Nick Koscianski is a successful affiliate marketer, blogs at NickyCakes.com, and is a WickedFire forum moderator. With the ultimate goal of helping new people succeed in the industry, his no-nonsense approach aims to show newcomers and experienced affiliates the “real” side of online marketing.
Thanks for the interview!
Thanks for asking me to do an interview Jon. I used to ask people to do interviews or guest posts for my blog when I first started it and they all said no, so I make it a point to always say yes when people ask me. Hopefully my answers provide a little insight into the not-so-exciting world of Nickycakes.
Tell us a little background info about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? How long have you been working in this industry?
I’m originally from Maryland around the Annapolis/Baltimore area, but I’ve lived in a lot of places on the east coast including northern VA and Boston for 5 years. I’m in Vegas now. I’m 26 years old, but if I shave I look about 14. I’ve been working in this industry for only 2 and a half years, but I came a LONG way to get here. I’ve been everywhere from homeless, to jail, to Harvard, to dropping out after my business blew up. I’ve worked a ton of jobs, most of them really bad. Things like construction, data entry, auto parts, 1 hour photo, phone answering, etc. Needless to say, life is much better now.
What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
Although I am proud of what I have done business wise, the things I am proud of are mostly related to how much I’ve changed my life which has allowed me to help people outside of my work. As far as the online marketing stuff is concerned, I’m proud of my blog whenever someone contacts me to say they were helped by it. That’s the idea, right?
When did you first realize the full potential in affiliate marketing? When did you first “hit the big time?”
There were 3 days in my short Affiliate Marketing career that I can remember clearly. I had my first $100 day a few months after I started. It was a dating campaign I created on Facebook ads, and I can remember refreshing my stats all day and calling in sick to work (I was working at a stationery store at the time designing business cards and wedding invitations). I quit shortly after. The second day I can remember was my first $1,000 day which was, I think, the first day of ASW ’08. I was staying at the Gold Coast at the time which was like $50 a night, and I can honestly say that first big wire was the first time I had ever had more than $1,000 that I had legally earned in my life. The third day I can remember followed shortly after and was the first time I made over $10k in a day. I couldn’t even work, and said F-it and went to eat ice cream.
What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
There are no failures as long as you learn from your mistakes. At least that’s what I try to tell myself. I’ve have a few really bad “oops” moments where I bid $80 on ppv traffic when I was supposed to bid $.80 and had my account on auto-refill and blew a few thousand for being a retard. Shame on me for letting that happen more than once, though. Everyone has failed campaigns. If they don’t, they’re lying to you. The more failed campaigns you have, the more successful ones you have, though, unless you’re just stupid.
Frustrations? Not enough time in the day, and using the time I do have wisely. I’m prone to procrastination and playing xbox when I’m supposed to be working, but when I get rolling, I work obsessively. For me, it’s go hard, or go home. There is no happy medium, unfortunately.
What is the single toughest problem you've had to face, and how did you get through it?
I’m going to assume you mean business. The single toughest problem I’ve had in Affiliate Marketing, so far, was getting started. Not because I couldn’t figure things out, but because I assumed there was useful information out there for me to read that would help me get started. I spent about 3 months just reading stupid blogs, forums, etc, which taught me absolutely nothing. Once I realized that most bloggers and all e-books were just out there to scam me, and I started trying things for myself, it was smooth sailing.
Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
I hate design. I’m really bad at it, no matter how much I practice so this is the one thing that I often have to pay for. Ideally I’d be able to do everything myself, but I finally gave up that battle and just hire designers.
Just a tip for hiring designers: Ask friends for recommendations. Never just go on some forum or google up some designers to hire. There are so many of them and good ones are really hard to find. Paying a crappy designer who takes too long or just isn’t good enough is the worst.
What’s the best advice you could give to someone starting out in Internet marketing? Any pro tips you feel like disclosing?
I get asked a lot of the same questions over and over by new guys just starting out, which is why I started my newbie guide so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself over and over on msn all day. The single most asked question is one that nobody can really give a right answer to: “Do you think XXXX will work?” Anyone who claims to have an answer to this question in Affiliate Marketing is a fraud. The answer is always the same: “Try it for yourself and see if it works.” Even if I gave you my exact keywords, landing page, offer, payout, etc for a profitable campaign I’m running, there are 100 things that could make your experience different from mine. The ONLY way to succeed is to try things on your own. So stop reading (and yes, your readers are probably reading your blog now looking for this same info) and just get out there and try things.
What is the future of marketing?
Affiliate marketing is still in its early stages. It’s still SO easy to make huge profits compared to any other industry almost. Cakestradamus predicts affiliates will start being consolidated into companies such that individual affiliates will be competing with larger corporations doing the same job as affiliates but on a larger scale. Much like when the software industry was in its infancy, people could start a million dollar software company alone in their garage, but now it is much more difficult to make a million dollar piece of software alone because you are competing with huge corporations with enormous resources and hundreds of coders. This is what affiliate marketing will likely look like in 10 years.
