Interview with Leading Online Advertising Expert Pace Lattin

Pace Lattin is one of the leading experts in interactive advertising and marketing. As the founder of one of the first Affiliate Marketing publications, ADBUMb in 2000, he had over 100,000 readers at its hight and was named as one of the most influential people in the industry by MarketingSherpa. In 2005 he started ADOTAS.com, which became one of the top interactive publications in the industry overnight. He was involved with the creation of SPRINKS which was bought by Google, and has run ran several companies in the industry including Affiliate.com.

1. Could you start by telling us a bit about yourself? Where are you from? How old are you?

I'm 35 years old, which is very hard for me, because I used to be one of the younger "experts" in the industry. Now I go on Facebook and see all these teen age looking kids, some of them who I honestly think know 100 times more than I do. Where am I from? All over, born outside of Chicago, but spent over half of my life in New York City (Brooklyn Baby!). I consider myself still a New Yorker, although I've calmed down quite a bit.

2. How long have you been in affiliate marketing and how did you get involved?

I've been in online marketing since 1997. I got involved in affiliate marketing after my first company was sold to a public company, and started doing consulting. I started writing scripts to help my client ABOUT.com pop it's website above content sites in 2000 or so, and discovered that this new idea I had (the pop-up) was really good for direct response also. I'm often credited as the founder of the Pop-Up, and been on the radio and TV for that years ago, but I'm not sure that's really true. I'm pretty damn sure that porn was doing it before me.

3. How long was it before you realized you could live off your affiliate marketing income?

I made several million dollars in 2000 or so from the company NextCard doing pops, but unfortunately they went out of business owing me about $2.5M. I made quite a bit covering the industry, with ADBUMb, selling sponsorships to parties (We did the first official ADTECH party, the First Official OMMA Party, and I think the first Affiliate Summit party, but I might be wrong with that one?). In 2004-2005 I made several million dollars on email submits running on FastClick.

4. What has been your biggest success to date?

My beautiful children. Seriously, that is my focus in my life right now. Have an 8-month baby that takes up much of my time, and I wouldn't change anything. My biggest business success, I'm not sure – I've had numerous companies that made it, but I still think the best is in the future.

5. I've heard you are against all the get rich "super-affiliates." What is that about?

I'm not against super-affiliates, but I hate how the industry has become dominated by guys who claim to be experts selling programs that claim they have the secret to affiliate marketing. There is no secret to this industry, except working really hard and trying one thing after another until it sticks. Any secret that people claim works to make them shitloads of money is preying on desperate folks who need money more than them.

6. What was the biggest mistake you made when you first started doing Affiliate Marketing?

Not believing Missy Ward that Affiliate Summit would be HUGE eventually. Seriously, should have listened to her, she's the smartest Gal that I know in the industry and she told me that the little group of folks at Baruch College would take over ADTECH eventually. The biggest mistake is not investing in affiliate technology 10 years ago.

7. Tell us a little bit about IndustryPace.com & Affpace.com, why did you decide to set up them and what you do over there?

IndustryPace originally was my personal blog, but it took off once I started talking more about my interactive advertising fraud investigations. So many people in the industry asked me to restart ADBUMb, but since I don't have the domain or trademark anymore, I decided to restart it kinda as Affpace.

8. Could you tell us a little bit about fraud in the affiliate marketing industry? Will fraud kill affiliate marketing?

It wont kill affiliate marketing, but it's going to have significant impact in the industry. Expect to see there being two camps of affiliate networks, one will be the scummy, get-rich, do anything crowd and the other will be the brand-centric group of performance advertising networks who refuse to work with FLOGS, Craiglist and Twitter Spammers.

9. What suggestions you would give to affiliate networks to prevent and handle fraud?

Hire a full-time compliance and fraud detection person, and add one for each $5M of revenue you do. You must be proactive with fraud prevention, too many of the networks have the "if no one complains it's not called fraud." We all know the stories of the networks that look the other way, they get slapped by Attorney Generals or worst most recently, the FBI goes after them and their friends.

10. In your opinion, what are the best places for a newbie affiliate to learn affiliate marketing? What advice would you give for them?

Honestly, start with Shawn Collins AffiliateTip. While I don't agree with everything Shawn says, he always has great links and you can move from there. AffiliatePaying is great obviously, as is OfferVault to see comparisons, which is a great tool. The best advice is to find something that you are passionate about. If you can write about something and make money from it, such as doing reviews of strip-club sites, you'll be quite happy.

11. What's the difference between a Super Affiliate and an Average Affiliate?

Five Letters. I owned a direct response display, almost 90% of our advertisers were CPA/Performance Based advertising, and I did as much as $50M/year doing that. I tried everything on a day-to-day basis on what would work, what wouldn't and then tried variants of everything. A super affiliate is someone who focuses his time on those little changes and goes with what works full-out .

12. If you could change one thing about the affiliate marketing industry, what would it be?

The name. Affiliate makes no more sense anymore.

13. What are your hobbies/interests/passions? What's your favorite movie and why?

Right now I am focused on my Buddhist Studies, my wife and kids. I love Blade Runner, you figure out why.

14. Give us a little glimpse into what a typical day in your life looks like.

Geesh, I am not sure I have a typical day. I wake up at 5, meditate, sometimes help with the baby (Sorry, I should do more!), then get on the computer, make sure I don't have phone call with clients, write something for a blog, a newspaper, a magazine, or whatever website wants an interview, post, etc. One thing I try to do is make sure that after 6 or so, I am spending time with the family. Leave the stuff behind, make room for yourself and yours. No matter how much money you make, its worthless if you can't enjoy life.

Originally published at affiliatepaying.com