Interview: Morgan Thomas

Morgan Thomas aka HeavyT has been doing affiliate marketing for over 6 years. He graduated college in 2003, with an associates in Networking and technical Support, a Bachelors in Data Communications and Networking Concentration, with a minor in Management. After college, he worked for several companies such as Sprint, Nextel, the US Patent and Trades Office, the National Institutes of Health, a private data center in Pittsburgh, and also does contract work for Siemens, IBM, and Dell. Morgan started his company, EDK Innovations, in in college, which became an LLC in late 2005. He ventured into affiliate marketing while running a bunch of websites he created offering free services, and from there made enough money to go fulltime and has been in the industry ever since.

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 30 years old currently living in Pennsylvania. I’m originally from Northern Virginia born and raised. I’ve been in affiliate marketing for 5 or 6 years now.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
Owning my own company at a young age and being my own boss.

How did you come to learn about this industry? Why did you choose this career?
I originally got into marketing online with AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network. I found that I was making good money, and that I could make additional money by marketing CPA offers in addition to the CPC revenue I was earning monthly. I chose online marketing as a career because the amount of money I was making in my job, was not reflective of how hard I worked; with online marketing, the more work I put into it, the more money I made.

When did you first realize the full potential in affiliate marketing? When did you first “hit the big time?”
I used to own a large network of websites offering free services in return for advertising; at the time, these websites consisted of multiple servers, which I ran AdSense on. One day, I received an acceptance letter from the Yahoo Publisher Network, and I switched my ad tags out; the day I did this, the amount of revenue I was making increased significantly. In the first month I switched to Yahoo Publisher Network, I earned my first mid-five figure check; from there, and every month after, the checks were six figures.

Tell us about your company, EDK Innovations. How did it get its start and what has it grown to today?
The company started when I was in college, and after I graduated, it went from a sole proprietorship to an LLC; now it is a full S-corp. EDK Innovations covers everything from my affiliate marketing business to web design, web hosting, computer repair and technical support.

On your blog, wallofmonitors.com, I’ve seen that you’ve had some pretty extreme computer setups over the years. What do you use all those monitors for?
I built my first computer in 2001, and decided to go with a dual monitor setup. Since I was a CS major, I was able to do homework and watch a movie, or listen to music at the same time. Having two monitors allowed me to multitask, while also offering a friendly distraction from my studies every now and then. After graduating college, I upgraded to a multi-monitor setup when I became heavily involved in affiliate marketing and needed to run macros. Any setup that you see on my blog with more than three monitors, usually meant that each monitor had its own computer. Over the course of the years, the monitors have been used for submitting ads to various self-serve platforms in order to generate revenue. Even though the amount of hardware I have seems like an expensive investment, it allowed me to devote my time to more important tasks; as the saying goes, “time is money.”

What do you think it takes to be successful as an affiliate?
In my opinion, becoming a successful affiliate marketer means you have to be willing to take risks, you have to be willing to lose sleep, and you have to be willing to work from when you wake up in the morning until you’re exhausted to the point of passing out. There is no such thing as a four-hour work week; every affiliate marketer I know works all day, every day; seven days a week. If you’re considering getting into affiliate marketing, and you think you have the money to do so, think twice, because if you can’t sit there and light it all on fire, you are not ready for affiliate marketing. Being an affiliate means knowing you will fail 99% of the time, and not getting discouraged because you know eventually you will find that 1%, and it will all be worthwhile.

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
The biggest failures I have experienced occurred when I didn’t check my work, or I didn’t try things outside of my comfort zone. It frustrates me to no end when I make an error when adding a keyword, or accidentally move a decimal point when bidding on a keyword, and I end up going through a few thousand dollars without even realizing it; this goes back to my statement about lighting money on fire; you’ll have good days and bad days, but learning from your mistakes and pushing forward is part of what affiliate marketing is all about.

