Welcome to Week #24 of the Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series!

This week I interview super affiliate, author, and blogger Jeremy Palmer. Find out how Jeremy went from being a pizza delivery guy and janitor to one of the most successful and recognized super affiliates in the world.  Jeremy is one of the most sought after speakers in the United States, but this week we’ve got him for an exclusive “Meet the Affiliates” interview.

Read on to learn more about Jeremy…

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 #24

Jeremy Palmer
CEO,
Quit Your Day Job
http://www.quityourdayjob.com

Question #1

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

JEREMY: I live in a small suburb 20 miles southwest of Downtown Salt Lake City. It’s one of those towns where everyone knows everyone. It’s a great place to raise a family.

I’m happily married with three kids. I have one boy (age and two girls (ages 5 and 1).

We don’t have any animals, but my kids keep asking me for a dog. I couldn’t even keep their goldfish alive for two weeks – I don’t think I would do much better with a dog.

Question #2

KRIS: How did you get started as an affiliate?  Please share with us your story…

JEREMY: I  started out as an affiliate back in 2003. I was working at a small software company as a web developer. I had a few web projects on the side, but none of them made money.

One of my side projects was an online dating site. I had a good site and a great domain, but it was too hard to compete with the big boys.

Since I couldn’t get anybody to pay me to join my dating site, I decided to start promoting the competition. So I put up a few affiliate links from Yahoo Personals, eHarmony, and Match.com and within a few days started making money.

I was only making $20-50/day at first, which felt like a lot of money – considering I was only making $36,000 a year at my day job. I reinvested all the profits back into the business until I quit my day job six months later. Once I quit my job my affiliate business exploded.

Question #3

KRIS: You are the guy behind the brilliant blog and e-book “Quit your Day Job.” Tell us more about “Quit your Day Job.”  What was it all about?  If possible, please provide our readers with a link to download your e-book for free.

JEREMY: I started Quit Your Day Job back in 2005. At the time it was nothing more than a weekly newsletter.

Subscribers loved the articles from the newsletter, but they wanted more. People on my list encouraged me to write a book so that I could cover more affiliate marketing tactics and go into more depth. Six months later High Performance Affiliate Marketing was born. You can download it for free from my website – http://www.quityourdayjob.com/learning

A desire to “quit my day job” was what motivated me to succeed as an affiliate. I felt like my day job was holding me back from so many opportunities. Quitting my job allowed me to spend more time with my family and allowed me to work on my own terms. QuitYourDayJob.com is a way for me to help other people achieve this goal.

Question #4

KRIS: Your newest (and most exciting project) is called “the Black Ink Project.”  Please tell us more about the Black Ink Project and how, if possible, our readers can get involved…

JEREMY: The Black Ink Project is a hands-on training course where I show affiliates how to plan, design, build, and market a successful affiliate site. In accounting, the term black ink (or operating in the black) is used to refer to a company that is profitable. The goal of the Black Ink Project is to show affiliates how to bridge the gap between learning – and – building a profitable affiliate business.

My e-book covers the fundamentals and gives affiliates a solid foundation for building on. Some people find this is enough to get them started, and proceed in their own direction. But many don’t have the skills or experience required to take the next step, which is taking what they learn from the book and turning it into action. It’s not that they lack motivation, but finding and sticking to the right path can be a challenge.

You can learn more about the Black Ink Project here – http://www.theblackinkproject.com/

Question #5

KRIS: If you could trade shoes with anyone in the world for 6-months who would it be and why?

JEREMY: Bear Grylls from the show Man vs. Wild. No tour guide will take you to the places on his itinerary. Being able to experience nature like he does would be amazing.

QUESTION #6

KRIS: Please share with us your top three tips for making more money with affiliate marketing and pay-per-click…

JEREMY: 1. Don’t make assumptions. One of the hottest trends right now in PPC is using “spy tools” to reverse engineer your competitors campaigns.

The logic goes something like this – find the keywords you’re competitors are bidding on – copy their ads and landing pages – make money.

People will often assume that if competitor A is using this keyword, with this ad, and this landing page it must be a profitable combination. But what they don’t realize is that most affiliates don’t even track their profits (ROI) at the keyword level.

