of conferences i go to mortgage i go to insurance i go to legal dude we have the best industry in the world man we have cool people people are entrepreneurial they're building businesses they're creative smart people smart figuring out how to make money they're friendly they're most of them are come from a place of abundance where they give because they're not trying to like hold on to that one little thing they have did you go to these other conferences and it's like people in business suits and stiff that they're punch clocks and you know they're they don't even want to be at the conference other than maybe
  131. share
    Jason to party but they like they definitely don't care about their work at all they're not interested in that that's super boring so yeah say that to say be thankful that you're in a world of entrepreneurial open-minded people that are
  132. share
    Carter you know it's just not normal right and it's kind of a how you do one thing how you do everything like i've had such good conversations outside of marketing with these guys because they're just trying to better themselves in every way like had good conversations about health and biohacking or investment or like basically anything about like improving life in general like most of these guys are super knowledgeable in everything so they're just
  133. share
    Unnamed veteran they're just like indispensable for having in your circle for things like that can i take this wrap this up with jason just said because i think this quick story is important yep let's take it home so uh i was just starting in the street in this industry in 2007 uh so jason was jason was definitely a few years ahead of me and my first affiliate show was affiliate summit didn't know
  134. share
    Unnamed veteran i was making you know a few hundred bucks a day maybe 500 a day in dating and i ended up going felt you know uncomfortable just in a room i didn't know anybody just met one person got invited to a ufc fight that night uh came across jason we were just talking with a bunch of people at the show and he had just mentioned one just one tip to me he's like hey what are you doing and i was like yeah i'm doing dating make a few hundred bucks a day i thought it was doing really And he's like, Oh, yeah, check out this other thing. And millions and millions of dollars was had from that one conversation. So and a friendship.
  135. share
    Unnamed veteran We're still friends to this day. I don't do as much in the affiliate space, but we just saw each other down in Miami. But that's that's how quick it could happen. And that never it expanded my whole horizon. And I never if I never left the computer and went there, that never would have happened.
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    Jason you know what else has been interesting uh because i work in all these other industries and i touch people you know everywhere like we're in the legal space and i you know when we went into the legal space you know i was doing something else for a while and i wasn't really involved but then i got a little more involved and i started meeting people uh you know where like cmos it's very large law firm i mean there's there's law firms that do billions of dollars a year in revenue big big law firms and i started to meet cmos And there's three CMOs in the legal space that were affiliates of A4D back in 2008 and 2010.
  137. share
    Jason This industry creates the best, the craftiest marketers that like, if you come up through.
  138. share
    Jason uh if you come up through like a job you're in a silo right and you just do this one thing but in this world you got to do everything right you're an entrepreneur you're you're learning marketing but you're also maybe doing some server management you're learning ai you know you're you're learning some money management so you know all these skills although they seem complicated there's a lot of moving parts like the more you can lean into the different areas you know the the better and and even if you get out of this space if you go somewhere else I'll guarantee you you will be the most productive person in that whole business because you'll understand how all the connective tissue works between all
  139. share
    Jason the all the different departments and So I'm a huge fan of all affiliate people.
  140. share
    Carter It's a great catalyst for starting your own business afterwards too and owning your own thing because you can promote a successful brand or company with just their ads as an affiliate. And after you see something that's been a big cash cow for you a while, you already have half the pieces of the puzzle to go build your own version versus starting some random thing from scratch.
  141. share
    Carter most of my businesses that i've built like internally that aren't an affiliate thing where i started out as an affiliate for something specific and then i'd go try to build my own version and then you could compare and contrast to like why yours is losing to like the the highly established offer you're already running so i think that's another big reason why so many affiliates are able to pivot to like successful businesses afterwards is
  142. share
    Jason so yeah i mean you're trained by default to care about unit economics right yeah and dollars out right like a lot of people are businesses they're like i have a great idea for a product and you're like okay well what does the unit economics look like what does the business model look like i don't know it's just a great product that everybody's gonna love it you're like oh yeah 100

