Ralph “Ruck” Ruckman of Convert2Media – Interview
Posted on 20. Jun, 2010 by ian in Interviews
For our platinum mastermind, I wanted to interview someone who has been to hell and back… not a network owner who has coasted with mediocre results.
I wanted feedback on:
- What it really takes to be a top level affiliate
- New options in business models
- Where the affiliate marketing industry is going
…and it had to be from someone with perspective. Someone whose major business was rebills before the crash, and now is more diversified than ever and back on top of the game FAST. It had to be Ruck from Convert2Media…
Ian
Ruck’s in bold.
Ian: I was kind of curious about what your toughest time in this business was. A lot of people just talk about the positives, and make things seem really easy. It makes one feel like they’re the exception because they’re having a tough time, or that they aren‘t doing it right. So I was just wondering what your toughest time was?
Toughest time was probably getting disciplined. When offers were going good I got into the habit of refreshing stats, or even leaving to go spend. Everybody loves to buy those new cars, and I’m no exception.
Dude I have to stop that! I spent $40,000 on turbo-ing my 350Z and then got a merc C63 AMG and then realized I needed to save for my wedding.
I went through about five cars. I’m right with you. New cars, house, clothes, everybody has their dreams when they start their business, and then when you start achieving your goals, there’s that saying that money changes people; and it will. But you’ve got to reward yourself, that’s the way I see it. It’s a double edge sword. Hard times are when an offer goes down or something unexpected comes up. Of course, I remember distinctly, the best offer I ever ran, for me personally, ROI wise (smooth-sailing wise), I got kicked off because my quality was bad. And I was paying direct PPC traffic for it. And it didn’t matter how I presold the offer or anything, I ended up getting blacklisted. And I still hold that company close to my chest these days because I use it as a big learning experience. You can’t be too comfortable.
The toughest time is definitely, for me, when things are going good. How do you discipline yourself? Because when you’re out of money, or you’re in the hole and things are stacked against you, that’s when you work hard. That’s when you really stay up two or three days, whatever it takes to get something going again. But if it’s already going, how do you discipline yourself to build another model, another revenue stream, whatever it takes, another offer, and keep going? A lot of discipline. Lucky for me, I’ve been online for almost six years now, so I’ve had enough downs impacted in my brain that I try not to stop. I keep going. If I get something good, I might take a vacation, but then I’m right back in. Before owning a network I used to take a month off at a time and that’s a business killer. Lucky rabbits foot or something, every time I’ve gotten in a jam, I’ve been able to get out of it.
I think that’s the fun part, man, or it used to be, when I was less disciplined. But these days, I’ve gotten a lot more disciplined about scaling. I play harder too.
I find it fun when I’m back on top. I don’t find it fun when I’m going up the hill. That’s not fun to me. But everybody needs a good challenge and when you run your own business if you don’t challenge yourself you can’t move forward.
What, in your opinion, is the number one difference between guys who hit it big early with things like Acai and even semi-big stuff like Zeus dating. The ones who hit it first before everbody was like ‘I wanna do this too, oh, [screw] Facebook.”
Really, there are two parts to that question. There are a lot of guys, I say, are lucky because when Acia hit big, it wasn’t hard to copy success then. I’ve always been a big fan, and I’ve said it a lot of times, of looking at your competition and doing it better. Unfortunately in a market such as weight loss, with Acai berry, with the celebrity endorsements and the media coverage that it had, it was wide open for any affiliate. The barrier of entry for success was so low until the restrictions started hitting that anyone could have gotten involved with it. Unfortunately when you’re first starting out and you smell that sweet success at the start, you go back into that mind set: things are going good.
I know guys from my MySpace days…who ran the Acai berry; once that started closing down on them, the roof kind of came in on them and it was like, ‘where do I go from here.’ We still see it on the network today. I could name ..[garbled]… five…off the bat…who I knew…quarter million dollars for this time lasts year in a month. June was our biggest month last year and I know five guys off the bat who could have done a quarter of a million dollars but three of them are out of business the other two run some lead-generation; they’ll do some teeth and some rebill here and there but they’re not even close to where they were last year and that was all because Acai berry was going so good.
