the WORST professional investment I’ve ever made (embarrassing)

I started freelance copywriting in 2016.

And along the way, I’ve tried my hand at pretty much every online business model out there:

- Print-on-demand
- Pay-per-lead
- Ecommerce
- Etc

None of these led to a big breakthrough though.

Another one that’s often recommended (especially for beginners) is affiliate marketing.

This is where you promote other people’s products and get paid a commission on what you sell.

At one point, I hired a coach to help me with this.

He specialized in using native ads to drive traffic to affiliate offers…

Which was a tactic I hadn’t seen many other people talk about.

This guy was a top Clickbank affiliate and had supposedly won some awards, made lots of money, etc.

So he seemed legit.

Now, if you’re not familiar with native ads…

They’re the spammy-looking ads that appear below articles on sites like CNN, Huffington Post, Newsmax, NYT, etc with the clickbait headlines.

You’ve probably seen them all over the place but not known exactly what they were.

Here’s a meme spoofing them:

LOL 😂

Anyway, this native ads coach charged $6k for a 3-month engagement.

Then you also had to pay for your ad spend, of course.

During the sales process, I remember asking what offers/niches he was running in at the time…

And he gave me a long and meandering answer about how he was moving and getting married at the same time so he wasn’t actively advertising at the moment.

Basically sidestepped the question.

Which should’ve been the first red flag.

The other question/objection I had was about refund rates.

Specifically:

Whether they were a major factor in overall profitability with this native ads model.

“Nah, there’s no need to worry about that,” he assured me.

So I pulled the trigger and signed up.

Spoiler alert:

Huge mistake.

It took probably 3k in testing to get a campaign and funnel that converted…

And as soon as it did, I started seeing refunds show up in my affiliate dashboard.

Yet my coach urged me to ignore them.

“Those could’ve just as easily not been refunds, so I wouldn’t factor them into our calculations”

Ummm WHAT?

It made no sense lol.

Regardless, I pushed on for another 6 weeks as my losses mounted.

I’ll spare you the gory details…

But all told, I burned through close to 20k on this little native ads experiment before I finally pulled the plug.

Now, two (very) expensive lessons for you from this ill-fated adventure…

If you’re hiring a coach, always make sure:

1) They’re actively practicing what they preach, and…
2) They don’t try to minimize any legitimate risks or challenges

For example:

I publish another newsletter that has nothing to do with how to grow a newsletter.

And I’ll be the first to warn you that building a profitable email newsletter is NOT an overnight endeavor.

It takes time, effort, and no small amount of persistence.

Not to say I’m the world’s greatest coach or anything.

Just that I try to approach it ethically & honestly.

Because the right coach can accelerate your progress dramatically…

But the wrong one can set you back in more ways than one.

Jim Hamilton

P.S:

Have you had a similar experience with a coach in the past?

Hit reply and let me know.

I’d love to hear about it so we can commiserate together 😂