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Comment RSS(PMI-TV) John Chow says Media Buying is a Waste of Money
Written by Murray NewlandsJune 17, 2012 # 11:02 pm # CEO Interviews, Specials # 15 Comments
John Chow is probably one of the most famous bloggers in the performance marketing and affiliate marketing game. Murray Newlands sat down with John Chow this past week to ask what was working with affiliate marketing and we found that he believes that many affiliates are just wasting money to make a few bucks here and there. According to him, media buying is not a business model and is nothing more than a game that will not make you money long term.
Please watch the actual interview before you comment
Written by Murray Newlands
Murray Newlands is the Host of PMI-TV. Murray is a speaker at major events such as Affiliate Summit in Europe and the US on social media marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing and affiliate marketing. He is the founder of the Affiliate Marketing Awards which takes place each year during ADTECH SF.
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I cannot but agree with John that any affiliate marketer doing media buy to marketer products is just wasting his money.
What most affiliate marketer don’t know is that marketing takes time and it is involves skills that knows how to read people and give them what will make them buy your products.
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I’ve been watching this dude for years and it’s always the same, people think that because he’s making money on the Internet, that he’s a guru to all types of online business.
John’s made all of his money (well most of it) running his blog where he talks about how much money he’s made running the blog where he talks about how much money he’s made (head spins).
It’s the same affect as setting up a blog where your angle is “Hey, I’ve got 1 million dollars”. People start reading about this guy who’s got a million bucks.
John’s got advice on media buying? This is like asking your accountant for advice on how to fix your car. John’s only expertise is blogging and strategies within that medium.
Ask John about affiliate marketing… He’s clueless.
No offense, did you watch the interview, or just responding?
Content is king, building your own brand, building your own product is what everyone is taking about now. Google hates spam, thus you need your own product to promote. What he is essentially saying is that you need to make sure you aren’t sending traffic to other people’s sites. BUild your own brand: that is what he did, very effectively.
Pace, you’re an idiot.
John Chow was blacklisted by Google, and Google isn’t the only traffic source on the web. What the hell are you smoking Pesach.
What a load of crap. So Media Buying is not a business, it’s a game. Yet running a blog and talking about stuff you clearly have no idea about is a *real business*. Nice one genius!
And you wonder why my income rose 100x when I stopped listening to these morons. Oh and that from Media buying.
Seriously? It’s not like John Chow is a multi-millionaire from the affiliate industry.
Oh shit, really? He is…Oh.
Great interview with John. Capturing your traffic is basic IM knowledge. If you are not in a position to ‘recycle’ your traffic – you lost before you even really got started. A marketer should send nearly 100% of his or her traffic to his or her OWN web property, and capture the lead.
Something KEY which John mentioned in this video… is the lifetime value of a subscriber (lead) … if he’s pulling in 40-100 subscribers daily – then in ‘future money’, he’s earning 400-1000 dollars per day from his blog. The KEY is to CAPTURE the lead.
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It seems some people are mad, I can tell you over the last what 12 or is 14 years or so, I don’t know one Media Buyer who is still buying media, and trust me they are not retired. Media Buying is a game, if you have a hot deal run it while you can and make what you can. A lot of times most deals people run on media buys are short lived at best –
Free Ipods Etc
Free Weight loss drugs (massive rebills)
Free Ringtones
Get Rich on Ebay
and the list goes on and on…
If you truly want to be an efficient Media Buyer – break into corporate branding – High End Lead Generation – and Direct Calls –
One Source – says these are the most expensive keywords in adwords – can you monetize them?
1. Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
2. Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
3. Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
4. Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
5. Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
6. Lawyer
7. Donate
8. Degree
9. Hosting
10. Claim
11. Conference Call
12. Trading
13. Software
14. Recovery
15. Transfer
16. Gas/Electricity
17. Classes
18. Rehab
19. Treatment
20. Cord Blood
Media Buying is Dead! All of you Obey John Chow!
Here is my view on this. Media buying is a real business. Media buying does work. However, if you are doing media buying then I suggest you send those traffic to your own blog so that you can capture the email list.
This is how I normally do it when I am doing media buying.