I’ve had two one million dollar a month pubs in one month, I’ve seen some crazy stuff from publishers. But I’ve seen them go from that kind of money to nothing, real quick.
Exactly. Do you think guys have a better chance to find the ‘next big thing’ by visiting conferences like Ad-Tech and, not going to the key notes, but just hanging out and meeting people or by asking their affiliate managers what’s hot right now and testing new offers all the time? Which approach do you think is better?
Which do I think is better? I really, I’m going to throw it all in the pot. Honestly, when I started going to conferences, I did the key note speeches, matter of fact that’s when I first learned about ShoeMoney selling auction ads for three million dollars. At the time I had a website, and I said this in an interview the other day with Scott Rewick, I had a quarter of a million dollar a year website that took me 17 hours to build. ShoeMoney, I read the story, and I remember him doing the deal pretty quickly in a time frame of a year or so, for three million dollars. Three million dollars is insane! Yeah, you can learn some stuff in the key notes, if you’re not experienced then you need to get someone that’s experienced and get some tips off the guys that go to the conferences for which keynotes to attend. As far as going to the bars, I can name a time in New York City when I did about 35 car bombs, gave some pretty good info, and one of the pubs did about half a million dollars with us last year. So, yeah, if you get your affiliate managers or your network owners liquored up, they’ll probably spill some stuff to you, you know.
[Laughing] Yeah, we’ll keep that in mind. In your interview with Scott Rewick, you got pissed off and started ranting on some interesting ideas that a lot of affiliates probably haven’t thought of. Like the CPA offer arbitrage, running offers with you guys but promoting your offers on the back end. Can you tell us some more how you feel this plays into diversifying beyond SEO projects, why people need do this now and how they can get started?
Yes, one of the points, and I re-listened to that interview and caught myself: I put the idea out there but didn’t explain the point of it. I’ll break it down real simple: I see a lot of guys who do SEO, we see guys who do PPC, banner display buys, media buys [silence]….tons of networks out there, to get ad networks to get traffic from.
Hold on. [Shuffling] I think my internet is failing.
I did the interview with Scott Rewick and I didn’t really clarify the idea behind arbitraging affiliate networks. Now, you can go to ad networks and do your media buys, you can go to Google and get your PPC, you can get your own email servers and do your email platform, there are many ways to get traffic. One of the ways affiliates are not even close to taking advantage of is actually arbitraging networks for their traffic. And much like when you go to click bank when you go to do an e-book, you’re going to rely on their humongous affiliate base. You go to Convert2Media, you’re going to rely on our Fraud Protection, you’re going to rely on our affiliate base to promote for you. And the idea behind it was Convert2Media started building their own legion offers, when we started watching rebills take a real big dump this year we went into offer creation mode process. Of course, with the experience of Steve and Me and Michael and everybody, both of our offers are the top two lead producing offers on Convert2Media.
Basically, the offer I bill as a first name email submit paying a dollar. And I think the ROI is 100-110% per month. Of course, we know exactly who is running it, because we own our network, we do our own file protection, we don’t put anybody on there that we don’t want on there, and the thing runs by itself. And one of the things I’m trying to tell affiliates is that there are other ways to promote affiliate offers, because all my offer is … and I will put this out there on the call right now, you will probably see a massive info-type product coming soon from Convert2Media. It’s not your guru-click-bank-eBook thing, but it’s basically going to cover the entire process of our internal operation for a certain amount of people.