  143. How to come up with angles

  144. share
    Carter pull some questions out i was gonna say yeah we got more um i like this one because i think this will help with a lot of people because this is kind of how we set ourselves apart on affiliates so like edwin asks how do you come up with unique angles like when i did like the payment reduction angle for car insurance what was my thought process there i think it's a really good question because especially newer guys this is something that you really need to keep in mind is it's it's very tempting to just absolutely churn and burn through networks and offers running more aggressive angles at the beginning and i was guilty of this myself because i didn't know any better at
  145. share
    Carter the time but to the point i made earlier about the space being very small there's only a few great networks and buyers to pretty much each vertical um and i think the where the
  146. share
    Carter find the line between it's going to convert well but the quality is still good enough for the buyers and most guys tend to lean too far away from the quality side um so like the example edwin mentioned um with car insurance most of you guys have probably seen like the big angle is oh if you have no duis you can get 600 back from your car insurance company like yes it's going to convert great you're going to make money but it's not going to be around for very long before you
  147. share
    Carter um but there's certain ways that you can change the wording a little bit where it's still going to convert highly but it's still good for the buyers so like i would just look at other angles people are doing that were a little too aggressive and like clean it up a bit so instead of saying they can get 600 back i would say like if you live in the state you can now officially apply for a payment reduction on your car insurance where it still sounds like almost like a state
  148. share
    Carter it's clean enough that like the buyers aren't going to care that you're saying that the lead quality is good because when the the lead buyers call that person they're not going to say on the phone like oh this ad said i could get a check for six hundred dollars but if they say i saw an ad that said i could apply for a payment reduction it's very easy for them to spin it so i think the magic definitely lies in really finding a way to kind of toe the line on that um I don't really know the thought process specifically for how I come up with those.
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    Carter I think it's more just you really have to know the vertical you're working with, like what you're allowed to say, what you're not allowed to say, what angles are working for other people. And just by coming up with like a slightly unique pivot like that, like your ads going to stand out because it's not the 10,000 other ads they've already seen before. But things like that, I mean, the angles are for sure more important, I think, than like. what the image is or the video or whatever. You just have to find a way to sell it a little bit more than other people do.
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    Jason I think on that front, you know, the core of marketing is just like, who's the persona? Like, hey, I always think about it. Who am I talking to? And then what's potentially a micro persona in there, especially. with Andromeda updates, you know, what's a micro persona in there that I can hit on? Like back in the olden days, you'd run an image ad on Facebook and you could spend a million dollars on a single image ad. But, you know, we just we just don't see that anymore, at least in the stuff we do. So I think a lot about like, yeah, there's a 55 year old woman, but.
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    Jason who is that woman where is she at in life is she divorced is she still married does she have kids or is she an empty nester right and I kind of think about that person that way and then I think about this product and you know what is her what is her pain or that she's moving away from or her pleasure she's moving towards and then I try and figure out some kind of a hook
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    Jason into that right like give me and this is this is what i think ai is really good for like if you structurally know how to think about these things right like who am i talking to and where are they at in life and what are their pain points give me 10 uh you know kind of hooks or angles that would hit at that pain point for this person I use AI for that a lot, and it works quite well for it. But you've got to, like, give it the right framework to work within. And to me, you know,
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    Jason some of the best hooks are done by the best copywriters um but i really think of like angle off angle offer hook creation separate from copy copy to me is the craft of words and you know layering in cialdini's influence and layering in uh you know where are they at the buying cycle and some of this stuff but you know those hooks is just like who are you talking to

  154. Quantity vs quality creatives

  155. share
    John and why why them and why now here's a question for both of you let's say you're scaling a winning offer to six figures plus per day and spend on meta how many videos are you typically scaling with are you going balls to the wall with one or two videos at most so i guess the question would be more of a quality versus quantity this person's also saying they found success with just smashing one or two four weeks meaning one or two creative for weeks or months but also see some of the biggest advertisers ad libraries having 20 200 to 300 videos at any given time
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    Carter yeah i mean i think you can do both to be honest like in the earlier days of my career doing this like i could absolutely just hammer one or two creatives forever um for months um i think it just really depends on how good the roi is on it but in my experience like the only reason i was hammering those videos so much is because i wasn't testing enough like if you're relying on that one you haven't found any more winners it's it's just because you're simply not testing enough creatives um and all the guys i see complain that someone ripped their video or something like i never cared because i had so many new winners in the pipeline by the time those
  157. share
    Carter came across the ad library for someone to find that it wasn't an issue for me so i mean if you're testing way more creators per week you're gonna you're not gonna need to default to spending 100 grade a day on one creative if it works it works but like the more you spend on one creative the less long it's going to last where we have i think our main ad accounts like we have like 20 000 plus creatives live in there you know um well i think ten thousands of max for live but like we have like a hundred thousand ads that are turned off in there that we've been testing over
  158. share
    Carter So, yeah, you can do it, but it's back to what I was saying where you're going to get much more roller coaster revenue every month in your affiliate journey where, you know, if you have a bunch of creatives and by the time that one dies out, you already have 20 ones better than that one that are ready to step up for scale. Yeah, but you can do it. I just wouldn't recommend it anymore.
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    Jason I think it's all ROI dependent, right? if you're uh running uh like some of these guys do fake celebrity you know stuff to brazilian bsls and it's a massive margin and you know yeah you can run that hard but like if you're running compliant ads like i think you're much better off building a large tranche and kind of letting facebook or google find the ones that are the winners and you know with andromeda it's the which ad speaks to which consumer bucket basically is how they think about it so
  160. share
    Jason creative diversity because maybe you're you're at like in the olden days it'd be like the margin would be so great you'd get one ad that had a super high ctr and that's all it took right and you could just spend so much money on that or now it's we think about it much more of like who is those pockets of personas and then how do we make different ads for those and maybe it's the same
  161. share
    Jason maybe the uh diversity of the style of the ad it's you know it's a post-it note versus a before and after versus a you know that maybe we have a hundred it's the same theme you know same hook we're hitting on but a hundred different diversity and just one person's going to click on one where they might not click on on another right yeah yeah for sure and it's
  162. share
    Carter - Kind of the point he made at diversity too. Like, I mean, there's plenty of ways to do that with lead gen like auto insurance. What did great for us was I'd make a specific video for each state and I'd have a CBO where each ad set was its own state. And that video was me just talking about Texas or Massachusetts or whatever it is. So like there are ways to like diversify your creatives without having to go too far off script. Or we would run stuff like for BizApp, for example, where I was doing okay, but then I'd make an ad where I mentioned Costco in it for one video and Walmart for another video.
  163. share
    Carter And I just target the Costco interest in that ad set and Walmart interest in that ad set. And they'd convert so much better because you're targeting people where specifically what you're talking about is something that resonates with them, right? So there are ways to diversify without having to go with completely different angles. um to jason's point i think if you're just blasting one creative like you're not exhausting all the possible angles and customer avatars and demographics are out there and i'd rather have 50 different avatars running with their own ads specifically where i had to spend three grand a day on each of them then try to squeeze 150k a day and spend out of one ad it's just not gonna

