Charles Ngo Interviews Malan Darras

Transcription

1 Charles Ngo Interviews Malan Darras In the beginning, I was en route trying to be a rock star, joined a mailing list to get tips and tricks on how to make it in the industry, and they did a JV partnership with a make-money online guy. Wait, wait. When you say rock star, you mean an actual rock star? I was in a band, trying to make it in the music business, trying to be a singer. That was my dream. Oh yeah, so Malan, he sings and he plays the guitar. He's a very talented guy. Yeah, so I was on the list and she gave me industry names and contacts, and one day she sent out a course, she said, "Broke musicians, do you want to make money online?" I was like, "Yeah, sounds great." I had no idea what was going on at the time, but she had partnered with someone and they mailed her list. I signed up for a free course. It took me 6 months and I made $27, and I was hooked for life. Affiliate marketing took over my whole life, and I've been doing it ever since. All right, so you are a musician and you found out about affiliate marketing, how long did it take for you once you found out to become successful? What was the struggle like, were you an instant natural at it or were you struggling for a long time? No, I struggled for a long time. I had thought about trying to find a way to make money online for 10 years before I did. I got on that list and got that . I took a 30-day course, and it took me 4 months of hard work day and night to make my first sale which was $27, but when I made the sale, I was asleep, so when I woke up in the morning, I woke up after 4 months of typing articles, after 4 months of work with no money, I woke up one morning and I had $27 in my account. I jumped for joy. Everyone thought I was crazy because it took me 4 months to make 27 bucks, but they didn't understand. What I knew now was that you could make a sale while you were asleep, and that changed my entire life. What was the product? Do you remember? It was a wart removal ebook. How did you even get into that? I don't know. I don't remember how I got into that, but I've figured out early on that embarrassment products work well. I had tried several other things like how to train your dog or whatever other Clickbank products they were at the time, but when I tried something that was kind of embarrassing, I

2 accidentally found out that so many people are searching online for the things they're too embarrassed to go buy in the store. No one wants to go to the store and go, "I have this big wart. I need some cream to get rid of it." I think the psychology is you're solving a pain point. Dog training is not a big pain, but if you have acne or wart or something wrong with your skin or you're looking old, you want to look younger, then yeah, that's a huge pain point, and when there's a pain point, people want to spend money. Yeah. It blew my mind, and I stayed in that niche for about a year, and it really took off. I was really surprised, moles, warts are a big, big niche. It's so funny man. All right, Malan, so I know a lot more about you than most people do, you've been doing this a very long time, and one thing I want to dig a little deeper into is, you tried to become an advertiser at one point. I want to talk about this because a lot of affiliates, after a while, they don't want to be affiliates anymore, they decide to grass is greener on the other side, want to start traffics first. Tuan, I interviewed yesterday, want to start an affiliate network. You started advertising. You were an advertiser for a little bit, and then you eventually came back to affiliate marketing. Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. I was believing the hype that the advertisers were making all the money, and then if I had my own product, I would make 10 times more money, right? I think every affiliate goes through that, but I went all the way with it. I created a product. This was a real world product that you had to make, put in a package and ship to everyone who ordered. Physical product, yup. Physical product, so I had to find a place to do distribution, to make the bottles, to ship the things, to do customer service. I set up shop. It took me about 3 months to get started, ramped up traffic, and I started making money. It was working, but what I wasn't ready for was the backend, all of the banking, and the customer services- The merchant accounts. The merchant accounts, the refunds, the chargebacks, I had no clue that there was so much work involved behind the scenes. I ran traffic, made money, but when it all started to fall apart, when the banking fell apart, it was over. I couldn't charge anyone. I couldn't do anything. When you were going through this, were you, A, buying your own traffic, so complete vertical integration, or B, you were you passing on to affiliate networks? No, I was buying my own traffic, because I've been running this vertical for 2 years, and I simply just switched out the products from an affiliate product to

