Turn Your Passions Into Profits
Today's guest describes how to build a rewarding online business. He is the host of The Affiliate Guy Podcast, your source for affiliate marketing news, tips, and strategies to take your online business to the next level.
Matt McWilliams is also the author of the best-selling book Turn Your Passions Into Profits. He has worked with some of the world's most successful businesses and entrepreneurs, including Shark Tank's Kevin Harrington, Tony Robbins, Ryan Levesque, Michael Hyatt, Brian Tracy, Jeff Walker, and others.
Our Sponsor
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The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete.
By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career that you love. To find out more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.
Matt's Journey in Affiliate Marketing
Matt is the owner of an agency that runs affiliate programs for high-level entrepreneurs and businesses. The things he learned building that and other businesses led him to write his book about building a rewarding online business.
Affiliate marketing enables business owners to sell without taking any risks. Matt refers to this as paid-to-practice (PTP).
Startup of Affiliate Marketing
Matt introduced his ‘Affiliate Donut' approach, in which you focus on your main services. You can establish an affiliate relationship with your audience by providing supplements or other products that will benefit them in numerous ways, which will lead to them becoming recurring buyers.
There are certain advantages to using Matt's approach:
- Start monetizing immediately
- Training your audience to buy before you have your own product.
- Serve your audience by recommending products right in your niche or tangential ones.
And if the performance is strong, one will be able to generate more revenue early in your entrepreneurial journey.
Building a Rewarding Online Business
Matt touches on other business principles during our interview. And his book, Turn Your Passions Into Profits, provides detailed instructions outlining his proven path to a rewarding online business.
It covers all of the other necessary aspects of building any business, from identifying your niche, describing your avatar, building authority, creating a marketing plan, and building a team.
Summary
Turn Your Passion Into Profits is available at booksellers nationwide. But the best place to get Matt's book is at passionsintoprofitsbook.com/jurica. There are extra free bonuses for you using that link, including courses such as Matt's Email Marketing Masterclass and others.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
EXCLUSIVE: Get a daily dose of inspiration, information, news, training opportunities, and amusing stories by CLICKING HERE.
Links for Today's Episode:
- Turn Your Passions into Profits by Matt McWilliams
- The Common Path to Uncommon Success by John Lee Dumas
- The Positioned Physician by Mike Woo-Ming
- How to Get Started on Your Nonclinical Online Business
- How to Select the Best Online Business Niche – 110
- How to Become an Author, Consultant and Online Authority with Dr. Tom Davis – 047
- NewScr!pt
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 288
What Is the Proven Path to a Rewarding Online Business?
John: If you've been reading my emails recently, you'll recognize today's guest. I've been helping him get the word out about his new book "Turn Your Passions into Profits", and I'm really pleased to be able to talk to him personally about the book today. Matt McWilliams, welcome to the show.
Matt McWilliams: Hey, John. I appreciate that and thanks for having me today.
John: And I think we were talking before we got out, we're kind of like neighbors. You're one state over Indiana and I'm in Illinois. So, we're Midwest guys.
Matt McWilliams: Yes, yes. I don't sound like it just because I grew up in the south, but I've been up here long enough, I'm getting that little bit of that, that twangs gone away. And my accents become a lot more neutral. It's kind of funny when you combine a dad from New Jersey, a mom from California, you grow up in the south, but in an area with mostly relocated Yankees, then you move up to Fort Wayne, Indiana. You end up with a weird accent. Apparently, I've been told I have a neutral to slightly strange accent because I say certain words like I'm from Boston. Other words like I'm from Indiana. Other words like I'm from Mississippi. So, I like the mix in that.
John: It sounds pretty Midwestern today, but we'll see. I'll be looking for those rare words that come out that are a tip off to some other area. All right, we're going to be talking about your book today. And I'd let you give us a little background about what you do and then we'll get into why you wrote the book. But tell us a little bit about yourself.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Today I'm so blessed, John. I get to live out both ends of the book. There's a reason why we titled it what we titled it, you turn your passions into profits. It's not about just having a business you're passionate about. It's not about just changing the world. I've been there, done that. My third business. Man, I was making an impact on people, changing people's lives. I'd get emails and, and blog comments and social media comments every couple of days. "Matt, you saved my marriage. Matt, I was thinking about killing myself and I didn't. Matt, you changed my life." And I'm like, "That's awesome. Yay."
Here's a funny thing though. Our kids are both in high level soccer now and it's thousands of dollars a year. And the soccer association sadly does not take blog comments as a form of payment or tweets and Facebook posts as a form of payment. The mortgage company, they never took. I tried once forwarding them an email saying, "Look what somebody said about me. I saved a guy's life." And they're like, "You still owe us $1,800." Dang it, that's not how this is supposed to work.
And I've been on the flip side, I've had a business where I made more money than I know what to do with John. The reality was, when I was in my early twenties, I was making between $8,000 and $10,000 a week teaching golf schools. At that age, full disclosure, don't ever make that much money when you're that young because you'll do what I did and do a bunch of stupid stuff with it.
John: Yeah, to squander it.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. May or may not, I had a lot of nice stuff there for a few years though. But yeah, I made more money that I knew what to do with, but I was miserable. I hated what I was doing. And so, today I'm able to do both. I've got a great business. We have an agency where we run affiliate programs for some high-level entrepreneurs and businesses and I love that. Got an amazing team there. Got our platform at mattmcwilliams.com. Got the podcast The Affiliate Guy, got the book now "Turn Your Passions into Profits."
The interesting story behind the book because I know you said you were going to ask about it anyway, but not the reason why I wrote it, but the reason why I was able to write it is because I was in that position. If I didn't have such an amazing team, if I hadn't gotten to the point where we built the systems for the business to run, if we hadn't gotten to the point where it provided an income.
Because here's a funny thing about a book. Newsflash everyone, you're not going to make any money for a long time off the book. This was actually financial, we lost money so far, we're in the red. Even with a pretty significant advance from the publisher, we're technically in the red, if you compare it. I think we're in the red unless you count my wage at about one third of minimum wage, in which case, if you'd pay me that, we might be breakeven.
