Mark Ling Review
Tim Fargo, American entrepreneur and angel investor, said, “Don’t envy what people have, emulate what they did to have it.”
A major factor in your success comes down to watching successful people, analyzing how they made it and emulating them.
That’s because a lot of business success comes down to trial and error. The more trials and errors you can eliminate from your business career, the faster you’ll succeed.
It’s true that some businessmen made it the first time around, but the vast majority took several tries.
To rectify that, here’s my review of one self-made millionaire who wouldn’t give up, Mark Ling.
Who is Mark Ling?
Mark Ling is a digital marketing expert and coach. His specialty is e-mail marketing.
He has been in the business for 20 years and has been the best-selling affiliate on ClickBank several times. To date, he has generated hundreds of millions in online sales.
We recently interviewed Mark to get more insights into his success and how he got started.
He has a free course titled “Personal development niche profits” on Lurn.com. To date, 5,316 students have attended that course.
The course is described as “business fundamentals you need to get started” and consists of 9 modules. The goal of the course is teaching you how to offer personal development services.
In 2005, Mark Ling joined forces with a New Zealand e-commerce entrepreneur, Simon Slade. They formed SaleHoo, a dropshipping company.
At first, the two could only scrape together $500 each. For current expenses they had to borrow money from friends and family.
By 2020, SaleHoo grew to employ 45 people and is now providing 1.6 million branded products. Their services include dropshipping.
Their “About us” page reveals interesting details about their success.
Healthy Commissions
In around 2020, Mark Ling released an affiliate marketing course called Healthy Commissions with some partners.
Now in 2022, he is releasing Profit Singularity Ultra Edition.
The whole program is based around teaching people how to scale lucrative affiliate marketing businesses, with the power of paid traffic.
It seems very interesting, because there are multiple methods of monetization we can take advantage of.
The course is based around earning commissions on low ticket products, recurring commissions, CPA commissions, and even high ticket commissions.
I have a full on review covering this program in more detail.
Mark Ling’s Humble beginnings
Small resellers find it very difficult to get their foot in the door. Nobody wants to do business with them.
The market changes so quickly that information gets outdated overnight. It’s also scattered between a virtual million message boards, articles and videos.
A small team can hardly know where to look or how to make the right call most of the time. Such an aura of uncertainty can ruin a small business and its owners.
Before Mark came on board, Simon had a lot of trouble staying afloat. As he puts it, “My success was due to a lot of trial and error”.
That gave them an idea on how to transform SaleHoo into a monumental business.
When asked how they did it, the two explain their priority was ensuring people with no prior training or experience can get involved. After setting up an affordable and approachable marketplace, all they had to do was manage the operation.
The 137,000 SaleHoo users would be doing the grunt work and SaleHoo would represent them. Manufacturers would move more goods and buyers would get a lower price since there’s no middleman.
Untapped potential
What SaleHoo can show us is that there’s a lot of untapped potential out there. Plenty of people want to get involved in global trade but have no idea how to start.
They would benefit a lot from someone giving them ready-made templates or just updated information. The simpler the instructions, the faster people can join, so they should be as foolproof as possible.
For the record, I found SaleHoo’s guides on getting started well-written and informative, so give them a gander. They cover everything from wholesale importing to customs and marketing without having any hard sells.
It’s a lot of information to absorb. By the time you do, some of it is guaranteed to become outdated.
Logic behind dropshipping
In a nutshell, SaleHoo’s idea is called “dropshipping”. It involves operating no physical store but rather ordering stuff from a manufacturer and moving it on.
Because dropshipping has lower operating costs, dropshippers can offer lower prices to end customers. Everything is simpler and easier, with less moving parts than in a traditional store.
What Mark Ling realized is that there are plenty of niches that aren’t being taken care of. When you think about it, physical stores have limited shelf space and it’s pretty pricey.
It makes sense physical stores won’t bother with niche items unless they turn them a massive profit. So, even if there’s a demand for a niche and there’s some profit in it, physical stores just won’t bother.
However, if there’s someone who would be selling these niche items without having to worry about physical space… Now there’s a potential for big bucks.
All you would need to get started is for someone to show you the ropes. This would help you skip the trial-and-error journey so many entrepreneurs had to take.
Affilorama
Simon Slade and Mark Ling eventually started Affilorama, an affiliate training website. The idea behind Affilorama is to help people earn an online income without having to set up a physical store or a company.
There are currently three offers on Affilorama:
Pathway to Passive
What would be the lazy man’s path to becoming rich? Something that involves low risk and brings passive income, meaning a steady trickle of cash without work.
Imagine setting up a source of income that nets you 1 cent a day. That’s it, just 1 cent.
I’d wager none of your friends and family would take it seriously. I’d also wager it wouldn’t give you any bragging rights at parties.
