Michael Pedrotti is someone I have known for a few years and has been an active member of the SEO and internet marketing community.
In this episode of Profiit Academy I had a conversation with him about:
- Working extremely competitive niches such as gaming
- How he became a top affiliate for one of the biggest affiliate programs online and to my knowledge is the ONLY person to do it mostly through SEO
- How he developed the best link shortening software on the market
- How a passive income lifestyle helped him when he faced some personal adversity.
- and much more.
Check out the full conversation below with Michael Pedrotti:
Podcast
Video
Transcript
Chris M. Walker:
Alright everybody I am here with Michael Pedroti. You partly might know him from different Facebook groups and from the Superstar SEO and Legiit Facebook Groups. I could list your credentials but why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself.
Michael Pedrotti:
Ok, so My name is Michael Pedrotti. I’m an affiliate marketer and basically I specialize in SEO and making passive income online.
Chris M. Walker:
Great and when you say passive income you mean you set something up? What do you mean by passive income?
Michael Pedrotti:
Basically I set up systems with little to no money that are low maintenance that are going to generate Revenue over certain amount of time.
Chris M. Walker:
So what is it about that that appeals to you?
Michael Pedrotti:
Basically, I come from an agency in Singapore and basically what I didn’t like about it was building up my client assets and not really having any asset to my own. I was just trading my time for money and I actually value my time a lot more now than when I used to be so I thought instead of working on other people’s stuff I’ll just start working on my own assets instead and and building on my own foundations for Financial Freedom pretty much.
Chris M. Walker:
What are some advantages of that? Do you sleep all day, do you travel, why does that appeal to you in addition to what you already said?
Michael Pedrotti:
What appeals to me is that if I want to go somewhere I don’t have to answer to someone or answer to my clients or anything. I can just go and go to another country or I can take a week off if I really wanted to see something, or if I got sick or something I don’t have to worry about income it’s just that the freedom is what I’m working towards.
Chris M. Walker
Great, so it’s like the laptop lifestyle. Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah pretty much like the laptop lifestyle.
Chris M. Walker:
You’re originally from Australia, right?
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah I’m originally from Australia but currently living in the Philippines.
Chris M. Walker:
So when you say “affiliate” do you rank for things like “Product X Term” or something like that? Because for some reason with people in SEO that’s what they associate with affiliate but there’s a lot bigger world to affiliate marketing.
Michael Pedrotti:
Okay so I never used ClickBank believe it or not. I was going through some of the products on that but honestly I thought the majority of them were pretty subpar to be interested in. And that’s how I select the product. I have to believe in it myself ,like, if I wouldn’t use it I’m not going to show it to someone. That level of interest in a product is what helps me stay motivated and drives success. That’s what I do, just find companies generally that sell the things on recurring revenue. I pretty much just look around to see what’s new and see what’s hot. I’m approached by a lot of companies now as well that want me to promote their products through different websites that I have. Much of what I have is sold on blogs, and I’m big on push notifications which a lot of people don’t really utilize.
Chris M. Walker:
You said couple interesting things there. So first is the push notifications, some people don’t know what that is. Basically you go to a site ‘site.com’ and they ask you if you would like to be sent push notifications. Do you push out content to people through those or do you have them go straight to your offer?
Michael Pedrotti:
Push notifications is whenever you release new content it’ll send them a notification. So in the Windows 10, out comes a little box on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen that has a featured image for your blog post, has the name of the blog site, and just a little tiny text off your blog site as well. They will be able to pick it up from the desktop and text them straight to your website or you can just send a standard message by SMS. I have some sites set up so basically as soon as I click allow, it just starts automatically sending them a message every single day until they just get sick of it and unsubscribe. It’s a really good thing right now for marketers to exploit because there’s no sort of restriction on that. It’s not like you’re going to any spam inbox or anything. You’re going right to their desktop or right to their mobile phones. It’s a gold mine right now. Not a lot of people are utilizing that right now.