  164. Build a machine

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    Jason Kind of reminds me of something you were saying in the beginning, and I, you know, you, you're like, think bigger, right? I love that, right? Because you're, you're like, oh, I think I can do this.
  166. share
    Jason So if I set my goal here, now I have to think differently, like Steve Jobs would have said, and a lot of what i think about too is like how do i build a it's like oh i want to make money no how do i build a machine that makes money i don't want to make money i want the machine to make money so i really think about that a lot what is the machine how what does the tooling look like all that kind of stuff that's going to make money so if we if it comes to creatives it's almost impossible to predictably produce a creative that's going to be a home run you might do it every once in a while, and
  167. share
    Jason you might make a bunch of money in that window of time. But the one thing that you'll want to get to in this space is predictability, right? This is the ups and downs are going to kill you at some point. I went through them myself, like as an affiliate from 03 to 08. And it was just like, hit it, make a bunch of money, back to zero, start over again, hit it, right?
  168. share
    Jason And you know, that's fine but it sure does get tiring and you're just like i'm right back where i started again yes i have money but i don't have like a machine that i'm working on that i'm learning you know over time it's getting better i'm making small improvements in the workflows i'm making small improvements in the processes and all of it adds up to just small incremental increases over time
  169. share
    Jason and that's the best part of you know i i meet some people they're like oh i want a lifestyle business i'm like what is that does that mean that you travel around and you have to do the work because that doesn't sound like a lifestyle business to me lifestyle business to me sounds like a machine that makes money that i get to do whatever i want as my lifestyle right
  170. share
    Carter that was a really big shift for me over like the last year or two as well because like as an affiliate you can go from like a zero out of ten to a four or five out of ten like in a week like profit wise but and it's a lot more appealing to do that because you can see the instant money and like the instant gratification from it but when i actually slowed down i was like okay well filling this out so i'm gonna take me from zero to one But that's going to take me from one to two and two to three. And it's never going to backtrack after that.
  171. share
    Carter So like taking a long time to actually put those systems in place. I feel like the most the most successful businesses aren't sexy. Like people assume like they're very boring, like they're very boring, very systematized. And it's something myself included, like a lot of guys in this space have a really hard time. like just biting the bullet and sitting down and doing the non-fun because it's super fun to go rip ads and paste them in and print money but the really boring stuff is going to set you apart from 99 of the people in this space because i can i can promise you pretty much everybody i know still
  172. share
    Carter um and that really was like such a big differentiator like you're gonna you're gonna have such an advantage over most people if you just spend the next year building out systems that are gonna give you fruits for the next decade versus you know from what jason said going from zero to four to back to zero back to four um and that's how we actually got back
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    Carter the really boring shit is just it's super crucial it took me forever to actually do it i think jason was telling me to do that like five years ago and i didn't want to listen to him but uh it's uh it's very important i have a question for you guys um to get someone told me that to get to your guys's level like multi-million net worth like really successful businesses you're gonna get sued do you find that true and is there a way to avoid getting sued it might be seem like a silly question but i'm just wondering if it's true i've never personally been sued um i think that that comes to the point of just knowing where the line is
  175. share
    Carter and where not to cross because i lived over in like bali or vietnam or something i could there's 20 things i can mention right now that i could probably make 50 million dollars a year in profit but like it's just not going to be worth it especially living in the united states and my moral compass isn't loose enough for it um but i mean i think this this is probably a better question for jason actually because he's probably he's been around the block more with stuff like that um but i don't think it's i mean i haven't seen yet knock on wood i mean I don't know a lot of guys in the space lab, but that's definitely possible for sure.
  176. share
    Jason I think if you get big enough, you'll most likely get sued. I had a light bulb company. We had a product, and it had a battery, like a little button battery in it. It leaked, and somebody sniffed the battery acid. and then they sued us because they wound up in the hospital were they trying to get high that's the wrong type of acid though does that work turn on your cam scott try it out the case got dropped right and uh i'm in the middle of two lawsuits right now in the master world right it's like you're dealing with litigating attorneys all day they something they don't like, they think you did something wrong, they're going to sue you.
