Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview #2: Introducing Scott Hazard
Friday, May 16th, 2008
Welcome to Week #2 of the Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series!
This week I had the pleasure of doing an exclusive interview with one of the most experienced, professional, and likable guys in all of affiliate marketing - Scott Hazard.
As you’ll see from his interview, Scott is candid - he is sincere - and he is incredibly forthcoming with what it takes to be a successful affiliate marketer.
I know you will enjoy Scott’s interview and we hope that you bookmark the Pepperjam Network Blog (do people still do that?) or simply click here to receive future “Meet the Affiliates” interviews via e-mail.
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 #2
CooperativeAffiliates.com
Question #1
KRIS: Where do you live? Are you married? Any children? Animals?
SCOTT: I live in Mineola, Texas, a small town of 5700 people that is 90 miles east of Dallas. I am originally from Alexandria, Louisiana, but have spent the last 10 years in Florida before moving to Texas in February of 2007. I have always loved East Texas. I used to come here when I was a kid to visit my Grandmother. I lived in East Texas during my days as a Kinney Shoes store manager in the 80’s, so when the hurricanes of 2004 started the wheels turning in looking for a new place to live, this was a fairly easy choice.
I live with Judi, my girlfriend of 5 years. We are not married (shhhh) but we might as well be and likely will be some day. She has four children who are grown and are scattered throughout the Southeastern US. I never had children.
Judi and I are both involved in Community Theater. This is how we met. You can often find us performing in plays or other events being hosted and run by the theater. We are both not only comfortable in front of a crowd, but we crave it from time to time. This is a lot of work and takes a lot of time and pays nothing, but I couldn’t imagine not doing it. We’ve both been involved with various Theaters for 15+ years and at last count have been involved in 60+ plays between us.
We have two Standard Poodles, Creole and Gumbo (creoleandgumbo.com), that keep us busy and keep us quite entertained. They are wonderful dogs. They both have an amazingly calm and friendly demeanor and the town of Mineola, TX is getting to know them. We take them to Dairy Queen for treats now and then and we take them to all of the festivals and outdoor events the town has. They love people and they love to be out and about town. They especially love going to the bank because the drive-in teller gives them treats.
New local project…MineolaLive.com.
Question #2
KRIS: When and how did you first get involved in affiliate marketing? Can you share your story…
SCOTT: In a nutshell, I was a merchant and got tired of affiliates outperforming me due to the flexibility and diversity available to affiliates. The Affiliate Marketing industry allows someone to sit at home on their laptop and run circles around a merchant who has inventory, shelf space, employees, utility bills and so many other expenses and burdens to deal with on a daily basis. These elements of being a merchant keep you from being nimble and able to ‘shift gears’ on a moment’s notice when opportunity arises. Of course some of the large merchants with deep pockets have this flexibility, but that was not my case.
I thought about affiliate marketing for years before I actually started it, mostly because I did not know how to get started or what or where an affiliate network was. Once I found my first affiliate network, I have not really looked back since.
I got in to affiliate marketing at the tail end of the days when you could stick a datafeed site out there and get sales within 24 hours. My first dedicated affiliate site immediately started making me money and I was shocked at that. Even more shocking was how quickly that money stopped once the duplicate content filter took effect and my site was buried. That was an early lesson in diversity in the affiliate marketing world.
Question #3
KRIS: You are one of the most respected (and admired) affiliates in the industry and you’ve been given prestigious awards, including the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for “Affiliate of the Year.” This is simply awesome. Based on your recognition and achievement, what advise can you give other aspiring affiliates that may lead to them one day being honored as “Affiliate of the Year?”
SCOTT: First of all, thank you for your kind words. I touched on my biggest piece of advice in my last answer, diversity. I’ll elaborate now.
I often consult with people just entering the world of Affiliate Marketing. The very first thing I tell them to do and the one thing I harp on the most seem to conflict each other, but they are the two elements to success in this business as far as I am concerned. I will outline them for your readers.
1) Find something…a hobby, a profession, a line of products…or whatever, that you are knowledgeable of and passionate about. Take this and run with it. Do some research on the topic. Find ways to monetize this theme with a web site. Find a way to make your web site different from any other web site on the topic then dedicate the time, resources and focus necessary to complete the task. BUT…before diving in to this task, keep a few things in mind.
A) Make sure you can monetize it. There have to be merchants with affiliate programs. There needs to be a market for your topic that is large enough to give you different marketing channels. For instance, there needs to be affiliate opportunity, contextual advertising (Adsense, PJ Ads) opportunity and other ways for you to make money on this site.
B) Make sure your topic is sustainable. For instance, if your topic of interest is transferring VHS video tape to DVD, this might not be a good idea because in a few years VHS will be right up there with 8-track tape. Certainly, as technology changes you can morph along with it, so this might not be the perfect example, but I think it gets my point across.
