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.

Internet Marketers, Tear Down That Wall!

There are many images of walls in history and they are usually not the best things. When they are destroyed, however, there is celebration and progress. There was President Reagan’s famous call at the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”. From the pop culture side of things, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” paints a picture of the self-destructive behavior that happens when walls are constructed to keep the outside where it supposedly belongs: outside.

So what’s this have to do with Internet marketing? I contend that it has everything to do with how the industry conducts itself and the damage that it is doing in the process.

For some reason, Internet marketing and the social media industry has decided that staying insular and incestuous with our opinions and information is a good thing. We run around at events and slap each other on the back about how smart we are. We gloat over big numbers of followers and fans but never reveal the dirty little secret that most of the people doing the following are the same ones slapping each other on the back thus the group never really grows other than in ego and self-importance.

What I am trying to say here is that the industry needs a “Take Your Internet Marketer to Work With Their End User” day. I can’t tell you how many times I have shown people, real smart people who are much smarter than me, some of the features that Google has for Google Android devices. Part of me is surprised as I think “I wrote about that at Marketing Pilgrim two months ago and they don’t even know it exists?!” Then I pinch myself and realize that the VAST majority people are not glued to updates about Internet marketing, social media and new tools. Our industry just thinks they are.

For instance, with all of the recognition in social media and search marketing circles that Matt Cutts or Chris Brogan has, how many people outside the industry have a clue who these guys are? Not many. Even more interesting is that they don’t care either. Why is that? They just want the result. They don’t care about the process or even the gadgets or the ‘celebrity’. This is the mass-market person that our little industry ignores on a regular basis and at great risk to the future speed of growth of the industry.

Rather than just rant, here are some suggestions to make this a better industry that reaches more than just the cool kids:

Do real research about real people – Our industry is not unlike others in that we sponsor ‘research’ which is really a PR move dressed up as research. It is usually about some level of usage around search engines or Twitter or Facebook and it’s usually conducted by talking to marketers about their views on marketing. Well, honestly, that doesn’t help much. People trying to use social media for their business need to know about how their customers respond and interact, not their favorite marketers.

Have conferences for end users not industry insiders – Whenever I attend or speak at a conference I am amazed and annoyed at just how Internet marketing industry centric these events can be. Many attendees at major conferences are people who do search and social marketing services for others for a living. Rarely is an audience made up of a majority of people who are from the outside trying to learn more. The recent Local Marketing Expo that I spoke at in Virginia Beach was a nice shift as most attendees were there to learn about how the Internet can impact their business. Of course, we as ‘experts’ rolled them with way too much information that at times was more than I could handle so I can only guess that the SMB seeking knowledge was overwhelmed too.

Stop talking over everyone’s head – We need to stop talking as if everyone understands our language. Most people don’t and they are not real impressed when we make them feel stupid by using buzz words and industry lingo in our conversations. People are hungry to learn about Internet marketing and social media in layman’s terms and our industry as a whole does a bad job of doing just that. We need to slow down and help people where they are and speak to them in real world language. Rather than racing them to the next best thing how about we just help them get a strong basic foundation on the Internet? Or is that beneath us?

Get out of the office and talk to someone not in the industry – When we retweet that great ‘find’ from one of the social media glitterati and think we are helping mankind with passing along this information we are simply yelling into our self-created echo chamber and then thinking and acting like we are accomplishing something. We need to stop talking to each other and instead talk to the people who need help in understanding this stuff in terms they can digest and eventually apply.

What if you didn’t talk to another social media / Internet marketing insider for a week and instead sought out only people who were interested in learning more about these disciplines because it’s not what they do 24/7? Do you think more work would get done and the spread of this great stuff would move more quickly? I think so. Get away from the screen and into the sunlight. Talk to people who are hungry for knowledge at the end user stage. They need help so give it to them.

Stop the social media PDA’s, please! – If we have to suffer through more public displays of sucking up to industry people who are ‘important’ we will suffocate under our own perceived self-importance. There are plenty of people out there with the chops to hang with industry insiders on a skill and knowledge level (and likely even blow their doors off) but they choose to do work for clients instead. While I would love to hear more from them maybe that’s just the point. Do more work and less promotion. We’ll find out about you if you are good because you will have done something and not just said something.

