Secrets to Affiliate Success with Jeff Vacek

I’m Igor Kheifets. And this is the list building lifestyle. The podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 Bonus packages including my best capture page templates, email, swipe files, and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

00:51

Welcome back to another episode of the list building lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets. And today I’m hosting Jeff Wasik. Now Jeff is the general manager of offer wave, an affiliate network, a performance network, if you will, where publishers and advertisers come together, he brings traffic to offers and offers the traffic. And the reason I wanted to bring him on the show was because, you know, we have a huge affiliate marketing listener base. And, you know, I wanted to pick his brain on some of the

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backstage stories of what he’s seen as, as an epic owner, as far as affiliate marketing goes, and some of the things he told me. And it’ll make a lot of sense, but it’s the kind of stuff you don’t really hear about when you go read on like affiliate marketing blogs and such. Because all that advice is usually very generic and broad and vague. When the, you know, in the real world, you can only judge whether something’s working by the numbers, right, and having access to a dashboard with multiple offers, and multiple publishers who are driving, you know, millions of clicks every day. This, this is like where you get all this juicy data. So, Jeff is someone I’ve met only recently, but I believe this relationship will, you know, go a long way. And he’s also a best-selling author, he wrote a book called the new masters of online marketing. He’s been online for over 20 years, which means he’s one of the dinosaurs. In this space. He founded five online businesses that each hit a seven-figure run rate in less than 12 months. And what I find most impressive is not how much money he made, but rather that he’s a husband and the father of eight, eight. Okay, which I’m assuming some of them have already started on their affiliate marketing journey.

02:50

Jeff, welcome to the list building lifestyle. Thank you, Igor. Really, really good to have you, man. I’m really glad to be on and appreciate the invite. I’m looking forward to it. Yeah, it’s really cool. Because before we started chatting, you were telling me that you deal predominantly with email marketers, which is the seven-figure big theme of this show, and pretty much my life. I mean, there’s almost every dollar I make, I can track back to email. I’ve taught people how to email, email is what most of my JV partners do. I just came back from webinar comm where the vast majority of the room is making money by running email promotions. So, I’m curious to know more. I’m curious to know more about what your top affiliates do? What do your top affiliates don’t do? What do you know; worst affiliates do and how does it work? So, before we get going, though, can you share with us how did it come to be that you now run an entire affiliate network? Sure, and thanks again, Igor. Yeah, it was, I actually extensively did speak, a webinar con, not that event, specifically. And I know that’s a great event.

04:11

But from a big portion of the beginning of my kind of real digital marketing career. I did a lot more on the tech side starting in the late 90s. And then got more into the marketing side in the 2000s. And pretty much from about 2008. Two, I would say 2015 ish. I was doing weekly webinars doing you know, the only kind of traffic that we did was affiliate traffic, you know, affiliate traffic JV partners. That’s all we did. We didn’t run a single ad for our offers. We ran Google ads for one week during that time period, in 2010. Everything else was affiliates and a JV partner. So, you know, I had a very, you know, extensive experience with that.

05:08

And then from, you know, 2015, up to recently, I kind of ventured more into E commerce. So, when I was doing affiliate marketing, I was doing a lot of, you know, digital products, courses, things like that. We had a really big, kind, of course brand. That was our brand. That was a big part of that, that time that I was talking about, between 2008 and 2015. And then I ventured more into E commerce and got into E commerce.

05:38

And it’s just, I mean, honestly, how I got to offer waves was kind of got to a point about six months ago, where, you know, my E-commerce businesses were kind of on autopilot. And, you know, I was just kind of, you know, honestly, just kind of in a position, where do I maybe want to buy another business? Do I want to start another one? And I’ve started a lot and it’s gone. Well, but you know, and also part of it was a personal, you know, family choice. Like you said, I’ve got eight kids, I’ve got one that’s about to go to college, so we’re not quite not the oldest about to go to college. So not quite in the, you know, affiliate marketing career stage yet with him, but but yet, it’s just a buddy of mine.

