Welcome to Week #27 of the Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series!

This week I interview super affiliate and Tracking202 founder Wes Mahler.

Read on to learn more about Wes…

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 #27

Wes Mahler
CEO,
Tracking202
www.tracking202.com

Question #1

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

WES: I was originally from Portland, Oregon. In order to best position our company for growth, I moved down to Silicon Valley and have been stationed in San Francisco for over a year now.  Moving to San Francisco has been one of the best business decisions I’ve made so far; the contacts that I am able to make within the valley are simply incredible. 

There are so many tech entrepreneurs and resources available in the Valley. If moving to a different city can help our business, we will move there in order to give us the best chance of survival, and this is why I chose to move to San Francisco. There is no better place to build a web company than here. I am currently single, don’t have any children, and I don’t have any pets either.

Question #2

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

WES: I have been doing various entrepreneur projects throughout high school and college but nothing of great significance. I wanted to create a world class company and have tried to create various different internet startups. I distinctly recall working on a project of creating college rental sites geared specifically towards students. At the time I was a student at Oregon State University whose mascot is known as the Beavers. I decided to create a site called BeaverRent.com. It would act a lot like rent.com where it would offer property rentals in the local Corvallis area providing discounts for students who use the site and a way for students to post on the site connecting them with other students and creating their own mini online profile. What started as a rental site for just OSU expanded to DuckRent for UO, RaiderRent for Texas Tech, CougarRent for WSU, and a chain of other college rental sites across the United States. Today these sites are no longer active. I was also trying to get into real estate as well looking for properties in Corvallis and the Portland area, and eventually buying my first house in Portland which I use as a rental property.

Around this time I was talking to an old friend name Jeremy of whom I met several years prior online through an entrepreneur forum and was completely astonished at the sheer volume of income that affiliate could generate.  I was still at Oregon State University at the time, and my friend starting doing this “PPC” thing, making great income.  I was astonished that within 12 months he was earning over $10,000/month, which was an incredible amount to me at the time. A year later he would reach around $50,000/month and later grow it to $50,000/day.

After he started producing this much passive residual income by being a PPC affiliate marketer, it was too much money for me to not be interested in affiliate marketing.   He would eventually write a single blog post that explained the basics of what needed to be done, and that was creating some PPC accounts, signing up for a few networks, and begin promoting theses CPA offers.  After about 2 days I would end up making my first $4.25/lead from an education offer and the rest was history. 
I did not pay anyone to learn about affiliate marketing, instead Jeremy was able to help mentor me and help me get off ground.  I will always be grateful for the people who have made a difference in my life and the best way I know how to pay back those who’ve been helpful to me is to help everyone else out who is in need.

Question #3

KRIS: Tell me more about Prosper202 and Tracking202…

WES: What is Prosper202/Tracking202? In short it is the only free open-source self-hostable ppc affiliate tracking software.  Essentialy anyone can download our software like wordpress, install it on their own server and have their own in-house ppc keyword tracking system.  I’ll talk alittle bit more about it in detail below.
Why the name Tracking202, and what’s with 202 in all of our product names?  Well basically we took the affiliate domain tracking101.com, and then modified ours to be tracking202.com.  Tracking202.com was originally just to be a domain to redirect traffic through, and it never had any intention of being a product we were going to distribute.  But we ended up disturbing it and never changed the name.  Now we simply put 202 at the end of all our product names—just how apple puts the i in all of their product names: iphone, ipod, itouch, imac, etc etc.

But lets look backwards a year and wow, just what difference a year can make.  You know what is ironic—affiliates will come up to us now and say what a great job we are doing, but a year ago most people don’t realize that everyone hated us.  I mean tracking202’s launch, was one of the worst launches in the affiliate space and possibly in history. Everyone thought we were out to do evil upon the world.  We had so many critics I can’t even think of all of the names right now. We’d go to our first conferences and no one would want to talk to us, and people actually would shy away from us.  But overtime being consistent with what we say we would do, and doing it, and being dedicated to our mission in building a world class ppc affiliate marketing tracking platform that everyone could use, slowly by surely things have started to turn around. 
Tracking202 is a PPC Affiliate Tracking tool; specifically design for Internet marketers promoting CPA offers.  There have been over 7,000 PPC affiliates marketers who have used our tools. 

