Interview with Jonathan van Clute

I’ve grown up my whole life here in Silicon Valley California.  My first experience with a computer was in 1975 when I was 2 years old and watched my dad build our first computer in the living room.  Since that day there has never been a moment of my life where I have not been around a computer.

I began making music with computers around 1986 when I discovered MIDI, and then I discovered digital sampling around 1989 and started making albums of my music.  I wanted to be a film composer until I realized I didn’t have the grades or music theory to get into any of the good music schools (I was a lousy student, I mostly hated school).  So I never actually went to college, and instead started off into the workforce.

My first “real job” was working for Digidesign (www.digidesign.com) from about 1993 until 1996 or so.  Then I went to Apple Computers briefly, then on to an ill-fated startup company.  I had always been into music & video/film so I got into video editing on the computer (anyone else remember when 320×240 was about as “high res” as you could get??) in around 1995 and that led to me going freelance as a video editor in about 1998.  I opened my own Post Production company in 1999 and that lasted until about 2002 when the dot-com bubble had burst enough that the last of my clients stopped spending money on video.

I got interested in real estate investing in 2004 and did that during the day while I dove into internet marketing at night.  Real estate lasted until the meltdown in 2007 at which point I had no choice but to go 100% to online marketing, as everything else I had collapsed nearly overnight.

I actually made my first money online with ebay, back around 1997.  My wife and I sold toys & other collectibles that we bought at thrift stores & garage sales.  We made quite a bit of money doing it (at least it was a lot to us at the time) because barely anyone was yet, and most people still had no clue what this “ebay” thing even was.

I didn’t actually start making money via affiliate marketing of any kind until about 2005.  I learned about Adsense Arbitrage and got very intrigued.  I spent the better part of the next 2 years trying to crack that code, before I realized that the “MFA” (made for adsense) days were over.  But I learned a huge amount in that time, especially about PHP (I’ve never been much of a programmer) and in particular I learned about pulling dynamic content into a landing page, which came in very handy when I launched my first product, LPGen.

I get pretty burnt out on the “rah rah mindset is key” stuff too, but that doesn’t make it any less true.  If you believe you’re going to fail at something, then you will.  Your subconscious will make *sure* that you do, because we like to be “right” and will do almost anything to be able to tell ourselves we are.

We all want to be able to push a button and have endless money come pouring into our bank accounts, and there are loads of products that will even make that claim!  But it’s all rubbish.  You have to “fail forward fast” as someone once put it.  The faster you can learn what doesn’t work, the faster you can get to what does work.  But you have to be very strategic about how you approach your marketing because you must not go broke in the process.

It also helps to be the kind of person who decides to be excellent at anything they’re going to do.  I’m like that… if I’m going to do something, I’m going to be damn good at it.  I’m not going to bother with something where I know I’ll be mediocre.  What’s the point?  Unless it’s something purely for fun (like playing a video game I suck at but enjoy anyway…), I don’t see any reason to not be the very best at anything I set out to do.

Sometimes it happens because we affiliates like to push the envelope and we do things we shouldn’t (black hat tricks, unauthorized incentivization, click fraud, flogs, spam, etc.) and the networks are justified in not paying us.  Other times we do everything by the book but a network’s advertiser backs out and they then leave us affiliates hung out to dry.  Regardless of whose fault it is, it definitely happens that sometimes we won’t get paid.  If it’s a few hundred bucks maybe it’s not a big deal… but I’ve had it happen to the tune of a healthy 5 figures and believe me that is NOT fun.  It really pays to be on very good terms with your reps from the affiliate network(s) you deal with, as their going to bat for you can make all the difference.

Also I often like to say it this way – don’t be stupid.  If what you’re doing is something you don’t want broadcast on the 6′oclock news, then you should be prepared for the potential consequences because eventually they will come back on you.  I have no problem with someone taking risk, but then they need to be prepared for the consequences, that’s all.

I guess I hit the “big time” probably when I released LPGen in 2007.  Prior to that nobody really had a clue who I was other than in a couple of forums where I was the top poster and was always helping solve everyone’s technical problems.

LPGen, and especially support from guys like Gauher Chaudhry and Keith Baxter, really helped put me on the map and got me recognition in some circles, but then when I was on Top Affiliate Challenge and won it by a landslide, that was massive.  It seemed suddenly like everyone knew me.  There was even a somewhat well known marketer who registered my name as a .com domain the day it was announced that I won TAC, and redirected the traffic to his own products.  I called him on it and asked him to give up the domain to me and he did, but it just went to show that people actually paid attention to me at that point and obviously he expected a lot of traffic from people looking for information on me.

I talk to aspiring internet marketers quite often… they email me or send me messages through facebook or whatever (and I almost NEVER look at Facebook…) and sometimes they think I’ll be able to say a magic spell or something and magically turn them into a money making machine.  =)  While I would love if that were the case, it’s not.

This business is not easy, no matter what anyone says.  Yes, when you finally have that campaign that puts hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars per day of profit into your pocket without doing a darn thing, it’s easy and a great feeling.  But it never lasts… never.  The longest successful affiliate campaign I’ve ever had was about 8 months of earning around $300 to $500/day profit.  And I’ve never duplicated that.  I’ve had campaigns that made me a lot more money over a shorter period of time, but I just don’t find that affiliate campaigns last very long – at least not CPA offers anyway.  If you’re promoting amazon or ebay it might be very different, but CPA offers in particular I find rarely last longer than a few weeks.

You need to be constantly monitoring everything, and you absolutely must learn to be somewhat technical.  If you don’t know how to pass a subid – learn!  If you don’t know how to set up a prepoop lander, or don’t know how to record something into a database, or don’t know how to do a pivot table, get off your butt and learn how.  Don’t throw up your hands with excuses like “oh but I’m not technical” – none of us are born technical.  We all learned.  And if you tell yourself you can’t… just remember – you’re right!

I really have never had any “secret traffic sources” but I certainly have my own secret sauce in how I use those sources.  In particular I like to *really* get to know a traffic source, inside & out.  I’ll ask as many questions about it as I possibly can and inevitably I ask questions that my reps have no idea of the answers to.  I get so familiar with how a source works that I know it better than the people who work at the company.  I’ve actually been called by one of my reps many times when he hasn’t been sure how an aspect of their own platform works.