You're listening to the Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast, a podcast with digital and affiliate marketers who want to grow and have their strategy while driving consistent sales. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is constantly changing. So why not get behind the scenes access to a variety of digital and affiliate marketing experts who share their insider tips, their strategies, the value bonds that will help you launch, scale, and grow successful affiliate marketing programs? The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else. So why not deep dive into the world of affiliate marketing and program management, to discover new digital strategies that big brands and agency use to grow their networks and detail exactly how to get more traffic and increase sales. Now here's your host, award-winning affiliate programmarketer Force.com, thought leader and the drums digital's top 50 UK agency owner, affiliate manager, motivator, the founder of affiliateinsider.com herself, Leanne Johnston. Leanne, over to you.
SPEAKER_01Welcome to this week's affiliate marketing podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. And I am absolutely thrilled to have somebody on the podcast with me who I've known for quite a few years. I'm not going to give it away because for a long time. But joining me today is uh the CEO and founder of DeepCI, which is an intelligence tool which I've been very privileged to use and see. And I wanted to get Rihanna Diaga, the founder on this podcast today, to talk a little bit about affiliate marketing, about uh more about this tool and the insights that it can give you. And also just to shoot the breeze about affiliate marketing together, because I know it's going to be an interesting discussion. So, Rihanna, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast with me this week.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. It's a long time coming. We've been talking about this for a long time. So it's very nice to finally be on. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01And for those of you who know me, you know my South African accent, you can pick up that Rihanna is a fellow.
SPEAKER_02Slightly different tribe, but more or less the same.
SPEAKER_01So we're gonna have some interesting talks today. So before we get started, though, what I want you to do is just for all of our listeners out there, tell us a bit about your backstory, how you landed up being an affiliate, what you've learned across the couple of, and can I say decades that you've been working in this space?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you might say decades, just not how many. But I'll give it away.
SPEAKER_01And now, you know, as a technology developer, so tell us this backstory.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I've kind of gone 360. I started my career as an entrepreneur in consulting and software. You know, I started building software, I studied computer science, started building software in my early 20s, sold a software business, a software consulting business into a listed company when I was about 24, 25 years old. Uh, you know, you think you can do anything. And it so happened that I crossed paths with the company in the very early days of iGaming, going back to 2000. And they had in those days nothing. There were no marketing systems. The payment integration was primitive. There were no fraud systems, there were no affiliate systems. So I got involved in starting to consult and build out some of those systems, CRM systems, that sort of thing. And eventually we spun out a company that started uh developing games. And some of those games still run today. They run by some of the UK cookies, specific games in horse racing, et cetera. And yeah, and saw the affiliate opportunity about 18 years ago and first set out as a sports affiliate in the US market pre-2006 when it was a complete Wild West. This really gives them over my age, but you know, Google AdWords didn't exist. I built a business originally around Yahoo Overture, drove all the traffic through Yahoo Overture into sports, and then got involved in a sports tipping business as well, to spun off as well. Um, and then probably for the last 12, 13 years, from an affiliate point of view, uh, my affiliate interest is casino. We have a lot of sites still have a very successful and a wonderful affiliate business full of absolutely wonderful people. Yeah, this idea came about by interacting over all these many decades with so many affiliate managers and so many varying affiliate organizations from big to small, from extremely good to downright awful. Experience them all. You know, I've I think I must have over the years if I had to count how many affiliate accounts, it's into the thousands. So, so you know, we've we've dealt with a lot of different operators, and this idea came about from those interactions.
SPEAKER_01And I want to just kind of say, you know, you and I met in Amsterdam, it's our annual tradition, you know, at the at the affiliate conference there, and we had that breakfast, and you started sort of explaining it to me four or five years ago, even if I can remember.
