Episode 118: How Anthony Wang Makes $300-$500 PER DAY with Plenty Of Fish Advertising

Episode 118: How Anthony Wang Makes $300-$500 per Day with Plenty of Fish Advertising

Mike: Hi there everyone! Welcome to the Episode 118 of the Mike from Maine Show, the place where we do daily interviews were successful online entrepreneurs. This is your host, Mike Tomas. And first of, if you are watching the video right now, the video version of Mike from Maine, you’ll see that I am on POF.com. That is PlentyOfFish.com. And what that is, is it’s a dating website that’s free. And one of the ways that they monetize it is through advertising. And it’s, there’s tons of visitors that come through here, millions of visitors. I wanted to say 3 million per day but I am not sure on that but it’s a huge amount of add impressions. And they sell these add impressions to mostly internet marketers who will go and try to monetize it by sending people to different dating websites that are paid and will offer you a commission when someone signs up through your affiliate link. Now, it sounds all easy and everything but when you’re – when you’re paying for your advertisements, it’s on a CPM method. Meaning, that it’s going to be on per thousand, you’re going to pay per thousand views that someone or that the people are doing on the advertisements. So, that can go really quickly. And if your ads aren’t very well targeted or you don’t have really good images, they drop people’s attentions in, then that can just go through quickly and you’re not going get many clicks therefore you’re not going to get that many sign ups and your ardvertising budget isn’t gonna add up. And it’s, you’re not going to get a profit from it. Anyways, I have Anthony Wang on today to talk about how he does this and he’s actually making profits on it. He’s making anywhere between $300-$500 per day profit doing it. He’s going to tell us his whole story about that, how he’s doing it, how he’s got students that have already been successful. It’s definitely got my interest. Let’s get to the interview. Anthony Wang.

Mike: We are here today with Anthony Wang. Anthony, welcome to the show.
Anthony: Thanks a lot, Mike.
Mike: Let’s start — let’s start off like we always do and tell us about your internet marketing journey.

Anthony: Um well, I actually started out as a chemistry major in college. And marketing, business, sales are one of the last things that I expected myself to do in my 20 years. But basically, how I got in to this was, I’ve read a book called The Rich Jerk, it was a ebook, like one of the first affiliate marketing guides. You have probably heard of it. And basically, it was like how to make these little affiliate websites. And it just like fascinated me that people can actually make money online. So, I did that and to my surprise my first like website ever actually made money. It was a –

Mike: What was your first website?

Anthony: The domain name is called, learn-street-magic.com. It’s not up anymore because there’s a funny story and I’ll get to that later. But yeah, it showed me that I can actually make like money selling other people’s products online. I am selling like magic tricks, stuff like that. And, and then I wasn’t making like a full-time income but it just showed me what’s possible. So, that’s how I got introduced to it. And like what happened to the website later was, I was such a nube and didn’t really know much about like technical things that I forgot to renew the domain after a year and it just went away. And I didn’t even know that after it expired you can like still get it back. So I just let it go, if you can go way back in a machine and you can check what the website look like, I thought it looked like crap but that was like 2006 or something so maybe it wasn’t bad.

Mike: Did someone snatch it – did someone snatch it up when it expired?

Anthony: Yeah, yeah. Someone has a domain in it., like one of those parts, like annoying part was that. But yeah, it showed me what’s possible with internet marketing and I really didn’t do much with internet marketing until my junior year of college. So, I was set on being a pharmacist. And what happened on my junior year was I got a stomach illness called ulcerative colitis. So, it’s like a pretty serious illness. I was on the hospital for about a month. I’ve dropped 40 pounds, really sick. It’s horrible. Ah yeah, and like I thought I was gonna die, I thought my life was over, but luckily the doctors took care of me. My mother flew over from China to take care of me. And after that experience, I kind of realized how precious life really is. And I didn’t want like spend the rest of my life either in the lab like mixing chemicals, like are we getting cancer? Or behind the like a pharmacy desk and just counting pills all day. So that’s – I know I was reading a book at that time called The Alchemist.

Mike: Well done.

Anthony: It’s a really great book.. Yeah, yeah It’s awesome. And that just inspired to like really go after what I wanted to do which is travelling. So internet marketing, it provides me with the lifestyle to just work from anywhere and basically just travel and go all over the world and just really experience life.

Mike: And obviously, we’re gonna talk about your Plenty Of Fish product today. But I, as I was looking over your sales page, I saw some pictures of some – the lifestyle that you are living. And it’s, it makes me like — when I see, honestly, I think when I see things like that , you see all these sales pages where people are showing like their convertibles and their big houses and big cars but to be honest when I saw that – I mean, it is obviously you and it wasn’t too off the wall like I think you were sky diving in one of them. And it wasn’t too crazy. So these are things that – what I’m trying to say was a genuine portrayal of the lifestyle you are able to live. How long have you been able to live that lifestyle?