1. Set up LP
2. Send Traffic to LP
3. Capture email
4. Once user confirms email, I forward them back to original affiliate offer.( that’s my thank you page)
5. Email them content every couple of days( depending on niche)
6. Email them more offers. ( no more than 1 a week). Or I add the offer as part of the newsletter series
I usually get them to purchase somewhere in that funnel.
Thanks
Stan
B4PSAds.com
That’s “kinda” what he was talking about.
John Chow is a good man and Pace so are you.
Maybe John was talking was kinda talking about that. But that’s not necessarily what he is doing or where he fits in. He’s building a list using info bait on his blog to draw in his prospects. Then he markets products to that list. It obviously works. Shoemoney does the same thing.
And as any direct marketer will tell you, the money is in the list. It’s all about the list, the offer and the creative – in that order of importance. A so-so offer with so-so creative to a good list will outperform a great offer and creative to a so-so list. It’s the list, stupid. This is just direct marketing 101 and it’s a proven business model for more than 100 years, long before there was an internet.
He is in effect the front man, no different than an affiliate marketer, just that he is promoting content to get the email with a squeeze page and then managing his list as an asset. Different only in that he has his own products to sell.
So the way you do that is by creating your own products and pitching them to the list.
But wait, there’s more – pitching other people’s products to your list.
But guess what, when you are pitching someone else’s product, you are an affiliate for that product. So whether you spend the time, money and effort on building a list as an affiliate or whether you arbitrage media buys, you’re still in the affiliate biz. It’s really not either or.
The other piece of the puzzle that you can’t see at first glance is that behind every one of these list builders there is usually some other guru or mastermind that is building a “syndicate” (a la Frank Kern, or Dan Kennedy, or dozens of others. The big daddy being Jay Abraham). This is a group of marketers who agree to work with each other. And then doing JVs (joint venture deals) where you are basically promoting their products to your list and they promote your products to their list for some kind of rev share or revenue split. This is the Infomarketing model pioneered online by Ken McCarthy and dozens of others including Shoemoney, Alex Mandosian, Yanik Silver, etc. etc. Your mailbox is no doubt full of these guys or someone in their downline. If it’s not, and you’re an affiliate but don’t know what I’m talking about, your not doing your homework and you’re not paying attention. Pace I’m sure you know very wel what I’m talking about.
It’s a very mature business model based on front end and back end products. The front end products are low price, the back end products cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. You know the drill here. So if you are someone in IM, maybe new to the game, and if you don’t, you need to. Go do the research. You fit in somewhere in that puzzle, that business model fits in somewhere in your business, and your goal is to move up the food chain higher and higher because that’s where the payouts get bigger and bigger.
Now as to media buying, yes you as some hotshot lone wolf gunslinger can buy media and you are thereby doing media buying, but let’s face it, the real media buying is being done by ad agencies, not solopreneurs. And there are hundreds of billions of impressions and billions of dollars being spent on online media buying every year. It’s real and it goes on all the time, it’s the backbone of the internet, and some (careful) direct marketers too and they’re using it to make money.
And when you really look at it, with the sophisticated cookie tracking and retargeting that Doubleclick brought to Google (other networks do the same), and when you really understand how the deals are cut at the top of the food chain, what you realize is that it actually works just like the affiliate business. But at the end of the day it’s just one method, one technique, one tool in your IM toolbox. Use it like any tool – when it makes sense to do so.
Just remember – whenever possible buy wholesale, not retail. When you are running PPC ads you are buying retail. And perhaps that is the real point of what John Chow means when he talks about media buying. But that’s just an issue of scale. Just because it only really works at a large scale, doesn’t invalidate the method.
OLD News!
1. The headline of this post is nothing but link bait. If Media Buying is a waste of money, then so is any form of organic or PPC traffic, unless you use it to create/build a business.
2. There’s absolutely 100% nothing new here at all. Chow is just regurgitating what any seasoned marketer knows already: “The money’s in the list”.
Complete waste of 10 minutes!
JC, does not say media buying is a waste of money, rather he states that sending the traffic straight to an affiliate offer rather then capturing the potential customers email first is a waste of money.