The Fastest Way To Make $1,000 Online | The Growth Booth #41

Welcome to Episode Number 41 of The Growth Booth. I'm excited that you're tuning into this one today because we're going to be talking about nothing less than the fastest way to make $1,000 online. I'm joined by one of my business partners, you've heard from him before, Sean Agnew. He was on a show with us earlier in the year where we were talking about e-commerce and how to build an e-commerce business.

What we're talking about here today couldn't really be further away, in fact, from e-commerce. We're talking about a way that you can generate huge commissions and turn them into an empire and how you can do this in a very quick way, so pretty huge, I promise. I don't want to let people down here, and I don't want to put you on the spot either, Sean, but I want everyone listening to us to know that on the back of this method and other bits and pieces that Sean is doing, he has actually built one of the fastest 500 growing businesses in Canada. His business is absolutely exploding. He's got a ton of experience. He's been doing this for a long time. And I think you're going to get some good nuggets out of not just the show that you're listening to here today, but the show that is going to be released next week as well, because we're going to get them back to dive into some more of the details of how to take the business to the next level once you've got things started.

Aidan

I think this is pretty exciting. I think it's something that everyone needs to know about. Where do we get started here, Sean? Maybe you can give us a 10,000-foot overview, break the business model down to the bare bones, and just explain to people what it looks like. How does it work?

Sean

Yeah, sure. I got started with this business, it's called CPA Marketing. CPA stands for Cost Per Action. Essentially what that means is there are many companies out there that want leads or sales, and they may not know how to get them, so they rely on people like me to generate that activity for them. If I was to give you an example that I think everybody would relate to, everybody needs car insurance, right? And certainly, you can see commercials for car insurance and things like that. But car insurance companies, as big as they are, don't always have the ability to run ads on Facebook, Google, Microsoft, native ads, you name it, whatever. They might have an offer out there on a network, and they might pay you $10 to generate the lead. Where I come in that equation is I'm really good at running ads specifically on Google and Microsoft. I might run an ad for this auto insurance company, right? This auto insurance company, when the user story clicks on my ad and they fill out a form, name, email, phone number, whatever their car is, they fill out a whole bunch of things, once the user fills out that form, I get paid $10. And the beautiful thing about that is, basically as long as the cost for me to run that ad is lower than the money that the car insurance company is paying me, I make a profit. I don't have to have any inventory.

You mentioned that I did an episode with you on e-commerce, which is a wonderful business model, but I don't have to set up a store, deal with customers, deal with inventory and refunds, and some of the things that e-commerce, some of the issues that e-commerce has (I love a good eCommerce store). But the beautiful thing about generating commissions in this sense is you oftentimes just need somebody to fill out a very simple form and you will get paid.

Aidan

You know, something that has always appealed to me about the model that you've started to explain here is you really don't have to sell anything. There's really no selling involved at all. In fact, the whole purpose is to try to provide value. If someone is looking for car insurance and you've got something that can help them find car insurance one way or another, then they give you the email address, you get paid for that, and then they ultimately end up being connected with someone who can provide car insurance for them and their specific situation. There's no real disconnect from that providing value, which I think is sometimes the case with other types of affiliate marketing. This is kind of like a little bit of an unusual offshoot, if you like, of affiliate marketing, where you can get paid commissions, but again, you're not selling anything.

I want to make sure that I'm really capturing what you're saying as I try to repeat it for people. It sounds like what you're saying is you set up a simple page, and you send traffic to that page one way or another. And you mentioned Google and Microsoft, but I'm sure there are dozens of other ways as well. People land on that page, they fill out a form, they submit some kind of information, and then you make a commission. That's in a nutshell, is that sound about, right?

Sean

Yeah, that's really simple. My job in this scenario is just basically to connect customers with the end advertiser, right? Somebody finds my page; they fill out that page. That page sends their information off to in the example we were talking about, like a car insurance company. Car insurance company contacts them. They may or may not get car insurance, I don't know. But I will get paid my $10 in that scenario. And it varies. Different offers. Some offers pay you $2, some offers pay you like $50. It really just depends. Yeah.

