You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by Affifirst.com, the chapter and verse of everything you need for running successful affiliate programs and partnership management. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers, publishers, networks, agencies, and Martech providers who operate in affiliate marketing. If you want to launch, scale, and grow successful affiliate marketing programs, you're in the right place. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is changing. Gain behind the mic access to affiliate marketing veterans. Listen and learn tried and tested program management tactics. Discover what's new and trending in affiliate and performance marketing. The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else.
SPEAKER_03Welcome to this week's affiliate marketing podcast with me, your host, meanne Johnston. And today I am really excited. I know I always say I'm super excited, but today I'm really excited to be here with you guys because we've got none other than Jim Banks, who has been told to me and a million times that he's an original OG in affiliate marketing. So I'm absolutely thrilled to have him here. And we're going to talk a little bit about affiliate marketing past to present and maybe a little bit into the future and give you a snapshot of what things were like in affiliate marketing more than 20 years ago. So for some of you listening, just about around the time when you were born. So there's a lot to unpack in this session, Jim. It's absolutely great to have you on this podcast, I think, today. Thanks so much for being here.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for inviting me. Again, it's kind of really serendipitous that we'd never met before and we met in Vegas. It's like insane that you've been in the industry a long time. I've been doing it a long time and we'd never met physically. But uh again, I'd had so many people say, you really need to meet Lianne, you really need to meet Nianne. So when the opportunity came, I was like, yeah, great, fantastic. It's uh it's an opportunity for us to meet up. But uh yeah, delighted to kind of come and come join you today.
SPEAKER_03Thank you so much. And it's quite funny that we met in Vegas because a lot of us have been in the industry a long time and still a lot of us haven't met because that's how the industry was back in the day. It was all cloak and dagger, everybody didn't want to say what they were doing. So let's talk a little bit about the beginning and first let's introduce you because you're my guest, and I want everybody to know who you are in the industry as an OG. So take us back to the beginning, Jim Banks 20 odd years ago. I'm not gonna give away your age.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, again, I don't mind it. So for me, the hate the gray hair is real, it's not died, I don't put it in by kind of choice, it's there naturally. But yeah, I mean I I started in I I used to sell financial services, so I sold insurance, pensions, stuff like that, did that for 12 years, hated it, absolutely hated it because it was so regulated, compliance, and all that sort of stuff. So then I'd really started to get into the internet, probably in like 94, 95. I was running up massive phone bills, probably 1,200 pounds a quarter, because it was all done on dial-up. And then obviously when broadband came out, fantastic, right? That became the kind of the next iteration. And my first sort of foreign to digital marketing, if you like, I started, I quit my job in insurance. I took a 50% pay cut to go and work as the national sales manager for a web design company. And the job I had was to basically sell websites. And back then it was again, there was probably hardly any people had a website, right? So we would build websites and it was usually a case of how much it's gonna cost, and we just think up of a number and maybe double it, right? And that was how we arrived at what the price of a website was. And then obviously we'd finish the website, present it to the client, and say, There you go, there's your website, and they go, What do I do now? And it'd be like, You need to do some web marketing, and be like, What's web marketing? At the time I didn't really know, right? So I started to learn a little bit about SEO, this kind of predated PPC as we know it today. So I worked for this web design company for six months, I got laid off. Uh, I went to work for a company that did premium rate dialers, so that we had two industries that we were big in. One was porn and one was gambling, right? So I was kind of like dealing with porn barons and gambling, you know, bookies and stuff like that. Did that for six months, got laid off, went to work for another company, went to work there for six months, got laid off, and I thought I'm beginning to see a bit of a pattern here. So in 2000, I decided to set up my own company because I didn't want somebody else to have control of my own destiny, right? So I set up a kind of like a initially it was like a kind of company that that that was going to be doing SEO, right? So I thought, okay, I'll do SEO for clients, but it soon became clear, I think I landed my first client and they were paying me something like 40 pounds a month, right? And I was like running around the house going, whoa, I've sold, I made a sale, I made a sale. And then I thought, hang on a minute, I've