You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by Alfiverse Media.com, the chapter and verse of everything you need to know about running a successful affiliate program for your business. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers, publishers, networks, agencies, and Martech providers who operate, support, or manage affiliate marketing programs around the globe. If you want to launch, scale, and grow a successful affiliate marketing program, you're in the right place. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is constantly changing, and tune in to industry experts who are getting behind our mic to share tactical insights and practical knowledge to help your affiliate program grow. Here you'll discover what's new and trending in affiliate and performance marketing, how to run your affiliate program successfully, and gain industry insights from experts and practitioners from around the globe. The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else. Now, here's your award-winning affiliate and performance marketing host, an industry veteran, your affiliate marketing guide and the founder of Ativerse, Leanne Johnston.
SPEAKER_02I am really excited to invite back Julia Logan from Zangus Digital to talk about some of the SEO anomalies that we've been seeing in the iGaming industry. Julia, it's fantastic to have you back on the mic. I'm really excited to talk through some of the things that we're going to be talking through today. Welcome back. Thanks for having me back. Hello, everybody. So let's start off by just telling everybody a little bit about who you are, because they might not have heard your previous podcast. So give us a little bit of a backstory about who you are, what you do, and what Sandwich Digital does.
SPEAKER_03Sure. My SEO consultants. I've been involved in the SEO industry for a long time since the year 2000. I've worked both in-house and as a consultant for all sorts of clients, from casino operators to medium-sized, small affiliates, and everything in the middle. I have had some experience running my own sites as well. Now I have founded a company called Zoom Goose Digital, which is focused on helping clients in highly competitive verticals like iGaming.
SPEAKER_02And that's exactly why I brought you back today, because you wrote a really interesting article in the IGB affiliate website around how mainstream media is now featuring more prominently in casino search listings. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the historical stronghold of casino operators that have held those search listings, and also how terms such as best online casino seems to now be kind of appearing for mainstream media. So talk to us a little bit about how you found this, how you started observing this, and what led to actually writing that article.
SPEAKER_03Basically, it's kind of a new story for eye gaming, but it has been going on for some time and some other verticals already. Let's say Cultural Colds of Coupons. They have been full of these for a few years already. And if we look back even further, basically something like this has been happening in pretty much all the serves around 2010 or so. But in that case, that used to be press release sites. Remember when you used to just submit a press release on basically just about any topic whatsoever, and the next day it would rank in whatever serve instead of all those sites that were specifically targeting that serve on top of all those results. That got sorted back when Google started releasing its and updates. Quite a few press release sites basically got killed by those updates. But I guess we're back to round one. So what's happening now is it's a long story again. Which is even in iGaming has been going on for some time already. As I diggle in the article, some super affiliates have started signing up deals with large mainstream media that had nothing to do with iGaming initially, such as the Telegraph. And basically, those large media sites have launched entire sections betting or casino or gambling or something like that. And those sections are market sponsored, and sometimes they actually have the credentials of the company sponsoring this, or just the site that they are pushing through those sources. But in other cases, it's a bit more anonymous, and you can't really dig down to who's behind this. In my article, I detailed several of these deals that I got down to the actual press releases released by the companies and what's been on the news, industry news, are mentioning those deals being signed. And those are large amounts of money being involved in those deals. And it kind of makes sense because you know, mainstream media sites, large publications have always been kind of a holy cow for Google, something that just cannot fail. Again, closer to 2012-2013, I don't remember the actual dates now, but there used to be a case when we pretty much witnessed whitelists in certain super competitive serves like payday loans. And those whitelists, because they were built up pretty cluelessly, ended up having the UK Parliament sites ranking for payday loans, and I wrote an entire investigation about that, including talking to the actual SEO of the UK Parliament at the time, and that was pretty interesting. So basically, what we're seeing now is just everybody jumping on this sort of train. They also the opportunity, I think, as far as I could investigate this as far as the public information shows or the press releases and all those public records and stuff like that. Better collective have been the first ones with the Telegraph, and the Telegraph has been in those search for quite a bit, and they've been probably reaping the rewards of this pretty nicely. I wouldn't say they are benefiting from the internal traffic of the actual readers of the Telegraph because that section is pretty well hidden within the site structure. You don't just go to the homepage to read your daily news and then have this content pop up in your face. You kind of have to search for something like this in Google for this to surface and for those articles published in that section to come up. And I guess everybody else saw the opportunity, and now we have companies signing up the deals with all the other large media publications. The Sun has it, the Daily Mail has it, a bunch of smaller publications have it. In the US, it's even worse. Basically, any random small news site is now involved in this, and they are showing up in the SERPs for the most unexpected queries that they would have, you know, legitimately no chance ranking for if they were just another domain, gambling-related domain.
