And your guide helping you make affiliate marketing support.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to this week's affiliate marketing podcast with Mealy Ann Johnston. And I am delighted to have somebody very special join me this week. Authority ACA offers an insightful blog, a weekly podcast of how to do better website marketing, and offers in-depth training courses on mastering SEO. And joining me this week is one of its founders, Mark Webster, who will be deep diving the affiliate side of program engagement and what affiliate managers can do and should know to support their content partnerships in performance marketing. Hi, Mark. It's a pleasure to have you on this podcast with me this week. And it's been a long time coming because I constantly get asked by affiliate program managers how best to support and work with their SEO-based affiliates. And there's nobody else I could think of that could come on here and answer that question but you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Thanks for inviting me on. And I'd be delighted to share our 14 plus years of insights on actually both sides of the fence, because we have an affiliate program for our own courses, but I've been an affiliate marketer for over 14 years now. Uh and we we sort of teach other people how to do it and and all that stuff as as well. So, you know, I'm we might say a little bit jaded by some of the things in the industry, but I I come here with solutions. So happy to get into it.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. So let's just, for anybody that doesn't know you, and I can't believe that there are many of them out there, but if there's people tuning in from other countries, because we we are quite a global audience here, I want you to just take a quick step down uh memory lane. So 14 years ago or a little bit before then, I would assume you would have joined the industry. Tell us how you landed up launching Authority Hacker and what first got you into the world of digital and affiliate marketing to begin with. So I think that's always an interesting story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I mean I've always had entrepreneurial aspirations. I think I started my first Pokemon trading car business about 13 years old, and it just sort of went from there. So somehow found myself in a regular office job after I finished uni and hated it from like day one. I wanted to get out of there and do something else, do something of my own. And I can't remember how I came across it, but and so that sort of like made me a bit aware of this whole industry. Started looking into it a bit more, trying to find some information online about it. Started my first website, didn't make any money, started my second website, made a little bit, but you know, just sort of broke it even there, played around with ads, played around with organic traffic, just trial and error, just taught myself really. But I was still wanting to get out of this this this job and and kind of make a full-time income of it. So, long story short, but we ended up meeting my business partner, Gail, and we decided to start an agency doing some of the basic stuff we'd we'd already learned, because that seemed like the fastest way to go from zero to kind of job replacement income. And we did it in sort of three months. And then it just just went from from there, really. We we ended up with 30 odd people working in our office and sold that company in 2015 14, 15. We were never really agency people, like customer people. I didn't really like that side of things. It was more into the like the the actual SEO online marketing, the the doing part of it. So yeah, when we sold that, we we started a few of our own affiliate websites, uh, which grew to be pretty big. Um, we've since sold quite a few of those.
SPEAKER_02What industries did you focus on when you wanted to start your affiliate sites?
SPEAKER_00So the first one we did was in like health and nutrition. And the it was literally like throwing a needle at a dartboard, like, oh yeah, that sounds like it will be be profitable, let's give it a go. And and we went from there. That's not the best approach for for choosing a niche, by the way. There are better ways. But we've done sort of like software reviews and sports. We had a golf website that we sold recently as well. So we we kind of dabbled in in everything. And then sort of a year or so after that, we started Authority Hacker, really is just a place to talk about our tactics and you know, create a little community of people who are doing similar stuff and just share ideas, really. People liked what we were doing, so um it kind of grew and grew and grew. And yeah.