SPEAKER_02It's longer, actually. I think it's about six, maybe. Yeah, that's right. So I've been carrying this idea around in my head all the time. And and really the question I kept on asking myself is is how on earth can an affiliate manager keep track of the detail? And I talk about the minutest detail of where their brands are present or are not present on an affiliate's website. How do they keep track if the traffic profile of that site changes? Suddenly new pages start to rank in Google, or some of the pages actually lose traffic. They can't go and look at every page every day to see that the affiliate has removed them off a page, that they've been demoted. So, what often happens, I think in a lot of in a lot of cases, is an affiliate manager will do a deal, a CPA deal or a hybrid deal or whatever the case may be, with an affiliate for one site or a network of sites, they'll agree the positions. And this is something I'll talk a bit about a bit later is this obsession with positions. And I think we talk about a changed way of thinking, we need to start thinking about the affiliate channel, the way we think about paid media channels. Where we don't get obsessed, well, I want that little button on that page. You know, we don't that's not what we want. We want to get optimized traffic exposure on affiliate sites, and that is a fundamental shift in the way that an organization needs to think. But we'll we'll we'll talk about that, I'm sure. So, so yeah, so that's where the idea was born. And I think at the time when I met you, I built a little proof of concept on my iPad, and I met two or three clients um who were foundation clients and have been with us through this whole journey. And I took it to them and I said, What do you think? And they were like uh unanimously, if you build it, we will come. And they've come and they've stayed. Um, and I'm I'm I'm heavily indebted to them. I wouldn't necessarily mention it they are, they might not want me to, but I'm heavily indebted to them because they gave us a fantastic lab environment to actually test the concept and to work with affiliate managers and see what they wanted. And as we talk through it, like this is as a tech company, something which is incredibly fundamental to us is that we've built a platform and it's like a, you know, there's a ground floor and there's a foundation, but everything we're building on top is completely, completely customer driven. Like we had a session last night with a large program, and they effectively helping us design our management reporting because they now want to use our tools to manage the performance of each individual affiliate manager, the entire organization, and the entire organization by vertical and by country. And we now have the base data to say, how did you do last month? How are you doing this month? And we can extrapolate and do some really interesting stuff. So that's how the idea came about was just how on earth can an affiliate manager be efficient? And I think without this kind of technology, sometimes you're flying blind, and it really comes down to the individual and how organized they are, how organized they are and how tech savvy they are as well. So I guess we're kind of leading into me describing what deep CI is now, right? So what we do is we build up a database with a number of algorithms of every meaningful affiliate page in 25 countries at the moment. So we cover all the obvious English-speaking markets. We've just launched Japan. Uh, we do some really interesting things where for an English-speaking person, simple things like you know, you see Japanese keywords, we give you the English translation right next to it, or we have Arabic, and we build up a database that gets refreshed every week of every single affiliate page, where how much traffic it gets from Google, for which keywords, and then we build up a brand profile for every page. So we know the sequential order, number one, i.e., brand, you know, yo, Vegas is the top, then B365, then you know, landbrokes, then whatever. But we also have an algorithm that determines the share of traffic that every brand should be getting of the aggregate traffic on that page from every country. Because remember, you know, the Vegas Lots Online free spin's page ranks in 20 countries. So we will do an estimate through our algorithms of how much the second brand on that page will get from every country. And this allows us then to obviously track position and track traffic week on week. And the use cases that we can build on top of this foundation are literally endless. You know, it's just like I say, our customers come up with new things all the time. But the most fundamental things we do is we'll help you very quickly analyze, meaningfully analyze an affiliate that you're trying to do a deal with.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Because instead of you sitting with three web browsers open and you know, you're trying to flick between their sites, you're trying to flick between pages on their sites, you've got SEMRush open to try and get traffic and keyword data, maybe AHRFs and whatever else your organization uses.
SPEAKER_01Whatever it is, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And you're making a spreadsheet and you're trying to collate all this stuff and you're trying to figure out, okay, well, what am I negotiating for? And that's incredibly time consuming. Like you can do like one or two of those a week properly if you're really going to do it properly.
SPEAKER_01And the other thing is traditionally, affiliate managers have always had to be relationship builders who then do transactional selling. And the two mindsets are completely different because one's analytical and one's kind of personal, you know, so or personal.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And you know, you have affiliate managers who are great at the personal stuff, but not so great at the data and analytics, and then you question, well, yeah, you've got a great relationship with that affiliate, but are you actually maximizing every dollar that you're and you know, we're we're kind of preempting kind of one of your questions later on is what do I see changing?
SPEAKER_02I see the analytical intel or the analytical DNA of a successful organization, affiliate organization becoming absolutely essential into the future. The supply side is becoming so sophisticated that by just being a good relationship manager, right, you are not going to outnegotiate somebody who goes into the finest detail. And that's really that that's really the ethos behind Beyond Out Tech is to enable that um and and bring everything that's needed from a keyword country web page level together, and BBC paid paid out paid advertising as well, which we're launching in time for the paid advertising site and launching in time for uh London in February, London for the conference. So that's being trialed at the moment. So yeah, okay, I'm jumping around. Sorry.
