Welcome to Week #21 of the Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series!

This week I interview super affiliate and blogger Amit Mehta.  Amit shares with you how he went from barely paying rent to generating over $2 million last year as a PPC affiliate.  Amit also talks about his recent project called PPC Classroom 2.0, which is a JV with another former ‘Meet the Affiliates” interviewee Anik Singal.

Read on to learn more about Amit, PPC Classroom 2.0, and find out why Amit ditched his Ph.D for a shot at millions of dollars as a full-time affiliate.

Here are the rules… 

The Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series will feature an original up-close interview with an affiliate marketer every Friday.  Priority will be given to Pepperjam Network affiliates, but that is not a requirement to share your story.  If you’d be interested in being interviewed please submit your request here – please make sure to tell us why you think your story is especially entertaining or educational and worth sharing with our readers.

As the series progresses we will do our best to ask questions that both entertain and educate!  We encourage you to comment on each of the interviews, as well as ask follow-up questions of the interviewee.

Lastly, if you are a blogger or just someone with a network of likeminded affiliate marketing friends, we encourage you to share our interviews series with anyone who you think may benefit. Also, since you won’t want to miss an interview once it’s published I encourage you to join the Feedburner Pepperjam Network RSS Feed, which is located at the top of this page or by clicking here.

Well…let’s get on to the interview!

Meet the Affiliates: Interview #21

Amit Mehta
CEO, Super Affiliate Mindset
www.SuperAffiliateMindset.com

Question #1 

KRIS: Where do you live?  Are you married?  Any children? Animals?

AMIT: I live in Boston and happily married to my wife Shilpi.

Question #2

KRIS: You are one of the most well known super affiliates in the business.  However, many people don’t know how you first got involved (and why?) in affiliate marketing.  Please share your story…

AMIT: A lot of affiliate have this misconception that super affiliates were somehow born super affiliates! I gotta tell you that was NOT the case for me. I still remember vividly how I started out.  I was newly married graduate student living with my wife in a 300 sq ft 1 bedroom/1 bath apartment. We were scraping by on a graduate student salary of $1277/month after taxes. Don’t ask me how you can live on that, because I honestly don’t know how we did it. At that time I had gotten burned out with the whole academic world, I wanted something different out of life, something more. I know, even after that dot com bust, that there was a LOT of opportunity on the internet.  So I started checking out books from the library and learning everything thing about the “internet economy” that I could. As I read more and more I started getting excited and asking myself: “How can I have a piece of the pie?”

Around the same time I was also reading about business and investing, in particular books by Robert Kiyosaki (which I HIGHLY recommend), such as Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Cashflow Quadrant and several others.

I first discovered affiliate marketing through Robert Kiyosaki’s website richdad.com.  It said that all I had to do is put these affiliate links on my website and I could make up to $500/month! Now at the time $500/month represented a 40% increase in my income.  I was super excited to say the least. Only problem was I had NO IDEA how to build even a basic website, let alone how to get traffic (forget about targeted traffic) to that website. After busting my butt for about 2 months I finally got an extremely ugly website up and running.  Over the next several months I added more content to my site and tried to SEO optimize my site.

After 5-6 months I had 30 whopping articles (almost all were written by me) on the site and affiliate banners place through out the site in hopes that people would click on them and make a purchase!

If you’re wondering my site was develop-residual-income.com (not up anymore).  Great idea, considering at the time I know NOTHING about how to develop even a single cent of residual income! LOL

Anyways, you’re probably wondering how many unique visitors a day my site was getting after putting all that work into it? 2 unique visitors a WEEK! No Joke.  I actually wasn’t as upset as you might have thought, I realized that I had no freakin’ idea what I was doing.

At around that time I was listening to a audio series from Nightingale Conant called “Mentored by a Millionaire” by Steven K. Scott (which I also HIGHLY recommend). There’s one particular technique that Steven K. Scott talked about was ‘Shooting for the Moon.’ The idea behind this success technique is to set an IMPOSSIBLE goal. Now I thought the idea was ridiculous, but hey what did I have to lose? I had NOT made a SINGLE affiliate sale yet. So I thought to myself: “What’s an impossible goal for me right now?”
$10,000/month! That was my impossible goal.  By this time I had graduated with a Ph.D. and gotten a $90k/year job or $7500/month before taxes.   Making $10k/month online (more than my job income) was beyond my imagination especially considering my original goal was $500/month!

After I set this goal I immediately realized I was beating a dead horse with my develop-residual-income.com website.  So I dumped it and started searching for other opportunities online.

2 week later I stumbled upon Googlecash, or direct linking method of affiliate marketing through Adwords.  You know where you just write Google ads with your affiliate link in the destination URL – no website needed! As long as your adspend was less than your affiliate commissions you made a profit. A light bulb went off in my head; this totally made sense to me.  I was SO excited that I couldn’t sleep for days.  I told my wife “Honey, this is AWESOME, we’re going to be millionaires!” And this is how I got started in PPC affiliate marketing.

Several weeks passed and I started to realize that this was a little harder than I thought; I had not made a single affiliate sale yet.  But I knew the concept would work, I got involved in some paid forums and bought several information products to learn, and APPLY, as much as I could.

I was hungry to learn, hungry for the information.

