Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation, JLD here, and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like The Shake Up. Today we'll be focusing on reinventing yourself after the government crushes your eight figure business. To drop these value bonds, I brought to Michael Jackness into EO Fire Studios. Michael is a lifelong entrepreneur who has been immersed in e-commerce for the past seven years, and he documents his entire journey along the way via the e-com crew blog and podcast.
Fire Nation today will be talking about what exactly is the business that Michael Jackness was in, and is in. We'll talk about why e-commerce is better than affiliate sites and also why it's worse. The single biggest lesson he learned from building a seven figure business brand in one year and so much more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Sorry, what was that?
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Are you ready to launch your Biz Fire Nation? Well today's sponsor, LaunchMyBiz.com wants to help you get there. LaunchMyBiz provides end-to-end e-commerce training and support, and if you're accepted into their partner program, your success is guaranteed. Apply today at launchmybiz.com.
That's launchmybiz.com. Michael, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. But you have to be a little bit lucky, right? Everybody says you have to work hard and be persistent, which I also agree with.
But I think there's some luck somewhere in there that you have to have as well. Well, I like to say that luck is where effort meets opportunity. So Fire Nation, keep putting in the efforts, the opportunities will come up and people will be like, man, that dude or do that is just so lucky. Right.
Michael, I'm excited to break this down for us today because we have some really cool conversations. But first off, I mean, what exactly was the business that you were in before what you're currently got going on? Well, I was in affiliate marketing, but specifically on the online poker space, which kind of had a black cloud over it for a long time and still kind of does in a lot of ways. And it was quite interesting because along the way, there were several beatdowns.
The government shut things down. Some of these poker rooms were doing some pretty nefarious things. But I mean, just talking about creating your own luck, I mean, I've been working hard my whole life, always was kind of an entrepreneur, but being at the right place at the right time, being really in the poker and having some online skills and being there in 2003 wasn't a bad place today. I mean, it's all about being cutting edge, about being a first mover advantage.
Like the people that can get there first and know what they're doing and hang on to it. I mean, there's a lot of different opportunities. But what's interesting is that you now believe that e-commerce is actually better than affiliate marketing and affiliate sites. In some ways, in some ways, it's actually worse.
So let's talk about both of those sides. Like why is e-commerce better than affiliate sites? And why also is it worse? Yeah, and I think when you've done both, you can obviously compare and only having the pleasure doing affiliate marketing to begin with, I think that there's this relationship when whoever you're marketing for it needs you way more than you need them.
And as they get bigger, the relationship kind of flips its head a little bit. And so there was a lot of times where we had worked really hard to build up affiliate pages and reviews and et cetera, et cetera. We, you know, legitimately put a lot of work in a way and felt like we were partners with these people. But at some point, I'd be encounters like, yeah, we really probably shouldn't be paying these guys that much or at all.
And they reduce or eliminate their affiliate program. And you realize how little control you have over your destiny at that point. And it's a pretty brutal feeling. That is a brutal feeling.
And you know, one thing I kind of want to dive into is some more details about e-commerce first, but what's specifically worse about affiliate sites via e-commerce? Really anything except for the content in your site and you can build a brand and you can own the content. But if you're the type of affiliate site that is built around with say online poker and you're sending traffic to the number one number to poke a room and it's all based on reviews of that room or things that you've done about that, then that goes away. It's kind of a kick in the rear.
I mean, Amazon's kind of famous for this as well. It's ironic because we'll be talking about that as well. People that have built affiliate sites around Amazon when they were paying 12% affiliate fees and then they knock it down and knock it down. I think they're down to like the one the 3% range now for some products.
And so you build your whole livelihood, put all the work into building these sites. And again, you realize how little control you really have over it when the £100 comes into the room. And that's one thing that I had a lot of conversations with my friends that are in the affiliate marketing game is like they would wake up every morning just like stressed out of like what happened today? What changed today?
What sites got blocked today? What rules? What laws got passed? What got changed?
