The One Critical Thing You Need to Know To Make Sales Online with Peter Nguyen

CEO of Advertiser360 – Peter Nguyen

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Peter has been in internet marketing since the beginning. He goes over the one critical thing that everyone MUST know if you are selling online. He also walks through his process of selling a new product or service, including case studies!

Check out Advertiser360.com and PeterNguyen.net for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy, and today we have Peter Nguyen on the show. He is a genius of online marketing. He has many, many companies. One of them is called Advertiser360. He teaches people how to do this stuff. I'm excited. Hopefully I can have as much time as I possibly can with him. I think we would be able to spend days together. Which we don't have that much time, so I'm going to try and pull out as much information for you guys as humanly possible. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Peter.

Peter: It's an absolute pleasure to be here, and I'm excited to talk today and hopefully share some insights and some of my golden nuggets I've learned over the last dozen years of being an internet marketer.

Jaime: So what year did you actually start? I know you said you started at sort of the forefront?

Peter: I got started as an entrepreneur when I was a sophomore in college at the University of Florida. That was back in two thousand and, well, I don't want to date myself, 2002, when I started my first company. 

Jaime: You're not even that old.

Peter: I just turned thirty. I've been doing it for eleven years; I've been an entrepreneur for eleven years. Mainly on the internet, but primarily, I used to own an internet marketing, SEO marketing company. I started my first ecommerce site back then, and it's just been a whirlwind. When I talked about this industry, the affiliate world, and the affiliate marketing industry which kind of really just got started. Maybe it really got started back then, but it really took off around 2005, 2006. I was kind of there, one of the original guys. There's maybe a dozen or so of us. Big advertisers who were kind of, who had all the offers. I was one of the original, maybe a dozen guys out there who started the first offers in large way. We used to sell thousands of products a day, on the internet. 

Jaime: That's funny. Because usually it seems like the bubble was in 2000 when you had the opportunity. In 2005 you were saying.

Peter: That was the tech Silicon Valley bubble. Our bubble actually kind of happened between 2005 and 2009, as far as in our industry. There's guys selling between ten and twenty thousand products a day: health products, anti-aging products, you name it, teeth whitening, and whatnot. People aren't doing those numbers as much because back then it was the wild, wild west. There was no regulations; it was just so new to everyone. Now it's much more regulated; it's much more mature. People are doing things a lot better now. 

Jaime: Okay, and you teach this stuff? I'm going to dig right in, and I want to find out if there's a company right now that has a product that they know is an amazing product; they've heard going online is absolutely amazing, but they have no idea. They might have a little bit of background but not much. Where should they start? The landscape is so huge that it's hard to just pick a place to start. 

Peter: Right. There's a couple different ways as far as your product. I would say more importantly, I think the most important aspect, and this is what I teach as well, is for those that are out there, my aha moment was around early, about five or six years ago when I got into this industry, one thing that I realized was so important was this one thing; it's called EPC, that's earnings per click. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but those who don't know, look this up. It's E-P-C, and the short formula for EPC because it's important, but the short formula for EPC is EPC equals your CPA, cost per acquisition, times your conversion rate. Conversion rate's obviously the conversion rate of your website, your sales funnel. Whether you're doing an ecommerce website, or you're doing a sales video, or you're doing a sales letter, or doing a landing page or whatever type of page you're doing, you're going to get a conversion rate. When someone goes to your website, a percentage of those people actually become a lead or a sale. Right? So that's a conversion rate. Your CPA is your cost per acquisition, or how much you're willing to pay to acquire that lead or that sale. Your cost per acquisition is how much you're willing to pay in marketing to acquire that user. Does that make sense? The biggest thing, your CPA times your CR is your EPC, or cost per click, your earnings per click, EPC. I'll give you an example of an affiliate to drive traffic to your website. Are you familiar? For those who are not familiar with affiliates, I do a lot things in the affiliate world, affiliate marketing. A lot of affiliates are what we call publishers who drive traffic to my website. That's how I sold thousands of products per day. All they care about is what your EPC is, your earnings per click. You know why? It's because they, if your EPC is fifty cents, right, they know that they can spend up to fifty cents to break even. An affiliate would probably spend twenty-five cents or thirty cents to; that's their max threshold. If they know that for every click they sent over, they're making fifty cents in that example. So your biggest thing as an advertiser, one big trick out there, if you don't know what your EPC is, most guys, ninety-nine percent of guys don't even pay attention to this. The reason why I've been able to sell thousands and thousands of products is because of this one little thing, your EPC, and I pay attention to that. What I do is I pay attention to two things: one, how well your conversion rate. I built these masterful conversion sites that convert very, very, very well. The other thing I do is I make sure I pay out well. I make sure I built, my product is a good quality, but at the same time I can get it at the lowest, I negotiate the lowest price. I have high perceived value. I have good margins online. When I have good margins, I can pay out more, and I can afford to pay out more. My EPC's stronger. To me, for anyone kind of getting started, the first thing I kind of fundamentally teach is if you pay attention to your EPC, then and you know what your EPC is, then no matter if you're driving traffic to yourself or whatnot. Even if you're not using an affiliate, that means you could spend fifty cents for example per click, and at fifty cents per click you can do a lot of damage. You'll get a lot of sales. If you can get up to a dollar or seventy cents or whatever, you'll get, it exponentially grows, versus five cents EPC. At five cents EPC what they'll give you is a small little bucket to play with. You're only going to get so much traffic. If you go up to ten cents, it doesn't mean ten cents EPC doesn't mean you'll get twice the number of sales or twice the number of clicks; you'll get like four times the number of clicks. When you go to twenty cents per click, you'll get, it exponentially grows. Once you play with the big guys, and you're in the forty or fifty, sixty or seventy cent range, you could spend wherever, basically get clicks wherever and you'll get sales, as long as you've got the right funnel. The right niche.

