Interview: Bryan Shearer

Bryan Shearer is a 28 year old full-time dad and affiliate marketer. He defines his life by his family and what they do together and loves the freedom that affiliate marketing has given him. His blog, Ahaze.com, gives you an honest view of some of the ways he goes about a campaign and how to tweak even the most profitable site for a little extra money. He is an easy going guy who helps people too much at times, but will always lend a hand if needed.

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 am 28 years old and I am from the tiny little Civil War town of Gettysburg, PA. I love living the rural life and wouldn’t change it for the world. I have been working online since October 2006.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
Just being able to to support my now family of 5 for the past almost four years from my online income is definitely what I am most proud of. It was tough for awhile and the hours get to be long at times, but the quality of life I have gained is amazing.

How did you come to learn about this industry? Why did you choose this career? When did you first realize the full potential in affiliate marketing? When did you first “hit the big time?”
As a lot of people who are in this industry, I fell into this career as a necessity really. I was extremely sick (you can read the full story on my blog) and I needed to replace a pretty decent salary and my wife didn’t have the skills to replace that income. So, I needed to support my family fast and figure something out.

Playing around one day when I was sick, I found Yahoo Answers and played around a bit on it. A couple days later, I found a link to MyLot.com, where you got paid to post on their forum. I started posting there and getting referrals and started to see my money grow. Like big time money, $3 a day at times.

After about two weeks of that and rocketing up their top referrers lists, I found another link to a GPT site. So, I tried it out and within the first month, I made over $1500 on doing offers on that site plus I won a $1000 gift card as well in the highest earner’s contest. I then realized that while that was nice to get, I need to build a recurring income and more of it. I then decided to open my own GPT site.

I bought a site that had a small membership that wasn’t very active for $100. Within three months, the site was profiting over $1500 a month and within six months, it was over $3,000. It was then that I realized that I needed to diversify my income as well, and since that incentive site was mainly on auto-pilot, that I needed to build other sites, and that is how I got started in non-incentive marketing.

I don’t think I have hit it “big” anytime, just that I slowly built my business the right way. I have always strayed from the quick money to build profitable, long-lasting sites, and my income has stayed steady for the most part the entire time.

What do you think it takes to be successful as an affiliate?
Long hours, dedication and the ability to think outside the box.

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
My biggest failures I try to turn into positives. I have failed at so many sites that I have built that it should be enough to deter my efforts. But the key was to keep at it and keep trying new things. However, here is one example of when I was just starting out.

When I first started with AdWords, I somehow messed a bid of mine up and let them determine my max bid. As a new marketer, I was trying to run some cash advance offers because of the big payout. Also, this offer was on CJ.com and as you may know, they are not the best when it comes to CPL stuff. Anyways, I started the ad up with some great keywords and messed up my bidding but didn’t realize it. I came back just a few hours later and I had spent over $400, which was a lot to me then. I got a couple of leads, but it taught me a huge lesson to always pay attention to detail.

What is the single toughest problem you’ve had to face, and how did you get through it?
My toughest problem hasn’t been in my career, although it does impact it at times. My daughter is 4 years old and is autistic with a seizure disorder. She does really well and we have her immersed in all the services we can, and she has come a long way. But, she still has her moments and this past winter was the worst. She would go into basically psychotic rages where they would last for hours and she would scream and attack myself and my wife. It was just really taxing on our whole family mentally, but we got through it, and she is doing better then ever.

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
I hate tedious stuff. I don’t like to do a lot of things associated with the actual building of sites, I just like developing the ideas and how to market them. I outsource my major design stuff, unless it is a simple WP blog, all my link building and most of my content. I do write some of my own content, especially if it is something that I like, but for the most part, I do not like to write either.

What is the future of marketing?
The future of marketing is constantly adapting new technologies to better serve people in their own lives. We also always need to stay on top of the latest trends, as that is the only way to truly profit. Think of AdWords when it first started. People made a killing off of it until it was abused and was changed. Same thing with Facebook. It is always about doing the most with what you have and trying to maximize your profit.

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?
When dieting was hot, I built websites, not landers. I built a large network of dieting and healthy living sites for the long run and I am starting to really see the fruits of my labor from that. My suggestion to everyone is not to go with the hottest niche or if you do, build it for the long term. You may take a bit of loss at first, but what you build for the future will be much more profitable then just taking the quick money.

