Interview with Mike Dillard: the Perks of a High-Quality Email List

Increase_Your_Email_List_By_100000_Contacts_This_Year2_1This week, we’re bringing you guys some invaluable insights from my interview with the incredibly successful entrepreneur, Mike Dillard.

Mike Dillard is an entrepreneur in Austin Texas. He built his first million-dollar business by the age of 27, teaching small business owners how to effectively market their products and services online using “attraction-marketing” strategies.In 2010 he founded a financial education company in order to teach others how to achieve financial freedom through investment strategies commonly reserved for the wealthy. Combined, his businesses have produced more than $50 Million in revenue without outside funding.

Dillard has had a lot of success growing hisemail lists and optimizing the amount of value he is able to receive from and provide to his contacts. Dillard talks about his shift from growing his list through affiliates to relying more heavily on paid media. Dillard also expands more on his unique lead nurturing approach. Learn more by watching the video below:


Check out Mike’s website @ www.MikeDillard.com

Video Transcript:

Jeremy Ellens: Alright welcome everyone; I’m really excited to introduce you guys to a guy named Mike Dillard if you haven’t met him before. Welcome Mike.

Mike Dillard: Yeah, glad to be here.

Jeremy Ellens: Awesome, so I’ll let you guys know a little about who Mike is. So Mike lives in Austin, Texas.
A little bit of background about himself, he started his first million dollar company by the age of 27 and since has gone on to produce over $25 million dollars in revenue and recently in 2010 he started a financial publishing company called the Elevation Group, which did $3.2 million in the first 7 days of business without any external funding and ultimately went on to make 8 figures in revenue. And since then, Mike’s gone on to grow his list to over a million people and his companies have produced over $50 million in revenue.

Mike Dillard: Sounds about right.

Jeremy Ellens: So that’s who Mike is, the reason I wanted to bring Mike on and do this interview with him was really to talk to him about how he’s grown his lists and his companies and what kind of value this has created for you. So maybe Mike if you want to start with telling me a little bit about your list, is obviously over a million people now, but what has that been able to do for you and your other businesses?

Mike Dillard: Well right now it’s active; it’s just over 400,000 so over the years I’ve built a list of well over a million people. But actively subscribed at the moment is around 400,000 people, just to be accurate on that.

Man you know, I’ve been an Entrepreneur, started my first business now 10 years ago in 2005, which was nothing special, it was taking a lot of lessons learned in a network marketing industry which is actually where I got my start in college. And started studying guys like Dan Kennedy, Yonic Silver and John Reese and all of those folks way back in school, and wrote an e-book based on what I had learned from that industry that it just started to sell. I wrote my own copy, built my own webpage and I use to have them printed down at the local Kinkos, with a plastic binding for $2 a piece probably, was never spell-checked once, you know was probably 50 pages long in Word. And I started selling those for $39 dollars apiece online and before I knew it; I was waking up every morning with 30 or 40 orders. I’d spend the next four hours every single morning hand dressing you know, priority envelopes, stuffing envelopes, making labels, putting those in a big plastic bin then hauling those off to the local post office waiting in line for 30 minutes every single day. And you know, mailing these 30 to 40 books. And before I knew it, you know, do the math on that, 40 books a day at $40 a piece is $1,600 a day which is a significant amount of money on a monthly basis. Especially considering the fact I was waiting tables before that, so you know that’s really how I got my start.

But as far as the list goes, that list I eventually grew probably to around 200,000 active people. The thing that really made the biggest difference to my business at that point was an affiliate programme which I had for the course and the subsequent products that come out. That was a very unique industry that I haven’t really been able to, it worked so well and it’s such a tragedy because I haven’t been able to figure out the same type of strategy in another world. But network marketing specifically, is an industry filled with aspiring entrepreneurs, people who are wanting to learn about marketing, they are wanting to make money. And so what happened is at the end of the book in the final chapter I said hey, you know I’m off setting my cost, my marketing cost and generating leads for free essentially by selling this book and other courses like it. And that’s why I can make money in this industry, whether I build the down line or not, because I have products that can offset this marketing cost.

And that was a revolutionary concept for people in that industry who had never heard of that before, and so I said you can go you know, write a book like this or build a marketing empire like I have or you can just join mine and I’ll give you an affiliate link and we’ll split the revenue. And that became the self-perpetuating machine at that point where someone would buy the book, they would join the system, become an affiliate, sell more books. And you know it quickly got to the point where 90% of the leads and revenue that was coming in over you know, 5 years were all from affiliates who became fans of the course and fans of the book, and essentially products of the product at that point. So I would have to say that 90% of my list at that point was generated through affiliate traffic which is a double edged sword, it’s a blessing and a curse at the same time.

