“I went from $5, making $5 a day, to $10 a day, to $50 a day, to a $100 a day, and then before I knew it, I was making a couple thousand a day.”

Mike:
Hey everyone, I’m Mike Sullivan. Thanks for joining us today at MO.com, where we feature small business owners and entrepreneurs and then bring you hints, tips, insights, and perspectives on what it takes to be successful. Joining us today is a Amish Shah. He’s the founder of Digispace, an online performance based advertising company, as well as the Magic Bullet System and provides internet marketing strategies on his blog.

Amish, thanks for joining us today. I greatly appreciate it. Let’s start out with this question. There are a lot of people out there that promise big returns for following their unique system. You say people can really profit from following your system. What about your approach differentiates you and makes you stand out from the rest?

Amish:
That’s a good question. My approach is different because I use four different, I guess you could say, silos that I go after. That’s researching your competition, researching the market that you’re going after, building your campaigns, and building your strategy around the research that we build. Then tracking everything that we built and that we launched. Then the last step is optimizing everything.

So, within the research phase, I basically dig deep into your market and your competition from finding keywords to finding your competitors, to figuring out which offers are working best on the Internet, or your competitors, what they’re doing good, what they’re doing bad. Basically, just identifying what your market needs and what your market needs to do to be in a better place. That’s the research phase of everything.

The building phase is basically when I go about taking on some of my clients and taking on some of the strategies that we use. We build your campaigns in a very unique way, and I’ve had eight, nine years experience now with building PPC campaigns, SEO campaigns, or sales funnels even, from beginning to end. Could be anything from anything, basically. It could be an info product, or it could be some kind of supplement, or it could be just an affiliate program, basically promoting a product for someone else.

We build the campaigns from pay-per-click to media buys to CPV traffic, SEO traffic, and even certain blog posts, and how to build that and how to get the copyrighting right. In PPC, there are only three lines that you can use, your headline and the two ads. You have to be very specific and you have to use very certain language in those kinds of ads when you go about building your campaign.

This building part also includes split testing, whereas sometimes when you’re building a campaign, you know that something’s going to work, but you know something might work better. So you obviously want to split test. This is the part where we build everything. We build the whole entire campaign from beginning to end.

Then we launch it. After we launch it, we basically have to track everything, right? So we want to track everything from which ad worked at which time worked on which website worked on which split test that you were split testing, and then tracking everything down to the minute detail. Even red buttons versus orange buttons make a huge difference. Could be a difference of 2% to 3% in conversion rates. That’s the kind of stuff that we’ll track.

Then the last step is optimizing. Part four is optimize. That’s when we tweak everything, and we turn on all the knobs, I guess you could say, and we optimize your campaign. I think that’s exactly what makes us different. We take a four step approach. Rather than just going straight in or just looking at your competitors and copying what your competitors do, we take a more holistic approach almost, where we look at everything from the whole, from the top down, and then we figure out how and what your strategy is, what is your market actually looking for, rather than looking at just your competitors and their strategy.

Mike:
Thanks for that explanation of your approach. What got you started in this industry, in online marketing?

Amish:
What got me started in online marketing is pretty unique. I’ve always been into computers since I was younger. I got my first computer when I was probably 13 or something like that, or 12. It was an Apple 2GS, and I always just loved messing around with the computer – opening it up, taking it apart, ripping the motherboard out, and replacing stuff, and adding RAM. I was always, always into computers. I remember when I was 15, this was 1995 or so, I got a modem. I went online, and I actually remember there were only two or three search engines at the time, and I used to always figure out ways to try add links or remove links or build a website, even back then in ’95, ’96 when the Internet was still very fresh. I just remember doing FTP and random things like that, and I guess my skills progressed. I didn’t actually take it seriously, because I was really good with computers.

I actually didn’t take it seriously until I was probably around 23. This was in 2003. I actually went online and I remember this day exactly. I put a deposit on a house, and I was still working a 9 to 5 job, and I had a pretty decent job. I was making good money. I was making $100,000 almost a year, maybe a little bit more. That’s pretty good money, but when you put a deposit on a house, and when you realize what your payments are going to be, and you’re like, “Oh, shit!” At that moment, I was just like, “Whoa, I have to figure out a way to make more money so that I can enjoy my life while I live in the house and not just be stuck in the house basically and look at every single penny that I’m spending.” I remember that moment and I was just like, I remember all the skills that I had acquired online, and I went to school for management information systems and loved marketing.

