Editor:
Today’s guest is someone who’s been at the heart of internet marketing for years. Based in Florida, John Cornetta is a seasoned entrepreneur, known for his deep knowledge of e-commerce, digital marketing, and helping others to scale online. Over the years, he’s become a trusted figure in this space, but just recently he took a step back following a health scare, which I’m sure we’ll touch on during the conversation, but we’re so grateful he’s here with us today to share his journey, his lessons, and his thoughts on what really matters in business and in life. John, it’s a pleasure to meet you.
John Cornetta:
My pleasure. Thank you. And we’ve finally got together.
Editor:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you have been in the digital space, as I mentioned, for years, decades. How did it all begin for you?
John Cornetta:
I was in another industry completely, and I saw the writing on the wall. It was offline. I had 12 retail stores and a nightclub and some other things, a publishing company, and I had 300 employees and I sold it all. I was thinking, do I wind it down or not? And then I was asked to help promote a network marketing company. That was one of the first that was going to try to do it all online, no belly to belly. And I did, and I was working on it a little bit, and I had a friend of mine named Scott Stamper, who I recruited to help me. And he was just doing incredible. And I kept asking him, “What are you doing?” And he said, “Well, I’m not using any of the stuff that they’ve provided. I’m building my own squeeze pages.” And I said, “What’s a squeeze page?”
And that started everything. That was 2009, I think. Now, I had already done obviously marketing, and I’d been in business since I was 19 years old. I’ve been on my own. I’ve started over 40 successful companies, and I learned about it and I figured I’m going to be out of this other company now. I’ve sold it. I’ve got money. I was living in a huge 12,000 square foot mansion in Atlanta, and I had just recently had gotten divorced, and I set 18 hours at the desk trying to figure out what this was. I remember Scott had said to me, then he says, “Oh, look at this other guy. Here’s a guy that you want to look at. He’s incredible. His name is Mike Filsaime,” he goes.
It was something like, he said, “Oh, don’t set your sights that high. You’ll never even meet that guy.” And I was like, “Watch me.”
And so that’s how I got started. I got started in Atlanta, 2009, and I came down to South Florida in late 2010 and continued. And what I got started in was I found a knack for list building, and I realized very quickly that the money was in the list. That’s what everyone was saying, especially in 2010. If you remember, it was just the list. There wasn’t really social media. I mean, in fact, I think Facebook might’ve been there, but Myspace was there and it wasn’t the big focus. And I took it to heart and I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I was going to get it done. And the claim to fame was I all of a sudden I built a huge list. And there was a site back then called Safe-Swaps, and it was in the day, people don’t do it much anymore, they should, but where there were email swaps.
So instead of buying a solo ad or selling a solo ad or whatever, you would say, “Listen, I’ll send out your email to my list, and then you send out my email to your list and I’ll keep the money from mine, and you keep the money from yours and the subscribers.” So that was a swap. And very quickly, I rose to the number one person on their board that could deliver the most clicks. And I had built a list of I think it was 400 or 450,000 subscribers in my first 14 months. And I could deliver at the time between five and 7,000 clicks in a day. And I had all these very interesting ways to build a list, just really from iteration marketing to doing long swaps to actually, while I’m not the inventor of solo ads, people kind of think I’m the grandfather of it.
I really perfected how that should have worked and how to use the extra clicks that were being wasted back then and getting money for them. So what happened is I caught the attention of a guy named David Eisner, and David said, “Hey, listen, I’d like to know, John, can I interview you about how you built that list?” And I said, “Sure.” And he said, “I don’t really believe you.” And I said, “Well, David, I tell you what, I have complete trust. Here’s my logins to my GetResponse, my AWeber, my InicaMail.” And he goes, “You’re going to give me your logins?” I said, “Absolutely.” And we weren’t even on Zoom. I said, “Just go check it out.” And he went and he came back and he goes, “I can’t believe it. You’re not lying.” I said, “I’m not.” And so we did this interview and he says at the very end of it, he goes, “This is so good.”
It was like five hours. And he says, “Can I make this into a warrior product?” And I said, “David, I don’t even know what a warrior product is, but go ahead and do it.” And he made it into a product on the Warrior Forum, and it was the number one commented and talked about thread that year. And one of the comments I’ll never forget, a person said, “I just listened to the interview with John Cornetta and holy shit me doodle, this stuff is amazing.”
So that started and then everyone knew who I was. And one night, late night, I’m up, I’m working on Skype, and I see a little PayPal notification, you got paid or whatever it was back then, and it was around $750 from Mike Filsaime. And I went, “What? Somebody’s pulling my leg.” This is going on. I had bought all his products and all this sort of stuff.
And as it turns out, Mike had found me on that site, Safe-Swap, saw that I was the number one provider and bought 3,000 clicks from me, and they might’ve been 30 cents or 40 cents or something back then it was low. And so maybe it was 900. And I just was like, “Mike Filsaime just bought something.” And then an email came in from Mike and then a Skype name. And the next day we were on Skype and we were chit-chatting and a friendship took off and I delivered the clicks. And he was really like, “Wow, that was amazing.”
I’m now selling traffic to Mike. And Mike is speaking at Frank Kern’s nephew, or a cousin, was a Trey, at his event in San Diego, a partner of mine at the time to Frank Salinas is in the audience, and my cell phone rings and he says, “Dude, dude.”
I go, “What?” He goes, Mike Filsaime is talking about you from stage. And I said, “What?” And he goes, “He’s telling everyone right now that he buys his traffic from you and how he kills it with the traffic.” And I think at the time, and he said he thinks he’s paying around 50 cents a click. Maybe it was 55 cents. And I was at the time, probably 45 cents or 30 cents or something. So he’s telling me this. And I go, “I got to go.”
And I immediately went and I changed all my PayPal buttons to the new price that Mike had mentioned on stage and orders started coming in. And I met Tom Beale after that because Tom had spoken in a mantini at that same event. And then I was selling to Rich Schefren, to Matt Bacak, to Russell Brunson. They all started coming to me because Mike had opened up the door and I was doing swaps with and or providing traffic for those guys.
And the advantage that I had, I think that the lesson here is I had 20 plus years in business at the time. And so I knew what a business owner wanted. And if you take anyone in this industry or any other industry that’s at the top of their game, they are businessmen or businesswomen at the base of it. And there’s things that they want. They want reliability…
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