[5 minutes]

Jeremy Ellens: Okay awesome, so you were getting affiliates to sign up and help you buy the book and then buy into the course or a system that you were selling?

Mike Dillard: Yeah, you know I spent probably a couple hundred grand building a replicated affiliate system, which is a bit more complicated than a traditional affiliate link. And so I said you can go do that yourself or just use mine for free, and so it was kind of a no brainer on their end and really helped me build my core business and audience.

Jeremy Ellens: Okay, so what do you think was probably the biggest mover for getting the momentum of getting more affiliates signed up?

Mike Dillard: Well that was the brilliant part. I never once advertised for affiliates or tried to recruit people. People would just go through the book and they would learn so much, and then to be offered the same ability at the end for free was a no brainer for people. And so really having a high quality product that essentially operated on the very principles it was teaching, and then giving people the ability to execute on it in a few minutes without having to do any work on their part. It was a very slippery slope, what was his name saying? Irresistible offer, Mark Joiner, there we go.

Yeah so that was the key to that success, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to replicate that kind of a system in any other industry. And so, when you look at the Elevation Group when I launched that in 2010, that is the biggest business I’ve ever grown. And once again, 90% of the traffic and therefore opt-ins came from affiliates, but the reason this time was different, the reason was that we had an offer, a great product that converted like crazy. And so a lot of people talked about the importance of traffic or they worried about traffic, or they spent all of their time trying to figure out the traffic question. And it’s something that I’ve never once focused any of my time on. I learned how to use Google Adwords way back when it first launched in the early 2000s. And then there was the first big Google slap, that I don’t even know if you were in the industry at that point to remember that. it was probably 7 or 8 years ago.

So from that point forward I never worried about traffic again, but it’s never been an issue and what people don’t realise is, if you have an offer that converts really well, you never have to worry about traffic again. And even if you know how to produce traffic and you become a Facebook ad master, it’s totally irrelevant if your offer doesn’t convert. So for me, I focused on creating the highest quality products that I can and the rest of the time is really focused on producing a marketing funnel and an offer that converts really well, and if you have that all of the traffic in the world will show up at your door step. So that’s what we’ve done for years now, simply outsourced our traffic needs to a third party or we have affiliates show up at our door that are really, really, skilled amazing guys who can just drive a ton of traffic to our offers and they take their commission and everybody wins.

So for EBG we ended up building a list of probably 400, 500 thousand people there, and that was again all 100% affiliate traffic, and that’s great until your offer stops converting and then all of a sudden that all goes away, which is the double edged sword. And then so through time, it’s always been one big piece of the puzzle no matter what businesses I’ve launched even if they’ve been in different industries like they have been. All of my emails still come from Mike Dillard in the same email address and they have for the last 7 or 8 years. And so I’ve been able to bring my following with me, wherever I’ve gone and to whatever industry I decide to get involved in and that’s been the biggest blessing, really is that relationship that I got with that list I think is the most important piece of the puzzle. So here I am, you know starting some very different businesses. I’m launching a podcast on personal development for men today; I’m getting into the hydroponics industry and organic farming this year, and you know I’ve still got that audience who was there and who follows my work, and if I don’t have anything to share with them from a business perspective, then it’s life. Hey guys, here’s how I did on my race last week, or what’s going on at the ranch or you know, whatever it may be.

[10 minutes]

Jeremy Ellens: That’s great. So when you talked about having a high performing offer, let me talk first about your list. So when you come in and you bring a list of maybe 100,000, 200,000 people and that’s able to help you test out how well performing your offer is, how beneficial is that as far as picking up momentum and some steam when you start any new project like Self Made Man or if you’re moving into this Hydroponics.

Mike Dillard: I mean, it’s the biggest advantage on the planet, you know it’s a ready-made distribution channel and that’s the way I look at a list. It’s as if you have your own radio station or TV channel, whatever it may be. But that’s what it is, instead of having 400 Starbucks retail stores you know, to get the same amount of traffic or eye balls, we have our email list which is the biggest advantage we have in the online world.