Aidan

You know, the thing that I really love about this model as well, I mean, you already mentioned how it doesn't have some of the other headaches that we've become accustomed to in e-commerce and other businesses. Things like logistics and inventory, things like dealing with customers and clients, things like product support. But one of the things I like about it, other than the fact that it avoids all these headaches, is that you can see income very quickly because you're really turning on the traffic, the traffic source. You're like flicking a switch, essentially, and getting that traffic coming in. This allows you to test really quickly.

What about the pages that you're building though? I mean, are these big in-depth pages? Are they complicated things to get up? Maybe you could describe a little bit more about what these pages are, and what sort of shape these pages take?

Sean

Right. I'm not out there building a giant website where I have a team of like, ten designers behind me, and it's like hundreds of pages and things like that. You can literally use any sort of page-building software out there. They're generally cheap. Sometimes you can find free ones. The free ones are kind of not very good, but you're talking about something, that $40, $50 kind of thing a month, and a page literally just will have a headline across the top. I mean, I'm just going to throw something out. It's a horrible headline, but like, “Get auto insurance starting from 47 a month,” something very similar like that. And then you're going to ask for the name and email so that you can capture the information for yourself. You might want to market to them another offer down the road or whatever. Once they opt-in through that page, they get redirected to the auto insurance offer. And then once they fill out that auto insurance offer, you get paid. If you can create a page that has a simple headline on it, one or two sentences, and name and email, sometimes phone number, maybe two or three of those fields, and press the enter button, that's all you need. There really is nothing more to that than that.

Aidan

One of the things that I always talk about when I'm teaching people about building landing pages is it really is a case of less is more. I mean, it's eliminating distractions. It's eliminating other rabbit holes that they can go down. I don't know what kind of links you would have on your landing pages, but maybe there's just a legal disclaimer or About Us or something, but I can imagine there's probably not much more than that. Is that the case?

Sean

Yeah. I also feel like the uglier the page, the better it converts. Sometimes people spend all this time trying to make it look all pretty and images, and I'm literally just like, headline, name, email down in the footer. Yeah, you’ve got to have a privacy policy and terms of service, those types of legal pages. But other than that, it's very basic. Simple headline, name, email, and submit button.

Aidan

How long would it take you to use Leadpages, ClickFunnels, or any other tool that you might have to build one of these pages? I'm guessing it's something you can pop out in five minutes or so.

Sean

Yeah, I mean, I've been doing it for so long. Yeah, I can pop it out in five minutes. Especially if it's a similar niche and I have a page that I know has performed well in the past, oftentimes I'll just press the duplicate button, then you go in, and you might change a couple of colors or whatever, but you can get that stuff done in five minutes or so. If you're new and you've never done it before, it might take you 10, 15, 20 minutes kind of thing, but it's very fast.

Aidan

It's certainly a lot faster than building an e-commerce store, which, again, I'm not trying to talk badly about e-commerce, we absolutely love e-commerce, but we're just in two completely different ballparks here. One of them is about building a whole sophisticated store with products and inventory and all the bells and whistles that entail an e-commerce store and the other one is about building literally a single page, like your website. How many pages would they have?

Sean

Yeah, I mean, you'll have your main page, right? And then I suppose you'll have a contact page, a privacy policy, and terms of service. You probably want to whip up a homepage, because generally you might test a couple of different landing pages and different variations if you're split testing. But let's assume you find your winning page. You have a home page, a winning page, and then three legal contracts. That's like five pages, tops. Yeah.

Aidan

Fantastic. I really feel like if you think about what you would spec out as a Holy Grail of online business, you'd want something that had a simple website. You'd want something where you didn't need to deal with customers. I'm guessing that because this is like an offshoot of affiliate marketing, dealing with customer questions and so forth is for whomever you're referring the traffic to.

Sean

Yes. The only time you ever have to get customers is if you email offers out. You might get a customer that says, “Hey, can you remove me from your list?” and you go, “Okay, fine.” You remove them, but you never, ever have to talk to a customer, ever. That is the problem in our example. That's the auto insurance company's problem. I don't care what happens at that point.

