How an online poker player went from near bankruptcy to building a site with 4m readers

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Benny Luo is the mastermind behind the website NextShark.com, a news aggregator specifically targeted at English speaking Asian youth around the world. He started making money in very non-conventional ways such as playing online poker and then jumping into the dark side of internet marketing.

Since then, he’s parlayed those skills into becoming an SEO and social media marketing expert, leveraging his niche to build a site that now drives over 4 million unique visitors a month. Let’s jump right in.

A photo of Benny.

Who are you and what do you do for a living?

“I was born in California and I went to UC Irvine in Orange County, California. I started off my career as an internet marketer back in college. We did a lot of PPC and search engine marketing.

“I worked multiple jobs in college; my first job was when I was a freshman. I was doing campus marketing for Dell computers, so I was basically involved with helping increase sales on campus for Dell. Within the first six months of me being on board, our school was ranked in the top 10 universities in the nation for quarterly units sold and I believe at the time we actually beat out Apple in sales for our particular campus. Then in […] my sophomore year, Apple actually approached me, so I started working for Apple for a little bit.

“Around that time I met a guy in class and he was playing online poker. […] This guy took me under his wing and I started learning a little bit of online poker and, naturally, I met a lot of successful people. In the poker scene and in the gambling scene you tend to meet a lot of successful people that didn’t make their money from poker—entrepreneurs, actors, celebrities, and whatnot. That gave me my first taste of the high life and meeting all these high-level people that had made it in life.

“I would say he was like an early mentor of mine. He came from a family of entrepreneurs. He came from a lot of money. While my classmates […] were out partying in their frat parties, I was partying with him at the presidential suite at the Bellagio during a series of poker week or something. It was a very different experience. While I did miss out a lot on the typical college experience, I definitely made up for it with living such an interesting life early on by following this guy.

“I guess long story short, I got into poker, I got a little bit of success.”

What was the transition to the next point in your life? 

“[…] Junior year came along and then […] a friend hit me up one day and he’s like, ‘Hey, Benny. You mentioned that your poker mentor made up to US$50,000 a month in poker, right? I want to introduce you to this 16-year-old kid. He makes up to US$15,000 a day.’ I’m like, ‘Really? Doing what?’ He was like, ‘He does affiliate marketing.’

“Basically what he does is he goes to a lot of these affiliate networks and companies that have affiliate programs. He signs up for them, sells his products using his own unique link, and whatever sales that come through, he gets a cut of it.

“It’s a big business. I would say now it’s a little bit harder to make money, but back then it was really, really easy and to be completely transparent, a lot of our tactics of driving traffic were very gray area.

“[…] Let’s say Nike had an affiliate program. Me, [the 16-year-old kid], and a team of five people, we found a way to not only bid on copyrighted words to drive traffic to our site, but we also [got] our ad rank higher than the official ad of a particular company because our ads were much higher performing.

“Obviously, a lot of these were short-term stuff. We would probably get shut down within a month max and then we would move on to the next thing. It was extremely lucrative. I mean I think that we would easily make up to six figures a month […].

That’s where you started learning more on how to do social media marketing?

How did you learn to do all this?