SPEAKER_02Let's just clarify like why this is a problem, because some of the people that are listening to this podcast, yes, you know, they're not maybe as technical in SEO as what you are, but you want to see Google deliver clean search results to customers based on whatever it is that they're searching for. So if you're typing in Best Casino online, you are not expecting to see the telegraph pop up at the top of the page because it is not relevant, it is not targeted, and yet this is what Google is saying every affiliate or publisher who runs a content-based site needs to strive for is to make sure that their site is ranking for keyword terms that are relevant to what users are searching for. And actually, what's happening is that they're serving results that aren't relevant because of these partnerships that are happening in the background. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_03I wouldn't say they are exactly not relevant. It's not the problem with the relevancy because you get to the page and what you are seeing is a copy of your typical affiliate landing page. Yeah. Along with the table of casinos, those ratings for the casinos, a bunch of you know, SEO text and stuff like that. So basically, regardless of it being the telegraph or any other large media publication, the actual page doesn't look irrelevant. Yeah. It is actually relevant. That's the problem for the affiliates. Yeah. Yeah. So basically for the end user, I don't think that's that much of a problem. The problem for the end user is that you are dealing with large affiliates, super affiliates with large budgets, who are affiliated with certain casino operators, who are pushing, of course, the casino operators that they are affiliated with. And that's the reviews that you are getting, and that's the content that you are getting. So basically, if any other affiliates are promoting any other offers from any other operators, that's where we have a problem because those might not surface where we have the influx of these sites controlled essentially by large super affiliates.
SPEAKER_02So one so break that down a little bit for us. What's the impact for smaller SEO-based publishers? If this trend is happening in gaming, and you've said that it's happened in other industries as well, because you watch the SERF so closely every single day. What is the actual impact for SEO-based affiliates? I think that's probably the question on my mind. Is SEO under threat? Should program managers be looking at how they diversify and segment their programs? And what's the long-term like strap plan on this? Because you obviously read the SERFs every day, you know how to kind of look at how the algorithms and the updates that Google implements impact how search responds and relays that that update. What do you think is going to happen?
SPEAKER_03Uh well, basically, the problem for the affiliates using SEO as their main traffic channel is that they will have difficulty ranking where they traditionally were ranking, no problem. They will have serious problems getting the same traffic that they had before.
SPEAKER_02So I just want to take a break here and talk a little bit about program segmentation and why it's so important for affiliate managers to look at where the traffic sources are coming from within their programs. And this little snippet from our affiliate drive time series is quite relevant. So take a quick closer listen to this and we'll pop back to the interview in just a second. Hey guys, and welcome to affiliate drive time. This week I wanted to talk a little bit about um segmenting your database. Now, obviously, when your affiliate program gets a little bit more mature, you've got a lot more affiliates in your platform, you sometimes forget to have a look at that long tail. And I've spoken about this before on drive time, but the reason why I want you to look at segmenting your database periodically is because often you are finding or ignoring partners that are growing over time that you've discounted before. Now, there's a massive amount of opportunity that can be taken up using your long tail to help build brand awareness. We're often taught in affiliate marketing that we're always about sales, about generating new sales, about acquisition, um, you know, and about making sure that we're bringing in new customers or new sales to the business. But what I want you to consider is looking at some of your affiliates in the long tail and utilizing those assets that they bring to you to build brand awareness because all of these things can help you to reduce your costs in other digital channels. And you must have heard lots of people talk about the fact that brand awareness can reduce your cost or quick ranges, it can reduce your paid advertising, your retargeting, if people are searching for you directly or searching for your products directly, all of these things can help you to reduce costs in other digital channels. So take a moment with me, have a look at that long channel in your program, all of those partners who are in active haven't activated yet or have digital assets and resources in social media channels, then you can leverage the whole brand reach. So the component that you deal with, or the approach that we have with these cards isn't necessarily how can you bring me more traffic, how can you bring me more signals, but it's about how can I get brand awareness in your community that then you know brings customers to me later on in their buyer awareness journey. So I hope that you are going to be looking at your long term this week, that you're gonna be supplementing, that you're gonna be finding these partners and seeing what they've done since the last time you touched them or spoke to them when they signed up to your program. And hopefully you'll be able to get some value out of these partnerships that may have been sitting dormant over a period of time.