Jaime: Okay.

Peter: That's what my secret is. I typically work with broader, bigger markets, not with super niche products because like the health, and the beauty space, and the e-learning space, those are big verticals that a lot of the general population. Just like the same verticals that you see in television and radio to the general public, right. For muscle offers or something like that or that the general public typically only wants to lose weight, so that's. The same sort of thing works whether you're selling. We have a member in Advertiser360 who sells false eyelashes. She does incredibly well actually, and it's a very, very niche product. Using our tactics and what not. I would say the biggest thing to try to do and focus is to go ahead, and before you do all that stuff, build out a good converting sales funnel. Make sure that people go through it. You don't want to just throw traffic. This is the reality that ninety percent of the people who get into this side. They're going to create some kind of ecommerce website. They're not going to put a lot of thought into it, and they expect that will people will go there and already start buying. They don't put any thought process as far as their pricing, the price point and all that other stuff, or even a sales funnel and all that. One of the biggest things that I teach is a couple good ways to increase your conversion rate. There's only two ways to increase your conversion rate. What we teach, the first thing is to increase your motivation, getting someone to want to buy. The second thing is to remove friction. If you master those two things, increase motivation and remove friction, a person's going to buy. That's how I've built some of the highest converting sites in whatever industry I'm in. That's what I'm doing in these industries I've built, my campaigns convert higher than almost all my competitors. In any industry I've done, it's because I focused, I spent a dozen years learning how to sell to people and mastered that into selling to people online. 

Jaime: Okay.

Peter: One of the biggest tricks here, one of the golden nuggets for those of you guys who haven't gotten my course, here's one big thing. There's a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini, right.

Jaime: Yup.

Peter: And Cialdini writes about six principles of persuasion. Most people are familiar with. I actually use the same six principles on the internet. My landing page, my website, my sales letter has those six principles. Those are the six principles that I focus on the most. All the other stuff is filler content and other things. One of the other biggest things, I always speak in terms of benefits, not features. That's right. What's in it for them? Don't talk about how this is a great red bottle. You talk about why does someone really want to buy a weight loss product? Because they want to burn fat. They want to look good. They want to feel good. They want to be confident. Speak in those type of languages. That's why people really want to buy weight loss products or beauty products or whatever it is. Find the benefits that really truly affect them versus just some crazy feature, that you have some crazy ingredient. Those are important, but those shouldn't be your forefront of what you're speaking on. Does that make sense?

Jaime: Okay. Yeah, it does. So let's say we have a landing page because most of the time you said when you have a product you have a landing page whether it be ecommerce or not. So you have this landing page, you're not a copywriter; I'm not a copywriter either, so whoever is writing this, they have this landing page. They try and talk about benefits. We know we should be talking about benefits. They try and do a good job. They send some of their traffic. Let's say they have a very small list, and they send some of their traffic to it. It doesn't do well. They're like "I don't know what to do from here." What do you suggest for them?

Peter: That's what happens a lot. Most people hit a brick wall, and then they stop, and they give up. That's the majority of the people. The biggest marketers in this entire that make the most money, I can promise you one thing that we all have in common ? we're the best testers. We don't think of it as we go in and he's going to blow out, and the conversion rate's going to be crazy, and we're going to sell like crazy. When I first got into this industry, my sites sucked. They did not convert well. I didn't know what I was doing, okay. Now, ten years later, now I'm a lot more likely to build a campaign that converts very, very well because I've learned a lot of little tricks on the way. One of the most important things is test everything. Test headlines. Split test. I A-B split test everything, even when I'm creating a new campaign, and it's already converting, I continue to A-B split test everything. Split test headlines, the images, the colors, the type of design. I split test bullet points; I split test every little different things. The other bit more important things, I have a philosophy that I kind of teach. It's imitate first, innovate later. I don't mean imitate and steal, break copyright infringements and steal people's sites. Don't do that. I have enough problems with people trying to steal my site. I'm in a lawsuit right now because, a six figure lawsuit, suing someone because they stole my stuff. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that copyright infringement or steal, but what I'm talking about is imitate people's business model. If you have a good competitor, that person probably spent thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars split testing different types of landing pages, you know, different things. Find the things that you feel that's working for them, whether they're doing a landing page instead of a sales video, or they're doing a, figure out the whole entire sales funnel. Then imitate that, and make that better. What a lot of people do instead, they start from scratch, and they have a big white canvas. They try to guess what the people want. Honestly the internet is a pretty mature industry. A lot of the smartest marketers are always split testing, including myself and the other guys out the. We're finding best practices. Fortunately with the internet you can just go on someone's website, and you can kind of see what's going on. You can see their whole entire sales funnel. That's what I recommend. You find best practices from your biggest competitors. 