And so, we wouldn't have been able to do that. How do you do something like this? How do you invest all this time and energy into writing, editing, producing, launching all the things that we did for this book without the financial reward. It's because we have the rest of the business doing so well financially that we're able to do that. So, huge kudos, again, to the things that I've learned that put us in that position and obviously, my team, which is amazing.
John: No, it sounds like it's a great story and I think it's definitely ranking extremely high on Amazon and the other list. I've seen some of the numbers and definitely you're going to be one of those few authors that actually make money off their book. Because I've interviewed many and a lot of people write a book to promote their products or to serve their audience.
But yeah, I really like the book. I've gone through it and I get a lot of questions because I send out surveys to my listeners and my readers and one of the things they're looking for is what's the roadmap? How do I build an online business? And again, I'll say, hey, here's the book. It's out. You can get it now. And the subtitle is "The Proven Path for Building a Rewarding Online Business." I'm not going to tell my readers how to do it or listeners. It's like, just get the book. Now we can get that pretty much everywhere, right? Anywhere that books are sold.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. If they sell books, they sell my book. Amazon, Target, Barnes & Noble. It's in stores, most Barnes & Noble, there's a few that are sold out. Some of the smaller Barnes & Noble will not have it. We have two Barnes & Noble in Fort Wayne. One is massive and then the other is not even the size of our house. It's a tiny little Barnes & Noble and that one doesn't have it. But yeah, we got a deal with Barnes & Noble nationwide. Right now, at least for the next few weeks, it's front and center in almost all the Barnes & Noble we've been into. You walk in and it's right there under the new non-fiction.
So, you can grab it anywhere, but the best place to grab it, you go to passionsintoprofitsbook.com/jurica. If you go there, that's the best place to get the book because John, we've got some special bonuses for your listeners there. You can go buy it in a store, that's great. Go to the store and grab it. That's awesome. Then go back to that URL and make sure you redeem for your bonuses there. So, we've got over $500 in bonuses. Stuff you cannot get anywhere else. And so, that's the best place to do it, of course, because it's just easy peasy. But yeah, if you're walking through the store one day, you see the book, it's about the only book with that color scheme.
My mom, of course, this is a funny story. When it went on sale in stores, she had ordered a couple copies or 20 through Amazon. I was like, "Mom, we got it in Barnes & Noble." And she's like, "What's in the Wilmington and the Jacksonville one?" And she lives an equal distance between the two. This is in North Carolina. She's like 40 minutes from both of them. And she's like, I got to go. And she goes and grabs the copies and she's like, it was so easy to see. I walked in and that is the only one out of like 80 books that are front and center at the store. The only one that looks like that. There are half a dozen white books and some green books and black books. And she's like, it is the only one with that color scheme. So, I wish I could say we did that on purpose. It's actually just because that's our color scheme as a company. But it worked.
John: Yeah. It's on the logo for the podcast, I think are those colors.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Obviously, it's just funny. It's one of those we're behind the scenes weird stories. The iterative process for a cover, because I'm sure there's people out there, somebody listening or watching you, you want to do a book. What we did was about 14 months in advance, we started pulling my followers, my fans, my email list, and I also did it with some friends and stuff. I started pulling them on here's six covers that the publisher designed. And it was a very iterative process because the original version of this, there were a couple of things that were different. The original version of this exact one was a completely different color scheme. And the words were not tilted and none of these were tilted here. It was straightforward.
Well, what we found as we did this was the ones that had the slanted words kept doing better. That became the next iteration. We narrowed it down to slanted words. And then the two that did well were this with a completely different color scheme and a different design with this exact color scheme. And so, we were like, we combined them and that ended up being the winner.
And so, it was a very iterative process. I think we did like four rounds. Now number one, I ended up with the best cover. The actual colors that we ended up with there's a slight fade if you look closely from the bottom to the top. The bottom is our official company color. The top is actually from a course of ours, and it's a fade from those two colors. And that was the only reason why we even bothered doing like, "Hey, try that, whatever." Number one, we got the best cover. We ended up with over a thousand votes across the board. A thousand people are voting on it, you can be pretty sure it's going to be the right cover. Secondly, it's pre-marketing for the book in advance. Third, the people who voted, and even if they voted for a different cover, they were a part of the process. So, they were invested in it. So they're much more likely to buy the book.
John: Right. Good marketing, man.
Matt McWilliams: That's what it is.
John: That's what you're an expert at. When I have someone who's an author or does other things, but I obviously get a twofer. So, the twofer part of our conversation is let's use a little bit of your expertise. I have physician friends and colleagues who have started small businesses, coaching, consulting, courses, what have you. Maybe one of them uses affiliate marketing in any way, shape, or form for their business. So, since you are the expert on this topic, maybe you can just give us an overview of what is affiliate marketing? Why is it so cool? And why business owners should start doing it? Maybe to get people to help promote their products.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Now I will preface this by saying I don't know any states' laws about physicians and how you can operate. So please check on all that stuff. And I did not stay at a holiday express last night. So, take everything with a grain of salt in that these are basic rules and principles for business owners that I'm sure in some random state, what I'm about to tell you might even be illegal. I'm just going to preface that. So, that is not to save my butt, but to save yours. Whoever's listening, you live in whatever, you live in California and you are not allowed to do this, okay, then don't do it.
The basic premise of affiliate marketing has been around for thousands of years, John. If you think about it, I don't know, ancient Rome. I can't name anybody from ancient Rome other than Julius Caesar, but so-and-so and so-and-so are walking down the street in ancient Rome. One of them is looking for a good cobbler. And he's like, let me take you to mine. And he takes them to his cobbler and the cobbler's like, hey, thanks for referring whoever. I'm going to give you your next pair of shoes 50% off. That's affiliate marketing. If you think about it. There's no technology.