And so when we launched the Elevation Group in 2010, and we did $3.2 million in sales which was 8,700 paid customers in 7 days, 8,700 people in a week, all of that, or the majority of it was from my existing list from Magnetic Sponsoring. And so we did zero advertising that week, that was all internal. So that is, your list is your business in my opinion. And so we’ll see when we launch Self Made Man here today I have no idea what to expect from it, but it’s definitely a hell of a lot easier than starting from zero and figuring out how to get any eye balls onto it. So you know that, the list is my business really and the relationship that I have with those people.

Jeremy Ellens: Awesome, so can you tell us a little bit more about how you’ve been able to nurture your list, to become a great following and if you made them some really good offer that they’re just going to trust you and take you up on it?

Mike Dillard: Sure, and you know that’s the key right. Everybody is concerned about the size of your list, when the size is irrelevant; the quality of the relationship is the most important. And for me, the 2 overwhelming keys to success in that are authenticity and honesty. I think more than anything else, people will listen to and follow someone who is genuinely authentic and honest with them, even if you screw up and you know, which I have in an unbelievably horrible way over the last couple of years. But if you’re honest with them and super authentic then they’ll follow you to the end of the Earth, so for me I never look at my list as a piggy bank if you will, or a pay check. Money is always, always the last item on the list I consider.

I only promote maybe 2 or 3 products a year to my list, maybe at most 1 a quarter. And those are only products, one that I’ve used personally and that I absolutely love and think that they need to check out and use it as well. And that’s first and foremost, I’ve never promoted anything that I haven’t used or purchased myself. Then when I do a promotion, it’s all full on, week long deal and I’ll get 110% behind it. So two of the last promotions that I’ve done were for financial newsletters that I personally read and love in the investing world, and on both occasions I offered a 100% matching money back guarantee, so basically double your money back. So let’s say if this subscription was $100 and they had at that time a 90 day money back guarantee themselves, so my offer was basically hey go buy this, and if you don’t like it, not only will you get a full refund back from them, I will personally send you a check for another $100.

And I really did that, and I think we sold 3 or 4 thousand subscriptions during that week and I probably ended up writing over the course of the next 3 or 4 months, checks to 20-25 people, for let’s say $2,500. And then I did it again for a product by Bill Bonner’s last book, which I essentially bought everyone a copy of the book for free, literally. And a subscription for them which I was able to do because they offered me 100% commission. So let’s say the subscription was $100, you know, I– how did I do this? Gosh I don’t even remember, but it was this over the top thing where I basically took on all of the risk.

[15 minutes]

Okay, I remember now I’m sorry. It was a 200% commission because they knew the life time value of their customer. And so I gave away half of my commission, if it was a $50 product which I believe it was, they paid me $100 for every customer that I acquired.

And so I just gave that back to my audience, and I said I’m just going to buy this for you, and so I essentially gave half of my commission back. Everybody gained a free year long subscription, I still made you know a 100% commission and they acquired a couple of thousand new customers. And this is a guy that I personally consider a mentor and that I’ve studied and I’ve gone to his events, and so the offer worked out great and the metrics were made for an interesting circumstance, but at the end of the day I was only willing to do that because I’m attaching my reputation to this man and his services. So that’s kind of how I’ve treated my promotions and my list is only 2 or 3 things a year, getting behind those 100%, putting my butt on the line from a financial perspective if I need to and at the end of the day all of those promotions usually produce a 100 to 3 or 400,000 dollars in commissions that week. So it really is a win-win for everybody.

Jeremy Ellens: Okay, I think those are some really good points, so far as the educational, the nurturing of the author. I know that you’re blogging on mikedillard.com. You’re also coming out with the podcasts for Self Made Man, what else are you doing to nurture the people on your list besides authors?

Mike Dillard: That has been my biggest challenge over the last year; we have been so busy building these companies that putting content out to the audience has unfortunately taken a back seat. For one primary reason, which is I don’t send anything out to my list unless I think it’s really going to be of genuine value and that they’re going to finish reading that and be like “wow, I’m really glad to have read that”. Either from an entertainment standpoint or an educational standpoint. And at the end of the day, I don’t if I don’t have much to say at this point in time, or I’m just too busy, or not that entertaining but I haven’t had a lot to say so I’ve probably, I’ll literally go 2 months without emailing my list at all. And most people would think that’s sacrilegious, but I’d rather not send them anything than send them something that wastes their time just for the sake of doing it.
So when people do get an email from me they’re like “oh this will be important in some form or fashion” whether that’s right or wrong I don’t know, it’s just the way I operate. So it’s either a post of genuine value like the blog post I put up, or it is entertaining. “Hey we just raced in the 400, I flipped my car 4 or 5 times here’s the picture of the carnage” and just want to share my results with you, kind of deal, so an involvement in the personal side of my life. Which I believe people, if they’re into you and your stuff, love to participate in.