SPEAKER_03So, my advice to them would be try and differentiate your approaches, try and differentiate your sources of traffic. First of all, do look beyond Google. There is Bing, and I think especially in the light of the recent events and the recent releases and all the AI development. It's gaining its ground, it's gaining its market share. So do look at Bing. We will get back, I will talk a bit about the AI in a bit. Let me just yeah, let me just talk about some other stuff first. AI is a whole different story. So we we need to talk separately about that. So talking of the traffic sources, if you can get traffic from like social media, if you can get traffic from directory farers somewhere else, if you can build your own, I don't know, YouTube channel and get the traffic from there and convert it successfully because it's not just about getting traffic, it's about converting that traffic as well. If you could run, I don't know, Facebook group, telegram channel, TikTok channel, I don't know. In the US, they are banning TikTok now, so probably not much of an option now. I'm not big on TikTok to be honest. I've never used it and I think I'm too old for that. But if that's where you feel your traffic could be coming from, if that's where you feel your audience could be, then by all means differentiate your behavior and use that.
SPEAKER_02So you were not saying doom and gloom, yeah, but we are saying start diversifying because with these different changes that are coming into Google, publishers are going to need to look across platform to actually target their audience, which means coming up with different types of content because SEO content SEO-based blogging and content might not be the only form of traffic that you should be investing in and going after. So maybe even looking at building emails. And we've long been talking about affiliates becoming brands and actually building and investing in brand versus just pushing traffic. So uh is this a sign of things to come? Like in your opinion, as a you know 20-year strong SEO, do you think that now's the time to diversify, or do you think that Google's gonna correct itself, or what's the future prognosis here?
SPEAKER_03Good question. And talking about affiliates and building brands, it all honestly, if you're looking at affiliates, if you're looking at any regular iGaming SERP, how many brands can you really remember without uh having a look at the actual SERPs? Okay, gambling.com, okay, casino hex and their series of sites and all the countries, maybe casino.org, maybe AskGambler or something like that. Yeah, that that's about it. Affiliates and brands, at least in iGaming, is two things that just, in my opinion, don't really mix very well. The affiliate model has always been the successful affiliate model. You get the traffic, you get the visitors, read the review, click the link, sign up to the actual casino, depose it, become players. You get the profit. The whole model is built on getting rid of your use of your visitors, sending them to their final destination as fast as possible. The faster you can do it, the greater your chances of having more conversions and having more affiliate commissions. What kind of value can you propose to those who are just looking for the next casino to play at? I don't know, bonus hunters?
SPEAKER_02So it's time for publishers in the gaming space to actually become more tactical about what problem they're solving for customers and what service they're going to be providing in that, you know, consideration, awareness, you know, review, and then purchase phase. So the role of an affiliate is going to become more tactical. It's not just going to be about getting traffic because traffic obviously is clearly being taken by some of the bigger media partners that are have all partnerships that are happening. So, do you think that you know publishers now need or affiliates now need to start looking at other tools like AI to create new products and services? I mean, you we kind of segue us in there, but what are your thoughts with all of this content that can be created now and flushed into the SERP very quickly? Is that the kind of thing that's going to change the way that Google, like, are we expecting another update in the future? What are your thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_03Oh, that's a bunch of questions at once. Yeah. Let's tackle it one by one. Absolutely. So, yeah, talking about AI. Let's start with the AI, I guess. Yeah. So talking about AI, basically what we're facing here, you mentioned using AI for creating new products and new offers. It's much more than that, really. Okay. Basically, it's stopping being just SEO being search engine optimization is becoming everything all.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_03Everything optimization. I mean, that's what it's all about. You have to adjust. You have to adjust because you don't know if Google is gonna exist tomorrow. And if it stops existing, the web doesn't stop existing. There is still something, people are still searching for stuff somewhere, people are still using something, people are still going somewhere, buying something, signing up somewhere, depositing somewhere, playing something. You know, that's still going on. So you just need to look at what's being currently happening and basically adjust to what you see. Adjust to how you can best meet your potential visitors halfway, meet them where they are using whatever they are using. Let's say if they are using AI assistants, then you kind of have to look the same way as well. You kind of have to see what kind of offer you could come up with that could be integrated with those AI assistants. Let's say Chat GPT now has an influx of plugin developers. Yeah. And what I am seeing, let's say I've been playing with some domains. There are three plugins. Out of those, at least two are essentially resellers or affiliates in the domain space. So what they do is I could go into the actual features and what they get wrong, what they get right, what I like about them, what I don't like about them, but this is not the topic of this podcast, so I'll just keep it short and nice. Basically, they are driving traffic to their sites or to their offers through Chat GPT. So think of how you could do something like this, not necessarily with Chat GPT. Chat GPT is just one platform. There is a lot of others being developed right now. There is a lot of other stuff being publicly or being made publicly available right now.