SPEAKER_01I want to kind of bring you back to the concept of why this is so important. So, I mean, you and you touched on quite a few things in in the reasoning behind why you actually launched this this tool. Is that the affiliate industry is is is huge, it's fast because now in affiliate programs we have multiple different types of publishers. We have traffic sources that are coming in from all over the place, and that's actually making an affiliate manager's job incredibly complex because they're no longer just working with only websites, they're now working with influencers who have got traffic sources, they're now working with mobile app developers who have traffic sources, email marketers. The depth and breadth of where and how they get to spend their budgets in the performance channel is phenomenal. And so, without tools that help to actually give them the data insights, and you and you touched a little bit on there about I don't need to be in position one to five. And honest to God, I tell people this all the time in our training course. It's not about the positioning, it's about the value. And so I want you to talk a little bit about why the data is so important and some of the insights that you've actually been able to glean from this tool, and why I wanted to bring you on this podcast was to actually like talk about this point. It's not about you always have to be above the fold or you always have to be in, you know, on this button on the right from a psychological perspective. You think that's the best place. And no, so that is just out in the dark anymore.
SPEAKER_02Let's talk about where you know on the other end of the scale where we and I think our thinking would be the same, where we think you should be. So the traditional approach that an affiliate manager would take is they'd look at your site and they'll go, they'll look at your homepage and they'll look at the five pages that sit in the top navigation of your page, and they'll go, What do I pay you for the top positions on those pages? First of all, you need to understand that I don't know who you are, so that's a problem already. And you're asking me such a broad question, and I get this question 25, 30 times a month at least, right? So I'm not inclined to respond. So that's the first thing is the approach that you need to take from now or in future is one that comes to the affiliate with a more intelligent pitch. And to make that intelligent pitch ties into what you're talking about, where you want to go and understand from three core dimensions where are the important positions for you to try and target. And you need to be realistic. You and I I, you know, as an affiliate, I can take the deep hat off quickly and put the affiliate hat on. When I get an approach from an affiliate manager with some detail saying, look, we haven't done that much business before. I understand that you're not just going to put me in the top 10. I completely understand that. But I have looked at your site and I see you have these and these and these pages, and there's some thought going into what those pages are. And if they smart and say, surely you must get good player value off these pages. And I'm talking about long tail keywords and that sort of thing. And then I'll go, you know what, this is an intelligent approach. I'm willing to actually entertain this person because they've they've thought about things. My response rate to those kind of emails is 100%. My response rate to hi, I'm so and so, can you send us traffic? Can we get a top three position is zero. I'll never reply to an email again because you're asking me as the affiliate to do the work.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I'm lazy by design as an affiliate. I don't want to do the work. But if you do the work in your country, so so so what does this mean? This means we need to be able to very, very quickly analyze a site or a network of sites. We need to be able to using keyword baskets, right? And it's very easy. I mean, most uh knowledgeable operators or or affiliates will be able to say to you, in the UK, what are the important keyword baskets that drive the highest player value? That's not a hard thing. Most most people, you know, if we sit with a with a blank sheet, we can probably write down 10 odd keyword baskets across casino and sports, and we know that those are the higher player value. And then we'll know there's a tier tier below it where the value could be questionable because we're starting to see long tail with bonus keywords and that sort of thing coming in. And then we get right to the bottom, which is straight bonus keywords, which is other people's brands, et cetera, et cetera, where we know we're not going to see high conversion or high value. But if we were able to take that as a framework for analyzing the first dimension, keyword baskets for every affiliate site, then we can quickly pull out and say, okay, well, even if I don't have a foothold here, I'm not in the top three already, I don't have that relationship. I can use this to see actually where are their pages that fall outside of the obvious pages where I can actually go and craft a story to ask this affiliate to get onto their site. And what obviously this is very different if you have a foothold, you have a relationship, you have a brand, you have reputation, you have a much easier conversation. Unfortunately, that's reality. We know that. A small fledgling program to have this conversation is incredibly difficult. But again, if you have, if you approach the affiliate with a more better crafted story, you have a but much better chance. So the first dimension is to look at the keywords. The second dimension is to obviously understand country by country, how does the site profile change? So we see so often, this is one of the things which come bubble to the surface the quickest when a new client starts to use our tech, is that they assumed and they negotiated for Canada, not knowing that the site is getting traffic from New Zealand and India or whatever the case may be. So that we just show that to them immediately through a nice graphic uh visual. So that's the second dimension is understand the the uh the country profile of every page. But then you obviously want to look at the other brands that are there, and you want to be able to be in a position to say, okay, well, hang on, you have got certain types of brands sitting there. My brand actually will fit in very well with these kind of pages and motivate by it.