What niche has worked best for you?
Dieting and entertainment (my wife and I run a bunch of fan sites for reality shows)

Which methods of promotion do you favor?
Whatever makes me money! But seriously, every niche is different and it all depends on your business model. I use the content network a lot and target sites that I want to run on and I love the control it gives me. Also, with my dieting sites, I run an email list off of that and that is my favorite because what the return that I have seen on it.

How have you made those promotion methods successful?
I just wrote a blog post about color psychology and how to use it on your websites. The whole purpose around that post is about building trust. We have such a short time period to build trust on our sites that we must utilize every chance we get in order to make money. On my email lists, I don’t always sell to them. I constantly send out emails with no links in them to products. I may send them to a site of mine that shows products for sale, but it is a soft sale. That is what we need to focus on the most, getting the consumer to trust us.

What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
I am working on a social site that basically will combine all the topics that you find spread across the other social sites into one site, called AllTopics.com. I have been working on it for a little while now and it has undergone many changes, but we will soon be doing a full out advertising blitz on Google and Facebook.

What problems have you had with those new projects?
Working with coders, getting the site to act the way we want it, site speed and changing our mind/focus of the site about a million times.

Do you think anything particular in your past prepared you for this industry? Your education? Jobs you’ve held before?
I was the finance manager at a Honda dealership before I got sick and it helped me with the sales end and always thinking how to solve the puzzle and get the customer what they want. I am also an Economics major, so that helps in the grand scheme of things of just how I look at my business model as a whole.

What are your greatest strengths?
I feel I have a good ability to think outside the box and I am willing to put the time in to make something work. I also know when to cut my losses and can handle criticism in a positive way.

What are your greatest weaknesses?
I don’t know how to code really at all, except to add some basic things to code. I am also cheap, which is good at times, but can also cause more headaches in the long run.

What motivates you?
Being able to stay at home with my family. Working long hours in the car business really gave me a sense of appreciation of this business. I love working from home and I love the freedom that it gives me. If I want to go outside and play soccer with my son, I can drop my work and go do it. If something comes up, I can go do it immediately. I love my quality of life and I work hard to protect it.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
When I worked in the car business, we preached the saying, “Pigs get fat, Hogs get slaughtered.” I feel that is the perfect quote for our industry. It is okay to make a profit and to make a nice profit, but when you start to do shady stuff and really take advantage of people, it will come back to bite you in the long run. We have seen that in the diet area, and I feel that I was a pig and built my business the right way while others took advantage of people and got slaughtered.

Who has impacted you most in your career, and how?
My wife. She always believed in me and defended me early in my affiliate marketing career. In an area like mine, saying you work online is like a curse word. People think you are automatically a bad person and that there is no way that you are doing anything legal when you “work online.” So, her support has meant the world to me and always kept me believing in everything I did.

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
I hope to build a stable enough income so that I can cut my hours back more not just because I want to do more leisure activities, but because it would be good for my health. So, in five years, I hope to have at least half my income on auto-pilot, requiring an hour or so of work a day. If I can get there, I know I will be happy and be able to slow down a bit more.

If money and health was no object, I would be a golf pro. I was a pretty good golfer back in high school and was just getting started, but life got in the way of any dreams of becoming a golf pro. If I was able to, I would be out on the golf course every day, training for the PGA Tour.

Where do you want to be ten years from now?
Hopefully working less but staying productive. I would love to work more efficiently or smarter, like the quote says, “Work smarter, not harder.” I love working hard and making something successful, but I do need to keep in mind my health. Also, my children will be hitting the busy stages of their lives, so I want to have more free time to be involved even more in those activities.

How do you like to spend your free time? What doe work-life balance mean to you?
My free time is spent with my family. Family is everything in my life, so there is nothing I enjoy more then going to a cookout and just spending time with family and playing with the kids in the creek. Yes, it is a hillbilly lifestyle, but a simple life is not a bad life. It takes the stress away from campaigns and worrying about coders and everything else.

If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
Wow, I think about this a lot, especially in my affiliate marketing career. When I was 18, I was looking for opportunities online, but never found affiliate marketing. I got into the MLM stuff and of course that never worked out, so I stayed away from online money making for a long time. If I could go back, I would have learned more about affiliate marketing and would have been around for some very prosperous times and I hope I would have taken advantage of some of those opportunities.

What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
Just being a father and a husband and being able to get through what we have gone through is what I consider my greatest achievement. I can’t say it enough, but they really are my world.

As far as unfulfilled dreams, I dreamed when I was younger that I would be rich all the time and always was thinking of different ways to do that. I would still like to develop something that would really take off, as it would provide for my family for generations to come.

Do you have a Twitter account or Facebook “Like” page?
@plibb.