Interview: Curtis Fullmer

Curtis Fullmer is an Internet business professional with 10+ years of extensive experience in various aspects of the industry & a variety of Internet marketing strategies including Email, SEO, SEM, Affiliate, Social Media, Online Video, Display, Co-Reg, Blogs, CPA, CPC, CPM and others. He has worn many hats in the affiliate community, and managed several major networks. His expertise has generated over $150 million dollars in revenue within the Internet marketing industry. Always the thrill seeker, Curtis has run with the Bulls in Spain, been on Safari in Africa, completed a marathon and 2 triathlons, and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. Next on his list - to summit Mt. Everest.

Curtis is currently VP, Business Development & Account Management at Adknowledge, the largest privately-owned, internet ad network.

Tell us a little background info about yourself. Where are you from? How old are you? How long have you been making money online?
I’m originally from Placentia, CA, near Anaheim in Orange County. I’m 33 years old and I’ve been making money online for 10+ years.

Do you have any experience with affiliate marketing? If so, to what extent?
I actually got my feet wet in the industry as an affiliate. I stumbled onto Commission Junction and Linkshare in 2000, had a friend build me a website and got started making money, losing money, and learning how to play the game. That opened up a whole new world and kicked off my career as an Internet marketer.

What accomplishments so far are you the most proud of?
Professionally I’m really proud of the trajectory that my career has taken. I started off as a publisher in 2000, and then sold my site a year and a half later. Next I became an advertiser by starting up a successful online DVD rental company in 2002 with my brother, going from a home office operation to taking on investment capital and building it up to several million dollars in revenue a year and selling it in 2005. I then put on the consultant hat and was helping publishers monetize and advertisers get their SEM, Email, and Affiliate programs rolling. After that I decided I needed to better understand the inner workings of the networks and how they fit into the whole eco system. So for the last few years I’ve spent my career building and managing some of the top affiliate networks in the industry, driving some phenomenal growth, as high as a 10x increase in revenue performance.

How did you become successful? Why did you choose this career? When did you first realize the full potential in the Internet? When did you first “hit the big time?”
For me, becoming successful was a process of trial and error and not being afraid to take chances. I made money and lost money and eventually figured out how to make it more often than I lost it.

Growing up I was always pushing against the standard idea of working a J O B for the rest of my life and retiring at age 65. Early on, I jumped from job to job trying to figure out my path doing everything from shoe salesman to ski technician to car transporter to software sales and everything in between. I stumbled onto Internet marketing in college and the idea of building my own financial path to success through my own creativity and hard work was enlightening. I’ve always been very entrepreneurial, as a kid I sold lemonade on street corners and candy at school, and the Internet became a great outlet for discovering, building and testing out different business ideas, so I grabbed hold and never looked back.

Getting that first check as an affiliate really opened my eyes to the new world of possibilities that the Internet offered and that world has just gotten bigger and bigger with every step my career has taken. I really felt like I hit it big when we passed the first million dollar mark in the online DVD rental business. The million dollar mark was a real milestone for me. I figured, “If I can generate a million dollars, then why not two, and if two then why not ten!”

What do you think it takes to be successful?
A few of the many key drivers of my success include;
• Failure: Don’t be afraid to fail. Failure is a priceless education that taught me what I needed to learn to eventually succeed and get to where I am today. Many great successes started out as big failures. Never give up.
• Ignore Negative Naysayers: If you want an unconventional and extraordinary life, as I did, a lot of people will tell you to be more realistic and keep your head out of the clouds. You’ll even get this from people close to you, people you trust. Just remember, most people are not trying to drag you down and kill your dreams, they just don’t want you to get hurt and fail. The reality is that most people don’t live an extraordinary, unconventional life and often those that fail while trying, give up too soon. If you really want to make your dreams a reality, you have to ignore the people that say you can’t or shouldn’t go for it.
• Beware of Pride: This one kills a lot of would be successes. Pride keeps people from seeing all the options. Pride keeps people from listening to others with different opinions or ideas that might be very helpful. Pride keeps people from seeing they have a bad business they need to revamp, sell or throw in the trash. Pride makes poor decisions in a variety of areas including finances, timelines, expectations, people, etc. Humility is a great teacher.
• Live Your Dreams Into Reality: Stop dreaming, stop talking, stop planning, stop analyzing, START DOING! Of course the other aspects are important as well but in order to make your dreams a reality you need to get to work and make it happen. Don’t let others inactivity stop you from taking action and manifesting your dreams into real success. Real success takes real hard work and effort. It’s up to you!

Is there anything that you don’t like to do, that you just hate working on?
I really don’t enjoy working on the tedious details of optimization. Don’t get me wrong, optimization is critical to success and I love seeing the increased performance and results it creates, I’d just rather have others doing the more tedious aspects of it for me.