SPEAKER_02Those who can teach, that's that's always true. And the second thing is people buy people, like they want to buy, they're not they're not just interested in the tactics that you can teach them, they're interested in the lessons that you have learned by creating all of these websites and doing all of these, you know, starting all of these businesses. So I think that's the key thing about the training courses is yes, it's the content, it's the physical content that you're gonna be teaching, but it's also the real life experiences that you guys share as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. And I I I think I would have probably gotten into this industry five, 10 years earlier. You know, I was aware of affiliate marketing, but in the the early mid-2000s, if you want to get into it, you needed to buy a course from some guy that had a picture of a Ferrari on his sales page and like, yeah, you can be like me in five minutes. And I just that was that's not really our style. So I I think what with the way we've crafted our kind of messaging is a little bit more authentic.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. So I want to talk a little bit about that startup journey and what that looks like for new affiliates because I always think you know, affiliate managers are tasked with managing hundreds of, you know, sometimes even thousands of affiliates in a database. And, you know, they they really only have the time to give to people that are driving volume, but they're missing that whole first segment of affiliates that are starting out. So talk to us about what that startup journey looks like for a new affiliate and what site owners really have to tackle and grapple with in order to become successful in in promoting, you know, multiple different affiliate programs.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I mean it's it's hard. That's the that's the first thing. It's really difficult to create a successful uh affiliate site these days, and it's only gotten harder uh every year that that I've been doing it. Google and SEO is a zero-sum game. There are only 10 slots on the first page of of Google at the moment, at least. And so it it if you're if you're not there, if someone else is going to be. And so it's it's a constant fight over that. And really all of our attention, or the vast majority of it, is focused on our SEO, our content, our links are getting getting our rankings up. And this is especially true for new affiliates, new site owners who perhaps don't really believe that this model can work. They just sort of try it out, maybe they're following a course or something, or someone's teaching them how to do it, but they're not bought into it completely and like, yeah, I'm gonna make millions of dollars from this. And the thing is that they have so little traffic in in the beginning that the monetization, it's really an afterthought. I remember the first site we started, it was 12 months after we launched the site, before we even put anything, even like Amazon Associates Pro links on it. We didn't care, we just focused on on getting getting the traffic up. So, you know, what I would say to like an affiliate manager is you have to sort of divide your your your time between your whales, the the people that are are currently making making you the money, and the people who have the potential to be. It's been my experience being on the other end of that, that the sort of 99% or 95% of affiliates or people that apply to affiliate programs are waste of time. Yeah. What often happens is you end up with this like categorization system. There's a long form, like how are you going to promote us? What are you gonna do? What's your plan? All that stuff. And that's great for segmenting, but you can also run bowel of like making it just like too difficult to get in touch with you, especially if you're using one of these kind of third-party platforms on there as well. So yeah, I mean, I would I would say like it's it's real tough for for the beginners these days. And I don't think many people on the affiliate side appreciate that quite so much. I mean, they're still sending out the bog standard emails like, hey, we have this product, you can make X percent. Why don't you promote us kind of thing? And it just doesn't really work these days.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the other thing is, you know, and you mentioned this at the beginning, at the start of this podcast, is people buy people, and you know, if you've got a new affiliate that's starting out and they have a really good idea and they've maybe created a really great, you know, first page and they seem to have really good keywords and a ranking, get in touch with that affiliate and actually talk to them about what are their business plans and actually see how you can help elevate and leverage that. Because as you said, the most difficult part that this person or this company or whoever is building that site is actually driving the traffic, their mind needs to be focused on all of the technical aspects that they need to be doing in order to drive that traffic rather than filling out a long form that tries to segment them into a bucket that then you know makes it uh easy for you to contact them in six months' time. So I think having a bit more of a human touch is probably more important too at the beginning.
SPEAKER_00I would also sort of add to that that most people who run affiliate sites are introverted. They don't like kind of chatting and you know, networking and that kind of stuff. There's really a lot of people who will not pick up the phone or like not interested in having that communication. You kind of have to be a bit appreciative of type of person you're you're dealing with when you're outreaching to them as well. My biggest tips though to identify a potential future whale would be just read their content. If they have a review of your product or or anything, just pick one article and read it. You can quickly tell, okay, is this just another regurgitated thin affiliate review article, whatever? Or does it have legs? Is this like have they really gone to town on this? And maybe one in 20 people, one in 30 people will will sort of stand out like that. And those are the people you need to focus on.
SPEAKER_02That's a great tip, actually. So, what are some of the biggest things that annoy affiliates then? Because if you're saying that they're, you know, all of these traffic drivers then and entrepreneurs, they're kind of introverted and they're looking at the technical side of building their business. What are some of the pet peeves that affiliates face that we can maybe learn from?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there there are many. I had this one affiliate manager once, and I I guess he had some kind of like process where he would like contact all his affiliates once once a month, and that was like, you know, his communication. Yeah, and he would say, you know, hey Mark, how are you? or something like that. On this was back back when people used to use Skype for messaging. And I just sort of stopped responding at one point, and he but he would keep doing it every month, and he kept going for three and a half years before he before he stopped. And I was just like, did it ever occur to you that this communication style may not really be the best use of your time?