got to sell an awful lot of these to make a living. But I persevered with it. I started to buy paid ads, right? On you know, this kind of predated Google. So this was on like Yahoo! They had some kind of a site called GoTo, whereas I was buying ads on GoTo, basically promoting my SEO services. And what happened was I was getting phone calls from people basically saying, Hey, I've seen your ad. Can you run ads for me? And back then, you know, being a good salesperson, I was like, Yeah, sure, I can do that, right? Without really working out what's what sort of business model it was or anything like that. So I set up an agency, ran it for six years. I'm gonna try and do a kind of cut the long story short, but I ran it for six years, grew up to 25 people. We took it to about 8 million pounds in revenue a year. And I got to the point where I think I'd taken my money had taken it as far as it was gonna go. I couldn't really take it any further. So I started to look at avenues to exit the business, right? So I looked at selling it, I looked at merging with other companies, and I looked at floating the company, right? I went through all those sort of scenarios, and in the end, I opted to sell the business. So I sold it to a publicly traded US company. They were buying lots of companies all at the same time. So they bought, I think they bought 14 businesses all within the space of about 18 months. Uh and my my my business was primarily bought to fill the portfolio gap that they had in paid media, but they also had an affiliate network business as well. So to go back to my original agency, so when I first set it up in 2000, although it was a kind of pay search agency, right, I really had started to get involved in affiliate marketing. I'd been to a few events, I'd met a few people who were affiliates. I'm like, what's that all about? They started talking to me. And one of my first clients who was an affiliate, he was a guy, he was basically running Tesco car insurance as an affiliate. And he basically wanted to outsource his affiliate business to me so we could buy all his paid media so he could go fishing. And it was like, fine, that's great, right? And it soon became apparent to me that there was clearly a lot of money in affiliate marketing. And at the time, we were working on net 30 terms with Google and we're working on net 90 terms with Yahoo, right? So we were able to bankroll our own sites. So although I had an agency and we were running ads for clients, we had about 45-50% of our business was actually sites that we'd built ourselves internally, where we were an affiliate of a company. So we were working with Hilton, you know, Booking.com, all sorts of different companies in I mean, travel, travel and finance were two of the big things that we did, you know, but we did all sorts of other things as well. So it became one of those things. Although we were running an agency, about 50% of our business was done like in-house projects that we had. And quite often we would run things, Google would say, Hey, we don't like that client, and I would go, okay, we'll get rid of that client, we won't work with them anymore. And so quite often they were our sites that they didn't like. So we were definitely pushing the boundaries in terms of what was acceptable practice. I had a kind of a mantra that if you weren't getting cease and desist letters, you weren't trying hard enough. And at one point in time, we could probably have wallpapered our office with cease and desist letters from companies where we were stretching the boundaries beyond where they should have gone to.
SPEAKER_03But honestly, that is how this industry was built. So, guys, if you're listening in now, a lot of this probably sounds like, oh, you know, like how can that be this industry, you know, non-compliant? But it actually we've come a long way since then. So what Jim's talking about now is like back in the beginning.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think to that point, you know, for me, it it was one of those things we were finding the limits of where they were. And I think even today, people still try and find the limits, and sometimes people will overstep the mark, which is why I think it's really important that anyone that's running a program or an agency or network has some like a significant facility in place for compliance and regulation and making sure that kind of everything is done in an honest way, right? Because unfortunately, in this industry, you know, there has always been bad actors. There probably will always be bad actors, and it's really just a case of trying to understand, you know, how you can spot them, what to look for, where where to look for them, and how to kind of deal with them, really.
SPEAKER_03But also it's powerful the course of our industry because we've all had to learn as we go along. There has been no textbook saying this is how paid media works in online, this is how affiliate marketing works in online. So back then, 20 years ago, we had to push the boundaries in order to learn what was relevant, what was compliant, what we could do, what was ethical. And so I just want I just want to set that as a precedence here, guys. We're not saying that you know this industry is rife with fraud, that's not the case. But back in those days, take it in context, we had to go and do things, you know, so at the fault fight.