Aidan

Yeah, awesome. At first, I started this episode of this show here today and I said that I was going to explain why this was the fastest way to make $1,000 online. I really believe that it is. We've spoken about the simplicity of the pages, and the website only has a couple of pages, and it’s pretty much cookie-cutter, rinse-and-repeat style that we're not reinventing the wheel.

We've explained an overview of the business model. What about choosing offers? This is something we haven't gotten to. How do you choose an offer? You mentioned that some offers might pay you $2, others might pay you $50 or even more. How do you choose an offer to start promoting?

Sean

I have a bit of formula behind that. It'd probably be a whole hour-long call to go through everything, but generally speaking, obviously, if somebody hears that there's an offer that pays $2 and there's an offer to pay $50, everyone will all just sell the $50 offer. It's not always the case. Sometimes these $50 offers just don't convert very well and the $2 offer converts like 50%, 60%, right? I always try to look for this to keep it simple.

There's way more to it than this. I always look for what's called the earnings per click, and that just means, for example, if I had 100 people hit my page and I made $100, my earnings per click is $1. If I had 100 people click my page and I made $200, then my earnings per click are 200 divided by 100, which is $2. The higher the earnings per click, the better. Sometimes a $2 offer, you might have like an 80¢, 90¢ EPC, and sometimes I got a $50 offer, you'll have like a 10¢ EPC, so the $2 offer actually outperforms it.

Also, what I'm looking for is simplicity. I like offers that are going to pay me for very simple things. Like if an offer is trying to ask for somebody's credit card, or Social Security number, people are very unlikely to give that information up and it makes my job a lot more difficult. If an auto insurance company, for example, is going to pay me for a one-page form submission, to ask somebody's name, email address, maybe what kind of car they're looking for, something very simple, the EPC is like a $1 or something. I look at that and I'm like, “Well I think I can get like 40¢ clicks on Google. This thing is paying me like $1+.” It's a very simple form, these things, check the box. That's the type of offer that I would go for.

Aidan

What are some of the different networks that you use? I know you actually have your own network for these offers as well so feel free to talk about that a little bit if you want to, but what are some of the places people can go to find these types of offers?

Sean

When you're first starting out, first of all, there are literally hundreds of networks. Full transparency: anybody can go out to CAKE or HasOffers, sign up an account, put a logo on there and you have a network tomorrow, right? There are a lot of fly-by-night networks you have to be really careful of because they can be dangerous. You sign up for a network, you start running money, and then that network never pays you and it could be a disaster.

When you first start out, you want to go to some of the bigger networks. Max Bounty is sort of my favorite-I’m biased I suppose because they are a Canadian company and I know them very well, but they're probably the largest, best company out there. They'll have offers in any niche you're looking for and you can get into those types of networks a little bit easier. They still want to vet you and things like that.

After that, what you do is let's say you get really good at auto insurance. We'll stick to that niche if there are networks out there, smaller ones but good reputable ones that will specialize just in the auto niche. You're running offers on MaxBounty, you're doing well, all of a sudden you go to conferences or whatever, and you meet a couple of other networks that are specialized in the auto niche. You'll probably go apply to those networks and that's sort of where my network was born out of. I started off at MaxBounty just testing different niches. I got really good at a specific one, not going to name that on the call, and I started meeting people in that niche and getting access to a few different private networks. And then the natural evolution is you start your own network. You have your own offers and you have your own affiliates running your offers so that you can make a little bit of money there and so on and so forth.

Aidan

Yeah, that's awesome. A lot of awesome synergies there. We've spoken a little bit about choosing offers and places people can go and we'll make sure that we include links to MaxBounty and some of these other places in the show notes. We've spoken or given an overview of the types of pages and what's involved in building them. Let's transition to traffic now because if we want to get people making $1,000 online in the fastest way possible, then traffic is probably one of the top considerations.

How do you start running traffic? Maybe put yourself in the shoes of a newbie here, not someone who's got over a decade of experience and everything else that you've got. How do you start with the traffic?

Sean

Well, I preface this in the sense of like I was in a position about a decade ago where cash was very hard to come by. Spending even just like a few hundred a month was very nerve-wracking to do. There are a few ways to generate commissions from a free perspective. You're not going to make like $10K a month doing three ways of generating traffic.