SPEAKER_02What is your favorite communication style?
SPEAKER_00Anything which is very personalized. So it doesn't have to be, you know, research the my second cousin's favorite color or something like that. It's just have a look at our business, spend five minutes trying to understand what we're doing and and take note of something, something cool. We have this kind of in-joke on our podcast where Gail, my business partner, he always says, and now it's time to ask Mark, how's it going, Mark? And it's this is like super awkward interaction with us. But it's like those in jokes are kind of things which are associated with you and your your brand. If you can figure out what those are for that person, maybe they have like a specific writing style or review style on their site, or they run their team in such a way, or you know, you stock them on SoundCloud and find what kind of music they listen to, and just something like that shows you care a bit, you know.
SPEAKER_02You know, I've been in this industry 20 odd years and it's still relationships matter. Like the, you know, your biggest affiliates, your biggest partners, and even as an affiliate manager, every company that you work at, if you stay in the same industry, those partners follow with you. So really getting personal with your partners at the start of their journey with your program is incredibly important. So with performance and affiliate marketing changing all the time. I mean, nowadays you don't even need a website. What advice do you give to someone starting out right now to be successful and not churn and burn time and effort with little results?
SPEAKER_00Uh well, have a good niche uh selection process. Don't just dive into the first thing that comes to comes to mind. But I think that mostly these days, creating content is where you're going to win. So you need to be very, very good at that. If you think of most people can relate to YouTube, if you watch a YouTube video from 2010, it had a certain, you know, roughness around it. The the editorial quality wasn't that great. You watch a successful YouTube channel now, it's all shot in 4K, and like the editing's amazing, and the production and the it's everything. It's like almost as good as TV. And the same kind of dynamic has been happening a little bit more slowly, but it's been happening in the last 14 years with content as well. The way to rank on on Google has been to create better content. And there's only, again, 10 slots on page one. So you have to pick someone there and and outdo them, hopefully outdo everyone. But if everyone keeps doing that, then the quality of the content just gets really, really good. When I first started this, you could write a review of a vacuum cleaner and you could just take a you know Amazon photo of it and write, you know, here are the features of it, here's my link, go buy it, kind of thing, and and you could rank on page one. It was really easy. But now you have sites like Modern Castle where they buy you know every cordless vacuum cleaner and they have like a fake office set up with different levels of carpet and different like types of rice and sugar, and they they do these suction tests, and it's for an affiliate review. It's great, it's really good content. Um, and that's that's kind of what you have to start thinking about now, and certainly in some of the more competitive spaces, if you want to stand a chance of doing well. So you have to be prepared to do that. And in order to be successful with that, you have to have some kind of motivation or personal interest in that space, in that niche, or at least really enjoy the the process of creating content and and creating these kind of interesting insights that no one else has.
SPEAKER_02Do you still need a strong level of technical SEO then if your content is so good? I mean, there is the basics, right? So you need to still understand if you're a really good content creator, you still need to understand how SEO works.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean it's it's still very important, but fundamentally, and then you just have the basics set up with your your own page. You don't need to get into any kind of advanced tech SEO when you're getting started. And you'll do well. The content, good content is the pillar of absolutely everything in in SEO these days. That's that's generally where I would I would I would start. And you can figure all the the other stuff later. The other thing I would say is you know, you you have many options now. So you can start a YouTube channel, you can be a TikToker, whatever the latest platform is that the kids these days are using. There's often a temptation to be like, oh well, I need to start my blog, get my podcast going, have my YouTube channel, be on TikTok, start doing Insta Reels, Twitter, all that stuff. No, pick one thing and do it well. I'm a big proponent of the more wood behind fewer arrows approach. And it's something we teach in all our our courses, sort of like just pick one traffic strategy, just pick one monetization strategy until you get to a certain point and you can add them in later.