SPEAKER_01But that actually means that an affiliate needs to understand their own brand, affiliate manager needs to understand their own. I'm assuming all of that. Often they don't actually understand how to pitch their brand properly because they've never really truly understood where their product is.
SPEAKER_02Don't tell me your brand converts better than anyone else's.
SPEAKER_01How do you know that? Exactly.
SPEAKER_02You can never prove that. But tell me where tell tell tell me you know, interesting promotions that that that you run. Tell me about something interesting about player experience. If you have a uh uh if you have a uh a USP from a from a CRM point of view or from a loyalty program point of view, tell me there's something different than this, a different story. Because what are we looking for as an affiliate? You know, if if we if we truly understand user intent, which is what that's our business. Our business is drive user intent to conversion, right? That's we just want to understand what that searcher wants and get them out the door. That's what 99%. I mean, I'm sure, you know, of course, there are affiliates building up forums, building up their own brands and so on, but most affiliates just we can't do it, let's be honest. But you know, it's nothing wrong with it either. Like, you know, let's admit what we are. Like we're trying to get that traffic through to the right place. And if you can influence that process and have a conversation with the affiliate will sit up and go, okay, this person's thought about it. You are steps ahead of where you could be by simply asking for more traffic. So I don't know if I answered your question, but I think that's a fundamental shift that we are seeing our technology enabling people to do, where we we are our our our bigger clients now really are starting to mold their internal process around our technology in terms of finding opportunities, but in terms of fighting fires, which we can talk about as well.
SPEAKER_01So there's there's a couple of things here that ring for me, which are very, very important. First of all, you've given incredible insight to affiliate managers listening to this podcast about how to actually approach new affiliates. But the second part of the problem is the fact that affiliate programs need to transform. There's a transformation of how affiliate programs are being run at the moment. And actually, that's the theme of this season is to talk about the transformational technologies and insights and learnings that are happening that are elevating affiliate program management to that next level. You know, this the way that we've done things, the way that we've looked, you know, at everything in one bucket, the fact that data is becoming more intelligent to help us with some of the things that you've already discussed. It is a tough gig. Affiliate management, affiliate management is a tough gig, and there are a lot of parts to the job. And you talk you touched a little bit about fighting fires. So let's talk a little bit about how your tool actually helps brands to get in and get competitive in a very competitive space because it is very competitive and there's only a finite number of affiliates that are driving volume. So talk a little bit about what Deep actually does in comparison to other tools.
