Warren Jolly’s site, CasinoAffiliatePrograms.com, started out as little more than a message board for web entrepreneurs who were running affiliate ads, but he was determined to grow its revenue. So he talked to his customers, and what he heard taught him how to bring his revenues up to $400,000 per month.

It wasn’t easy — most entrepreneurs would have given up if they were rejected half as often as Warren was — but check out how he did it and tell me if you agree with me that your business can benefit from Warren’s methods.

The FULL program

Video excerpts

About Warren Jolly

Warren Jolly is President and CEO of Affiliate Media, which owns affiliate-related properties such as CasinoAffiliatePrograms.com,  Poker Conference, and CAP Magazine. The company was recently named an Inc 500 company.

Notes from the interview

Owning a $400 a month forum wasn’t enough for him

“A forum is something anybody can set up and anyone can join,” he said in the interview. So he tried a new idea, “It was about wrapping a good quality product around the forum.”

I asked him if he thought of charging forum members who used his site to talk about affiliate programs. “You can’t charge the user. That’s my belief,” he told me. “You have to make your money off the advertiser who’s looking for that user, otherwise you’ll never be able to scale or build your audience.”

His advertisers were the people who ran affiliate programs for online casinos, but just running their ads wouldn’t grow his business significantly.

So he talked to affiliate managers to identify their pain

“I organized 10-20 affiliate managers who were potential customers of mine and said, ‘Hey, what are your challenges. What are you not able to do effectively online? What are you looking for?’ It was very straightforward. It sounds simple because it is.”

They told him that since they were outside the US, affiliates were reluctant to run their ads.

He created a product based on their input — but they didn’t like it

The product he created was a certification program for affiliate managers. It was designed to help them get more affiliates.

“I think like, any other entrepreneur, you’re going to get a couple of doors slammed on you. The key here is, even if you have 50 doors slammed on you, you can’t get discouraged. You need to take that experience and take it as a learning and say, ‘Okay, why did these 50 doors get slammed on me? Why did they all say no? Is it my price? Is it my product? Is it my brand name?’”

Rejection taught him how to improve his product

“We weren’t targeting the right pain point,” he realized. “We weren’t targeting the trust issue, we were targeting affiliate managers’ need to acquire more affiliates, which wasn’t enough of a sell for them. When we combined the fact that they’re going to get new affiliates from this and they’re going to convince their existing partners to continue working with them, that was really powerful.”

He says he only figured out his product “by going through the process and getting the doors slammed in my face. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”

The certification was like “rocket fuel” for his business, he told us. It’s what helped him earn $400,000 a month.

Full program includes

- I went into details with Warren about how he figured out where the revenue was for his business because I want you to be able to repeat his success.

- You’ll learn how Warren would start today if he were trying to recreate his success. He would NOT start out with a forum. Listen to what he’d use instead.

- I didn’t write about it much in my text here, but Warren’s company also runs a few affiliate programs. Listen to how he makes money by being smarter about his sites conversion strategy than bigger companies are.

Suggested comments

- We had a little tech difficulty, so we put my video and Warren’s side-by-side. How does that look to you?

- Can YOU reproduce Warren’s strategy of talking to clients to figure out what YOU should charge for? (I’m very curious about your opinion on that.)

- If you learned something from this program that I should have included the text notes, could you add it to the comments?