SPEAKER_02So how are they doing that? Break it down. What exactly are they doing with ChatGPT to drive traffic to their sites?
SPEAKER_03In ChatGPT, let's say if you install certain plugins, then ChatGPT and basically you can activate up to three plugins at a time, but you could install unlimited plugins, you could install even the entire library of everything that has been developed so far, which is like in the hundreds now. I wouldn't be able to provide you with the exact number. It's probably changing as we speak. Of course. New developers signing up, new developers coming up with their own plugin ideas and getting approved, and those plugins being included into the ecosystem that's growing on ChatGPT platform. And ChatGPT basically is associated with Microsoft. So there goes Bing's influence. And I wouldn't be too surprised to see if this functionality eventually gets implemented also in Bing AI chat as well, which is based on the same technology, OpenAI, as Chat GPT. So if this is the same ecosystem, I don't see any problem them integrating what they found most useful and most interesting and most demanded by the users into Bing AI offer. Okay. And therefore into Microsoft's AI assistance in all those programs, you know, I don't know, Windows, Cortana, anything. So basically, if we are looking at this ecosystem, we are seeing a huge opportunity there. Basically, yeah, let me explain. If you're looking for something domain related, let's say you want to come up with suggestions of domain names related to topic X. You are looking to build the new sites around that topic. You have something interesting to offer to your potential visitors and buyers and whatnot, and you're looking for a good available domain name. You used to go to your registrar of choice and just look for domains there. You don't have to do that anymore. One of the plugins that I have tested gives you suggestions of possible domain names around your topic, and then can also check for availability of those domains and even check for the lowest price across a bunch of different registrars.
SPEAKER_02That's saving loads of time for SEOs.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. That's saving loads of time. But what it doesn't do, it doesn't give you the back history of that domain. You don't know if it's just currently become available, if it's never been registered before, if it has been banned from, let's say, Google search at some point, and therefore has been dropped for that reason by the previous owner, if it has been spammed to death and has been ranking for a bunch of unrelated, spammy stuff that you probably don't want to be associated with. But so that doesn't solve all those problems. Let's say if I was building a plugin, I would probably build something that does the research that we normally do manually for our customers. But within that ecosystem, within that interface, that's where I see the opportunity. But basically, yeah, it works, it does the job, it does what its creators wanted it to do. And it drives them affiliate commissions if they are the affiliates of all those registrars, from the actual registrations that happen through those referrals sent through ChatGPT. And what about the content side? There has been some discussion going on whether or not you should close your site's content from indexing by all those AI companies. Like ChatGPT uses for training everything they scrapes from everywhere on the web up to a certain point. At some point, they will probably be updating their core base of knowledge. For now, the availability of web browsing in the paid version of ChatGPT enables it to access the live web, what's current on the web. So basically, it enables it to access your site. If you don't really want it to access your site, you can put the user agent in your robots. But the question is: do you really want to ban it from accessing your site? Or should you really embrace this as a potential traffic channel?
SPEAKER_02It's a very good point because there's a lot of talk about you know ChatGPT, the logistics of it, the compliance of it, who owns the content that gets created by it. And it's a very interesting like phase that we're moving into, which is going to require some time to bed in to actually see how you know what the results are. And I'm sure there is going to be an impact in Google because as more content goes into the search, how's Google going to determine what is good content, what isn't good content, and how is it going to rank it with the sheer volume of articles that can now be created in like literally in minutes? Okay. Obviously, good content is always going to rank best. And I do believe that it's not going to replace humans. And a lot of the SEOs that I've spoken to have agreed with that, that whilst it can help to create content, it's never going to replace human-based content, edited content. But the thing is, are we waiting for the next big update? Is Google currently sitting there going, oh, we're going to see how this works for the next six months and then make a whole big change again and everybody has to readjust? Do you think that's something that might be coming?