Jeremy Ellens: That’s a great point, so Mike tell us what’s your barometer for segmenting and how you predict they’ll find value or entertainment in your stuff. Because you probably have people that are all over the spectrum, from just starting a business to very successful.

Mike Dillard: True, and I’m probably a much harsher critic than I need to be because honestly if I don’t find it personally interesting or insightful myself then I’m not going to send it off to them, which is a pretty crappy barometer to have because I’m sure I’ve at this point forgotten more than most people on my list know, so I can lower the bar for sure. But at the same time, I mean honestly writing a 10 page blog post for me literally will take me 2 entire days. You know, I’d probably say 10-20 hours to write, so I’m not very quick and that’s a huge commitment for me if I have a 4 day work week, you know if I have my 4 year old 3 days and I have 4 days left to work, 2 days to write a blog post to me is a huge investment. So it hasn’t been one that I’ve been willing to make very often, and honestly that’s one of the reasons I’ve started the podcast. Here’s a way that I can provide value to my readership on a weekly basis and do so with a total time commitment of maybe 2 hours. You know an hour, hour and a half to do the interview and then another half hour of back end work, whatever that may be. And that was part of the reason why I decided to do that, I was like I have to deliver value, I have to keep my relationship up with them, I’m building 3 companies at one time, that portion of my business is getting neglected. And so, you know what is the solution that can provide the greatest amount…

[20 minutes]

of value possible and the highest leverage for me personally, from a time perspective? And the podcast was really the solution to that, and so we’ll see how it goes, but it’s a very easy and I believe efficient way to leverage other people’s expertise for yourself and your readers, you know really everybody wins at that point.

Jeremy Ellens: Okay, so why don’t we shift and why don’t you tell us a little bit about your podcasts, what it’s going to be like, what the strategy is behind it. Because podcasts are huge right now and that should be a huge list growth, and as well as nurtured for you as well.

Mike Dillard: Yeah it’s interesting, so I bought the domain selfmademan.com last year for a significant sum of money, but it seemed like a no brainer as far as finding a good use for it. So we had that opportunity, so I picked that up and so the podcast for Self Made Man, and the mission behind it is actually pretty interesting, it’s much deeper than my goals for it from a marketing perspective.

I’m personally motivated by businesses and projects that can actually have a real impact on people in the world, so if it doesn’t have that potential, it doesn’t grab my interest.

So my friends and I over the last couple of years, we’ve sat around and had a cocktail or two, we’ve always asked the question “how can we genuinely change the world for the better right now?” considering a lot of the challenges we see out there, whether it is in the food supply or the food system, or in society in general, how can we do that?

And so one of the most interesting questions posed was how do you change society for the better in a large society like the United States or the world without using the barrel of a gun, because that’s typically how it’s done, through force. So how can you do that? And the conclusion we came to was you would have to change the values held by men living in that society. And so if you want to change a society you’d have to change the values set that people are living by and unfortunately, especially here in the United States it’s been unbelievably shocking how quickly I would say over the last 7 or 8 years the value system in this country has decayed noticeably. Between the infighting of race stuff, politics and you know, capitalists vs non and liberals vs conservatives, it’s just ridiculous. And if you ask yourself, well where the future is headed, what is this going to look like in 20 years. well just look at the kids who are in school right now. Are they coming from broken homes? Yes, are they in jail more often than ever? Yes, are they eating quality food? No.

It’s just going to be a cesspool here, so how do you change that? You’ve got to change the values these people live by, especially from a family unit, men specifically. So that they can be actual role models for their kids, whether it’s their kids, or they’re a teacher or they’re a coach, whoever they may be. And so that really is the goal of Self Made Man– to promote a set of principles and values to men specifically around the world that lead to long term success in all aspects of life, whether it’s in parenting, finance, health and fitness, entrepreneurship, careers, whatever it may be, it really is, the attempt is to make a very specific set of values and principles cool again. Which is you know, work ethic, honesty, integrity, things like that.