SPEAKER_01We helped to create the rule book. We definitely helped to create the rule book. But breaking all the time. We were working with Google, yeah. We were working with Google, and we had really good relationships with we call them the kind of pre-IPO googlers, the people that were working for Google before they floated, right? Because obviously they had a different kind of mindset than the people that work for Google now. And when you look at it, I think Well, they were less corporate, yeah. They were much less corporate and much more helpful, and they wanted to again like like I was working with with Overture, which was bought by Yahoo, and they used to have a list that they called them unbidded keywords, right? So every month I would get a list, uh kind of an Excel file of all the keywords that had had significant volumes of search done in the previous month where there was nobody actually bidding on those terms. So those were incredibly cheap keywords. So we would just scan through them and go, yeah, I could do something with that, I can do something with that. So what I would do is I'd have the keywords on one side, affiliate programs on the other, and say, which can I dovetail into the other? And again, we we used to run things. And again, for us, you know, when we were running things as an affiliate, right, we were very focused on cash flow, because obviously we were running paid ads, so we had to make sure we got paid in a timely way, right? So again, quite a lot of the time our process was making sure we were negotiating with the network or the advertiser direct to make sure that we got paid in a timely way, primarily just so we could continue to run the program. Because if we had to wait to be paid, we'd have to stop running traffic, which meant nobody was winning, right? So Google wasn't making any money, we weren't making any money, network wasn't making any money, advertisers were making money. So for me, it was just really making sure cash flow flowed through the way it should.
SPEAKER_03It's quite an interesting point, actually, because cash flow is still a problem today, 20 years later, in terms of some programs are still in this day and age, it's a beggar's belief that you need to pay on 60 days when everything is immediate. And with the current you know, e-payment solutions and things that happen, you know, you should definitely be paying your affiliates within 30 days still. And there are some programs that just simply don't have that capability in their infrastructure to do it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I and again, I know that in in the kind of program management space, again, that's something that you have to try and sort of balance. I always say it's a little bit like juggling chainsaws, right? You know, you your job as a program manager is to keep the network honest, keep the advertiser honest, keep the affiliate honest. That's what you're there to do. And you know, and obviously, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's you know, and when I sold my company, I be I set up a CPA network here in the UK, right? They had a one in the States that we were basically replicating, and again, it was a kind of great model. So we basically became the affiliate network, right? Then in sort of 2008, the company that had bought mine decided that they were gonna shut up operations in the UK, wanted to move everything to Florida, asked me to relocate to Florida. I said, look, you know, it's just not really good timing at the moment, even though I would I look back now and go, maybe I should have gone to Florida. But there we go, that's by the by. But you know, I said, okay, I'm gonna shut up shop, uh, so close the office, right? And all my advertisers said, What are you gonna do? I said, I don't know. All my staff were like gonna be out of work, right? All my affiliates were like, what are you gonna do? So I basically set up another network called Global Direct Media, and I think I set it up in something like May of 2009, and I sold it in January of 2010. So it's a really a kind of an incredibly quick flip the second time around, right? And I was thinking like that's one of those things. If you make a mistake, you learn from the mistakes. So I made lots of mistakes the first sale, right? I didn't make the same mistakes on the second sale, and ultimately wanted to make sure was I had a good home for all the staff that I had working for me, right? So they were all able to work for a much bigger company, you know. In this sort of late, like late 2010, after a year's earnout, I decided to go off and you know, probably semi-retire a little bit. So it took a bit of time off. 2012, I said, okay, I've had enough of that. I don't want to do that anymore. So I set up the agency that I have now, which is called Spades Media, and we're a performance marketing agency. We run primarily paid ads, but we also do display, a little bit of email, and we do a lot of consulting. And I call us more of a consulgency, so we're a consultant agency, right? So you know, but a lot of the stuff that we do is still affiliate-based, so we we kind of a lot of it is still we run programs for people where we're getting paid a percentage of sales or you know, percentage of revenue, that type of thing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Okay, very colourful backstory there, which is awesome. And that's the kind of stuff that I want to share on this podcast because people coming into this industry, they're working in a much more compliant environment and they don't actually understand where we've come from and what we've had to do, and all the experiences that we've had in order to get us to where we are right now. And the industry is still growing, you know, double-digit percentages year on year that hasn't stopped, and yet it's still one of the most misunderstood parts of digital that sort of gets ignored as well, it gets sent off into a little side pocket of the business to just you know germinate in silence in the shroom room, is what I call it. So I'm trying to get people that have had all of this experience onto this podcast to actually talk about some of the things that we've learned over the last 20 years. And I know you've had a lot of stories. So you know, before you came on this podcast, we were talking a little bit about the whole boohoo thing, a little bit about Amazon. So talk to us about some of those stories where big lessons were learned from mistakes that were made.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I again I think when you look at, you know, so again, there there have been so many sort of good success stories, but also some horrible failures, right? And you know, so for me, it is it was always one of those things, like, you know, some sometimes when you're trying to run stuff as an affiliate, right? It's always very difficult to try and compete with the big boys, right? You know, again, quite often we identified certainly with Amazon when we were running against them, they were our biggest competitor. What we found was that Amazon were really aggressive right the way through the month until around about the 20th of the month, and then they'd run out of money. So they'd stop ads at that point. So probably the last 10 days of most months, they wouldn't be a competitor. And it was only by doing that analysis we were able to understand that we had an opportunity in the last 10 days of the month and less of an opportunity in the first 20, right? Whereas if we try to go head to head, we're always going to lose against a company like Amazon. They're gonna kick our ass from here to there, they're just gonna beat us, you know. But I think from my perspective, is understanding kind of what opportunities are exist and how you can capitalize on them. Just again, try and think a little bit differently. We used to call it we zigged when everyone's zagged, right? So we try and look at things in a different way, right? To try and find opportunities when other people would say there's just nothing there. I can't do anything there.
