Behavioural measures for social intelligence can be compared across all the species, and it is driven by the advantages of better approaches to understand social, adaptive behaviour such as instinct, trial and error learning to better overcome certain obstacles and survive. What animal would describe Maor better than the top predator wolf, in affiliate marketing. 

Over the years he has been focusing on everything from effective marketing and affiliation, to the spread of progressive ideas and sometimes changing the way how affiliates approach certain challenges, Maor has been able to motivate and inspire countless marketers and affiliates around the world with his successful speeches at conferences, including his own videos that he is frequently posting.  

Maor is located in Israel, where a culture of hard work and a certain mentality that leans towards risk acceptance urges people to develop their skills-bases already from a young age. In order to reach great achievements both in life - and in technology - we need to be able to take lots of risks, but in a calculated way, with a diversified approach to everything. 

1. Topicster: Maor, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and talk to us today. Tell us a bit more about your background and the path that led you to the successful affiliate marketer you are today?

Maor: Sure! my Cinderella story is also a rags to riches story, I was born in the second poorest city in Israel and it’s a miracle that I got lucky enough to build and learn what I have right now as I did not have any successful financial role model to look after growing up. At a certain point, I made a decision I wanted a better life for my family and that I’m going to be a millionaire by the time I am 30 years old (I was 21 at that time), it wasn’t like it is today, dreaming about lambos and chasing another guru, I just wanted the basic stuff for my family and me. From there I went on to work at a digital agency, opening up my first agency running large budgets in Israel and abroad and from there to now I’ve managed to open and run 15 different companies and partnerships that were all successful in making money. Today I focus on both affiliate marketing, consulting large affiliates and companies, running my first offline business – a fitness center (Boost Fitness Center) that also gave birth (due to covid-19 circumstances) to an online workout operation that we managed to get to the point where it’s the biggest one in Israel and also getting my vitamins and supplements company (NUNC) to scale!

2. Topicster: Let’s talk about productivity and how do you get things done? You are doing so many things. What kind of tricks are you using that help you follow through with everything?

Maor: I don’t feel like what I’m doing is a trick but rather my personality, I get so obsessed with my projects and businesses that all I do is think about them. That, combined with the minimum sleep that’s needed for me to function, leaves a lot of time to think about my goals, that, combined with the fact that I’ve trained myself to be super-goal-oriented to the point where everything I do is goal oriented, from simple tasks to the toughest meetings. I don’t believe in apps or anything that’s technological to help you get more productive, it’s all inside of you, you need to become your own best app. 😊

3. Topicster: Now to your daily routines, do you have a typical day?

Maor: What I love about my life is that I don’t really have a typical day. I get up really early, without any alarm, my body is used to getting up early, from there I walk my dog, make sure she has enough water and food and I go on and start reading business and stock market articles and Facebook groups stuff for at least an hour. When I finish that, I would usually start my morning campaign optimization routine and that’s where the day gets dynamic – I’d either go and workout, go on sync calls with my teams or just go on a consultation call, it’s really dynamic when you have so many partners and businesses, you tend to prioritize the businesses that are either scaling a large campaign, trying to really ride the momentum wave, just like my online workouts business that’s trying to help people and take advantage of covid-19, every day really looks differently.

4. Topicster: When you are busy as you are, and you have so many things to do, how do you balance your family life and how do you find the time for the ones you love?

Maor: It’s been really hard, the way I approached it is when I found out at a pretty young age, through playing video games – that I’m a different type of player – I would rather start with the inventory I get in the beginning, for example the first car or weapon the game gives you, till I have enough money to buy the best car and not spend money on just levelling up through small tiers and spending money on slightly better cars / weapons in the game, and I made sure to apply this method into my life. So business always came in first, and only at the point where I felt like my financial future is really secure at the point I wanted it to be – I made myself available to dating and creating a better social life, it made me an actual late-bloomer, but I love it. Nowadays business would still come first – but I know how to prioritize tasks and work really fast so that I don’t hurt any of my relationships.

5. Topicster: I wonder if you would like to share with us about a moment of struggle and adversity and failure in your life, that helped make you who you are today, that actually is part of the foundation of all that success you do have.

Maor: I have so many I could do a whole blog about it, and I would like to take the time and say that for some reason people that get into the industry tend to think or believe that it’s so easy, it’s all success and everyone is making money- and it’s so far from that. Almost everything I did started out really bad, with me either losing money or having an other really tough struggle… it’s all about having the balls and pertinence to make it work, my last project, the one I opened up almost two years ago – is my vitamins company, that started out really good in terms of the metrics, but had a lot of legal issues. Until I understood what a strategic lawsuit was, a lot of my competitors felt like they wanted to make sure they keep their market cap high and sued my company multiple times; we had to deal with a large volume of lawsuits. It was a nightmare and I learned a lot about US litigation as for a couple of months my life circled around talking to lawyers.

6. Topicster: Let’s talk about marketing and advertising. Would you say that marketing and advertising are the same or how do they differ, what are the main principles of marketing and advertising?

Maor: I believe the game is not only changing, people love saying that the industry is always dynamic and changing – I think that it’s even more than that – it’s layers on layers that are being added on top of each other so that it’s not changing completely, but rather just became more complex – and that’s what’s tough for a lot of people who are looking to join the industry and learn, they don’t know where to start, and each subject is so deep that you can spend years just studying it, unfortunately, that’s where a lot of scammers sell dreams about magic courses. The truth is that you don’t have to be good at everything – you can just be amazing at some of the stuff and make successful business and money without even knowing about the rest. You can be an amazing copywriter without knowing media buying, you can be an amazing Google ads media buyer without having a lot of Facebook experience, that’s okay, as long as you know it and know whom to team up with later on.