Anthony: I say for like a year and a half now. So yeah, I totally agree with you, like some people, they have like their convertibles and mansions. And that’s cool like, if that’s what they are in to, more power to them. But me personally, I am so young, I’m 24 right now. If I had like an awesome car like, I won’t really care. It’s L.A. right here, like I will just be stuck in traffic for four hours in a day. It really doesn’t do anything for me. And for me like, I want to live my 20’s just traveling, seeing the world, getting new experiences before I’m old, you know. So, so yeah for about a year now I’ve been traveling. My goal is one new city every month and recently I have just been doing like American cities but pretty soon I’m going to head out to South America. Thinking about making a Columbia trip, also Peru and Brazil. So that should be fun.

Mike: How long have you been doing the one city a month thing? Anthony: Since you’re up last year, last March.
Mike: Okay. So, it’s been about a year now?
Anthoy: Yeah.

Mike: Have you, have you been in 12 cities or?

Anthony: Yeah about, I mean, like some months I’ll just go to Vegas or something. So, I kind of count that. But yeah. like there’s like a lot of places where you don’t really hear about. Like for example, like Budapest. Like I never would have expected that Budapest was a super cool city. Like, I got there, we only went there, me and my buddy went there because we were just like it has a cool name, like I never – don’t know much about there, let’s check it out. We got there, it was freaking awesome. The people are super nice like everything’s cheap. They’ve got a lot of amazing food. So yeah, that’s what I love, just like exploring and finding new places to check out.

Mike: Did you get a chance to go to Istanbul?

Anthony: Ah no, no. I heard great things about it though.

Mike: Ah that’s where, that’s where I live. So that’s why I ask everyone should come and visit Istanbul. It’s a great city to visit. On your sales page also you go over kind of how you got into making money the way that you are now with Plenty of Fish advertising and CPA ads. That’s what I – what I have understood. Can you tell us that story on how you got success? How you are able to provide this lifestyle for yourself?

Anthony: Sure. Yeah, so like when I first signed the internet marketing, I did the affiliate marketing. I’m following like The Rich Jerk formula, like little websites, SEO to the websites, promote affiliate products, review blogs, whatever, stuff like that. I have some success with it and I’ve also had a lot of projects that just bombs. But like, those limit with SEO and what a lot of people try when they’re new just because methods are free, the problem with that is your income is limited, especially if you go after like a narrow niche. Like a lot of people say like, “Oh yeah, find a niche that is unexploited, like so that you can dominate it.”, which makes sense but then you realize like, oh no one actually like cares about this niche. There is no buyers.

Mike: Is that the reason why no one’s monetize it and try to go for the keywords just because there is no money in it?

Anthony: Exactly, yeah. It’s like you can find some like super secure niche and you can get yourself rank for number one. You get five visitors a day. So yeah, I was doing stuffs like that. And I was doing I don’t know like maybe a good day I’ll have 100, like 50 dollars a day. And I thought that was cool. I mean, it was like a passive income. I just had a website up there, it’s making me some money. I thought it was awesome. And to me that was a success. But, ahh I met my buddy now. He’s my friend now. But at that time, we just

started talking about internet marketing. and he pretty just made fun of me for going down that route before, like having a little Adsense sites, Amazon sites, ClickBank products, like promoting stuff on Youtube, for like “mere pennies”. That’s what he said. And because he was using paid traffic which you can do a lot more volume and you can like scale up a lot quicker. You don’t have to wait like 10 months for your site to rank. Then, Google throws an update and then, you’re pissed. So, I mean that happened to me a bunch of times. So yeah, and then we got along pretty well, so I asked him if he could show me how to do Plenty of Fish marketing. And I was actually surprise that he agreed because he was making a lot more than I was at the time. And he could have hired like a lot of other people, like anyone would have been eager to learn his system. But we live close and we got along so he said yeah, I’ll teach you everything I do. The thing is you have to pay me 70% of everything you make. So –

Mike: So 70% of your profit.

Anthony: My profit, yeah.

Mike: Okay.

Anthony: Yeah. So umm. I mean. It was worth it because, because within 3 days I was making like a hundred dollars a day. A couple weeks I had like 500 dollars a day and then it’s a skill that like has last me since our like our formal internship was over —

Mike: So how long, how long have you been making — sorry, sorry. How long have you been making, I guess it’s — what are you doing? Like 500 a day now? Is that – What is your average?

