Interview: Alan LeStourgeon

Alan LeStourgeon has been making money online since 2004 and blogs about his endeavors at his site Affiliate Confession. At his blog, he is very open and honest and shares many practical tips that are worth looking at if you’re wanting to get started with affiliate marketing.

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 like to tell people I’m from Manhattan and when that piques their interest, I say, that’s Manhattan Kansas, you know, the land of Dorothy, Toto, Oz and tornadoes. I’m from Kansas, but I’ve been in Florida most of my life, so I kind of feel like a native Floridian.

I’ll be 50 in January which is kind of scary, but hey, life goes on. And I’ve been involved in affiliate marketing full time for 6 years now, but not always making a livable amount of money.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
Making a livable amount of money. When I quit my job it was because I was doing pretty well in an MLM company and I was making a few bucks on the side with affiliate marketing. About 9 months after quitting my job, there were several issues that caused me to leave the MLM business and I was only making about $600 a month in affiliate marketing. I was able to quickly ramp up my affiliate skills and income in just a few months and was able to continue to work from home. It was a challenge, but I had lots of time on my hands. I was desperate to make this work, because there was no way I was going to go back to a job. Thankfully it did work out.

When did you first realize the full potential in affiliate marketing? When did you first “hit the big time?”
That was probably when I realized the potential of the eBay affiliate program. Although a lot has changed with eBay and Build A Niche Store since the 3 years or so that I started building stores, a whole world open up to me during that time where I was able to see and understand that you could take this business wherever you had the desire to go and the willingness to work.

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
I struggled for years trying to figure out PPC advertising and spent a lot of money learning the ropes, but was able to finally earn some very good money in that field. As far as frustrations go, that would be just one word, Google. Read the next question…

What is the single toughest problem you’ve had to face, and how did you get through it?
Right at the time I feel like I finally figured out PPC, I got caught up in the mass banning of Adwords accounts and had all my campaigns and a good amount of earnings simply dry up. Fortunately, about 3 months ago I had taken the keyword data from a couple of my best campaigns and have been working on some blogs that have the potential to earn a lot more than the PPC campaigns did. I’m only seeing a small return from this now, but organic traffic is picking up steadily.

For those affiliates that all they did was PPC, this Adwords fiasco is a nightmare. Fortunately I’ve always tried to diversify because my affiliate career has been a rollercoaster ride. You have to diversify in this business or you might find yourself back at a job when the first big hurdle hits.

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
Yes, I just despise making the bed in the morning. I wish we had a maid.

What’s the best advice you could give to someone starting out in Internet marketing? Any pro tips you feel like disclosing?
This business isn’t easy any longer. It’s getting harder and harder to get accepted into many affiliate programs such as eBay and even Adsense which used to be what some people called “free money.” You now have to really focus on quality and delivering information or a product that people are going to want to read or use.

The best pro tip I can give is that whatever kind of site you build, get backlinks and get them early and often. I made the mistake of not thinking they were important for a long time and many of my sites are suffering for it. In fact, I could focus on only backlinks to the sites that I have right now and that would keep me busy for the next 5 years.

What is the future of marketing?
Honesty! With the FTC and Google cracking down on fake blogs, fake testimonies and just outright fraud on the net, it is important today to be honest about what you write and how you market on the web. Frankly, I think this recent action by the FTC is ominous and government intervention is bad, but this is what we’re now faced with as affiliate marketers so we have to deal with it.

I also think there will be lots more advertising opportunities coming up in the near future. With Google recently banning advertisers, I’ve heard up to 200,000 Adwords accounts, many of those people, including myself, will be scurrying around trying to find other marketing venues. This is a huge opportunity for Yahoo, MSN and even somebody new to capitalize on. I don’t think Google really thought this one through. There are literally multi-millions of dollars of advertising revenue out there just looking for a place be spent. Google may one day regret the unintended consequences of this action.

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?
The travel niche will always be hot and easy (Hmm, that doesn’t sound quite right). What I mean is that, this is a niche that anyone can create a blog in and make some good Adsense earnings. All one has to do is put up a quality blog about their favorite vacation spot and write about dining, shopping, attractions and vacation rentals there and you will instantly have people looking to click on ads and get great deals on travel.

I don’t mind telling you that because you could do that with nearly any city in the world that people travel to. The opportunity here is just about infinite.