  177. share
    William So if someone just decides to sue you, you're fucked and you have to spend loads of money?
  178. share
    Jason That's exactly how it works. Yeah.
  179. share
    William You can't just say fuck this.
  180. share
    Jason And ultimately, the more public you are, the bigger you are, the more they think they have something to win. know you're going to get sued i've also sued people right i have a tenant in a building that walked out and on an 800 000 lease and she just walked out and didn't pay the rent i've been suing her for three years oh jesus and i work in the legal space like our clients are attorneys
  181. share
    Carter in most in most cases like from at least ones i've heard through the grapevine from other people like unless you're doing something extremely heinous like a lot of times the lawsuit's going to be for far less money than you made anyway so it's like it's like when the wall street guys get in trouble for like market manipulation and and they made a billion dollars off of it and they're fine as like 50 million dollars or something like in some cases just the cost
  182. share
    Carter you know some sms guys like there's there's legal trolls like lawyers that will basically go submit a lawsuit to you saying you texted them a list like illegitimately whatever for you know and they'll shake you down to pay him five grand to settle out of court because it's going to cost you more to go fight it or do something like that and basically just paying the five grand to go away like it's i mean in some industries for sure
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    Jason around buildings and look for handicapped stuff that's not compliant and sue you there are people that'll go to your website and uh they'll say they're blind or they'll find a blind person to go to your website and you don't have the right stuff on it and they'll sue you like yeah everybody is doing something wrong The question is, how big of a target are you?
  184. share
    John And, you know,
  185. share
    Jason the way I think about it is like, okay, I'm going to get sued for something or not. I better make enough money at it that it's worthwhile. I had one time we had an emailer on A4D, and they said, I don't know, maybe they made.
  186. share
    Jason three hundred dollars for us um on um dating right they sent out some dating through another affiliate network well this mailing cam spam person got involved and they wrapped up like 12 different affiliate networks in it it was like a five million dollar lawsuit that whole thing cost me a quarter million dollars for like a three hundred dollar mailer uh that that we you know i we didn't make 300 the total revenue and and we out of 10 000 emails in this thing we had two emails that were identified yeah oh i was just gonna say it just you know
  187. share
    Carter Yeah, I was going to say on that note, when you get to any like significant level of scale, it's very important to start looking into asset protection and diversifying things. So if you're doing multiple businesses, don't run them under one LLC. You know, there's ways to set up trust. You can protect your personal assets. So if you get sued, they're not going to take your house or your car, you know, separate money or businesses you have. When you get to that level, I mean, when you have the cash to throw around, it's very easy to go get a legal team or like a consultant to set you up in the best way possible.
  188. share
    Carter And also you can get, you know, business insurance and things like that to help you with those lawsuits. And it's going to cost you pennies compared to like what it would cost you to get sued and you'll sleep better at night just knowing you have it. So if you get sued, you have insurance and protections in place for that.
  189. share
    Jason They're going after the subscription companies in California, like big time.
  190. share
    Carter Yeah,
  191. share
    Jason I saw that last actions.
  192. share
    Carter yeah and it's and jason i think you actually answered me to a lawyer i spoke with as well about our brains now like as you're getting bigger like that um one of the big econ guys like the primal queen dude is i think they're doing 5 million plus 10 million a month just in subscription
  193. share
    Carter they said like when you're first building just go fast and don't worry about putting those pieces in place but once you get to a significant level like have a lawyer go through your page make sure everything is like on the up and up so there's not something slipping through the cracks or someone can just come see you for some some random reason um you always you always want to have it and not need it and need to not have it so it's better to just
  194. share
    Jason know go through that preliminary thing pay a few grand for someone to go through and like spot check all of your stuff to lower the risk of that like don't don't live in fear right yeah i think that's the important part like whatever it's just another thing right like in business like we'll deal we deal with things all the time you know like oh somebody didn't pay a bill oh the inventory didn't show up for christmas because the uh it fell off the ship on the container on the way over right oh there's a lawsuit like it's just another thing it's none of it i mean it all matters but none of it matters in the end