Jaime: Okay. We've got a site. We're starting to pull things from other places. I'm just sort of going step by step how we should do this. Starting to pull things out, starting to split test, is there any specific split testing software that you use that works better than anything else?

Peter: Yes. Honestly the cheapest one I would say is Google Website Optimizer. They have, it's a free tool. I use that sometimes. I have other tools as well, more expensive ones. I use affiliate tracking tools and what not, like HitPath. Those are much more expensive. They're enterprise level. You don't really need it if you're just getting started. I spend a few thousand dollars a month on my tracking software. You don't really need that at that point. Google Website Optimizer, if I'm launching a brand new campaign and have a smaller budget, I'll use that. 

Jaime: Perfect.

Peter: Also Unbounce, a pretty effective one that works pretty well as well. There's other cool tools every day that are coming out. 

Jaime: Nice. I just interviewed someone who's an investor in Unbounce, and I think that's a great way to go. We've got this landing page. We tried it before; we figured out what our conversion rate. It wasn't good. What's, do we know, what's a good conversion rate, and what's a not good conversion rate?

Peter: It just really depends on what you're selling. There's no range, but I would say anywhere from point one percent if it's like an ecommerce site that doesn't have a lot of traction, but sometimes that might be good, up to two or three percent sometimes. It really, really depends. It depends on also your funnel as well. Sometimes direct response marketers, what we do is we have is called a pre-sell page. Like an actual, not the fake new article crap that is out there, I'm talking about a real, just like what we call an advertorial. Same thing that you see on a magazine. You have your claim up there; you have your terms and conditions. I do it the correct legal way, but sometimes a pre-sell page actually helps conversion rates most of the time. That's one of our little secrets that we use is that we use a pre-sell page before it hits the landing page, and it works really, really well. 

Jaime: Oh, even online?

Peter: Because you're not selling right away, they're caught a little bit off guard. You're reading a little article; it's an advertorial. It gets your attention, intrigues your attention. Now many, most of my websites, most of sales funnels will have pre-sell pages ahead of it. It works quite nicely. 

Jaime: So it's warmer traffic essentially? Because they sort of know a little bit about it instead of traffic.

Peter: If you get really, really cold traffic, then you warm it up is how I'd put it. 

Jaime: How, where do you put that page?

Peter: So I send traffic to that pre-sell page.

Jaime: Okay.

Peter: And there will be links going to my landing page. 

Jaime: Okay. Do you ever have to care about the conversion rate of that pre-sell page?  

Peter: Yes. Absolutely. We call that your click through rate, how many people actually click through. You want to have, those ranges are anywhere from five to forty percent. It just really depends on what it is, what type of traffic you're getting.

Jaime: It's worth it more for you to have a higher click through rate in the end, even though if not all the people see your sales pitch.

Peter: That's right because more people at the end of the day will convert going through there. Usually that's the case. That's a little secret sauce. You know what? Here's the beautiful thing. If you're not using affiliates, and you're driving your own traffic, Google and Facebook allow pre-sell pages as long as compliance and you're doing everything right. As long as the URL, here's a little trick that most people don't know out there, I actually just realized this like a year, year and a half ago. It's because in the affiliate world, affiliates create pre-sell pages, and they send it to a landing page. Usually affiliates do that. But the affiliates have to do it on their own website, their own domain. It goes to our landing page. If domain "A" is the pre-sell page, and domain "B" is a different dot com, right, so Facebook and Google do not like affiliates, even though affiliates were the guys who made them all their money in the beginning. That's the reason why they're as rich as they are, but then they put a ban on affiliates. It is known in our industry that pre-sell pages don't work on Google or Facebook, and then I started seeing one or two guys actually having a pre-sell page. I was like "How are they doing that?" I realized it's because as long as the pre-sell page is on the same domain as your landing page. So let's say your landing page is ABC dot com, your pre-sell page can be like ABC dot com forward slash health review or something like that. Right?

Jaime: Yeah.

Peter: Does that make sense? As long as that link going to your landing page is on that same domain, they know an affiliate isn't running traffic to it. It's the advertiser; it's the person. Google's completely fine with that. That's been a little secret sauce that I've been using. Google and Facebook that nobody else can really play with, and I've been doing very, very well doing that. 

Jaime: Wow. Then tell us what is on that pre-sell page? What sort of content should be on it? How do we get them to click to the sales page? 