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That is, the President of our parent company just literally just called me up one day and said, hey, I know you’re just tossing some things around. How would you like to come run, offer a wave? And I was like, I was like, this just sounds fun. Like, you know, I’ve obviously done a lot of affiliate marketing, but I’ve not run a whole network and done that aspect. And it just sounded fun. So yeah, I started doing that back in July. And it’s been a blast, man. I’ve really enjoyed it. Interesting. Okay. So

07:02

kinda kind of reminds me of that saying, your net, your net worth is your network or your network is your net worth, where somebody who knows you and knows your track record just decides to call you out of the blue and invite you to, like this really cool position? Yeah, I mean, that’s how you and I got reconnected. We actually did meet guys a long time ago, man. I mean, it was like, because I was looking back at emails. And

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That was eight, nine years. It was like, I think it was like, gosh, like almost eight years ago or something. But kind of see, that goes to show you that even the kind of people you forget, you know, come around some way when you have a great network. And as you know, our recent connection, and then now having me on here was through our network, our combined network of someone introducing us. Yeah, no doubt. Like, my network is my greatest asset. I mean, there’s no doubt about it. That’s really interesting. Yeah. Forgive me. I don’t recall our meeting but you make me sound really old. Really old when you said dinosaur? But you know, you don’t think of yourself as one. Yeah. Okay, so. So, now you’re on the network, you’ve been running it for some time.

08:23

So, what are you seeing? You said, you predominantly deal with email marketers? So, what kind of trends? Are you seeing what’s working? What’s not working? What are some of the mistakes they’re making? Like? So, what do you have access to behind the scenes? What kind of data do you know? Sure. So, number one, I’ll say that,

08:43

You know, email is not dead email, if anyone tells you that. It’s quite the opposite, actually. And one of the ways that I know, quick story was recently I kind of started using a new email program recently called spark. And you know, they’re constantly upgrading it. They’ve now integrated you know, AI and stuff like that. And I know a lot of programs are doing that now. So, you know, that kind of tells me number one, that you know, email is not dead like why So, are these So, companies Why would you know technology firms and stuff are still investing in email if email was dying or email is dead? So, you know, that’s number one. I know sometimes, you know, people say that and with the rise of you know, things like advertising on So, tick tock and I know tick tock has their even marketplace now and things like that, but that that’s just one channel and not everybody’s constantly paying attention to that channel.

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You know, every day. So that’s number one, that the trend that I’m seeing is email is totally not dead. And in fact, you know, people are still using it and expanding it using AI. I help them with it and stuff like that, um, probably another big one, and that a lot of affiliate marketers don’t talk about is data. You know, I see a lot of affiliates, quote unquote, you know, gurus out there and things like that, and they talk and they So, sort of talk about affiliate marketing and this has been going on forever, you probably know Igor is kind of like the,

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then maybe not necessarily a get rich quick thing. But you know, it’s like, easy to get into, you don’t have to have your own products, and you know, all that kind of spiel. And, you know, I really, I really completely disagree with that, in that, if you want a business, if affiliate marketing is going to be your business, then treat it like a business. So, when I look at the light, let’s just take the top 10. And I won’t say names, but let’s just say the top 10 affiliates on offer wave on our platform, which I’m very much in tune with those, you know, talk about data, I deal with data every day data, like we live or die off a data, you know, an offer wave. And if I look at these, these top 10 affiliates, you know, they’re, you know, they’re constantly there, they treat it like a real business. I mean, they So, treat their affiliate marketing, like a real business, you know, it you know, it’s, it’s, it’s their business, it’s when you want to pack, can you unpack this really quick, because a lot of people see that a lot of people hear that, I’m sure. I’ve been treated like a business since I started. But I didn’t truly understand what it meant, maybe three to four years into my journey. And it’s only then I started treating it like a business. So, we say dream, like a business. Give us a checklist or a recipe like what exactly does that mean? Sure, absolutely. Um, so, you know, treating it like a business. You know, number one, you know, if it’s, if it’s what you’re going to do, even if it’s, you know, a side hustle for you, if it’s what you’re going to do to make money, then I mean, honestly, you know, I mean, even some of the basic stuff, like, you know, case, set up a company, you know, set up, set up, you know, set up an LLC, that you’re going to run everything under, and I’m not, you know, a lawyer or an accountant, but I mean, that’s just something that I, you know, I think you have to do, even if you’re doing an affiliate business to, you know, even you know, protect yourself and, you know, pay your taxes and, you know, take deductions and not pay taxes, the, you know, and all that, you know, where you where you don’t have to and all those kinds of things is, you know, so I would I would I would do that, number one, just putting that out there. Number two, is,