And so, you know my goal is to bring people I see as role models onto the show and to interview them and to learn about the principles they live by and raise their kids by and build their businesses by. And to give them a stage and a platform to share their insight with men around the world, so that’s the vision for the show and the meaning behind it. From a business perspective, it’s an interesting opportunity because one of the, the crappiest things about a podcast is it’s quite possibly the worst business model ever, meaning that you’ve got a free show that people can subscribe to through iTunes, which is a closed eco system so you have no access to any data or any contact information. And it’s a listening only medium that people are usually consuming in their car or on a treadmill, which means they’re not in front of their computer, they’re not going to click on anything or buy anything. You can’t present a link to them, you know in real time. And so from a conversion perspective it’s a nightmare, and so it goes back to traditional, you know, if you look at guys like Tim Farris.

[25 minutes]

Mike Dillard: If you can get one of the top shows in any nichel, you have a massive audience of a million listeners a month, well then you get to make money from a sponsorship perspective but the chances of anyone doing that are the same chances of you becoming, you know, a professional athlete. So it’s a crappy business model so my challenge has been and what I consider before I even decided to go this route is how can you make it self-perpetuating and self-funding. So I hate organic growth. I hate any kind of organic traffic sources, whether it is SEO or social media or blogging­­––to me it’s the single biggest waste of time on the planet and it’s a lesson that differentiates in my mind the people who are amateur entrepreneurs, and professionals as professionals buy their medium and buy their traffic and amateurs hack away at a keyboard for years trying to get attention. So how can I bring paid traffic to self-made man if it’s not really making any money. So it has yet to be executed on obviously for launching the show today, but my plan is to take advantage of the asset that is being created on a daily basis which is the content so if you are producing amazing content in various different niches, all of which are substantial on their own, health and fitness, finance, relationships, whatever it may be.

All of those are 9 to 10 figure niches themselves, how can we capture that and take advantage of that asset. So my goal is to take every single episode and put it behind a traditional capture page, you know name an email address. We’re going to be promoting those shows on Facebook and through paid ads and paid banner ads. You know basically give us your name and email address for this free lesson by X, Y or Z person on how to do X, Y or Z. And when they opt in, we’ve got a short three or four minute video that is very personal from me on camera that says ‘thanks so much for downloading this free lesson as part of the Self-made man project, here is the mission behind self-made man and why we’re doing this and what it’s about and how you’ll benefit and how we are looking to change the world with this content.

And a part of becoming a self-made man is largely becoming financially independent and becoming an entrepreneur and that’s a huge subject of interest for most of our community here. And it is something that I happen to personally know a lot about, like here is what I have been able to do in my career and at that point I give them an opportunity to join my mentoring programme which I sell for 97 bucks a year and it’s basically a private mentoring community for entrepreneurs where I do free lessons on every week and that’s an annual subscription for a 100 bucks basically which is a ridiculous offer. And so the goal is at that point to get one out of four, one out of five people to take that offer and then all of that money goes back to the ad budget and we get more eyeballs, more listeners, more opt ins, bigger lists and if that simply funds itself and we can get up to a point where we’ve got ten episodes out there and ten different niches and each one is generating 100 opt ins a day, that’s 1000 opt ins a day, or 30,000 a month. But that’s really my strategy and I haven’t seen anyone do that yet and I’ve talked to Lewis Howes a little bit about the idea and he loves the idea, he’s probably going to do it as well.

But no one out there from a podcast perspective is reall,y I think, properly valuing the content that they are producing by asking for an email address in exchange for it. So that’s the goal and that’s the strategy and I predict that it will be successful just based in my past experience. To some degree, there is always law of diminishing returns and marketing so we will be able to break even at some level of activity and traffic. We’ll see from a conversion perspective how big we can go but that’s the business model behind it basically and it’s a nice advantage because when you can pay for your eyeballs and your listeners, that can allow you to jump up to the top spot infinitely faster than all of the other competing shows out there.

Jeremy Ellens: Well that’s a great strategy. So your strategy is you are going to run paid traffic to get people to opt into these episodes that you’ve created and then offer them an up-sell into your programme and funnel all that money back so it’s a self-perpetuating model.

Mike Dillard: Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Ellens: Awesome. Okay. Cool. And one of the things you brought up that I wanted to ask you about is creating really great offers and as you’ve been talking it is very apparent that like you do this stuff, like not only do they give you money back.

[30 minutes]

How do you go about creating these really great offers, because that’s a huge part of paid traffic, or if you’re running like any kind of affiliates to mail for you. The offer is tremendously important.