SPEAKER_02And it does take time. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen an affiliate unless they've found a niche that nobody else found and coined it really quickly. It takes, you know, the better part of almost a year to probably get a site, you know, ranking up and running and you know, traffic coming to it. So it's not a quick win. You know, you could do it as a side hustle for a little while, but eventually, if you get it right, it's a full-blown business. And there must be people coming in that great content curators, but they're not necessarily great business people. You know, they've they've started this as a side hustle, they've got really successful. And I think that speaks back to the affiliate manager role as well. Understand who you're speaking to and what their experience is, and then treat them like a person rather than all affiliates are the same, you know?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. And I think there's there's even more things that if you're talking about the affiliate manager that they can proactively do if they want to really get on the good side of an affiliate, because you know, we have people emailing us every single day saying, Hey, can you promote our product? We have affiliate managers from products we already promote emailing us almost every day as well, saying, Hey, can you promote more of this? Or we have this sale coming up. Can you can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? I don't apply to almost any of them. They're they're they're they're just they've they're all missed the point with the conversation. The affiliate managers that do it well are the ones who who do a few things, such as proactively increasing commission rates. Now, I am obviously biased as the affiliate. I want I want more commission, but we all know every affiliate program has higher tiers. All affiliate managers, or almost all of them, have the ability to turn that dial up. Rather than waiting for them to come to you and then you know coming back with this ending up in this sort of like almost transactional relationship. Well, if you hit this target, we'll do this, we do this, we'll do this. Proactively do it. That's the suggestion. It doesn't have to be a crazy amount, but we really appreciate that. They think, okay, this guy, this girl, they care about us and us doing well. So we'll we'll take note of that.
SPEAKER_02That's the thing that, and I'm so glad you said that word. And those of you who have been on my AMP training program for affiliate managers, you will know the term transactional selling because traditionally in the affiliate space, that is the only kind of selling style that affiliate managers are ever taught and told. Yes, in some cases it's worthwhile having a transactional sales stance, but more often than not, you'll get more if you do not have that sales stance. So if you want to learn more about that, look it up on Google or come to our training course. But Mark's hit the nail on the head, and that was totally unsolicited.
SPEAKER_00The the other thing I would say is give them the tools they need to succeed. So I can't tell you the amount of affiliate programs where I have to kind of it's like getting blood out of a stone when I try and get you know uh the ability to deep link to a blog post they've written as an affiliate, and they're just not technically set up for that. I don't know why in 2022, like that should be like a standard thing in your your technology. I I know there are a lot of you know legacy platforms and and people with with programs dating back even to the 90s and that that that still still use the same technology, but you you've got to be able to let affiliates you know create their own links and and link to you in in in the right way and just make it easy for them to see a report of how many clicks they're making, how much money they've made. Like so sometimes I navigate like me as someone who's doing this for 14 years, pretty tech savvy. It's like, how on earth am I supposed to see how much money I've made in the last month? And the dashboard just it's not there, it's not set up for it correctly.
SPEAKER_02And multiple dashboards in different designs and reporting jargon, you know, one report means this in one platform, and another report with the same name means something completely different in another platform. There is a lot of jargon in our in our industry, and it must be frustrating when you're working across multiple different programs. So I think, yeah, I mean, if you can simplify your reports, that's a that's a plus, I think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and then you know, obviously I said like don't hassle them before. So as a site owner, we're very different to an affiliate who you know does paid media and will buy a bunch of um ads and then put affiliate links in in there. I know there's fewer and fewer people doing that these days. Um, but site owners, we don't have the ability to just turn on some promotion for your Black Friday sale or whatever it is. Most of our content, uh, certainly the people who are doing organic, you know, Google uh traffic and all that, it's it's evergreen, right? We rank for a review for your product or the best vacuum cleaners or whatever it is. And we we can't just turn that off and on. It's it is what it is. So if you come to us and say like, oh, we got this Black Friday promotion, I'd really like you to push this new thing, and you know, it's obvious they're getting some kind of commission if they if they reach certain sales targets with that. It's just like it's not something we we can do. So and it just feels weird when we keep getting asked about about this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_02This is a little bit of a curveball, and it's and and I just want you to be honest, a lot of affiliate managers ask me why should I pay a listing fee to get onto a website? Now, my um price you know thought process around that is that there's a cost to creating content. There's a baseline cost to creating content. You're asking that affiliate to create specific content about your brand. So if there's a minimal listing fee of you know maybe 300 bucks or something, it's probably to offset the cost of the content writer that then that they're going to hire to actually create that content for you or the video or whatever it is that they're going to create. And I don't see that as a problem necessarily if you're managing your budgets correctly, and then move on to the kind of revenue share or CPA deal or whatever it is that you're going to do later on. What are your thoughts on that? Because it is quite a sort of contested subject that comes up often.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I would say like I'm I'm probably more against like the these kind of listing fees and stuff, because in general, I think it's certainly with Authority Hacker and our reputation. Like I don't like the idea that someone can come along and say, Yeah, I'm gonna pay them to write something good about us. Like we we don't sell that. I know some other people in the industry do, and they've they've been very open about it, they make a lot of money from it. And you know, that's that's the sort of their their decision.