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you know, look at it, you know, plan, you know, plan it plan, what’s your plan, what you’re going to do, it’s like, okay, I’m an affiliate marketer, I’m going to do email. So, I’m going to find a bunch of offers, and I’m going to, you know, send emails to my list. Well, you know, how are you going to build that list? You need to think about what niche you want to be in? Or what verticals? What niches Do you want to be in? And how are you going to build those lists? Because, you know, you and I were kind of talking about this ahead of time, Igor, you know, if I look at, like, for example, again, you know, some of the better affiliates on So, offer wave, they have, you know, multiple lists, they have, oftentimes, they’re in multiple verticals as well.

13:37

And sometimes they even have, you know, their lists on, you know, on So, multiple on multiple platforms, and backups, and things like that. Right. So, if you look at uh, let’s back up a little bit, I’m glad you asked me this, actually. If you look at like, quote, unquote, a real company, and I’m being careful kind of, you know, saying that I don’t want to offend anyone, or like anything like that. But if you if you look at a quote, unquote, real business real company, which I know can be in the eyes of the beholder, but let’s just take it at a basic level, let’s just take, you know, somebody, like, even So, a smaller company, I’m trying to think of one that has a lot of techs around them. You know, I was gonna say Amazon, but it’s like, whoa, you know, that’s obviously, you know, biggest company on the planet, but let’s take like, like a smaller version of an Amazon, right? They have a company and actual entity, they have their, their, the tech, you know, the tech that they’re going to use very well thought out. They have, you know, backups of that. They have, you know, not just one bank account, but multiple bank accounts.

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They have to get into the plan out what verticals and niches, you know, products and services they’re going to get into the plan that out. Um, they have a marketing plan. You know, they know what resources they need. They have, you know, maybe they hire people, maybe not. They keep good books, they keep track of their finances, everything is tracked. So, you know, data, I think that’s probably one of the biggest things. So, if you in other words, if you look at, you know, any kind of good solid company, whether it’s, you know, I don’t know, your local auto repair shop, all the way into, you know, an Amazon or, you know, a Walmart, or some kind of big company, these things are thought out, and they’re set up, and they’re planned. And that, I think, you know, that’s what you have to do with affiliate marketing, as well. And you have to, you know, protect yourself, as well from you know, you know, you need to make sure that you’re protected, as far as when you’re, you know, promoting offers and pushing out offers and everything, you read the fine print about the offer, and, and stuff like that, and you, you protect yourself.

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You know, the quick story about that. So, you know, so I don’t kind of sound like I’m rambling all over the place, I think like, number one, is create an entity create a business, that you’re going to put everything under, have your bank accounts, all those kinds of things, you know, in check, have more than one bank account. You know, plan, what you’re going to do to grow the business and work that plan execute on that plan. If you need some resources, get some inexpensive resources at first, like, you know, virtual assistants from the Philippines or somebody on Fiverr or something like that. Number four, protect yourself. So, anything that you’re doing, this is what I’ve seen, I’ve had affiliates, a couple of recently a couple of affiliates on our network, Igor, that didn’t read the fine print in the offers, they were promoting, didn’t read the fine print in the terms and conditions that they signed.

