In 2005, banks wouldn’t work with Maria Sparagis because of the stigma that came from working for the biggest porn company in the world.
Today, she’s a sought-after payment solutions and sales conversion consultant, a popular public speaker, and an expert on all things crypto.
As a founding member of MindGeek, Maria taught herself digital and affiliate marketing and led the charge to better monetize content at PornHub, whether by striking deals to cut transaction fees or by setting up cross-sales funnels when people canceled their memberships.
But as Maria found out, there was (and still is) a stigma against women in the pornography industry…
Join Maria Sparagis and Stefan Georgi for episode 43 of The Road to a Billion, the call-in show where YOUR questions are answered by the experts.
Get help on everything from copywriting and entrepreneurship to relationships, mindfulness and more!
Maria Sparagis is a payment and monetization expert who started her career at MindGeek/PornHub before striking out on her own as the founder of DirectPayNet.
Today, she makes it her mission to help merchants to find the best payment solutions for their online business, with a specific focus on online subscriptions and continuity products and services.
In this episode, Maria joins us to share her story and to offer up some insights on increasing conversions and revenue while cutting overheads, minimizing chargebacks, and identifying risks and fraud.
Along the way, you’ll learn:
- Why you should accept ACH and Bitcoin payments
- Why you should revisit your payments strategy when you hit six figures of revenue
- How to build business cases and negotiate with banks and payment processors
- What to look for when buying altcoins
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Show notes
- How Maria learned about paid ads, SEO, and affiliate marketing by working at Pornhub from the age of 22.
- The type of marketing Maria enjoyed the most at Pornhub, which helped her to discover someone who made $20,000 per month from paying just $10.
- When Maria became the VP of Monetization, even though she didn’t have any experience in marketing.
- The stigma Maria experienced from her friends and family because she was working in the adult industry. Plus, why you should be studying this and the gaming industry if you want to be ahead of your competitors.
- Direct Paynet’s secret sauce as a merchant account and payment processing company, especially for direct response companies.
- [For Aspiring Offer Owners] How to work around payment processing caps when you’re aggressively scaling a new offer, even if you don’t have a processing history.
- How to connect with Maria online through her podcast Uncensored Direct Marketing.
- Is crypto going to disrupt the world of payment processing?
- Maria’s predictions on how cryptocurrencies could be used in daily life and the possible challenges in making this a reality.
- Why Maria thinks that NFTs can potentially make higher gains than Bitcoin in the near future.
- The exact criteria Maria and Stefan look for when deciding which coin to buy.
- Why being for-profit can still bring value to the world.
- A simple hack to make your offer more merchant account friendly.
- Discover marketing and psychology principles from the adult industry that can be applied to other niches.
- Maria recommends 2 books to read to learn more about crypto.
Useful resources/links
Maria Sparagis:
http://mariasparagis.com/
Maria’s monthly newsletter:
http://eepurl.com/bn3KcT
Maria’s Uncensored Direct Marketing podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
DirectPayNet:
https://directpaynet.com/
Take on writer’s block and learn to create high-converting sales copy quickly, easily and effectively with Stefan’s “RMBC” copywriting course:
https://www.thermbcmethod.com/sp3/
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