So I ask that we “Tear down this wall” that we have created in this industry. If we stop feeding off of each other and simply get out in the mainstream there will be much greater things ahead. Right now, the Internet marketing and social media industries are experiencing stunted growth due to this insular approach to how we do business. It’s time to expand and move beyond the self-imposed boundaries and really see where this thing can go.

I am sure that many of you reading this are saying “I do that! I am not one of those!”. Good for you. Tell us how you are different in the comments. Tell us what you or your company does to be out amongst the regular folks rather than glad-handing the industry. Maybe it’s just a matter of showing others that it is truly being done that’s needed.

Sure, this is another rant to some degree but I feel better. Too bad no one outside the wall will see it .

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Web 2 Summit Points of Control: The Map

(Cross posted from the Web 2 Summit Blog...)

As themes for conferences go, Points of Control is one of our favorites. Our industry over the past year has been driven by increasingly direct conflicts between its major players: Apple has emerged as a major force in mobile and advertising platforms; Google is fighting off Microsoft in search, Apple in mobile and Facebook in social; and Facebook itself finds itself on the defensive against Twitter and scores of location startups like Foursquare.

Nor are the Internet’s biggest players the only ones in the game – the rise of tablet computing has revived nearly every major hardware and handset manufacturer, and the inevitable march of online payment and commerce has roused the financial services giants as well. You know we’re in interesting times when American Express is considered an insurgent in its own industry.

The narrative is so rich, it struck us that it lends itself to a visualization – a map outlining these points of control, replete with incumbents and insurgents – those companies who hold great swaths of strategic territory, and those who are attempting to gain ground, whether they be startups or large companies moving into new ground. Inspired in part by board games like Riskor Stratego, and in part by the fantastic and fictional lands of authors like Tolkien and Swift, we set out to create at least an approximation of our industry’s vibrant economy. (And yes, we give a hat tip to the many maps out there in our own industry, like this one for social networks.)

*Ed note, I am also indebted to the late night jam session I had with a bunch of pals in my garage...you know who you are...*

The result of our initial efforts is pictured above, you can go to the complete map here. We very much consider this to be “for your consideration,” an initial sketch of sorts, a conversation piece that we hope will garner a bit of your cognitive surplus. In other words, we designed the map so you can give it input and make it better. Over time, we plan to revise the visualization, adding various layers of companies and trends.

(click here for the map, here for the rest of the narrative...)

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Facebook Will Have Plenty of People to Put in Front of Marketers

In the last month there has been more than a little discussed regarding Facebook and privacy. There have been reactions that range from industry famous folks deactivating accounts to some deleting their accounts and everyone, including myself, having an opinion. Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has become everyone’s favorite whipping boy. It’s been a dog pile on Facebook as of late.

Well, how about a dose of reality? The chart below shows that even though it seems like everyone has tried to paint Facebook as the privacy devil incarnate, people keep coming to the site. Everyone including those crazy people who actually use Facebook but wouldn’t know a social media expert, guru or whatever if they tripped over one because they don’t read nor care about the industry prattling on about this and that.

comScore tells the story below of Facebook having one of their best months ever. Who woulda thunk?

Maybe there was increased traffic from the Like button craze? Maybe people were visiting to change their privacy settings? Both are very real possibilities. It looks like the bottom line is that despite all of the public hand wringing and concern over the future of Facebook, it makes sense that there has been little real worry at all from Facebook.

Why? Because there is a very large group of Facebook users who don’t have any clue about the privacy issues Facebook is facing. Facebook is banking on this. Even if half of the 500 million accounts have made themselves less available to marketers that leaves a significant number of people who are walking around with their privacy pants around their ankles. These people have all of their information out there for marketers to jump on. While it’s not 500 million it’s still a big number. A big enough number that Facebook will still do just fine.

Oh and those who have shut down their privacy settings? Facebook won’t stop until there is some way to get to that group as well. They can’t stop because there is too much money at stake. When you have investors to please the altruistic CEO “gonna change the world” talk makes for nice headlines but means nothing. Money talks.

Facebook is just a business. Big business. They’re not done yet. Would you be?

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