Interview: Ryan Bukevicz

Ryan Bukevicz is a full time affiliate marketer and the founder of Bevo Media. Bevo Media is a full scale affiliate marketing platform that acts as a 'one stop shop' for affiliate marketers to manage their affiliate networks, PPC accounts, track keywords, add/edit/analyze PPC accounts and social media accounts, etc. It is going Open beta the week of April 20th. You can check more out about Bevo Media here: http://ryanbuke.com/my-bevo/

You can read Ryan's blog at: http://ryanbuke.com and follow his Twitter: @bevoryan.

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 23 years old, born in the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. I now reside in La Jolla, CA where we have an office with 8 employees. I have been heavily involved in online marketing since 2001 (my freshman year in high school). I graduated from Syracuse University in 2009, where I played football and ran track for the first 2 years. In the latter part of 2007, I became heavily involved in search marketing, specifically. At that point, I had decided to move past my athletic career, and allocate 100% of my time to online marketing, where my profits began to exceed my wildest expectations. I soon saw the need for consolidation in the industry, and used my profits began the 2.5 year development process of Bevo Media.

Although I am heavily involved in all aspects of online marketing, I would consider my forte PPC Marketing, on both Search and Social Media sites. Aside from affiliate offers, I also do a good amount of local marketing for small to medium sized businesses. Additionally, I help mentor/coach 50+ affiliate marketers expand their revenues.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
In affiliate marketing:

In the summer of 2009, I was one of the top publishers that Azoogle brought to the Playboy Mansion. Azoogle brought their top 25 revenue publishers to the Playboy Mansion for an incredible weekend, exclusively for the biggest publishers. I met some of the biggest guys in the game (many of them $1mil+ a month). With Azoogle being the biggest CPA Network in the industry, to be considered one of their top publishers is an honor!

In Life:
Playing 2 Division 1 sports at a major university was a huge goal of mine growing up. I always dreamed of playing teams like Florida State and Notre Dame on national TV, and throughout my time at Syracuse, I was able to achieve that. In high school, football and track were always my number one priority in life, online marketing was something I just did for extra cash. It was ever so sweet when I achieved my goals. More importantly, along the way of achieving this major goal, I learned a lot about the way the world works. I am now finding myself relating back to these experiences as I move towards my next goal with the launch of Bevo Media.

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?”
I learned to program in Visual Basic back when I was in 6th grade. At the time, I used my knowledge to build small applications for the then popular AOL. In 2001, I developed an application that helped high school students learn vocabulary words, and my partner, Michael Vellucci, made the website to go along with it. Instead of charging a monthly fee for the product, we had the users fill out an offer. Our application somehow got featured on a popular educational site, and revenue blew through the roof! At that point, I realized the power of online marketing, and instantly became obsessed.

In 2007, Mike and I developed a batch of incentivized websites, that we promoted heavily and optimized. After only 6 months, we amassed over 20k members, with over 50k page views a day. During this process, I learned the in's and out's of search marketing. Mike and I went on to sell off our website collection for a lucrative amount. This lead into some major experimenting money for my search marketing efforts, which eventually lead into a few pretty successful campaigns. At the end of 2007, I had my first big hit. From there, I never really looked back. With this money, I began Bevo Media, and got to the point I'm at now.

What do you think it takes to be successful as an affiliate?
Patience and trial and error. The job is 90% trial and error, and 10% experience/skill. The real value of experience is recognizing specific tendencies within a campaign's behavior and knowing what kind of adjustments are necessary to allow the tendency to go in your favor. You have to approach affiliate marketing as a job, and that requires work. Most newbies are not willing to accept that. If you just keep swinging, something is going to hit.

What have been your biggest failures and frustrations?
I once lost $7k from forgetting to pause a campaign. I definitely learned my lesson to check my campaign statuses multiple times after that.

