Welcome to Week #23 of the Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series!
This week I interview super affiliate Rae Hoffman, also known around the WWW as Sugar Rae. Rae is the epitome of a true affiliate marketing success story – after building a successful Web site as part of an effort to promote an international support group for pediatric stroke (her son suffered a stroke as an infant) she founded, Rae stumbled upon affiliate marketing as a way to monetize the traffic that was coming into the support group Web site.
With the help of a few friends, a lot of persistence, and smarts Rae has not only built a strong brand in “Sugar Rae,” but in the process built one of the most respected and successful affiliate marketing businesses in the world.
Read on to learn more about Rae and her remarkable, inspirational, and educational story…
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 #23
Rae Hoffman
CEO of website publisher MFE Interactive
Author and owner of the often controversial Sugarrae blog
www.sugarrae.com
Question #1
KRIS: Where do you live? Are you married? Any children? Animals?
RAE: I’m an American happily living in Guelph, Canada. It’s a great little town outside of Toronto. I moved around a bunch as a kid and even though I was based in Florida for ten years, Guelph has been the only place in my life that has ever felt like “home”. I’m a single mom and have three great kids who desperately would love to have some animals, but I am so not the animal person.
Question #2
KRIS: How did you get started as an affiliate? Share with us your story…
RAE: Totally by accident. My son had a massive stroke as an infant and I built a webpage about him. Long story short, I founded the first international support group for pediatric stroke, fell into affiliate marketing as a result of trying to figure out how to make a little cash to support that site and have never looked back. If people are really interested in the drawn out version, they can read a post I wrote a few years ago that explained how I ended up becoming an affiliate. I owe a lot of my success to two guys who saw what I *could* be and took me under their wings. I’ve tried to give back in that same way over the years to other aspiring affiliates when I see that potential within them.
Question #3
KRIS: You are the principal at Sugarrae SEO Consulting. Tell us more about Sugarrae SEO Consulting…Who are some of your clients and how can someone get in touch with you to learn more about your services?
RAE: Sugarrae is mainly my “home on the web” and is more about my brand and my internet marketing blog than consulting so to speak. I rarely take on clients because most of the time, I can make more building a site in their industry as an affiliate. However, every once in a while, I’ll take on a local business or a site that sells lab beakers or something I wouldn’t get into otherwise – small SEO consulting gigs. It works well to keep my skills sharp and to see mistakes, problems, etc that I don’t deal with in my own sites. It keeps me on my toes. Sugarrae also owns a bunch of affiliate sites and also co-owns a company named MFE Interactive. MFE is a website publisher and affiliate is one of its bigger monetization vehicles. I serve as the CEO to both companies.
Question #4
KRIS: You are active an active Blogger and appear to embrace all kinds of social media, including Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. Why? What are the benefits of being active on sites such as Twitter and Flickr? Why do you blog? Do you embrace social media for personal or professional reasons, or both?
RAE: Yeah, my blog is often seen as being controversial because I don’t really hold any punches and pretty much say what I think, even if it isn’t a popular or politically correct opinion. Fair warning to your readers that I curse quite frequently, in case they’d be offended by that sort of thing. I blog because I believe in giving back to the community and to build my brand in case I ever need it. If someone can take my affiliate marketing business plan or any other post I do on affiliate marketing, blogging or whatever and follow through on it to their benefit, then I feel like I’ve been able to give back some of the education and guidance that was given to me back in the day.
I’m active on YouTube and Flickr, but am definitely most active on Twitter under @sugarrae. Twitter enables me to still voice an opinion on something I wouldn’t necessarily make a blog post about. It allows me to keep connected to the industry and acts almost like a feed reader for me to with people dropping many good and some great links throughout the day. I’ve also written quite a bit about Twitter, including case studies to using Twitter for business. As for what I Twitter about, I still have no idea why 2000+ people follow my ramblings.
Question #5
KRIS: What types of promotional methods do you use to make money as an affiliate?