Mike Dillard: Yeah you know, the secret to my success and every other online marketer that I’ve ever seen is their skillset with copy and copywriting which was the skillset that set me free 10 years ago. I discovered what copywriting was and I studied that every single day for a year, writing out old guys’ sales letters by hand on a notebook every night and buying every course that I could get my hands on.

And that first sales letter that I wrote for the Magnetic Sponsoring book, that first e-book that I wrote, it probably took me 3 or 4 months to write. Writing, trashing, re- writing, trashing, but it was a great investment. That letter went on to make 25 million bucks you know, for the next 5 years.

So you have to learn how to effectively communicate in a persuasive manner to your audience, so that you can persuade them to follow the suggestions that you’re giving or the course of action that you want them to take. And if you don’t have that ability you’re going to be very ineffective, in every form of marketing. So for me, first and foremost it is mastering the skill of copywriting. And I’m at a point now, especially once you start to establish a following, that the authenticity starts to take over your skill at copywriting at that point. You’ll always have the skillset but it becomes less important, because your level of trust and authenticity at that point count more, so I don’t have to sit there and go through the entire 10 step formula for writing the sales letter anymore. I just genuinely and authentically say here’s what I think you should go do and why you should buy this, and how you would benefit, and here’s what I’m willing to do in order to make this totally risk free for you and make sure you win no matter what.

So for me, you know speaking from a standpoint of authenticity and leadership has really been the key to my success and figuring out what your voice is and what you want to be to your audience. You know it’s funny, Frank Kern is a good friend of mine and he has a very particular style in all of his videos and copywriting where his goal is to just be cool. Like “I’m uncle Frank, I’m you friend and I’m here to just be cool to you, and send you some love and give you some goodies, and I just want to make you happy”. That’s kind of Frank’s deal. And my personality is very different, I’m more of the drill Sergeant, where I say here’s exactly what I want you to go do and why, and if you don’t then I think you’re an idiot for this reason or that reason. Not necessarily in those terms, but a great example of the posture I do have is, once every couple of years I literally ask people to get off my list. And I did this a couple of actually, where I said, and it was when I launched my mentoring programme.
You know it was 97 dollars for me to get on and answer your questions live and provide you with mentorship every single week for an entire year for one payment of $100, and I basically just challenged people. I said, “Why are you here if you’re on my email list because you want to learn from me and get my help, I can only assume that’s why you spend this kind of time reading my stuff. Then so I’m going to give you your single best opportunity you’ve ever had to get personal access to me, for what is essentially free. And I want you to join, and if you don’t join then I want you to literally get off my list, there’s the link it’s down at the bottom, I want you to hit unsubscribe, or I want you to buy my thing and join my programme.”

So it was a challenging email, to either force them to take action and get off the fence or to be honest about themselves and that was really the context which is… “Look if this isn’t worth a hundred bucks to you to get my help, then either 2 things are apparent here. You’re really not serious about becoming an entrepreneur and building your business or you don’t really think that I can move the needle and provide you with actionable help. So either way let’s stop wasting each other’s time and just have you move on. And so that does a couple of things. One, every time I’ve done that I’ve got record sales that day, and two, I’ve gotten, you know on that campaign I probably think, out of sending that out to 450,000 people I probably got 2 or 3,000 unsubscribes. And at the end of the day what did I really lose? If they weren’t willing to become a customer for my single best product that I could release, why are they here? I’m just paying money to send them emails every month.

[35 minutes]

You know as far as I’m concerned, everybody wins. But what that does for the other people who are listening and watching, is it really positions me in a position of leadership who’s willing to stick to a certain set of principles even if I risk losing in some way personally. And I think that’s important for your audience to know, and that’s part of that authenticity and that leadership component.

And so you really just have to pick your voice and your style, that’s not going to work for other people. You know other people would prefer Frank’s style, so you know that’s part of building your personal brand and your relationships with folks and yeah, so that’s been one of the big keys to my success as well.

Jeremy Ellens: Very cool, alright let me ask you some bonus questions real quick. So if you could go back, what would you tell your 18 year old self, Mike?

Mike Dillard: Goodness, goodness. You know I wouldn’t really change anything except one thing. A couple of years ago in 2011 or 12, during EBG we met, I’ve always done business with a handshake and kind of, if we make an agreement that’s great, and if you think the agreements bad I’ll give you the winning end of it. Life’s not worth fighting over crap at the end of the day, especially when you have the ability to go create anything new that you want once you have the skillset, anytime that you want.