Chris M. Walker:
Are you getting good traffic from that? Are you getting good conversions?
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah, yeah I am. I’ve got a couple lists and out of a few thousand people it’s at about 1% conversion. It’s not bad, especially for just a push notification because it’s constantly going out and hammering them.
Chris M. Walker:
And they’re really hard to turn off in my experience.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah there’s no ‘unsubscribe’ button or anything really.
Chris M. Walker:
Do you see this as being a long-term strategy at all?
Michael Pedrotti:
No, not at all. As soon as more people start abusing that it’s going to stop but there will be something else to do like it by then anyways. The good thing is that I don’t only rely on just that. You need to have more/multiple sources of income you can’t just rely on one. Because one day a policy will get changed or your account gets deleted and it’s all gone. That’s the biggest thing in affiliate marketing, you can’t rely on just one strategy.
Chris M. Walker:
I’m glad you brought that up because a lot of people put their entire affiliate marketing career into that one program, and to me that’s just insanity. It’s always good to diversify your niches and the way you drive traffic to those offers.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah every single thing like your traffic source, websites, the landing pages, all of it has to be diversified. You can’t rely on just one thing. Google updates can come out and penalize your sites and it’s gone.
Chris M. Walker:
One thing you touched on was monthly recurring. Is there a way you go about finding programs like that?
Michael Pedrotti:
A lot of things like that are just manual research. For example, whatever niche you’re going into, just have a look around to see what other people are promoting, see what’s new on the market…it’s really just looking on Google. I don’t really have a special system for finding that.
But I’m at the stage now that I have a couple sites that are ranking very well and we get approached by people. I usually just wait for the email to hit my inbox with people offering free lifetime accounts and X affiliate program and you just set up your deal through that.
Chris M. Walker:
I get emails like that from time to time but I don’t promote a lot of things because of something that you said actually, which is ‘ If it’s not something I use, I don’t want to promote it’.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah that’s right. I’ve had people in the past that were real pushy. But yeah, don’t just promote things because they want you to. You have to believe in it.
Chris M. Walker:
Yeah I totally agree, I could be making 30k+ a month but it wouldn’t be from stuff that I actually use. I’ve done 2 promotions this year only from things I do use. What do you think is an advantage from having a monthly recurring offer?
Michael Pedrotti:
It’s basically so you can continuously building upon foundations. So you’re not just following the trend of software ‘this is hot’ now but 6 months later, you’re not making anything from it. You can keep building up your user base continuously and you keep earning money from that one platform for a couple years time. I would say keep building upon a strong foundation, not a one-off. You keep getting paid for the work that you’ve done.
Chris M. Walker:
There’s nothing wrong with this business model, it’s not for me, but there’s people that just promote whatever comes out on JvZOO that week.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah, I hate that. I don’t like it.
Chris M. Walker:
I don’t either and the reason that is 1. It’s just exhausting 2. It doesn’t work well for SEO 3. And to keep that up as a financial source, you’re going to have to promote garbage sometimes. Is that where you kind of land on those?
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah it’s basically it hasn’t been a proven product at that point so you don’t know if it’s going to be any good or not. There could be a trail of ten people that use it and stop. So it might not even be worth your time spending hours and hours and thousands on guests posts with no results in the end.
Chris M. Walker:
That also ties back to something that you had said earlier about having assets. Those aren’t going to be real assets, that’s more so going to be a quick 2-3 thousand bucks. So we don’t have to get into specifics but other advantages of having passive income is that if something happens in your life where you can’t get to a job, it’s very helpful. Have you ever had experiences like that?
Michael Pedrotti:
Oh I’ll get into it, basically I got diagnosed with a brain tumor and at the time I was only 28 and it came at a bit of a shock. You don’t quite expect that to happen. But having that income and that foundation built, allowed me to not have to worry, I just had to get myself sorted and health in check. That’s the moment where I thought to myself, “This is Awesome”. I didn’t have to worry about a boss or holiday pay or anything. If I’m honest, if i was working a 9-5 job…I didn’t have health insurance, so I wouldn’t to have been able to afford the operation if I needed to.