Anthony: Right now, I’m at like ahh, 300 a day because Plenty of Fish just changed their advertising guidelines. So, they just re- framed pretty much everyone’s adds. So other people had to start over, which is why now is a great time to jump in to Plenty of Fish if you’re new because like established advertisers are — you are at the same playing field now, because the advertisers or other affiliates with ads that have been running for months, like their ads got disapproved. So, you’re pretty much starting at the same page.

Mike: So, the method that you’re gonna talk about, is it based upon the changes or is it based upon the old way that Plenty of Fish was?

Anthony: Pretty much everything is the same, except the images that you use for your ads has to be tamer — Mike: Have you updated that?
Anthony: What was that?
Mike: Have you updated that in the product?

Anthony: In the course?

Mike: Yup.

Anthony: Yup. So, yeah. What happened actually was one of the one-time offers was a pack of images, like my best converting images and literally the day after I launched my product, Plenty of Fish made their changes. So, half of my ads were wiped out, a lot of other people said they can’t get a lot of images approved. So, what I did was I started testing new images like crazy. And for the next month, I’m just releasing my best images to the members.

Mike: Okay. That’s reasonable. That’s fair. So, okay. Why don’t we — why don’t you explain coz I think there’s gonna be some people listening, they’re saying, what the hell is Plenty of Fish?

Anthony: Yeah. Plenty of Fish is a dating website. It’s a free dating website, online dating. It’s number one largest free dating website in the world. So, everyday there’s I think 3 million active online users. And how you monetize it is you put ads on there. And then the ads could link to your own products or affiliates. So, the easiest way to get started is to do a CPA network, find offers that will pay you like anywhere from like $3 to $12 per sign up and just promote those. So, that advertising platform is so like Facebook where you get to upload your own ads, you get to target by certain things like age, gender, country, something like that. and they approve you and then, you’re good to go. You can vary in your bids, all that stuff. So, it’s like a self-served advertising platform.

Mike: I mean, it sounds — it sounds simple, when you explain it like that. But then, I think okay, Facebook advertising can sound simple but it’s not. And if it was simple, then everyone and their mom would be out advertising at Plenty of Fish and making the kind of money that you do. So, what’s different that — what’s that I mean, I know you’re not gonna explain everything but what’s this secret that you can talk about here. What makes you successful and so many other people not.

Anthony: Well I mean, I think like the cortical secret to success is applicable in all areas, not only just in marketing but in life. Basically, you just gonna have to do things that other people aren’t willing to do. So, for example, for Plenty of Fish, what a lot of people do is they see another advertiser and another affiliate, one of their ad. So, they’ll just copy them and then they’ll think it is the same offer. Maybe they’ll change it up a bit. And in business, a lot of people recommend doing the same thing, just say copy from your competitors because that’s already working. And that makes sense in theory but if you’re always copying, you’re never gonna like hit that like the profits that you want because someone else is making more money than you and you’re only getting like a small portion of that. So, what I stress in the course over and over again is, I give you the like the fundamentals but I tell you to test a lot of different images, a lot of different ads. Coz most people, they’ll – there are certain ads that you’ll see over and over again, so they’ll use those ads but those ads actually burn out really fast because people are used to that — it’s called banner blindness. So, what happens when you start testing new ads is maybe the majority of them are not gonna work and they’re not gonna convert but you’re gonna file like a couple of killer ads that are gonna convert super well that nobody else is using. So, I’d say, the secret is just doing more than your competitors and doing things that other people aren’t willing to do.

Mike: What’s a good click-through rate for ad on there? I thnk it’s on a per — it’s on a CPM method, right? It’s not a pay-per-click or is it a pay-per-thousand impressions?

Anthony: Yeah. It’s a CPM, you bid for every thousands impressions. It varies, man. And to be honest, click-through rate doesn’t really matter and here’s why. Coz it varies by like a lot of targeting options. If you target — there’s an option to target by log-in account, so you can have your ads only shown to new members that are logged in less than 50 times. So, basically you’re ads are gonna be shown to people aren’t really familiar with Plenty of Fish and they haven’t seen ads like a zillion times already. So, those guys are gonna convert the most. So, those people, that demographic, they’re gonna click your ads a lot more. So, a good click- through rate for that would be 0.3 —

Mike: Are you just advertising – are you just advertising to them?

Anthony: No. Some campaigns I target only the log-in count of 50, coz they convert the best. But it’s also only like I think 11% of the entire Plenty of Fish population.

Mike: Okay.
Anthony: So, they convert the best but you’re not — you can’t scale up very well. Mike: So, your volume is gonna be less.