All we did 30 years ago is add technology to the basic concept of referral marketing. And then in advance, because we added that tech piece, before technology, Joe had to walk Sam to the store and say, let me introduce you to this guy before the advent of the telephone. Then we got the telephone, and the telephone allowed us for Joe to call up the shoemaker and say, hey, I got my friend Sam, he's on his way over. And boom, Joe got some credit for those shoes that Sam bought.
About 30 years ago, we added technology. So now we don't even need to know our affiliates, and our affiliates don't need to necessarily have us. But ultimately this comes down to, there's a concept I use called the affiliate donut. In the physician world, your core, if you can picture a donut with the core, the whole there, that's your core offerings. I'm simplifying this, John, but people come to you, if let's just say you're a general practitioner, they come to you when you're sick, when you have injury. That's pretty much the only time people ever unfortunately go to their doctor unless you go for your annual checkup, which reminds me, I'm due for an annual checkup last November. But I was launching a book, so I need to schedule that.
And so, that's when you go to your doctor. Annual checkup or you're not feeling well in some way, shape, or form. That's your core offer. You solve problems and perform annual checkups. Again, I'm simplifying this. I'm not diminishing what physicians do. I'm just saying that's the core offer. But think about all the other things. Do you sell supplements? Are you going to create as a doctor in Fort Wayne, Indiana or Kansas City for that matter? Are you going to create a supplement line? No. But do you recommend supplements to your customers? Maybe.
Well, why not form an affiliate relationship with those and create a single page on your site that says here's all the supplements. I'm just going to say drjohnsmith.com/supplements. And on that page are all the supplements that we recommend. In fact, you can narrow them down. For my patients that are men under 40, here's what I recommend. For my pregnant mothers, here's what I recommend. For my seniors, here's what I recommend. And so on and so forth. And you can recommend those supplements.
Now, if one of your patients become recurring buyers, for let's just say three supplements each fish oil, multivitamin, and one other. They become recurring buyers and you make $3 a quarter off of those 10%, that's $9. That is now a 90-cent increase per quarter in your average customer. You go, "Well, that's not a ton of money in the grand scheme of things." I'm just using round numbers here. Probably a little bit more than that. A $1.50, $2 more.
But those are the type of things at the end of the year, all of a sudden, your affiliate commissions could pay for an entire team member. Let's say you have three front desk staff. One and a half of those could be paid for by your affiliate commissions. That's kind of cool. $50,000 - $60,000 a year. That's a nice little vacation last time I checked. Or I don't know, you could pay off most of your mortgage, whatever it is. That's just off supplements.
There are other types of things you could recommend, whether it be various products that would serve your audience in different ways. Again, I'm making this up as I go here because I'm not super familiar with that world. But if you're a chiropractor, for example, recommending certain products. There's a one that I bought recently called Chirp. I don't know if you've heard of these, John, but think of a foam roller on steroids. My chiropractor years ago gave me a PVC pipe. He's like, don't use a foam roller too soft. Get the PVC pipe. And I'm like, it hurts. And it doesn't dig in. This chirp thing kind of digs up in there and I get on it, I just hear stuff popping. And I get up and I'm like my posture's better.
Could you recommend that as a doctor and make $10 a sale off those chirps? If 5% of your patients buy a chirp, how many patients do you have? Multiply it by 5% times $10 and it starts adding up and it creates that side income that, again, I've heard of people, specifically chiropractors who literally their affiliate commissions pay for their entire administrative staff. Their entire admin staff is paid for, not from their client fees, not from anything else they sell directly, but just from their affiliate offers.
John: Well, let me jump in here for a minute because a lot of my audience, they're getting burnt out. And so, what they're doing, they're creating side gigs that are in the healthcare realm, but it's not under their license. They're not actually practicing. So, they're building consulting or coaching or something. And obviously they can find products and actually other coaches or learning about something that affiliate marketing would be perfect for. And I've done it myself, the things I'm doing affiliated with the podcast and so forth. So, what are the other advantages of affiliate though? Because it's not simply the fact that you have this. You don't have to have any product, right?
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. That's a big one. In that instance, John, think about it. If your practice, though, is bringing in more revenue, yeah, you're burned out. But if you can increase the value of a patient $10, you could reduce your patient load by 10% and make up for that with affiliate marketing. That's one thing.
Number two, if it's bringing in more money on the side, it's building up that reserve. And I know a lot of people when they're switching careers, I have a particular client I'm thinking of, a coaching client. And she's burned out with her current platform. She's building this other platform. And I said, "Okay, the first two coaching sessions, I'm not focusing on your new platform." And she's like, "What do you mean? I want to focus on my new platform." She's doing about $250,000 a year in her current platform. I said, "I want to get that to $300,000 in the next year." She's like, "I don't want to grow that Matt."
And I'm like, "No, listen to me. If I can tweak a few things that don't require any extra work or involvement from you, but get that to $300,000 for the next two years versus going down to $150,000, you have an extra $300,000 in the bank at the end of two years. What could you do if you have an extra $300,000 in the bank at the end of two years?" And for most of us, the answer is pretty much whatever the heck we want to because we have such a load of money sitting there that it frees us up. Because one of the things, what's the thing about a side hustle? "Oh, I want to leave my practice. I'm burned out." Okay, can I just go to making $0? No. Could you go to making $0 if you had a half a million dollars in the bank? Maybe.But with that thing, we're not going to go to $0. We're going to build the side hustle. Maybe that side hustle is only bringing in $3,000 a month. I'm going to go out on a limb and say most physicians make a little bit more than that.
John: Yeah, that's true.
Matt McWilliams: But the physician side is now bringing in an extra $75,000. I don't want to be unrealistic. $75,000 from affiliate marketing. Over two years that's $150,000. Plus $3,000 a month for two years is $72,000 if I'm doing my math right. We're now at $200,000 some. You could go full-time on that side hustle now. It's currently bringing in $3,000. What would it do if you were full? Plus, you have over $200,000 in the bank. So, think of it that way.