C) Make sure there is a niche (or more than one) within the broad topic that you can exploit. Start broad, then start chipping away at niches within your broad topic. For example, if I start with a site about photography, I can then move in to underwater photography, negative image photography, time lapse etc. from there. Make sure your broad topic will accommodate this logic as it is essential to making your site different than everyone else’s site.
2) Develop content on your topic. Write, take photos, video is hot these days. -Sidetrack Story- Judi and her sister, who has recently moved to East Texas and is living with us while she gets settled etc., sit in Judi’s office for hours on end and watch videos on YouTube. This sometimes leads to them making purchases based on the videos they have seen. They often call me in and show me something and say something like “Maybe we should be doing that….” I am not one to sit and watch video on the web, but there are a LOT of people who do. This has prompted me to start development on a localized, all video site. -/Sidetrack Story
Develop your site out using anything you can to make it unique. People love tables with facts and figures, cool widgets they can play with or anything else that they can interact with or share.
This is where I contradict myself.
3) Diversify Diversify Diversify !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Forget about your cool site as discussed above, once it is up and running and you are happy with it. I am NOT saying to abandon it, but shift gears to something different.
Do something totally different. Make a coupon site, make a price comparison, make a review site…anything except what you have already done. Work on running some product-based PPC for products you are familiar with. Work on developing a newsletter from a blog or chat site. Work on developing a Facebook application…ANYTHING, but something completely different. You can find another topic all together and repeat the steps above if you want, but I still encourage you to try completely different things.
Know going in that in this business, I am happy if 1 in 5 things I try actually pay off. In an industry with so many variables, some visible and some latent, a 20% success rate is great, in my opinion at least!
I know this sounds crazy, but I have learned twice the hard way in this business that you can never rely heavily on any given:
• Merchant
• Vertical market
• Network
• Promotional method
• Web site
• Business arrangement
• Affiliate manager
• Traffic source
…or anything else. DO NOT allow yourself to make more than 40% of your income from any single element listed above or any other single element. Things change. Merchants lose their mind and make terrible decisions that destroy their affiliate program. Affiliate managers seem to come and go like the wind in this industry. While a little bit of loyalty can go a long way in an affiliate/affiliate manager relationship, do not hem yourself in here and never let the relationship become personal. Keep it business.
Most of all, Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan. It is REAL easy to get sidetracked in this industry with so many ways to go. Plan out your mission and execute it. This is something I have struggled with and continue to struggle with, but I am getting better at it since I have removed many of the distractions from my professional life.
Question #4
KRIS: What are some of your favorite online resources for learning more about affiliate marketing?
SCOTT: I keep up with many online resources. I seem to get the best information at Revenews, but there are too many to name that I at least read regularly.
Question #5
KRIS: Tell us what an average day in the life of Scott Hazard is like…
SCOTT: I wake up and have my coffee while looking at yesterday’s stats and reading the news of the day. I sit outside on my back patio if the weather is cooperative and let the Poodles run and take care of their morning business. Then we go inside and get started on the day’s work list. I’ll admit that I am not rigidly structured in my work agenda, but I am usually working on something that takes focus early in the day. Often times things will come up that I will deal with, then I move back to what I was doing before.
I try to work for at least most of the hours between 9 and 5. I find that if I am able to do this, my social life is much better because all of our friends etc. operate on the 9-5 work schedule so this allows us to fit in to the activities and such with our friends and community.
I often find myself sitting in the living room with my laptop in my lap and working my way through my favorite evening TV shows. After years of trying, I am still pretty well unable to unplug from my business unless I am actively doing something else. I seem to default to work and rely on something else to take me away. For this reason, we belong to several associations, clubs etc. in town and try to get out at least a few nights a week and on weekends.
Question #6
KRIS: When you were a kid what did you dream of becoming when you grew up?
SCOTT: HAHA. My first professional aspiration, when I was about 5, was to be a trash man. I thought the way they rolled those big 55 gallon barrels down the street was really, really cool!
Throughout my preteen & teenage years I idolized Tom Brokaw. I thought, and still do think, that it would be totally cool to be in front of millions of people every day delivering the news. I realize now that there is a LOT more to a job like that than just sitting down in front of a camera for 30 minutes a day. With the exception of working as a radio DJ while I was in college, I have never really pursued that. It could be said that I pursue this with my theater activities. Anyone who knows me knows I am a ham.
Mostly what I have always wanted was the ability to be autonomous and do something that I really enjoy doing…something that is not such a…job! The fact is that I really enjoy thinking up crazy ways to sell things and I really enjoy fooling with web sites and online stuff. I have also always enjoyed sharing with others and helping people who are willing to take the time to learn, so I am doing exactly what I want to do in my affiliate marketing and consulting endeavors.
