We share our worst mistakes during our search arbitrage journey since 2009, so you hopefully can avoid them. These mistakes have cost us millions of dollars in missed revenue and are critical to avoid.
We share our worst mistakes during our search arbitrage journey since 2009, so you hopefully can avoid them. These mistakes have cost us millions of dollars in missed revenue and are critical to avoid.
welcome to the chop shop search arb sessions with me, Martin and Matthias Miller on the other end, coming at you straight from Aschaffenburg, Bavaria and Berlin. I thought that we today, you and I, I hope you have a pen and a paper. Because I want to ask you, could you write down your top three most critical mistakes that you've done during your long search ARP career? I'm going to write them down as well and then we could compare notes and share them because I mean, it's great. If you hear other people's mistakes, maybe you don't repeat them. Do you have the tools that you need? Lovely. It looks like an iPad pen, but I hope you can write with it. Oh, love it. It's on, it's on brand. You're probably there for some form of arbitrage related conference. Ah, yeah, yeah. You were treated to some very nice T bone steak, huh? Tomahawk steak. Some very nice T bone. Yeah. Yeah. As long as someone else is paying, it's fine. Yeah. So the top three mistakes. You got it? I'm still on the third. Thinking about the third. Okay, good. Let's show them. See if we have the same. Ah, now it's like the other way around, huh? Dude, this is really difficult. Ah, you put zero there, huh? Okay this doesn't work really, but okay. So do you want to present, do you want to present your top three mistakes? Okay, hit it. This is matching with mine. Okay, do you wanna give some some color to this point? Mmm, yes, yes. tHat's great. That's, yeah, it, that was my number two. I would have described it, my feeling was, Because when we discovered ARM, it felt like, oh shit, we've discovered like a crazy money printing machine, and we have a secret here, and we have to guard that secret, that other people don't steal it from us somehow. And with time, I learned, sure, there's, there's a There's a cha, there's a risk that people will take knowledge and go away. But if you set up the system nicely, if you make it easy for them to succeed and to make money in a stable way.'cause most people want stable income. They want they, they like to have someone to hold their hand. Also, if you can be that person, they can, that they can hold onto, most of them will stay. And also if you do it right, then it's not gonna be that easy to copy. Your system, if your system is that simple that people can just run away with it, then maybe you're not, maybe you're not doing it right. Maybe you don't have the right scale. So now I'm, yeah that I've dropped a long time ago, but a part of why I didn't want to delegate is that I had the feeling, Oh, there's nobody out there. It's like a very ego driven thing. Nobody can do this very advanced. Search ARB stuff, finding pictures on Google images or whatever it now might be. There's nobody out there. Well, if you have that feeling, that means that you haven't broken down the process enough, because it's very important when you delegate, you shouldn't delegate in order to find someone like you. Because if you're a business owner, and you want to find someone like you, it's going to be very difficult. Because your clone, your doppelganger out there, he would have their own company. He wouldn't go out searching for jobs there, most often. So you make it simple, you break down the process, and you hire for different parts. Of the process. Cause if you want this, I've said before, if you want to find someone that understands AdWords, that's a graphic designer that knows how to register domains, that's also very analytical that can build shit in Excel, like that's going to take a very long time to find that person, split it up, make it easy. Take the most annoying part or the easiest to delegate and begin with that. sO yeah that's, that, that costs a lot not to delegate early. And I also want to add, when you start to delegate it's like with any other task, you're going to suck at delegating to begin with. You're going to make mistakes, but just. You have to learn how to delegate properly. Oh, here I also want to add, in the beginning when I delegated, that's a real big fuck up. Then I was like, oh, these people, they have to face the same reality that I faced. They, I'm going to throw them out into the water and then they have to sink or swim. No way. I want to emphasize again, you, the easier you make it for the people to succeed, the more enjoyable the task will be to delegate, the people are going to be happy, you're going to be happy, so your task is not like to throw people in the water and go away and then hope that money comes out the other end, but instead make a system that will make it easier, your job is to help them to succeed, basically, and you have to invest in these people. If you don't invest in your people, you're not going to get anything back. This is like me talking with my former self. So. Beautiful. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Hmm. I'm trying to think of how long did it take us to delegate? Like we delegated very carefully. It took years. Took years. Yeah. It's true. It's true. It's a lot about doing, it's a lot about having speed. Okay, you need capital, you need knowledge, and you need speed. Speed is of the essence when you are, so if you're a one man shop just finding your own images and renewing your headlines you, you can't be fast. Cannot be fast. Yeah, yeah. Thank god I learned so much important stuff. Boom! Yeah. All right. What else do you have here on your list? What's the number, the second point or the first point? Yeah. Not scaling fast. Yeah. Please, please tell more. Yeah. That is, that is a great point. Yeah. It's search arm is so powerful that it forces you to re evaluate your perspective on your potential to make money. It sounds weird, but sometimes it can almost be like a bit scary to make a lot of money, like much more than you think. You think like this can't be real this, this can't work. But so it takes a little bit of discipline to keep on. reaching higher because you most often you can there's a book I haven't read about