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And then a customer of the product that they promoted, complained to a local government agency, and that local government agency didn’t go off, didn’t go after the offer owner actually went after the affiliate. And for about two months, months caused the affiliate, absolute hell with all kinds of demand letters, and cease and desist and subpoena even at one point, and they finally liked it resolved at all, and everything, but it was because the affiliate didn’t, you know, read the fine print and things like that. And they said some things in their emails that they weren’t supposed to say kind of made some So, false claims that, you know, they So, shouldn’t made, and they didn’t do it, you know, like, not like, they didn’t necessarily know they were doing it, and we’re trying to, you know, do something, you know, bad but it just it came, it came back to bite them. And so, you know, this person has recovered, and is, you know, kind of back, you know, promoting on the network and things like that, but you know, they, you got to protect yourself. And then number five is just data, you have to track what you’re doing. I mean, otherwise, honestly, if you’re not tracking your email, if you’re not tracking conversions,

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you actually might as well drive down the freeway and throw money, throw money out the window. Data is everything. I always say data never lies. And so, if you’re not tracking your, you know, your open rate your click through rate your conversions, you know, how well, even demographics, if at all possible, I know, sometimes it’s difficult with being an affiliate, because you’re maybe reliant on another network, maybe you don’t have access to all of the data.

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But demographics, do as much as you can and get as much as you can. I know, on our network, and this isn’t a pitch, I’m just saying on our network, we can pretty much provide you with anything, if you ask for it. You know, we can push it through our you know, not to get too technical, push it through our API somewhere, whatever, if there’s something that you want, just ask us for it, and we can, you know, push it somewhere for you so you can see or, you know, do something in your dashboard, or something like that. So, to me, those are the five things, Igor, that you have to do. If you’re going to treat affiliate marketing like, you know, like a real business, so to speak. Yeah, absolutely. I think it comes down to attitude.

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In general, because as somebody who teaches people how to do affiliate marketing in email, what I’m noticing is that the decisions people make the attitudes that bring to the table, they’re just half ass. They’re really not, not emphasizing what they’re, they’re not really emphasizing the importance of what they’re doing. You know, it doesn’t take priority, they’ll still prioritize going to the grocery store or vacuuming the apartment, or, you know, I’ve had a tough week, I’m probably going to take the day off. Yeah, I remember writing emails to my list, while

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being at work, kind of slacking off a little bit with my laptop into the bathroom. Just so I could write a few emails. You know, other times I would actually call in sick for work, you know, with my sick voice. Yeah. Not sure what happened, I just woke up and I can’t even. And I would like to stay home to catch up on, you know, posting content or something. The back of my social media days, like I would basically make it a priority to work on my business, rather than go party, or do things that weren’t terribly important, like skip birthday parties, you know, people who will go to every freaking birthday party for anyone they know. You know, what, there’s only like five people in my whole life. Of whose birthday party, I’ll go, and I’ll cancel my plans. And I’ll go because, like, how many best friends? Or how many really close people can you have? Yeah, if you tell me, you’ve got 30 best friends, then none of them are best friends. Right? Like if everyone paints lime, green, lime green doesn’t stand out. So, you can have like 30 friends and say 30 of them are your best friends. So, it’s like, what’s more important to you, and at the onset of your affiliate career, that should be really important. Your So, business should be extremely, in fact, it should be more important than pretty much anything else.

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You know, like, even when I started, like, I started dating my future wife. Even then, I would like to bury my work over spending time with her. And yes, it got me in trouble quite a few times, for sure. But guess what, now, I can wake up with seven tickets to school, have breakfast, etc. Then I can work until 1pm. And then before we pick up the kids from school, we get older, quality time to spend that we want. Or if you want to go out, you know, for a night downtown, bringing the babysitter. That’s not cheap, by the way, in Toronto. You know, in fact, our babysitter. She used to live across the street. And now she moved downtown because she goes to school. So, if we have to bring her I have to Uber her from downtown, for the babysitting. And then we’re back. And I’ll still do it first because I can afford it. But second, because you know, quality time or date night is probably a priceless thing for a relationship. But my point being is that back then, when I needed to prioritize my business, I did. And I made the sacrifices I had to do

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I even actually had to cut off some people from my life because they did not get me, they did not really understand my attitude. So, they weren’t really supportive. So now I can do the things that not none of them can do. Yeah, you know, I can go in the same month, I can go to London to watch a couple of football games, come back, go to Vegas to shoot out of the helicopter. Because it’s the only place where you can do shit like that, like only in Vegas, you can do something from a tank or helicopter where there’s a lot of only Vegas things. Yeah. And then and then come back, be on time. You know, for my daughter’s concert,