People would most likely compassionately shake their heads when they see you. They’d whisper behind your back, “That’s the 1-cent guy.” “Good Lord.”
Yet, you’d always be able to count on that one cent. If you manage to multiply and scale that trickle up, you’d all of a sudden have a steady cash flow.
You’d also discover this kind of cash flow is unusually resilient to market changes. Oil prices would go up and down, stock and housing markets would oscillate but your cash flow would never stop.
In fact, it would even increase over time. That’s the appeal of passive income—small but steady sums that require no work.
The only thing is that passive income gets you no bragging rights. Many people would actually consider it an insult to even talk about it.
In a nutshell, that’s Pathway to Passive for you.
Affilorama actually talks about setting up websites with affiliate links and so on, but you get the gist of it. As long as your idea creates a trickle of money, that’s all that matters.
AffiloTools
Marketers need stats, stat!
AffiloTools tracks your website’s performance in real time. You get a comprehensive report, including:
- keyword management
- status check
- traffic
- revenue
- SEO
- social management
- research
- website settings
In short, AffiloTools is meant to be a no-brainer dashboard for your website. You can get the traffic data segmented by region, so you know how to appeal to local markets.
The dashboard lets you track your competition and figure out what they’re doing better than you. The status check lets you see your website from a first-time visitor’s perspective.
Is it running slowly? Are there any unresolved technical issues?
As you know, search engines loathe bloated websites that grind mobile devices to a halt. They push them down the search results with a vengeance.
That’s the only reason why Google introduced its AMP technology, which incidentally means Google hijacks a lot of mobile device traffic.
One feature I like in AffiloTools is your website’s Facebook Like trend and Twitter follower counter, showing your social impact over time. That should be a given for any website management dashboard.
Building backlinks is another huge advantage of AffiloTools. They give you more relevancy, a passive source of traffic and boost you in the search results.
AffiloJetpack
All right, so you got a visitor. The person left an email address.
Now what? You should, uh, send an email and then a PDF of some kind, right?
You have to strike while the iron is hot.
That’s where AffiloJetpack comes in. It’s a bundle of four modules:
- 90 human-written emails designed to build trust with visitors
- three PDF offers for the visitors
- a WordPress-based website template with no-brainer interface (hosting included)
- 20 content cheat sheets for making articles that draw in traffic
The bundle is designed to skip over the tedium of building things from scratch.
The cheat sheets are pretty useful even for expert writers. They shave off a lot of mental load that normally goes into writing new articles.
Research is the biggest problem with writing content. It really takes dedication and a lot of time.
What’s the catch?
Each of the three Affilorama systems has downsides. That’s only natural but you should still be aware of them.
Pathway to Passive takes a lot of time to get started. The PtP page I linked to above mentions 5 years before it really took off.
What actually happened is that Google rolled out a new search engine update, the infamous Penguin, around that time. It penalized websites that spammed keywords and links, which was pretty much everyone in the affiliate business.
The affiliate site in question didn’t use either because the owner was too lazy. Once the dust settled, it was one of the rare ones standing, which made traffic naturally flow to it.
AffiloTools is good for website management but the data size might be too small to draw any meaningful conclusions.
If you’re getting 50 visitors a month and then it drops to 30, what do you do? Should you do anything?
On the other hand, if you have a big website, AffiloTools might not be comprehensive enough, though your mileage may vary on that.
AffiloJetpack is great for newbies but will ultimately limit your growth. For example, if you keep using the 20 cheat sheets for articles, you’ll eventually run out of things to say.
Besides, if everyone is using AffiloJetpack, then all the websites start looking the same. You don’t really stand out from all the competition.
Why would a visitor go to your website? If there’s no reason, then it’s no better than the lottery.
You could always invest a bit more effort into it, but that actually invalidates AffiloJetpack, doesn’t it?
Final Thoughts Regarding Mark Ling
Like Tim Fargo said, there’s no reason to ever feel envy. Instead, channel that energy into building something for yourself.
From my experience, it’s much easier than it seems once you get started. It’s the first few steps that take the most time and effort.
It’s what you build through your own efforts that will make you feel true joy that nothing can take away. Even if it makes you 1 cent a day, that’s a wonderful start.
Learn from successful people, especially those who have made it themselves through trial and error.
If you need help, ask for it. There are people around who are more than willing to help, it’s just that they don’t want to appear intrusive.
Take up free courses whenever you can. You got the one from Mark Ling I mentioned above, but you can take any others you can find.
Knowledge is increasingly becoming globalized. That’s a good thing because it means everyone can access it.
The downside is that it’s all a big bundle of information. An average person won’t have any chance to go through it all.
We need teachers, and especially those that are willing to give us ready-made tools and solutions.
So, I hope you like what you read.