Chris M. Walker:
That’s really powerful. I know of a few other people who had this type of story since I got started in this. It’s very nice to have that sort of freedom and I don’t think that gets talked about enough.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah it’s just one of those things, when it’s the last thing that you expect to happen but you have nothing else to worry about and don’t have to tell your clients you’re going to be late about anything else. It’s nice that you just don’t have to worry about something like that.
Chris M. Walker:
That term “Passive Income” can be a little bit misleading. Can you explain a little bit more about that?
Michael Pedrotti:
How must people sort of thing passive income is that you put x amount of time into something and then build a website and it makes money forever. There’s nothing on the planet that will make money forever without upkeep. You always have to be doing something. Basically all passive income is semi-passive. The only form of true passive income is stocks or REITs, something that pays a dividend. That’s passive. For the most part, everything you do online is semi passive anyways.
Chris M. Walker:
A lot of people end up quitting after getting into it because of that idea. People that get into internet marketing think they’re just going to press a few buttons and it’s going to sh*t out money. Although it’s easy to sell people on that dream. I can’t promise people they’ll instantly see the results they want. I can’t promise people junk.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah there’s a lot of people out there that push lies until the cows come home.
Chris M. Walker:
You actually built software a while back and you don’t actually offer it too much anymore. Why did you have it built in the first place? Why don’t you push it out anymore?
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah so I run a link shortening tool called ‘snapt.io’. basically , I used to post quite a bit on Reddit/Quora/Yahoo answers, sites like that, and I wanted to be able to target people who clicked my affiliate link via facebook ads etc. The reason I built the software was to act as a URL shortener and it would send people to a dummy page straight away with a facebook pixel before redirecting them to your affiliate page. So, if people didn’t buy, you could just retarget them with different ads on facebook/instagram etc. It works on Google ads as well.
Chris M. Walker:
You were offering that to public at one point, why did you stop doing that?
Michael Pedrotti:
When I first got started in marketing, there weren’t really any free tools with quality, that did what I wanted them to do. So i offered it for free, but it turned out pretty bad because people exploited it too much and got the domain blacklisted by Google. So I locked it down and made it by application only but I’ve been getting way too many applications for it. I don’t want to hire support staff for it so I just offered it as a bonus to someone who buys something through another affiliate offer/course. I don’t want to focus my time on it. It won’t be earning me tens of thousands of dollars per month…again it’s all about that customer service role i don’t want to be in. People aren’t using it for spam anymore and people that come on have skin in the game at that point.
Chris M. Walker:
SAAS (Software as a service), and platform/sass development people don’t appreciate the support and overhead that comes with it. It becomes a full-time enterprise.
Michael Pedrotti:
Exactly, to run something small-scale you can get away doing it by yourself and it doesn’t have that many dramas but when you get to a certain level where you have to wake up to hundreds of emails and issues, it gets to that level where you have to consider if it’s really worth being a fulltime commitment or should you be focusing elsewhere. It’s how i operate, if something is working, i’ll put my time and effort there.
Chris M. Walker:
That ties back into your passive income idea, a software is not really passive income.
Michael Pedrotti:
Definitely not at all. It’s a full time job.
Chris M. Walker:
That’s the thing, with Legiit we put the most time into developing the software and support. We do get a good amount of support but it’s still a full time commitment. I have 4 fulltime people that work for me and it takes up my time managing them. I’m not complaining but if that’s not your main business, it’s not worth it.
Michael Pedrotti:
I agree, if you’re earning money in a side hustle then I would just say, stay where the money is.
Chris M. Walker:
You could make a good amount with smaller sass but it breaks a lot. Even though SEO software makes a lot of cash flow but you need to be monitoring it constantly. Alright I’m here with Michael Pedrotti, if you have any questions with income, passive income, affiliate marketing, anything like that, SEO or for me, drop them in the comments and we will answer them. I know you have the flu Michael so we appreciate you being on.