Anthony: Exactly, yeah. And other country is — I don’t want to say the name of the country coz I’m doing really well in it but they’re like the CTR is like 1 to 2%. So, every hundred people that see your ad, you have like 10 or 1 or 2 people click on it. Every thousand people that see your ad, you have like 10 to 20 people click on it, which is pretty insane for a CPM — for A Plenty of Fish —

Mike: How much are you paying — sorry, sorry. How much are you paying for a thousand? Are you paying like a dollar or 3 dollars or how does that work?

Anthony: No, no. A dollar is considered like higher, a higher bid. Bid start at, I think the minimum limit is about 16 cents.

Mike: Okay.

Anthony: So, if you’re not targeting by logged account, you definitely wanna go lower. Lot of my campaigns are already running in the 20% range. And if you’re targeting by logged account, you wanna go higher because more people are bidding on that demographic.

Mike: Okay, so. I mean, it makes sense. You’re willing to pay more per thousand views if therefore you’re gonna get more clicks per thousand views —

Anthony: Exactly.

Mike: — from those new users. So, it’s worth it to pay more because you’re gonna get that back in clicks essentially. Anthony: Right.
Mike: If that makes sense.

Anthony: Right. And I would recommend, when you’re first testing a campaign, you wanna bid — just target everyone. Don’t narrow down by logged account or some like crazy niche targeting. Just target — make it pretty broad. And once you find some ads that are converting, then you want to automize. So, take those ads and you can now target a little bit. And you can start running those ads by logged account because they’re gonna be your best ads, so if you are wise, it’s gonna be better, so it’s fine when you pay a little bit more for that.

Mike: Is this the first time you kind of release a course teaching people how to do this? Anthony: Yeah.
Mike: And —
Anthony: Yeah, basically —

Mike: Sorry, my lead up — my follow up question would be, have you — how many people are in your course and have you had anyone that’s had successful result yet?

Anthony: Yeah. Right now, there’s about 450 members. I just — I scaled it to 450 because of support issues. There’s actually a comment section in the membership area. So, the members just ask whatever questions and then I go through that and I reply to them. And that’s there so everyone can see it. So, if someone else is — has the same question, instead of emailing me or researching it, they’ll just see that someone else has asked and my answers are right below there. And then yeah, yeah. If you go on the sales thread, just see that a lot of people are posting like screen shots of their CPA accounts with profit. So, yeah. A lot of people are seeing good results with it.

Mike: What are the start up cost for people doing this? Because it’s not like, like you mentioned before, when you do SEO stuff, a reason why a lot of people do that is because they think psychologically okay, it’s not gonna cost the same as it’s gonna — it’s gonna – have to put work into it but it’s not gonna cost hundreds of dollars like other methods can. How much should someone have to invest in doing this?

Anthony: I recommend $100 to $200 for testing and that’s definitely on the lower end. Ideally, you want like up to $1000 because then, you can — your test ad is gonna be a lot more accurate because you can drive more traffic to your campaigns and you will be able to see like, oh this campaign is not — it’s performing well, it’s not performing well. You have a better sense of whether to cut it or scale it. Whereas, you can get it done with another 200 bucks but your data is not gonna be as accurate because you’re not having as much traffic.

Mike: What kind of tracking software are you using?

Anthony: I use Prosper202. So, it’s sort of like the industry standard for affiliate marketing tracking. It’s free. I highly recommend it. The only thing is installation is problem for some people. So, they can just go on, like oDesk or Fiverr and just find someone to install it for them and actually after that, it’s pretty intuitive to use. And tracking is definitely very important. Some of my students, they’ve done CPA marketing before but they just for some reason, never tracked their ads. And when I showed them how to use Prosper202, they’re like oh my god, this is amazing. You can actually see which ads are making your money, which ads are losing money. So, yes. It’s definitely important.

Mike: I’ve heard of people complain, especially with paid traffic, how they’re afraid of going out there and just burning through 100, 200, 500 dollars and not seeing any results with it. What would you say to those people in a way of — so that they don’t go out there and get burned?