  195. Hard conversations

  196. share
    John I got a question for both you advice around having hard conversations, whether it's like a team member or a buyer or someone else.
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    Carter yeah um coming from the midwest i'm very bad at this i'm a very non-confrontational person i'm getting much better at it but tim ferris had a really good quote for this where he said um the speed at which you progress in life is directly correlated with the number of difficult conversations you're willing to have um and for me
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    Carter when it when i read that i thought about like all the parts of my life whether business or personal anything that was stagnating almost every single one was because i didn't want to have an uncomfortable conversation for 30 minutes whether that was was i happy with a former business partner and i didn't want to be in business with them anymore but i didn't want to talk to about it so i stayed in business longer than i should have or
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    Carter know anything like that like that i think it's such a crucial thing that i'm really trying to get better at because there's so many so many ways i could grow in business if i was just willing to you know be be critical of somebody else and have that conversation um and i think i haven't i have it on my reading list but jason even recommended me a book what was it the hard thing about hard things i think was what you mentioned that's a really good um just for me reading like the summary of it so far that's a really good um place to start i think but um it's it's as a business owner like it's it's very important to be comfortable
  200. share
    Carter with that like you're going to have to be the bad guy a lot of times. As much as you want to be their friend.
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    Jason You know, there's things that you need to be a great entrepreneur, right? You need to be very curious. You need to be tenacious. And that that's probably the two more than anything else. In my opinion, to be a great business leader, you know, I think you need to have the hard conversations early and often. As soon as something don't let it fester. right like really really important that you're like and then like the more you can become aware of like if somebody makes you feel a certain way you sit with it for a second you don't lash back out emotionally right but you say hey that made me feel this way okay let's talk about it right
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    Jason And I think that's hard, especially for men, to talk about their feelings. But if something makes you feel a certain way, you know, it's one thing if Carter comes at me and he says, well, you did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I say, you're wrong. But if I say, wait, hold on a second.
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    Jason making me feel like i i did something really wrong here and i i don't think i did so could i just understand some more before we move forward right that that little bit of curiosity in there that little bit of like if you attack back you will lose right like this is like i learned this growing up you know we had a very we fight a lot in my household and it was like escalation right
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    Jason um but you know just little strategies for for that stuff it's just like being conscious of like and then like do you need to win there's a lot of people that just need to win like hey i'm going to argue just to win and and they think winning is i'm going to go harder than they're going to go with us and i'm going to beat them into submission But really winning is for both sides to get whatever they want, what they want out of the relationship, right? I've seen employees like go at it with one another and it's like, guys, like, what do you want out of this? Like, and they just want to win. They just get to this, this place.
  205. share
    Jason So I think being able, you know, strategies for that kind of stuff is so important, you know, communication strategies. being self-aware of of those conversations um and attacking anybody really never never yields anything right so it's like hard conversation cool how how do i approach this how do i think about it and the more you have it's as with anything it's like a muscle going to the gym you know the more you do it the better you get I think there's one other piece in there is quick decisions. You know, on a on a busy day for me, I make 100 hard conversations that most people would do over four months. A lot of people would.
  206. share
    Jason And I think to be a great business owner, you've just got to see it, feel it, process it, decide, move on.
  207. share
    Carter right yeah the faster you get at that the better yeah i think it's also important to make sure that you're fostering like a work environment where they feel comfortable talking to you about things as well too because i this i know some people that you know they'll they'll freak out on their employees and things and then the employees one are going to start resenting you but also like they're going to be afraid to come to you if they screwed something up or know they're having some conflict with somebody else like so you have to like also feel like you're you're going to be approachable by your employees and they can come to you with criticism and you're going to take it in stride
  208. share
    Carter and not be offended um and like have a mature conversation with them about it i think that's super important i think on that piece you know i think a lot of times you know somebody does something wrong and they're like oh no i'm gonna get fired
  209. share
    Jason And if they're a good team member, you know, as a business leader, I say, you know, oh, you just made that mistake. You just learned something, right? Like, you won't do that again, right? You've got an emotional tie to that thing. Better I keep you because the next person I bring in might make that same mistake again, and we've got to go through all of these same processes.
  210. share
    Jason you know the more you can make it a safe space like uh carter was saying the more that you know you're going to get creativity out of people they're going to work together this is this is uh you know trust in businesses and trust amongst co-workers it's a really hard thing in business but if you have it it's spectacular