Michael Pedrotti:
Always happy to help
Chris M. Walker:
I always like doing these interview style lessons because we get to bring in different kinds of people. Last week we had Scott who’s mainly in SEO but he also does creative stuff. Week before that we had Jim who does web design. It’s great to bring in people with different perspectives.
Angus says, “What do you think about Rank and Rent Websites?”
Michael Pedrotti:
They’re good, a lot of people make money off of them. There’s actually an article I was reading that worried me about the future of Rank and Rent. Basically, those businesses are stealing real business. I’m pretty sure the future of Rank and Rent seems pretty bleak to be honest.
Chris M. Walker:
Could you be more specific? Do you think Google just won’t rank those sites?
Michael Pedrotti:
No, I mean the crackdown on things like GMB’s. The main thing with Rank and Rent is not the site itself but it’s the GMB that’s getting the phone calls. But if Google starts cracking down on them, then most of the rank and rent is going to finished.
Chris M. Walker:
I was never a fan of that model because I have to do all of the work before I get paid. With clients, you get paid first.
Michael Pedrotti:
Exactly, I have a legal niche site with a friend that we’ve been trying to rank for 12 months now.
Chris M. Walker:
Yeah and you haven’t made money from it yet this whole time. That’s what I don’t like about it.
It’s like a halfway between clients vs affiliate.
Kiril says, “Hey Michael, what are some of your first action steps in getting an affiliate site ranking and making money as quickly as possible?”
How do you go from zero to money?
Michael Pedrotti:
Ok, basically here’s my process: if it’s just about a single product or family of products ie SASS company and they own multiple products, I would start brand hijacking. Basically find all of the keywords that are like “Product Review” or “How to use X Product”. Write some high quality about that (take Chris’s course if you want to find out how to set up a proper blog). Write high quality articles. From there, I’ll create social profiles/branding – this is probably the main thing – from there Ill do posts on high traffic places (look for forums, Reddit, quora posts), offer value in those areas, and thats pretty much it. Just rank it like any normal website. It’s really simple. People tend to overthink it. I think branding is the #1 factor to getting a site off the ground as quick as possible. I never used to have social profiles built but that’s the key. Make sure you post the link in high traffic locations.
Chris M. Walker:
I guess there’s also the temptation to spam a lot. I see it a lot when people come into my facebook groups, and drop their affiliate link.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah definitely do not want to do that.
Chris M. Walker:
I get that temptation but you have to provide some value and know what you’re talking about. One of my first sites used to be in the technology niche. I wasn’t making a ton of affiliate sales from that, mostly from adsense. That was in 2014, I’m not sure if that still works now but it sounds like it does.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah Reddit is good. Back when I used to run a gaming community, we needed game servers, basically the hosting companies have affiliate programs so at the time everyone that was in my community, I was telling people people to look for specific Reddits and post there on a single thread and just write a blurb about using those game servers and at the time within a couple hours we had hundreds of links. Still to this day, we have links being clicked. I’m still getting commission from that. No website, no nothing.
Chris M. Walker:
Yeah that’s incredible, I still get an amazon affiliate commission once in a while from something like that. What blows my mind is that it’s so outdated.
Michael Pedrotti:
You’ll be so surprised what people find and dig up. People are looking everywhere for something.
Chris M. Walker:
I’m glad you brought that up to. Gaming is an extremely competitive niche in SEO, probably among the top 5 easily. And you have experience in that too. Do you have any advice for working in a difficult niche?
Michael Pedrotti:
When I first got started in SEO like back in 2007. I started out just wanting to rank for my local gaming community, that was pretty easy right? It was old school SEO. It doesn’t exist anymore. But I’ve done some blackhat CPA gaming stuff before, Just don’t even do it. If it’s blackhat, it’s not worth your time. I made good money with it but the thing is, half of the time I didn’t care really, but then the site gets nuked or spammed. It gets tiring. It’s better to spend the time creating quality assets. It goes back to what I said in the beginning, you want your heart to be in a product or a website because if you don’t, you really won’t succeed long term.