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attend my son’s soccer practice, have the date night and still make, you know, a ton of money. So, again, this only is a result of attitudes and decisions made in the past. And you know, you can’t really get there unless you prioritize your online business and treat it like a business again, would you use what you’re saying is really true. Like, you know, have some asset protection there, start a separate bank account, make it like at least make it seem to yourself like you’re taking this seriously. You know, because the attitude people bring to the table today is so and there’s so much entitlement Right? Like everybody wants to be a millionaire in five minutes. I was. You know, I took my son to soccer a couple of weeks ago and there was this. One of the moms there. She was reading a book and the book was called the Five Second rule by Mel Robbins. And it’s like how, How much faster can we get? Yeah, like, Why? Why don’t we keep responding to these messages to say all and it says so on the cover? All it takes to change your life is five seconds. What? Yeah, what? Bullshit? No, it doesn’t get to make a decision to change your life that takes five seconds. Yeah. But to change your life, you’re going to have to execute over a long period of time she was to discipline, you know, deal with adversity with some challenges, you know, pivot, show some creative thinking. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff you shake some hands, make, you know, make new friends, let some old friends go, invest, take risks, all that requires is required to change your life. But not I mean, it’s not five seconds. So, this this entitlement attitude is really annoying to me. Yeah, it is. I mean, you So, make time you make So, time for you make time for what’s important to you. So, look in the mirror, ask yourself, what are you making time for? And if you’re not making time for this, or that whatever, whether it’s affiliate marketing or whatever, then you know, maybe it’s not important to you need to move on and go do something else. Or, like you said, you need to make that commitment and do it. And that’s the thing about affiliate marketing, just like any other again, business, if you’re gonna treat it like business, it takes consistent and persistent effort, and commitment. It’s not going to happen overnight. Has it happened overnight? For some people, I mean, maybe, but everybody’s not going to be a unicorn, whether you’re doing affiliate marketing, or starting, you know, any other kind of business, or anything like that. It takes persistent, consistent effort, commitment, you know, over time, and that’s, that’s the only you know, it and here’s the here’s the funny thing, Igor, and you could probably agree with this. So, like I said, I’ve been doing, I’ve been doing that, I mean, I’ve basically been an entrepreneur, and doing stuff, you know, for the better part of going on 24 years, I still don’t feel like I’ve even come close to arriving, like, well, you know, it’s, I still get up every morning and consistent, persistent effort.

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You know, no matter what it is, yes, things look a lot different. Yes, I can, like you said, I make my own schedule, spin time, you know, play basketball with one of my eight kids in the middle of the day, blah, blah, blah, you know, all those kinds of things. But it’s, I still, you know, there’s always another level, there’s always another level that you’re, that you’re trying to get to and affiliate marketing is the same way you and I were kind of talking about that. At the beginning, it’s like, you know, let’s say let’s, you know, we have we have a guy, for example, again, won’t say names, we have a guy, one of our top affiliates, and he’s been in the survival and tactical like kind of prepper like market for a very long time, a long time, like, probably at least seven, eight years. And, you know, one of the things that he started doing recently, I would say, probably within the last year, is he started building other he started building and branching out into other verticals.

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Now, not that he’s going to give up the survival tactical prepper vertical or feel like he’s dominated that or something like that. But it’s like, you know, what, I need to diversify a little bit here. I need to go you know, Omni vertical here, we talking about Omni more marketing and multi marketing, you know, I need to go multi vertical here, you know, just in case and kind of broaden and my horizon so he started he started getting into the health. And when I say health, because that’s broad, mainly like supplements and mainly he niched down really well, I feel like and of course, I can see all his data, you know, and all this kind of stuff and everything, but he niches down kind of into supplements that deal with like, like chronic stuff, or aging, anti-aging and stuff like that. Now, let me backup a little bit, you know, how he came up with that idea? Data, he knew his audience. So how he started building that was he knew that he had the audience for those types of products on his survival, tactical and prepper. Lists. He knew he had kind of a, you know, 45 to 50 Plus, you know, primarily male, but also female, that are starting to deal with like chronic pain and you know, maybe not wanting to age and stuff and things like that. So, all the way back when I said data is important. Here’s a guy on our platform on our network that took the data that he had, and realize, oh, I’ve got this audience. This vertical this product works with that on

