Shameless Plug - Vote for my business to get a grant from Chase

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miketpowell

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Hi Everyone,

Just as the title says this is a shameless plug asking for votes: https://www.missionmainstreetgrants.com/b/53141

We entered a contest to get a 100k grant from Chase and need to get 250 votes to make it to the next round. Just finished the application and this is the first place we are posting.

A little background on me and my company for everyone as well. I've been doing IM (online monies) in some form full-time since 2009 now and have had pretty good luck with it. Was largely a "one man show" besides remote VAs and contractors for 1 off jobs I ran my own stuff up until 2013. At that point I started this company, GravitasWorks using some money I had saved over the last 5 years.

The best way to describe our company to those familiar with the affiliate marketing industry is "we are building offers" and not just pill rebills (skin/diet/muscle/dick/ect) although we certainly may do some in the future. Right now we run everything we have internally as quite frankly we cannot afford to compete with the CPAs of other big advertisers on networks yet and keep the margins we like.

Feel free to ask anything else, I will state from the start I'm not comfortable sharing specific niches/URLs at the moment though.
 
Thanks to anyone that voted! We of course made it over 250 votes in time... now just a little luck and maybe we'll get that grant.

Guess none of you cared to ask questions about our business. Maybe you guys would be more interested if you knew I was one of the largest 1 man affiliate operations in the game.
 
In regards to creating internal offers... do you reach out to companies and pitch them an affiliate program or selling them leads?

I've always been interested in that TRUE process, and not the double and triple brokered offers that most of these companies end up doing to take shortcuts and have a large list. Coincidentally its why they all go broke and end up stealing from each other and their customers and affiliates.

Sounds like you're doing it the right way. What kind of margins can you expect on most offers?

I'm asking out of curiosity and I realize some of this is sensitive to a degree, please don't answer if it risks opening up too far :smile:
 
What do you want to know about the CPA affiliate days @Calamari? I'll post a follow up with a campaign I ran start of 2014 that was direct linked to a CPA offer on Adwords and did plenty of volume.

@Ryuzaki - I tried a long while back to do things working with other companies and I never liked it. So the idea of this company is we build the entire product (to an extent) if we want to enter that market. We work with B2B companies to support us but we don't find customers for B2C companies pretty much. The billing customers CCs is in our hands as well as owning the "brand" that we are building.

Our margin right now is effectively zero because everything is reinvested into the company. I'm not taking money out of the business in anyway and just living on savings. Growing revenue as fast as we can. Whatever our margin can be will only serve to increase as we improve our back ends for LTV, cut merchant processing costs and gain economies of scale on customer support. Once a given product reaches maturity and stops growing the goal will be to get a 20%+ margin out of it ideally. If things like SEO can really kick in years down the road maybe much higher.
 
So here is a example CPA campaign I used to run:

Pimsleur Approach - a giant language CPA offer with a VSL and high payout, they've died out over the last 12 months.

I ran the campaign just direct linking to the offer - but I had one significant advantage. The creatives I used all cost at least a grand each to make. They are video ads! Designed to be run as in-stream video where the user can click the video to go to the URL.

Here is an example one:

I changed the description so you would know it's me. I also turned on the statistics so you can see when it got the views, back before start of 2014. This was one of the early test videos before things got bigger.

Having a simple competetive advantage is the key to being a 1 man operation and running 5-6 figure profit days. In my case for this campaign and some others like its that I'm willing to invest 4 figures up front just to design creatives. If it doesn't work out I loose 20k+ between creatives and testing easy. That keeps most affiliates away.

Before I had money to use to my advantage I used creativity. Either creativity in my angle/ads or in how I would get my ads approved or in trying something new on a new ad format. Now I combine creativity with money and time to really put barriers between me and others.
 
6 figs a day profit... That is insane. Why did you stop?
 
MrMedia said:
6 figs a day profit... That is insane. Why did you stop?
Click to expand...

6 figure profit days doesn't mean making $500,000 all day every day. As a 1 man operation 6 figure days that start with a 1 are occasionally possible when everything is working out perfectly. Very rare though and never long lasting.

So the simplest answer of why I stopped and moved into what I'm doing now is there is quite a bit more upwards potential. I'm trying to take a crack at the next level pretty much. Building products that will do 100mm+/yr in revenue year after year managed by teams/systems I'm building with my partners.

One thing to note is "stop" is not exactly the right word. I started the company in 2013 and the campaign I posted here was one that was big in 2014 so I did keep running affiliate stuff and still do some to this day. I'll always keep my eye out for big opportunities there.

Beyond being a project that has more upwards potential it's been much more satisfying to work on as well. We have a number of employees now that have really been able to grow their career with us and I'm excited to expand on that.
 
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