I talked to and interviewed Jon from WickedFire via email. Jon started WickedFire, an online forum about internet marketing, in June of 2006. Jon is just 25 but he has been in the internet marketing business for 11 years. He’s friends with a lot of the big players-- from the “gurus” (I can’t print what he calls them but he doesn’t respect them at all) to the mainstream. He is self-proclaimed “ethics free”. After you get past his “wild side” you will love his openness and passion for internet marketing.
Note: Content has been significantly scrubbed to remove profanity.
September 23, 2006
"Affiliate Marketing is by far one of the most innovative ideas implemented on the internet, ever. Some people think Google or search engines were. However, there is no easier and cheaper way for merchants online to get their products sold without having to spend any money."
How did you Get Started as an Internet Marketer?
At age 14 I got a job as an email spammer with a company that ran a porn site. I was paid $1500 a week. I eventually got tired of working for them. So I took all I learned about the adult and online gambling industries and started my own company with some spammer pals. I was 19.
We failed miserably. We burned through about $30k in less than two months. I learned A LOT from that. Never go into business with friends. Never go into business with people who are on the same level of knowledge in one specific area as you. You need to have complimentary skill sets. Otherwise it becomes very one sided, and you have a much higher risk of failing.
After that lovely episode, I ended up going into business with a small, but semi-established company. We churned out 90 adult sites. I worked for them part time. On the side I was dominating the search engines as an online gambling affiliate marketer. By this time, we were doing VERY well. We had all of these subscription porn sites with thousands of big-time affiliates doing all of our marketing for us. I decided I would drop out of college and do this full time.
How did you Explain to your Parents that You were a Porn Marketer?
The conversation I had with my parents about why their pride and joy was dropping out of an Ivy League college to pursue internet porn didn’t go over well. But they had to find out somehow!
When did you get into Affiliate Marketing?
I got into affiliate marketing about a month or so after it was initially invented online. It was yet another innovation started by the internet adult industry. Back in 1995/96 the only way to get porn was to download it from newsgroups or forums, or to buy it from overpriced porn sites. There were no affiliate marketing programs. So one guy (I think it was Ron Levy from Cybererotica) came up with the whole affiliate marketing for the internet. Thus our industry was born. I think it was by far one of the most innovative ideas implemented on the internet, ever. Some people think Google or search engines were. However, there is no easier and cheaper way for merchants online to get their products sold without having to spend any money.
Affiliate marketing allows these merchants to hire virtual salespeople. They will most likely never meet face to face. These people will market their products, and only get paid when a sale is actually made. When you have zero out of pocket costs, how can you even debate that there is something better than that?
Are you still Marketing Porn?
Absolutely not. It was fun while it lasted, and I will never regret being in it for one moment. It taught me so much. I still use many of the tactics from then in my marketing and business strategies. It was the right industry to get into at the right time. Everyone else was running around trying to come up with some great new idea and get millions of dollars in VC funding. Meanwhile porn was innovating and literally paving the way for the future of business and online marketing. The first over the internet transaction was for a porn site. The first image uploaded and posted or emailed online, was a porn image. It’s basic human nature to always search for something that the rest of society may consider taboo. Let’s face it, whether you want to admit it or not, every person in Western society knows what porn is.
What were you doing when the Internet Bubble Burst? How did it Affect You?
I knew of so many guys, my age, or even older who were worth millions of dollars. Like me, they had dropped out of school. They lost everything in a few weeks or even days. Then they went off the deep end. It was unreal. It was a learning experience for me, even though it had never affected me or my income. If anything, I just grew stronger and richer, because porn and gambling are recession proof.
For years I heard about how there were no jobs for any tech guys or that advertising online was going to die. I knew that these analysts were wrong. Sure enough, look at advertising spending online now. They are back to spending billions of dollars, and revenue is just skyrocketing up. Fortunately for everyone, it’s not jumping as high or as fast as it did during the boom in the late 90’s. We all learned many valuable lessons from that.
Tell me About the Gambling Industry.
Gambling is an interesting industry. Unlike adult, it banks on people’s weaknesses to give them hopes and dreams of one day striking it rich, without having to work for it. The whole idea of it is just plain foolish. However it’s human nature to hope beyond odds. Even though you know you won’t win in the end, many people convince themselves that they can do it. That “maybe” it will have a different, more of a positive outcome for them. That’s how offline casinos do so well. They bank off of one of human nature’s biggest flaws, greed.
Gambling online convinces people that it is just so easy to make money. You no longer have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a vacation to a casino. Instead, you can do it from the privacy of your own home. What’s more, you can use that extra cash you saved from the trip, and wager it online. It’s just so simple. It hurts me when people can’t understand what it is that makes vulnerable people gamble online.
Marketing online gambling back in the mid-late 90’s was like selling crack to a nation of crack addicts. Everyone wanted to do it. At the time, it was very unsafe to use your credit card. Remember, nothing was very stable. There was no 128-bit encrypted SSL forms or certificates. Consumers were still buying and using dialup. Even 28.8k and 56.6k were considered pretty good speeds. The software to download was bulky and unappealing.
This is what led me to one of my first ideas. This idea got me promoted to Director of marketing for this firm at age 17. They had porn sites and did internet gaming consulting. I was sitting at the table one morning eating cereal. On the table there was a postcard that casinos had sent my dad. They wanted to lure him to Atlantic City to play. Next to the postcard was an invitation to a Bar-Mitzvah for one of my brothers. Out of nowhere I had this epiphany. Instead of trying to spam the big players with postcards and emails, let’s personalize it with hand written invitations. We’d get them done by a professional calligrapher. We would treat them the way they want to be treated--like gold! I sat there just marveling at the idea.