As the weeks passed I started making a few sales here and there, but no real profit yet. Finally in November 2005, after 3 months and 15 failed PPC campaigns, I found my first real winner. I make around $2,000 that month, net profit. In Dec 2005 I made $10,000, the IMPOSSIBLE goal I had just set 4 months ago!  And that changed my life!
If you’re wondering, yes I got a nice Christmas bump in Dec, and my profits fell back to $3000 in Jan.  At that point I didn’t care, I knew this business worked, I just had to figure out how to make my sales and profits strong and consistent. Over the next several months I built my income up to $20k/month and walked away from a $90k/year job. My last day was June 15th, 2006.  I’ll NEVER forget that day as long as I live. It was the day I walked into the land of the living! Life has just gotten better and better every year since.

Last year I make a staggering $2.4 million in affiliate revenues and honestly I just getting started!

Question #3

KRIS: You author a very popular affiliate marketing blog called “Super Affiliate Mindset.”  Please tell us more about your blog and share with us a summary (and link) to your most educational post ever….

AMIT: Super Affiliate Mindset is a blog about ppc affiliate marketing, unlike most affiliate blog out there it just doesn’t talk about techniques and strategies but the mindset you need to succeed as an affiliate.

Perhaps my most educational and popular post is about keyword research, it talk about how most affiliate take a completely incorrect approach when researching keywords :

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/keyword-research-secrets-to-explode-your-affiliate-business/

Question #4

KRIS: Can you share with us a few tips for how your build your blog readership and any strategies you use to make your blog interactive?

AMIT: Other than basic social marketing I did in the beginning (signing up for mybloglog, bumpzee, blog directory submissions,etc) and twitter, I really don’t do much to market my blog. My philosopy has always been if I provide quality content, the marketing will take care of itself.

Question #5

KRIS: One of your newest projects is called PPC Classrom 2.0, which is a collaboration with super affiliate Anik Singal (click here to read Anik’s Meet the Affiliates Interview).  Tell us about PPC Classroom, including how our readers and affiliates can benefit from the product…

AMIT: PPC Classroom is comprehensive course on how to do affiliate marketing with ppc.  I’ve spent months writing this course, and it literally contains everything I know. Even if you’re a complete newbie, this course will take you by the hand and show you step by step exactly how to launch a profitable affiliate campaign AND build a sustainable business out of ppc affiliate marketing.

Check out : http://ppcclassroom.com

Question #6

KRIS: Name your top three sitcoms from your adolescent years? What about your top 3 favorite movies of all time?

AMIT: My top 3 sitcoms are : Fresh Prince of Belaire,Threes Company, Perfect Strangers

Favorite movies are : The Matrix, Lord of Rings Trilogy, Braveheart 

Question #7

KRIS: You and I have spoken at quite a few previous Affiliate Summit conferences.  The interesting thing is that you and I have different perspectives for how to become a super affiliate. In short, I call for a simple three-step approach that includes (1) Identifying something that works, (2) Replicating it, and (3) Scaling it….where you tend to take a much more focused approach.  Tell us about the unique approach you have taken and shared with others as part of your previous speaking engagements at Affiliate Summit…

AMIT: Believe it or not my approach is not that much different than yours.  Here’s how my approach is different :  I focus on a handful of niches vs dozens of niches.  Once I find a strong offer I scale that offer by adding more keywords and rigorously optimizing it.  This allows me to build my volume of sales WAY up over a period of 6 months.

Question #8

KRIS: What are your top three “must-have” affiliate marketing tools? 

AMIT: 3 Tools that are must have for affiliates : keycompete.com (competitive keyword research tool), digDB (digdb.com) – tool that allows you to manage and build keyword lists in Excel, Google keyword tool – which is a free tool provider by Google, one of the top keyword tools in my opinion.

Question #9

KRIS: What is the single best piece of advice you’ve ever received that has resulted in your ability to make money with affiliate marketing?

AMIT: The idea of scaling.  Once you find a niche that works, or an offer that works you need to scale your efforts by either adding more keywords or promoting related products in the same niche with the same strategy.

Question #10

KRIS: Take us through a day-in-the-life of Amit Mehta….

AMIT: I wake up at around 9:30-10am I head off to the gym where I meet my personal trainer.  Then I’ll come home eat, take a shower and get ready for a day of work. My work typically 4 hours sometimes 6 hours on a long day.  Work typically consist of managing my team, writing a blog post, optimizing an affiliate campaign, etc. 

Question #11

KRIS: If you were to trade shoes with anyone for an entire year who would it be and why?

AMIT: I know this sounds like a cop out, but I seriously can’t think on anyone I would want to trade places with, no even for a limited amount of time!

___________________________________

Read Previous “Meet the Affiliates” Interviews:

Week #1 – Sam Harrelson
Week #2 – Scott Hazard
Week #3 – Rosalind Gardner
Week #4 – Colin McDougal
Week #5 – Zac Johnson
Week #6 – Harrison Gevirtz
Week #7 – “Uber Affiliate” Paul Bourque
Week #8 – John Chow
Week #9 – Scott Jangro
Week #10 – Darren Rowse
Week #11 – Carsten Combrowski
Week #12 – Thor Schrock
Week #13 – Garry Conn
Week #14  – Ron Passfield
Week #15 – David Adams
Week #16 – Marcus Tandler
Week #17 – Bob Jones
Week #18 – Anik Singal
Week #19 – Collin De Ruyck
Week #20 – Tyler Cruz

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 8:31 am and is filed under Affiliate Interviews, Amit Mehta, Meet the Affiliates, Next Generation Affiliate Marketing, PPC Classroom, Pepperjam Network, Super Affiliate Mindset, affiliate marketing, affiliate network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.