Interview: Paul Bourque (UberAffiliate)

Paul Bourque is an Uber Affiliate that has had a great amount of success as an affiliate. Having seen months of $500,000+ in revenue, Paul has really established himself as someone who knows affiliate marketing in and out and now is actively working on becoming an advertiser. Paul is a great friend of mine and has played a big role in my marketing career.

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 Paul Bourque, 22 years old from the frigid state of New York. I've been in the affiliate marketing industry since 2007 I believe.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
As far as personal accomplishments, I'm probably most proud of my blog UberAffiliate. It's great to read all the comments of people I've helped through my articles, and it's also great publicity for me through other advertisers and networks that want to do business. There are other more private accomplishments (certain profit goals, etc) that I'm proud of but have no reason to make public.

You've been blogging a lot less recently, Any reasons why? Plan on blogging 
more frequently?
Here's exactly why. When I was blogging about affiliate marketing, it was because I was having a lot of success with it. I had been in the internet/AM industry for almost a year before I started writing about it. I had something to blog about that people could use, that's why my blog was successful…the information was real. Towards the tail end I had mentioned a few times about how being on the flipside of things was where the real money was at…the advertiser side. I switched from affiliate marketing to building out my own products, and I haven't had any success yet…hence the shortage in posts.

This is what happened…

Over a year ago I was making money selling bizopps like anybody else. Once I signed up for one of these myself and saw how horrible they were, I wanted to at least promote my own rebill and try to provide these people with some real content. So I put together what I thought was legitimate content that could give people a good start into making money online. We ran it for 5 days and I lost about $30,000 from chargebacks and cancellations. That taught me that slapping things together in a few weeks and just pushing traffic at it just doesn't back out. If I wanted to make money selling a product, I needed to put the time in to make sure everything is top notch and high quality.

Now we're at Stage 2, I've spent months of working full-time on a physical skincare product that hadn't been done before. The product works as advertised, I had great looking landing pages, a great looking product, and wasn't going to hit them for a ludicrous amount. Here's where part one of the meltdown begins, right at the tail end of the project after I put all my time and money into it. Rebill advertisers really start to get cracked down on, which makes NEW advertisers extremely hard to be approved to run a continuity offer. Places guarantee they'll get me MIDs…nobody does, and all for the same reason: banks are rejecting all new continuity merchants. Part two of this…I find out the manufacturer was using a new packaging method and it failed to seal the product in…the 2,000 units I bought went bad after a week. Now we need to look into new delivery methods, shipping out the old, getting the new in the fulfillment house, new designs, etc. I was going to work on all of that when…

An opportunity came along at this time to work on a new product. I liked the idea, the niche is guaranteed to be extremely high volume, and it was more in season than my damaged project I was trying to fix. So I dropped all work on it and started working on this project. I had all the contacts in place already to get things moving fast, so this project has taken about 1/4 the time so far. Right now, specifically, we're in the last 2 weeks of pre-launch. I'm not going to talk much about it because to me if it's not actually out there and running, it's not worth talking about. If I have success, I'll be sure to share what I've learned.

What do you think it takes to be successful as an affiliate?
No fear, confidence, and hard work.

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
As noted above, the whole advertiser thing. There are many more components to being an advertiser, and you have to get them all working properly. It's not as cut and dry as make LP > find offer > send traffic > profit.

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
I don't really enjoy being on the phone. Especially with business decisions, I like to think before I say something. E-mail is probably my favorite way to communicate because I can write all my thoughts down and then read them over to make sure that's what I want to say. The phone is usually much faster so unfortunately I'm on it all the time.

Jonathan Volk, NickyCakes, and UberAffiliate at ad:tech SF 2009

What is the future of marketing?
The same thing it is now. One person does something, everybody follows, once that gets difficult someone will find another way to make money, and everyone will follow.

Right now a lot of affiliates are looking back into lead gen since rebills aren't exactly what they used to be. Internet marketing is still young, the rebill bubble is just one of many kinks that will be worked out over time as more regulations come into play.

Which methods of promotion do you favor?
I've always been a PPC/Google guy, but lately I've been working with more social traffic (Facebook, Myspace).

How have you made those promotion methods successful?
This is something that's been said a million times, but simple split testing does the trick. Whenever you think you have the best converting ad or best converting page, always test it against something else.

What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
Mentioned before, doing the advertiser thing right now. Hopefully once we launch and get some of our own data, we can open the door for affiliates. We're setting something up very legitimate though so it's going to be hard to compete with the few rebill advertisers out there paying out $45.


What problems have you had with those new projects?
The biggest problem and only problem I've had has been MIDs. I've expressed this on my blog and Twitter and have had plenty of people contact me about solutions they have, but not one person has backed out yet. I've had at least six places tell me they would get my offer approved, and none have. I was approved with one company and then found out the rep who sent in my app lied about our business type and expected volume…once the merchant actually saw my page my account was shut down. It seems merchants are getting desperate out there now too.

What motivates you?
I've kind of been in and out of motivational phases for the past couple years. Originally I was motivated by the fact that I could drop out of school and quit my part time job. Once I was making some money and succeeded with that, I was motivated by some of the friends I made who were really making bank. Once that happened I kind of went through a slump where I was pretty happy with what I had done, so I just kind of relaxed for about 8 months. After that happened I realized I couldn't be lazy and just hang out with friends forever, but getting back into working was fun…so that motivated me.

What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with? Any good stories?
Oh I've got plenty of stories, I'm just not too sure how happy certain people would be if I talked about them .

Right now I'm having difficulty working with the different merchants, like I said they're all guaranteeing me approval and in the end I'm declined everywhere. Everyone loves the site, loves the idea, loves how legitimate we're trying to be, no problem no problem we'll have you up and running in a week…yeah…

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough? If money was no object, what would you be doing?
At this point, I don't really know what the future holds. $5-10MM is enough, but at that point I don't know what I'll do. Just taking things one step at a time from here.

How do you like to spend your free time? What does work-life balance mean to you?
I spent most of my time hanging out with friends. Working from home alone all the time can get a little boring, so the best way to switch it up is to be with people. I like playing hockey, football, tennis, golf, frisbee, snowboarding, etc…so I'm usually doing that, hanging out, playing video games, and having a good time.

If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
Probably nothing. Everyone would probably answer that question "I'd be the first person to sling berries", but yeah wouldn't we all? I haven't had any severe life crashes yet and have been enjoying myself and that's all that matters, so there's not anything I'd need to change.

How is PaulyBeats doing?
Still playing every day . Right now I'm just trying to learn as much as possible. I've bought some recording equipment and have messed around and it's really fun…so hopefully in a couple years I'll start to actually put something together.