SPEAKER_02So the first thing we do, which we don't believe we're certainly not aware of another tool doing this scale and at the depth that we do, is we add a layer of so your typical traffic and and keyword tools, you know, everyone knows what they do, but we uh add that layer of brand intelligence uh on top of that. So we know every we know every brand on every page, the position that it occupies from week to week. So um the first thing that we can do, and this is so we we kind of divide the world into like you know, in our interface, you know, green and red things. Green are where there's opportunities for you with either new affiliates or existing affiliates, that you have reds where bad stuff's happened. Bad stuff can be either because Google's running update and pages have lost traffic, or the affiliate has actually done be naughty, emoted you, taking you off a page, taking you off a site, et cetera, et cetera. We trigger an alarm immediately to tell you that that's happened. But the more interesting side is um, and that's kind of motherhood, and we monitor that stuff and we push those alerts to you. So we make your life so much easier that you don't have those four hours a week, whether it's your Monday morning or whatever, where you have to go and trawl your way through your VIPs to make sure everyone's still maintaining the positions that your deal dictates with them. You don't ever have to do that again. We do it. And we'll only tell you if something goes wrong. And some days you get a daily email from us, for instance, and a weekly email that summarizes these things to you. So firefighting and knowing, because what often happens is you will only start picking up the drop off in FTDs a week or two weeks later, right? And this assumes that you have a CRM system that actually pushes that data to every affiliate manager so they can actually see what's happening almost in real time. Very few programs actually have this because there's there are a lot of shortcomings in the affiliate platforms. Not so much the affiliate platforms' tech capabilities, but the lack of deep integration between the affiliate system and the actual platform. Yeah, absolutely. So it kind of plugged that gap by preempting, by saying, hang on, um, we know that that's a problem and you don't necessarily have all that data, but Bill and we'll give you an alarm that you've dropped off this page, and as a result, you stand to lose another 1400 clicks from this affiliate this month. And we aggregate all of that. So we quantify everything in terms of the traffic loss or the traffic gain. But traffic gain is really an interesting one because what we do when we bring a new customer on board is I always say to them, if all you do with Deep CI for the first month is you every one of your affiliate managers takes their top 20 to 50, depending on how big the organizations, VIPs, and you just look, use our tool to look at the money that you're leaving on the table. What is that? That is pages which you are not even present on, number one, or paid if you're a multi-brand program, pages where only one of or two of your five brands are present, and there's still room to put your other brands there, right? Just analyze your top affiliates for that. And we are seeing time and time again, like we've done some calculations on the business case, you know, and and just doing that in the first month, in terms of gained FTDs for bigger programs with bigger affiliates, pays our license fee for the first year. Literally, I've calculated this multiple times now.
SPEAKER_01Because I often get that with with clients that we're training, or or you know, uh in our training academy where we we bring affiliate managers through, where they say, Oh, I work for a really big program and we work with all of the affiliates already. It's very difficult to go out and get new because you're looking in all the wrong places.
SPEAKER_02Like come and sit with me, I'll show you a thing or two. And it's it's not I'm not trying to be be, you know, uh, you know, it's just human nature. Like we we we fight to get a deal, we get the deal, the deal's done, we move on. And that's you know, we incentivized also on, you know, where but what what what we're saying is where can you go that you find the easiest FTDs and they are under your nose. And and even with let's not even talk about our tech. I think it's a way that affiliate managers have to think very differently. And I don't see this of affiliate managers in our affiliate business uh uh who we deal with. I don't see them doing this even without the tech. And you can do it without the tech, without our tech, it'll take you much longer. But if you're getting great value off a site, you should hone into the very last page and try and saturate that site as much as much as you can. You should build up uh uh templates for yourself to do this uh in spreadsheets and things. Even if you just do that, you can be a hero, you know? And I think it's just often a case of of um of it's just it, it's it's it's just not a mindset um that I think has to change.
SPEAKER_01Well, the problem is is that most affiliate managers learn on the job. So depending on who they're learning from, learn the skill set of the person that they're learning from. And if you haven't had a lot of experience, you don't know that you can do this kind of data analysis. And unless you're not, like I said, you know, some most affiliate managers are are people people, but they're working with people that are analytical because most affiliates are analytical and they're not relationship-led. So there's this disconnect that happens. And if you're not good at data and and assessing data and actually quantifying data, then you can miss out on all of these low-hanging fruit opportunities.
SPEAKER_02There's another reason, and and and and and that's a fundamental reason, is for most programs and an even larger, and I know some programs which which are actually quite good at at safeguarding themselves. Yeah, but you are only as good as the quality of the affiliate managers that are today sitting at the desks.
SPEAKER_03Exactly.