7. Topicster: This is a follow up question on our previous question. Let’s say in popular imagination, marketing would be the place we’d point at for something exploitative that actually panders to the lowest common denominator, or tries to make us all alike in unthinking ways, tell me how do you look at it?

Maor: I absolutely don’t agree, and even if that was true – that would be true for each campaign, meaning, each campaign would try to make us all alike in one way of thinking – and there are a lot of campaigns out there – that affect each one differently, so that makes each person unique again, or at least large groups of people unique.

8. Topicster: What is your opinion about the new thinking how we all live and work in a world where mass marketing no longer works and where micro marketing has taken its place?

Maor: I always addressed my campaigns and coached my clients to create specific personas of people who they want to target, their potential customers, so that they would get the highest metrics – from CTR to CPA of course. So that’s nothing new to me, and when you’re getting a large number of impressions and clicks – numbers can’t lie, you have to approach each campaign as a group of smaller campaigns – ad creative wise, advertorial or pre-lander wise and sometimes even site-wise.

9. Topicster: What succeeds, what can succeed? Maybe even better than that – what endures? Those are a few things you are talking about a lot during your presentations and panels, but how do you know?

Maor: I always say that smart people invent, but geniuses copy… taking it to the next level would be reverse engineering how people think and act in order to predict trends and make decisions. The closest I can really tell you, that would really help you understand the way I “know” or think – is comparing it to two things – stocks and playing football or any type of sport, stocks – you should invest in stuff that you either believe in or use, or at least can study on the subject so that you’ll be able to make the smartest decision possible, for example I love video games, and I definitely see the e-sports market exploding in the next 5-10 years, why not go there? Everything that relates to that should grow – from e-com stores selling goods that relate to that, to even owning an e-sports team. The second way I want to explain how I think is just to tell you that just like in football (or any other sport), the biggest players have done it so much time that it almost became an automated thing for them, that’s how I feel when I make small and big decisions – from optimization to creating a new business, when you know, you just know.

10. Topicster: No one believes what you believe. No one thinks what you think, and no one sees what you see in your head, what do you think are the best ways to get people to take action and actually follow the actions we are requesting them to take?

Maor: In the last year I’ve taken on a much different approach, I don’t try and make people take action, I offer something and explain why I think It would benefit me. If that person wants me to tell him why I think it’s also good for them – I tell them, and if not – then I don’t. I learned that when you make people take action or follow actions that does not last long, and as a Capricorn I’m looking for long-lasting friendships and partnerships.

11. Topicster: What do you think is truly powerful marketing and how is it grounded?

Maor: That’s a super wide ranged question, but in a couple of sentences – I think that powerful marketing is having an amazing offer that connects with an amazing team that believes in the project and is hands-on even when the project takes time, loses money or just starts off slow. As first and foremost a media buyer – it’s when all the pieces come together and you have an amazing “full stack” media buyer that really understands all the platforms.

12. Topicster: What do you think which marketing trends will drive in 2021 and what is your opinion about the latest iOS14 update, will it change the advertising game?

Maor: I’ve learned not to guess what trends are going to work specifically but rather to listen all the time and adopt. I can tell you that the iOS update would probably change a few things – it’s going to hurt people who are not into DTC marketing, and it’s going to help those guys who are not spending that much on their campaign because the campaigns are going to get less signals (conversions). I do have to say that I truly believe that the industry and giants would come with a tech solution to it all, because it’s so big and probably also very overdue.

13. Topicster: Let’s talk about the latest bitcoin and finance offer boom, what is your opinion about it? Will this grow even more and what is the best way of promoting these type of offers?

Maor: I don’t believe it’s going to grow much more than it really is to be honest. I believe it’s really big now and that people who are taking that route would eventually find themselves looking for the next big thing all the time.

14. Topicster: Content marketing is a revolution and many people will agree this is the future. How do you relate to native advertising, programmatic, mobile video and sponsored content? What are the major differences here and is it really that powerful and converts that well?

Maor: It converts like crazy, from my vitamins and supplements company to my fitness center – the traffic there is good and converting. It’s a lot different than Facebook advertising and I always know when someone comes from Facebook advertising to native when I see their ads. With natives, at the end of the day, you really target people with your copy, your ad, and it’s a much more creative based type of way to advertise. The thing I like about it the most is the way that traffic works, because of all the impressions and clicks you’re getting, you’re also getting a lot of brand recognition and that helps you get even more at the end of the day, through remarketing that traffic to Amazon sales.

15. Topicster: What is your opinion about push notification traffic, and do you think this is an advertising method that will stay?

Maor: I’ve never had a lot of luck with push traffic, couldn’t get it to work steady and couldn’t get it to scale once I got it converting. I do believe that you as a brand or offer owner need to manage and monetize your own push traffic, but I believe that as long as you have a limited budget, you should stick to the more known sources of traffic, or if you decided to buy push traffic, at least do it with a smart algorithm like Taboola’s that would help you target within that traffic by having their 3rd party cookie data.

Topicster: Maor, we appreciate your taking the time today to sit down with us and we value the insights and guidance you have provided for us and our readers today. 

Maor: Thank you for having me, it was a pleasure.