Tracking202 development started in early August 2007 and the original start of it occurred in October of 2007 when we had people started using the very first alpha version of the tool. We would launch the first hosted version of the application in February 2008 publicly.  We came under a lot of criticism because at the time we launched the first ever-hosted free ppc affiliate-tracking platform.  But we’d later resolve that by then launching what became Prosper202 in April 2008, a self-hosted version of our software, which just like WordPress can be downloaded and installed on your own server in 5 minutes. 
Prosper202 was originally an encrypted application, and then we’d finally take one more step to becoming fully transparent.  Almost a year later on October 2008 we’d do something that was never done before and we shocked the industry by releasing Prosper202 open-source for the entire affiliate marketing industry.  Since then people have developed on top of it to make it even more powerful, and it has become one of the most used PPC affiliate tracking software in the affiliate community.
Now after the last 7 months of development, we have just released the beta of our Tracking202 Pro product.  It is the only search management software that is fully integrated into the big 3 PPC engines and all of the affiliate networks, PepperJam included.  There are other systems like DART, which are extremely good for enterprise clients, but they are not suited for the typical PPC CPA affiliate marketer who is promoting CPA offers on different networks, and can’t always for instance: place a pixel on the thank you page.  Affiliates now have in one application a mashup of their affiliate earnings and their PPC costs all automatically synced into one interface with 100% accuracy.

Question #4

KRIS: On your blog – www.wesmahler.com – you say that your goal is to build a company from $0 to one million dollars a year in sales.  What is your plan to reach your goal?  Share your insights…

WES: I was inspired early on by an entrepreneur name Ryan Allis who wrote a book called, “Zero To One Million”.  Although I still have yet to meet Ryan, the ideas he has shared with me in the book stuck and in the book, his goal was to build his company, iContact, to over one million dollars a year in sales.  And I was inspired to do the same for our own startup. What is our plan to reach your goal?  The idea is pretty simple—although the reasoning’s and the philosophy behind why we choose this product and how we market it I could talk about for a while…

To really sum it up we are a product-based business, and we have a product that works great on a subscription model.  We plan on developing a product good enough that people would subscribe monthly to and getting enough paying subscribers on the books to eventually do a million dollars a year in sales.  If you build a good enough product and have a membership-based model, overtime you will eventually do a million dollars a year in sales if there is enough market cap for it.  Because the membership subscriptions keep building up overtime and then all of the sudden because membership sales overlap with last year’s efforts you will sooner or later do a million dollars a year in sales.

Our plan is to do this with our new product Tracking202 Pro and scale out the application and start building our membership base.  Once we start becoming some-what profitable we are planning on raising a serials A round of venture capital and to really sky rocket our growth.  I’m so grateful for companies like PepperJam for stepping in and really starting to innovate and do things differently in this industry.

Even with the amazing amount of dollars that are pushed this business, it is astonishing at how behind technology wise our industry is behind.  And unfortunately I think the technology does actually exist, but it is all in closed environment and not shared with the world.  Our plan in a bigger picture is to develop more products that can help affiliates out, and really help innovate this entire industry like PepperJam is doing.   If we can build what people want, and what people will pay us for, we will do our one million dollars a year in sales which was the mission statement of my personal blog.

Sure I can probably make more significant income by doing affiliate marketing myself and I could have kept Tracking202 all to myself and profited greatly but my goal has always and will always be to create a world class company. To me, the value in doing so and creating such an accomplishment is a goal I’ve long sought after for years now and is something I truly love doing more so than affiliate marketing itself.

Question #5

KRIS: Name the top 5 books you’ve read that other Internet marketers should read…

WES: Books are incredible! My top five favorite… hrm… that’s a pretty difficult question.  Well the first one I’d say isn’t a physical book at all, in fact it is an audio program.  It is “The Art of Exception Living” by Jim Rohn.  This has been one of the biggest influences in my entire life, at the time I use to listen to this program almost every day.  It is about 40 minutes long and is one of the best programs I’ve ever heard.  Jim Rohn, is the one who mentored Tony Robbins who we all know now when he was only 12 years old. 

I would also highly recommend “Never Eat Alone” by Frazi, it is absolutely the best networking book I’ve ever read.  And even though internet marketing may seem like a solo activity, any big-time affiliate marketer has their connections and sphere of influence.  They are all well connected, and having a strong network of associations around you in this industry will only do incredible things for you.   It isn’t about knowing the latest ppc trick either, it’s just about being connected to everyone you’d ever need to know in advancing and scaling your internet marketing business.

As I try to think of more books, most of my books are about building a web 2.0 company in Silicon Valley—so thinking of affiliate related books that would help increase their scaling efforts.  I would also recommend Search Engine Optimization (SEO Book) by Aaron Wall.  Here is a very extensive book that talks about search engine optimization which if applied can be extremely powerful for any affiliate marketer.   We just recently did an interview with an accomplished affiliate and what they do is run the offers on PPC, find the keywords, and once they get the keyword to convert they then try to rank organically for the same keyword and they do extremely well.  Even if you just do PPC, the ideas and philosophies around building links and authority in google is just a good thing to know when setting up landing pages in general and trying to get a good qualitly score.

