Dennis Becker Interview

Editor:

I'm really pleased today to be chatting to one of the most trusted online experts, someone who's not only created products about how to Earn1KADay, but also has a website and online community that shows you how to do just that. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Dennis Becker.

Dennis Becker:

Well, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Earn1KADay is my first membership site.

Editor:

It's such a great resource though, Dennis. I mean, it's been a mainstay of the IM space for, what is it, 2007 that it started?

Dennis Becker:

Yeah, 2007 and unbelievable. It's been, what is it, 16 years now? And when I started it, it was more of a training kind of site, and I kept adding a few bits and pieces of downloadable material that I had licence to, and I told my members, it's not about the stuff that you get here, it's about what you learn and what you do. Especially it's about the action that you take and the results that you have. And now there's about 2000 pieces of stuff inside the download area, and it's just unbelievable. I've never taken anything out. That's just the way I do things.

Editor:

Well, I mean, it's been a great resource of anybody who's not come across Earn1KADay. First of all, what's the website address so people can check this out?

Dennis Becker:

It's Earn1KADay.com. Earn1KADay.com.

Editor:

I mean, it has been an amazing resource. I remember discovering it many years ago, probably about 10 years ago, and since then, it's become perhaps one of my most visited sites on the internet.

Dennis Becker:

That's nice to hear. Thank you.

Editor:

Well, thank you. I mean, it's a fascinating story about how you got started online. Maybe you could take us back and just tell us your story.

Dennis Becker:

How far do you want to go?

Editor:

All the way back to the cradle, Dennis? No, no, not maybe not that far.

Dennis Becker:

No, no, no. My memory isn't that good. Memory isn't that good at all, actually in my advanced age. But yeah, my quick story is I had a retail store. I was selling sports collectibles mostly, since 1989. I had a regular job before that, but we won't go into that. And 1989, and the economy was pretty good and business was pretty good. And after a while though, the economy got worse and I wandered luckily, into eBay, which everybody probably knows about. And I did pretty well with that for quite a while. And after I had experienced several months and years of paying eBay fees, which were mounting to me for a couple of thousand dollars a month, I said to myself, there's got to be a better way to sell stuff than to do it all on eBay and then pay all those commissions to them. So I learned how to build a website, and that got me into an e-commerce kind of venture. And I found my way into the world of internet marketing with the Old Warrior Forum and all the great people that were there. I got onto a bunch of email lists and eventually I ended up, I don't know, around 2012 or so, getting completely out of my retail store. And I was completely online and I had been online since about 2006, but things weren't going too well back then. I kept trying everything in my power to actually make a living because the people that I was on the list of kept saying, oh, all you have to do is very, very quickly you can make a fortune from your kitchen table in your pyjamas. And I said, well, I don't need to work in my pyjamas, but I'd love to make a livable income. And it just wasn't working. I remember one day, I forget what year it was, but after I tried so many things and I finally had a day, I was always tracking my income and expenses. And I remember one day I looked at the income from the day before and it was a hundred dollars for the first time, and my wife was working with me in the store and I had her come over to my computer and I remember actually the tears were streaming down my face and I said, look, we made a hundred dollars yesterday. And she said, oh, really? Can we pay all our bills now? And I said, well, not really, not quite, but I said, it's a start. So from that point, things just sort of levelled off. And towards the end of 2005, things were at the worst. I was spending more money between the retail store and my online purchases and all that. I had gotten myself in about $300,000 of credit card debt. And I was at a point where previously I had always paid off one bill by taking a cash advance on another. And everything was pretty much tapped out. I was at my max and I applied for another credit card and they turned me down. And I was surprised because I'd never been turned down before for a credit card. And I said, uh-oh, we got to do something. So I sat down with myself, I went into a quiet room and turned off my computer and I said, we've got to figure out how to do better than this. And I concocted, I guess you'd call it a scheme, where I would leverage the things that I knew and the skills that I had. And I called it afterwards, I called it my five bucks a day system. It was actually my goal was to create short and quick income streams that would pay me, on a recurring basis, $5 a day. And the first one that I tried did pretty well, did a lot better than $5 a day. And I kept doing those kinds of projects on a pretty much a weekly basis. And I said, you know what? I should really write something about this. I should write a short report and give it away and build an email list for people that would want to do this, because it worked out pretty well for me. And I had given a heads-up to people in a community that I was in, that that was my plan. And some of those fellows, probably females too, reviewed it and said, you know what? You don't want to give this away. You want to sell it. So I tried to put it on ClickBank, and ClickBank said that that report is not long enough for the price that you want, which was only $12 at the time. You got to have a certain number of pages, I don't know, 25 or 50 pages or whatever. So I beefed it up and I added some things and added some images to make it bigger and all that. And that was the beginning of that was my first ebook. And I posted it on the Warrior Forum, the Warrior Special Offers Forum, which is different than the Warrior Plus that we know and love today, the WSO Forum and a couple pretty prominent affiliates found it, bought it, read it, loved it, and started promoting it in ClickBank. And suddenly out of the blue, I was waking up in the morning and I had another 50 or a hundred sales, and I said, wow, there, there's really something to this. And then I started getting a lot of questions from the readers, and a lot of the questions were the same. So I said, you know what? I ought to learn how to create a members' forum so that I could put all the questions and all the answers in one place and people can ask me there, and then they can all share and share and success stories and all that. So that became a free forum, a five bucks a day forum, which is still around, but not active at all now. And after that I said, well, that worked out pretty good, and it is working pretty good. So what if I asked the members, what if I asked you to pay a little bit and we will add more deliverables to what you get than just being able to chat with other members? And the response to that was pretty overwhelming. So I started the Earn1KADay forum, and that was in 2007. And I haven't looked back since. I've created a lot of membership sites since then, but that was the first, and that was obviously probably the event that changed my life.