Peter: So it should be for a pre-sell page, it should mention, obviously you should have a really strong headline. That headline is probably the most important thing to get their attention. It should be consistent with the messaging that the banner or the ad that they clicked on, it should be consistent messaging. Literally whatever that message is on the banner or the ad, Google AdWords or whatever I'm using, right, I use that same messaging on the headline. You don't them to click on here, and then you have a different messaging, and they're like "Oh." They wanted to read one weird trick to lose weight. They wanted to learn whatever. You have to use the same sort of messaging. Then what you want to do is you want to cover all the facts, the benefits. You want to, sometimes what I like doing is, you create an actual true testimonial story. I'll take one of my actual clients, and they share their story as a pre-sell page. That's usually very, very powerful. You can actually share his or her story on a pre-sell page, and it works very, very well. I make sure I have all my affidavits and my own testimonials and all that stuff to do it legally. That's one way that works really, really well. You can do it more like a journalistic approach, just like you're reading a real article. It should be kind of unbiased, not too sales-y. If it's too sales-y in the beginning, they're not going to, it's not going to work well. You want to, you want to grab their attention, and you want to increase interest, and you want to get them to desire this product, and then at the end, most importantly at the end, you have to strong close, a call to action at the bottom that you actually click on.

Jaime: That's what I was going to ask you, does it just say click here? What are some good calls to actions? 

Peter: Sometimes we'll have it all throughout the article. You'll have every time they mention that weight loss product or they mention a diet or for example, a diet product, you know, all through the thing the links will click to the, your landing page. 

Jaime: Okay, good.

Peter: You have it multiple times throughout the letter or the article.

Jaime: Okay, which makes sense. Okay, if they're sold after the first link, they'd rather click that link than have to go. How do you actually send traffic? I love the way it works, so pre-sell to landing page. We care about the conversion rate of the landing page. We care about the conversion - that light keeps going off ? 

Peter: Motion detector light, sorry about that.

Jaime: We have to keep moving, just have to move every five minutes. So sending that traffic, what are the best ways that you've found to send traffic from cold to that pre-sell, that warming up page? 

Peter: Right. I mean there's all sorts of different types of traffic. I think what most people don't realize is that there's more to life, to internet marketing than Google and Facebook. There's a lot more. I mean, yes, they can send you a lot of traffic. I mean, there's things that most people don't even know. There's things called PPV or CPV marketing which is like, you know, pop-unders. You know that's a whole other marketing that's very, very powerful. There's media buys which is very, very, very good. I advertise on CNN dot com and Fox News dot com and ESPN dot com and those type of bigger sites because I sell a lot more product, and I do a lot more volume. Most people can't afford to be on those sites, but there's all kinds of different like the TMZ dot com, or those other big, high-traffic sites. That's one thing. If you have a big budget, and you know what you're doing, go for it. If you have a smaller budget, Google, the problem with Google is it's getting very, very saturated, and it's getting very expensive. The cost per click's getting a lot more expensive than ten years or five years ago, so that's a problem with Google. There's other search engines, MSN and Yahoo both merged. They have adCenter now, and you can get a good amount of traffic now. You can still get a good amount of traffic, and some people say adCenter works better than Google sometimes. Vice versa. There's even second tier search engines like 7Search for example, and no one even knows that. You spend pennies on the dollars, and still get a good, decent amount of traffic. There's email marketing, where there's big mailers. I work with a lot of the biggest mailers who drop email, and use that as a direct response tactic. There's also the social media tools as well. Obviously there's the Facebook. If you have a beauty or health product, use Plenty of Fish, which is a free dating site, the world's largest free dating site. They have ads, a few of my ads on there. There's more than just Facebook, or there's other social media tools as well. If you're using free marketing. Everyone loves free marketing. There's a whole chapter just talking about free marketing in our course. I'll give you an example. We have the person who's doing the false eyelashes hasn't spent a dime on marketing. They've probably had close to a million views on their site in the last four or five months, all from free marketing. They use YouTube. She would reach out to YouTube bloggers and Instagram followers and what not. All she's been doing is reaching out to the gurus of those spaces, having them review the product, and they're just freely, promoting the product for free. She'll get twenty thousand, ten, thirty, forty thousand views in one day from any given blogger. It's pretty incredible. That's how she gets a lot of her sales. She just sold out one of her eyelash sets. She's been doing just incredibly well in the last few months with her launch. She's only been using free marketing, so that's exactly what we're talking about. She's just quit her job recently, and now she's doing this full time. 

Jaime: I was going to say, so she just started not that long ago either?  

Peter: Yeah, like in September, October I think.

Jaime: She started in October, and she's got tens and tens of thousands of views. 

Peter: Sold thousands of sets. It's pretty incredible.