To answer your question, what are some of those benefits and what does it do for our business? Number one, you can start monetizing immediately. This is the big one. When you start that side hustle, maybe you're building a platform around your passion and maybe your passion is, we'll just take John's for example, his passion was helping other burnt out physicians. But maybe your passion is around something that has nothing to do with medicine but sort of does. Maybe your passion it's about youth sports and the science of helping youth athletes become better. I'm just making this up.
Well, initially you might not have very many product offerings. You're certainly not going to go create physical products because physical products, I had an idea recently for a physical product and I was told the CAD design alone was going to be $18,000. I'm like, I want to do this, but not that bad. I think I'm just going to pass on that physical product.
So, we start promoting other products and I'm going to get to some of the other benefits that are tied to that in just a second. We don't have any fulfillment, any customer service. You do not need any space in your garage. For those men out there, this is less applicable to the women, just to be honest. But for the men out there, the last thing you want to do is start a business and then your wife can't park in the garage.
John: Right. Absolutely.
Matt McWilliams: Do not do that. I'm giving you marriage advice right now. Never, ever, ever do that because you will not be married in about a year. And so, we don't have to do that. And we don't have to worry. If my promo goes bad, if they don't buy, at least I don't have a garage full of crap. There's no hidden cost. When I sell stuff, I sold a couple of courses today. We sold like a thousand dollars' worth of courses today. Here's the thing. $994 is what my payment processor says we made. $994. And you go, "Hey, $994." I didn't. Not only did I have to pay my affiliates for both of those sales, $400 and change out the door. I paid 30 cents plus 2.9% on both of those transactions and credit card processing fees. So, $60, if I'm doing the math right out the door.
Almost half my revenue is gone. Our customer service manager has to email both of them and make sure that they're set up in their logins. Statistically one out of four is going to have an issue with something. Trying to log in or something's not going to work. An email's not getting delivered. That cost another $10. I'm over $500 on a $ $994 purchase. There's a lot of hidden costs. There's no risk like we talked about.
This is a big one. Affiliate marketing teaches you how to sell, it teaches you how to sell without all those risks and stuff. And so, my favorite kind of practice, I call it PTP, paid to practice. You get paid to practice selling online. You start to learn what works for your audience. Okay, what price points is your audience going to buy it? What sales strategies work? What topics are they going to buy at? What are the best promotional methods? I can send four emails or go live on Facebook for 30 minutes and sell the same amount of stuff. What are you going to do? Write four emails or go live for 30 minutes? You learn those things when you're doing affiliate marketing, it trains them to buy. That's another big one. You are training your audience before you even have a product of your own. You're conditioning them to buy. And I go through a bunch more reasons why, benefits in the book.
But the last one, this is the most important one, it serves your audience. So, let's just go with that example. I don't know it very well, but let's just go with that example. You have a physician. They're a pediatrician and they have a passion for working with kids on things like nutrition and healthcare for kids that are youth athletes.
So you go, okay, this is who I work with. Now I can create a course that teaches parents how to help their kids in these areas, but what supplements do these kids need? Well, you're not going to probably start a supplement company in your first couple of years with this business. You may not even have the money to. And even if you did, again, what did I tell you? Don't have a garage full of stuff.
So, we're not going to do that. We're going to serve our audience though, because your two options, John, are A) serve my audience by recommending supplements and recommending exercise equipment and recommending the things that the kids need to be healthy at their athletic peak. Or tell them, screw you. I'm not going to recommend anything to you because I don't have it myself. Those are your two options.
Again, you become an affiliate for the supplement company. You become an affiliate for the equipment company. Our daughter has a lingering knee issue and it's not structural, she's not going to injure it worse, but because she's having her growth spurt right now, every time she plays soccer it hurts. So, the doctor recommended just a simple knee brace. It's nothing, not clunky or anything like that. This isn't like reconstructive knee surgery. It just takes a little bit of the pressure off the knee. That's all. Well, he was like, I recommend this. I'm like, okay, so I went to Amazon and I bought it. He could have sent me to a link and I would've gladly have clicked on his link and he would've made $5.
John: Right.
Matt McWilliams: I do not make the $5. What's the point of not making the $5? Am I better or worse served by him making the $5? Actually, the truth is, I would've been better served if he'd sent me to drjohnsmith.com/resources because I wouldn't had to have Googled the complicated name of this thing and clicked the link and bought it that way. I would've been better served and he would've made actually probably more like $8. It's a free $8. That's not quite lunch these days, but it's close. It's half a lunch. Half of lunch at Jersey Mike's.
And so, my point there is it serves your audience because you're recommending products right in your niche or in tangential niches. So, when I think about, I'm going to go with this example because I'm on a roll with this example, and even though I don't know it very well.
Even though we have two youth athletes, I don't know that particular niche, but if you've got youth athletes, here's what I also know. They need to learn goal setting. Are you a goal setting expert because you're good at teaching kids how to take care of their bodies? No. Do you know a little bit? Sure. But are you going to create a course? No. But could you recommend a goal setting course for athletes? Yeah. What about time management? I know this with an 11-year-old who's in seventh grade.
The last season, last fall, we homeschooled, but she takes courses outside of the home. And we overwhelmed her, we accidentally signed her up for too much stuff. And she was doing five hours of homework a night. What about a time management course for teens? Does somebody have that course? Can I sign up for it? And it's a $200 course and I get an $80 affiliate commission. Think about that. Other products that they could buy and things that they could do that not only serve them in my direct area, i.e., supplements or braces or things like that but also in those tangential areas.
John: It sounds like there'd be an infinite number of possibilities the way this can work. And like you said, it's a way to get going much more quickly and with less investment. So, we could go through the whole book today, I'm sure you'd love to do that. But no, this has been really helpful. I like to get something tangible from and just that little lesson was tangible and useful. So again, I just want to thank you for coming on this show today. mattmcwilliams.com is the website. You can get the book there. You can probably find the podcast there. But that's called The Affiliate Guy podcast. And boy, I hope all the best with the continued sales of the book.
