Harris Fellman

Editor:

Welcome to our conversation with Harris Fellman, the new vendor liaison at WarriorPlus, but he's also a professional magician and the entrepreneur behind TrafficForMe. Harris's unique blend of digital marketing expertise and magical entertainment provides a fresh perspective on creativity and innovation in business, and with a career that spans significant roles in various industries, including business and entertainment. I think we should dive right in. Harris, it's great to meet you.

Harris Fellman:

It's good to meet you too.

Editor:

Maybe you could start by telling us a little bit about your new role, first of all, as vendor liaison at WarriorPlus and what that entails.

Harris Fellman:

Basically, I was brought on last year, six to eight months ago to help with vendors, to help bring new... So I don't know. Everybody here, anybody reading this or listening to this, knows what WarriorPlus is, right? It's an affiliate-driven marketplace and we have sellers and we have affiliates and we have buyers. And the sellers we call vendors. And thus it's my primary job to, number one, help existing vendors do better, sell more, create better quality products that people will like, and then elevate the best products. And then also to bring on new vendors as well. So I've been just out there talking to other potential new vendors, and then I'm able to pull a couple of levers for vendors. I can't do it for everybody every week or anything like that, but if somebody has a really good product and they have a launch and they're prepared, don't call me the day before and say, "Hey, can you help me out with this?" We can help you reach out and get some more affiliates sometimes. We can help you with, we have, I don't know, a lot of people don't even realise little things. There's so much that WarriorPlus offers, and by the way, I mean I've been doing digital marketing since before WarriorPlus existed, and I haven't always been on WarriorPlus, so there's so much on there that it's good to have somebody on the inside that you can talk to and say, "Hey, can you guys do this?" Like for instance, a lot of people don't even know that there's advertising. You can pay 50 bucks a day or 109 a day depending on where it's going to be advertised, and that's another lever that I can help you pull just telling you about something like that. And it's quite effective to be able to advertise right on the marketplace. And some people don't even realise that exists because it's what I call a well-hidden feature. There's a few like that, like the inline upsell, it just got taken out of beta and I mean, it's been public, it's been a public beta, but the inline upsell is what we call a bump at WarriorPlus, or what they call a bump at WarriorPlus. And not a lot of people know about that. It's the easiest way, I'd say it is the only magic money button that actually exists in all of internet marketing is to add a simple bump so that on your checkout you just have to write three lines of copy and put a product up and some percentage of people will get it if it's a fair offer. So anyway, little things like that, it's just looking at your, so I might look at your sales funnel, I might look at your pricing models and what your product actually is and is it updated enough and whatever. So yeah, I mean all those things.

Editor:

Sounds like an exciting time though at WarriorPlus with the new innovations that are coming through. You mentioned that you've been in the digital product space yourself for quite some time. How did you get involved in WarriorPlus? Were you selling on the platform?

Harris Fellman:

A little bit. So let's get to it then. This is, you don't know it, but you've got me stepping in it. So like you said, I've been around for a long time. A lot of people know me from, I think, 18 or 17 years ago, I had a product called Sal the Site Stealer, where I dressed up like a mafia guy and I taught people how to do copywriting. Hey, forget about it. We're going to... Oh, this isn't going to work for the newsletter. It's a great accent I just did, I sounded like Tony Soprano when he was alive. But anyway, so I have a company called TrafficForMe, as you mentioned earlier. And that's not the only thing I do, clearly. I still have my traffic company, I still do other things. I have a crypto project, I have the Comedy Magic, which is my real passion. I actually, my real passion is actually making people feel good through comedy and magic and making people feel good by helping them make more money. That's why I like the vendor relationship role because I'm actually able to help vendors make more money, and that's fulfilling for me. So I had a bunch of product launches up until 2010, 2011, 2012, and I started doing JV management, which led me to doing JV swap management. So basically somebody that I was representing has a large list and I'd go to somebody else and say, "Hey, We'll promote for you if you promote for us." And I would make a percentage of whatever money was made. Anyway, long story short, I reached out to Mike Lance, I reached out to him, I've known him for forever and said, "Would you be interested in me maybe advising your vendors?" Or whatever. And he's like, "Well, actually, not in the way you're thinking, but yes, we want to bring on new quality vendors and we want to elevate." So I'm going to say something, I want to be really careful in how I say it. Over the last few years, probably since a little before the pandemic, some bad acting vendors have taken advantage of WarriorPlus and the way WarriorPlus does things. Basically they took advantage of compliance. They actually don't have lax compliance like I think some people think. What happens is a lot of bad vendors would change their sales page after they got approved. So they would put up false testimonials after they got approved. And if we catch it, we might not kick them off from one infraction. That's where I think we're friendly to the vendor. We consider the vendor to be our primary customer. So we want to work with vendors, but then I feel that they've taken advantage. I think some vendors have taken advantage and it's caused WarriorPlus to appear too lenient on things like this compared to... I mean everybody, I'd say a lot of marketplaces go through it. Like there was a time where you could put anything you wanted up on ClickBank, and then they grew and they started disallowing some things that are, I'd call it more aggressive from a marketing standpoint, but WarriorPlus, most of their products are make money online related, whether it's info products or software or what have you. So that's instantly, according to the rest of the world, this is all baloney. I mean, when people ask me, "How do you make money online?" I'm like, "There's a thousand ways. My problem is, there's too many ways." That's my real problem. I don't know what to take action on, not that will make me the most money, that works the best for me and what have you. So it's the same thing with WarriorPlus, which is, hey, they're making a lot of sales and they're not getting a lot of refunds, so it must be okay. And actually that is a good indicator, the refund rate and then the dispute rate, that is a good indicator if a vendor is selling truly good products.