Jaime: Do you know her story well enough? Can you walk through a little bit? So she's started, I mean she was part of your course. She just bought Advertiser360, the course that you have. 
Peter: She's one of my members, but at the same time, she's been working on the false eyelash. She's been working on a false eyelash company. She imported; she used a site called Ali Baba that we teach, resource, I think Yahoo bought them for some crazy billions. That's where, it's a good place to import, export from overseas, especially over in Asia, the different parts of South America, whatnot. She found the manufacturer because a false eyelash, here's an example, the false eyelashes is really kind of saturated, kind of niche though. Then the other big competitor is Shu Uemuera, or Sephora, then there's guys who have their own false eyelashes. They charge anywhere between twenty-five and thirty dollars. There's some big margins in there. Well, what she did is she went overseas, and she didn't go overseas, but she went on Ali Baba. She contacted a bunch of manufacturers. She found the exact manufacturer that sells Shu Uemuera's, which is the high end one. She got it on pennies on the dollar. Right, but she had to buy a big quantity. She saved up bought a big, big quantity, so she can get the margins there, right. She didn't have a big budget, didn't have a big marketing budget or anything. She puts a big order in, and she just sold out of a couple of her eyelashes, which is crazy in such a short period of time. In a couple months, she sold out on one of her designs, or whatnot. She spent a lot of time creating what's important is the perceived value. We talk about that a lot, your perceived value and brand. We have a whole chapter on branding, your perceived value, your naming. Hers is called the House of Lashes. That's the name of her brand. What she does is she spent all this time making these beautiful packaging; it's really, really cute. Different from all the high end ones which are kind of boring looking. She spent all that time creating some nice packaging for them, and the quality was definitely there. She spent a lot of time on back up work, making sure the quality and all the designs were perfect. Then once she did all that, she finally launched it. She worked on creating an ecommerce website. She sold all her different variations of lashes. After doing all that, she launches, and she reaches out to all the YouTube bloggers and Facebook people, people with big Facebook followings.  They just started, and this is what she did. Here's what I'll walk through exactly what she did. She just basically reached out to them, private messaged them. She personalized it "Hey, I'm the owner of this company and what not. I'd love for you to review our site. Where's your, what's your address so I can send you a free sample." She would say sixty or seventy percent of the people responded back. Maybe not after the first time, but maybe after the second time, after a follow up, most people were actually really nice about it. They give her their address. She literally mails it out to them. Simple, right? Even sometimes without even her notice, she'll get this crazy amount of traffic because they just put a review on YouTube or you know, whatever, saying "Hey, I got this package. They look beautiful." They'll show pictures of them. Now she's like, she has celebrities wearing her eyelashes now. It's crazy. The biggest celebrity makeup artist is licensing her stuff. She's getting crazy wholesale orders. It's a crazy, wild ride that she's gone through. I'm so excited to see a member like that do spectacular things. I love that she's never spent a dime in marketing. That's just awesome.

Jaime: That's awesome. 

Peter: I was kind of the same way when I first started. One of my first ecommerce, I didn't have a budget, and so I had to think creatively. Now that I have a budget, it's a little bit easier because I have a way to do it. Back then whether you were working on a shoestring budget or not, you got to work with what you got. 

Jaime: Tell me a little bit too. She, that sounds like an amazing story, number one. It's really good to be able to hear the success stories, and the hard thing though is that there's probably tons of people that started this journey. You know, right? That haven't. So what are some of the common mistakes, or the common thing that you see come up over and over and over again based on why these people aren't doing what they should be doing or could be doing, I suppose?  Like if they, that's the other piece too, if we sat you down in the shoes of any other person, well, you'd probably have no problem. What is it about what they're doing that's a mistake? 

Peter: Most people just give up too early. I would say that's one mistake that a lot of people do. Again, I treat everything like a test, versus a success or failure. I think that true serial entrepreneurs out there who are really, really successful. They're not afraid of a little failure. If anything what my goal is to fail as quickly as possible so you get all the kinks out of the way. That's everything. We don't think of it as failure; we just think of it as testing. Where everything's a test, it's like our laboratory. Every landing page is our lab. It's our creative outlet. When we do this, we get a test. We see results, and I love how analytical doing stuff on the internet is because you get aspects. You see every click that comes in. You see every conversion. You can track that much easier than offline media, right. Honestly, that's number one. A lot of people just, they just give up too early. Two, they're not, some people, I was just talking about this. I just got back from Baylor. We have a class at Baylor, so I was lecturing with our students. We're talking about this whole concept and this idea of those who are inspired, right. There's some people who get inspired, like you can see this interview.  You go on your website, Eventual Millionaire. You see all these inspiring stories that might kind of motivate you in the beginning. People get inspired, and then there's the next level up, which is what I call motivation. Motivation takes a little bit of extra work because that's the kind of day to day motivation needs to be. I think someone famous once said motivation needs to be like taking a shower every day. 

Jaime: That's Zig Ziglar. 

Peter: I completely agree with that. I find new ways to motivate myself and inspire myself. That's the second thing. I would say the last thing, the one above that, I would say the last thing is obsession. I was obsessed about being an internet marketer and being one of the best ones out there. Five years ago, no one knew who I was. I was obsessed with being a good student and a lifetime learner in my craft, in the internet space. I was obsessed with learning every aspect of the internet, both creating a product and the traffic side and everything in between. That's one thing that I think separates me from most people because I'm obsessed with this. This is my passion. This is what I love to do every day. I can work five hours a day, or I can work fifteen hours a day. It feels like I'm not working at all. To me, that's key I would say. Passion, and just find something that you can feel proud of. That's very, very important. When I created Advertiser360, the only reason I created it honestly, because I'd never gotten into the guru space. I didn't want to promote other people's products because I thought most people didn't have a good enough product that I could promote, that I was willing to be passionate about. I said "You know what? There's a big hole in the marketplace." A lot of people have these really shoddy products that just aren't very good. They're just overly hyped and overall. I said "I'm going to spend some time after I've learned everything about the internet, and become an authority." I said "You know what? I'm going to go back." I think most people who have had success what happens with most of their courses out there, they will put in eighty percent of the foundational stuff and twenty percent of the secret sauce they don't put in there. They're showing the proof that they made some money. They're, I'll say most gurus make their money selling info products. They don't make their living doing anything else. My course is less than five percent or a few percent of my income. Most of all my income comes from actually still creating products. I have fifteen or twenty different companies that I have and campaigns that I run at any time right now. My big thing is automating these processes. This is what we teach in our course as well. I would say that's the other thing. Just it's so important to have a product that you can believe in. Jen from House of Lashes, she believes in her product, and she can promote it, and she can do it. I'll have students that come to me, and say "I have this product. I really don't like the packaging." They're not even excited. They don't feel proud of it. Those are the guys that I can immediately say "They're not going to take off because they're not. They're too afraid to share it or go to the manufacturer and say how great their product is." You see what I'm saying? A lot of people don't have it. They're just "Oh, whatever." Just for a quick buck. Honestly if you're in there for just a quick buck, most people are in there for the wrong thing. You aim for adding value to people. Addding value to peoples' lives, and I think that's more important. The all the stuff will kind of come.