And it was like this always undercurrent of stress. Of course, more times than not, nothing happens. But it was always that like undercurrent of like what if? Like when is the shoot gonna drop?
It's not a matter of like if but when. So you were able to on the other side, you know, build a seven figure e-commerce brand in a single year. So share some of the biggest lessons that you learned over the course of doing that in 365 days. It wasn't just all again, lock, right?
I mean, you have years of experience in online marketing. We had done other e-commerce stuff in the past and drop shipping and then we had been selling some other people's products and eventually feel comfortable enough in e-commerce to create our own brand, our own brand and products, which is really what our business is focused on today. And so that brand was around coloring for adults. And so it was similar, I guess in the way to online poker where you had this exploding industry, not really a fad, but certainly something where it was popular before but it became way more popular and probably won't be as popular tomorrow as it wasn't a heyday, but will be bigger than it was before the growth started.
And so we were again at the right place at the right time, identified this niche just by doing a bunch of research. And the key is that we didn't just copy what everyone else was doing. We made small improvements to create a brand where people who were fanatics in this space, that people that would be our future customers really cared about this stuff. And so the way we really went about that was just to read the negative reviews of all the existing products on Amazon.
And so people would just be like, oh man, like when I'm left handed colorist and so like when I try to color the book tries to close on itself and it's really aggravating or the book doesn't like flat when I try to color and it's just, it's really difficult. The cheap paper that you might have a novel printed on, maybe it's printed on those sides. And so when I color one side it bleeds through. And so we fix these problems.
I'm not an inventor. I'm certainly no Thomas Edison. I'm not, I really made out of high school. I'm not really all that intelligent, but I can put together all these pieces.
And we made a new class of coloring book. We were able to charge a premium for it and people that were into coloring soak it up. This is one thing, Foundation. I think a lot of people don't really go into really deep research on is what are the major things, and sometimes even the minor things that people are actually complaining about right now, right there on plain sight.
I mean, you know, as Michael was talking about, you could just go through some reviews. You could like kind of get some complaints that were coming up over and over again. And then he could run some numbers too. He could be like, okay, is it actually worth me going into this product or the service to actually go all in on it?
Cause like what would these profit margins look like? Like what would the actual reality be of creating a solution to the problem that all these people are having with the current iterations of this product, of this actual item that people are obviously buying, but at least a certain segment, a certain percentage of them aren't finding exactly what they need. So we'll be like another great example, Michael, in that kind of vein right there, that you were really like, wow, this is an opportunity because of things that I'm seeing. Well, the next product we made were the things that actually color with, right?
So we made the books and you start to learn from your customers what it is that they like, what they don't like, what they're struggling with. And so we would, you know, and I think that the cool thing about what we were doing, we also built the community, right? It wasn't just selling the products, but we would really get a lot of user generated content. We did like weekly Facebook lives.
And I think that what you end up finding is that the next thing that you end up doing can be things that your customers just tell you. You know, it's like, it's awesome to get free information. And so when we went to make the actual coloring mediums, like gel pens or colored pencils, et cetera, we knew what they were struggling with. And specifically with gel pens, the average gel pen that these guys were coloring with were just the same gel pens you would find at Staples or Office Depot or on Amazon.
They were kind of cheap gel pens with, you know, a big variety and a pack. And we did some small things. The first thing we did was printed a color name on each gel pen. So when they went back to like, pick from one of the seven reds that are in the box that they could actually pick the right red to go back and color with again, we put them in a nice little travel case.
We included some refills because people would complain about like, combining these expensive pens and I had to like just throw them all away if I needed to buy refills again. And so we just solved those problems again. These are very easy things, but we were the first ones to do it much like we were talking about earlier with being the first mover in online poker. Ascension, Fire Nation, like think about that.
And that's an area that I've actually failed in over my physical product journey is saying, okay, once somebody buys this, what is the next logical thing they're gonna want with it? Or after they complete that or going up and forward? I mean, that's just this ascension model that you can kind of take your clients through learning along the way. And I love that Michael's also building community as well and continuing to engage with them, asking them, hey, what do you like about our products?