Editor:

It's an amazing story. And I guess one of the questions I have is, you came to this maybe slightly later in life than some people would've done. And has that been something that you've then adopted as you've moved towards retirement age?

Dennis Becker:

Yeah, I started that. I wish I would've been born later, but I wasn't. So the internet wasn't around when I was becoming of employment age and all that, so I had no choice. So later in life is as good a time to start as any. You start from where you're at.

Editor:

It's an inspiring story though that you have Dennis, I mean, Earn1KADay has become such a huge resource for anyone who's looking to make an income online, and you are also legendary for your weekly emails that you send. How would you say you've managed to build that community and generate such loyalty since 2007?

Dennis Becker:

Just lucky, I guess. I don't know.

Editor:

I'm sure not.

Dennis Becker:

Yeah, no, I really feel a great responsibility to serve the people that put their trust in me and have paid their hard-earned money to support the community and me. And I think people realise that. When I mail people out, whether they're on my regular promotional list or whether they're on my members' list that I update every week, I try to tell them my real feelings and I try to be very transparent about what's happening in my life. And a lot of people sort of like that, so they feel loyalty to me too.

Editor:

You do give an insight into your personal life as well, which I know a lot of budding entrepreneurs or internet marketers maybe choose not to do the degree that you do. And I know that obviously, if I'm okay to touch on this, you have had a few health issues over the last few years, but you've not shied away from talking about that, which I guess means that people see Dennis Becker as a real person as opposed to someone who's just maybe trying to sell them something.

Dennis Becker:

Yeah, I hope so. I hope that being able to relate to me as a person and as a human being, and I have a lot of loyalty to people, especially more towards my age group, 60 plus, 70 plus, 80 plus. I'm not 80 plus yet, but I ended up getting closer to that than the others. So they relate to me and they realise that I've been where they're at and I've come through the other side and they hope that I can lead them to the same sort of success.

Editor:

Well, tell me a little bit about your company, if you like, the business that is Earn1KADay. I know that you have obviously the online elements as well, and I also know that you've done some live events over the years. What were they like to do and would you do them now?