Jaime: Beautiful. What does obsession look like? What does a typical day, especially when you were very first starting? I know a lot of people, like you said with House of Lashes; she had a day job and was trying to go through all this sort of stuff too. How can you be as obsessed as you want to be when you're doing so many other things in your life? 

Peter: Right, I think that's so important. I was definitely obsessed when I was nineteen and starting my first company. It was, I was as busy as I was, and when I'm talking about busy, I was at the University of Florida; I was the vice president of our Asian student union; I was sports coordinator of our Asian; I was chartering an Asian fraternity; I had a girlfriend at the time; I was leading a Bible study and Sunday School, back two hours away at home; and doing all that stuff and I was taking eighteen or nineteen credit hours any given semester.  Right? I was busy. Then on the side, I was starting a company. I was in the office thirty five hours a week on top of all that stuff. Any given week. I was consistently staying up until two, three, four, five in the morning, or doing all-nighters studying, or reading other books, or reading everything I could get my head around. That's obsession. 

Jaime: That is. That's crazy.

Peter: Amongst all that other stuff, what I was doing was reading everything I could get my hands on. I would ask my mentors or other people, "Hey, what's the best? I want to learn search engine optimization. I want to learn this; I want to learn that." You know? "What's the best marketing book? What's the best conversion book, sales book?" I read everything. "Management book? Everything." I knew as an entrepreneur I needed to be good at all these little different things, so I kept reading. After, well, you'll probably understand. A lot of people can relate to this. After reading a few really good books, they all start blending, kind of saying the same sort of thing. I don't read as much. I used to read twenty, thirty books a year. Now I don't read as much because now I can just play. It's like I practiced so now, from reading and doing and trying, so now I can just play. I think that's important. I think just like being a professional sports athlete, you need to practice. You need to put in the hard work. You need to study your competitors. You need to study all that stuff. People think you can just jump in and be an entrepreneur and just do it. I think there's a lot more preparation to the serial entrepreneurs that we all admire. Those guys went through, they started off at a young age, and they started practicing. The Malcolm Gladwell ten thousand hours. I know I had my ten thousand hours to get to where the accelerated growth that I have now.

Jaime: I know. It's so hard to look at someone who's so successful, and go "Oh, they have it easy." We don't get to see the ten years of you working your butt off, trying to figure it all out. Yeah. That's great.

Peter: Exactly. 

Jaime: It's funny. I don't want to take too much more of your time because I'd love to have you back on the show again, and I think we could definitely do a lot more. What do you think for the last question that I usually ask? What's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million? 

Peter: I would say one thing that I love doing is that if your goal is to be a millionaire and get your first, actually generate your first million dollars, I would say accountability is so important. I know when I was back in the early days, when I started, when I got into the affiliate space. Back then, actually sort of my story. I made my first million when I was in college. In revenue, right? But then I lost it all. I actually had a bad deal where I was doing printing for a big company, and I was doing marketing for a company. They never paid us. It was a big, big deal. Tens and tens of thousands of dollars. That put me under. I had to lay off my employees and all that stuff. It was a hard time. I failed, flat on my face. After three and a half years of building this business, because of one deal that just kind of went sour. It wasn't even our fault, other than not doing our due diligence in not prepping. I didn't know the concept of cash flow back then. So when I hit rock bottom, I turned around. It took me a little bit, maybe a year to finally kind of get back on my feet. Then when I did it the next time, I said "It's so much more important than just the money aspect." Money back then when I was young and immature was my drive. Now it's adding value, and finding what I was going to do with the money. You know I'm big on nonprofits and charities and all that stuff. That was my big drive. I want to make a million, so I can give it away. You know that type of mentality. When I got back, one of my biggest things was, I like to use this example. I think Tony Robbins mentioned it. One of my buddies said it, but here's kind of my story of how what kind of accelerant growth has never been.  I've never had any sort of major failure ever since then, and it's been this one thing. Back then, back in 2006, around that time is when I kind of got back on my feet again. I got back into that space. I only had a seven thousand dollar investment. It wasn't even my money honestly. It was my partner's. He raised seven thousand dollars. It wasn't that much, right. Here's my story of how I got seven thousand dollars but my fourth month, I had a million dollar month from that seven thousand dollars. 