SPEAKER_03That's really about touching on the strategy of a program and how you manage a program and where when and where you spend your money throughout the program. And it also impacts the life cycle of the program, where you are. Like you said, you know, if you're not at the stage where you can go head to head with Amazon, how do you compete? Where do you look for those niches? I remember back in the day the story around Boohoo where you know the I think it was the CMO called affiliates grubby. I can't even remember the terminology. Yeah, grubby little whatever. And the industry just blew up. That was around about the 2008-9 time when what I call the golden years of affiliate of you know performance marketing. What was the tell us the story of that? Because I know you remember that that time as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. You know, again, it's really one of those things, you know, your job as a merchant, advertiser, right, is to look after your affiliates, right? And again, if you do that through a network or through an OPM, right, it's very difficult to, you know, you know, you have to watch what you say, how you say it. Again, I've always said to advertisers, you need to share everything with your performance channel, right? Because ultimately these are people that are taking risks with their own money to generate sales for you where there's no risk for you at all, right? Like you you generate no sales, you you get you, you know, there's little to no cost to you in in that respect, right? So the more you can share with people, the better. I think that the challenge is usually internally, there's all these sort of silos of divisions, right? So you've got the internal SEO team, the internal paid media team, the internal email team, right? And quite often they feel threatened by channels that are not internal, right? They see the kind of the affiliate channel as a in some respects, they don't say it now, but that they did back then, the kind of grubby channel that doesn't really add that much value, right? And I know when when like voucher codes and cashback sites first came out, right, they had a horrible reputation, right? Because they were just basically stealing, they were stealing from everyone, right? They were stealing from affiliates, right? Because they were usually picking sales up on the last click basis, right? People would go do make a search, do lots of searches, go to Google, type voucher codes, find a voucher, click on it, and the sale would go to the voucher code company that that or the cashback company that kind of you know got the click in the in terms of the last click. Whereas obviously, I think now it's become much more measured and modeled, right, to make sure that kind of everyone in the equilibrium is actually getting a fair crack of the whip, right? So everyone is getting their fair share. And obviously, again, the voucher codes and cashback sites, they add a huge amount of value. They've got huge databases of people that they've nurtured over time, right? They've got good reputations, good trust, they do a lot of TV advertising, things like that. Which again, you're thinking like now compared to where we were back then, it's it's amazing that there are companies that are doing like national TV ads and things like that, made major promotions, right? Of basically what effectively is like a performance marketing channel.
SPEAKER_03And I think that's it's testimony to how far we've come as well, because you know, we can see that affiliates play a much bigger role in the partnership economy because the economy has expanded so much. It's not just you, your customer, a website, or you, your customer, an app. There's 26 different touch points, maybe even more now, that customers are going through as they're on their buyer awareness journey, and affiliates play a part in every single one of those things. And you touched on something a little bit earlier, too, but you said transparency is here. And I think back then we didn't understand the impact that e-partners had in the customer buying journey because we simply didn't have the data. So we were making assumptions on the fact that affiliates weren't sending us new customers, but actually we didn't have the full data spectrum to actually have a look at that. So there were a lot of mistakes being made in terms of diminishing the value that partners have in the partnership economy. But now we have all of this data, we're still finding that there's clients that don't want to share that and be and be transparent. And to me, that's again, I'll give you an example.