I’ve always just loved marketing, so I got into PPC and I got into AdWords. I did a little bit of SEO. I went from $5, making $5 a day, to $10 a day, to $50 a day, to a $100 a day, and then before I knew it, I was making a couple thousand a day. Then I just realized this is actually while I was working at the company. I was working for Morgan Stanley at the time. I would actually leave work and go to FedEx Kinko’s and look at my stats and analyze my stats. That’s what got me into this world because I loved it so much that I was actually leaving my real job to go and do this other stuff on the side. I guess you could say I’m a visionary and I think outside the box. I like to create ideas, and the Internet is my medium to create my ideas and to make it happen.

Mike:
If you’d come up with one thing, one area that was the key to your success, what would you say that is and why?

Amish:
The key to my success, I think, was basically, it all leads back to being positive and having the right mindset, because, having the right mindset is so important. Just to my previous story, the first weekend I launched my PPC campaign, my first ever PPC campaign, I lost $8,000. I didn’t know anything. I mean I knew about marketing, but I didn’t know about stats. I didn’t know stats that well. I just figured one out of ten people would convert. That’s really what I thought. I really thought one out of ten people would convert, and I was literally willing to pay a $1 per click in my marketing campaigns, bidding on very broad terms. I was just like, “Whoa.” I didn’t look at it because I figured, “Yeah, I’ll make money. This is awesome. This is so easy.” No, it’s not that easy. And just having the right mindset and being positive, I turned that around, because I was just like, here I am, just put a huge deposit on my house, and I just lost another $8,000. I’m like, “What am I going to do?” I literally felt like, “Oh my god, what am I going to do now?”

But I didn’t give up. I just had the right mindset that I’m going to figure this out. I’m going to do this. That’s how I got into SEO. Then from SEO, I basically just expanded from there. I just kept going, and I think that’s what it is, having the right mindset. There’s a certain mindset that someone has to be in inside before they can go and reflect towards the outside and trying, I guess you can say, to make money online. It’s not as easy as everyone thinks it is. It’s not. It’s a struggle. Once you figure out that you want it and that you need it and you’re willing to change your life with it, not just make the money, change your life and your lifestyle, then you realize things start becoming easier because you have the right mindset and you’re being positive about what you’re trying to achieve.

Mike:
This isn’t the only area that you’re interested in. You often talk about giving back. What ways would you say that you’ve given back?

Amish:
I’ve always wanted to give back to the community since I was younger. I didn’t grow up in such a great environment. I wasn’t wealthy. I didn’t come with a golden spoon in my mouth or anything like that. This might seem like the same old story, rags to riches story, but I think it’s very important that you give back to your cause. Why are you doing this? And it fit my causes because I like seeing results. I like seeing people become passionate about their business because I’m passionate about what I’m doing.

So my wife and I are involved in many organizations around the world. She’s actually a dentist, and she just came back from a trip from Uganda that I helped sponsor. She goes out to Uganda and she actually does extractions, root canals, she fills cavities, she cleans kids’ mouths. She gives brushing lessons, because out in the villages, they don’t know. She brings supplies, toothpaste, toothbrushes, everything like that. It’s a truly amazing organization that she’s helping, and even more recently, my wife and I started an organization called SEEF [SP], and it’s our own organization. We’re headed out to India in November to help build things like schools and libraries in unfortunate countries, not just India, but in general. From bringing technology to those schools and libraries to musical instruments to anything creative and anything that sparks the children’ interests. So, it’s not just about creating a school that’s going to teach them mathematics and how to be a doctor, because that’s the norm in a lot of these countries, like you have to become a very smart person. How about something different, like learning how to paint? Or utilizing something that’s different like the right side of your brain, instead of being a robot in society? So we want to bring about something different. It could be as crazy as becoming a diver. We want to support these kids to do whatever they want to do, as long as it’s something they’re passionate about.

Mike:
Give me your perspective on affiliate marketing.

Amish:
I literally started with just affiliate marketing. It’s a very strategic way to making money without actually owning a product. That’s what makes it so appealing, right? You don’t have to deal with customers. You don’t have to deal with products. You don’t have to deal with customer support. You don’t have to deal with anything. You have to find traffic, and you have to sell the traffic somehow. That’s all you have to do. All you have to do is focus on the marketing. So it’s a very, very marketing based business, right? Because all you’re doing is finding a product and finding a traffic source, and finding a way they’re going to work together. That’s all marketing.