SPEAKER_02It depends on your business model and how you are set up as a business to create content. You might have to outsource that piece to somebody.
SPEAKER_00I mean, even if you don't, you know, it's your it's your own time at the end of the day that that goes into it. So There's a value exchange going on there, and that's that's kind of how how it is. It's not something I I particularly approve of as an affiliate. Like if people come and say, I'll pay you 500 bucks to write about this, it's like I don't I don't care. It's like $500, it's like not really a big deal. But if you have a good product, and this is the thing, like if you have a really good product that is interesting to us and is going to provide value to our audience, then I'm I'm paying attention, right? So if you're maybe against or if you as the affiliate manager doesn't want to pay for listings, then you can go the other angle and find people who are are not looking for such transactional relationships and instead give them the product for free. Like make get them using it, show them how to use it, find a use case where they could use that on their site or with their audience or or someone else in their industry has has already used it and kind of use that competitive edge thing to uh to kind of motivate them to use it. I I had this a crazy example the other week where uh someone came to us with this really good WordPress plugin and they wanted us to they wanted us to write a review of it and they were gonna pay us some money. And I was like, all right, send me send me the plugin and I'll I'll have a look at that and see if it's good first, because I don't want to take their money if we're gonna write something bad about it. Um and they were like, well, you can just sign up for a free trial here. I don't know like it was like a seven-day trial or something. I'm like, Really? I mean, is that the approach you're taking? You know, just want to like give us a free account so we can like maybe test it and say good things about it. We ended up not doing the the paid thing, so I said, you know, like actually ended up using the tool. It's like, yeah, it's really good. Do you want to give us a free account? And you know, we'll we'll probably use it a lot and and recommend it to our audience and share it on our podcast and and stuff. And and they're like, Well, what are you gonna give me? Yeah, how how many words is your review gonna be about it? You know, how long's the video? Where are you gonna mention it? I'm like, dude, that's like it's not the way to start a relationship with someone, especially, you know, like uh an affiliate who who has some some clouds.
SPEAKER_02I'm glad that you're actually talking so candidly about this because, you know, unfortunately, people come into this industry and they're not well trained. You know, they just get thrown into being an account manager and they have to kind of learn these things on the job. And it is bad business practice that you're speaking of right now, and it happens every single day across multiple different programs that I've touched or managed in my career. And I just I'm so happy that we have in this chat because I hope that the people listening to this podcast will actually just understand how their words, their content, their sales pitch is being received by affiliates on the other end. And you know, we don't openly talk about stuff like this. So thank you for answering that question because it wasn't really part of this podcast, but it just felt right for me to throw it in there. And I appreciate you being so honest about it. I do want to get back to SEO because that's obviously your area of expertise. And I'm very interested in finding out what's going to happen with SEO because I read a stat recently that 50% of search is now voice activated. And I don't know how accurate that stat is. I think I read it on Google, but you know, everybody says don't ever read everything you see on Google. But do you think that SEO is still going to be a big driver in terms of traffic as we move forward? And or should we be looking at you know multiple platforms and how search works on multiple different platforms instead? So, how does this kind of from technical and content and link building, how does that transcend into Web 3.0 and voice activated search, which is obviously very different to type?