3 my own product, and it was the same traffic that I was sending. I thought I was going to be set for life. What was the turning point where you were like, "No more."? Was it the banking? It's when the banking went down and I realized that I didn't personally have the business mind to fix the problem, and so the entire business stopped. I couldn't just set up a new campaign. My entire product was gone and over. I couldn't even charge people for the sales that I had already made. It was a real nightmare. It was an eye-opener. Wow. I didn't enjoy it at all. After that, you're done. I'm just going to focus on being affiliate again. Well no, I took a second shot at it. Sure, I didn't know that. This is really bad, because I did make bunch of money on the first attempt. Even though I got shut down, I was able to make a bunch of money. I took a second attempt with a business partner that was going to handle all of the banking. You focused on marketing. Yeah, I focused on the marketing. I ramped up the traffic, did it all again, and he wasn't able to keep it going either, and this time, we lost just as much money as I had made on the first one. I spent the year pretty much broke even. Jesus, are we talking like 5 figures, 6 figures, 7 figures, roughly? The first one was 6 figures. The second one, we lost 6 figures. Was that at least a good learning experience? I taught me what I don't want to do, and that's be an advertiser with a physical product. If I was going to do it again, it'd be a video course, and ebook, something digital that can just be sent out. Oh Jesus, info-products are pure margins. It's the best. Yeah. Wow. Big learning lesson.

4 Very interesting. Okay- It did teach me... Let me just say before we move on, that the grass is not always greener on the other side, and some people are cut out to be affiliates and other people are cut out to be product owners, and it's 2 different total mindsets. Yeah. For the longest time man, I was an affiliate for years, for years, and people are always like, "Charles, why don't you become an advertiser? Why don't you start an affiliate network?" That always bothered me because the way people were hinting at it was that I was a failure because I remained an affiliate marketer. No, because being an affiliate, you could still make a lot of money, but I didn't want the headaches, I didn't want the stress. I rather just give me the money. I don't need to become and advertiser or anything like that. I think what's most important before you go to the next step is figure out what's the end goal, what's the end lifestyle that you want. One thing I like about you is you're very different than other "super affiliates" in more ways than one. I notice you made a blog post the other week where a lot of guys are building teams and you choose not to as some other stuff is, you place a lot of emphasis on your lifestyle. You place a lot of emphasis on your hobbies, your fitness and stuff. I'm curious, what's your end goal lifestyle-wise? Well, my end goal lifestyle-wise, I've always had this vision. It's just me and some friends on the back porch of my house on the beach with a bar, we're drinking out of coconuts, and we just relax and living the good life. That's my end goal, is someday to end up there, with a select handful of friends. When will I get there? I have no idea. What would be the exact steps to get there? I have no idea. I never expected to really be where I am now. I never expected this to be my life. Number 1, I never thought I'd do affiliate marketing, and number 2, I thought if I did, I'd never make a lot of money at it. I thought it might be a nice 100 bucks a day lifestyle to have. Yeah. What do you feel affiliates are doing wrong? As far as what I think people are doing wrong and the building the teams thing, because I have led teams before... Before got into affiliate marketing, I led web design teams, and what I learned from that experience was that I loved making websites, and I just really didn't like leading teams of guys that made the websites. I like having the headphones on, drinking coffee, and geeking up. For me, that's just what has worked better, has worked best. I think one mistake that affiliates make is they think that from the get-go, they have to build a team to launch their first campaign, that I get these s, like instead of "How do I launch my first campaign, what offer should I use," they ask me, "How do I structure my team and my accountants and how many media buyers to launch my first campaign?" It's like the cart before the horse.