There’s one big problem with affiliate marketing, though. It’s that with paid traffic, most of affiliate marketing is done with paid traffic. So you consistently have to find new traffic sources and new products, and you have to come up with new marketing angles. So it’s not really a real business model if you think about it. Yes, you can build a business model off of affiliate marketing and SEO, but at the end of the day, what happens if you get slapped? Or what if something happens? So at the end of the day, you’re not building any long-term value. Yes, it can bring a lot of money, don’t get me wrong. I’ve made millions of dollars, actually, with affiliate marketing. But at the end of the day, it’s not a real business model, and it should be used as more of a side income.

Mike:
So tell me about the Magic Bullet System that you implemented, and what does that entail?

Amish:
Basically, the Magic Bullet System was developed as a one-stop shop for online marketing. As I mentioned before, I think it was the first question. I was talking about research, build, track, and optimize, so those four things are actually what I built into this software. I have been building this software for the last 4, 5 years, 6 years almost now, and the software literally does everything from researching your market or researching your competitors to building your offers, building your landing pages, building your squeeze pages, and then tracking everything, and then literally giving you optimization things that you can do to your campaigns, and what you should do to your landing pages, what’s working, what’s not working, to measure your ROI. So it’s an online system where you can actually go and do these four steps, which are research, build, track, and optimize for all your campaigns.

It’s built off of our platform, which is called Revenue Logics. We’ve actually had over 2,000 customers in 70 countries. It’s definitely proven to be a successful platform. Not to mention, we’ve spent close to a million dollars developing this thing over the last six years. So we’ve put a lot of work into it. We’ve put auto-optimization that builds blogs, that builds landing pages. It finds your competitors. It does almost everything you need from a marketing perspective and online. Whether you’re a small company, whether you’re an agency, you’re a local business, whether you’re just doing YouTube marketing or social marketing, doesn’t matter what it is. It’s a system that I built, so it’s built from my perspective. Built, I guess you could say, by marketers for marketers almost. That’s basically what the software is. It’s a suite of tools.

Mike:
So I’m looking at your website right now, and it states you’ve created benchmarks in the internet marketing world by consistently overachieving and defying the odds in every venture. What do you mean by this?

Amish:
What I mean by this is that I’ve consistently had success in almost every venture that I’ve pursued. When I first started online, I got into affiliate marketing, and I pretty much mastered it and I generated millions of dollars in commissions. Even some days hitting $100,000 in commissions, day after day after day. Over the last 8 years or so, I’ve generated about $12 million or so in affiliate commissions itself. Basically, after that, I set out to create software because I was building software to help automate my tasks and get these campaigns out there and manage a lot of the campaigns that I was running. I created the software and I created a system, and then I marketed the system because I knew there was a big need for this. Basically, I generated $8.1 million in sales in 13 months with over 2,000 customers from 70 countries. When I pursued the software business, I generated $8.1 million, and then now that I’m consulting, I have clients paying me over $100,000 for marketing strategy and consulting, just for my consulting.

In my personal life, on top of that, I’ve achieved a level of understanding of myself and business, and personally and spiritually, that I think takes other people decades if not their whole lives to understand. I’ve always had the interest to start businesses and I’ve always had the mindset to achieve it. Most of the time, when I go after them, I always achieve this success because of that, and that’s why I’ve said that on my website is I’ve always achieved the benchmarks that I go out to pursue and that I really want to pursue.

Mike:
Great. Last question. What are your hopes for the future of your profession and your system?

Amish:
The future of my profession is going to be making an impact on the world. I only take on clients that have a positive message and they’re out of make an impact on the world themselves or make an impact with what they’re actually trying to do, whether it’s software, whether it’s a website, or whether it’s a product that they have. It could be anything. But as long as they’re trying to make an impact, or they’re making an impact on a specific community and they’re doing it for good, then that’s where I see my profession headed. Basically, if I can make an impact on those clients and they’re out to make a positive and big impact with their customers, then collectively, basically we can change the world, right? And that’s my theory, basically what I call mass scale impact, and that is making the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time.

The future of my company will basically be four-fold. That’s why I’m writing a book, and I’m going to be speaking about it. I’m taking on high quality consulting clients like I just mentioned, and I’m going to be doing a lot of philanthropic work with my wife, so I’m going to be going to volunteer in different countries and setting up my organization. Basically, I’m going to be creating free content for those who are just starting out online on my blog, and that’s where I’m headed with a lot of the things that I’m doing.

Outside of that, the future of my system will be basically to eventually have the technology acquired. I know what I’m building, and what I’ve built already is very strong. I want to sell it basically to a larger company that has a vision similar to mine, because with the technology that we have built, we can help out a lot of businesses and a lot of companies improve their bottom line.