SPEAKER_01So, in a lot of programs that I have a look at, and again, usually if I want to run a program, I'll look through the terms and conditions before making a decision as to whether even to consider putting it into my kind of like rotation, right? So one of the things that always frustrates the hell out of me is when you see people that basically say, you know, no affiliate can do brand bidding for my brand on PPC, right? And I'm like, okay, I I completely understand you don't want to, you know, compete with your affiliates and so on. But the alternative is at the moment, it's a case of there'll be your ad, right, and then there'll be seven of your competitors, right? I'd much rather have my ad than seven of my affiliates operating on the first page or whatever, whether the whatever the kind of makeup of the ads look like, right? Much rather have that than one of my ads and seven of seven of my competitors, right? Because Google are always going to show like the maximum number of ads that they can for any given search, right? So I think again, I think if I can give anyone that's running a program, right, as an advertiser, don't try and put that up as a barrier. It's not a barrier, right? There are defin definitely ways you can do it, right? If you're a big brand, yeah, you'll get a lot of affiliates, you'll make a lot of money off your brand. But what you need to try and do is then nurture the relationship and the partnership to make sure that they're bidding on generic terms and other terms that are not necessarily related to your brand to help give you that kind of blanket coverage.
SPEAKER_03But you see, that also takes active account management. And we don't spend money in this industry on educating our account managers. They're either coming in from customer support because they know the product, or they're coming in from a sales per perspective because they're really good at commercially negotiating or building relationships, and we're not nurturing the education piece that needs to sit behind that, which you and I have learned on the job. You know, it's one of the reasons why I launched our training program is to actually coach affiliate managers through things like this, where active account management, what does that actually mean? And what are the things that you should be doing? And it's this stuff that you're talking about right now.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and as you say, the education piece is so important, right? So, again, like the obviously there's your training. I always recommend that you know, if you can send people to your affiliate summits, Easts and Wests, right? Because there's again great content, great educational stuff, right? Link Unite, if you're a female industry, huge for you know, in terms of helping females in the industry to understand who you you know that this is an industry that is thriving in on in you know, with there's so many of my friends who are women in This industry who I absolutely love to pieces, right? Because we've done such great things as an industry, right? Whereas that again, when we first started out, right, it was like 95% men, right? So it's you know, and that wasn't we sort of exclude women, just weren't weren't many many women coming forward at that particular point in time.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely. And just I'm gonna give a little plug to Link Unite because I am actually speaking at their conference at Affiliate Summit Eastern New York. So if you haven't checked out Link Unite and you want to join a community of women that are really trailblazing in affiliates and performance marketing and lead generation and a whole bunch of other digital sectors to go and check it out. So thanks for mentioning that and reminding me about that.
SPEAKER_01Again, as as a man, I'm I'm like so behind that as a kind of initiative. I think it's such a great initiative.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we love it. We love the support that everybody's given it to. What are some of the big changes that have happened in affiliate marketing over the last let's just talk about the last decade because prior to that it was you know like everybody was doing every everything that they could to make a quick buck. But what are some of the big changes in affiliate marketing that our listeners need to be aware of? For me, the kind of rise of the network or the demise of the network now that we've had such, you know, really great tracking solutions that have come in, like Impact and you know, tune and cake, and there's so many tracking solutions out there like I think you're spoiled for choice now, whereas back then in the day, you had the option of I either build it myself or I go to a network and launch quicker. So, what are some of the things that you think are the big changes that have elevated us to where we are now in affiliate marketing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I definitely think that tracking piece is definitely one of them. I think the you know, again, it used to be that the tracking was this kind of one element of the equation, but it again, I think the problem that you had was that a lot of the kind of network tracking softwares charged so much money for something that they weren't really adding huge amounts of value to. Whereas I think with you know some of the more robust solutions that are existing today, it's very much a case of, you know, I just need the cape capability to do the tracking. I can do my own recruitment, I can do my own partnership development and you know that type of thing. Again, enlisting the help of you know program managers like yourself to help bring in gaps in my kind of portfolio. Because I always think it's you know, when you're actually running a program, right, you need to try and have a balance of different types of traffic coming in, right? It's not just a case of let's have everything searched, have everything SEO, everything email. It's like you need a balance, right? I always used to say to people that that you know, if when we were running some of the programs that we had, we would get an allocation of leads or sales that we could generate in a month. And for me, it would always be a case of I would try and distribute that as best I could across all of the channels where we had different affiliates doing different things. So it'd be a case of I'd say, This, these are my email people, I'll give them the opportunity to promote this program through their email stuff. These are my pay search people, I'll get them to do the pay search, and then we would have our own internal media buying teams as well. So we would try and pick up the majority of the snack internally, because then we we knew that there was integrity in the results that we're generating, right? Once you kind of go out to third parties, then it's uh you know a little bit more kind of a leap of faith and you have to trust the process. But you know, when you've done it yourself, you know exactly that every single sale that you've generated is legit. But I get I guess probably the big the biggest change that I've seen is the industry as a whole has become so much more professional than it was. And I think probably the tipping point on that was the rise of the kind of cashback sites, voucher codes, because I think that brought a lot of money into the industry, right? So people like Waleshark Media bought 300, I think they raised 300 million and they were buying the biggest voucher code site in each country across Europe. You know, so all of a sudden, people that were grubby little affiliates sitting at home in their underpants doing kind of coding, right? All of a sudden we're selling their businesses for 30, 40 million pounds, right? So all of a sudden, there was the opportunity for people to create massive value in their business and create real wealth, other than the wealth that they were generating from the affiliate commissions that they were getting. They had a significant value in the kind of the ancillary stuff. So they had a database of maybe six to eight million people, right? That has a greater value than just saying I can send PPC traffic and I've got a website, right? Or I've got six websites, or whatever it might be.