it, but it's called the 10x factor by Grant Cardone. I heard yesterday saying that it influenced them so much. And it's just whatever you do, then you say no, I can do 10 times more. So I think this applies to. To ARB as well, and I've observed it in many campaign managers, because say you have a couple of campaigns going, you have a little bit of success, and you have a nice ROI, say that you buy the traffic at a 50 percent ROI, that's comfy. Then you're not like, you're not dancing on the edge here because you push it so hard. So I've observed more than like more than one campaign manager. They just relax them because they like it. They feel good about themselves when the ROI is high and the volatility is low and so, but 50 percent ROI means that you're not pushing hard enough. You should push harder. You shouldn't be that comfortable. So yeah, just to underscore your point. Okay. Second point is, I actually wrote on top of the list. I jumped around because it took the delegation. Delegation was number two for me. My number one point is not going a hundred percent with search arm. That's a huge mistake because Because you have to think that we've done it for a long time, right? It was so on the fringe back then that there was also a feeling this cannot continue This will be closed soon. I'm talking back in like 2010 2011 So with that in mind We made the, in hindsight, grave mistake to think, ah, let's build out a different business at the same time. So we have something to fall back on and that business then grew and grew and grew and took more and more attention. And then we had customers and the customers need attention and you need to go to meetings with the customers. And then you don't run your arbitrage as good as you could. If I could use a time machine, and the easiest thing I would do is to tell myself stick with it and go a hundred percent in search of, and I can understand people that don't do it because it's a bit nerve wracking at times it goes up and down and sometimes your accounts get banned, especially way back when it wasn't like so kosher and and established, then I think many people got shaken out. Yeah. When their accounts got suspended one time too many and they thought this search sharp thing is over. So big mistake. Um, um, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. And you just gotta walk through the desert and learn it. Gotta feel the pain, feel the ups and downs. Not give up. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm. No. Mm. Dude, you must describe your work in very interesting terms, because nobody has ever asked me, oh, I want to do this too. Not a single person. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's true. But yeah, it doesn't mean that it's easy to reach the reach this guy. No, it's very democratic. Yeah. Everybody can make money. Dude. There's people that say that the American dream is dead. That's not true. It's still lives and it lives in search arbitrage and it's accessible on a global level. Yeah. What else? What other mistakes have you done? Yes. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's connected. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's, that's, uh, but that's when it comes to tech, it's difficult to imagine how much it can grow. There's a lot of growth. I mean, we've witnessed a lot of growth. In general, like the macro environment for tech, but we're not done, we're not done. Okay, um, my third and last one is not constantly improving. And with that, I mean, when you are, there's going to be bad times, and there's going to be good times. And in the bad times, okay, the signal is clear, you need to improve. But there's also a trap when it's going great. Cause it, there were times it was going great for a long time without, without the hiccups. And then I have to confess, I got a little bit lazy. I just went put on the autopilot and enjoyed, enjoyed the money that came in. Whereas I should have been constantly thinking, how can I make this process better? This is amazing. This time will not last forever, but now I have the breathing room and the mind space. To think about how to sharpen my tools for when this shit is going to take a turn down or in connection to the points that we brought up earlier, this cake is nearly infinite. I'm taking this piece out of it, but I want, I want to take more. What kind of tools? Can I, can I apply in order to get a bigger piece of the cake? And, and when you ask yourself that in your own organization, yeah, it goes back to like making it easy to delegate. You should think about what is annoying and repetitive and mind numbing. Cause there's a lot of tasks in the art process. If you do everything from beginning to the end, remove and automate those tasks. And if you removed and automated all of them, then you're going to find a, Hey, it's way easier to hire. You can hire much, much more. You can delegate more scale more. You're going to have less headaches. It's all going to be wonderful. We've seen many people in our industry that have had a lot of success and that then they start to party a lot and travel a lot. And so it's nice. You should, you should, uh, should enjoy your, your success and wealth and whatever. But. Don't get too distracted, it's a trap. Yeah, yeah, that's the capitalist nirvana. I have a, I have a great cautionary tale from the early days of Arb, someone that taught me the first steps. When he had success and money was just pouring in. Then his, uh, his thought was, okay, delegate. Yes, he did. So I found the dude, he's good at doing everything. And he just handed him all the credit card data, explained the whole process. Didn't, didn't do anything and was just driving around in his, in his new sports car, and then the dude just ran away. With all the credit cards and all the, yeah, it is, it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a extreme example of complacency. Yeah. Okay, lovely. Then we have, then we have, uh, our, our, our biggest mistakes in ARB. I hope, I hope the listeners and viewers have enjoyed that and I hope they can do it better. Then we've done it. So, uh, definitely possible. All the mistakes are on the way, but Hey, mistakes are part of the, part of the journey. Everybody makes mistakes. Good. With that, I say, thank you very much. And, uh, we'll see each other next week again.