  211. Live case: William's electrolytes

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    William So I have, I have one more question for the panel. Um, I am selling electrolytes on Amazon and Shopify. I'm going to be totally vulnerable here. I'm fucking this shit up. I'm totally in the red, not in a good way. I'm not fucking it up in a good way. Like I am like 10 K in the red from ad spend. I did 10 K spend last year and you know, like I barely broke even slash. lost money, if you were in my spot, your fucking, your card has like 20K in business debt on it, and you're making like maybe 2000 a month passively from the shit, what would you do to kind of like unfuck this? Sorry.
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    Jason What does the data say, William? Like that's to me on that little bit of spend. And I know that sounds kind of like a dick, but with that little, you're just buying data. So is the data pointing you in a direction? That would be my question.
  214. share
    William Just like male, female, 55 and up like to buy it?
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    Jason No, like what is there a specific skew? Is there a specific flavor? Is there bundle sizes? Is there subscription? right like these are these are all data points in what in your business and you know it takes money to invest to get data and but the thing is you've got to be looking at that data like i'll go spend 25 30 50 000 and i know i'm not going to make money But I'm, I'm testing a bunch of stuff and then I find something and I just lock in and then that's the thing, right?
  216. share
    William So I should open another business credit card and then spend more money on ads. No,
  217. share
    Jason that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is like, you, have you, have you looked at the data? Have you looked at the skew take rates? Have you looked at the flavors? Like it's one of those channels. I wouldn't spread myself cross channel, right?
  218. share
    William i would do i would say locked in on one thing right like i'm gonna figure out how to do an image ad on facebook and you know i'm gonna figure out how to whatever that is get that cpc to where i need so you wouldn't you wouldn't throw in the towel like you would just keep trying on the data i can't i couldn't i could never tell anybody i mean it's making sales like on amazon it's people are buying it every month and that's the that's the start sorry clarification you said you spent 10k and lost all 10k or did you break even off like 10k spend i i didn't break even though it was like yeah it was yeah i mean to
  219. share
    William give you like a frame of reference like i mentioned a minute ago like we
  220. share
    Carter went negative 500 grand on like our brands and stuff before it even got back to break even and took 12 months um so like i mean to do like a really large scale business like that it's either going to take you a really long time spending a little bit of money or you can get the data and stuff faster by spending a lot and most people like the cash side is a little more prohibitive
  221. share
    Carter you really only have two levers you can pull in business like you can pull the money lever you can pull the time and effort lever as you pull more of one you have to pull the other one less and at the start it's it's a lot more of a time and effort investment than the month like i just throw money like what jason said i'll just throw money at something fast and now i'm going to lose it to get the data and optimize faster but like in your situation like to his point i would just focus on one thing and for me when i'm doing something like that i i mean obviously being
  222. share
    Carter testing something and seeing if it improved it or made it worse like there's probably so many different factors that are influencing whether it's profitable or not without us looking at it we can't give you a straight answer but for me i'm like yeah yeah it's right and you've got 20 sales and is there three of those sales did they come from one ad right like that's directionally
  223. share
    Jason and and then like what is the angle in that ad who is the persona that i'm speaking to in that ad right and then i would just keep going narrower and narrower to begin with until you can get something that's profitable
  224. share
    Jason you want to hone in um there's a zach uh stuck right he he talks about when he starts a new product he has he basically finds one image ad that's going to work and then he tests all these different headlines for different personas and different angles and different benefits of the product and then he looks at those ads and he sees which of those ads are clicking And so then he takes his 50 ads he creates and he brings that down to five and now he's got five ads and now he does this next iteration on the process and he's getting narrower and narrower until he can run something profitably.
  225. share
    Jason And then once you've got a profitable machine, now you can start doing testing profitably.
  226. share
    William I'm wondering if I should run direct to Amazon. I don't know if you guys have any experience with that, like meta ads direct to Amazon. No.
  227. share
    John Haddon Yo, can I say something?
  228. share
    SPEAKER_2 Yeah.
  229. share
    John Haddon Hey guys, John Haddon, a long time listener, first time chatter. What's up,
  230. share
    John man?
  231. share
    John Haddon What's up, John? What's up, Jason? What up, Spooky? Yeah, so my first business was an Amazon business. I tried running Facebook ads and like I would use like what's called like a super URL. And basically it like tricks Amazon into thinking you went to Amazon and search for like. you know your your product whatever so like i would run facebook unprofitably because i never got facebook to my shopify store or anywhere profitable but just by focusing on amazon learning everything you can about their algorithm and then just like running their ads like the good thing about amazon is like
  232. share
    John Haddon offer converts better than the competing offers so let's say people click on yours and convert at 12 and everybody else is converting at 11 amazon is financially incentivized to keep your offer higher in the search rankings than everybody else because like they they have that data and they know people convert better on your offer so like
  233. share
    John Haddon easy mode since you've been running at a loss for a while is just like hyper focus on one sales channel and like amazon is where everybody is so if you can just do amazon marginally better than everybody else and then drive sales on amazon spike your sales and like uh i would just worry about that and then like once you're making money focus on shopify and everything they're talking down the road once you can you know fund it because you know you're asking should i open up another line of credit or credit card like you could bury yourself in debt real quick bro you might you might need to like change your kind of outlook on where to focus your efforts right now
  234. share
    John Haddon and i think john what you're saying there my takeaway is if you don't have a lot of money
  235. share
    Jason If you have no money, just continue, like, try and do one little tiny thing the right way to make a little money. You know, what you don't want to do is go wide. I'm going to try Amazon. I'm going to try Shopify. I'm going to build this. I'm going to do all these different angles. I'm going to do all these different SKUs. You have to have capital to do that. And if you don't have capital, just be narrow.
  236. share
    Jason maybe even take your capital and run affiliate offers right like until you can get some comfortable level of dexterity uh where you don't have all this burden and overhead john is there somewhere off platform i can talk to you uh yeah i'm in the telegram chat so hit me up

