An Our Manly Thinking Tank Business Interview with Mark Ling
Mark Ling Interview - Traffic Travis & Affilorama Founder
Mark Ling became an internet millionaire at 21 years of age. He is now just-turned-31 and continues as a New Zealand based internet marketing entrepreneur. Starting his first businesses while still at university, he created Traffic Travis in 2007 (Now World Number 1 SEO Software Download on CNET) & Affilorama ("#1 for Affiliate Marketing Lessons, News, Tools & Talk") in 2006. He now has 6 companies each with year-on-year growth of 50%.
Our Manly: Would you describe yourself as more of a techie or an entrepreneur?
Mark Ling: I’ve never really been a techie person. It’s frustrating when people ask me to fix their computers and I have no idea because I’ve always passed that on to someone else. The only solution I have is to Google the problem. Just because I use the computer to do marketing doesn’t mean I’m a programmer.
Our Manly: What drives you now in business in terms of your passions?
Mark Ling: Money is one motivator, not because I personally need more money, otherwise I’d draw more money out of the company’s bank accounts, which I don’t, but money in terms of being a scorecard if you want to judge the performance of your business from one year to the next. Money is one of the first things you look at. I’m motivated by the dreams I want to achieve. If I can make a lot of money I can help a lot of people. I’m much happier when I’m helping other people.
Our Manly: What percentage of Traffic Travis users do you think are SEO pro’s versus amateurs just working on their own 1 or 2 sites?
Mark Ling: It used to be 80-90% amateurs and the remainder SEO professionals. But, there are a lot of amateurs who operate as professionals because it doesn’t take that long to learn most of what you need to know about SEO.
Years ago, when we first started Traffic Travis, we sold it. There was no free version. I had a chat with my business partner about it because I wanted to make it free and he was sceptical. He suggested we have a professional version as well and I said ok, but let’s make the free version have everything the professional version has except with the pro version you can print the reports.
Our Manly: Why did you want to give it away for free?
Mark Ling: I thought by giving it away for free that it would be really good for building a mailing list. People who got Traffic Travis might want another of our products later on. Also, no matter how much the free version offers, a certain proportion of people want to upgrade to the paid edition because they love the software so much. We get about 4% upgrading to the paid edition. We get more money from just that than we ever did from when we had a pay option only.
I wanted to build word of mouth marketing and dominate a different space because it was hard to compete against all the paid software out there. We wanted to be number one in the free realm.
Our Manly: Did you design Traffic Travis for your own needs or other’s?
Mark Ling: My own needs first, and then started looking at feedback and started updating the software after that. People who use the software notice there are updates nearly every week- little tweaks that someone who doesn’t use the software everyday might not notice, but people who use it regularly notice. It can be very time consuming when you add these changes. You want to make sure that it doesn’t break anything else, and that it is still compatible with everything it receives its data from. We don’t rush changes in because we want to support them.
Our Manly: How did you get someone to design the code, if that isn’t your specialty?
Mark Ling: I actually went on-line and found a guy for some of my earliest software projects and he ended up doing them very well for ridiculously cheap prices. He had done a few hundred rent-a-coder projects so he knew how to design software to the client’s complete satisfaction.
I don’t know what gave me the idea, but one of the first projects we did together was designing software for home daycare services. It only cost a few hundred dollars to make and I’ve spent a couple thousand on updates, and over the past 4 years it has made me consistently $200 a week. Some might say that’s nothing, but hey, I’m not paying anything for it. Another software project that he made for me makes $600 a week -- it monitors keystrokes on your own or your employee’s computers -- it's just passive income now.
This same designer ended up moving down to Christchurch where I am and working for us full time where one of his first projects was making Traffic Travis.
Our Manly: What sort of investment did you make to get Traffic Travis off the ground in time and dollars?
Mark Ling: The first version cost about $8,000 with the designer working full time for 8 weeks. It had a lot less features, it just did a couple of things that were very handy. A lot has gone into it since then. Somewhere between $60 and $150k I guess.
Our Manly: Did you attend uni and finish?