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Audience, I’m going to start with that. So, he didn’t even necessarily right at the beginning do anything like separate list building, so to speak by, you know, buying media or putting out content or whatever. He went to what I call low hanging fruit. And said, I’ve got these people right here. On my end, he has a really big list, but he’s been doing it for a long time, and started pulling them over and seeing which ones are interested in, you know, the health offerings and the health products. And now he’s going out, even very recently, now he is going out and buying media and doing some more or less building on that side. But it’s like he already knows.

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He already knows what works and what works to that audience by using his current audience. And so, you know, an absolutely brilliant move, that I’m seeing more and more people. Ya, and I agree. Oftentimes, when you engage your audience, we have a list and you’re just intimate with the list in a way of just continuously communicating to IT and marketing to it. You get to know the audience, and you can start, you can tell like there’s always signals. And then you can run a test promotion, see if they respond, and some things they do. And some things they do. And you know, that that gives your ideas on what to promote next. It’s a really smart move, in my opinion, because it is just a launchpad to either another business or another income stream, which, of course, you know, having an email list, the beauty is you can create multiple streams of income. It’s never about just one, one offers one solution or one problem. It’s an audience, right? audiences tend to have multiple problems, multiple seeking multiple solutions. And, you know, we’re not alike, consumers are not one dimensional. Like, if you got a bunch of 45- to 55-year-old, you know, conservative males, then there’s going to be other stuff they’re interested in. And they might not necessarily, you know, think of you as the source to, to a solution to a different problem. But if you know, make an announcement, Why wouldn’t they pay attention? They already know you already trust you. Why not? So, it’s a very easy thing to do. Yeah. All right. Cool. Well, thank you for spending this brief time with us. It’s been pretty cool to get your insights.

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Guys want to encourage you to go and check out if you’re an affiliate, you got some traffic and you want to promote some really cool offers checkout offer wave at offer wave.org. And if you’re new to marketing, if you’re looking to get better, if you’re looking to grow, if you’re looking to learn from So, Jeff, then you can check out his book, titled the new masters of online marketing, it’s available on Amazon. Go check it out. And besides, you know, aside from that, aside from the insights you share today, Jeff, there’s one more question I’m gonna ask you. So, if you’ve been in line for over 20 years, if you were starting over today, what would be the first thing on the agenda for you? The first thing on the agenda for me would be what? What do I want to create as my brand? Whether that’s a product brand, or a personal brand? And that’s what I would do? Because in this day and age of trying to get people’s engagement content?

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And things like that, you know, I would create, what So, is that brand going to be? And that’s what I would do, because everything else can stem out from that brand . So, that is what creates attraction. I mean, obviously, it is what you do with it.  But instead of just like, I’m just gonna go make some money. It’s like, I’m going to build a brand, whatever that is, whether it’s your own, again, your own personal brand, like a Tony Robbins, or something like that, or, you know, a product or technology or like whatever, what So, is, what is that brand that I’m going to build and stand behind? That’s that, and a lot of you might say, well, your brand doesn’t make you money. That doesn’t make any sense. Well, yeah. You said, where am I going to start? And that’s where that’s where, where I would start. All right. Sounds good. So, Jeff, again, thank you for spending this time with me. Thanks for rapping about affiliate marketing. Appreciate your insights. Guys, you want to check more

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about Jeff, you can go and check out his book. And you can also check out offer wave.org If you’re an affiliate or if you’re an advertiser, and you want to get more affiliates. Obviously go. We’ll get listed on the offer wave. It’s a boutique agency and they got a ton of email traffic and multiple verticals. So, you might want to check that out. So, with that said, thank you so much. And until next time, we’ll chat. Have a good thank you.

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Thank you for listening to the list building lifestyle, get access to the previous episode’s transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at www.listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to claim your free copy of my bestselling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email, swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com Now to claim your free package