Editor:

You mentioned earlier Harris, about your magic, your entertainment that you do as well. Bringing that into business I guess must be a challenge, but also something that's quite exciting for you personally to do. What's the reaction been like?

Harris Fellman:

So first of all, I really only started doing magic maybe six years ago right before the pandemic actually, because my business was doing so good, I had free time. I was like, this old passion became an obsession, but I'm the type of person that I have to monetize everything, which I haven't really monetized the magic too much. So when I first came into IM, I was still freshly trying to be an actor. I actually had a company and I was in Los Angeles and I was going on auditions. I would come to work and then I'd get called on an audition at 11:00 and then I'd have to be across town and ready to be a funny comedy actor. And I was in my twenties and I looked like I was in my forties, so I needed to somehow present that way. And I didn't really have the... Now I would have grown into it, now I'm past my forties. So I did end up saying, oh, I love performing and I love comedy. Let me bring that into my marketing. Anyway, I don't bring the magic into marketing too much. During the pandemic, I had just started and loved doing it on stage and I was like, how can I do this? And that became a thing. Large companies were hiring magicians to entertain their suddenly work from home remote workers with that. I did one show for Groove Pages. Mostly I found clients because I used my limited Google AdWords skills and I said, "Hey, looking for a virtual magic show?" And I got some companies to call me and I made good money. I mean, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Editor:

I love the fact though, that you're able to mix your passion for magic with business entrepreneurship. A lot of people look at internet marketing or digital marketing as a side hustle. They've got their full-time job, they're doing this as a side hustle, they're doing this to make a bit of extra money. I guess in many ways you're doing it almost the opposite way around. Your full-time income, I'm guessing right now, is from the digital marketing stuff that you're doing with WarriorPlus and your own products. And then the magic is the side hustle, the passion project if you like. Is that a fair assessment?

Harris Fellman:

Absolutely, because I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars. I mean, I've sold $30 million worth of stuff online in the 20 plus years that I've been doing this. So I know I can make money there. It's a trap for me though, because as I said, as long as I get to help people, I'm fine with it and it does fulfil me. So is that a passion? I have some thoughts about this. Is it my purpose? I've always thought that my purpose was, which is a crazy purpose, to make people laugh. Before all of this, I went to Los Angeles to be a comedy actor, and then I started an internet business and I got married and that became my main income. But absolutely, the digital marketing is my main income. I know how to make money here, I understand it really well. And then when we go over to magic, one of my friends, he's a clown, and he told me he was putting up social media content and he showed me something that went viral, like really viral, not not BS viral, like millions and millions of views. And it wasn't him, it was a remix. So this was about a year ago. It was a remix, which for the listeners or readers, it means you use somebody else's video. There's a button that you can push instead of sharing, it's called remix. And you can overlay your own video, you can overlay audio. There's a guy, I forget his name right now, on TikTok, that all he does is he makes a weird face at the thing. And he's literally been in Marvel movies because he's become a real celebrity. And so this is the same concept, I don't remember what it's called on TikTok, but it's called a remix on Instagram. And my friend was not even doing that. All he was doing was putting a caption over it as his remix. He just commented on it. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. Let me test that and see what happens. First one I did got a hundred thousand views. I put an avatar of my funny bald guy and I said something about it and I picked well, I mean that was good. And then I kept doing that every a few times a week for a little while. One of them got 400,000 views, most of them got 10,000 views, whatever. One of them went viral. One of them is at 4 million views now. And it is a comedy magician who happens to be bald with a goatee just like me. I didn't do that on purpose, but I think some people are like, "Oh, funny bald guy. I'm going to follow this guy." So I've gotten a few thousand followers from that. And by the way, not a lot, if you really think about it, like 4 million people have seen this and only 3,000 maybe have followed me from it, 3,000, 4,000. But that's more than half of my current followers. And then, now when I put stuff out... So now I have actually haven't put out other people's content in a little while, but I will start doing that again because it gets you followers. And by the way, I'm going to get in the weeds a little bit about social media marketing because this is the IM Newsletter. So I started putting out, I have a bunch of videos that I recorded of me on stage. So I gave them to somebody on Fiverr. And actually, the truth is, this is a good strategy for people if you've got a little bit of money, I used Onlinejobs.ph or Fiverr, and I had maybe I have 10 clips, ten seven to 10 minute onstage performances that I've not clipped down. Before anybody stops and says, "Oh, you could just do this with OpusClips, with AI, with Descript." Sorry, but AI does not know when a joke begins and ends. So you're just having to re-edit it again, the algorithm is not like, oh, this is a setup and this is a punch. Oh, this is a magic trick. Otherwise, I would do it. I love AI. So anyway, I hired seven different people at once. I gave them each a video and said, "I'll pay you five bucks. Get me six one minute videos. Each video should be a joke or a magic trick." That's it. And if you can't figure that out as a human being, then I'm not going to be able to hire you. And basically I found a couple of guys that I'm willing to work with on a regular basis that way, but right away. And I still haven't even posted all of that content that they made, which was over 40. But that stuff was not really made for social media. But so I started putting those up mixed in with the other people's content. And now, I've started putting up specific for social media that I'm creating. And I'm not inventing, I didn't invent this at all. I'll give that to the editor and they'll tighten it up and they'll make, probably that whole five minutes, they'll probably make that into a minute. And they'll put that up on social media. And then there's ways of doing that with like, they're called random chat video apps. So one of them is called, a lot of people have heard of Chatroulette, but there's 20 out there, there's more than 20 out there. So I just find random people. And the great thing about that is I was going to go out and do this in person, but it's really intrusive. Like go to your local mall and as people are walking by, "Hey, do you want to do a magic trick?" I've done it, I like it, but this is better, because people are literally sitting at home bored out of their mind. You have to be bored out of your mind if you're going on a random chat video. If that's your idea of a fun time tonight, "Hey girls, let's get together and let's go see who we can talk to." And then they're like, "Hey, you want to see a magic trick?" They're like, "Yes." There are people that are purely YouTube creators or purely Instagram creators and they actually make money, or TikTok has the TikTok shop now where they actually sell things on the app that they're presenting on. I'm not sure that that's the direction that I end up going, but basically it's build an audience and they will come, I guess. They will pay.

Editor:

It's interesting because I think that's also true of things like podcasts. You build the audience over time by the content that you're putting out, and then at the end of the day you decide, okay, how now do I monetize this audience? Is it by selling sponsorships? Is it by making a direct sale of your own product to your audience? There's a number of ways that you can do that. And I guess it's quite a similar world, if you like, with the social media marketing. You build your followers, you get those dedicated followers, and then off the back of that, you've got the opportunity to sell the merch or whatever it might be, particularly if you've got a catchphrase. So yeah, I love the fact that you are moving in that direction. Harris, I really appreciate your time with us today. And for anybody who's looking to find out more about you, maybe to book you for some magic or to find out more about your digital marketing, where do we go to find you online?

Harris Fellman:

So my name's Harris Fellman. Anywhere that you are, if you search for Harris Fellman, you're going to find me. But Facebook is Harris Fellman. However you reach me, it's me. So if you look up funnybaldguy, it's actually on Instagram and some places it's funnybald... So my domain name is funnybaldguy.me and my Instagram is funnybaldguy.me because myfunnybaldguy got suspended because I was unfollowing people with a bot and they caught me.

Editor:

Oh, no.

Harris Fellman:

And I like to say they thought I was unfollowing people with a bot because I was unfollowing people with a bot. And I prefer that to be my personal brand without the .me, but it's pretty much funnybaldguy.me. And then WarriorPlus, my email there is Harris@warriorplus.com. The best place to reach me is Facebook. Instagram for the funnybaldguy and Facebook for anything else. And it's Harris Fellman on Facebook.

Editor:

Great. Well listen, thank you so much for your time today, Harris. Been an absolute pleasure chatting with you. I wish you all the success as well with the magic shows and that's really fascinating and of course incredible success with WarriorPlus. And it's great to hear the future for WarriorPlus is looking so bright. So again, thank you for your time today.

Harris Fellman:

All right, thank you. Have a great day-