What have you been up to recently? What projects are you working on?
A recent project I’ve been working on is FilmFury.com. It’s a free online video site dedicated to classic films and cartoons, (think Alfred Hitchcock, John Wayne, Popeye, The Lone Ranger, Groucho Marx, Dragnet, Cary Grant, etc.) It’s a fun project and I’m just re-launching it after changing it from a paid site into what is now a free site, supported by ads.

What are your greatest strengths?
Resourceful, adaptable, tenacious, confident, people person, knowledgeable.

What are your greatest weaknesses?
• Sometimes I’m too self-reliant. I’ve realized it’s important to get support and help from others. With the right people, you can achieve more together than you ever could have on your own.
• Spreading myself too thin. There is so much happening in this industry and so many opportunities that it’s easy to take on too much and when you do that, you often don’t do as good a job at everything as you otherwise could have if you were more focused on just a few core things.

What motivates you?
I’m motivated by an intense desire for freedom to live life on my terms and to have the ability to fulfill all my dreams.

What is the best advice you’ve been given and try to apply to your life?
Attitude determines altitude. You can’t let the highs and lows of life take you on a roller coaster ride. The worst day can always get better and sometimes the best day can turn for the worse. Don’t be a victim. Ultimately, it’s up to you individually, to choose what you will make out of all that life gives you.

What kinds of people do you have difficulties working with?
I really don’t like working with people that are arrogant, prideful, self important or treat other people poorly. We work in an industry full of big egos but there are plenty of ways to make a ton of money in the industry without having to deal with those people.

How do you like to spend your free time? What does work-life balance mean to you?
I love adventure and travel so I spend as much time as possible traveling and doing adventurous things like running with the bulls in Spain, Scuba diving in Costa Rica, climbing big mountains around the world, driving around East Africa on Safari, swimming with Manta Rays in Hawaii and anything else that makes for a life changing experience or intense adrenaline rush.

Work-life balance is critical for me. There was a time when I worked 80 hours a week and wasn’t very fulfilled. My career was going well but my life wasn’t what I really wanted. I realized that I was much more happy and fulfilled in climbing the ladder of financial success by taking time to enjoy the ride, balancing it out by achieving other dreams and goals along the way as well.

If you could go back to being 18, what different career choices would you make?
Knowing what I know now, if I could go back I’d skip college completely, instead of just dropping out 75% of the way through, and I’d jump right into the industry learning and applying as much as I possibly could about driving traffic, monetization, optimization and all the other critical things that go into creating success in this business.

Oh yeah, I’d also be sure to create Google, Facebook and YouTube

What is your greatest achievement outside of work? What are some of your unfulfilled dreams?
Honestly, my greatest achievement outside of work was meeting a girl named Julie, persuading her to give me her number, go out on a date with me, date me exclusively, and just recently convincing her to say yes to my marriage proposal.

As far as unfulfilled dreams go, well, I’ve got a long list of them, but they will remain unfulfilled for only so long because it is really just a matter of time and effort before I achieve them all!

Do you have a Twitter account or Facebook “Like” page?
My Twitter.

FilmFury.com Facebook Page.

Adknowledge Twitter.
Adknowledge Facebook Page.

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Social Media vs. SEO: My Approach

The SEO vs. social media debate is one that has been going on for a number of years now, and it hasn’t abated.

A recent guest post here on ProBlogger titled Why Social Media is a Better Investment than SEO sparked some interesting commentary on Twitter after going live.

Social media fans spread it like crazy (with over 1000 ReTweets in less than 24 hours), and a number of SEO forums picked it up as an example of the closed-mindedness of social media proponents. There were also some good blog responses on the topic.

A number of readers asked for my own opinion: which camp do I stand in?

I’m going to annoy some people with this but the reality is that I’ve got a foot in both camps. Let me throw a few random thoughts out there in the hope that it’ll show why I’m a fan of both social media and SEO.

There’s a lot of traffic to be had on both search engines and social media.

As bloggers we’re all interested in being read. Traffic is important for most of us and, at a most basic level, it can be generated using both SEO and social media.

Alexa ranks Google #1 in terms of size, and puts Facebook at #2. Look at similar sites, and you’ll find similar rankings. It makes sense to me to put some effort into being a part of both efforts.

What type of traffic are you after?

For me, the answer to where you should direct your focus largely comes down to what you’re trying to achieve.

Not all traffic is the same and, depending upon your goals, you might want to look at different sources of traffic.

Example 1: on my first photography site (which is no longer active) I relied much more heavily upon search engine traffic than social media traffic to achieve my goals.

• The site aggregated reviews of cameras from around the web.
• Readers were there to research cameras that they were purchasing and rarely commented (so there was little community).
• The site was monetized largely with ads and affiliate programs (tied to camera purchases).
• Readers were very transient—they didn’t come back after they made their camera purchase.