Chris M. Walker:
Yeah I agree, I get that question a bit in my courses and stuff. People who wanted to get started with stuff in affiliate marketing don’t like that answer. It doesn’t matter if you just want to make money, you’re going to lose interest.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah you’ll get burnt out. You’ll think ‘why am I even doing this’.
Chris M. Walker:
It’s cliche but it’s the truth. The first site I did, I really hated big cable companies and my $200/mo cable bill I got for the 4 channels I watched. So I turned it into a blog and monetized it. I actually enjoyed writing the content on it. All of it is written by me. The point of that story is that if it’s not interest to you, you’re not going to do it. Also, if you tie your enjoyment to the money in it, if the effort stops, so does the money. If you get into a niche just because it’s hot and makes money..if that money goes away so does the effort.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah what one of my mentors told me basically was that you do what you love and the money will come and that’s true. It’s as simple as that.
Chris M. Walker:
He’s a marketer but I’ve heard Russell Brunson say stuff like that but it feels like he really means it. I completely agree with that. One of the things that’s been good to me over the years was selling SEO services in marketplaces and that lead me to Legiit you know. If I hadn’t done that then God knows where my life would be right now.
Michael Pedrotti:
Definitely. I would not be as successful as I am if I did not enjoy what I do.
Chris M. Walker:
You’re not going to enjoy every minute of everyday right but if the overall experience is something that you enjoy then that’s good.
Our next question comes in from Kearn “When do you buy expired domains for affiliate sites ie .co.uk domains? How much do you normally pay? Chris do you have videos on this? ” I’ll let Michael answer that but as far as videos on it, it’s still ongoing but I did do a case study in the academy. But Michael, do you use that at all?
Michael Pedrotti:
No not at all. I’ve used maybe 2 ever. And I haven’t had any more or any less success with those sites than from starting from scratch.
Chris M. Walker:
I in theory believe that it is effective but I’m the same way, I much prefer getting a branded or exact match domain (EMD) or PMD type domain that’s going to – I think I’m going to get more benefit out of that than an expired domain. Unless I’m going to get an extremely powerful domain that’s going to cost thousands of dollars.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah see, I’m not interested in spending a thousand dollars on a domain. The way I see it, I can build this website up using the money I would have spent the money on that domain anyways. That’s just me. People have success with paying for expired domains. I don’t really have to worry about losing my trademark or my website.
Chris M. Walker:
I’ve had that happened before actually with a couple churn and burn websites like ‘netflixcoupons.com’ or something like that. I made like $200 in a week before they found it and shut it down. I used have facebookaddictiondisorder.com too and that was starting to rank for a lot of stuff and they made me shut that down. It does happen. So my point is that it’s better to just find something that you can make an authority site out of or just an EMD. There is a little SEO value to that.
Kiril says “Have you found that affiliate site type keywords are harder to rank than for a website in a local business?”
What he’s asking is if affiliate SEO harder than Local SEO?
Michael Pedrotti:
No. If you can do local SEO then you can do affiliate SEO. It’s the same sort of deal. To be honest, the hardest term I’ve gone for is that rank and rent website I started with my friend 12 months ago. And that’s local law.
Chris M. Walker:
I mean obviously that’s not apples to oranges but it’s a situational thing. Overall I might say that there might be more competitors for affiliate type keywords but again that depends.
Michael Pedrotti:
It depends on what you’re going for or promoting. There’s still untapped brands out there that get 10’s of thousands search results out there with 0 competition. For example, I’ve done one where I’ve started a website and outranked their main website. It gets 27,000/mo search volume, according to keywords everywhere. I actually outranked their website and they called me at 1 in the morning, and they told me to modify some things on my website. So there’s things out there like that. There are strong brands out there but their SEO is just not on point. So I was pretty much able to just come in and destroy them.