When it comes to paid traffic, I've done Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, YouTube, Google, and Microsoft, I think that's about all. Pretty much any traffic source out there, I've done. I really like starting at Microsoft for people. First of all, those types of companies out there like Facebook and Instagram are so strict. You breathe the wrong way and you're getting your ad account shut down. Do you know what I mean? It's very dicey. There's also the difference between interrupt marketing and intent marketing. People don't go to Facebook, for example, looking for auto insurance. We'll stick to that topic since we've been doing that on the call. They're going there to, I don't know, argue politics or look at cat photos or do whatever the hell people do on Facebook. You're interrupting them. If you're putting auto insurance out in front of them, they're probably not going to be your target market, versus Microsoft. I like Google as a secondary source, and I'll talk about that in a second.

Microsoft and Google, people are literally going to the search bar and they're typing in something like “How to Get Cheap Auto Insurance” or “Best Auto Insurance Miami” or whatever they type in. They're looking for auto insurance. They see your ad; they click on it and they find you. I like starting with Microsoft because you can get cheap clicks. They are very lenient. Let's say you do something wrong, you forgot to make privacy policy pages or I don't know, you just do something wrong.

Aidan

They just seem more understanding, right? Yeah. I opened a new Microsoft account, I guess maybe 18 months ago or something. There was a new account that I was doing for a new project and the very same day they said, “Oh, your account has been suspended.” I was like, “Okay, here we go again.” I replied to them and they said, “Oh yeah, we just wanted to verify some things. There's nothing wrong, you don't have to worry,” and the very same day they reactivated my account. It's been good ever since. Whereas Facebook will ban you and you'll never know why and you will never ever be able to talk to a person. And it's just a roll of the dice. I mean, you're playing Russian roulette.

Not to mention the fact that when we're talking about Microsoft and even Google, it's just like 1000x easier probably. Well, you're the expert here, so I'll ask you, but do you think in terms of paid traffic, that's the easiest type of paid traffic?

Sean

Yeah. Facebook too is a weird platform. Anybody who's run ads, if you run an ad and you pause it and you unpause it, your costs go through the roof. You trip up the algorithm. You're constantly having to rotate new creatives in, meaning like new images, new videos, and new angles. You're constantly having to be creative. And I know I'm in marketing, but I'm not creative. I can't even draw a stick figure. It's awful. When it comes to Microsoft or Google, your ad is literally 80 characters. It's like “The best auto insurance in Miami, starting from $79 a month. Click now!” and that's it. I just made that up. Literally. That would actually probably be a decent little ad. And then somebody goes and they see it and they click and that's it. You don't have to get any more praise than that.

Aidan

It helps a lot. You mentioned this a moment ago. We're not really interrupting people. We're talking about giving people what they're searching for. You don't have to get creative and try to disrupt their browsing pattern because they're going through their news feed, which is the case with Facebook. It's simple, what does someone want? Auto insurance? Okay, you've got 80 characters, make an ad, and there are dozens and dozens of templates out there that you can use. I know that in our business and your business, we use variations of the same templates over and over and over again. That also helps with the speed factor.

Good stuff. You mentioned Microsoft as a starting point, and then I guess you scale to Google. Do you put yourself in the shoes of someone who is starting from scratch? Would you scale to Google or would you start simultaneously?

Sean

Microsoft is like your bachelor's degree. Your first couple of years at university, you're getting your feet wet, you're like, “Okay, I like this. I'm going to really get into like, ``I don't know, I want to be a doctor.” And then Google's like, you go get your master's degree or your four years of medical school or whatever the hell, then you become a doctor. I say that because just think about it: when you go to search for something, you're not going to Bing.com, you're going to Google.com, right? The traffic is just much larger. That's not to say you can't get results with Microsoft, I made millions of dollars just using Microsoft alone before I moved on to Google. Once I moved to Google, it was like, “Oh my god, what took me so long to get here?”