So you know I’ve always had this attitude of just doing business with a handshake, expecting people to be honest and have integrity, and I’ve never come across anyone who was otherwise so I didn’t have a lot of evidence in life to show any kind of warning signs or to tell me that I should be a bit more cautious. And part of that is understanding that we live online these days, so if you screw someone over it ends online forever and everyone knows about it so it’s like why would you do that?

And unfortunately I did run into an individual a few years ago who ended up not sharing those same values and was basically a con artist, who hurt a lot of my people and myself and my business. And was the source of the single worst period of pain in my life essentially, because he took advantage of my readers who are near and dear to me because they are everything to me in my life, and why I’m here and they provide me with my living. So to have someone take advantage of that for their personal gain and then to hurt those people was a really devastating period to go through.

The period of I guess naivety, and blank check of honesty that I gave folks in business came to an end during that period. So if I would go back I approach the business I do people with now more of a trust but verify type of attitude, instead of simply saying trust. And you know the more successful you’ve become, the bigger of a target you are, the more you have to lose. And at the end of the day we started in a very naïve industry, where everybody has an abundance mind-set, everybody’s reading personal development, and everybody wants everybody else to prosper. And it’s a very rare world to develop as an entrepreneur in that the rest of the world doesn’t operate within those characteristics.

And so a lot of us I believe in this world, in this industry approached it from a very inexperienced naïve way at the of the day, and once you actually leave that bubble and start to work with other businesses and individuals that can come to a reality check very, very quickly. So the only advice I think I would give myself is that is approach business relationships, especially with someone you don’t know or haven’t worked with before with a much higher level of maturity and there’s a reason why contacts exist, and attorneys exist and private investigators exist. And so that would be it, treat this business with a much higher level of maturity. You know, here we are basically kids running out of our own houses or offices with 8 figure a year businesses with a laptop, which is pretty absurd when you think about it. So, yeah I think that would be it.

Jeremy Ellens: Okay, that’s a great point. One of the things that popped up to me is that, kind of a little bit of shift in your strategy it seems like. So you started out very strong with affiliates, that’s how you got started, was growing your big list of affiliates with a great offer.

[40 minutes]

You used that with your first business, you used that with DVG, and now you’re doing this podcast where you’re talking about a paid traffic strategy, where affiliates have their pluses and minuses like you mentioned, if the offer runs out they’re going to stop mailing to you, but paid traffic is like, well if it’s cheap enough you’d just run it all the time, but sometimes offers expire as well with paid traffic. So are you kind of making a shift in your strategy from affiliate to paid traffic?

Mike Dillard: Well, you know..

Jeremy Ellens: Obviously with interviews you’re probably going to get people that are going to mail for you so that’s essentially like affiliate traffic model built in.

Mike Dillard: Yeah so the affiliate thing is interesting, it’s great because essentially it’s free labour and free traffic but you don’t have any control over it. And so if you build up your businesses like we did to over a million dollars a month in revenue and all of that traffic is coming from people you have no control over and who can walk away anytime they want, then it’s kind of a stupid business model.

The nice part is when it’s just you and another couple of other people it allows you to essentially outsource the massive, very time intensive part of your business. So I’ve always ended up taking that trade off because the traffic world is just not what my brain is wired for. So, you know when it comes to affiliates the other downside is, specifically if you’ll take anyone as an affiliate which I did for Magnetic Sponsoring, if you bought the book “How you can become an affiliate”. Is you’ll have a lot of very inexperienced, enthusiastic people who don’t understand the long term value of you and your brand and your name, who will put out anything they want.

And so you end up with “is Mike Dillard a scammer” SEO blog stuff that says “no he’s not, he’s actually great here buy his shit” but at the end of the day your Google listing is filled with crap like that on YouTube and press releases and stuff. And so you lose control of your brand at that point, and so you know at this point in my career I am not willing to go through that again. And so I don’t have an affiliate programme at this point for my mentoring programme, for that specific reason. If I know you and I know you’re a professional affiliate and a marketer who understands the value of reputation and brand, then I’ll totally let someone like that promote but it won’t be an open white listing for people.

And so from a traffic perspective now, I essentially am still reliant on other third parties to do my traffic that we outsource to, guys who are full time media buyers. But we have a relationship, I get reports every day, they get a budget and we work on that together as a partnership basically. I just simply do not have the time, you don’t have the time to do it all yourself and you have to focus on what is the thing you do that makes the biggest difference in your business, and for me that’s building a relationship with my audience and delivering value to them and creating the offers. And that’s my stupid human trick, and so everything else needs to be outsourced at that point.