What is the single toughest problem you’ve had to face, and how did you get through it?
The toughest thing I had to do is break out of my comfort zone when it came to trying new types of marketing. I used to market heavily in Social, and it got to the point where the traffic didn’t convert anymore, or the offers weren’t good; I was stuck in a rut and I never explored anything outside of this such as media buying, CPC, PPV, etc. It took me a little bit of time to take that first step, and now I’m glad that I did because it has allowed me to diversify and create multiple streams of income.

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
I HATE programming; enough said.

What is the future of marketing?
Even though the internet is still in its infancy, people need to embrace the fact that marketing online is only going to get bigger as the internet matures. With this maturity, new regulations will be created, which will define what is allowed and not allowed in this emerging medium. We can already see glimpses of the future, here and there, with the laws our government is trying to pass to regulate/censor the internet, etc.

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?
Slapchop and Shamwow.

What niche has worked best for you?
Health related offers. Everyone is concerned about their image.

Which methods of promotion do you favor?
Display.

How have you made those promotion methods successful?
Good servers, good tracking and tons of data to sort through.

What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
Right now, I’m just trying to diversify my income and try new things; I want to continue to find new revenue streams.

What problems have you had with those new projects?
Finding good traffic and new angles to work an offer.

Do you think anything particular in your past prepared you for this industry? Your education? Jobs you’ve held before?
Going to college and having a love for computers; as you can tell from the monitors, if I didn’t learn anything about servers, computers or hardware, I wouldn’t have been able to automate a lot of the projects I’ve worked on. I have always been very analytical and have always planned everything out as much as possible, from beginning to end; if anything, you can never do enough research.

What are your greatest strengths?
I was bred for my skills in magic.

What are your greatest weaknesses?
My cage fighting skills.

What motivates you?
Being financially independent and the satisfaction from being able to do so.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
To never settle; I come across a lot of people in my life, who always settle; they never strive for anything more than what they have. Some of these people say, “It must be nice,” but they aren’t willing to put in the time or effort required to get what they want. A lot of people say, “I want this,” “I want that,” but they never sit there and ask themselves, “What do I have to do to get that?” It’s the people who never settle who get to where they want to be; it is the people that settle who watch them as they pass by.

Who has impacted you most in your career, and how?
My parents; they always tried to give me a better life than they had, but at the same time, they taught me the value of a dollar, and how much you have to work to earn it. None of this was handed to me; I had to earn it and work for it.

What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with? Any good stories?
I try to get along with everyone; I can’t really remember a time when I had problems working with someone.

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
To be happy and content with where I am in life; I don’t think there will ever come a point when it will be enough, but if money was no object, I would like to travel; I love flying, I love exploring new cultures, etc.

Where do you want to be ten years from now?
I want to be happy, be in good health, have kids and just enjoy life.

How do you like to spend your free time? What doe work-life balance mean to you?
In my free time, I like to travel and visit friends/family. Balancing work and life is a very delicate task; I am always working, I’m always connected, someone can always reach me. I went on a cruise for my honeymoon for two weeks and freaked out because the internet connection was so slow and I spent 600 fricken dollars for something slower than dial-up in order to check my campaigns. In the past six years, I don’t think I have ever not worked and just relaxed.

If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
I think I would still be doing this; I would just want an earlier start. If I could talk to myself back then, knowing what I know now, I think I’d be a lot more successful. It is a learning process; you never stop learning in this business, every day you learn something new and if I could have taught myself that when I was 18, who knows where I would be now?

What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
Obtaining a college education; I graduated in 2003 with a Bachelor’s in Data Communications/Networking, an Associate’s in Technical Support, and a minor in Management. As far as unfulfilled dreams, I would like to be able to travel more, especially to Europe again, Asia and Australia.

What is your favorite quote?
There is an author named Richard Bach, you can search for him on Google. I love a lot of his quotes, but if I had to choose one that fits my situation right now, it would be, “The simplest questions are the most profound. When were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.”

Do you have a Twitter account or Facebook “Like” page?
Twitter is @EDKInnovations and I have a blog at www.wallofmonitors.com.