What do you wish existed? I can hand you a magic button, you can press it right now. And the perfect item would exist. What would that look like?
Like what's missing? Like all these different things are so key when you're looking to solve people's problems, like create real solutions to real pain points. And we're gonna talk a little more about the blueprints that Michael followed when we get back from thinking our sponsors. E-commerce is on fire.
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That's MDHearing8.com promo code FIRE, or you can even call them at 1-8-3-3-9-3-8-3-0-7-3. That's 1-8-3-3-9-3-8-3-0-7-3. Michael, we're back and you built a seven figure e-commerce brands and then another one and then another one. What is this amazing blueprint that you created and then followed?
I think we kind of started alluding to what I read, right? Differentiate in some way. I mean, the average person that hears about doing e-commerce, selling on Amazon, a lot of these gurus out there are like, oh, this is easy. All you gotta do is find something on all of you or some throw in Amazon.
You're just gonna sell it and make a million dollars. And that's just ridiculous, right? I mean, it might have been true maybe in 2013 when Amazon was really first-gant, started with third-party products, but now the competition is really stuff. And so you have to differentiate.
But as I was kind of illustrating, you just have to differentiate a little bit. If you do what everyone else is doing exactly, just go into the canton fair or going on Alibaba buying the product off the shelf, trying to sell on Amazon, well, there's gonna be 15 other people doing that exact same thing. But if you can make small improvements and bundle some stuff together, include a bag, some higher quality packaging, put some better instructions in there, change the colors up a little bit, add a higher quality zipper, small stuff like this. It doesn't have to be huge.
It can go a long way, because now you have something that's differentiated. It's your own product. Someone wants to copy it. They still can, but you're gonna be the first one up there.
It will take them six, 12, 18 months to copy you and catch up. And hopefully by that point, you have several other products in the pipeline to kind of rack the competition. So one thing that you've done really effectively, we have already mentioned one or two things about, like your weekly Facebook groups and lives, et cetera, is you were able to really build community. You were able to build content around your e-commerce business.
So how can Fire Nation use content? How can Fire Nation use community to start an e-commerce business? It's kind of funny, because it's really all comful circle now, right? I look back at my life since 2000, the end of 2003 when I first went on this, it's 17 years now, it's kind of crazy.
Seems like a completely different lifetime ago, but back then it was all the same thing was content marketing. And so instead of affiliate marketing, it's really just for my own stuff. And so we own several different content properties. One of the ones we talk about is we own Tactical.com.
And a great way to do this is to build community there. You get people who are into survivalism, things like that, which is really what the sites about, people join your Facebook group, your email list. You start to get attention from Google, get a bunch of organic traffic, start reviewing products. You can send that traffic off to Amazon through affiliate links and start there and see what products are selling.
And once you have that information, now you can develop your own product and start selling that on Amazon and directing the traffic to that. You just change the knob to point to where you want. And now instead of just running the affiliate commission, you're also earned a margin on selling that product, plus extrapolate out all the additional sales from the fact that Amazon's like 57% of e-commerce these days can become quite lucrative. And so we're really competitive in spots where we never would be if it wasn't without that content play.
And I love that visualization fire nation is that you can kind of turn the knob, kind of turn the hose to spray in a certain direction when that next opportunity arises. Because you've been building this content, you've been building this community. And as you and I are talking, Michael, it's 2021. So let's get specific about a few things that are really working in e-commerce and a few things that aren't working in e-commerce in 2021.
The biggest one is we talked a little bit about before, you gotta differentiate, right? You have to have products that are different than everyone else's, but you don't have to have a patent. So it's not to that level, but something where you put the work in and work on making the difference, the different products, do something that's going to be at least somewhat difficult for people to copy. The only thing that's hard for people to copy, because most people just give up is creating a content site and controlling your destiny that way.