5 Yeah. Yeah, because even guys like you that are doing really well with teams and all that kind of stuff now, started- It took me 9 years man. Yeah, so they're looking at your year 10 and they're saying, "I'm in week 1, how do I set that up?" I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, you don't need to do that." Because if when I came into the business, if the requirement was that you have to run a company, I would've never come in. I like that I could sit at home, work online, and make a bunch of money. That was the dream for me. I think a lot of guys are, like you said, putting the cart before the horse and trying to keep with you or I, like our year 10 and their year 1. If they see us talking about making a lot of money and they're only making $1,000, they don't necessarily lose. They're still making $1,000. It's just who they compare themselves too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's dangerous really. Because you can be winning and feel like you're failing, and then that'll drive you to quite. Yeah man. I made a post the other day on my Facebook where I said, "Just because you're worth $10 million, doesn't mean you've made it, because if you're comparing yourself to your next door neighbor who's worth 50 million, you could go broke trying to keep up with him." Yeah, and if we're comparing ourselves to people online like Zuckerberg s up there, like Tony Billion or something now, and these Google guys, or Tony Bill, whatever, billions, like it. If we're comparing ourselves to those people, we're always going to lose and feel like crap. I compete against myself. If I'm making more money, if I'm doing better today than I was yesterday, I take that as a win and I feel good the whole way that I progressed. My nest question is what's a day in the life of Malan like? I see it because I follow your Snapchats, but for those that don't, what's your typical day like from morning to nighttime? Yeah. It's pretty regimented that at this point I found that works best for me, but I wake up really early. I go to sleep really early to start off. I go to sleep 9, 10:00, because I like to get up at 5, 6am. I just wake up. Have a little bit of coffee. I un-pause my campaigns if that needs to start, and I usually go to the gym and do a little cardio. 10, 20 minutes on the treadmill just kind of wake up. Your gym in your building? In the building, yeah. Okay. There's a small fitness center, not really a gym. I do a little cardio, drink coffee, check my social media, then I come back to the apartment and I do

6 maybe 2 to 4 hours of work up until about noon, and then at noon, I officially close down the workday. I usually do some work afternoon, but all the important stuff is usually done. Then I spend the rest of the day going to the gym. I go to the gym. I spend the rest of the day having meals, eating with friends or socializing, or doing whatever I do. If I feel like staying home, I'll watch 4 hours of Sopranos or something and just hang out, and then I spend a lot of time creating things outside of marketing. I write music. I do the YouTube videos. I write my blog posts. I just sprinkle those throughout the rest of the day. I look at it. It's like a power morning. If I get all of this stuff done in the morning in 2 to 4 hours, I could have the rest of the day to do whatever the hell I want to do. It's like what Cal Newport says in the book, deep work. I do the same thing. That 4 hours in the morning, no Snapchat, no social media, no Facebook, completely focused that time. Yeah, and when you do that... I think I may have picked this up from your blog 2 years ago, but if you do the focus, even 1 focused hour a day, you can get more done than most people get done when they're working 12 or 13 hour days. Yeah. It's not how long you work. It's what you actually get done. All right, there's a lot of affiliates out there that are reading, and I would guess most of them are not making much money. It's a numbers game. Most people are not making much money, and you've been pretty successful. I'm curious, what would you say is your affiliate marketing superpower? What is it about you that you've made it work? I'm not going to say it's effort, because at 4 hours a day, other people work harder than you, so what would you say is your secret sauce? Going against the grain, 100%. I've had so much success doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing. I think a lot of people, and I do it too, we copy whatever trend is happening now. We jump into that. If everyone is doing mobile, you jump to mobile. If everyone starts doing brain supplements, you jump into brain supplements. You're saying, where they zig, you zag. Yeah. I've done it all the way back to Everyone was advertising the same offer to men between the ages of 20 and 50 on Facebook, and everybody was doing great, using the same images. I was doing it too. Then I thought, "Wait a minute, what if I went and do this to women? No one's advertising the same offer to women, and it would work for women, so I just changed the images, changed my ads, ran to women, and because there were zero competition, instead of paying 60 cents a click, I was paying 5 cents a click, and I destroyed the opposite vertical. While everyone was fighting over the men, I just destroyed the female side. I've done that time and time and time again. When everyone moved to mobile, I stayed on desktop, because my competition went from here. Everyone was competing on mobile, Malan's on desktop. Now everyone is leaving mobile and coming to native, maybe I'll go to mobile and see what is there. I've had so much