Matt McWilliams: Go to passionintoprofitsbook.com/jurica. Connect with me at mattcwilliams.com. Guys, you can reach out to me anytime, connect with me there. It's got my phone number on there so you can text me if you got questions or anything like that. But if you go to the passionsintoprofitsbook.com/jurica, I know you'll put that in the show notes for everybody, John. But if you go there, that's the best place to get the book.
John: And the bonuses really support even what's in the book, because I've seen some of the bonuses when I was helping promote it. So, this is fantastic.
Matt McWilliams: That's exactly what it is. The reality is my first manuscript was 117,000 words.
John: Oh boy.
Matt McWilliams: And the publisher wanted to get it down to 75,000. We ended up about 82,000 but there's still 35,000 words missing. And so, some of these bonuses, essentially, we created a little course around some of the stuff that we took out there. We took some deep dives into some stuff and then there's some bonus stuff. It's like, hey, once you have a list, we have an email marketing masterclass. That's one of the bonuses. You got a list, you got some subscribers. What emails do you write? Well, that's another 15,000 words. I didn't have time to write that in the book. So, we created a course around that though. It's one of the bonuses.
John: This is going to really kickstart people's pursuit of this. This is fantastic. Okay, Matt, thanks a lot again. I really appreciate it. It's been great talking with you.
Matt McWilliams: Hey, thanks for having me, John.
John: Okay, bye-bye.
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 288
What Is the Proven Path to a Rewarding Online Business?
John: If you've been reading my emails recently, you'll recognize today's guest. I've been helping him get the word out about his new book "Turn Your Passions into Profits", and I'm really pleased to be able to talk to him personally about the book today. Matt McWilliams, welcome to the show.
Matt McWilliams: Hey, John. I appreciate that and thanks for having me today.
John: And I think we were talking before we got out, we're kind of like neighbors. You're one state over Indiana and I'm in Illinois. So, we're Midwest guys.
Matt McWilliams: Yes, yes. I don't sound like it just because I grew up in the south, but I've been up here long enough, I'm getting that little bit of that, that twangs gone away. And my accents become a lot more neutral. It's kind of funny when you combine a dad from New Jersey, a mom from California, you grow up in the south, but in an area with mostly relocated Yankees, then you move up to Fort Wayne, Indiana. You end up with a weird accent. Apparently, I've been told I have a neutral to slightly strange accent because I say certain words like I'm from Boston. Other words like I'm from Indiana. Other words like I'm from Mississippi. So, I like the mix in that.
John: It sounds pretty Midwestern today, but we'll see. I'll be looking for those rare words that come out that are a tip off to some other area. All right, we're going to be talking about your book today. And I'd let you give us a little background about what you do and then we'll get into why you wrote the book. But tell us a little bit about yourself.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Today I'm so blessed, John. I get to live out both ends of the book. There's a reason why we titled it what we titled it, you turn your passions into profits. It's not about just having a business you're passionate about. It's not about just changing the world. I've been there, done that. My third business. Man, I was making an impact on people, changing people's lives. I'd get emails and, and blog comments and social media comments every couple of days. "Matt, you saved my marriage. Matt, I was thinking about killing myself and I didn't. Matt, you changed my life." And I'm like, "That's awesome. Yay."
Here's a funny thing though. Our kids are both in high level soccer now and it's thousands of dollars a year. And the soccer association sadly does not take blog comments as a form of payment or tweets and Facebook posts as a form of payment. The mortgage company, they never took. I tried once forwarding them an email saying, "Look what somebody said about me. I saved a guy's life." And they're like, "You still owe us $1,800." Dang it, that's not how this is supposed to work.
And I've been on the flip side, I've had a business where I made more money than I know what to do with John. The reality was, when I was in my early twenties, I was making between $8,000 and $10,000 a week teaching golf schools. At that age, full disclosure, don't ever make that much money when you're that young because you'll do what I did and do a bunch of stupid stuff with it.
John: Yeah, to squander it.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. May or may not, I had a lot of nice stuff there for a few years though. But yeah, I made more money that I knew what to do with, but I was miserable. I hated what I was doing. And so, today I'm able to do both. I've got a great business. We have an agency where we run affiliate programs for some high-level entrepreneurs and businesses and I love that. Got an amazing team there. Got our platform at mattmcwilliams.com. Got the podcast The Affiliate Guy, got the book now "Turn Your Passions into Profits."
The interesting story behind the book because I know you said you were going to ask about it anyway, but not the reason why I wrote it, but the reason why I was able to write it is because I was in that position. If I didn't have such an amazing team, if I hadn't gotten to the point where we built the systems for the business to run, if we hadn't gotten to the point where it provided an income.
Because here's a funny thing about a book. Newsflash everyone, you're not going to make any money for a long time off the book. This was actually financial, we lost money so far, we're in the red. Even with a pretty significant advance from the publisher, we're technically in the red, if you compare it. I think we're in the red unless you count my wage at about one third of minimum wage, in which case, if you'd pay me that, we might be breakeven.
And so, we wouldn't have been able to do that. How do you do something like this? How do you invest all this time and energy into writing, editing, producing, launching all the things that we did for this book without the financial reward. It's because we have the rest of the business doing so well financially that we're able to do that. So, huge kudos, again, to the things that I've learned that put us in that position and obviously, my team, which is amazing.
John: No, it sounds like it's a great story and I think it's definitely ranking extremely high on Amazon and the other list. I've seen some of the numbers and definitely you're going to be one of those few authors that actually make money off their book. Because I've interviewed many and a lot of people write a book to promote their products or to serve their audience.
But yeah, I really like the book. I've gone through it and I get a lot of questions because I send out surveys to my listeners and my readers and one of the things they're looking for is what's the roadmap? How do I build an online business? And again, I'll say, hey, here's the book. It's out. You can get it now. And the subtitle is "The Proven Path for Building a Rewarding Online Business." I'm not going to tell my readers how to do it or listeners. It's like, just get the book. Now we can get that pretty much everywhere, right? Anywhere that books are sold.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. If they sell books, they sell my book. Amazon, Target, Barnes & Noble. It's in stores, most Barnes & Noble, there's a few that are sold out. Some of the smaller Barnes & Noble will not have it. We have two Barnes & Noble in Fort Wayne. One is massive and then the other is not even the size of our house. It's a tiny little Barnes & Noble and that one doesn't have it. But yeah, we got a deal with Barnes & Noble nationwide. Right now, at least for the next few weeks, it's front and center in almost all the Barnes & Noble we've been into. You walk in and it's right there under the new non-fiction.
