Jon Shugart, CEO of Book Profits, obtained his Bachelor of Science in mathematics with honors from North Georgia College & University. Mr. Shugart received his Masters of Education Leadership from the University of Southern Mississippi. However, after teaching high school mathematics for four years, Mr. Shugart caught the technology bug and enrolled at the Georgia Institute of Technology to study Computer Science in the year 2000. It was that decision that has led him down the path he is currently on.
Over the past 19 years, Jon Shugart has followed his passion for technology and entrepreneurship and he has built several multi-million dollar businesses from scratch along the way. But more important to him than just the revenue is that the they have helped improve the quality of their customers’ lives.
Whether it was through marketing automation or the use of big data, Mr. Shugart has tackled problems that very few others have gone after solving. However, that is what gets him excited the most, and the more difficult the challenge, the more ready he is to jump in with both feet and get to work to solve it.
Luke Sample is one of the most well-known and well-respected figures in the entrepreneurial and software startup space. He has over 20 years of experience in nearly all aspects and areas of online entrepreneurship.
It takes a lot of talent, passion, creativity, dedication, discipline, hard work, and leadership skills to build several multi-million-dollar businesses from scratch and to reach the top of several fields in a single lifetime. Luke Sample has been able to do that and much more in his early life.
Luke’s success in so many diverse areas comes from a combination of his insatiable desire for excellence coupled with an unrivalled ability to never give up until the goal is reached.
One doesn’t get featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal as a 23 year old entrepreneur, or generate more than $50 million in online sales without putting everything together successfully.
Whether it’s his early successes in life as an athlete, a student, an artist, a musician and band founder, or in later years a successful founder and builder of companies, Luke is always striving for that next big goal or achievement in life.
But what is most unique about Luke and the thing he is most proud of is his ability to create success in other people. Creating success for himself is one thing, but the ability to help someone else achieve their own dreams and reach their own goals with his help is what really drives Luke now. He has been able to help thousands of people quit their jobs, make hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in several cases millions of dollars.
Creating several millionaires from humble beginnings or scratch is no small task yet it’s one Luke has been able to do over and over again, most recently with his partner Jon Shugart and the Book Profits training program.
We are delighted to have a few minutes to talk to the Book Profits founders and learn a little more about their unique approach to online sales and marketing
What is native advertising?
Jon Shugart:
In terms of native advertising, I’m referring to, I guess, networks where the ads are showing up. You probably have seen them. Most of them are usually pushing some kind of diet offer or credit check, but they’re showing up all over the internet, not necessarily search ads or Facebook ads.
We’re talking your standard. They kind of blend into the article, is really what, I guess, is the best way to describe it. There’s a blog out there talking about weight loss or something, and then they’ve got advertising that kind of blends in a little bit with that.
And you see that a lot these days. You see those types of ads, when you click on an article in Facebook and you’ll see things, maybe it’s silly things like, I don’t know, the top 10 things this or that. And usually it’s a number a lot of times, right?
The top 10 biggest celebrity homes and you click on this thing and then you go through these pages and pages of each celebrity home has three pages dedicated to it, right? You go through all this whole countdown, but usually embedded in those pages and at the bottom there’ll be networks. Like, I don’t know, the Taboola comes to mind. Outbrain as well. And so those are kind of just embedded ads in those articles.
I guess that was the most recent ad arbitrage opportunity, they come in waves, right? Every time there’s a new advertising platform, there’s that maturity of that advertising platform that takes place, and usually there’s opportunity because they’re hungry for money.
And so they end up taking a lot of advertisers and things like that, that I guess, they normally will not take as much when they mature and have the scrutiny on them and things like that. Usually with new advertising platforms, there’s this time period where there’s a good chance that you can make money arbitraging. That’s basically what I’m trying to get at.
There’s some information asymmetry in those initial stages. Somebody will become an expert at it, will recognize that they can get cheaper clicks or more effective traffic or leads than the average person hence and then they resell that traffic at market rates, even though they were able to get it for cheaper.
Jon Shugart:
Exactly. Yeah. It’s a great way to make money for a while typically. However, it’s a game, and like Luke said earlier, it requires a lot of skill that the average person… When we set out and looked at different methods, we were looking for something that would eliminate a lot of skill set needed for online marketing.
And so the arbitrage that we like to focus on has to do more with the physical world, E-commerce type scenarios and things like that, and got away from what we call click arbitrage, really getting paid from one ad network and paying cheaper for the traffic and things like that, because they’re just not sustainable usually long-term.
Eventually you’ll either have more advertisers and your initial costs will go up like in Facebook’s case or something like that and it just gets more expensive and you just can’t make money arbitraging the traffic usually overtime.
That brings really a couple of great points. Speaking of inventory, if you’re going to arbitrage something, you want to arbitrage something that is not likely to lose its value over time, because you can’t necessarily control when it’s going to sell always. So looking for those opportunities, you want to try and find products that are likely at least over the next 12, 24 months to go down significantly in value.
Preferably have a consistent market that’s looking for them and that’s how we got started with textbooks. We discovered a process to buy books online and then sell them on Amazon for a profit!
Initially, the problem was it was so time consuming to find profitable books, so we automated it! To put it simply, with book arbitrage you buy books online that are in demand at low prices and resell them for more than you purchased the books for.
You never have to touch the books either, you just keep the profits, and that’s what we show people how to do with our Book Profits system.
Is it profitable to sell books on Amazon?
Luke Sample:
It can be amazingly profitable, if you know how to do it the right way!
For beginners and people first starting out, it can be a very frustrating experience to find profitable books to sell and most people give up without really trying to learn which books will be in demand and what price to pay for them so you can sell for a profit.
We automated the entire process of finding profitable books to buy and then immediately list for sale on Amazon, and we hear time and time again of people making money month after month.
I want to share a real testimonial from a guy named Patrick who recently tried the Book Profits program, “My name is Patrick, I’m from Wisconsin. Originally, when I got into this, I just wanted to get financial freedom so that I could travel the world. That’s been my big dream. I just didn’t want to have a normal life and have two weeks of vacation. So I really just came in with that dream just to go have experiences. I just didn’t want to be tied down.”
“In my first year with this. I was able to get to the six-figure mark and stop driving Uber. So that was my big goal, and really was able to start traveling from that.”
That’s potential and profit and performance in one amazing story after another, and we love to hear that at Book Profits.