Mark Ling: Yes, I was one paper short of getting two degrees. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. My dad always taught me that I needed to get a degree and get a job. While I was making all these thousands of dollars a week on-line I was trying to decide what I wanted to do for a real career and then I suddenly realised that the internet wasn’t going to go away. I thought I can make a career of just doing this, doing my hobby. And it was just a hobby but I was making a killing. I was a straight A student until I started making a lot of money online marketing then I just scraped through!
The only exam that I ever failed contained a question about how you would market a particular website. I was like great; I know how to answer that. I answered it the way I would have done it in real life. Unfortunately, the lecturers had learned a lot in theory, but I hadn’t shown up for those classes. At university, you’re going to learn about things that after finally being included in the curriculum are outdated and aren’t going to work. I had an answer for what I knew would work.
Our Manly: Do you hire staff that don’t have degrees?
Mark Ling: I’ll give you a couple of examples. I hired a guy who had straight A’s all the way through. A+’s. A degree in computer programming. After 6 months we had to let him go. He was slow and couldn’t complete anything. The Traffic Travis designer never went to university. He finished high school in 6th form and learned programming as a bit of fun. He found out online you could get little jobs writing code and ended up coding up over 200 different projects. He would look up how to do things online, join chat forums. He learned how to get things done to a client’s 100% satisfaction.
In one instance, I wanted to find out the difference between all the different types of people who applied for a writing position. We had 60 applicants and we had them come in for a 4 hour test. About 25 turned up to sit this writing test. That eliminated the ones that weren’t as keen for the position as we hoped.
We gave the applicants 10 articles to write in 4 hours. We didn’t expect them to finish, but we wanted to know what their speed was. We graded them on both speed and quality. So that no preference was shown, each applicant was given a number and their scores were collated by our judges.
The average applicant finished 4 articles and was graded 5 out of a possible 10. Only two got 10 out of 10 for all their articles. One guy got 10 out of 10 for 5 articles. He was a primary school teacher. Bear in mind that some applicants had PhD’s. One girl managed to finish all 10 articles with a score of 10 out of 10 on all of them. We found out later that she had not completed her degree. We would not have uncovered someone like her if we had just looked at grades. She’s been our best writer ever since.
Our Manly: In the context of the Australasian online space what are your thoughts on government funding? Could it help the industry grow?
Mark Ling: You can get into internet marketing without much funding. I lived off my student loan and had a part time job at Pizza Hut before I started making money online marketing. Funding would of course be very helpful, but I don’t know if it is essential.
I would almost rather give grants to people who are already showing some success, because they are more likely to succeed even further. It might take them two years less to start making ten million a year. That’s two years faster that the government is making a third of that in tax.
One of the marketers we hired had experience accessing funding and she spent a few days filling out an application for a government grant. Next thing you know we get approved for $90,000. We just paid her wage like that and we’d never even tried before. Obviously, funding is out there. I thought we’d have to jump through a lot more hoops, but it was easier for them to approve us because they could see we were already making money and that it was obvious we were going to make taxpayers a good return.
Our Manly: And what are your thoughts on the private funding investment environment for online business in Australasia?
Mark Ling: We’ve thought a lot about it, but money is not our only goal. We prepare our books for that eventuality, but more money means more stress, more people to answer to. I like having to answer to no one but myself. That’s the main reason we haven’t gone down that route.
Almost all of our businesses have doubled in size over the last year. That keeps us pretty happy.
Our Manly: Who do you curently have your eye on in online?
Mark Ling: I always look at the world market, not just New Zealand or Australia.
Firetrust http://www.firetrust.com/ , Market Samurai http://www.marketsamurai.com/, LT SEO http://www.ltseo.com.au/ are all doing good things. EHow http://www.ehow.com/ is an idea I had but never got around to doing first!
Our Manly: Are you continually having ideas about new businesses?
Mark Ling: For sure. Being involved just keeps your mind interested.
Our Manly: Thanks for your time today Mark. It has been a great discussion and Our Manly Business looks forward to hearing more of your ideas, and keeping an eye on you, in the years to come.
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