I capture the name, I capture the email. I capture the data, I auto-respun the data myself with affiliate offers. I don’t have any other products to promote out there, all I care about is this. It’s just a simple biz-op and I can put that out there and rely on the affiliate managers I have at Convert2Media that I’m going to get good quality. It runs by itself. Affiliate networks are full of affiliates and you can take advantage of that traffic too, not go to Google and place your Google Pixel and download your conversions through Prosper, that takes a [lot] of time throughout your day. You don’t go to a Media Buy and insert your server tags and do your IO’s and stuff like that, not with this. With this you pay for performance. You only pay for good valid leads to your offer; you can promote affiliate offers on the back end. And then there’s a ton of ways to monetize your own data. You can sell the leads to LeadsConduit or LeadsPile or something. You can rev share the data out to companies like RevStar or BlueSky for 50/50, you don’t even touch it. You just batch your file up from your auto responder, send it over there, and make 50% of whatever they mail for you. I don’t know why this method is not out there. Of course, a lot of people are going to be pissed once it does get out there, but what can you do? It works to our benefit. Guys are saying you show me how to set up my own offers, you get me on a network, you run my fraud protection, I run your affiliate offers: we make more money. They make money. We make money.
Yeah, I’m definitely going to want to talk to you about that because I was running a biz op with [ClickGood] back a while ago. I did ok, I put a lot of effort into it. But it wasn’t entirely set up correctly and I’m hearing a lot of stuff I could have improved upon. Those were some good tips you just gave regarding BlueSky and it’s a different concept from what I was doing. I was just trying to independently run my own offer, I wasn’t thinking about adding other stuff to the back end to increase revenue.
Yes, and with us it’s like I’m not going to put an offer on Convert2Media if it isn’t going to make money. We go through a lot of offers and I’m going to look at it and say ‘yes, no, here’s what I want you to do, try this’. Steve actually sat down for a month and custom coded a PHP Sub-ID tracking system. Lets say you have your auto responder set up for ten emails throughout the month. All ten of those emails do Sub-ID tracking and we’re actually giving that out in part of the course for everybody. You can track which affiliate is mailing for 40% ROI, or if a guy is negative which is crucial, because if you’re paying a dollar for an email submit, and you’re making $4 profit on the front end and you’re making $2 profit on your exit pop up, you’re going to know your ROI on each email that’s going out. If you can add up your front end profits, your exit pop profits on traffic that’s leaving, your double opt-in traffic when they confirm the link in their email and then they go fill out an offer, and you have your 10 auto responder sequence. At the end of those ten emails you’re going to be able to calculate lifetime value and ROI for every single one of your leads.
That’s one of the biggest points that people miss, how much tracking everything really in depth helps; eliminating stuff that’s not performing. I wasn’t tracking performance for years.
I’m right with you, Ian. When I started it was very, very basic. When I started there wasn’t even Google Pixels. So, I’m with you. I used Extreme Conversions, I don’t know if you remember that product. I can’t cut it, it made me money. It was a Guru product but I can’t knock it because it made me money and that’s what we had back then. Nowadays you’ve got a CPA Affiliate Network owner custom coding his own PHP Sub-ID tracking system for your emails. Anybody can do anything these days. Of course that would have never happened if we hadn’t started doing our own offers. Once we started doing our own offers Steve was like ‘If I’m getting 300 leads a day? I want to know what the average is for those 300 leads after my ten emails for the month go out. What’s my lifetime value per customer? I want to know what affiliate in Convert2Media is producing that type of lifetime value.’ That way, say you have 100% offer running, and you’ve got a guy that’s doing 10% ROI and your second pub is doing 90% ROI, well [break up]. You can just cut out the 10% and concentrate on the guy that’s doing 90% because there are a lot of deals on the back end that you can work out. If he’s doing 90% of your ROI out of the total offer ROI, it doesn’t make any sense to work with that other publisher.
I have a lot of opinions myself, but where do you see affiliate marketing going in the next couple of months? I say ‘couple of months’ because things change so fast. And what about one year from now?
A couple of months from now…we’re kind of in a stagnant era right now. I’ll comment on the rebill market. There are some advertisers that are coming back. Of course you’re really going to have to watch what network you work with because I’ve seen the big boys take some hits over the last couple of weeks, some real nasty hits. A lot of what Convert2Media is doing is, we have a couple of offers. We have affiliates agree to terms; ‘if we’re getting paid bi-weekly this is what we need to pay you at.’ That’s really small. I do see a very slimmed down version of the rebill market.
