Interviews

J. R. Fisher Interview @ AWA 2017

Last updated on May 8, 2018 by Mobidea Academy 8 min read

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AWA 2017 Interview Series: J. R. Fisher

J. R. Fisher is the president of survivalcavefood.com and a real affiliate marketing pro.

We met him at Affiliate World Asia.

Which means what?

That we’ve got an amazingly awesome interview to share with you!

Check the video right now!

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J. R. Fisher Interview at AWA 2017

1. Tell Us About Yourself

I’m J. R. Fisher and I started in 2009, on eBay and Amazon.

I formed my own company in 2010, where we actually manufacture survival foods.

We’ve been manufacturing for seven years.

We have retailers throughout the United States, including Sears and Walmart.

And that grew.

I had a lot of people tell me that they wanted to know how we grew our company and that’s why we came out with a course.

That’s what we’re marketing now, which is the Digital Cash Academy.

We actually teach people how to start an E-Commerce business from scratch and how to grow that business.

It’s all based on what we did.

It’s not theory:

It’s exactly how we did it.

Now, we market that to a lot of people.

We’re getting good results out of it.

2. What is the Best Strategy for a Newbie?

If I was a newbie…I consider myself a newbie to this day.

Because you always have to be learning something.

I would concentrate more on something that interests you and that you like doing than going after the money.

If you just go after the money, you may or may not have knowledge in that area.

You may not like it.

That means your odds of making money wouldn’t be very good.

I would actually go out there and would try to find out what I’m interested in and try to find a niche that matches my interest.

I think you can do a whole lot better by doing that.

3. Biggest Challenge for an Affiliate Marketer

The biggest challenge is frustration.

When you get into this, you think that you’re just gonna instantly make money and you’re gonna work four hours a week from a coffee shop and it’s not like that.

You’ve gotta put in the hours.

The only way to really fail in doing this – because obviously people are succeeding – is to quit.

The only way you can fail is to quit.

4. What Skills are Needed to Become a Super Affiliate?

The first one is patience.

It’s not gonna happen overnight.

It didn’t happen overnight for me.

It doesn’t happen overnight for most people.

I think that’s what they’re looking for:

It’s quick money.

Second thing?

You’ve gotta be prepared to work.

If somebody’s telling you that you’re gonna make money and you won’t have to do any work, it’s probably not accurate.

And the last thing is that you’ve gotta be able to handle failure.

Failure is part of this.

I would say that you’re gonna fail 80% of the time.

But that small 20% way more than makes up for any of those failures that you would have.

You have to have those three traits or you can’t make it.

5. What Would you Tell Affiliates who are Experiencing Difficulties?

When you’re buying media, the cost of media generally matches what the market will bear.

Just like any product, whether it be food or gasoline or cars or whatever.

If you’re buying media and it costs you a lot of money and you’re not converting, I’d look at your offer.

Because if you have a really great offer and it’s something of a high value, you’d probably be doing okay.

But if you’re just trying to go for the masses and put a whole bunch of different offers that aren’t great…yeah it’s probably gonna cost you a lot of money and they won’t do well.

6. Affiliate Marketing Mistakes

Going after the quick buck.

Trying to make a quick dollar instead of trying to build a real, sustainable business.

I also think that the big thing is that you need to check out what your offers are.

They need to be good offers.

They need to be valid offers.

And they need to add value to the buyer.

If they don’t, you’re probably wasting your time.

7. Favorite Traffic Sources

A lot of people complain about it but I like Facebook.

They have a lot of data.

You can really target people in there.

I think people who use Facebook tend to not target enough and they don’t go back and look at their ads.

One thing we do is that we run an ad and when we get some results we go:

“That’s great! But let’s see which states in the United States are getting the best results.”

If one of them is getting $1.50 a click and another one is getting $2.50 a click, we get rid of the $2.50 and put all of the money in the $1.50.

It’s all about constantly readjusting those ads and the targeting.

8. Affiliate Fraud

The first thing I would say?

Know the rules.

You’re not gonna have as many problems if you know the rules.

A lot of people will run ads and will lose accounts because they didn’t read the rules.

And then they’ll blame somebody else for that problem.

Fraud is a real thing and we’ve been hit with it.

I would also say:

Vet the offers and vet the affiliates.

Figure out who they are.

Before somebody can offer our course they have to fill out a questionnaire.

And that usually wipes out 90% of the bad people.

We’ve had some bad people try to offer it.

They were pretty much a scam.

That’s the way we do it.

We vet them.

We figure out who they are first.

Don’t do business with just anybody.

9. How to Develop Your Skills?

There’s a lot of knowledge out there.

Some of it’s good.

Some of it’s bad.

I would say that what you’re doing is probably the number one thing to look for.

You’re asking your audience what they want and what they need.

If you find a company like yours…which I would recommend for that reason, because you’re actually getting feedback.

If you’re getting feedback is because you actually care.

I would wanna deal with a platform that really cares about the end user.

I recommend you guys.

10. Should Affiliates Read a Specific Book to Succeed?

Wow.

There’s so much stuff out there.

The one thing I would tell you is that there’s a lot of really good people, and there’s a lot of really bad people.

If you’re gonna get knowledge from somebody, make sure they’ve done it.

A lot of people will sell knowledge on things they haven’t even done.

We have a course at Digital Cash Academy but that’s all based on us growing an E-Commerce business.

We only teach what we did.

If somebody’s gonna teach you something, the next question you wanna ask is:

“Did you already do it? Where’s your proof?”

They can google “survival cave food” on the internet, for example, and they can see millions of hits for it and they know it’s actually selling.

It’s a real product.

A lot of the people out there selling courses haven’t done anything.

You wanna be real careful about that.

11. Affiliate Marketing Trends

There’s good trends and there’s bad trends.

There’s gonna be a lot more bad offers.

A lot more “Get Rich Quick” type of things out there because – as people are exposed to the word affiliate – a lot of people don’t even know what the word means…there’s gonna be scammers out there, really.

That’s a good thing because companies like yours are talking to people and vetting people and figuring out what’s good and what’s bad.

I think that the two big trends are that it’s gonna get really bad and it’s gonna get really good.

You’ve gotta get with the right platform.

A good one.

12. Surprises in 2017

Audiences are more sceptical nowadays.

You have to give more value than you did years ago.

We didn’t have to do as much years ago as we do now.

This year, we had to give a whole lot more value than we did the year before.

I would assume that trend is going that way.

You’ve gotta give some type of content or value way before you can ask for their money.

If you aren’t doing that, you’re probably not gonna do well.

13. Future Plans

We’re gonna grow Survival Cave Food.

That’s been around for seven years.

It’s a known brand.

We have a lot of products coming out there.

But what I really enjoy doing is…over the years I had a lot of people saying:

“How did you do it? How did you grow that business?”

We’re gonna be coming out with more courses to show people how they can start their own business.

How they can grow their business.

How they can make it profitable.

We have one main course which is Digital Cash Academy but we’re gonna be doing a lot of smaller courses.

If you need expertise in Facebook Ads, or if you need expertise to build your site, or if you need expertise finding products, we have several softwares that go with our course and teach you those things.

We’re probably gonna expand on those.

Thanks, J. R!

This really was a remarkably informative interview!

As for you, our reader, stay tuned to the Mobidea Academy because we’ve got more cool content for you to explore!

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