If it’s possible for you to share, are there any particular niches that you currently favor? Or that you aren’t necessarily in right now but that you would recommend?
Anyone who knows me knows I almost never share what I’m doing, even with close friends. Nobody else should either if they care about making money. If you strike oil, keep it secret and milk it till it dies. I put a lot of effort into this too. People are constantly trying to find out what you’re promoting. When you link to a network with your referral code, they can use that to find your campaigns. Oh you don’t have 2 accounts at the networks you use so you can use a separate referral id from your campaigns? Your bad.
How has your education prepared you for your career?
I learned almost nothing that I could put to practical use in my job by attending school other than math and some econ. The rest is good for impressing girls, though.
What are your greatest strengths?
I’m at the top of the leaderboard among all my friends for gun accuracy in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and I never snipe or use shotguns.
What are your greatest weaknesses?
I’ve never been really good at RTS games like Starcraft, even though I’ve put many many hours into them.
What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
Never get mad at things that are out of your control. I can’t control people who don’t know how to drive, I can’t control the weather, I can’t control the advertisers merchant account getting shut down, I can’t control other people’s stupidity. Getting mad at these things won’t make them better, they’ll make me worse. I CAN control my actions, though. And I can get mad when I screw things up. So the things you can control, do them well.
Do you have any role models or people that you look up to?
I admire anyone who brags about how much they gave to charity or how much they helped people rather than how much they put in their bank account or how much they spent on themselves. That’s the sign of a true baller.
Who has impacted you most in your career, and how?
When I first started I had a crappy day job and could barely afford to pay for $25 in traffic per day and still eat. My first profitable campaign was being bottlenecked by cashflow, obviously, and Scott Richter, owner of Affiliate.com (they were CPAEmpire at the time), called me up and offered to loan me $2k to get my campaign rolling. Normally I hate to owe anyone anything, but that is what pushed this thing from a hobby to a career in 1 week. These days, the people that impact my career most are the guys who were kinda newbies when I was a newbie and are now all successful. Really good to see everyone making it, although plenty don’t.
Do you try to keep current with the latest Internet marketing news at all? What or who are your main sources?
I have to keep up with current events a bit just for the blog. Hard to be an authority on Affiliate Marketing if I don’t keep up with things, obviously. But if I didn’t have the blog to write for, I would make a serious effort to NEVER read ANY news about ANYTHING. If you think about it, it’s a complete waste of time. Anything important going on in the world you’re going to hear from a friend anyway. Staying current on the latest celeb gossip does nothing to improve my life or my business.
What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with? Any good stories?
I get along with people pretty well, but I can’t stand fake people, and there are PLENTY in this industry. You see them all the time at trade shows. They are the used car salesmen of the Affiliate Marketing industry. Usually they are the management or PR guys at the bigger corporate affiliate networks. They have never run a campaign in their lives and are not involved at all in the day-to-day operations of the network so they have NO idea what affiliates want, but they love to pay people to write nice things about them, or take affiliates out to lunch and pretend to be your best friend, etc. Here’s a good story: MarketLeverage has a phone booth that swirls $1 bills around in it that they expect affiliates to jump in and get all excited about grabbing $5. Guess what, your target demographic are people who make 5 figures a day. Idiots.
What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
Most people’s long term goals involve building a bigger business and more responsibility for themselves. I think they’ve got it backwards. My long term goals involve building a business that requires less work for me so I have time to build a family and spend time doing things I love, like traveling. This is also my short term goal, by the way, and I’m already living it. That’s why I love this business.
What are your typical hours like? When do you just chill back? Do you have a usual day off?
I work harder than I want, and I work longer than I want, usually. I get obsessed with what I’m doing and just can’t stop. I often work a lot longer hours than most 9-5’ers do, but the difference is, I love my job. I have too many days off and I “chill back” far too much for my own good.
How do you like to spend your free time? What doe work-life balance mean to you?
I like to spend my free time these days traveling, watching football/basketball, playing xbox, and spending time with my friends and family. I also am pretty into restaurants so I go out to eat a lot.
If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
My life was pretty F’d up when I was 18, but I wouldn’t change any of it since it all got me where I am today, and I’m very happy with where I’m at.
If your Kindergarten teacher saw you now, what would surprise him/her about how you turned out?
I don’t know about my Kindergarten teacher, but most of my teachers from middle and high school would be surprised to know I’m alive, let alone doing well.
What would you like to change about yourself?
As I’ve said, I’m pretty comfortable with life these days. Nobody’s perfect, but as long as I recognize when I screw up and learn from my mistakes, I’m on the right track.
What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
That’s easy. Going from being a complete detriment to society in the worst ways to being a productive member of society, and doing my best to help people along the way. I won’t go into too many details about that, but anyone who asks me personally I’m always more than happy to talk with about it.
As for unfulfilled dreams… I’m living them.
Keep it real!
Featured Money Maker Of The Month:
