Anik Singal founded The Affiliate Classroom, which is a virtual training center for marketers. He trains affiliates of many experience levels, from newbies to experts. By keeping an eye out for the latest developments in Internet business, Anik is able to provide extensive knowledge and keep traffic flowing to your websites. Whatever your skill level, Anik's methods are guaranteed to generate greater traffic and profits for you.
RIC THOMPSON: You've made quite a name for yourself in starting people out in the very beginning. Let me jump right into it and ask you this: what would be the easiest way for someone to get online, to get started, and to make, let's say, their first $500?
ANIK SINGAL: That's an absolutely amazing question, and I'm glad you asked that question. As a matter of fact, the biggest change we've made in our training, philosophies, theories, and everything we do here at Lurn in 2010 is because I'm tired and I will no longer hype and sell people these promises and dreams to make $1 million, $2 million, $5 million, or $10 million, gazillion dollars.
Here's the bottom line: with anything we've ever sold in the past, we've never lied. The systems we've sold and the results that came from those systems were identical. That was the truth. However, I always feel like we kind of end up selling way too much of the sizzle, and we need to sell the steak sometimes, because the bottom line is that it takes a process and a certain amount of work to get to those millions of dollars.
Believe it or not, what sometimes happens is you can think too big. Sometimes you get so caught up in thinking about how you're going to make the $1 million, $2 million, or $3 million that you skip the most instrumental and monumental steps that are involved. Those steps involve you making $500 and your first $1,500. It's a process. The other thing that goes with that is this.
Any time I talk to any of the bigger gurus or people out there who are teaching online marketing and known for it, I ask them, "When you first started, what was your focus?" Every single one of them is going to tell you the same thing, and this goes for me too. When I first started, my focus was to make $2,000. I had a competition going with one of my buddies over who would make $2,000 in one month first. I did it the next month.
If you go back to any of the biggest successes, you'll see that they'll tell you that they had these baby-step goals. It just comes intuitively to people who get it. That's exactly why as of 2010, Lurn is changing what we teach. Now our goal is to help people get started. Now our goal is to help people make that first few hundred dollars. The bottom line is that if you can make $500, you can make $10,000.
If you can make $10,000, you can make $100,000. If you can make $100,000, you can make $1 million. It's the same stuff repeated over and over again. You have to be able to make that first $500. What we've done is we've come up with a system that allows our students to dive in. It's very simple. It involves no thought process. Basically, it's just a blueprint, and what we want you to do is follow it.
We just want you to follow it step by step. It starts the process for a business that will eventually, one day, become your million-dollar business, but it has the specific goal of helping you make your first $500 online. What we do is we do it through email. We do it by helping you build an email list and tying it together with affiliate marketing, because those are the two easiest ways to do things online.
Affiliate marketing means you can get started tonight, right now, today. You don't have to spend the time, money, or energy building a product, customer support team, infrastructure, or a way to transact money. You don't need to do any of that. You can purely and simply start making money, driving traffic, and transacting today, right now. Why email? We use email because as an affiliate, that's the number-one way you can build an actual asset.
Email lists are something that's yours. Google can slap the crap out of you tomorrow, but guess what? Your email list is your email list. You get to go with that wherever you go, and you get to continue making money from that every single day. To break it down even more, what I've always said is this. This is not science; this is not proved. We don't know, but this is the number that all the Internet marketers who have been building lists for a long time came up with.
This is the number we came up with based off of our own results and our own testing. Each name and email is worth $1.00 a month to you. If you want to make your first $500, build an email list of 500 people. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get students to now stop focusing on the money and the end result and start focusing on the little baby steps involved in getting to that end result.
Basically, you build a list of 500 people. You get 500 email addresses for free. I don't mean going and buying them; I mean literally doing it the right way by getting these 500 people to opt in. Then you will make $500. There's no way you won't make $500. It's just the way it works. For example, at Lurn we make $3 a month for every name we have on our email list. To make $1 is not hard.
The reason at Lurn we can make $3 is because we do have our own products and services. Eventually, one day, with all of our students, we encourage them to do that same thing. Right now, it's just to start with affiliate marketing and focus on making $1 per name an email. What we try to do is just break the process down into a little chunk that you can actually understand. When I say to someone, "Go make $500," they get freaked out.