So, you can grab it anywhere, but the best place to grab it, you go to passionsintoprofitsbook.com/jurica. If you go there, that's the best place to get the book because John, we've got some special bonuses for your listeners there. You can go buy it in a store, that's great. Go to the store and grab it. That's awesome. Then go back to that URL and make sure you redeem for your bonuses there. So, we've got over $500 in bonuses. Stuff you cannot get anywhere else. And so, that's the best place to do it, of course, because it's just easy peasy. But yeah, if you're walking through the store one day, you see the book, it's about the only book with that color scheme.
My mom, of course, this is a funny story. When it went on sale in stores, she had ordered a couple copies or 20 through Amazon. I was like, "Mom, we got it in Barnes & Noble." And she's like, "What's in the Wilmington and the Jacksonville one?" And she lives an equal distance between the two. This is in North Carolina. She's like 40 minutes from both of them. And she's like, I got to go. And she goes and grabs the copies and she's like, it was so easy to see. I walked in and that is the only one out of like 80 books that are front and center at the store. The only one that looks like that. There are half a dozen white books and some green books and black books. And she's like, it is the only one with that color scheme. So, I wish I could say we did that on purpose. It's actually just because that's our color scheme as a company. But it worked.
John: Yeah. It's on the logo for the podcast, I think are those colors.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Obviously, it's just funny. It's one of those we're behind the scenes weird stories. The iterative process for a cover, because I'm sure there's people out there, somebody listening or watching you, you want to do a book. What we did was about 14 months in advance, we started pulling my followers, my fans, my email list, and I also did it with some friends and stuff. I started pulling them on here's six covers that the publisher designed. And it was a very iterative process because the original version of this, there were a couple of things that were different. The original version of this exact one was a completely different color scheme. And the words were not tilted and none of these were tilted here. It was straightforward.
Well, what we found as we did this was the ones that had the slanted words kept doing better. That became the next iteration. We narrowed it down to slanted words. And then the two that did well were this with a completely different color scheme and a different design with this exact color scheme. And so, we were like, we combined them and that ended up being the winner.
And so, it was a very iterative process. I think we did like four rounds. Now number one, I ended up with the best cover. The actual colors that we ended up with there's a slight fade if you look closely from the bottom to the top. The bottom is our official company color. The top is actually from a course of ours, and it's a fade from those two colors. And that was the only reason why we even bothered doing like, "Hey, try that, whatever." Number one, we got the best cover. We ended up with over a thousand votes across the board. A thousand people are voting on it, you can be pretty sure it's going to be the right cover. Secondly, it's pre-marketing for the book in advance. Third, the people who voted, and even if they voted for a different cover, they were a part of the process. So, they were invested in it. So they're much more likely to buy the book.
John: Right. Good marketing, man.
Matt McWilliams: That's what it is.
John: That's what you're an expert at. When I have someone who's an author or does other things, but I obviously get a twofer. So, the twofer part of our conversation is let's use a little bit of your expertise. I have physician friends and colleagues who have started small businesses, coaching, consulting, courses, what have you. Maybe one of them uses affiliate marketing in any way, shape, or form for their business. So, since you are the expert on this topic, maybe you can just give us an overview of what is affiliate marketing? Why is it so cool? And why business owners should start doing it? Maybe to get people to help promote their products.
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. Now I will preface this by saying I don't know any states' laws about physicians and how you can operate. So please check on all that stuff. And I did not stay at a holiday express last night. So, take everything with a grain of salt in that these are basic rules and principles for business owners that I'm sure in some random state, what I'm about to tell you might even be illegal. I'm just going to preface that. So, that is not to save my butt, but to save yours. Whoever's listening, you live in whatever, you live in California and you are not allowed to do this, okay, then don't do it.
The basic premise of affiliate marketing has been around for thousands of years, John. If you think about it, I don't know, ancient Rome. I can't name anybody from ancient Rome other than Julius Caesar, but so-and-so and so-and-so are walking down the street in ancient Rome. One of them is looking for a good cobbler. And he's like, let me take you to mine. And he takes them to his cobbler and the cobbler's like, hey, thanks for referring whoever. I'm going to give you your next pair of shoes 50% off. That's affiliate marketing. If you think about it. There's no technology.
All we did 30 years ago is add technology to the basic concept of referral marketing. And then in advance, because we added that tech piece, before technology, Joe had to walk Sam to the store and say, let me introduce you to this guy before the advent of the telephone. Then we got the telephone, and the telephone allowed us for Joe to call up the shoemaker and say, hey, I got my friend Sam, he's on his way over. And boom, Joe got some credit for those shoes that Sam bought.
About 30 years ago, we added technology. So now we don't even need to know our affiliates, and our affiliates don't need to necessarily have us. But ultimately this comes down to, there's a concept I use called the affiliate donut. In the physician world, your core, if you can picture a donut with the core, the whole there, that's your core offerings. I'm simplifying this, John, but people come to you, if let's just say you're a general practitioner, they come to you when you're sick, when you have injury. That's pretty much the only time people ever unfortunately go to their doctor unless you go for your annual checkup, which reminds me, I'm due for an annual checkup last November. But I was launching a book, so I need to schedule that.
And so, that's when you go to your doctor. Annual checkup or you're not feeling well in some way, shape, or form. That's your core offer. You solve problems and perform annual checkups. Again, I'm simplifying this. I'm not diminishing what physicians do. I'm just saying that's the core offer. But think about all the other things. Do you sell supplements? Are you going to create as a doctor in Fort Wayne, Indiana or Kansas City for that matter? Are you going to create a supplement line? No. But do you recommend supplements to your customers? Maybe.
