Jeffrey Levesque Affiliate Manager, Online Entrepreneur Web sites TightropeMarketing.com TMSMS.net AffiliateAttractorFactor.com SalesFunnelManual.com Birthday: June 19th, 1964 Hometown: Liberty Hill, Texas Family: Meghan-Daughter, Reagan-Granddaughter and Jack, my Alaskan Malmute I’ve been building things for nearly my entire life. Ever since “Santa” brought me a pint-sized tool set and my brother and I built a boat in my parent’s basement, I knew that I wanted to be in construction when I grew up. By the way, in case you’re wondering, the ‘boat’ was so big that it wouldn’t fit out the door and wouldn’t have floated if our lives depended on it! But hey, we were 9 and 5 years old at the time and our Dad thought there was a lesson to be learned in the project. I’ll get to more on that later. When it came to my education, I was an excellent student, participating in accelerated and honors programs until the 11th grade. In elementary school, I was in a program that included me and 4 other students. The best part of the program was that every Monday, we were given our lessons for the entire week. We had the whole week to complete the lessons but I usually had mine finished by the end of the day on Tuesday. Now, we weren’t allowed to mess around or play hooky the rest of the week. Instead, we could go to the library and learn about the things that interested us and if we wanted to, we could submit reports on what we learned for extra credit. Well, I submitted a LOT of reports! Not so much for the extra credit, but because I liked to learn and write about the things that were interesting to me and the same holds true today. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be given the same opportunity in the later years of my education. Even though I was in honors programs, it was a cookie cutter curriculum and in the 9th grade, I began to lose interest and get bored. That summer, I got my first job as a carpenter’s helper with a friend of mine’s dad who was a General Contractor. I didn’t get to do much carpentry that year, mostly cleaning up and hauling lumber. But, I loved the atmosphere, the smell of cut wood and EVERYTHING that I was exposed to was new to me, so I was definitely looking forward to the next summer! So, it was on to another school year, more cookie cutter lessons and more boredom. That was also the year that I began to cut classes and go across the street to Onota Lake for some daytime fishing, Frisbee and Rock-n-Roll with a couple other “honors” students. School was becoming more and more boring and less and less important to me. I knew that I wanted to be a builder and couldn’t have cared less what a participle phrase was or how it was used. By the time I was half way through my senior year, I had had enough. Our school did have a vocational program, but they said that I would have needed to start the program in my junior year and wasn’t allowed in. So, I saw no other choice. I dropped out and got my GED. The funny thing was that I went to go take the exam the weekend after I dropped out and they wouldn’t let me! They said that I had to study for it and I ended up taking the test one month later. Oh, I passed the test getting 98% of the questions right and didn’t study a single minute. Finally, I could go to work as a carpenter full-time! I spent the next 5 years working for a few different contractors, learning the trade. Each contractor had their way of doing things, but there was one in particular, Mark Gardner, who I feel taught me the most important lesson. He taught me to always visualize the finished product and work backwards from that image in order to figure out where to begin. To this day, I can stand at the edge of an empty field and visualize the driveway leading up to a new home. In my mind I can travel up the steps, through the front door into the foyer and from there, my mind’s the limit! I worked with Mark for two years until he decided to retire as a general contractor and build only custom cabinets, part-time, in his Norm Abram caliber workshop. During the time I spent working with him, not only did I discover that I was actually going to make it in this business, but I was really good at it! Flash forward ten years. I found myself in Austin, Texas, where unlike in the northeast, builders could work year round in the more than moderate climate. It was 6:30 am on a Saturday morning and I was on my way to pick up one of my helpers to head to work. The roads, as usual, were fairly empty. I exited Interstate 35 and was driving on the frontage road in the left lane when a woman in a mini-van decided to make a u-turn from the center lane! The next thing I knew, I was swerving to miss hitting her in the driver’s door, which would have surely killed her since I was going 55 mph in a double cab 1 ton pickup truck that was loaded with equipment and 110 gallons of diesel fuel. My effort to save her life nearly ended up taking my own! I just caught the end of her bumper, went over the curb and then hit a 3’x5’ concrete column that holds up the expressway head-on. The result was: a broken cheekbone and nose, a broken sternum, a dislocated shoulder and more importantly, a broken hip socket. This left me out of work and bed ridden for over 3 months. Since I was self-employed and without insurance, it was totally devastating. A couple weeks later, after the swelling had gone down and I had gotten sick of watching all the daytime shows like Montel, Jerry Springer and Judge Judy, I had my soon to be wife go out and pick me up my first ‘real’ computer. I say real, because I had had a Commodore 64 from Radio Shack several years earlier, but didn’t really know how to use it. Once I got the computer