I’d also probably recommend the 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss, although it wouldn’t be the first book I’d recommend.  What most people don’t realize about his book, is it is basically about affiliate marketing.  But most important is in this book Timothy Ferris really hits on the idea on productivity and how to make the most use of your time, and he is very on-point with talking about how he setup his internet marketing campaigns and lived from them by only doing 4 hours of work a week.  Although I know he spends probably a lot more time than 4 hours realistically, it sure makes you think and how to be more efficient in your time.

One more incredible book, even though it is more oriented towards building a company with lots of employees is the E-Myth Mastery.  It lays out some incredible framework for anyone looking to build a world-class business.  And the ideas in the book could aid any marketer who eventually wants to start working with a team of people. Some affiliates have started partnerships or even hiring employees to scale their campaigns to a higher level than they could ever accomplish individually.

Queston #6

KRIS: You work with a lot of PPC affiliates.  What types of offers are hot right now?

WES: Well I think everyone knows already that the diet offers are hot right now; especially at this time of year, if you search weight loss for instance on google trends, you’ll see that weight-loss has about three or four times the regular search traffic as it normally does.  The reasoning behind this is because after New Years—everyone makes it their goal to lose weight.

We recently asked this question to some other network owners recently and the responses we got are that grants are doing extremely well.  IQ tests are also hot which for those who don’t know, are basically a sort of incentivized ringtones offer.  That should also hit on the point as well, that even though people think ringtones are dead, it isn’t at all, and there are a lot of volume.

Also financial related offers are doing extremely well right now because of all the turmoil that is currently going on in the marketplace. Of course this is mostly feedback we’ve heard from other people so I can’t say for sure this is the case with everyone.

Question #7

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

WES: I’m honestly not sure, but because I tend to make sure my time is relevant to the mission we have set for ourselves–I’d honestly love to be in the shoes of Ryan Allis right now, because where they are at, we’d like to be in several years.

Question #8

KRIS: Please share with us your top tips on becoming a PPC super affiliate…

WES: The first thing a person needs to realize before they can become successful at affiliate marketing is “deciding” whether or not they will take the time, invest the money, and figure out a way to make it work no matter how long it takes and how many challenges you run into.  The fact of the matter is that PPC Affiliate Marketing works, and we as people need to decide if we are going to spend enough time to make it work, and do it.  So many people quit, and think they can’t get it to work, and it is a shame because they don’t understand they could have made it work, but they didn’t. To many people give up, like this ppc thing doesn’t work, even though the fact of the matter is it does.  We just have to stick it out and figure out how to do it, no matter what it takes.

So number one, decide your going to do it, and then after that nothing should ever stop you from becoming a PPC super affiliate.  Now once you have decided, and will put in enough time it takes to succeed we can actually talk about scaling and becoming a bigger PPC affiliate. 

Lets really now break it down.  There are three things that affiliates need to do to really explode their affiliate marketing efforts.  And the level of intensity they focus on all of theses three things will determine how well they do.

1)     Is simply doing the work
2)     Is simply learning how to do the work better
3)     And finally is simply networking with those who are doing it well

If you can spend enough time networking, meeting people who successfully doing it, and actually invest the focused time into doing the work, I promise you’ll be successful.  Get into the industry, go to the forums, meet with people, start a blog, make a twitter account—get connected. Attend some MeetUp202 events and if there isn’t one in your area, contact me and we can help you start one.

Become a resource to other people; don’t just try to learn from others. Start actually providing information you can share with others first.  Remember that in order to receive someone must first give.  Start the giving process, help some people in affiliate marketing and in return you’ll be given ideas on how to help your business as well. 
And you have to put in the work.  And not lackluster activity, I mean serious focused activity 10 hours a day if possible straight for several months in a row.  When I got started into this industry I told myself, number one, it works, I just have to figure it out and I went to work.  I’d turn off everything and simply setup PPC campaigns everyday, every night and really put my heart into it.  I eliminated all distractions; there wasn’t any of this doing PPC sloppy, no it was serious and I spent a large amount of time to make it work and it paid off.  You too can do it, but you can’t try to do ten things at once.  Simply focus on building your campaigns and drop everything else you possible can at the time so you can make the most of your time.

I honestly believe it is more about mindset than tips and tricks.  But here are a few actionable ideas if someone can used to help scale their efforts.

