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Today we have an interview with an affiliate marketer and entrepreneur who started his career as a blogger and now runs one of the internets best examples of an affiliate blog (his own) as well as co-founding and running 2 very important blogging sites, which give you detailed news and information about the affiliate and marketing world.
Today we have Zac Johnson under the spotlight, and if you have never heard of him, then please take a moment to check out his websites…im sure you will learn something new!
Name - Zac Johnson
Location – NJ USA
Blog or Company you represent.
I currently blog at http://zacjohnson.com which is my own personal and business related blog, while also being the co-founder of http://blogging.org a content generation site and http://ppc.org, a high profile pay per click marketing based blog.
Brief description of your business profile.
I’ve been an online marketer for more than 15 years and a blogger for the past five years now. I like to think I’ve had my hands in nearly every facet of online marketing over the years, from affiliate marketing, pay per click, media buying, social networks, mobile, blogging and much more. Through my blog at ZacJohnson.com I share my stories, success and failures with my blog readers to help inspire and improve success with internet marketing.
How did you find out about affiliate marketing?
Way back in the mid to late 90s I started making money with Amazon’s affiliate program and then came across an affiliate network that was paying out $1 for lead gen sign ups for free catalogs and various other offers. Realizing it was much easier to make money with free leads then having to actually sell products through Amazon for a small commission, affiliate marketing quickly became my game of choice.
When did you begin your first affiliate campaign and how did it run?
As mentioned, my first affiliate marketing was with Amazon. I was creating thousands of individual celebrity pages and sites that were ranking very well in the search engines. When people got to my sites they would see a bunch of movies from those same celebrities. Since all of the traffic was free from the search engines, the revenue and profits were great. I went on to make over six figures as an Amazon affiliate. I slowly transitioned my sites from Amazon stores to free stuff based sites, which I was earning commissions on from the affiliate networks.
How do you advertise your blog or company, which methods work best for you, SEO, SM etc?
Nearly all of the advertising for ZacJohnson.com has been through word of mouth and my content being shared on other blogs. Lately I have been doing some guest blogging which seems to work quite well. It’s all about growing your brand and making something that people come back to and trust in.
Can you explain your 3 key golden rules to becoming a good affiliate?
This one can really swing depending on the niche you are in, but I would recommend the following:
- Start small with your ad budgets, then scale out
- Split test everything and hit target demographics
- Build something long term so you aren’t relying on quick ad campaigns that come and go
Do you need to be a good writer to have a profitable blog/company – explain?
Of course not. No one needs to be a great writer anymore, and no one cares if you have an English major or never even finished high school. It’s all about the quality of content you provide. Be real and people will care about what you have to say. When it comes to a landing page copy… that’s a bit different and should be treated like a published book and proofread multiple times.
Are you attending any affiiate or marketing events in 2013?
I almost always make it to AdTech, BlogWorld (NMX) and Affiliate Summit when they are on the East Coast. Depending on what I have going on I may make it out to the west coast for a few events.
If you could run any company or blog for a week, which would it be and why?
I think it would be fun to run a site like ESPN.com or CollegeHumor.com for a day… just something completely different and see how they manage their ad campaigns and sell space on their site, while coming up with their original content. It would be pretty cool to look over the shoulder of the people working at Facebook and Google too.
YieldKit would like to say…. a massive thanks to Zac Johnson for the great interview, and we wish you many more years of growing your business and teaching thousands of people about marketing.