RAE: I build real websites. Back in the day, I’ve done some promotional methods that definitely wouldn’t be looked on favorably by a search engine, but haven’t been on that side of the line for a few years now. As simplistic as it sounds, we build real websites, market them via real methods and monetize them with affiliate marketing being one of those monetization avenues. We use SEO, branding and word of mouth marketing. We don’t do any PPC, but we know that we probably should be given our organic success.
Question #6
KRIS: If you could “trade shoes” with anyone for three months who would it be and why?
RAE: My oldest son, hands down. CJ is severely multiply handicapped. He is eleven, but has the physical and mental ability of an infant. I’d want to know for sure what he does and doesn’t understand. I’d want to be able to understand how he thinks, how he feels, what makes him happy and what makes him sad. I’d want him to be able to experience all that he can’t by trading spots with me as well. I’d switch with him for a lifetime if possible.
Question #7
KRIS: I’m sure you’ve been given a lot of advice that has made you a more successful affiliate marketer – With some of this advice in hand, could you share with our readers three tips for becoming a successful affiliate marketer?
RAE: To be honest, my biggest piece of advice would be not to fall into the traps we set for ourselves. I’ve listed five there, but essentially they boil down to being focused, not worrying about industry fame, not looking for shortcuts, doing something to move you towards your goals every day and seeing things through. Persistence and self reliance are what make the successful successes. I’d also advise that any successful affiliate diversify as quickly as possible. Diversification is the key to weathering any storms the economy or the search engines may bring. Lastly, I’d advise you to grow a pair and go for it. Don’t find excuses… take the success you want in life.
Question #8
KRIS: Can you make more money as a pay-per-click affiliate or as an SEO affiliate? Make your case for one or the other…
RAE: I’d love to, but the truth is, I don’t do PPC so I can’t make a case for or against it vs. SEO. I think in the short term, PPC has much more lucrative possibilities, especially utilizing certain methods. I think organic has more long term possibilities, providing you aren’t an algorithm chaser (which means you’re building a branded, good website that makes its money through CPM, lead generation, affiliate and contextual advertising models that deserves to rank and not building sites that rank on the latest algorithm) and aren’t spending your time building thin affiliate sites. To be honest, I don’t think of myself as an affiliate anymore. I don’t think of myself as an SEO anymore. I’m an entrepreneur. I’m building a business. Affiliate or anything else regarding the marketing and monetization of this business is merely a component.
Question #9
KRIS: Name your top five favorite books of all time…What about you top three favorite movies?
RAE: The Godfather, The Last Don, Bringing Down the House, The E-Myth Revisited and Think Big and Kick Ass would be my favorite books when having to come up with a list on the spot.
If I get five books then I’m listing five movies. Ha! I guess it would be The Godfather, The Godfather II, The Matrix and Die Hard 1 and 4 are tied.
Question #10
KRIS: There is a rumor floating around the internet marketing world that you own a ridiculous amount of shoes. Would you like to put the shoe rumor to rest or is it true? Now that the shoe thing is cleared up how about sharing something that even some of your closer friends may be surprised to know about you?
RAE: I own not only a ridiculous amount of shoes, but also what some clarify as a ridiculous amount of blue jeans. I don’t even know how many pairs of shoes I own anymore, but I know that I own over 30 pairs of jeans. The sad part is that if I really am honest with myself, I wear the same pairs of shoes most of the time. I’ve tried to cut back on my shoe consumption as a result, but it hasn’t been going well. As long as I spend less money on shoes per year than I do at the casino tables, I at least feel some sort of victory over my shoe obsession (or maybe I suffer a loss re my love of gambling LOL).
As for something people don’t know about me? Most don’t know I have an insane fear of birds, in addition to my irrational fear of moths. I think I have aversions to things that fly. Birds without wings would be fine. Birds with wings would do well to avoid me at all costs.
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On Deck for Next “Meet the Affiliates”
Jeremy Palmer. Come back next week to see how Jeremy “quit his day job,” authored a best-selling e-book, and started one of the most talked about “secret projects” of the last five years.
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
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