Google used to be like Facebook; they used to be very ultra-complying. You do anything wrong; you never talk to them. They were the worst thing in the world. I lost my Google account like twelve years ago when I first got started and thankfully then I went to Microsoft, got really good, understood all the compliance, whatever, went back to Google. It was like a new business and things like that and they've been great. The thing about Google is it's exactly the same as Microsoft. Literally the same ad types, the platforms basically look the same, they're just different colors because whatever Google does, Microsoft just goes and copies. It is literally like copying everything you did on Microsoft, moving it over to Google, and watching your traffic like 10X.

I just don't recommend you start on Google, especially if you're new, because the traffic is so much more. If you do something wrong, they are a little stricter and the last thing I'd want to have happen is if somebody new starts up, they make a couple of little mistakes and then they lose their Google account versus if you do those couple of mistakes on Microsoft.  Microsoft is going to work with you. You'll figure it out, you'll get good, you'll learn. And then now that you're like a borderline expert at it, you go over to Google and your business just explodes.

Aidan

Yeah, it's amazing. And I've noticed the exact same things in working with Microsoft and Google. I'm sure there are people listening to this though that have been burnt in the past. Maybe with paid ads on Facebook or Instagram or even, maybe on Google or Microsoft. There might be people out there thinking this is just not going to work for me for whatever reason. What would you say to those people who are skeptical about this model that we're introducing here today?

Sean

I always like to give a sports analysis. I'm a baseball guy, and in baseball, if you fail 70% of the time, you're a Hall of Famer, you know what I mean? I can relate. Every one of us, Aidan and I, every successful entrepreneur I've ever met has probably failed more than any unsuccessful entrepreneur. And that's because the reality is, just full transparency, it's probably unlikely that the very first page, the very ad, the very thing like the very first, everything you do, all of a sudden millions are going to fall from the skies. It's not how it works. Yes, I've been burned in the past too, but you can't let your past experience of I got burned six years ago and I lost $500 in this other course I bought. And that's a shame. But the reality is this stuff works. I'm glad that I didn't just let a couple of bad experiences, and I still have bad experiences happen all the time.

I remember a funny story. It was like a news event that happened two months ago. I was sitting up at the cottage and the news event actually caused everyone in America to go search a couple of the keywords I was running on Google, and I lost $4,000 in like an hour. And I just came back, check my desk. I was like, “Oh, my God, what the hell happened?” And these things happen to you every single day. To me, this is about as simple a business as you can get. It's the easiest ad to run. It's an easy page to set up. Yes, there's a learning curve, and millions aren't going to fall from the sky on day one, but it's the simplest way. You're talking about getting to $1,000. This is something you can do in a matter of weeks. So that would be my advice.

Aidan

I think if you had the whole recipe sort of right in front of you, you could go through it even faster. You can start with a micro-budget. You don't need a lot of money to get…

Sean

Sure, like $5-$10 a day.

Aidan

Yeah, exactly. And you can know if you're in profit because you're going to spend $10 and you're going to make $15 back kind of a thing. You know you're in profit. It's very simple. It's not like e-commerce where there are a lot of other margins and bits and pieces to sort of worry about that.

This has been good, this episode. We are just scratching the surface, which is why Sean is going to be joining us again on our episode that will be released next week, and in that episode, we're going to be talking about how you go from this business, which you've built, which might be generating $20 commissions here and there, maybe doing $100 a day, and how do you take that and turn it into a business which could be earning you millions and millions of dollars a year. I think that's going to be really interesting because it's going to allow us to delve a little bit deeper into some things we haven't even spoken about today. We're going to be able to talk about exit strategies, and at the start of the show next week, I will also share a story about how Steve Clayton, a mutual business partner of Sean and I, was actually able to buy his way into this business way back in 2006.

Make sure you tune in for the sequel this next week for lots more information. So, Sean, I'll wrap that up there. Thank you so much for taking some time out of your day, and we'll do it all again in the next episode.

Sean

Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

Aidan

All right, guys. Remember, you can head over to TheGrowthBooth.com and Episode Number 41 to see show notes, to see the video if you've been listening to the audio version, and to see the other links and different bits and pieces that we've mentioned here. I'll see you again back in the next episode of The Growth Booth.