I mean, the average person that starts out podcasting or blogging or YouTubeing or whatever it might be, gives up after one to six months because they aren't making a million dollars yet. And you know from running a podcast, and I know from running a podcast that, the only person you're talking to to begin with is your mother and maybe one is your friends, right? And so you have to stick through it. And once you get on the other side of that, now you have something that's an asset that you can use however you see fit.
And that's something that we've really seen working very well in 2021. And I believe that this is something that will continue to work well over a long period of time. The need for good content is going to be there in the future. Places like Amazon or large retailers will never offer the type of detailed content about a subject that someone who's really passionate about can do.
And it's like, all the people in the world can go put together e-commerce blogs, but I mean, we've lived it for six years. And so I feel like the content that we have there is really good. And the same thing about survivalism or about coloring, you have to have some passion about it. And personally, I might not have passionate about survivalism or prepping type stuff or coloring, but we made sure that we were surrounded by people who did and put together the right content and community around that stuff to where you start building fans that start talking about the stuff where you're not advertising.
And so I really see that continuing to work very well in 2021 and beyond. Well, start watching the show alone, Michael. And you'll start getting passionate about survivalism. I'll tell you that shows a dicking thing.
I will check it out. I believe me, my fiancee, she's the last person I would have expected getting into that show. Like literally like catching a check-monk, like skinning it. I mean, and she loves it.
And it's fascinating. If I was gonna guess the title of that show, what it was about, I would have just guessed it when I'd been sitting home alone based on a pandemic last year. Definitely what a lot of people unfortunately had to go through before. And so many great takeaways here.
I wanna go through a few that I was taking notes on. Number one, differentiate fire nation. How are you solving issues that others aren't solving? Look to reviews, look to complaints.
Create a high barrier. Like the higher the barrier, the lower the competition. Think about that. Because if it's easy to copy, people will copy it.
So how do you create a high barrier? So you have low to no competition. How can you build a moat around what you're creating? And then create a content site to control your own destiny.
You wanna be in control. Great content will always be needed. And don't get frustrated when you hear the numbers of like millions of podcasts, billions of blogs. They're all dead, literally.
97% of them are not getting new content added to them. They're all dead sites. It's very few people, five to 7% total, that are still creating consistent great content on a very meaningful basis. So Michael, give us the one big takeaway that you really wanna make sure fire nation gets from everything that we talked about here today.
Give us the best way that we can connect with you, that we can learn more from you. And then we'll say goodbye. I think the one big takeaway, I just interviewed a Gene A withman on my podcast. He wrote a new book called Entrepreneur Leap.
And so I would encourage you to read that first. And if you're not really an entrepreneur and don't really wanna put all the work into doing this, then don't even get started. I see some people start and just kind of give up. And so I encourage people to dig deep and realize that they're really made to go do this.
And that's much more ship and do any types of things as a long road. In terms of what to follow me, I've been blogging and podcasting about my entire e-commerce journey over to site called econcrew. You see em, c-r-e-w-dot-com where econcrew and iTunes almost 400 podcast episodes. You know econcrew dot com slash free.
Get a bunch of free resources. You come crew on all the Twitters and Facebooks and all that good stuff too. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with MJ and JLD today.
So please keep up that heat. If you head over to eofire.com and type Michael in the search bar the show on this page will pop up with everything we've been talking about today. Best show notes in the biz, time stamps, links galore. And of course, head directly over to econcrew.com.
All those free goodies you mentioned, the podcast over 400 episodes. Michael, thank you. For sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that brother, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.
Hey Fire Nation, today's value bound content was brought to you by Michael and Fire Nation. One thing I've identified over the years is that successful entrepreneurs are productive disciplines and they are focused, which is why I created the Mastery Journal, which is a gorgeous full leather journal that will ensure that you master productivity, you master discipline and you master focus in 100 days. Visit the mastery journal dot com. Use promo code podcast for a $15 discount and thank you for listening to my podcast and I will catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side.
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Launch my Biz provides end-to-end e-commerce training and support and if you're accepted into their partner program, your success is guaranteed. Apply today at launchmybiz.com. That's launchmybiz.com.