Going forward from two months to a year though, smart affiliates are going to have to get systems and real businesses in place. And that’s what I was talking about: having your own offers. And I call it posing, because when you do an affiliate offer, such as mine…it’s an email submit type offer into affiliate offers. You’re doing $18,000-$19,000 in revenue a month on that little offer that took you a night to build. You could very well have 10, 12, 15 of those in a six month period, no problem. They are all running by themselves. All you need to know is that you’ve got a $5,000 prem payment or you need to pay the network for your traffic. Those are systems in place where affiliates can get RICH, and when I say rich I capitalize R-I-C-H because I’ve seen guys do a million dollars in a month. When I say rich, I’m talking tens of millions of dollars a month. I’ve seen $357,000 on one offer in one day before. Convert2Media had 400 publishers when that happened. So you’re going to have to scale businesses, they’re going to have to get serious. There’s PPC, the Landing Pages, or Media Buy companies; those are all great and fun and can be set up rather quickly but affiliates are going to have to concentrate on building real, solid type business markets. If they’re in the education market, they’re going to have to build education portals. If they’re paying for traffic, say, PPC, media buys or whatever to that education portal, they need to get a system in place [silence ] for their business. And that’s when you can go to affiliate networks and count on their publishers to deliver your traffic.
There’s no work on your part other than watching your quality. Have a system in place that allows your business work for you instead of you working in your business. I’ve been working for six years in my business and I still haven’t found that secret to making my business work for me, although we make money every minute of the day. What I’m saying is that affiliates, if they’re in the education market, they need a way to get businesses coming to them. And one of the ways to do that is going to a CPA affiliate network and taking advantage of their publisher base.
So you’re talking about having a real business that’s sustainable instead of spending all of your time feeling like you’re hustling, right?
Absolutely. You need to be building business, not monitoring your business.
Yes. There are a lot of guys who are tired of that and they’re wondering why they’re doing this and where they can go from here. And if they just had a little mind set change and maybe talked to some more people, like we’re talking now, they’d probably make some progress and be happier people.
The cat is coming out of the bag, I’ll put it that way.
Alright! We’ve all seen that you’ve lost some weight and I wanted to congratulate you. I lost 65 pounds seven years ago and I feel way better. I’m also into cross fit and other high intensity stuff and you are too.
If I would have known that losing 90 pounds since February 1st was going to get me so much attention, I’d have lost weight years ago. Who knew?
I heard you can’t sleep either.
To be honest with you, I did go through a two year period of clinical insomnia and I went through a whole load of medications. This past year from January until the end of May I was having problems sleeping, but of course that was because I was exercising and my metabolism was just jacked up. But I’ve actually got a life mentor, if you want to put it that way. I’ve never been into the hokey-pokey positive stuff but you’ve seen the Facebook so you know what I’m talking about. But, she’s actually got me sleeping every night, so it’s pretty crazy.
How many times have you thrown up since January?
Hundreds. [Laughter]. When I first started with the Insanity Program by Beach Body, I changed my eating habits, and I felt like I wasn’t even eating food. I was 285 lbs at my heaviest at 6’2” and I’m down to 185 lbs today, since February. So much exercise that nothing was staying down. Of course your stomach gets smaller as you start shrinking. I used to eat a full pizza, now I’m lucky to eat two slices of that crap. It just tastes so bad, you know?
Yeah, exactly. I don’t even drink Coke anymore. I can’t stand it.
But it does wonders for my business. I’ll get up and through the day I’ll put five or six miles on the treadmill and 200 or 300 pushups just getting up every 10 to 20 minutes.
That’s a good idea. That’s something to try.
Literally, my guys think I’m kind of insane at this point. It’s gone from being obsessed with weight loss to being obsessed with being fit.
Exactly. It just feels so good.
Everybody wants to look like Tyler Durden from Fight Club. That’s what I’m going for.
I’m sure you’ll get there pretty soon. That’s all I had for you. Thanks a lot for doing the call with us. I know a lot of people are going to get a lot of value out of it. Have a good day and talk to you soon.
Have a good day, Ian!