The site wasn’t overly social (although I did try at times to make it more social). Readers simply weren’t there to belong or interact—they visited with a different intent. As a result, social media traffic didn’t really convert or make sense—but Google traffic did. People use Google to research purchases a lot! They also conduct research using social media (I think this will happen increasingly) but at the time, search traffic was converting at a much, much higher rate.

As a result, it made a lot of sense to invest quite a bit of time into learning about and implementing SEO. I dabbled with some social media stuff too (it was embryonic back then) but it was never going to be a major focus of the site as it just didn’t connect with reader intent.

These days, if I was still operating a review-type site, I’d certainly be trying to capitalize on the trend towards people researching purchases on social media, but I suspect I’d also be primarily focused upon search traffic.

Example 2: on my second photography site (and my main blog today), things are remarkably different. I started it from day one with the idea of community and belonging in mind. It was always going to be more social and interactive, and attract repeat visitors.

• People come to dPS to connect with others with a similar passion.
• Readers like to show off their work and have it seen by others.
• The site aims to create a community for learning.
• The site builds trust with readers and aims to hook them into coming back time and time again.
• The site is monetized largely with the sale of ebooks, which do best with repeat visitors/loyal readers.

As a result, dPS is much better placed to benefit from social media. Our Facebook page continues to grow fast and our interactions on Twitter have driven a lot of traffic to the site.

Having said that, I still set the site up with sound SEO principles in mind as search traffic is important to the site. In fact, Google traffic is still the #1 source of traffic on the site—although I have to say that that traffic doesn’t convert anywhere near as well when it comes to selling products to readers. The good thing about search traffic on dPS is that a certain percentage of those who arrive that way do become regular readers down the track.

Ultimately, whether you direct your focus toward SEO or social media, or both, will depend upon the goals you have and the type of traffic you’re after. In the case of dPS it is both SEO and social media, but there was more, too…

Email vs. the rest

If I had to identify the single best source of traffic on dPS, it wouldn’t be search traffic or social media traffic. It’d be email.

Search and social media have been important elements in the mix, but truth be told, our biggest days of traffic occur when we send our emails out each week. The biggest days of discussion in our forums are newsletter days. The biggest days for ebook sales, ad revenue, voting in polls, retweets on articles, Likes on Facebook, and comments on blog posts are all newsletter days.

The reality is that with dPS I spend more time on email than I do on either SEO or social media.

They all feed each other.

As I look at dPS today it’s difficult to really split the different activities that I do into neat, discrete tasks. One thing tends to feed and grow the other.

• Search traffic grows our newsletter list.
• The newsletter promotes our Twitter and Facebook accounts.
• The sharing of our content on Twitter and Facebook accounts often generate links from other sites.
• The links on other sites send traffic which grows our SEO and newsletter signups.
• I suspect the search engines are paying more attention to what’s being shared on social media in the way they rank sites.

This list could go on—every day, I see the pay off of all of our promotional and community-building activities in making other efforts more effective.

This will only get more and more important: with Google now indexing tweets and presenting them in search results, we’re seeing social and search merging more and more. I can’t imagine that this trend will decline; increasingly we’ll probably see efforts in social media helping SEO.

Personality and style matters.

Something that struck me at an SEO conference that I attended last year was that a number of the people I met seemed a little different to the people I’d met at a Social Media conference the week before.

I don’t want that to sound offensive. To be fair, there was an overlap between people at both conferences (including me), but what I noticed was that quite a few of the SEOs I met that day were people who obviously paid a lot of attention to detail and really enjoyed the process of analyzing numbers of links, strategizing about keywords, and watching the impact that small changes in content and code have on search rankings.

A number of times that day I felt my eyes glazing over at some of the presentations that were being lapped up by others. It struck me that perhaps some of us are hardwired to be SEOs, rather than social media types.

I’m sure some people are wired for a bit of both, but perhaps one’s personality type and style lends itself more to one discipline than others? I’m not saying that SEOs are anti-social or incapable of holding a conversation, nor that social media folk have no ability to think analytically (although that would have made for an attention-grabbing headline), but perhaps there’s something there for a psychologist to do some research into!

Do what suits your situation, but don’t be closed off.

Let me sum up by saying that I think there’s plenty of room to move in thinking about this topic. Your situation, your style, and your goals will no doubt lead you to a unique mix of promotional activities.

It’s okay to focus upon one above the others, however, in my opinion, you’d be something of a fool to completely close yourself off to the possibility that there might be potential in those things that you’re not doing.

Those that claim SEO is dead are just as deluded as those who claim social media will never convert—but that doesn’t mean we all need to take exactly the same approach.

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