Like everything I do, I put myself into the consumer’s shoes. I think of them instead of thinking as a marketer. One of the key parts at understanding and selling to your target audience, is to become them for a moment and act like them. I pitched the idea. Again, I was underage at the time. They were putting a lot on the line for what some 17 year old kid came up with. Instead of getting the usual conversion rate of 15%-20%, it had an over 75% response rate. I got a huge bonus and was promoted to Director of Marketing. I wasn’t even 18, had zero formal training. I hadn’t even graduated from high school yet. That did wonders for my ego. I also knew right then and there, that I had a talent for this stuff. I was absolutely in love with it.
Did you Consider Internet Marketing as a Career?
No. It took me years to realize that this is what I wanted to do with my life, as a career and passion. For many years I tried convincing myself that I was destined for bigger and better things. But the roads always led me back to internet marketing. I finally realized that it was true. I am here for a reason. That’s to be the damned best I can be at doing what I absolutely love and am so extremely passionate about -- internet marketing.
How do you Scale your Business?
I hire project managers, not Ivy League graduate. I like the community college guys because they know how to work their *** off. I give them a percentage of everything they do. I’m going to offer them health benefits. I coach them and talk to them every day. One is making $6000 a month now. I put lots of pressure on them. We are relentless. We make them sign a 2-year NDA. We put them through a sort of hazing experience.
What Projects are you working on Now?
I have two major projects going on. One of them is building up and establishing the WickedFire brand. I’m creating sort of a media hub. I feel that there are resources out there already. They are all dominated by money and biased reviews and very limited resources. Nothing is out there with regulated terms, so that’s an avenue I am exploring and trying to innovate with my team.
The other project is an affiliate program. Read that again, an affiliate program, not a network. I do not want to be the middle man between advertisers and publishers. I know many network owners and reps make a ton of money from being in the safe middle. It’s just not where I want to be. I’m going back to my porn roots. We are going to churn out information sites that will be sold on a subscription base. This way, affiliates will be able to earn more from each sale. It won’t be like an e-book where you get $30 a sale and that’s it. The way we are doing it, you may not make more than say $15 a sale. However, the payout will be recurring, month after month, for the life of membership. Even if they only subscribe for 3 months, that’s still $45, from that one sale. You could realistically market the site and get 100 sales. Typically 90% rebill for three months or more. Then you can go to Hawaii for a month on the earnings and you’ll get a check from us every single month. You can get $4k or so in checks every month, all because of that one sale. Not a bad deal!
How Many Sites Do you Plan on Launching?
We have plans to launch 300 different niche sites by the summer of 2007. We plan to grow to over 2,000 sites by the spring of 2008. We will be the manufacturers of our own sites, control the pricing, billing structure, and payout our own affiliates. We have a lot of leverage because we are not in direct competition with any of the ad networks out there. We will be the advertisers and also the network. Our first site is in testing beta mode right now and it’s been converting at a ratio of 1:3 (sales to clicks). Unbelievable, to say the least.
This is where I’ve always wanted to be. I’ll be in absolute control of my sites and my earnings. I’ll start a well-respected media outlet for the industry.
Why Haven’t you been a Speaker at Affiliate Summit?
I just found out about it about a week or two before the one in Orlando (Affiliate Summit East 2006). I never knew it existed and I’ll be a speaker at my first one (Affiliate Summit West 2007). I’m doing a Q&A panel. I will take live questions from the audience. I’ll come prepared with the two best questions from WickedFire.com and talk for probably 10-20 minutes. Then everything else will be live and I’ll wing it. I love doing that. It gives me such a great rush and sense of accomplishment. I’m not being paid for it. That’s probably how you know that I’m not one of these idiot “gurus”. I’ve never made an e-book, and I never plan on it. Nor do I ever plan on selling any type of services to webmasters that can potentially be a rip-off. That’s just not what I’m about. I want to be out there constantly innovating and pioneering our great industry. I want to be remembered as one of the forefathers of this industry.
Give us Some Internet Marketing Tips.
Marketing online is not just an easy fix for making money; there is an entirely different aspect of it. I’d say 99.9% of affiliate marketers ignore this. It’s called psychology. Psychology isn’t studying wackos in an insane asylum or wondering why serial killers kill people. Psychology with online marketing is more about why people do everyday things. It’s what gets them to override their natural instinct of “I don’t really need that” to instantly flip over and say “I must have that”. So we have marketing psychology, purchasing psychology, and my favorite of them all “greed psychology” (I think I coined that!).
This whole interview is a guide in itself. If you want specific tips, go to wickedfire.com and join the forum. Ask questions; never be afraid to do so. It may be a rough place when you first get there, but don’t let it intimidate you. WF members are a tight knit group of people who have never met each other in person. When we do hang out, we will act like a gang of old friends. My blog has a ton of tips too, especially in the art of pay per click arbitrage. I wouldn’t be surprised if some “guru” fool ended up copying my ideas and turned it into an e-book.
One day I will unleash hell on those idiots at the Warrior Forum. They plague our internet with their get rich quick e-books and other pointless content they try and sell. That’s one area of the internet I plan on changing and hopefully dissolve their industry. I’m tired of typing now, so I hope I covered everything you needed!
Thank you Jon. See you on WickedFire!
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