7 success just watching what the crowd is doing and turning it on its head and going the different direction. Okay. I know the answer to this, but what would you say is the best way of knowing where the crowd is going? There's normally a buzz, like when you go to Affiliate Summit West, everyone's talking about something. A private forum. Private forum, or just the entire industry, like the blogs, maybe we'll start talking about something or someone else starts talking about it, but you can just feel the trend. You start seeing the ads everywhere, and everyone starts focusing on one thing. One thing I want to say is just because a lot of people are moving towards a different niche or traffic source, doesn't necessarily means it's because there's opportunity or it's better, it's just because we get bored. Like, dude, if I fucking do this same shit for 2 years man, I just want to do something different for the sake of doing something different, not necessarily because it makes more money. It reminds me a lot about landing pages man. It's like one person invents a landing page, everyone starts running, assuming it's the best, but it was the best because he had first-mover advantage and no one bothers testing out other landing pages. Yeah, or ever optimizing page, they won't even change it. I still see guys running today, in 2016, they're running my landing pages from 2009, or elements or images from those pages, and I'll just slap my head, like, "Why aren't you even testing? You could probably do way better than this page now. I don't even use that page anymore and you're running it now." It's crazy man. All right, so we talked about, that's your strengths, what would you say your weaknesses are as an affiliate? What could you be doing better? I could probably... Well, let me see. That's an interesting one. It's easy to say what you're good at. It's hard to say what you suck at. Hey, it's like a job interview. What I suck at... If I suck at something, it's I like to have control over everything. I like doing everything myself, and if I'm being completely honest, that limits my scalability. I love making the websites. I like making the ads. I like running the campaigns. I like optimizing them. I have very little patience for delegating things, and so I can't compete with someone with 20 employees, I can't run as many campaigns, but so far, that's just the lifestyle that I've chosen. That's what works for me. I've tried to use assistance, outsources, and I just get so frustrated so quickly. If I want a landing page done, I don't want it done in 48 hours. Yeah, I want it done in 45 minutes, to

8 go and test it today. I guess, it's impatience and liking to do everything myself. I think a lot of it stem psychologically because I can tell you're a creative person. If you design websites, you make music, then you have a higher level of what's acceptable compared to most people, whereas for me, I'm like, "It's good enough," whereas for you, it's like, "Fuck, that pixel is off. Get it fixed." Yeah. Yeah. That career in web design and creative director, sometimes that's a problem because I do get pretty picky about my stuff. Can you program or you just focus on the graphics part? I can "program." I can copy and paste stuff together, and take this script and make it do something else, but I'm not really a developer of any kind. You contributed to my newbie course, so thank you for that. I asked you a few questions. I asked you what do you think are the top 3 mistakes you've made in affiliate marketing, so could you share what you said for that? As a newbie, I did everything wrong. I worked alone for way too long. I tried to learn the entire industry by myself with no help. I spent a period of 5 years where I was just failing. I was 100 bucks here, 100 bucks there, and I thought that was it. I didn't really reach out to a community. I didn't try to find people to work with. My entire career changed when I found an affiliate manager. He found me, and he explained to me what hot offers were and what Google AdWords was. He showed me everything. How did you feel when you went to your first conference? It was like the little girl in the video in a bee costume, and she feels like she's all alone. The what? There was this old Blind Melon video. Look this up, Blind Melon. There's a video of a little girl in a bee costume and she's out of place in society, and then she finds this field full of kids in bee costumes, and they're all weird bees together. Oh, I see what you're saying. That's how I felt. I was like, "Holy shit, there's thousands of people doing this thing and everybody is making insane amounts of money. This is real." It was a really good experience. You've been doing affiliate marketing for a while now, and after a while, every affiliate wants to do something different for the sake of diversity or challenge, and you did the advertising route and you went back to an affiliate, I noticed a few months ago, you started a private forum. I'm curious. There's a lot of things you can do man. You can do ebooks. You can do info-