Chris M. Walker:
That’s something you have to look at with affiliate type programs right? What they allow or don’t allow. There are some programs that won’t allow you to do PPC or they won’t allow you to do PPC on their brand name. So is there anything that disqualifies a program for you? What do you look for in a program?
Michael Pedrotti:
If I like it, I’ll promote it. But if it’s crap, I’m not going to waste my time.
Chris M. Walker:
Is there a dollar threshold that you won’t promote the product?
Michael Pedrotti:
I don’t really look at the dollar value. If it’s monthly recurring, I don’t really care. It could be 10$ per month but that will build up over time. But if it’s a low money one off payment then I’ll question it. I won’t exclusively go after high or low ticket things, I have a mix of everything.
Chris M. Walker:
Ok interesting. So, thats cool. A lot of courses that I’ve taken on affiliate marketing say that you want ones with stats like high gravity or low etc. To me, I just find things that I like and I’ll promote it if it has an affiliate program.
Michael Pedrotti:
That’s right. Everything is just a product. Something I don’t like is that people tend to just overcomplicate things and it’s really not that complicated.
Chris M. Walker:
Yeah we were talking about that before like, SEO – maybe it’s the particular people that it attracts – but SEO’s tend to make things so elaborate. Like new secret techniques, all of these different strategies when really (except for a few instances), SEO is really simple.
Michael Pedrotti:
I have a theory and this is how I operate, I think, “What would a real person do” or “How would real people interact with this website or where are they active or actually post these links”. They’re not going to post some gaming website on some Harvard.edu whatever, it’s just not going to happen and that’s been my whole theory. Anytime I’ve had penalties on websites is when I’ve been doing dumb stuff like 5-tier backlink building. Google is going to know. But when it’s like ‘this is what a real person is doing’, its going to be a lot harder for them to detect and you’re going to survive a lot more updates.
Chris M. Walker:
Yeah, I agree. And the only penalty I’ve ever had was because I did something to make people mad and they went out and did things to intentionally get me penalized. I’ve also been hacked a few times that way too. That’s why I don’t share a lot of sites publically.
Kiril says, “What are your favorite affiliate offer sites to find offers on?” , I know you said you don’t use clickbank but do you use any others?
Michael Pedrotti:
No. With competitive sites in a niche that I’m going into, I’ll just see what they have and then generally if they have a community I’ll join the FB groups and see what people are talking about and then you get a feel for whats up and coming. If 10 people start talking about a product in a week then I think it’s something that I might need to pay attention to but no, I generally don’t pay attention to sites like clickbank or jvzoo.
Chris M. Walker;
I do a little but, my favorite affiliate programs have been directly from the vendor. I have a site that makes me a little bit of money in the nootropics space and the affiliate program I use is directly from the vendor and that site is from like 2015. It makes about 1200/mo but that’s not even life changing money or ranking really well. My point there is that I know the company will be around for a very long time.
Michael Pedrotti:
Another thing too worth mentioning is find stuff mentioned on TV. Especially popular TV shows and reality TV. That’s another one where you can find high traffic keywords and generally it’s sort of overlooked by other SEO’s. But there’s money and intent behind them.
Chris M. Walker;
That’s interesting. It’s never going to work for me because I don’t watch TV but you’re absolutely right. That’s paying attention to brands and seeing whats actually going on. Buzzsumo is good for finding things like trends.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah for example shows like “Shark Tank” – if anyone watches Shark Tank – they mention products on there all of the time. Just lookup some of the products, you’ll see the search volume and you’ll see a handful of websites ranking for that product.
Chris M. Walker:
That’s a great tip actually. I hope somebody watching this episode will actually take advantage of that.
Michael Pedrotti:
Definitely. You guys have QVC or shows like that. Just lookup products there and products that people are actually buying and a lot of them will lookup online to buy them anyway.
Chris M. Walker:
Kiril Asks, “How do you deliver bonuses to people for affiliate offers? How do you know when they bought something, and how do you get those specific people the bonus offers?”