SPEAKER_03100%. I think that shift from traffic driver to brand or problem solver, that has been the biggest mindset change in affiliate marketing in the last 10 years for me.
SPEAKER_01When I talk about it, I try to talk about partnerships rather than affiliate relationships because it's you know it is a partnership. It's got to be a reciprocal thing. You've got to, if I'm running your program, I've got to do what you want me to do, right? But equally, if I'm running your program, you've got to do what I want you to do, right? And sometimes that might be pay me quicker, sometimes it might be give me a better offer, you know, a bump in payout, dedicated landing page. It's just something that kind of differentiates what we can offer versus what everyone else can offer.
SPEAKER_03And us as the affiliate managers and the marionettes of those puppet strings, like that's pretty much what we what our job is. And understanding that and knowing your place and your value and your worth in controlling all of those mechanics is really ultimately what affiliate marketing and affiliate program management is all about. One thing I want to ask you, which is like something that I've been waiting to ask you for a while because I know of your experience in the industry, but what's the one lesson that you wish you had learned sooner? Because you know, hindsight is an amazing thing. I know me, I would have probably swapped to the affiliate side a lot quicker way back in the day and made my millions, but I didn't. I stayed on the kind of you know B2B side and actually managing all of the relationships instead, and it's been an amazing career. You know, we get to travel to amazing places, we get to meet amazing people. But what's the one like key lesson that you've learned in your time in the performance marketing economy that we're in right now?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think for me it's probably right that I it certainly for the first several years of running it, I didn't really think of it as a saleable business opportunity. Whereas I think now I would absolutely set myself up for success by looking to have a business that I could grow to either, you know, buy other companies or sell to somebody else. Because I still think there's a lot of there's a lot of uh demand for people to, you know, again, like you look at your impacts and you know, acceleration partners and so on, they're going around buying companies left and center that fit the kind of gaps that they have in their portfolio. And if you can create something that fills a gap in somebody's portfolio, right, then you have the opportunity to grow a business pretty quickly, right, without much risk, right, and have something that is significantly saleable down the line, you know, maybe two, three, four years down the line.
SPEAKER_03So do you think because there's a lot more like tech stack companies that are solving problems in the e-commerce space coming to the market? You know, you've got the rev. We've mentioned a lot of companies on this podcast, and I just want to like caveat that neither of us are affiliates for these companies, but it you know, it's just the way that the conversation's gone.
SPEAKER_01But again, I've got lots of good friends that work there, right?