9 products. You could do workshops. You could do software, so why did you choose to do a private forum? What's the thought process behind that? To tell you the truth, it wasn't my idea. I had a Periscope group that I used to turn on Periscope and chat with every morning. I don't know how you did that, because I get so many trolls whenever I had to use Periscope. Yeah, it's hard to deal with, but a lot of times, I turn the comments off or you will go nuts, because they're like, "Your hair is stupid. Your nose is too big." Oh, you're Asian. I'm like, "Yeah, I'm Asian." These guys, they like the vibe of the Periscope so much that they kept saying, "Build us a place to hang out," and so I asked them, I said, "What do you want?" Build us a forum. I said, "Well, how much would you pay for it?" They said, "Well, we'll pay this amount of money." I said, "Okay, if I build it, will you actually sing up?" They said, "Yes. Do it." When I build it, will you come? They picked the name of it for me. They picked the whole thing, and so by the time I set it up, I already had a line of people waiting to get in, or I never would've really built the forum. I didn't have any interest in running a forum, but they wanted it, I built it, and they started coming. It was great. What's it called? It's called MadSociety.net. Dude, I feel so stupid, but, really, 3 weeks ago, MadSociety, I thought it was like people are going crazy, but then I was like, "Holy shit, Mad is Malan D." It took me a very long time to realize that. Yeah. My middle name is Anthony, so my initials are M, A, D. Oh, I didn't know that. My nickname was Mad when I was a kid. How's is that going? Is it a lot of work? Is that worth it? It's not a lot of work. It's worth it. There's a really great group of guys in there right now, and I'm helping a lot of new people along. The funny thing is that I get to see everyone's posts. I see all the conversations. Even though I've been in the game 8 years, what these guys don't know is sometimes the questions they ask me lights up my brain in a way I never would've thought of. Yeah. Yeah.

10 They ask me some weird newbie question, like, "Why would you do this?" I go, "Well, I've never thought of that," and I write it down and come up with some new idea based on their- People don't realize that when you teach a concept to someone, you actually learn more. Yeah. Okay. You have your forum. I have never seen it before. How is it different from StackThatMoney? Is this a pure affiliate marketing forum, or is it more like... What is it? I have no idea. I'd say 95% an affiliate marketing forum. In the beginning, the guys wanted to create more of a lifestyle that affiliate marketing was part of, and we do also have in there. There's fitness information, guys who are losing weight. We're coaching them on how to do that kind of stuff. There's a section on your favorite music. Just off the wall stuff, but number 1, it's different from StackThatMoney or Affplaybook. I'm a member and a moderator at both of those forums, and I'm not really trying to compete with them, because it's different. It's smaller. It's brand new, and the problem that a lot of these guys have with the current forums is that they're so big and they've been around so long, they don't know where to start. They feel like they're lost in the ocean of information. Yeah. Our goal at MadSociety is to just limit the number of post and threads and we're not trying to overwhelm anyone. In fact, the design is minimal, the threads are minimal. I try to keep the categories... I only add a category if it's asked for. There's not a list of every traffic source. If someone specifically wants to know a lot of traffic source, we'll add a category for that, but it's different in that way. I hold a live Q,A session every month where they ask me questions, I answer it live. Everybody seems to love that feature more than anything. The focus, we don't focus on a lot of different verticals or traffic types at a time. Right now, we're mainly focused on native ads and Facebook type of stuff. There's not a lot of overwhelm, like, "Should I chose mobile? Should I do adults? Should I do PPV?" It's mainly like, right now, we're talking about Facebook and native. That's the main topic of the conversation. Interesting. Yeah. This has been a very good conversation. If one of my viewers, they're watching you, they want to know more about you, where can they find you? We'll have links in the video. Yeah, because my name is hard to spell, but my blog is MalanDarras.com, and then the forum is MadSociety.net, and each one of those sites has an opt-in. The best thing they can do is sign up, and after you sign up,

11 send me a question personally. I get a lot of s, but if you're ing me from my list and I see that you're a subscriber, I answer those first. You're worth more. You're worth way more. Yeah. Yeah. You're also available on Snapchat, right? Snapchat is my name as well, Twitter, my name, Facebook/MalanDarras.com or something. It's all pretty easy to find. It's just so hard to keep up with everything. You're telling me now. It's like Twitter, Facebook, Periscope, Snapchat, the blog, the list. It's crazy. You got it man.