SPEAKER_02And they're gonna all walk out tomorrow. And when they do, yes, you know, maybe you'll have data protection and the contact the the database with them and what maybe um maybe you can you can safeguard. But the knowledge of the of your clients that they have in their heads that is not documented or captured anywhere, that there is no history for, you know, and I'm talking about, you know, sure, you might have a system that captures your deals and you capture when the deals change, and some of that's sure, like you know, my affiliates and edifera and income access allow you to deliver that. Yeah, but you don't have the intelligence of what is going on with my brands on Ryon's affiliate site. That walks out the door, it's not documented anywhere. And and that's if we talk about the most fundamental layer of becoming a data, or let's call it a knowledge-driven affiliate program, you have to get that foundation in place. And it's not just through tools like DPCI, but it's through integrating tools like deep CI into your affiliate uh system. Um, and it's it's through integrating even you know, something which we have as a vision is to actually integrate you know, the click all the way from the button on the affiliate site all the way into the actual converted FTD, which is what we're working hard on to achieve. Because that's really where that's really the you know, that's that's the snitch, the golden snitch is if you can say, hang on, on gambling.com's real money casino page in the US, my player value of that button in position two is this. If you can say that, you can say 99% of programs can say the following our average player value that we get from gambling.com is X, right? But they cannot say, hang on, they can't show you what that's made of. Well, they can show you what it's made up of, because they obviously have all the player data, but where it originated, they don't know. And that's really that's for us the vision of you know what I said at the beginning there is treating the affiliate, being able to treat the affiliate channel like you treat a paid channel. We have to we have to connect that click to the FDD. I believe we will get there. I believe we'll get there through you know partnerships that we have, speaking to the affiliate programs and and and we know of some big affiliates that are interested in doing this kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01So, what does that actually mean? That will transform the way that we spend money in this channel in the world.
SPEAKER_02Because now you can actually go to gaming.com and say, please take my brand off that and that and that page. Nobody ever does that, right? Never. You're just too happy to be there and you're too happy to take the players, but it's sucking down your average player value out of that affiliate. You don't know it, you don't know where. So you're just happy with that average that you're getting. And if you really spend a lot of time, you can, without that integration, do some optimization by just applying good motherhood, like you know, get me off the no deposit page. Like I don't want to be there. But but do you know the difference between the real money casino page and the blog posts?
SPEAKER_01That's the honey grail of every marketer is to be able to maximize every dollar that they're spending. And this kind of analytics being plugged into your performance, into your affiliate program, will actually start to help you to do that.
SPEAKER_02I think, and again, jumping the gun to some of your later questions, if if we talk about how programs should change in the future, I think they need to start laying the foundation. Number one, become more data-driven, but number two, start to find ways of capturing that knowledge about the affiliate sites in-house that they're not relying on, but not in people's heads. It's it's intelligence that sits and is owned by the organization. And and you know, some some programs that I that I speak to, they they they're starting to get this. Um, it's a lot of moving parts, it's it's a it's a culture shift, it's this enormous change management involved. The tech is not gonna be the tech is gonna be complicated, it's gonna take time. But if you had if I had to look into a crystal ball in five years' time, who's gonna be winning? And you're gonna go find a constant in every single one of them. They're gonna be extremely analytical, data-driven organizations. I've got no doubt about it.
SPEAKER_01Which is great because we want to see the industry transform, we want to see positive change come in that helps us to spend money in all the right places, and we want to be able to equip our affiliate managers to do their job to the best of their abilities.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. And I mean, your work is is an essential cog in that wheel because there's some fundamental uh skills and fundamental thought patterns that that that filled to be taught. Like in any other customer-facing uh uh discipline, um, there's certain ways that they should and shouldn't uh act behave communicate. Um, and this all meshes together.
SPEAKER_01It certainly does. This is really just drawing on your years and years and years of experience in the industry. Is what is the one piece of advice that you can give to those listening to this podcast today, whether they're affiliates or affiliate managers, because we have both, that you would want them to be to level up their programs or even their skill set to continue to build their business in the year to come, which is going to be a challenging year. We're facing cookie deprecation that's coming into the market. We're facing the emergence of Web3 and what I like to call affiliate three, which is the next iteration of what you're talking about now, transform transformation, where data is going to help us elevate and change the way that we even do strategy in programs.
SPEAKER_02Uh there's a lot of things that you know I thought about, certainly for programs. I mean, it ties into what we've been talking about, but I think it's about efficiency. Um, it's really about efficiency. We can't be arrogant enough to think that you know what's going on macroeconomically in the world at the moment is not going to affect this world we live in. There's no doubt about it. It is, and like any other business, we all have to become a lot more efficient than what we're doing, whether we're in affiliate or an affiliate program. Some things are just going to become harder and harder. There's no doubt, and there's no doubt about it. Competition at the same time is increasing, because you know, it's more and more programs are launching. So it doesn't matter how good your brand is, because there are 10, 15, 20 other brands that quite frankly, sorry to say this, are as good or if not better.
