This post is from 2008. Products, prices and links in it may be out of date.
Hey guys, I want to introduce you all to Harrison Gevirtz. Harrison is a 15-year-old affiliate marketer who has been rocking it for going on two years. I started following Harrison when I initialy started affiliate marketing a few months back on his blog CPAshare . I also had the chance to meet up and tag along with him to different events while I was at Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas. At such a young age, Harrison is so immersed into the industry that in the short time I was hanging out with him it felt like he knew what everyone was up to, and he was always on one of his three cell phones talking business. Harrison really knows his stuff. I had the chance to interview him for Tracking202 and thought it would provoke some insight for you guys. You can check out Harrison's blog here.
Larby: How did you get started as a Super Affiliate and how long have you been doing it?
Harrison: I was in 8th grade and made a simple turnkey myspace help site, after making about $800 in one month I became driven to keep working on making money online. I than made my own non-turnkey resource site and was making a nice chunk of money via various CPM networks and Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN). I began to experiment with CPA offers on my websites which eventually led me down the path of Search Marketing, etc.
Larby: What was the most unexpecting roadblock you faced as a beginner?
Harrison: As a 14-year-old search engine marketer (the age when I started) I struggled with scaling my offers due to credit limitations. It wasn't that I had no money but the fact that not even my bank would give me a check card without a really low limit made it really hard to just let loose. Another thing I used to struggle with was my ad-copy; I had no sense of originality so my ads looked exactly like everyone else's. Now I am able to really analyze every ad and optimize it as much as I can. When you start out with affiliate marketing/search engine marketing you learn as you go which makes this business pretty problematic for newcomers, so normal issues like quality score, not using landing pages, and such have affected me. However, I wouldn't consider them an unexpected roadblock.
Larby: If you could go back in a time machine, what is the one thing you would change?
Harrison: I would travel back to 2003-2004 and promote ringtones. It would've been great if I was able to be in this business back than since I would have already established some capital to run my business with at age like 11-12 lol.
Larby: Should new affiliates read a lot about affiliate marketing or should they just start?
Harrison: I have never read an e-book so if your asking about e-book type stuff I'm going to say no. Affiliate marketers blogs are great but we don't like to reveal too much (just see my posts and you'll know what I'm talking about). Jumping into it can be tough though; I thought it was that easy and one day made a quick campaign and spent like $400.00 to make like $6, I than went back and thought up a game plan. Thats how I do it and so should you; just form a plan of how to execute everything. For example plan out different ad variations, different bids for different ad groups and landing pages, quality score stuff, and which offers to promote before you go blow five grand testing a shitty campaign. Another thing I recommend is to read up on Search Engine Marketing and all 3 main engines ad platforms. Although the information available isn't primarily targeted to affiliate marketers, there is a lot of valuable information available which can help you with your campaigns indirectly (because you are still using those engines right?).
Larby: What do you look for when searching for an offer to promote and how do you find them?
Harrison: I have no set method of finding campaigns to promote. Usually my affiliate managers (AM) e-mail me with offers they think I can do well with. Sometimes the offers my AM's try to get me to push end up making me a TON of money, and sometimes they are just pushing offers to me since they have an exclusive and are able to take a massive margin. I also like to go on google and search for tons of keywords (from product names to various niches like payday loans) and see what others are promoting. If I have a gist of a vertical I want to promote like I usually check my competitors landing pages to see what offer everyone else is promoting, then I like to try maybe 2-3 of the most popular offers I see competitors trying out. I also tend to check the EPC's on affiliate networks which usually aren't accurate. The offers with high EPC's aren't always the best offer to promote but sometimes those offers will convert pretty well; It just depends.
Larby: As an experienced PPC marketer, can you share perhaps some top tips for promoting via Google Adwords?
Harrison: I don't want to ruin my business model but I would like to emphasize the importance of a landing page. This business is changing every day and I have determined that without a landing page your bound to run into issues. It truly sucks and does hurt your conversion rates and ROI but google has rules in place to maintain the search quality for it's users, and I respect that. Now I don't see how a landing page improves the quality but I'm not the CEO of google so it doesn't really matter. Another thing I really like to point out is to maintain a personal bid strategy that you follow when scaling your campaigns, it will make scaling a campaign 5x easier!
Larby: What do you hope to accomplish in the future as an affiliate marketer or entrepreneur in general?
Harrison: I really haven't thought out my goals very much BUT I could tell you that one of my main future goals is to have a more national search marketing setup with staff etc. PepperJam is a company that I look up to and I think it would be truly awesome to have my own team of internal marketers scatters throughout the country working under my command. I feel that with my personal experience and the management skills I am developing running my own business at such a young age could be beneficial to running a company like that.
Tracking202 would like to thank Harrison for taking his time to answer some of these questions. We hope these interviews this past week or two have helped you guys learn more about affiliate networks and affiliate marketing in general. We may have future interviews and more in-depth answers in the future, but for now, this concludes our interviews.