Dennis Becker:

I did them. I haven't done one since, I think it was 2015, but we did I think seven of them every year starting in 2009. It was a lot of fun. The first one was in Orlando, Florida, the others were in Las Vegas. So that's where I met a lot of really great internet marketers who agreed to speak for me. People like Jason Fladlien and the Rhodes Brothers and Barb Ling, who I later became business partners with. These are all people that have been around and have been an inspiration to me. I don't think I have the energy anymore to do the live events. It was really draining. It really wasn't profitable, but profitable in terms of finances and profitable in terms of paying things forward and getting people together and learning and being able to sit down at the bar or at the restaurant or whatever and break bread with, that's more valuable than any amount of money.

Editor:

I mean, I guess as well... As you say, it's more the fact that the networking opportunities are there, particularly with in-person events these days where everything's done online or on Zoom, I guess it's not quite the same. In terms of your business now and the websites that you have, you touched on the fact that you work with Barb Ling. Can you tell us a little bit about that, how it came about and what it is that you do together?

Dennis Becker:

Barb was a speaker at a couple of my events and we're both from New Jersey and we flew out there together and on the same flight from Newark to Las Vegas. And we became sort of close, and she'll probably laugh about this more than I will, but the first event she spoke at, we were on the same flight coming home and I was going to meet her in the lobby at the end of the event and we were going to share a cab ride back. And she was waiting for me in the lobby about, I don't know, 4:00 AM, 5:00 AM. It was an early flight. And she said, Hey, guess what? My ankle fell off. I said, what? You're kidding? She said, no, no. She was just packing in her room or whatever, and her ankle just collapsed and she still deals with it to this day. She had to have her ankle fused and whatever. We never forgot that. I helped her get back to the airport and get her through security and onto the flight and off the flight where her husband picked her up and all that. And we became friends. And over the course of a period of time, we kept in touch on Facebook Messenger and I was, back then I was... Sean Mize, I don't know if you remember him, you probably do. Sean Mize was a great internet marketer and very prolific on the Warrior Forum, on Warrior Plus. And he decided to close his business and he sent out an email saying, if anybody is looking for good assets, I'm willing to talk. And so I said to Barb, I said, I could do this... If you were to help me, we could do this together. But I said, I don't want to do this alone. And she agreed she wouldn't want to do it alone, either pick up his complete stock of products and websites and Warrior Plus account and all that. So I said, well, let's do it together. And we became partners to do that and it's become a whole lot more sense. Sean has moved on and going on hopefully the bigger and better things, and we've acquired his product base and they did pretty well with it for a while. They're less evergreen now than they used to be, but Barb and I created a Warrior Plus business that is now our bread and butter.

Editor:

Wow. I mean, it's great to see that from just a chance meeting, along those lines, and to stay friends that you've been able to put together a viable business and got a great business partner as well to work with. I know that you've also acquired other products over the years as well. Am I right in thinking that you got the rights to Jason Fladlien's first product range?

Dennis Becker:

Absolutely. He and Robert Plank were partners in a group, a membership back in 2008, 2009, and I was a paying member, and that was another case where they said, this is sort of burning us out and we'd like to solicit bids for the rights to the ongoing membership and the content, exclusive rights to the content. This was called Daily Seminar, dailyseminar.com. So I had Jason's phone number, which I called, and he answered by himself and I said, Jason, I hear you're wanting to sell exclusive rights to your content. What are we talking as far as money? And he told me and I said, well, that's a lot of money. It was $32,000 for about a year's worth of content that they'd created, a weekly seminar-type video and audio every week. So I said, well, could we do a payment plan? And then that ended up, we negotiated, and I bought it and it was quite a gulp kind of moment for me as far as the finances, but I did it and probably one of the best purchases I ever made. Not only did I become more friendly with Jason, but I had a lot of content that was very valuable and very lucrative to me, and I still make money from that content still to this day. So that was pretty good. Another Jason story, you asked about the seminars. I forget what year it was, but one of the seminars we had, a bunch of the speakers got together for a mastermind before the seminar actually started and Jason was there and Wil Matos was there and I was there and a few others were there, and we were just telling stories and Jason said something about this piece of software that he found and he loved and he was trying to buy, that every time he tried to buy it, the website was closed because the owner of the website was in the in Europe or somewhere or Russia or whatever, and the business hours there didn't conform to Jason's business hours and they shut down the website when the business hours in their country ended. I said, I'd never heard about that. I thought everybody online was always 24/7. So Wil Matos was there, and he said, you know Jason, I could probably write that for you, that software. And as the story goes, Wil and Jason could tell you more specifically about that, but Wil was able to write that particular code and it ended up being the partnership called Rapid Crush International. Rapid Crush is an eight figure company now. So it all started with a little mastermind and a little event that you never would've imagined back then.