What is the single toughest problem you've had to face, and how did you get through it?
I've learned a lot about life being a business owner. One of the hardest aspects of running a company is managing your relationships with employees. I am an extremely optimistic, easy going person, I don't complain often, and am very seldom mad about anything. However, when you have a business to run, you sometimes need to act as an authoritative figure to ensure that the proper pace of work keeps up. This can lead to uncomfortable situations when someone is not performing as expected. I've learned to deal with this by being as upfront as possible, stating the expectations before the job, developing performance measurement tactics, and laying out the results of an unsatisfactory performance beforehand.

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
Landing page edits. I try to stay as hands off as possible, outsourcing the easy but time consuming, tangible aspects of marketing.

What niche has worked best for you?
Health, Dating, and Downloads

Which methods of promotion do you favor?
PPC for both Search and Social Media

What is the future of marketing?
The industry is going to start getting cleaned up, significantly. Continuity offers will begin to become heavily regulated, and companies will start to focus on providing a high quality experience to both consumers and merchants. The industry will start to focus more around lead gen offers. Networks and merchants will begin to consolidate. Within the next 5 years, cable television will be entirely streamed from the internet. When this occurs, not only will online marketing begin to take a vital role in main stream media, it will be main stream media.

Do you think anything particular in your past prepared you for this industry? Your education? Jobs you’ve held before?
Although I have never had a “job” before, sports have definitely taught me a ton of life lessons. I've learned what it was like to succeed, fail and how to compete. I find myself referring back the lessons athletics have taught me almost every day.

What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with? Any good stories?
Throughout business, I have worked with all sorts of people. Selfish, easy going, cheap, rich, smart people, illogical people, rational people, etc. One of the first things I do when I meet someone new in business is to figure out what type of person they are, then adjust to handle their personality type. I have a high tolerance for all different types of personalities, so I handle them all pretty well. However, I will say that I cannot stomach negative people. I go out of my way to ensure that I don't work with any pessimistic people.

What are your greatest strengths?
My state of mind

What are your greatest weaknesses?
Emotions

Where do you want to be ten years from now?
Retired

What motivates you?
I am absolutely determined to achieve my goals. My biggest pet peeve is someone who expects to achieve something great, but never goes out of their way to be anything more than average. I am an advocate that if you truly believe you can achieve a goal, and have everything in your life revolve around that goal, regardless of how crazy the achievement is, it will be attained to the highest degree. You control this thing called "Luck" by the way you envision situations. At the end of the day, we all control our own destiny, it just so happens that 95% of the world blames "luck" on their failures, and use it as an excuse why they didn't achieve their goals. This is something I realized at an early age, and make it a point to live by this value.

How do you like to spend your free time? What does work-life balance mean to you?
My life revolves around my goals. When I'm not at the office, I'm thinking about work. I work 14+ hours a day, 7 days a week, and although it sounds crazy, I love every second of it. When your work is that focused around your goals, it becomes a game that you are trying win. I am constantly pushing for that euphoric end result. All being said, it's safe to say that my work-life balance is off, however, that's fine by me. I'm only 23 now, and have the rest of my life for balance. The same people who use to tell me I was too focused on my business while I was in college are now looking for jobs. I wouldn't change a thing in my life to this point.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
There are 3 main quotes that I've installed into my life values, and strive to live my life by:
1.) Life's unfair sometimes, either for you or against you. The real challenge is realizing this, and not letting it throw you off your aspirations.
2.) The ability to keep your focus on where you envision yourself in the future truly defines the person within.
3.) Never ask for anything in life... Just go out and take it...

What are some of your long-term goals? How much is enough?
I did not start Bevo Media to make a million dollars. If that was my goal, I wouldn't have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars of my personal money to bootstrap the entire company. I am determined to accumulate enough money to make a significant impact in the world, and although the size of the market may only allow Bevo Media’s max potential to cap out at a few million valuation, I am pleased to say that I have much larger project in the making that is targeted towards a much broader realm of internet marketing. Bevo Media, combined with the projects that stem from its development can be that 8,9, or even 10 figure company that I envision. When I achieve this goal, I would love to go back and reward everyone in my life who molded my character to be the person I am today. It's what I think about everyday when I wake up. With whatever is left over, I also think it would be pretty sweet to own the Lakers too