SPEAKER_00When I first got into doing SEO in 2008, there were people posting on forums back then saying, oh, SEO is dead, you shouldn't get into it. And every day, every year since then, people continue to do to do that. And it's it's gotten it's different to what it is back then, but you know, people ultimately need to type something in and search uh for something. That what you're talking about there, voice voice search, you know, things like Surri on the iPhone and and uh was it Cortana or something, the Microsoft one. Um people use it a lot more um on their on their phones, especially. Um but all already 10 plus years ago when smartphones started to become a thing, we saw this divergence between sort of desktop search and mobile search, and you know, the content you're creating was was different. The voice searches though, they tend to be more kind of like day-to-day, what's going on in my life, like what's the weather like tomorrow, Siri? Um, or you know, set me a reminder for this or or do this, or simple questions that they want a simple answer to. You don't really go to uh voice search and it's especially if you're looking for a voice answer, say like, well, you know, how does this vacuum cleaner compare to this other vacuum cleaner? And you're not gonna get the whole spiel. It's it's very like snippet-based responses. So SEOs, you know, they they try and do a little bit in terms of incorporating responses that would be spoken out in for for voice search by like text-to-spee stuff, but it's it's really not a thing so much. It's it's more just Google does a pretty good job of figuring out the information on the page and really relaying that back. So I don't think people need to fundamentally change what they're doing from a content creation perspective for voice SEO. Every year on our podcast, sorryhacker.com slash podcast, we do a uh SEO predictions. And I think three years in a row, we talked about voice search being being a thing. And then at the end next year is one we reviewed it, and like nothing really changed in terms of the volumes we're seeing from for traditional search, both desktop and and mobile. So I don't think that's gonna change anytime soon. What is more interesting, I think, and what is definitely happening now, happening now, is Gen Z. The way they search and the way they use Google is very different to URI. So to me, Google is a robot, it's a computer, and I need to not program, but I need to type in a command in its language. Gen Z people, they they will speak to Google and speak to us like like it's their mate, and they want to just ask it a question, like, hey Google, can you tell me this, this, and this, or whereas we're like, oh, um, you know, best vacuum cleaner for three-inch carpet or whatever it is, you know what I mean? Um which is which which is again different inputs, but the result of what what you're searching for is the same thing. So if you're creating that piece of content, in theory, it should be able to serve both both audiences, like both both types of of searches. One kind of thing I would take away from SEO from search is that more and more people these days are actually going away from Google to search for certain types of things. I didn't know this, but you if you go to Instagram, you can people search on there for restaurant recommendations in their city. Like you go and search for, I don't know, best nachos in Edinburgh, city I live in. And it'll like people do that to find restaurants these days. That blew my mind when I learned that for the for the first time. So whenever when you're on a different platform like that, you're obviously looking for a different form of media, images or videos and YouTube. YouTube's second biggest, has been for a long time, second biggest search engine in the world. But yeah, that's kind of having this like platform divergence in a way. But there's more and more people using Google still every day as you know uh more countries come online and more people have smartphones. And I think that sort of increased the overall volume of of search in general. So we haven't seen any kind of decline or even us nearing the peak of anything yet.
SPEAKER_02See, I could say the same about performance marketing. Everybody says, oh, affiliates are dead. It's never gonna die. It's never gonna die because it's part of the buyer awareness journey. No matter what platform you're getting on until the final stage when you buy, there's always gonna be multiple touch points in between. And, you know, we have to build our strategies around all of these channels. But the thing for me, what I want to see going forward is more affiliate managers actually understanding SEO because they don't right now. Most of them understand paid media, but very few actually understand the principles of SEO, which is exactly why we've got you on this podcast to talk about these practical things.
SPEAKER_00It's it's quite interesting that that point, actually, about affiliate managers and kind of this this whole journey thing. On the kind of like future of affiliate sites in general, there's there's something I I did want to kind of bring up. And that's what we're seeing at the moment is consolidation in the in many, many industries. And I think that that's something Pillar Managers really need to be prepared for because we're seeing in the most competitive spaces, there's companies like Pillar 4 Media. They own, I think, like 60% of the sleep websites that review mattresses and pillows and things like that. So that they're really kind of diversifying there. And you know, if you're dealing with one of those sites, you're dealing with them all. So they start to command larger negotiating power and for things like that. What's also interesting is in the VPN space, we're seeing vertical integration. So that is where the the product owner, in in this case, like ExpressVPN, which is owned by CAPE Technologies, they've actually gone and started purchasing affiliate sites. Like uh one of the biggest affiliate sites in the world, VPN Mentor, was sold for $150 million recently to this company. And sure enough, they recommend ExpressVPN all over them now.