  237. Future-proofing

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    Carter cool palooza asked a good question i thought both of you would be great to answer this what are you guys doing to future proof your business uh the system's for sure i mean i think the nice thing about marketing like as much as it pivots year to year is like once you know how to like drive traffic uh to something like regardless of what it is like i mean when tv came out people thought like oh advertising's over because newspapers and billboards weren't going to be as popular or whatever like it's always going to pivot and i think keeping your pulse on the industry and staying active in these conversations is so crucial because to what jason said earlier like you might be
  239. share
    Carter on the top now and you're have been doing the same shit for five years and don't talk to anybody and like their businesses start fizzling out because there's just stuff that changes so much but as long as you're staying in the know about where people are pivoting to and what's making money right now like future proving your business is kind of just knowing what other businesses people are doing successfully i think um but the other thing i would say is like um the other day like
  240. share
    Carter really ltv to cac ratio is really what's going to matter in your business so like if you start having a hard time reducing your cac like you just have to find a way to increase the ltv or get some sort of recurring out of it whether it's data monetization or some sort of subscription model like telehealth like when you have things like that where you spent money to acquire this customer once and you're getting paid for it for the next you know months or years afterwards it's so much better when you have these walls in your business um so something like that i think that was really the big difference for us is just finding ways to like monetize data you know squeeze
  241. share
    Carter way more money of each customer for what you're spending on ad spend because it is going to keep getting more expensive year over year um they you have to that's one thing i think a lot of guys in the space don't focus on is um they're also focused on customer acquisition costs on the front end but they're not asking themselves like how can i go make four times as much off of each sale or lead that i'm getting um and it's really going to start pivoting to that eventually i think
  242. share
    Jason um but yeah that would be my two cents on that i would answer i would answer in two parts first part is anything that's working now if you can pull out the middleman you're going to create alpha
  243. share
    Jason just period right like if there's when i first started in affiliate marketing i everything i ran brokered through three affiliate networks and each of those affiliate networks were taking a piece out but it was still enough margin for everybody to eat as time went on those affiliate network then it was one affiliate network then it was everybody went direct to the advertiser right so just you know if you're doing something how do you future proof it in my opinion is you you take more bite of the apple right you take more of the value chain you're more direct um in some way um like with lead router you know we built out so like you could go direct to agents and they can
  244. share
    Jason sign up through an e-commerce experience because i think that'll cut out
  245. share
    Jason rather than going through a network selling direct to people so i think that creates alpha that creates margin that lets you win for a period of time but that will get normalized and eaten up at some point so you've got to figure out something else that's number one number two it really depends on where somebody's uh vision is right is your vision here sit here is it way out here and i think the biggest opportunity over you know the next somewhere between five and ten years is uh going to be all all software is going to be reinvented period um because software is what ai agents are going to run on right like they're not
  246. share
    Jason in my opinion things aren't going to just be hermes or you know whatever right it's got to be have some software a harness and a model um so i think all software is going to get reinvented it's going to get displaced it's going to be cheap it's going to be open it's going to be accessible So literally, if you look around the world and you see any kind of software out there in any niche micro industry, that is an opportunity. I don't know that I'd go compete against the big boys, but, you know, like a gardener, you know, a gardener CRM that an AI agent runs on top of. And you can build this stuff pretty quickly with AI.
  247. share
    Jason You know, the other thing I think is really an interesting opportunity right now is all of the workforce, everybody in the workforce is going to have to be retrained to use AI tools, you know, because I'll tell you right now, my employees that use AI are 10 to 20 times as productive as the ones that don't. Right. And, you know, we've slowly been retraining them over time to the point like I had some developers and I said, I'm firing you guys because you don't use AI and I can do what you do in one fifth of the time. And so that's my level of expectations on productivity.
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    Jason know i said but if you go learn cloud code or codex and you become good at it you know we'll hire you back um because now you'll be 10 times as productive as you were before and so i think the whole workforce has to be retrained so if we think about uh kind of like pre-industrial age to industrial age then you have industrial age to information age and industrial age uh our industrial information age a lot of people that were factory workers lost their jobs But a lot of those people had to get retrained. So I think there's going to be a massive opportunity for training.
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    Jason And then I think there's also just a tremendous opportunity for bringing AI into people's businesses, whether that's your marketing for consulting firms. Um, and then there's a big discrepancy between what people believe. uh what people believe things should cost and what they actually do cost and that's going to go on for a period of time because in people's minds move slowly so they're like oh this is going to 50 developers to build and three years you know that's going to cost me 10 million dollars but maybe you could build that in seven months as a solo developer with just your time and sell that for 80 of the cost they would have thought it was built because it was a totally turnkey solution
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    Jason i think there's these opportunities in the market as we transition between the industrial agent or i'm sorry the information age and the ai age of the industrial information now as we go into the ai and we're right at the front of it so there's all kinds of stuff to sell and yeah basic info courses and stuff like this yes but just think every business out there wants ai enabled employees because they're going to be much more productive so how do you give it to them that's my thoughts

