In this VIP Case Study, we feature Vick Strizheus – a successful entrepreneur, super affiliate, and mentor to hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide.
Vick is a master internet marketer with two decades of experience in online marketing. He is also a long-time client at the Vavoza agency, and our campaigns continually generate millions of dollars in revenue for Vick’s companies.
We asked Vick a series of questions about his business and marketing experiences, and in this premium article, we will share his insightful and value-packed responses to each question.
Enjoy this VIP Case Study!
– Team Vavoza
How did you earn your initial full-time income as an entrepreneur?
I started online marketing in 2005, and at that time, ezine advertising was my primary “go-to” marketing strategy for traffic generation.
However, that alone wasn’t enough. Initially, I bought solo ads sending traffic directly to my affiliate link, trying to sell other people’s products, but that didn’t work. I was getting no sales.
Looking back, I know exactly why that was – I was “just another affiliate” in the sea of thousands of affiliates trying to promote the same stuff to the same audiences. I was playing the “whoever gets lucky” game.
Then, I created a personal custom landing page and started focusing on building my personal list of subscribers. Once somebody opted in, I would then show them the affiliate offer I was promoting.
I also started doing weekly teleconference calls with my subscribers – delivering valuable information and sharing with them what I was doing and what worked for me.
My focus shifted from making a sale to genuinely serving my audience. And that’s when I had my first success! Sales started to happen naturally as more people began to connect with me on a personal level.
Ninety days later, I was earning more money per month than I used to make in a year working at a job.
Six-figure Income
As I started growing my list, I needed to stand out from the sea of other marketers doing similar things that I was doing. So, I started doing free weekly teleconference calls (exclusive events) for my list.
I would send an email to my list once a week, inviting them to a free, exclusive live call with me. I would tell them to leave their wallet in a different room because there was nothing for sale, and that I would just share some valuable insights with them. That’s exactly what I did.
At first, 5 people showed up to these live calls, then it grew to 15, 20, 50, and eventually 100.
My subscribers started to bond with me and look at me as a trusted friend and advisor on the topics I was talking about. Sales started to flow easily, and this strategy took me to my first 6-figure annual income consistently.
– Vick Strizheus
What marketing strategies made you a millionaire?
Well, when I was promoting affiliate products, I got to about $30,000 or so per month (consistently) selling affiliate products by myself. I would create my own marketing system, and that worked for me.
So, then what I did is I started to replicate what I was doing. We turned the marketing system that was working for me into a replicated system, and I allowed my customers (people who purchased products that I was promoting) to use my marketing system for free as a bonus.
And in that system that we built out, we had integrated multiple additional streams of income – different tools and resources. And my customers would essentially make money using my system.
That gave me more exposure, and I became more known in the industry.
Then, I started to charge $67 a month for other people to use my system, and that literally doubled my income overnight. I went from about $30,000 to about $60,000 – $70,000 per month once I did that.
So, to make a million dollars, I basically started to deliver more value to my community (to my people) and help them get better results for themselves, and as we did that, it naturally made my system that much more desirable in the marketplace.
More people wanted to work with me; more people wanted to buy affiliate products through me so that they could get access to my bonus (the system), and that naturally grew my income and my brand.
The strategy here is to make yourself stand out from the crowd by giving away an exclusive valuable bonus to your customers, list, or community that would make you become more irreplaceable in the marketplace, and money just follows.
– Vick Strizheus
What strategies did you focus on in 2023, and why?
In 2023, I started to focus heavily on building a true hub-centric business.
What does that mean? Think of your business as an island – most businesses don’t operate with that mindset. Most businesses are just contributing to the noise, and most marketing strategies are just contributing to the noise in the marketplace.
My strategy in 2023 has been building a hub-centric business. As I’m building my list, my goal is to turn my list of cold subscribers into community members (into my tribe), and I need to create a place where my community members will congregate.
So, I need to have a hub. I need to have my own island, metaphorically speaking, where my business becomes a destination.
On this metaphorical island (on my hub), I can sell my products and give away free stuff. I can put up all my resources, tools, and stuff from third-party companies that I’m collaborating with – all on a single platform.
I can collaborate with other companies as an affiliate, but I can also do my own live events that people can tune into.
My strategy has been building that for myself and my community.
– Vick Strizheus
What strategies are you focusing on in 2024, and why?
In 2024, I am doubling down on perfecting and optimizing my hub-centric business model, making it more intuitive for people, and turning my business into more of a destination instead of just me being out there with a product with 50 different URLs for 50 different things that I’m promoting.