They say, "I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to do it. I don't know where to start, how to get a website up, and how to do this." When I say to them, "Go get me 500 email addresses for free. Get 500 people to opt in by giving them a free report," all of a sudden they say, "That's easy. I can do that." It's just a change in mindset, but guess what? Both of those things lead to the exact same result.
RIC THOMPSON: That's fantastic. You've covered a lot of things. First, I really appreciate the focus on simplicity and the focus on getting people started. That really is what most people's problem is. They do get overwhelmed by looking at the big numbers, and they want to make $40,000 a year, $100,000 a year, or millions of dollars in a year.
It really is that first $100, $500, or $1,000. Thank you for that. That's very awesome. It's really making it real. I totally agree with you. When you get that list, you have the revenue. Let's talk about this. You guys walk people step by step through making that first list of 500 opt-in subscribers. Where do we start?
ANIK SINGAL: First we start by, obviously, picking a niche. You have to know it. There's a whole process involved in picking a niche. You can do this in most niches, but you just have to make sure that the niche is an active one, has lots of affiliate programs, and has competing affiliates. Yes, I just said that competition is good. That's a big concept that we teach. You have to make sure there are people spending money in the niche.
We go through a process of picking niches, and we definitely give our students a lot of niches and a lot of things that are ready to go. The second part of the process is just to get up a website. You will be shocked and appalled at how simple and easy it is. It is literally one page. It's not even one page; it all fits above the fold. It's just a box that has a picture of your free report.
Then it has some sales messaging, and it has a place to put a first name and an email in. That's it. Now what you're going to do is you're going to start using some traffic techniques to drive traffic to that page. Get the first name and email, and let them opt in. Now they're on your list. Now what we do is we teach you how to set up a series of emails behind the scenes that will automatically go out to these students using the simple system and the autoresponders. They send all of this for you.
You don't have to do anything. All you have to do is get traffic to your website. Focus on the marketing techniques that we show you. The rest is all automated. These messages go out to these students with the affiliate links in them and, lo and behold, before you know it you start to make commission. What we were able to do with our system is automate all of this. We actually pick the niches for you.
We give you the design of the website to put up and to put online, and we give you the emails to use for the rest of the year. It's one message a week, so 52 messages are done for you. All you have to do is run a piece of software that will personalize them. It will put in your name and your affiliate links, and then you just upload them into the system, and that's it. You're done. Now what I want you to do is go focus on the marketing. I want you to focus on driving traffic to your site. That's it.
RIC THOMPSON: I want to talk about emails here in just a minute, but let's talk about traffic. What are some quick ways to get started on getting those first 500 opt-ins?
ANIK SINGAL: I'm going to focus on the free ways now. The quickest, anyone could argue, is pay-per-click. However, let me tell you that the landscape in pay-per-click has changed so much that if you're just starting, you have to put at least a month or two months of education, testing, trial, and error to do it. I own PPC Classroom. I teach PPC; I love PPC. However, I have to tell you that it takes some time.
If you want to start, the easiest way is we recommend you go do some article marketing. It's easy, quick, and free. Write some content and put it out there on the network of articles. Let other people drive traffic for you. This is a very slow process, but as it accumulates over time and over life, it's a huge process. The second part is we're going to teach you how to do little things like forum marketing. The first few hundred bucks I ever made online I made through the forums.
Go find an active board or discussion in your niche. Go out, and we teach you how to drive traffic from just participating in a discussion board. I made a lot of money doing that in my day. The third technique we're going to teach is how to use blog commenting. Find some of the biggest, most popular blogs in your space, and I'm going to teach you how to actually drive traffic and search engine quality to your site by leaving comments on people's blogs.
We're not talking about spamming or anything black-hat. You do this genuinely. You actually offer input and value back to that blog, but the more value you add, the more traffic you get. All of this traffic is incredibly targeted traffic. It's coming from your space, and you're offering them a free report. Your conversions will be very, very good as well. It's those three techniques right there.
We also get into video marketing and how to use YouTube to start driving free traffic to your site. I've made a ton of money from YouTube. We've put it all out there. We show you exactly what we've done. We talk about Twitter, building a massive Twitter following, and how to get Twitter to convert into quality traffic for you. There are a lot of techniques.