SPEAKER_03No, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um, so so you've really got to become super efficient. And that that's that's certainly in what for many operators is their one, the biggest uh money generator, the affiliate channel, that's where they've got to really, really become efficient. So that that that would kind of be uh for for affiliates at the you know, for for new affiliates starting out tonight, and um I'm like to start off as an affiliate now is a tough gig. Yeah, so to me, you have to have either one one of two things. Uh you've got to have you gotta have a lot of guts and a lot of resilience.
SPEAKER_01No guts, no glory.
SPEAKER_02No guts, no glory. I mean that you have to be very resilient as an affiliate these days, especially as a non-corporate affiliate, if I could call it that. So if I'm talking about the bigger corporate affiliates listed on this, that um, you know, they have uh big war chests, they've done a lot of acquisitions and bought a lot of that traffic. Not anymore. They've bought bought a foundational layer in their business that's that's enabling them to take the hits, take a hit when Google has a has a headache, um, to take a hit if a market closes, etc. etc. It's the mid and small tier affiliates that that are under pressure. And especially if they you know try and obviously for many of them trying to build up a business to sell to one of these gorillas down the road, that's that's that's the game. But you know, if you don't have a a unique traffic source of sorts, and you're gonna you're gonna do the typical uh SEO, you're an SEO, or you do some paid media, or you do some social media advertising, etc. etc., pick a niche or a number of niches, and that's what we have we were lucky enough to to you know fit at business target certain niches. Um, because you cannot compete on the obvious stuff. That game's over, it's gone. Like, don't think you're gonna, you know, you don't think you know better about targeting the traffic for online casino in the UK than the monsters that are sitting at the top there and dominating it, and everyone has just been bubbling under them for the last five, six, seven years. So pick your niches, do something different, do something interesting on your websites. Like, you know, don't don't just be a side filipanda. That doesn't work anymore unless you have unless you have some clever SEO juju that miraculously within a year can get a site to rank. And then we see that we see these mysterious sites popping out of nowhere and popping into the rankings in a specific country for a certain keyword and high-value keyword sometimes, but they're becoming few and far between. So to build a sustainable business as an affiliate, pick a niche, work at it, be resilient, you're gonna get knocked back, things are gonna go wrong, things you're gonna think you're gonna think are most certainly gonna work or not gonna work, and you're never gonna know why they didn't work either as an affiliate, especially in the SEO channel. Um, you will try something that you can see others working, and you will try it and it will not work, and then you'll see somebody else doing it and it works, and you don't know why, and you can never really figure out why, because it is a black box. As much as all these big name SEOs will tell you, and they'll write in their blogs and they'll podcast and tell you about do this, do that, do one and the other, you can follow those recipes and may still not have success. So you've got to be prepared to try it over and over and over again and tweak it and change it, and have an arsenal of you know different hypotheses that you keep testing and just be resilient.
SPEAKER_01So, to summarize that in three words, I heard get efficient on the way that you are managing and working with your program and educate your team and be resilient because a lot of changes so there's three very good words to take away out of this podcast this week. Rihanna, it has been my pleasure to host you.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_01A long time overdue. And thanks for dropping so many amazing nuggets. I hope that all of you, the affiliate managers that are listening to this call, will take heed with what you have said and change their approach and start being clever about how they work with their partners too.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. Let's hope so. Thank you, Leanne. All right.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's a wrap for this week's affiliate marketing podcast. If you love what we're sharing, why don't you head over to Apple ITUs now and leave us a five-star review? Doing this helps us reach more people just like you. And we'd love to hear your feedback too. While you're there, make sure to hit subscribe, join our podcast channel so you never miss another insightful episode, and leave us a comment so we know what you're thinking. Want to amplify your affiliate program performance? The Amplify Virtual Summit is brought to you by Affiliate Insider. Save these dates, 17th to 18th of January 2023. Your calendar now and book your free ticket. To come and join us as we explore all the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends. This is not a sales pitch virtual event. So you'll get nothing but great advice and a chance to network with agencies, networks, stat, and Martech to provide what we call an insider scoop on how to amplify your affiliate program and partner performance. Plus, you'll get exclusive access to expert-led in-depth master classes, group coaching and ask me anything sessions with expert tools show and tell you how to implement tools and tactics helping you save time and money to get consistent results. Get your free ticket to join us at Amplify now. Visit www.affiliateinsider.com and click on events to register.