Question #7
KRIS: In 50 words or less (hahaha), what does the future of affiliate marketing look like?
SCOTT: It looks good. There is still a lot of corruption and abuse in this industry, but it seems to be slowly moving in the right direction. If the industry can survive until the networks and other entities realize the things that are truly harming the industry and act to fix them, it will be fine. If those with the power and influence in this industry don’t continue to make the right decisions, or in some cases don’t start to make the right decisions, this industry could be in trouble over the long run, but I try to remain optimistic.
I will, however, admit that I continue to branch out in my online (and offline) activities beyond just affiliate marketing. Again…diversity is key.
Question #8
KRIS: What is the next big money making opportunity in affiliate marketing?
SCOTT: Anti-social media. I think many people are getting tired of all the social stuff and will soon revert to their caves and live as hermits. OK, I am just kidding.
I think we will see large advances in video streaming and linking technology real soon that will change how the affiliate marketing industry, as well as e-commerce, works. You will never be able to try on a pair of shoes or pants over the internet, but I think we are approaching a time where video will take over for static images and consumers will start to expect to see video from every angle of an item before purchasing it.
From the marketing standpoint video is obviously gaining ground daily, but there are still some out there who deny its usefulness. Those affiliates will be part of the propwash if they don’t adapt.
Question #9
KRIS: Can a new coupon Web site (i.e. CouponMountain.com), cash back (i.e. Cashbaq.com), or search-engine marketing affiliate (i.e. Clicks2Customers) make money these days or have these opportunities dried up?
SCOTT: These opportunities are still out there. It’s not as easy as it once was, but what in life that is good is? As the economy continues to slump, coupon sites and cash back sites will continue to grow.
As long as an affiliate adds value to the merchant and helps the customer in some way, there will always be a way for an affiliate marketer to make money. If all of the networks dried up tomorrow and the industry as we know it came to a screeching halt, there will still be merchants who are willing to pay me and others like me to send them buying customers. It is as simple as that in my opinion.
Question #10
KRIS: Name one person in the affiliate industry you admire and tell us why?
SCOTT: If I can only use one name, it is Pat Grady. I met Pat when we were both very young in this industry and we have been very good friends since then. With both of us realizing the potential long-term benefits, we made a pact early on to be open with each other about what we are doing, the methods we use, what works and what doesn’t and every other aspect of our businesses. Over time, this relationship grew very strong and gets stronger every day. We have made our mistakes and we have both learned from the other’s mistakes.
In an industry where trusting others can be so dangerous, to have a friend like this has countless benefits. From having someone to listen with an objective ear when I am bitching about something, to having someone to bounce crazy ideas off of, the importance of having this kind of relationship in an industry of “lone wolves” is invaluable.
To top this off, Pat remains one of the single smartest people I know. He often provides insight that I could never have gained otherwise. I won’t say that we always agree because we often do not, but to have someone who you trust implicitly who knows the business is the closest that many of us will ever get to having a business partner.
Large companies have one big advantage in that they are (hopefully) staffed with brilliant and intelligent people who can create an atmosphere of synergy by leveraging all of their individual knowledge and experiences. This is where most affiliates fall far short, but my relationship with Pat Grady has allowed me to grow and I can only hope that I am as helpful to him as he has been to me.
I also have to say Kristen Kinsey (since Sam had multiple answers to this question too). Kristen is an OPM who only came onto the scene a short time back, but she is bright, honest and always energetic and willing to do whatever she can to help someone succeed in her programs. She enthusiastically portrays the ideals of her clients and she is not afraid to admit when she is wrong about something. Kristen is wise beyond her years and her programs will always be attractive to me because of her association.
Next on deck for Meet the Affiliates: Super Affiliate, Best-Selling Author, Blogger, Revenue Magazine Columnist, and International Speaker - Rosalind Gardner
Rosalind’s interview will be published here on the Pepperjam Network Blog next Friday, May 23, 2008.
Make sure you don’t miss it! Click Here to subscribe to the PJN Blog and have each interview delivered to your e-mail box.
Read Previous “Meet the Affiliates” Interviews:
Affiliate Interviews affiliate marketing Meet the Affiliates Next Generation Affiliate Marketing pepperjam Pepperjam Chat Pepperjam Network pepperjamADS Sam Harrelson Scott Hazard TransparencyAffiliate Interviews affiliate marketing Meet the Affiliates Next Generation Affiliate Marketing pepperjam Pepperjam Chat Pepperjam Network pepperjamADS Sam Harrelson Scott Hazard Transparency