Anthony: That’s kind of a hard question to answer because you’re — with anything you do, with anything you do in internet marketing or in life, you’re gonna fail some of the time. Probably, most of the time. So, if you’re always afraid of losing money or whatever, then you’re never — you’re never gonna have like that, just that determination to succeed, like persistence, which I think

ultimately is what makes people successful in internet marketing. Like, you hear stories of how people just tried to over and over again. And that was definitely me for the longest time. I’ve tried everything, like blogging, SEO, Youtube, flipping websites. So, I tried a lot of different things and Plenty of Fish was like my first major, major success. And I think the reason I was able to make it work is that I was just so set on living this lifestyle of you know, like not having a 9 to 5 job, not going to work every day and at the same time, hating my life. I’ve really wanted that, it’s what Napoleon Hill says in his book, like a burning desire. So, I think once you have that, then nothing can stop you. So, even if you do lose money, if you have the belief that okay like, this is just a temporary setback and I’ll ultimately gonna succeed with this, then it’s not really an issue. But I would just say, if you’re budget is a little tighter, you just definitely wanna optimize for RLI. So, you wanna use landing pages because you’re gonna up boost your conversions, like what I’ll do is I’ll direct link to the offers, so it goes from my ad directly to the affiliate landing page. I’ll do that to test and if that’s going well, then I’ll throw a landing page to optimize it. But if you’re just starting out, you wanna use a landing page right away because that’s — because direct linking doesn’t yield as high conversions. So, you’re sort of saving money by doing that.

Mike: You’re saying that direct linking from Plenty of Fish directly to the affiliate offer has less conversion than creating a landing page.

Anthony: Generally, generally.

Mike: Really?

Anthony: I mean, I’ve had some campaigns where I was surprised because I put a landing page and that actually hurt conversions but that’s usually when it’s — when it’s like a niche offer. So, like I say that, say you’re promoting a dating offer for like single parents. And then, you’re targeting single parents on Plenty of Fish. So, the traffic — so, it’s converting great if you go straight from the ad to the landing page or to the affiliate offer. So, if your landing page, it can definitely help but it’s not really necessary a lot of times.

Mike: Interesting. And you go — and you go through all of that from creating the add to setting up, to finding up the affiliate offer to doing a landing page. Is that all covered in your course?

Anthony: The only thing is the — I don’t go over on how to create a landing page with html, all the technical stuff, just because I’m not a html wiz myself and there’s lot of tutorials. So, what I do instead is I give landing page templates. So, some of my best landing pages. So, they’re just gonna — they might have to learn a little bit of html but they definitely won’t have to start from scratch.

Mike: And you mention before that the one-time offer that you’ve had about the images, I think that’s not working. That’s not happening anymore. Is there any other kind of one-time offer —

Anthony: I said I replaced that.
Mike: Oh, you replaced it.
Anthony: Yeah.
Mike: So, there still is a one-time offer. Anthony: I’m sorry?

Mike: There still is a one-time offer.

Anthony: Right.

Mike: Okay. How much does that cost?

Anthony: It’s $19 to $29? So, um —

Mike: Is it something that people have — sorry, sorry. We’re going over each other here for a little bit. Is it something that is gonna be necessary for people to have or is it just one of those things that’s gonna be a little helpful?

Anthony: Yeah, it’s definitely not a necessary because in the course, I advocate finding your own images, testing a lot. But just for people who wanna save some time, instead of testing their own images, they can just use my best ones and I also put a limit on the one-time offer, so that it just doesn’t get so supersaturated. So yeah, I just help people who wanna save time. And there’s actually 2

one-time offers. The other one is an ad uploader. So, Plenty of Fish, basically if you use their ad uploader, you have to upload one ad at a time. So, after you upload your first ad, you have to find another ad image, like another headline. All that stuff, change your tracking link, give it another ad title and that’s just the second image. That’s fine if you wanna spend like 5 hours a day, like creating campaign. So, what the ad uploader does is basically it just poke, uploads images and you can have different headline variations and everything. So, it’s just a time saver for people who don’t wanna stand the entire day in front of their computers.

Mike: Well, Anthony. Thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking about Plenty of Fish and CPA advertising. Is there anything that we didn’t cover that you wanted to tell us about before we wrap it up?

Anthony: We covered a lot. It’s my pleasure to be here. It’s awesome. I’d say for the listeners out there who want to get into Plenty of Fish, my biggest tip I guess would just to — would just be treat it like, treat it like a real business. And don’t always — don’t always try to copy other people. Be innovating and have like, have your own goals that you want to strive for yourselves, because that’s gonna drive you to — to really put in the effort to succeed.

Mike: Great advice. And we’re gonna have links to the product of course in the show notes. If people wanna get in contact, where can they reach you at?

Anthony: They can just go to the website where the course is being offered which pofplaybook.com. Mike: Great. Thank you very much, Anthony.
Anthony: Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Mike: I hope you enjoyed the interview today with Anthony. If you’re interested in finding out about his Plenty of Fish method, go to mikefrommaine.com/pof, mikefrommaine.com/pof. And you can check that out. Of course, there’s also links in the show notes on mikefrommaine.com. Thank you so much for watching. Remember, there’s interviews here five days a week with successful online entrepreneurs. I appreciate it. See you tomorrow.