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SHAUN GROOMES
INTERNET MARKETER, COPYWRITER, & OFFER CREATOR REVEALS PLUGS
HIS DAMN NEWSLETTER
AFTER 17 YEARS OF SILENCE AS AN AFFILIATE AND MARKETER
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"I've never heard your name before!"
"Where's your coaching program?"
"Why don't you have a blue check mark?"
Yes, all great points.
That is if you care about that sort of thing.
I do not.
Because after making "eff-you" money running dating offers around 2010, I learned I could make my own coin without following the gurus or having to rely on a job to get me there.
(And there weren't many gurus back then. It was heaven on Earth.)
A few years after that, I started offering my landing page designs and marketing angles for no-brainer, stupefied price point.
It was one of the first "low-ticket" offers of it's kind before they became one of the well-known colloquialisms of Broccoli-headed marketers of modern times.
This is the only PG one I can show.
Here's what they looked like back in the day:
And frankly...
I made good money from it in my 20s from computer but at the time I didn't know how to keep it. I wore out my checkbook on cars, trucks, motorcycles, travel, and bar tabs like any other 20-something would do making enough to make a doctor weak in the knees.
I blew through it all.
Even Facebook banned me from advertising, and back then, it meant an overnight death.
If your traffic source kicked you out, you were as good as done unless you could bribe, stab, and steal to get another account.
It was the end of my time as an affiliate, or at least I thought.
And after hitting this rough patch, I decided to do something different to make a living.
I flipped the script, if you will.
I basically designed and sold landing pages using all the marketing angles I relied on to make a living.
I didn't know it at the time, but that was my first offer.
It's something that I sold that I created and put together and it gave me a ton of freedom because I was in full control of it from nose to tail.
And, to add, the money felt even better because I dictated how much I'd end up receiving from customers as often, or as little, as I wanted.
Every time I released a landing page pack (consisting of 15-20 different pages for people to use), sometimes twice a month, I'd see 15-20k hit my account.
It continued this way until people started ripping them and sharing them all on Pirate Bay.
Oh well.
Keep in mind, this was way before I knew about any special funnel software (not even sure they existed then), different payment processors, et cetera.
I kept it simple because it's all I knew how to do.
But that's how I did it.
I Built a Little 5-Figure Business With a
WordPress Blog and PayPal.
Easy-peasy.
There were no upsells, no downsells, no backend, no coaching, and no memberships.
Had I know better, a membership would have been smart. But I had no idea how to put that all together because I didn't have a tech background or even a business background.
I could barely even GOOGLE.
And just a few years prior to all this I was a gun-totin' airborne infantryman in the 82nd Airborne Division.
I had done a lot of hard work, served overseas, got blown up by an IED, suffered the loss of a brother, I didn't want to do have to go back to sweating and bleeding just to get a paycheck.
I wanted the easy way out and I found it.
I discovered internet marketing and found a clearly distinct relationship between the military and this strange industry.
In the Army, and the other real branches, the infantry leads the way.
Everyone else on the service side supports the infantry.
And so it is with this industry, the people who create offers in this space, or run their own campaigns pushing to affiliate CPA offers, or anyone who essentially just arbitrages the entire internet...
They are the infantry.
Everyone else?
They just support the whole.
Copywriters support the offer owners...
Media buyers run the traffic...
Designers make the graphics and beautiful landing pages...
Payment processors rely on sales from offer owners...
Email copywriters write for offer owners...
Affiliate managers make their bread from offer owners...
Even traffic brokers like Taboola, MGID, and others all rely on offer owners. To an extent Google, YouTube, and Facebook do as well. I mean, I know they do their own thing, too, but their entire business model is based on selling ads.
But not too many in the support crew have any freedom.
If you're a part of the service industry, as in this case, you have to rely on clients to hire you.
Your entire paycheck is based upon people using your service.
It's totally fine to be in the service biz for as long as you want, hell you can make great money doing it (especially if you're really good at what you do and referrals just come out of nowhere) but you ARE constantly working and constantly, for the most part, waiting on that next client.
There's not a lot of freedom in that.
Because simply...
Your Freedom Revolves Around
How Much OWNERSHIP You Have.
And the more ownership you have the better.
That's why if you have something to SELL, you'll never need a job again and you'll never have to tuck your tail, swallow your ego, wipe your mouth, and enter the service industry.
If you're a service provider, you're always gonna have to schedule your time around everyone else.
High level copywriters, and I know many of them, all do a fantastic job, and they're the best in their respective areas...
But what you may not see is the long hours some spend juggling multiple clients, projects, taking calls at strange hours, sacrificing days they could have had off, writing copy on airplanes, in hotels, on "vacation," and even at the hospital when your first kid is born.
(Ask me how I know this.)
All you see is the screenshot of the sales they're responsible for or them bragging on Facebook on how much money their copy is making other people.
I'm sorry to say, but to me, this kind of strung-out business isn't scalable when it's just you hopping on with clients on Zoom 50 times a day and working 24/7.
Clients are fine to have, but eventually, you realize it has to come to an end - especially if you want to enjoy life.
So in 2012, after wasting everything I had earned and getting banned on Facebook, I became destitute and I hit a dry spell as an affiliate and started selling those landing page packs each month.
I had to pick between doing client work to make a living or creating something of my own to sell.
The choice was easy.
I Buckled Up And Did A Bunch Of Creating
So I created LPMoney.com (I no longer have it).
I sold landing page packs on popular forums at the time called and really, pretty much any other place I knew internet marketers were hanging out at.
I still had to work, but not much because I had ownership.
And the stuff I created sold more and more incrementally as time went on.
Each month, I'd sit down with a cup of coffee, bang out designs in photoshop, slice them up, code it in Dreamweaver, put it all in a zip file and release the download for $21.95 a pop each month.
The money started to come back...
And it was life changing, all over again.
I got my own place, bought a Ducati, traveled to Amsterdam and bummed around Europe spending thousands thinking I'd just sit down, make some more designs and do this for the rest of my life.
And like I said, people started to pirate everything.
So that was the end of that.
The ship started to sink and I consumed all my time trying to learn new skills in protecting what I had built.
I went from mid 5-figures a month to nearly broke again and it was time for another offer.
This time a lead gen insurance business.
It was a one page website I whipped up in photoshop with a form on the front page.
That's it.
PURE HTML.
I launched it in 3 days.
People would fill out the form, click a button, and go to the next page where they clicked on a company that would give them a quote cheap auto insurance and I'd make between $8-$20 per click.
The insurance companies would do all the calling.
I just sent clicks.
Easy enough.
The point is...
You Don't Have To Be Smart To Make Money.
You can be dumb as rocks.
Plenty of dumb people make a lot of money.
(They still are!)
You'd be surprised, too.
And you know what?
It's perfectly fine if you make mistakes.
I sure as hell did and I still do.
You can sell anything you want.
Even if it's in a crowded marketplace with a lot of competition.
I know a lady making millions with baking cookbooks competing with free recipe sites you can find online. Her angle?
No long winded sap story before the actual recipe.
And not everything has to be pretty, either.
Hell, look at this page.
I've even done it with WordPress and a PayPal link.
You can use Cluckfunnels, Get-High-On-My-Level, or whatever...
As you can probably guess, I could keep blabbering on and on...
But I'm just gonna go out give whole fricking heck of a dang lot away on my list...
And if you like building online businesses too, or want to create one, or get incrementally better at internet marketing, copywriting, and slew of other single-leg takedown tactics that can help you become more financially independent...
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