SPEAKER_02Is that ethical? Like, can you know, because I mean, yes, it's fine to buy affiliate sites, and and probably most brands at some point do. But then how much of the market share do you earn? And then, like, should we have an ombudsman that should, you know, have fair and equal equity? I don't know. I mean, it just might be something that we need to be looking at.
SPEAKER_00In future, when this sort of trend continues, there will be some more, I think, regulation around what you can say and like how you you have to disclose how you came up with your recommendations and and things like that. The the current sort of rules, you know, you put a little disclaimer in it, some sites do, at least in in the US, you know, they're they're not really that stringent. Um, so I I think this is an area where we will definitely see more regulation in.
SPEAKER_02Very important point. Gives me a lot of food for thought, actually, in terms of how we advise and and drive the compliance and regulation forward in our industry. All right. You've given us so much food for thought in this episode, Mark. Um, but before you leave, what do you think the future of digital looks like? And what do you think at this early stage the big trends in 2023 are going to be?
SPEAKER_00Um, I mean, just what I've said before, really, like this consolidation thing in in the affiliate space is a big deal. I think we'll see more platform-specific creators. So you have these TikTokers now who have 50 million followers, but no website and no Instagram, and of course they don't use Facebook. And whatever the next platform is, you know, there'll be people really, really big on that.
SPEAKER_02There's a risk with that though, because if you do something naughty and TikTok decides, sorry, you can't have your account anymore. What the heck do you do? Because you don't own those customers. And with you know, cookie deprecation coming in and everything else, to me, it's really risky to start on a platform that you can't own your customer.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and this this is why we're not like really big on YouTube, because it's it's too much of a treadmill. SEO, which I love, is my favorite medium. You know, you kind of build it, and yes, you are beholden to Google, and yes, they can pull the rug from under you. But generally, if you're doing the right things, they they tend not to. There are exceptions.
SPEAKER_02As long as you're adding value with good content, like you said, and giving customers information that's fair, accurate, you know, correct.
SPEAKER_00What you said before as well about kind of like owning your audience. So, like having an email list, and you know, like they all come to your site, they all know you there, they they come back to you. That's I think really important as well, versus someone who's on YouTube and their platform is YouTube, and you know, they don't they don't have a website, for example. So, yeah, this there's a big big risk for people like that, I think.
SPEAKER_02Even Mr. Beast has got YouTube, and now he's got burger joints. I hear yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, this is the thing. Like if you're on these platforms, you tend not to be make your mon monetization isn't that great. You can have 50 million followers on TikTok, and okay, you'll you'll probably do it well. But if you have a million, there's plenty of people who uh have a million followers that don't make any money or next to no money. So yeah, you need to need to kind of like figure out how to actually monetize in a way that that you can can really afford to to do all this this crazy stuff with content, which you're gonna have to continue to do in the future if you want to be at the top.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so one last thing. What is the one thing that all affiliate managers should know about SEO?
SPEAKER_00One thing that they should all know about SEO. I mean, it's it's hard. Like it's really, really hard, and it is our main focus, and it's a constant battle. We're checking our rankings every day. No matter what you say, no matter what you dangle in front of us, we're focused on our SEO. So help us. Help us with our SEO. I don't think I've ever had an affiliate manager proactively reach out to me and say and say, hey, I noticed you're kind of ranking number three for this. I've just pointed a few links to our site to that. So hopefully that increases your your rankings. Like, wow, if someone does that, it doesn't cost you anything either. If someone does that, then I'm I'm taking note. So try and kind of appreciate what we're we're going through. I know your job isn't isn't easy either. So I'm I'm trying to be sort of balanced in this. But if you if you want to get on our our good side, help us with our SEO.
SPEAKER_02Fantastic. It's as simple as that. And if you need to learn more about SEO, you can go on to Authority Hacker because they do do a very intensive range of courses. And Mark, it's just been fantastic spending this time with you. And thank you so much for coming on the affiliate marketing podcast and helping us to understand how we can help our affiliate partners who are SEO experts do more for our businesses.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, Leah. Great to hear.
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