There are a lot of services out there that are social-related. They have large groups of people who you can quickly access if you just do it the right way. There's more than enough traffic out there for you to go and generate a list of 500 people. That should be no problem.
RIC THOMPSON: Awesome. Do you recommend having people jump into a bunch of different methods or start with one, get that going, and add a second method? There are a bunch of different methods, so how do you kind of keep the overwhelm to a limit?
ANIK SINGAL: That's a great question. We do recommend that you start with one. We actually recommend that until you hit your first 500, you don't do more than three. Just use three techniques. I think we teach seven or eight just in this one course that we have. We ask that you just use three, and you start one at a time. On day one, you start doing article marketing. Then on day two, once you have that down, you can add blog commenting. Then on day three, perhaps you add forum marketing.
RIC THOMPSON: Awesome. You keep things simple and focused. It's definitely not rocket science. Let's get back to emails. You mention that you have a whole system. Let's dig into this a little bit because you just mentioned things like social media, going into Twitter, and all this stuff. You're still basing your revenue off of email. That's the core.
ANIK SINGAL: Yes. Email is absolutely the core of all this because it's the easiest way to reach out to your customer base. It's quick, and it's free in many ways. Did you have a specific question around that?
RIC THOMPSON: I just kind of want to get into this. It's kind of interesting. You mentioned the whole thing is automated. You would use, for instance, social media to drive folks to your landing page. Then the automated email is just an engine that follows up once a week. Is that how that works?
ANIK SINGAL: Exactly. That's what we provide. We teach our students that they should not be shy to write to their list. We communicate with our list almost every day. At least five times a week we will write a message to our list. As long as you're offering value and giving something of value, your list does not mind hearing from you. Actually, as a matter of fact, there's such a thing as not writing to them enough. I think you should always write to your list a minimum of once a week.
I've tested this before where I fell back to once a month or once every two or three months, and the response rates went way down because people start forgetting you. They're not used to hearing from you. I got it back up very quickly when I just started messaging them much more regularly. What we do is we provide you with 52 minimum messages. We have some niches where we actually have 200 emails ready to go.
You can literally message them every other day, and you'd be good to go for over a year. You could stretch it out over three years of messaging them once a week. Some niches have 52. Some have up to 200. There's a minimum of 52. That means that at a minimum, you would have one a week to go, or you could do three a week, and you're good to go for four months.
It's just about putting people in the cycle and letting technology make you the money. The technology is the autoresponder that's going to send out these promos for you on the fly as the people join.
RIC THOMPSON: You're using social media to drive traffic, and you're using old-school email to keep communication going and to help make the sales.
ANIK SINGAL: That's exactly right.
RIC THOMPSON: A lot of folks are talking about using social media to follow up with their list, to Twitter them, to make sure they're on your fan page, and all this stuff. What are your thoughts on all that?
ANIK SINGAL: I think it's great. A lot of that stuff is work, though. If you're going to put up a Facebook fan page, it's not like you're going to get a barrage of traffic the next day. You have to do a lot of work to get some fans, and then you have to keep that Facebook fan page updated. You have to put new stuff there. You have to give people a reason to come back to your site. The other thing is that those are really good for people who have new offers and new things all the time.
Once they're on your email list, you're going to be emailing them anyway. How many times can you promote your opt-in page, which is the same page, on a Facebook fan page? I'm all for having those, but those aren't going to generate traffic quickly enough for you to get that 500 really quickly. What we do is we focus on some techniques that will generate traffic quickly enough for you to hit 500.
RIC THOMPSON: I think that's the best part about this, is that you definitely boiled things down. You keep things very simple and clean. You can almost feel a whole lot of people who are listening in kind of breathing a sigh of relief because, Anik, you just boiled it down to say, "Yes, you can do all that stuff, but there's no need to." You've boiled it down to, "Here are the very simplest steps that you can make this happen. If you want 500 people to make $500, just do this."
I think that's just awesome. I guess summing this up is that you know all the talk out there is on social media. It sums it up by saying email is not dead. Email is still alive, still kicking, and still profitable, obviously.
ANIK SINGAL: Yes. I laugh so much. I'm not going to use names here, but this just happened two months ago. It made me want to punch someone in the face. This person sent out an email message that said
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