People may be running unprofitable keywords because a) they don’t know they’re unprofitable, or b) they know the keyword is unprofitable, but they want to drive more volume to the merchant to get a better payout.

Spy tools are very powerful, but use them to harvest ideas, not to copy and paste entire campaigns.

2. Track everything. In today’s competitive environment you need to track your PPC campaigns at a granular level. Knowing which keywords are driving commissions is helpful, but knowing what combination of keyword, creative, and landing page is even more powerful. Advanced tracking and analysis has helped me squeeze thousands of dollars of extra profits out of several campaigns.

For example, many marketers think that the keyword modifier ‘cancel’ would be a negative no-brainer, but through tracking I’ve found that this modifier can also drive sales. Customers will often want to know how to cancel a service before they commit to it. Most people using this modifier are probably existing customers wanting to know how to cancel the service, but since no other affiliates bid on this modifier bids are often very low. Good tracking and analysis is the only way for you to know.

3. Test everything. The easiest way to make more money is to take a profitable campaign and make it better. Paid search provides the perfect platform for new experiments. You would be surprised how easy it is to double your click-through rate (CTR)  or conversion rate (CR) with just a few simple adjustments. This is a lot easier than launching a new campaign from scratch.

Question #7

KRIS: Please name three tools that you use to make more money with affiliate marketing and pay-per-click…

JEREMY: 1. Optimize My Site (pay per click tracking software) – www.OptimizeMySite.com

2. Speed PPC (the easiest way to create large laser-targeted campaigns) – www.SpeedPPC.com

3. Keyword Spy (PPC spy tool) – www.KeywordSpy.com.

Question #8

KRIS: If you didn’t become a successful internet marketer what would you be doing with your life? Fireman? Lawyer? Salesman? Author?

JEREMY: That’s a good question… Before I discovered affiliate marketing I worked as a janitor, pizza delivery guy, baker, and middle management at a call center. I never declared a major in college and dropped out after just one year. It’s not that I lacked ambition, but doing the same thing for 30-40 years never appealed to me.

If I never discovered affiliate marketing I would still be an entrepreneur. I would rather drive my own ice cream truck than work as a VP for a Fortune 500 company.

Question #9

KRIS: In 250 words or less, what is the future of affiliate marketing?

JEREMY: I think affiliate marketing has a bright future. The barriers to entry are getting lower every day. Web applications like Wordpress are making it easier for new affiliates to get started. I predict that content creation tools for the web will continue to advance at a rapid pace, making it easy for all affiliates to build advanced sites.

Question #10

KRIS: Please share with us your top five online educational resources (i.e. blogs, industry news sites, etc.) that you consider must read…

JEREMY: According to Google Reader I subscribe to 65 blogs. All of them are good, but if I had to narrow it down to 5 I would choose these:

1. Copyblogger (http://www.copyblogger.com/) – the best copywriting blog on the web.
2. SeoBook.com (http://www.seobook.com/)- An SEO blog that goes way beyond SEO
3. Super Affiliate Secrets by Zac Johnson – (http://zacjohnson.com/)
4. SEOMoz (http://www.seomoz.org/) – One of my favorite Internet Marketing blogs
5. CDF Networks (http://cdfnetworks.com/) – Chad makes a lot of insightful posts about PPC, CPA, and business in general

Question #11

KRIS: Are there any existing projects or Web sites that you are currently working on that you’d like to share with our readers?

JEREMY: I’m getting ready to launch CouponPal.com (www.CouponPal.com) – a new deal and promotion site. We’re looking to launch before Black Friday. I think shoppers are going to be very price conscience this holiday season. Creating a site that will save shoppers money is a slam dunk in this economy.

___________________________________

On Deck for Next “Meet the Affiliates”

Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney).  Come back next week for an exclusive announcement from Jeremy about something you will not want to miss.

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
Week #21 – Amit Mehta
Week #22 – Will Haimerl
Week #23 – Rae Hoffman

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 12:33 am and is filed under Affiliate Interviews, Jeremy Palmer, Meet the Affiliates, Pepperjam Network, Uncategorized, affiliate marketing, affiliate network, pepperjam. 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.