1)     If you don’t have money to scale your PPC efforts, leverage yourself, and use someone else’s’ credit card.  I know a friend who scaled and became extremely successfully utilizing someone else’s’ Black card to over 1.5 million per month.
2)     Take advantage of the free yahoo and msn credits.  When we got started there were so many coupons that we used, that when we tested PPC we didn’t even use almost any of our resources, we utilized Yahoo’s coupons to help us first scale
3)     You have to have to use more than just Google Adwords.  So many people tell me they only use Google, or only Yahoo.  It is a horrible idea to only rely on one PPC network, test them all–they will all result in having different results and more often than not if your campaign works on Google it’ll work also on MSN and Yahoo.
4)     Attack the niches that are currently big.  Sometimes we try to look for the most obscure offer and we forget and to realize that the best converting offers are generally some of the most competitive for a reason.  We don’t have to re-invent the wheel.  If other people are doing well on a specific offer, try that one, you can shorten your earnings curve by several months if you just run an offer that has the highest possible chance of success.  And you can do this if you run the offers others are already doing well on.   For instance, if you see people complaining about their ads getting disapproved for a certain offer over and over, that is maybe an offer to look at.   Go where the money is—of course look at some small offers, but never disregard the money that is in the big niches that everyone is running.
5)     Get payout increases as soon as possible, a slight difference in payout can mean the difference between making and losing money.  Sometimes offers aren’t viable until the payout is increased slightly, and having the payout increased means you can outbid your competitors because you’re getting a higher payout on the backend.
6)     You need to be using cards that either have cash back or points, the absolute best card for PPC in my opinion is the AMEX Plum Card, and it is an unlimited 2% cash-back bonus.  This is so much extra money you’re leaving on the table if you do not use a rewards cards. 
7)     Get offers that lasts a long-time.  So many affiliates promote offers make money only to have the offer be discontinued.  There is a simple way to find an offer that, if you get to convert, will perform for years in the future as well.  And the simple trick is this, when you look for an offer, sort by the date the advertiser joined.  If the advertiser was around for the last 2 years for instance, and they are stable, rest assured in most cases that if you get their offers to work that the offer won’t be shut down any time soon.  How would you like it if every offer you setup paid you for 12-24 months into the future? You can do it, invest a little time to find those long-term offers.
     Always have multiple PPC accounts.  Most people know there is a MCC account for Adwords which lets you manage multiple accounts, but there is also the master MSN and Yahoo accounts which allow you to have sub accounts.   And try running campaigns on different accounts—sometimes you’ll setup a campaign on google and it gets slapped for instance, but if u try a different account with the same campaign, sometimes it’ll run.
9)     Use the free tools like Export202 or even the Yahoo importer which allow you to import a converting good campaign directly into yahoo and msn in seconds without manually doing much work.
10)  Make sure to use the Google Adwords desktop client and the MSN AdCenter desktop client, theses tools will save you hours of time in the future.
There are so many more ideas out there, theses are just a few, to find out more, talk to other people, share your ideas and in return you’ll receive some.  Attend of course as well, Affiliate Summit, and the Ad:Tech shows.

Question #9

KRIS: Take us through a day-in-the-life of Wes Mahler…

WES: Every day I pretty much wakeup, of course hop on the computer and what awaits me is about 2-3 hours of tech support every day.  And about 30 minutes to an hour of emailing.  Once that is done I then try to focus most of my energy programming all day.  If anything comes up related to business development and general business operations, my partner Steven whom I work with takes care of everything else.  I try to do my best talking to customers, getting feedback on our product and coding all day. The two of us work about 16-18 hours a day non-stop every day of the week trying to really scale this company because that is our passion.

Question #10

KRIS: What projects are you working on outside of Prosper202 and Tracking202?

WES: We honestly don’t work on anything outside of Tracking202 and Prosper202.  I’m really an advocate on focusing on one thing at time. So all we develop is Tracking202.  Until and only until we are able to become the absolute best PPC Affiliate Tracking platform in the industry we won’t start to work on anything else.  This may take 3-5 more years, and if so we’ll be working on this and nothing else for that whole time.  Any time I spend on other things, is time and resources that could have been invested into our company.  We plan on working on this and only this for next 3-5 years and building a world-class company to over one million dollars a year in sales.

___________________________________

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
Week #24 – Jeremy Palmer
Week #25 – Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker
Week #26 – Jim Kukral

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 9:34 am and is filed under Affiliate Interviews, Meet the Affiliates, Next Generation Affiliate Marketing, Pepperjam Network, Tracking202, Wes Mahler, 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.