Well, why not form an affiliate relationship with those and create a single page on your site that says here's all the supplements. I'm just going to say drjohnsmith.com/supplements. And on that page are all the supplements that we recommend. In fact, you can narrow them down. For my patients that are men under 40, here's what I recommend. For my pregnant mothers, here's what I recommend. For my seniors, here's what I recommend. And so on and so forth. And you can recommend those supplements.
Now, if one of your patients become recurring buyers, for let's just say three supplements each fish oil, multivitamin, and one other. They become recurring buyers and you make $3 a quarter off of those 10%, that's $9. That is now a 90-cent increase per quarter in your average customer. You go, "Well, that's not a ton of money in the grand scheme of things." I'm just using round numbers here. Probably a little bit more than that. A $1.50, $2 more.
But those are the type of things at the end of the year, all of a sudden, your affiliate commissions could pay for an entire team member. Let's say you have three front desk staff. One and a half of those could be paid for by your affiliate commissions. That's kind of cool. $50,000 - $60,000 a year. That's a nice little vacation last time I checked. Or I don't know, you could pay off most of your mortgage, whatever it is. That's just off supplements.
There are other types of things you could recommend, whether it be various products that would serve your audience in different ways. Again, I'm making this up as I go here because I'm not super familiar with that world. But if you're a chiropractor, for example, recommending certain products. There's a one that I bought recently called Chirp. I don't know if you've heard of these, John, but think of a foam roller on steroids. My chiropractor years ago gave me a PVC pipe. He's like, don't use a foam roller too soft. Get the PVC pipe. And I'm like, it hurts. And it doesn't dig in. This chirp thing kind of digs up in there and I get on it, I just hear stuff popping. And I get up and I'm like my posture's better.
Could you recommend that as a doctor and make $10 a sale off those chirps? If 5% of your patients buy a chirp, how many patients do you have? Multiply it by 5% times $10 and it starts adding up and it creates that side income that, again, I've heard of people, specifically chiropractors who literally their affiliate commissions pay for their entire administrative staff. Their entire admin staff is paid for, not from their client fees, not from anything else they sell directly, but just from their affiliate offers.
John: Well, let me jump in here for a minute because a lot of my audience, they're getting burnt out. And so, what they're doing, they're creating side gigs that are in the healthcare realm, but it's not under their license. They're not actually practicing. So, they're building consulting or coaching or something. And obviously they can find products and actually other coaches or learning about something that affiliate marketing would be perfect for. And I've done it myself, the things I'm doing affiliated with the podcast and so forth. So, what are the other advantages of affiliate though? Because it's not simply the fact that you have this. You don't have to have any product, right?
Matt McWilliams: Yeah. That's a big one. In that instance, John, think about it. If your practice, though, is bringing in more revenue, yeah, you're burned out. But if you can increase the value of a patient $10, you could reduce your patient load by 10% and make up for that with affiliate marketing. That's one thing.
Number two, if it's bringing in more money on the side, it's building up that reserve. And I know a lot of people when they're switching careers, I have a particular client I'm thinking of, a coaching client. And she's burned out with her current platform. She's building this other platform. And I said, "Okay, the first two coaching sessions, I'm not focusing on your new platform." And she's like, "What do you mean? I want to focus on my new platform." She's doing about $250,000 a year in her current platform. I said, "I want to get that to $300,000 in the next year." She's like, "I don't want to grow that Matt."
And I'm like, "No, listen to me. If I can tweak a few things that don't require any extra work or involvement from you, but get that to $300,000 for the next two years versus going down to $150,000, you have an extra $300,000 in the bank at the end of two years. What could you do if you have an extra $300,000 in the bank at the end of two years?" And for most of us, the answer is pretty much whatever the heck we want to because we have such a load of money sitting there that it frees us up. Because one of the things, what's the thing about a side hustle? "Oh, I want to leave my practice. I'm burned out." Okay, can I just go to making $0? No. Could you go to making $0 if you had a half a million dollars in the bank? Maybe.But with that thing, we're not going to go to $0. We're going to build the side hustle. Maybe that side hustle is only bringing in $3,000 a month. I'm going to go out on a limb and say most physicians make a little bit more than that.
John: Yeah, that's true.
Matt McWilliams: But the physician side is now bringing in an extra $75,000. I don't want to be unrealistic. $75,000 from affiliate marketing. Over two years that's $150,000. Plus $3,000 a month for two years is $72,000 if I'm doing my math right. We're now at $200,000 some. You could go full-time on that side hustle now. It's currently bringing in $3,000. What would it do if you were full? Plus, you have over $200,000 in the bank. So, think of it that way.
To answer your question, what are some of those benefits and what does it do for our business? Number one, you can start monetizing immediately. This is the big one. When you start that side hustle, maybe you're building a platform around your passion and maybe your passion is, we'll just take John's for example, his passion was helping other burnt out physicians. But maybe your passion is around something that has nothing to do with medicine but sort of does. Maybe your passion it's about youth sports and the science of helping youth athletes become better. I'm just making this up.
Well, initially you might not have very many product offerings. You're certainly not going to go create physical products because physical products, I had an idea recently for a physical product and I was told the CAD design alone was going to be $18,000. I'm like, I want to do this, but not that bad. I think I'm just going to pass on that physical product.
So, we start promoting other products and I'm going to get to some of the other benefits that are tied to that in just a second. We don't have any fulfillment, any customer service. You do not need any space in your garage. For those men out there, this is less applicable to the women, just to be honest. But for the men out there, the last thing you want to do is start a business and then your wife can't park in the garage.
John: Right. Absolutely.
Matt McWilliams: Do not do that. I'm giving you marriage advice right now. Never, ever, ever do that because you will not be married in about a year. And so, we don't have to do that. And we don't have to worry. If my promo goes bad, if they don't buy, at least I don't have a garage full of crap. There's no hidden cost. When I sell stuff, I sold a couple of courses today. We sold like a thousand dollars' worth of courses today. Here's the thing. $994 is what my payment processor says we made. $994. And you go, "Hey, $994." I didn't. Not only did I have to pay my affiliates for both of those sales, $400 and change out the door. I paid 30 cents plus 2.9% on both of those transactions and credit card processing fees. So, $60, if I'm doing the math right out the door.