How has your education prepared you for your career?
Getting an education in graphic design really helped save me a lot of money paying someone else to design my websites. I’ve been able to do all my logos, graphics, photos and saved my sites from looking like trash. The rest of my education helped me to decide I didn’t want to be working in a cubicle the rest of my life. I just never wanted to do what everyone else planned on doing.

What are your greatest strengths?
Sticking with things and figuring out how to make things work. I’m pretty much self taught in all stuff internet and affiliate marketing.

What are your greatest weaknesses?
I’m not really a technical person. I know just enough technical stuff to destroy a website real good. I’d really just like to do the marketing and leave the rest to someone else. But you have to figure out how to do most everything when you strike out on your own.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
It came from the Bible and it’s the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The last thing you want to do in life is go around making enemies and ticking people off. Life is a whole lot better when you just try to be decent to people.

Do you have any role models or people that you look up to?
That would be Jesus Christ. He’s my standard that I look to daily and especially when life throws me a curve.

Who has impacted you most in your career, and how?
I had an art teacher in college that made us work like dogs. We had to sketch, paint, draw, design, sketch some more, print stuff, do projects at home, sketch some more and it was a real learning experience. Did I say she made us sketch a lot?

Most college classes do nothing to prepare people for what the real world is like, but this teacher did. In my class where I learned Adobe Illustrator we had to do 6 projects for the semester and that was completely unrealistic because when I got a job as a graphic designer, we had to do 12 ads a day! But my drawing teacher prepared me for what was really going on when it came to work and that has helped me tremendously in affiliate marketing.

Do you try to keep current with the latest Internet marketing news at all? What or who are your main sources?
Lately I’ve tried to limit the amount of information coming into my head. I pretty much know what to do at this point, I just have to do it. Honestly, I read a lot more economic news than I do Internet marketing news.

What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with? Any good stories?
People that don’t want to work hard and just don’t seem to get it. I don’t have many good stories from affiliate marketing because I work on my own pretty much, oh wait, here’s one. In one of the paid ppc forums I once had someone pm me and they asked me a ton of questions wanting me to go into great detail and when I looked at how long they had been a member, I think it was only for a couple of days. They had to have read almost nothing, that by the way, they were paying $50 a month for, and they wanted me to give them the shirt off my back. It was pretty amazing.

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
My wife and I are into nutrition and have fairly extensive garden in the back yard and we’d like to share the good news about good nutrition with more people. We kind of do that with our healthy diet site already, but we’d like to do more of that and spend more time there.

Enough money is kind of relative because my wife and I live pretty inexpensively. Having enough money to me just means never having to worry about paying bills or taking a nice vacation and giving to the charities we support whenever we want. I’m not into bling at all except for maybe a Corvette ZR1. Probably $300k or so in the bank would go a long, long way for us. Anything more than that I’d probably just give away.

What are your typical hours like? When do you just chill back? Do you have a usual day off?
I usually work from about 9 am to 4 pm or so, then take a few hours off in the afternoon and then do a couple hours work in the evenings. My wife and I usually take Fridays and Sundays off. We spend the whole day together on Friday and go out to dinner in the evening or late afternoon when no one else is at the restaurants yet.

And on Sunday I spend half the day at church because I play in the band there, but after church we do zero work and just relax, read, eat the killer chocolate chip cookies I usually make, have a cup a tea and then maybe take a nap. It’s wonderful and I look forward to it every week.

How do you like to spend your free time? What doe work-life balance mean to you?
I read a lot, work in the garden and hang out at the local coffee shop or Barnes and Noble for free time. We usually spend Friday evenings watching a movie, 20/20 or some other news program. I’m still working on the work-life balance because it always seems like there’s something else to do.

If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
I would have gone to school for graphic design much earlier and started a business earlier as well. I was a goof off surfer and wanna be rock star when I was a kid and somehow thought that was going to carry me through life. Not too smart.

If your Kindergarten teacher saw you now, what would surprise him/her about how you turned out?
She’d be surprised that I work at home probably.

What would you like to change about yourself?
I wish I had the brain power for the technical side of all this web stuff and not get so frustrated with it. I manage to get through, but it would be nice to do more than that.

What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
Teaching myself to play drums. I love music and would like to be in a Christian rock or jazz type band someday besides just playing at church. I would do the whole music / band thing again in a heartbeat if I found the right group of people.

I also plan to get back into digital art and photography again once the affiliate marketing payday happens. The only really unfulfilled dream I had was to be a professional waterskier. I competed in some local slalom tournaments for a few years, but never got good enough or had the time to devote to it like I wish I could have.