setup and connected to the internet, I began to surf the net blindly, clicking on links at random. Then, one day I came across a Bulletin Board (now called Forums) and little did I know that visit would change my life! I was reading a thread that explained; if you right click on a web page and choose ‘view source’ from the menu, you could see the code that makes the page ‘work’. WOW!! Now that was cool! As a ‘builder’, I found that VERY interesting and the next thing I knew, I was no longer surfing blindly. Instead, I was surfing the Internet looking for web sites that intrigued me. Not so much the look of the site, but how they functioned. Soon after my ‘right click’ discovery, I got a hold of my first HTML editor, Arachnophilia, which I still use on occasions today! During the next few months, I went from being clueless, to starting to build my own web sites. I hosted them on a free service called Tripod. When I had recovered from the accident enough to go back to work part-time, I had a huge pile of unpaid bills and no clue how I was going to take care of them. At the time, I would have never dreamed that I would one day work as an Online Marketer full-time, but every day after work, I would come home and ‘play’ on the computer, investigating all the claims of “Internet Riches”. About a year later, I came across an offer for a “Bulk Email Home Study Course”. Now, keep in mind that back then, the words SPAM and Double Opt-in didn’t even exist. The thought of being able to sell products and services to hundreds of thousands of Internet users sounded good to me, even though, at the time, I didn’t have a product or a service in mind! So, I paid the $697 that I really didn’t have and eagerly awaited its arrival. I’ll spare you the details of the course since 99% of it is totally irrelevant for how business is conducted on the Internet today. But, I will tell you that it opened my eyes to the potential profits that marketing on the Internet had to offer. The result of my studies was the purchase of my first domain (I have 850 now!): www.lms-international-mall.com In this site, I had convinced artists and entrepreneurs from all over the world to allow me to offer their products to my almost non-existent web visitors. But there was one major problem. I had no clue of what I was doing! I didn’t know what an Affiliate Program was or that they even existed. In fact, when one of my web visitors wanted to purchase one of the products included in my mall or get more information, I was sending them to the owner’s web site! Yep, I was sending them away from my site with no means of tracking my referral or getting credit for the sale! It makes me a little ill just thinking about it now. Flash forward five years. Well, during the first five years of my online efforts, I was basically wandering aimlessly, creating web sites that didn’t look very good and certainly weren’t functioning properly. During this time, there were also long lulls from my efforts. After all, I was a builder, not a computer geek! However, I was beginning to feel the residual effects from my accident. One day, while I was walking on top of one of the newly framed walls, which were 3 ½ inches wide, my hip gave out and I fell. Luckily, I fell inside the house. So, it was only an eight foot drop. The alternative was outside the house, which would have been over thirty feet! It was then that I decided that my body wasn’t going to allow me to continue being a builder until my retirement and I was going to have to come up with some sort of alternative to take me into my “golden years”. That’s when I made the decision to give this “Internet thing” a whole-hearted effort and began to read everything about Internet Marketing that I could get my hands on. My wife thought that I was nuts and asked if what I was doing was even legal. She asked me, “Aren’t you selling air?” My Dad didn’t understand how I was going to actually make any money using the Internet and my Mom just said, “Well, I’m sure you know what you’re doing.” My reply to all of them was, “You’ll see!” Even though at that time, I had no idea if I could make it work, I just knew that I was going to do everything possible to make it work. At the very least, just to save face! During this process, I started to follow some of the more successful marketers and join their mailing lists. I started to pay attention to how they were doing things and trying to figure out how I could emulate them. My big break came when Russell Brunson was looking for ten Joint Venture Brokers. I knew that with my minimal success online, I was going to have to come up with something really unique to be chosen. So, here’s what I did: I began attending every teleconference that he was conducting and whenever possible, I was asking well thought out questions during those calls. Making sure, each time, that he knew it was me on the line. I did this by stating my name and spelling it out! Since my name isn’t the easiest to spell after hearing it spoken, I thought this would definitely make it stick in his mind. “Hi Russell, this is Jeffrey Levesque. L-E-V-E-S-Q-U-E.” It worked, because he began to remember me among the hundreds that were attending his calls. When the time came to submit an application for one of the JV Broker positions, I knew that, once again, I would have to do something unique. I knew everyone else would be submitting resume-like applications. I didn’t have an impressive list of scholastic accomplishments, so I took it to the next level! I built a web site! You can still see it online today: www.PleaseRussell.com. I keep it there to remind me to be as unique as possible whenever I’m after a high-profile client or looking