SPEAKER_03And yeah, I mean we we all help one another out, but do you think that there's a massive market now for those like problem-solving solutions and tech stacks where it's not a traditional affiliate, but it's more of a partner?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I read yesterday, and funny enough, I took a call yesterday from somebody at Tipalti who basically do the payment processing for, you know, because again, it's like if you have like, let's say you have 3,000 affiliates, right? Yeah, 3,000 affiliates all over the world, trying to get them paid is like one of the hardest things in the world, right? And Tipality helped solve some of those problems. They just raised, I think, another $250 million yesterday, which takes to, I think it takes their total raise now to $700 million. And you're thinking, this is like crazy money in in bar industry, you know. But again, today Vodafone announced they're laying off 11,000 people. So there's again, there's going to be opportunities for people that are maybe being laid off to repurpose, reskill themselves, to come into an industry where they can have an element of control over their own destiny. That's the thing I've always loved about affiliate marketing, right? Is I'm in control of my own destiny, right? I get out of it as much as I put in terms of effort, right? And sometimes the effort is minimal, right? I if I run programs where the most effort I had to put in was make sure I paid my credit card bill at the end of the month, that was it, right? And I made tons of money on the back of it, right? But not everything that not every attempted shot that you take is a winner, right? I've made lots of mistakes along the way. I've hired some great people, I've had, you know, lots of great people that have left me and gone and done fantastic things. But I equally I've had people that were not good at what they did. But certainly as an industry, again, I think it's in great shape. I think it's only going to grow quicker. I think it's going to put more, I think there's going to be more emphasis on performance marketing in the next three to five years for sure.
SPEAKER_03100%. If you're in this industry already and you listen to this podcast, good news is you're in the right place. You know, and now it's just going to be, you know, reiterating and refining and looking at everything that's happened in the past in order to learn from because I am a big believer that history repeats itself. And as we go through the next iteration of you know, AI, virtual reality, blockchain, crypto, all of these different types of currencies and things that we're looking at. It's how we were back then in the 90s, like looking at mobile phones as huge breaks and going, this is never gonna work. Like, how are we gonna work with this? And now look at us, we've got these smartphones in our hands. It's exciting because you know, having come from where we've both come from and seen the iterations of where we are right now, like I'm really excited to see what the internet looks like in 20 years from now. Please, God, may I still be around to enjoy it. But yeah, it's it, you know, like I really want to encourage people to get into this industry and really like grab hold of it and start building careers because not only look, it is hard work, there's no denying like hours and hours of time have been spent learning our craft on the job, but it is also an incredibly rewarding because you are constantly learning all the time.
SPEAKER_01But again, I take my hat off to people like yourself, Deanne. Obviously, you take a huge amount of time out of your day to produce things like your podcast and your training programs and things like that, which don't necessarily add any money to your bottom line, but it's helping to educate the people that come into the industry, which is helping the industry to grow, which then means that there's more opportunity for your you know, your business to thrive as a result of that. And I again I've I'm all in favour of people that kind of help educate the kind of the next generation because again, I think when you look at it, there's a lot of people that will educate you well, and there's a lot of people that will just want to take your money and educate you badly. And for me, it's really just a case of making sure that you get the education from the right people, and uh, you know, and then like I said, I think it's just an industry that is going gangbusters and it's going to continue to do that.
SPEAKER_03That's the thing, and that's why I bring people like you onto this podcast because we need to tell these stories and we need to share where we've come from so we know what's happening next. A couple of more questions before I let you go. What do you think affiliates and publishers really need from the programs that they work with? If you can dumb it down into three key things, make sure that you're doing these three things in your program.
SPEAKER_01I would say decent payouts, quick payouts, and creativity in terms of what you're allowing your partners to do in terms of running your program.
SPEAKER_03To step outside.
SPEAKER_01I think if you try and if you try and restrict them so much and pay them so poorly and pay them like in a really untimely way, you're not going to get success of your program. The more you can, you know, help reward people, again, be flexible. I'm not saying you need to be flexible for everyone, but you could probably take your top 5% of your partners, right, will probably generate 80% of your revenue. And if you just work with those 5% and made things more flexible for them, right? Whether it's the case of right, instead of net 30 or net 60, pay them every week if they generate more than X number of sales or X thousands of pounds worth of revenue, right? Pay them every week because you know, again, it's like as long as you you know you don't have a product that is high chargeback or high refunds or returns, right, there's less likelihood of them, you know, getting money that they shouldn't be entitled to get, right? You know, so again, pay them quickly, pay them more than you're able to in terms of the standard program, right? And then that way people will want to run the program. I get again, I used to run programs before where the program was so popular we had to really try hard to get into them. And those are the sorts of programs that ultimately would be the most successful.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Because they look after their partners and pay them, pay them better than most people are and are more creative in what they offer.
SPEAKER_03It's really not rocket science. Like we, you know, like people look to us and go, Oh, how do I make my program successful? And you just heard those three things are gonna make your program successful. And they're all things that you can do, they're all things that are within your grasp and within your power to make happen.