Almost half my revenue is gone. Our customer service manager has to email both of them and make sure that they're set up in their logins. Statistically one out of four is going to have an issue with something. Trying to log in or something's not going to work. An email's not getting delivered. That cost another $10. I'm over $500 on a $ $994 purchase. There's a lot of hidden costs. There's no risk like we talked about.
This is a big one. Affiliate marketing teaches you how to sell, it teaches you how to sell without all those risks and stuff. And so, my favorite kind of practice, I call it PTP, paid to practice. You get paid to practice selling online. You start to learn what works for your audience. Okay, what price points is your audience going to buy it? What sales strategies work? What topics are they going to buy at? What are the best promotional methods? I can send four emails or go live on Facebook for 30 minutes and sell the same amount of stuff. What are you going to do? Write four emails or go live for 30 minutes? You learn those things when you're doing affiliate marketing, it trains them to buy. That's another big one. You are training your audience before you even have a product of your own. You're conditioning them to buy. And I go through a bunch more reasons why, benefits in the book.
But the last one, this is the most important one, it serves your audience. So, let's just go with that example. I don't know it very well, but let's just go with that example. You have a physician. They're a pediatrician and they have a passion for working with kids on things like nutrition and healthcare for kids that are youth athletes.
So you go, okay, this is who I work with. Now I can create a course that teaches parents how to help their kids in these areas, but what supplements do these kids need? Well, you're not going to probably start a supplement company in your first couple of years with this business. You may not even have the money to. And even if you did, again, what did I tell you? Don't have a garage full of stuff.
So, we're not going to do that. We're going to serve our audience though, because your two options, John, are A) serve my audience by recommending supplements and recommending exercise equipment and recommending the things that the kids need to be healthy at their athletic peak. Or tell them, screw you. I'm not going to recommend anything to you because I don't have it myself. Those are your two options.
Again, you become an affiliate for the supplement company. You become an affiliate for the equipment company. Our daughter has a lingering knee issue and it's not structural, she's not going to injure it worse, but because she's having her growth spurt right now, every time she plays soccer it hurts. So, the doctor recommended just a simple knee brace. It's nothing, not clunky or anything like that. This isn't like reconstructive knee surgery. It just takes a little bit of the pressure off the knee. That's all. Well, he was like, I recommend this. I'm like, okay, so I went to Amazon and I bought it. He could have sent me to a link and I would've gladly have clicked on his link and he would've made $5.
John: Right.
Matt McWilliams: I do not make the $5. What's the point of not making the $5? Am I better or worse served by him making the $5? Actually, the truth is, I would've been better served if he'd sent me to drjohnsmith.com/resources because I wouldn't had to have Googled the complicated name of this thing and clicked the link and bought it that way. I would've been better served and he would've made actually probably more like $8. It's a free $8. That's not quite lunch these days, but it's close. It's half a lunch. Half of lunch at Jersey Mike's.
And so, my point there is it serves your audience because you're recommending products right in your niche or in tangential niches. So, when I think about, I'm going to go with this example because I'm on a roll with this example, and even though I don't know it very well.
Even though we have two youth athletes, I don't know that particular niche, but if you've got youth athletes, here's what I also know. They need to learn goal setting. Are you a goal setting expert because you're good at teaching kids how to take care of their bodies? No. Do you know a little bit? Sure. But are you going to create a course? No. But could you recommend a goal setting course for athletes? Yeah. What about time management? I know this with an 11-year-old who's in seventh grade.
The last season, last fall, we homeschooled, but she takes courses outside of the home. And we overwhelmed her, we accidentally signed her up for too much stuff. And she was doing five hours of homework a night. What about a time management course for teens? Does somebody have that course? Can I sign up for it? And it's a $200 course and I get an $80 affiliate commission. Think about that. Other products that they could buy and things that they could do that not only serve them in my direct area, i.e., supplements or braces or things like that but also in those tangential areas.
John: It sounds like there'd be an infinite number of possibilities the way this can work. And like you said, it's a way to get going much more quickly and with less investment. So, we could go through the whole book today, I'm sure you'd love to do that. But no, this has been really helpful. I like to get something tangible from and just that little lesson was tangible and useful. So again, I just want to thank you for coming on this show today. mattmcwilliams.com is the website. You can get the book there. You can probably find the podcast there. But that's called The Affiliate Guy podcast. And boy, I hope all the best with the continued sales of the book.
Matt McWilliams: Go to passionintoprofitsbook.com/jurica. Connect with me at mattcwilliams.com. Guys, you can reach out to me anytime, connect with me there. It's got my phone number on there so you can text me if you got questions or anything like that. But if you go to the passionsintoprofitsbook.com/jurica, I know you'll put that in the show notes for everybody, John. But if you go there, that's the best place to get the book.
John: And the bonuses really support even what's in the book, because I've seen some of the bonuses when I was helping promote it. So, this is fantastic.
Matt McWilliams: That's exactly what it is. The reality is my first manuscript was 117,000 words.
John: Oh boy.
Matt McWilliams: And the publisher wanted to get it down to 75,000. We ended up about 82,000 but there's still 35,000 words missing. And so, some of these bonuses, essentially, we created a little course around some of the stuff that we took out there. We took some deep dives into some stuff and then there's some bonus stuff. It's like, hey, once you have a list, we have an email marketing masterclass. That's one of the bonuses. You got a list, you got some subscribers. What emails do you write? Well, that's another 15,000 words. I didn't have time to write that in the book. So, we created a course around that though. It's one of the bonuses.
John: This is going to really kickstart people's pursuit of this. This is fantastic. Okay, Matt, thanks a lot again. I really appreciate it. It's been great talking with you.
Matt McWilliams: Hey, thanks for having me, John.
John: Okay, bye-bye.
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