to secure a Joint Venture for one of my clients. Well, I’m happy to say that it worked! I spent the next two years learning from Russell and for those lessons, I am truly grateful to him. On my own, it was still a lot of trial and error, lots of testing and a whole bunch of uncertainty. But, I was determined to ‘find my niche’ and make it happen. I was creating software products and service sites with some success, but I still hadn’t found the one thing that fit like a glove until one day it hit me. More than anything, I loved the ‘mechanics’ of the internet. I guess it was the builder in me that was coming out, but I realized that I enjoyed the building and setting up of Affiliate Systems the most. This, along with my gift to gab, made it crystal clear what my niche was going to be! So what is my niche? Affiliate Management. Soon after I made this decision, things started to fall into place for me. Once I got away from all the things that I ‘thought’ I should be doing and concentrated on what I loved to do, everything got a whole lot easier for me and some of my online friends even started calling me, “The Affiliate Mechanic”, and it stuck! And so, TheAffiliateMechanic.com was born! Although I still create info products and software applications, this web site is at the center of all that I do. Today, I’m proud to say that I currently manage some the Internet’s top marketer’s Affiliate Programs and have arranged Joint Ventures for them with dozens more. Not a week goes by that someone doesn’t email me asking me to become their Affiliate Manager, but since I’m only one person, I couldn’t possibly take on all of them and effectively manage their programs. The number of successful online marketers that don’t have their own army of affiliates promoting their products and services still amazes me and because of this, I’ve decided to dedicate a portion of my efforts during the next year to the creation of my own home-study course that will teach others to do what I do! Yes, there have been other courses produced, but they have all been created by ‘product creators’, not the persons actually in the trenches, working with the affiliates on a daily basis. This factor alone is why I’m sure, that my training will be unique and provide those interested in becoming an Affiliate Manager a definite advantage over their competitors. When I started writing this, I mentioned something about a boat that my brother and I had built in our basement and said that I would get back to it. I said this because there is a lesson for you in the story. A lesson that I didn’t realize until many years after the fact, but I’m sure that the lesson can help you with your online business and well, any business that you’re running or would like to run. If you’d like to read the whole story, you can view it online at: www.TheAffiliateMechanic.com/why-you-need-an-affiliate-mechanic But here, I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version. My father watched his two sons labor away, building a boat in his basement for weeks after school and on weekends knowing darn well that it wasn’t going to fit out the door and even if it did, it surely wasn’t going to float. When we were finished, we called our Dad into the basement to show off our accomplishment and ask for help getting it outside. So, there we were, the three of us, dragging the boat towards the door. When we got there, we tilted it on its end but it wouldn’t fit. No matter what we tried, it definitely wasn’t going to make its way outside. After a few minutes of trying, my Dad said, “Guess you boys should have had a plan!” at which point, the three of us dragged it back to the center of the basement and my brother and I, with tears in our eyes, began to take it apart. The lesson to be learned is that we didn’t have a plan. We didn’t think about what our overall outcome was going to be. Which brings me back to Mark Gardner, remember him? He was the contractor that taught me to visualize the finished product and work backwards from there. Are you seeing what I’m getting at? Instead of saying to yourself, “I want to be an Online Entrepreneur, so I’m going to build a web site”, take a step back and determine what your overall outcome is going to be. Take a long hard look at what YOU love to do. Then, think about what the highest level product in that niche could be. Once you’ve determined that, you can then begin to work backwards, towards your front-end products and eventually what your web site will need to include and how it needs to function. This method alone will save you years of fruitless labor and heartache. Oh, one more thing, don’t forget to include an Affiliate Program in your plans! There’s nothing more powerful than having thousands of affiliates out there promoting your products and services. And for the most part, operating one is basically free! Simply because you don’t pay your affiliates anything unless they make you money! And don’t think that you’re going to be successful as a “one man band” either. You’re going to need some help with all aspects of your business. Outsource as much as you can or feel comfortable in doing. Even if you have no budget right now, there are plenty of people online that are willing to work on a barter system or for a portion of the profits once the product is launched! In conclusion, I’d like to leave you with this. There are no “magic buttons” or “get rich quick schemes” on the internet! If it sounds too good to be true, chances are it is. Running an online business is no different than running any other business. It takes work. But if you’re willing to put in the effort, you can and will be successful! I wish you well in all that you do!