Jaime: What?! Okay, wait, if you have time I need you to talk more about that.

Peter: Sure, sure. That's when I got into this space, back in the direct response space. I took seven thousand dollars, and I turned it into a million dollar month. I did two million dollars in four months. The next four months from the seven thousand dollars, and the rest is history. Obviously I've been selling thousands and thousands of products per day and whatnot since then. I figured I cracked the code, right. How I did that was this very important aspect. I've seen the same thing. One of my students, an eighteen year old, bought the course. Eighteen years old when he launched his campaign. Four months, one week, it took him to make his first million dollars, from taking my course. Eighteen year old. We've seen it again from a twenty year old. Now I have a sixty year, a close to sixty year old woman who just finished going through our course, watching. She's going to hit six figures in her first month. She's going to be our first million dollar woman in our course. We've had crazy success stories. I want to say one of the biggest things that I kind of teach, and what I've found fundamentally for me, was this whole concept of what I call burning your boats. This is what I, this is an example. If you ever go, when you go on vacation, I went to the Virgin Islands on my honeymoon, right. When you go to an island, the boat sometimes, if you're on a cruise, the boat will kind of go there. What do you do when you're at the island? You're laying down, you're sitting at the resort, laying on the beach, drinking, sipping coconuts, and this is the most relaxing time in your life, right. But what happens if all of the sudden your only boat to get you back to your mainland just all of the sudden burned? To the ground? There's no way of access; there's no internet, none of that stuff. What happens then? Your way of thinking is very, very different. I think what most people, most people are too comfortable. They want to just have fun and sip their coconuts, then build a million dollar business. Well, but all of the sudden if your boat was burned, what happens? Your way of thinking is now about survival. I was at the point for me where I was motivated with the right way. Honestly for me, my motivation, one of my biggest motivations, I lived in Florida at the time, and my girlfriend at the time, who's my wife now, was in California. She literally said "I need you, if you're serious about it, I need you to move sometime this year." I said "Okay." The only way I could do it was to make a stupid amount of money where I can literally get there, get to that point. That was one of my biggest carrots for me. What I did to burn my boat, I knew I had to do something dramatic. I literally wrote a check to my business partner, my ex-business partner, the one I built all of my businesses in college with. He lived in Miami at the time. He was my partner in this venture, but he was one of my closest friends. I knew he could hold me accountable. I wrote a little check, and I said, "Hey, you're going to cash this check." For me, that would hurt the most because that was my last bit of money I had. I said "You're going to cash this check if I don't launch in three and a half weeks." I had dated the check. At that point I said "You know what? If I don't, I have to do it. I'll do whatever. There's no such thing as an excuse." I literally gave myself three and a half weeks to launch. I didn't even have a product. I didn't have my manufacturer. I didn't know order fulfillment. I didn't know any of that stuff. I knew I had to do this. I gave myself three and a half weeks to launch. I did it just in time. Literally. I thought I was going to be two days late, but I hustled every last ounce of it, and I did it just in time. He didn't have to cash the check. He ripped the check. At that point, I launched, and that type of momentum I had, just doing whatever it takes, that first month I only had maybe ten sales a day. Then it was like seventeen. I remember about three weeks into that I had about seventy-something, seventy or eighty sales a day. Back then, that got my really excited. I was like "Wow, that's a lot." Soon I was doing two or three thousand products a day. You know, right after, so it was pretty crazy, just the momentum that happened. 

Jaime: In months. In months. 

Peter: Yes. 

Jaime: That's insane. Do you think the landscape is the same now? Even then it was not as much competition and all that. Do you think you can do that now? 

Peter: Well, I do that now. I typically launch a campaign. I work on a project. My managers, I give them about three weeks, maybe about four weeks, sometimes less. My last offer I gave them about eight days to launch a campaign. I kind of teach them the same philosophy, the momentum, just be obsessed. This is your whole focus, a laser like focus. Usually, like my last campaign that we launched, with my partners, we, they did it in three and a half weeks, maybe four weeks from launch. Now we're doing three or four hundred products a day. We're selling a day. By the fifth day, we were doing three or four hundred products a day. 

Jaime: Jeez.

Peter: I do that times eight or nine. You see what I'm saying? We sell thousands of products collectively. I just don't sell as many, maybe the thousands of products a day anymore, because in our industry merchant account processing is the hardest to get, so it's not the same as it used to be. It just makes it much more difficult. I have to horizontally grow versus vertically grow on a couple different ones. It's still fun.

Jaime: It's still fun. That's awesome. I love that idea of accountability and that check. That really puts the fire under you to just actually go ahead and do it. We have so many excuses, and we can let things slide for so long with procrastination. That actually gave you the intent to do it.

Peter: Most importantly find that kind of partner who would actually go cash the check or whatever. There's actually two forms that when I set goals, for me I'm very goal oriented. I've had my own life coach for three or four years now. I meet with him twice a month and whatnot. I set quarterly goals every quarter. I literally say here's my quarterly goals, all sorts, not just financially, but even like as husband, maybe eventually soon to be father, all through my community, all that stuff. Right, what I can give back relationally and family. I have certain goals I want to reach. What I do is I have two or three in every category this quarter to kind of get me to because I have the next thirty years planned out as far as what my goals and my bigger milestones are at. Every quarter you're trying to chip away more and more at every two, three, four year goal. Those two, three, four year goal chips away at your bigger thirty year goal. My mentor once told me "In order to change the world or do something dramatic in your life, it takes thirty years to do anything." I kind of think in a thirty year span. 