Editor:

That's amazing. Because I know that for anybody who's not aware of Jason and his business partner Wil, they have gone on to create, as you say, an eight figure company, and it's all based around online marketing and business opportunities and so on. And they also credit you, Dennis, with a lot of their success. I mean, they've both generated tens of millions of dollars. That must feel pretty special for you to know that you were there right at the start and that they still admire the work that you've done with Earn1KADay.

Dennis Becker:

And it does make me feel good. They both say that I was their first affiliate, so that makes me feel really good.

Editor:

I can imagine. What are some of the successes and perhaps a couple of the setbacks that you've encountered in your time online, Dennis?

Dennis Becker:

Oh, boy. In my first ebook that I wrote, Five Bucks a Day, one of the prevailing themes in there was failure is your friend. And so I've had a lot of failures and they've all led me to learn things that were valuable later on in life and in my business career. So trying to remember some of the setbacks from the point where, like I said, I had $300,000 in credit card debt back when I had the store. That was definitely a setback, but some of the things I did later on paid that off and then some. So successes, the ebook, it taught me that you never want to forsake the opportunities that are put in front of you. You want to grab at whatever and just try things. I've tried a lot of things and I've failed at a lot of things. I've succeeded at a lot of things, and the successes are less numerous, but the successes are always more long-term and more lucrative than the short-term failures.

Editor:

And did you use the products that you were creating to pay off that $300,000 worth of credit card debt?

Dennis Becker:

To some degree, but it was what I wrote about in Five Bucks a Day, which was sort of an arbitrage kind of business where I was buying Google AdWords ads and sending those ads to webpages that had Google AdSense and eBay affiliate offers on them that actually paid off all my credit card debt. At one point I was making up to $60,000 a month in AdSense earnings. On a Christmas Eve one year, I think it was 2007. Christmas Eve that year, I got an email from Google saying, we're shutting down your AdSense.

Editor:

Oh, my. Oh, wow. Happy Christmas!

Dennis Becker:

That wasn't a good thing to see on Christmas Eve. And I replied back, I said, is this a real email or is this a phishing kind of email? And I got a quick reply back saying, this is real. We don't like your business model and we're going to shut you down. And a lot of people I know that they've done that to for one reason or other, and most people, they keep whatever earnings you have in your account, but they were nice enough to let me have the earnings that I had at the time, and at that point in the month I had over $20, $30,000 in assets, earnings that they did pay me, but they didn't let me go on.

Editor:

That's a definite setback. That's it.

Dennis Becker:

Yeah. That was a setback. I was okay. I think I made more of the next year than I did that last year, and that $60,000 in AdSense earnings for a month. Obviously I had expenses, I'd had to pay AdWords ad costs and all that. So it wasn't all profit.

Editor:

For anybody who's listening to this or reading this and they're keen to dip their toe into the online marketplace, what would be your take on that? What would be your tip for anybody who's starting out today?