  251. Same offer, different results

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    John two questions from edwin i want to i want to throw in real quick uh he asked first let's say you're running the same offer slash payout slash similar creative angles everyone else is i'm assuming you're an affiliate how can one person make it work another can is it the pixel is it random is it the ad accounts or something else and to follow this do you believe
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    Carter yeah that's the that's the age-old question that so i'll be a billionaire if they can answer it like directly but like i mean the really the way to diversify yourself from other people is to diversify what you're doing i would say right like you can i mean you can rip and run people's creatives and maybe make like 500k or million profit a year but like once you get once you want to get like a higher consistent level like it really is about like coming up with your own stuff um i mean you can rip and run all day but i mean if you're doing the same thing as everybody else and expect the same the same money that everybody else is getting
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    Carter at best and at worst like it's not because to your point like ad accounts are different there's times like i'll go launch the same creative and 10 ad accounts and two of them are profitable and eight of them aren't um i think it's i i think this just comes down to like the phrase volume negates luck where you might get lucky pasting some random thing in and it's profitable or it's not but like i'd rather just go if everybody's doing the same thing and you you want to default to only doing the same thing as everybody else and like ask yourself how you can do the same thing as everybody else but 10 times the output and you're still going to make more
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    Carter money right So, yeah, if you're going to rip and run creatives and that's your strategy, then rip and run more than anybody else in the space is doing. And you're still going to beat them if they're doing the same strategy. But doing the exact same thing as everybody else isn't going to tear you apart too much.
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    Jason I think I'm pretty sure Facebook has footprinting technology where they know what an ad is and they've seen it before. And if you put it up and it's been in somebody else's account. and it's already milked out, they already know that that ad's done, right? And that used to work in the old days, but at least for me, I mean, again, we don't run highly aggressive, super high margin stuff, right? So maybe that works in that world, but in the compliant advertising, you know, regular advertising world, like if we go take ads from somebody, 99 times out of 100 it's just not going to work like if i i take ads from john or carter like they've already milked them
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    Carter yeah i think it's a good thing like out of the gate if you want to do something like you're brand new to like i would replicate then reiterate so like there's nothing wrong with ripping 50 creators from somebody else but whatever one's doing the best then go find a way to go make your own versions of it that are better or use that angle as a jumping off point like i mean my first couple years i just or my first year i'd like rip and run and that was it and it worked um that was six years ago where facebook was a lot more conducive to that but it gets harder every year um so i would just use that as like your
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    Carter phase one and then add some phases afterwards to actually uh you know make better versions of the creatives or optimize the funnel or whatever
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    Jason I mean, I mean, all right, like back in the day to use Photoshop, like, you know, you could basically, you know, go into the ad library and say, OK, I'm going to. look at 100 ads and i'm going to come away with three themes for these ads and three personas that they're hitting and then i'm just going to go over to ai and i'm going to use those same themes and those same personas and i'm going to have ai make me unique ads you don't have to rip and run anymore like it's too easy
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    Carter yeah at this point yeah for sure i mean there's no reason you should really be cloning something identically anymore with how easy it is to you could use cling and change the ugc actor to a different person and it's the same video on facebook i think it's different like at least try to add something unique to it right um but yeah either way i mean the answer when i don't know what to do it like that like the answer is almost always just just do more more of what you're already doing and then something's gonna shake out typically like obviously you want to know the direction to go but if you don't i just do more of what's already like semi working and
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    Carter something something emerges typically but almost always just doing more output than everybody else's is like the first answer for me

  262. Predictions and closing

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    John Guys, last question to answer, just as I got to run for dinner and I'm tied to the recording,
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    Carter so... Yeah, no worries.
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    John where do you see things are headed in the next one to three years it seems like a couple years ago everyone was making tons of money but now things seem to have dried up for a lot of people like what are basically like what are your predictions do you think there's gonna be another wave of money making flooded flooding in or is it just gonna get harder and harder
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    Carter uh it all goes in ways man i mean like ad platforms get more expensive but then off-runners get more savvy and better funnels and figure out better ways to pay you out but like for legion specifically i mean the last huge like boom of a vertical was probably aca in my opinion like a couple years ago
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    Carter in my opinion it's kind of tied to who's like in office i think like when a republicans in office typically there's not really a lot of new things coming out because like the biggest uh affiliate articles that come out most of the time they end up being tied into some government subsidized program at the back end whether it's ACA or Stoller tax credits or Medicare or whatever it is um so I mean there's always something new that pops up but like to your point there hasn't been a big boom like that in like the last like couple years um but it just comes back to keeping your pulse on the industry and like what's working and I mean the guys that in the
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    Carter circles i'm in like they always they're they're like cockroaches and i made that in a great way where like they just never die and they find a find a new way to pivot to something and when you have this skill set to do with one type of business or one type of vertical like you can do with other things and like what jason said like it's more about just getting great direct relationships with buyers eventually instead of going through networks and there's so many different ways to like optimize what you're already doing but um i think just keep showing up and talking to people and seeing what's working is always going to be the best way to do it because someone else is
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    Carter going to figure it out first and if you can find that person and they they're nice enough to share with you like you'll you'll always be good like i've always laid it on my feet when stuff starts flopping you'll find something jason
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    Jason yeah i uh i my my closing thought is it's a guy named jim rohn jim rohn who was tony robbins mentor and tony robbins uh jim rohn would always say one of my favorite sayings he's had a lot of things he calls himself a business philosopher and he's somebody i really admire and inspire to and he would say,"Work harder on yourselves than you do in your job or your work." And then he would say,"You're paid based on the value you bring to the marketplace." And those two kind of go hand in hand. And I think a lot about machines, like machinery in a factory.
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    Jason And I think i think the most important machine to feed is yourself right be learning every day be trying new things be testing stuff um and you know over time build your external machine you know you got your internal machine and you know the other thing that i'll leave you guys with is You know, I think of this concept called false peaks. And when you climb a mountain, you go up, there's a shelf. And on that, you're standing on the mountain and you look up and in that shelf that, you know, it looks like the top. And wherever you're standing right now, wherever your perception is right now is what looks like the next level is.
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    Jason or like the top of the mountain but then you climb over that shelf and you see there's a whole another mountain there and just i think it's important to remember that as you go through any of these things whether that's a lawsuit or whether that's uh you know a big winning campaign or a big down it's you're just sitting someplace on a on a mountain on a on a shelf with a perspective
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    Jason and try and find other people like carter said around you that have a different perspective that are way further up the mountain because guess what when you're at the top of the mountain you can look down and you can see all those shelves because you've already been through them but when you're going up on them they're they're not there so awesome guys jason carter
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    John thank you for your time appreciate you both we'll have this up on youtube for everyone that uh did not get in to watch the replay all right appreciate you guys thank you guys guys appreciate it
Recording