Jaime: You've only been alive for thirty years. This is crazy.

Peter: I know, I know. I'm thinking kind of the next thirty years and the legacy I'll be leaving. Part of that, on a quarterly basis, you do one of two things: either you punish yourself, or the second thing is you reward yourself. What I found is that when I reward myself, for me, I really don't have, I have almost everything I need. I don't need anything else. I'm very comfortable and all that stuff. When I reward myself, it doesn't really do anything. I found out I can reward other people, my friends. I can take my wife on a great trip, my mother on this trip. I reward, I'm actually more motivated. As far as punishment, I used to do a cash punishment. Right now, that doesn't hurt as much now. Right? So what I would do instead, so punishment doesn't really work. I might do I can't be on Facebook for a whole week now because when I think of punishment that sucks. 

Jaime: Oh, yeah.

Peter: Exactly. That would be like a punishment. Whatever kind of motivates you. Everyone is very, very different. That's what my goal is. Everyone is different as far as what's going to hurt, or what's going to really, really motivate you, whatever that may be. Find that within you. Make that your, anchor that, and make that a little dangling carrot. Give yourself some just crazy goal, and just surpass it. I love, the last thing I want to end, like Will Smith, I was hearing an interview with Will Smith in Reader's Digest. He talks about this one concept, and I love this concept. She was interviewing him, and he says, he's like "Everything you touch seems to be gold. Whether singing or acting or naming your kids, everything." He says it very, very simply. He's like "Well, I'm not the most talented person. I'm definitely not the most smartest person in what I do and whatnot." He says that one of the biggest differences is this, and I have the same philosophy. He says "You know if you're going to have a goal to run three miles, you know, every morning, health wise. What do most people do? Most people don't ever run. Or if they do, they might run one or two miles, and get tired, then they say ?oh that's good enough.'" Well, when Will Smith sets a goal to run three miles, he will actually go and run four miles. He runs an extra mile every single time. That little extra, or three and a half miles, every single time. He lives, he has that philosophy. You're setting a goal? Go above and beyond because most people won't even hit those goals or have them up close. That will put you over and above. For me, my work ethic stems from my mother. When I was twelve, my father passed away right in front of me. Right during that time, instead of my mom making excuses, what she did was she worked. She was working a full-time job. She worked two full-time jobs, and it was hard labor. She was making nine-fifty an hour. It was nothing. Just to support three kids. She didn't complain. She worked the night shift, and she worked the day shift, and I don't even know how she raised the kids. My brother and sister are pharmacists, and I'm a serial entrepreneur. She did a decent job. She did that for years, upon years. She never missed a day of church either and all that stuff. She's that woman. I saw that growing up from my mother, seeing how hard she worked. Now I get to, if I work sixteen hours a day, doing what I love to do, she didn't do what she loved to do. I'm not working hard enough. Does that make sense? A lot of people just don't have that. I had the privilege to grow up, obviously it's an unfortunate thing, my father passing, but that was my inspiration every single day. To say "You know what? This is exactly what my father would want me, just to be the best Peter I could possibly be." That was my inspiration from age twelve up until now, to work as hard as I have. 

Jaime: Which is also why you're talking about legacy already. You're only thirty, and you're talking about the next thirty years and how you can change the world, which is sort of an amazing thing. 

Peter: Absolutely. 

Jaime: Tell me about, I want to chat with you longer. Tell me about where we can find more about you online, if you're on Facebook, Twitter, where we can see Advertiser360 or some of the other projects you're working on. 

Peter: Okay, so we have, Advertiser 360 is Advertiser360 dot com. We really don't promote that site because it looks ugly and horrendous. We don't really try to promote it. Right now Advertiser360 is closed to the public because I'm not actually trying to sell anything. I do get requests on a case by case basis if they are seriously interested in it. I might give a discount, or I might do it on a case by case basis, only those. We don't open it up to very many people. There's no really easy way. You can email me at Peter at Advertiser 360 dot com. That's my email. You can find me on Twitter; it's PeterNguyen. It's Peter, p-e-t-e-r, last name, n-g-u-y-e-n. I have a blog. I don't really post much, but just some of the publications. It's Peter Nguyen dot net, and what else? You can find me on, just look me up on Facebook. I know there's like a million and a half of them.

Jaime: There were. I tried.

Peter: My Facebook is Phe Nguyen, that's p-h-e, and Nguyen. 

Jaime: Nice. I'll definitely link everything up too, so everybody can check it out. Definitely. I really, really appreciate it. My good friend, John Hall, actually introduced us, and I interviewed John too, so everyone can check out that interview. I really appreciate meeting you. It's been awesome, Peter. Thank you. 

Peter: Awesome. It was a pleasure as well.

Tags: E-Commerce, internet marketing, millionaire interview, Online Sales, Peter Nguyen

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews, Systems/Processes

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