I am bringing all these things I’m doing under one umbrella on a single platform. And so, I have been building a platform for myself – we’re calling it Estage, and it’s by invitation only; it’s not publicly available yet.
I am moving my entire education company, Four Percent, onto this Estage platform.
We are making it a true hub-centric, community-based, destination-like place where everybody who does any transacting with me, whether with their attention for free or with their money as a paid member, will have a place to come to and get advice from me.
People will be able to create a free account and become members of my tribe, and I can communicate with them through a verified email. They can buy products from me. They can attend my live events where we do not depend on any third party – everything is on the platform.
During live events, I can pop call-to-action buttons and show different offers in real time, and members can communicate with each other.
And we can collaborate with other companies and bring the same opportunities to my audience. It’s a real community!
Now, we are also turning Estage into a platform that my community and others in the industry can use. Nothing like Estage exists right now to the degree that we are doing it or at the level that we’re doing it.
My focus in 2024 is to bring Estage to be a mainstream platform that would serve and allow any entrepreneur, company, creator, anybody with a voice, anybody with advice, and any thought leader to be able to build their own hub on their own platform – and everything they do will be under the same umbrella.
So, they don’t have to duct tape a webinar platform over here, a Facebook group over there for social, and a course delivery system over there. All the funnels and everything is at one destination, and everything runs on one single URL.
I’m also focusing on helping people build their own real deal affiliate businesses, where they can promote any product they want and collaborate with any company they want.
And instead of giving them a bunch of theory, we’re actually giving them a complete business in a box – it’s called Affiliate Business System.
And that’s a big focus – to actually help people get started.
They don’t have to build a product. They don’t have to create a course. They don’t have to sell. They don’t necessarily need to have persuasion skills immediately. They can just tap into a done-for-them business, activate their affiliate links, and start making money immediately.
As they’re doing that, we then focus on teaching them how to grow and scale their businesses and really become true entrepreneurs, where they don’t depend on anybody else.
That’s my focus for 2024.
– Vick Strizheus
What advice would you give to someone who is just getting started as an entrepreneur?
Well, if somebody is just getting started as an entrepreneur, that means that this person is probably ambitious and wants to make money. If somebody wants to become an entrepreneur, they probably want more financial freedom and time freedom.
My advice would be the following five things in five steps.
Step 1:
Step number one is leverage. Immediately, instead of trying to create your own product, trying to sell it, and seeing if it’s going to work or not, what I would do is leverage. We live in a day and age where you can leverage so many things right now.
So, I would find great products (that are in high demand by millions of people in the world) from already established companies that are world-class, have all the distribution systems and centers set up, have all the data, and have all the optimizations for their products.
I would collaborate with these companies as an independent affiliate and earn commissions by selling their products. This way, I can be in a money-making position immediately. So, find products you can promote and earn affiliate commissions on.
Step 2:
Step number two is to build your hub; build your place of destination. Make yourself stand out head and shoulders above everybody else who is promoting that product.
This will make you more valuable. It will eliminate your competition, and you can sell the same products, but you will do it differently, and you will stand out from the competition.
Step 3:
Step number three is I would focus on building your community on your hub. And I’ll give you a target: shoot for a thousand free members in your community. If you do it right, a thousand members will pretty much guarantee you an income of a hundred thousand dollars a year.
Step 4:
Step number four is I would serve your community and become a connector for them.
You don’t have to be the original content creator necessarily, but depending on what your community is all about, whatever they want as an outcome, you source and supply solutions that they need that would help them with their challenges and problems.
A lot of these solutions will be in the form of you recommending different products on which you can earn affiliate commissions, but it would be a genuine service for them. Some things will be free; some things will be paid.
So, serve your community and be a connector for them.
Step 5:
Step number five is to think of these two questions (as you build your business, you have to get very clear on these two questions):
- Question number one: Why do you exist as an entrepreneur?
- And question number two: Why should anybody care?
When you get very clear on these two questions and answers to these two questions, you will be able to make yourself stand head and shoulders above the competition. You’ll be able to utilize your platform, and you will serve your members in a way that only you can.
So remember: why do you exist, and why should anybody care? The clearer the answer, the further off you will be.
– Vick Strizheus
Closing Remarks
That’s a wrap for this special edition of Vavoza Insider Plus.
As Vick would say, “Chicky-Boom!” (A playful term Vick likes to use when talking about earning affiliate commissions, kinda like “Cha-Ching!” but more original.)
We hope this article inspired you and gave you many actionable ideas. Stay tuned for more premium content continually.
– Team Vavoza