So I don’t know if that answers your question or not, but you know you’ve got to have traffic, it’s got to be paid in my opinion. My job as the brand owner and the marketer is to figure out how to build a funnel that makes sure that happens successfully at that point.

Jeremy Ellens: Yeah, no I think that’s a good point. I think you’ve had some good learning lessons with affiliates. Obviously they can be great but there’s also a down side to them as well, and you’ve definitely lived those experiences and seen paid as a good source as far as scalability and having control, but yeah I guess those are some good lessons. Very cool.

Mike Dillard: Yeah, again it’s the difference between those who are making 6, 7 figures in a business and those who are still struggling trying to build a following on Instagram. You know, you’ve got to learn that component. And again, you don’t need to know traffic, you need to know conversion. You’ve got to create a great offer, and then if you have that, the guys who do show up will be happy to send you all the traffic you could possibly use. So traffic in my mind is a complete non-issue, it shouldn’t be up for discussion, it shouldn’t be, it should all be for product, brand and that will get taken care of on its own.

Jeremy Ellens: Awesome, alright one more question. What are some of the books you’re reading right now Mike?

Mike Dillard: Oh man, the one I’m reading this week, I finally got around to it is “Good to Great”

Jeremy Ellens: Jim Collins?

[45 minutes]

Mike Dillard: Yep, yep finally getting around to that one. Reading, what is it? Let me bring up my Amazon here. I bought one yesterday that was actually recommended, if I can remember the name, I literally bought it yesterday so I don’t have it yet, but I’m excited to read it. Which is, on parenting basically. Principles and values when it comes to raising your children in parenting. And you know, I have a son who is 4 and a half years old so it’s The Book of Virtues by William Bennett. And that was actually mentioned on Tim Ferris’ brand new podcast interview with Glen Beck which was released yesterday, and was an absolutely phenomenal show. And so it seemed to me to be a perfect match with the mission for Self Made Man. So yeah, those are ones I’m going through at the moment.

Jeremy Ellens: Awesome, I just picked up a book off of Tim Ferris, I think he had a blog post a couple of weeks ago, one of them was the Power of Habit, I picked that one up. Have you ever read that one?

Mike Dillard: I haven’t, you know it’s been unfortunate. It’s so easy to buy books, whenever I hear one I just buy it on Amazon, and they are just stacking up like crazy. Essentially right now I’m attempting to build 3 companies at once and it’s me and my customer service team at the moment, so reading has unfortunately been the victim of my schedule. But I need to bring it back because I do remember when my career first took off, there was a direct correlation between the amount I read and the success of my business, so I’m very leery of the risk I’m taking in that regard.

Jeremy Ellens: Okay, awesome. Alright Mike, well I really appreciate your wisdom and you sharing your experiences, I know I always learn a lot when I follow your stuff and I listen to you, so I guess one final question, where can people find you, how can we support you?

Mike Dillard: Oh thank you, you know MikeDillard.com is probably the single best place to go, it’s kind of my big bio page. And I’ve got a great 7 day boot camp that you can get there. You know on the home page there’s an email form, but those are a series of videos I shot a few months ago which are the biggest lessons that I’ve learned. Building two 8 figure businesses in 2 very different industries, and so for me the content is extremely valuable. And you’ll be able to check out Self Made Man and the other businesses I’ve built there as well, learn about them and see some pretty cool pictures from my racing life. And you know at this point my goal is to build some awesome companies over the next 3 to 5 years that will allow me to go race cars full time and go round in circles as fast as I can.

Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes

Get Started

Build Your Email List By 100K This Year Using Quizzes

Get Started

So yeah, thank you so much for having me Jeremy, this is awesome and obviously I’m a huge fan of yall’s work and the very first post I remember I found you guys through was the funnel makeover, or really the architecture of Tony Robins’ funnel which was just a phenomenal post that I shared with everybody.

So I appreciate you having me and hopefully we can have you on Self Made Man soon and it’d be amazing.

Jeremy Ellens: Awesome, thanks Michael we hope to have you again soon. We’ll throw these links under this video so people can find it.

Mike Dillard: Cool, thank you guys so much.

Jeremy Ellens: Awesome, thanks Mike. Bye.