Dennis Becker:

I get a lot of emails from people that just joined my list saying things like, I absolutely am desperate to figure out to learn how to earn whatever the number is, a thousand dollars a month, $5,000 a month, a thousand dollars a week quickly so that I can pay my mortgage and all that. I said, well, I'm not really in the business of showing people how to get rich quick. And I said, you have to work, you have to learn. You have to pay your dues. I said, it took me three, four years before I started making anything online, I said, it doesn't need to take you that long because you have a lot of resources available to you now on the internet that I didn't have back when I started, including me. So that's one thing I advise people to do. But I also say... People say, well, I can't do anything without you say, you need to have an email list to be an affiliate marketer. And I said, that's pretty much true. I said, but I started with an email list of zero members or zero subscribers, and I started with a product inventory of zero products and I started without having anybody, any affiliates willing to promote for me in the beginning. And you got to start where you're at and you got to grow from there. And you just can't say, well, I can't do it "because". You know, got to figure out why that "because" doesn't have to be forever.

Editor:

Absolutely, absolutely. Amen to that. Definitely. Are there any places online that you would say people should start? Is Earn1KADay a good place to staff anybody who wants to dip their toe into growing or starting an online business?

Dennis Becker:

I have to be honest, Earn1KADay has seen better days. There's a lot of members there that are lifetime members. I would say just start looking around, get on some people's email lists that you trust, the people you trust trust, and sort of see what they're doing. I'm a big proponent of see what they do, not what they say. I don't like to follow the marketers that show big fancy sales page ads with pictures of their castle in Scotland and their yacht and their Lamborghini and whatever. And I know they've just gotten probably a rental on the car and just was a tourist and took a picture in front of the castle and all that. So I don't try to follow those kinds of people, but I try to follow real people and then see what they're recommending and to some degree sort of buy products. And I tell people, don't get involved. Don't get the bright shiny object syndrome and buy everything that you see that you think you could get rich quick with. But you do want to look around and see what products sort of inspire you and maybe can help you move forward. And now, especially in the last six months or eight months or whatever it is, the artificial intelligence, the ChatGPT and all that, that's opened up great opportunities to not only learn from the products that are out there that teach how to use artificial intelligence, but to get involved with artificial intelligence and learn yourself. You can ask ChatGPT questions like, what are the 10 best ways to make money online? And it'll tell you. And you can say, well, okay, expand on point 3 because I'm interested in that. And you can say, I have these skills. What would you recommend I do next? And there's so many opportunities right now to teach yourself and to learn from a few trusted others that you start following. And I would say go that route to begin.

Editor:

And what about your business with Barb these days? Barb Ling. How can people find out more about that?

Dennis Becker:

Probably the best place to start and to get on our list or to get involved with us. We have a membership called DAB Insiders. Spelled just like it sounds, D-A-B, Dennis and Barb, insiders.com. And there we provide a lot of resources to people that are internet marketers and if nothing else, you could sign up for our list through there.

Editor:

Great. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And what's next for you, Dennis? I mean, you're quite prolific in terms of your reports and the work that you do. What are you working on at the moment? What's on your to-do list?

Dennis Becker:

I've started getting in a little burned out from all the membership sites I've set up in the last year or two. And I'm very loyal to the people that are there and really appreciate their support and I don't want to leave them in the lurch like I've seen other marketers do. So I keep adding content to each site every week or every month or whatever the deal has been that I promised when I started it. So I'm sort of at the end of my membership site creation for a while. But that doesn't mean that I won't get a brainstorm in the middle of the night one night and say, Hey, this is something that I'm not doing that I could, that the people might like and start something new, but I'm going to slow down as far as that. Barb has been the product creation genius pretty much for the two of us. We have a lot of products on Warrior Plus, and she also creates a lot of bonus products because we're affiliates as much as we are product creators for some of the trusted people that we've been working with over the years. And we found that, and it's probably pretty obvious, but today, affiliates really need to provide more than other affiliates do to convince people to give them the click and to get us a commission. So we like to provide a pretty nice bonus with every affiliate promotion that we do, and she's been creating them for us and she's been pretty prolific.

Editor:

That's great. Well, we wish you continued success, Dennis. It's an amazing story you have and long may you continue doing what you do and providing all these amazing resources to the online community. So thank you and thank you for your time today.

Dennis Becker:

Well, thank you for having me here.