I guess it depends on how you got them? Even though I did a 2 webinar promotions, even though I gave specific directions in those promotions on how to claim them, I’m still getting people asking me about it. So if you have any tips on that it would help me.
Michael Pedrotti:
It’s annoying, you have to go into the back-office of the affiliate offer, export the CSV, see who bought it….I don’t really offer any bonuses anymore. I know people say you have to add value to stand out but to me, the product that you’re trying to sell is the value that you’re providing. That is what they initially want. All of these bonuses that you’re going to add aren’t going to change the persons success most of the time. It’s not going to change the success that they’re going to have with that program. I know there are people out there with some huge bonus stacks. For some things I think it’s actually essential to have a bonus stack, especially in real high ticket offers like $5,000 sort of things. But they need to be of good value. But they can’t be something like Russell Brunson said, a PLR article and stuff that’s just junk.
Chris M. Walker:
He said that?
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah in OFA they say lookup PLR stuff from 2002. So I think the bonuses need to be of value. But the system for delivering bonuses is literally looking at the backend and seeing who bought it.
Chris M. Walker:
It’s still a pain in the butt. People turn into kids who bought the Happy Meal wanting to get the toy.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah. I’ll never do bonuses on a low ticket program. The software itself or whatever it is I’m promoting, that’s going to be the value but, for a high ticket thing where there’s going to be less people buying it or a better quality buyer then you sort of want to offer them bonuses.
Chris M. Walker:
What I did with the two things I was promoting was – you called them stacks – I stacked things on top of that. For example one thing was helping people get clients, SEO Clients, So what I did was offer some SEO training on top of that. So you got the client, now you know how to do the SEO for them. And then a tool that helps them with the SEO by making it easier. It flowed right from the offer itself.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah it compliments what you’re trying to sell them. That’s exactly what you want to do. There’s a lot of affiliate marketers out there and they’ll be just like, “You get my affiliate guide for this” and “You get this software that does client work and then you get the logo generator” and it’s like ok Cool what are they going to do with that? Nothing. Give them something with like, real value, if you want to even give them something.
Chris M. Walker:
I remember the old warrior forum days, that was something that people would do. They would stack these like 35 bonuses and crappy pieces of software that cost them nothing. I have so much crap like that on an old computer somewhere. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be a thing anymore.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah, I’m not interested in that sort of stuff anymore.
Chris M. Walker:
Angus Miles says, “Is Googles current marketing style (3 ads at the top) sustainable? Or will other search engines take over in the future?” That’s an interesting question I was talking about with someone else earlier today actually. What do you think about that?
Michael Pedrotti:
I think Google makes the rules and we just gotta play by them. To be honest, now that I think they’re getting called into unfair marketing practices with Facebook, I think there might be some changes but, you know.
Chris M. Walker:
It does seem to me that over the last couple years that their goal has been to or that their search results have no longer been their product and they want to keep you right there on Google. They provide answers, shopping, ads, it does seem like they’re deemphasize organic results. And they may even charge for map results in the future too. I don’t know the answer to this question. Who knows what the future will hold. I do think that they have left themselves open a little bit to somebody with the right money and the right goals to be an alternative. If not necessarily take over for them. In 2008 or 2009, Myspace was the most visited website on the internet so it doesn’t take long for things to drop. It’s never say never but I don’t think we have anything that’s going to take over and nothing we have that exists now will take over and be a problem for them.
If people wanted to connect with you or anywhere else, do you have a Facebook group or something like that where they could join you?
Michael Pedrotti:
I do, you can actually go to “PassiveLiving.net” and you can join my facebook group from there. There’s also a couple little things in there that you can download as well like the social profile things I was talking about earlier for your branding, some affiliate programs that you can promote like some SASS stuff, and some general marketing things you can download.
Chris M. Walker:
There is one sore subject that we need to talk about. You are a moderator in a couple of the Facebook groups that I’ve started like the Legiit Facebook Group, and Superstar SEO Facebook group, did you ever have any posts in the Superstar SEO group that did pretty well?