SPEAKER_01And like I said, as as an affiliate, the first thing I do is I look to see what the terms of the program are, right? Payment terms, like restrictions, right? And I'll make a decision like within two minutes whether I want to even consider running that program. And nobody, whether it's the advertiser, programmer like yourself, you approach me and say, I want you to run that. I'm just gonna go, nope, not interested. Because, you know, because like I said, it's just it's not worth my while to stop doing again. A lot of the stuff that we're doing is buying paid media. The last thing I want to do is to take a risk on a program that is gonna pay me much slower than the ones I've got now. Because it's cash flow. Yeah, it's just not gonna work for me.
SPEAKER_03Okay. One last question before I let you go, which is how do you think the future of affiliate marketing might change in years to come? Because you've got the past, you've got the history, you've lived through it. What do you think the future of affiliate marketing is gonna look like?
SPEAKER_01I try and look forward as best I can. I think sometimes you know, so many people try and look back and go, Oh, I made mistakes, I made mistakes. We're all gonna make mistakes. I think the more you do, the more mistakes you're gonna make. And you just gotta accept that you make them, learn from them, move forward. Again, I think there's definitely some step changing that's going on at the moment with things like Chat GPT and AI and BARD and all that sort of stuff. And at the moment, I'm probably a little bit further behind in my knowledge of that than I should be. But fortunately, I've got some really smart friends that are probably miles ahead, right? So I'm trying to pick their brains and see what's going on from them, right? Because again, I've always said my biggest asset has been my Rollodex of connections. But no, but you know, we do things for other people. There's never any money past his hands. It's not like again, when I say I want to pick somebody's brains, I hate it when people say I want to pick your brains because usually it just means I want to get lots of information from you and not pay you any money. And for me, I'd rather somebody said, Look, Jim, I want to hire you as a consultant. What would be the alley rate? And I'll go, don't worry about it, I'll do it for free. But rather they offered at the beginning than just saying pick your brains, buy your coffee. Because again, I've spent loads of time getting into my head all the knowledge I have. So to then powers, yeah. Yeah, you know, so I think for me it's a case of you know, I'm going to try and understand the opportunities and threats that that chat GPT and stuff has in our industry, right? Because hey, again, I think it has lots of potential, right? But it also has a lot of potential to be abused, right? And I'm scared about the potential abuse of again, people creating 10,000 page websites just by you know a couple of prompts and away you go, right? That's not really what you want. I get again, I've always said whatever programs I'm running, I want to make sure that the end users of the advertiser have a good experience, right? So if somebody's buying white t-shirts, jeans, glasses, flights, whatever it might, whatever it is, I want them to have a good experience working with that advertiser. And if they don't have a good experience, then I don't want to run that program.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So future of affiliate marketing in years to come, it's gonna look different.
SPEAKER_01It's gonna look very different, but again, I think it's uh it's definitely gonna evolve. And uh I'm so excited about the next, like I said, three to five years, right? And beyond that. And as you say, hopefully we'll still be around to see it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we just yeah, I think we will. I think I know I will, and I don't think I'll ever stop working, and I don't think I'll ever stop learning. And that's like our mantra here at AppleVers is always be learning, always be learning about what is working in the partnership economy and the affiliate space. So, on that note, people, we're going to say thank you so much to you, Jim, for joining us and giving us the past, present, and future of affiliate marketing. It's been a pleasure to have you on this podcast and to get you to share some of your knowledge and insights with my community that are tuning in.
SPEAKER_02If you're looking to launch an affiliate program but aren't 100% sure where or how to begin, or you've launched your affiliate program but something isn't working and you're struggling to scale, we can help. Book a free 15-minute strategy call with our Affiverse agency team to find out how we can help you get to where you want to be. We offer a range of affiliate program management services, from strategy and consulting to technical setups and complex affiliate program migrations. Our award-winning agency team handles everything from affiliate strategy to affiliate partner recruitment and a deep dive affiliate program audits. We help you make affiliate marketing simple. Don't waste time struggling to get the results you need and deserve. Visit www.affiverse.com and click on the agency button to book a call now. That's a wrap for this week's affiliate marketing podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down, why not head over to Apple iTunes and give us a five-star review? Make sure to subscribe to our podcast and our YouTube channel so you never miss another insightful episode or one of our free webinars ever again. Tune in next week for more digital affiliate marketing insights, trends, tips, and content to keep your affiliate and performance marketing fresh and your partners driving consistent sales.