Michael Pedrotti:
Ha yeah I’ve had one that did.
Chris M. Walker:
Michael actually did a post that has the most engagement in the history of that group. Which doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve only brought it up a couple times. I think it was a giveaway from like 6 months ago or something like that. I think it got like 1,000 reactions and stuff.
Michael Pedrotti:
Yeah it was something crazy like 100’s and 100’s of comments.
Chris M. Walker:
I remember you told me that you posted it and I went to bed and woke up from like 4 messages from you. So haha that doesn’t bother me at all.
OK, I think that pretty much wraps it up unless there’s any last minute questions or do you have anything that you want to add or talk about ? Any advice?
Michael Pedrotti:
I would say keep putting in effort, you can’t expect to be successful just putting in one or two hours after work. You have to put in a foundation of sometimes 18 to 20 hour days to have any sort of success. You’re crazy to expect that you’re going to do an affiliate website or anything like that and it’s just going to be half an hour after work. You have to put in the time, you have to put in the effort, and if you’re not putting in 100% and you’re only putting in 20% there’s someone out there who is putting in 100% and they’re going to beat you every single time. So, put the effort in, and reap the rewards later. That’s the main thing. Just keep going.
Chris M. Walker
Side hustle effort will get side hustle results.
Michael Pedrotti:
That’s right. Treat it like a full time income. Instead of a part time job.
Chris M. Walker
Even to do what you’re doing which is considered passive, it takes a lot of upfront work.
Michael Pedrotti:
I’d be crazy or lying if I said this happened to me overnight. It didn’t. There’s been times where I sacrificed going out with friends, seeing family and I just worked hard and worked my ass off to get to the point where I am now. It doesn’t happen overnight but it will happen for you. As long as you keep putting in effort, things will happen. It’s impossible for things not to happen if you keep putting in genuine effort.
Chris M. Walker
I can see where it gets frustrating because the effect from cause takes a long time to happen. But if you realize that it will happen, the cause always leads to effect. If you can be patient waiting for the effect, the cause is worth the effort.
Michael Pedrotti:
I remember when I first started getting into affiliate marketing, it literally took me months to make 1$. As soon as I made that 1$ I was like “Hell Yeah Here We Go”. A few weeks later I made like 30$, and then a couple weeks later I was making like a couple 100$’s. It died off and then I had to try new things. It took a long time to get stable, consistent, and just finding what works. And the secret for me was just finding things that interested me. I really needed to have my heart in something in order to have effort, to be able to give it my time of day pretty much. It’s exactly what we talked about earlier.
Chris M. Walker
So what you’re saying is that you didn’t quit the first time you hit an obstacle.
Michael Pedrotti:
No, no I didn’t haha. It was persistence and changing the strategy, not just listening to one person. I was doing my own thing, my own testing. You can’t just listen to someone. You have to go out there and test for yourself.
Chris M. Walker
Yeah, it’s not a static thing. If one thing works for one person, it’s not necessarily going to work for everybody. You should take the principle of what they say, and apply it in your own way. Alright we have one more question and we’re going to call it a day;
Kieran asks, “Do you recommend any seo/passive income/marketing audio books?
Michael Pedrotti:
Audio books? I don’t listen to any audio books. If I could recommend any sort of marketing books, it’s just going to be Dotcom Secrets and Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson. There’s a lot of value in it.
Chris M. Walker
I’ve seen that complaint before. There’s a lot of good information in there but don’t forget that it is a top of the funnel thing.
Michael Pedrotti:
But there is a lot of value in those books and they are motivating too. You’ll read them and be like “lets get started”.
Chris M. Walker
He’s very good at that. His energy is very infectious. Alright that’s going to wrap things up. I appreciate you being on, I know it’s like 4 am there and you’re not feeling well and I’m glad you took the time in doing this and I know everyone will take a lot of value from it.