SPEAKER_03It's not whether or not we're waiting for the next big update. We know that it's going to happen because core updates are happening every half a year or so right now. It has been our reality for the last couple of years already. So we know that's going to happen. That's been pretty regular, pretty predictable. Plus, there have been a number of other regularly rolling out updates like product review updates, spam updates, and so on. Whether or not they are going to help in this particular situation with the mainstream media in the gambling serves. You know, honestly, I don't know. I did a thread on Twitter sharing some of my thoughts on what I think is going to happen. And basically, the main question we've got to ask here is does it make sense for Google to change anything? So basically, yeah, in some countries in iGaming, advertising has been banned and you can't use the ads. But let's say in the UK you can still use the ads, and if you can't rent organically, that pushes you to using the ads. Yeah. And using the ads means generating profits for Google from those same SERPs that you have the problem with. So essentially, like I said, Google does not have a problem with the relevancy of those pages. They are perfectly relevant. Users might have a problem. Affiliates who used to rank in those SERPs might have a problem. Operators that are no longer getting the traffic from those affiliates may have a problem. I don't think Google has a problem.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, because uh just in you saying that, I mean, it's gonna have a problem for operators because they are gonna have to determine where and how do they actually spend their budget. A large proportion of operators spend their budget through affiliates. You know, they're performance-based and they work with partners to actually attract that traffic versus trying to do a direct and in-house. So if it's gonna get it.
SPEAKER_03Talking about the operators, if they think they are safe without investing into their own SEO, without building their own sites, making them stronger, it's very wrong. It's a false security sense. Simply because this phenomenon that we are witnessing is not limiting itself to just the traditionally affiliate populated Serbs, longer tailed. If you look at online casino, those mainstream media sites start appearing there as well. First of all, what I have noticed so far as featured snippets, not featured snippets, but people also ask sources. Some of the sources that I have seen are already coming from like Herald Scotland, something like that, you know? Yeah. So nobody's safe.
SPEAKER_02So what Julia's just said there is that nobody is really safe from this phenomenon that we are discussing on this week's podcast. And I wanted to bring you back to a little segment that we did in our affiliate drivetime series, which is how to choose the right affiliate partners for you and to make sure that you're using all the different types of traffic sources and partnerships that you can leverage to grow your affiliate program. Take a listen to this little snippet here, and we'll get back to that interview in just a moment. Hey guys, and welcome back to affiliate drive time this week. I wanted to talk a little bit about partner discovery and figuring out whether a deal is going to be profitable for your business or not before you start having a conversation with an affiliate. There's a lot of preparation work that needs to happen before you reach out to a potential partner, whether they're an influencer, a media partner, an SEO, a review site. Doesn't really matter where you're looking to place your affiliate program banners, but what does matter is understanding whether those partners have the right traffic sources for your business. Now, there's a lot of tools that we use that can help us to determine what type of traffic a partner has. But the best way to do this is to really just hop on a call, talk about your product, talk about your customer, and then make sure that the affiliate or partner that you're dealing with has the right fit for you. Now, there's no better way to determine whether an affiliate's traffic is good or bad. Um, you know, you can look at stats, you can look at um how the website functions, you can go through the user journey that the affiliate or media partner has. It's always going to be a little bit of a gamble. So, you know, having confidence in terms of negotiating the right pricing for your for your placement and understanding whether the traffic sources are really the right uh match for your customer avatar are two of the most important things that you can do before you start a commercial conversation with an affiliate partner. It's also very important not to dismiss a potential affiliate before you've actually had these uh conversations. And reaching out to partners is really, really simple. You can do it on Skype, you can do it on a quick phone call, you can pop them a quick email before you improve them into your program. Um, often we see programs that have declined many uh publishers because on the surface they haven't looked very deep, maybe they've been a little bit busy and they've actually missed out on opportunities to create really lucrative commercial deals with partners that have traffic that matches their exact ideal avatar. So try and look beyond the obvious. Dig a little bit deeper when a partner joins your affiliate program, make sure that you have a telephone call or a reach out or a conversation about the type of traffic and customers that they have, and get the deal started by having a bit more of a human touch. So, you know, numbers are great, and you know, looking at data is incredibly important as part of the affiliate manager role, but nothing can help or beat um looking at numbers by having a real-life conversation with your partner before you actually approve them into your program.
SPEAKER_03Operators should really think about what they are doing and how they are differentiating their efforts. On one hand, it might seem tempting to cut off all the smaller affiliates and just stick to the deals with the super affiliates because those are sure they are ranking through all those rent-to-page mainstream media sites, all those big publications, small affiliates cannot afford buying a partnership like that, yeah, concluding a deal like that, because the amounts of money that are involved there, they don't have that sort of budget. Yeah, but basically, if the actual operators do not take care of what they are doing and differentiate their own efforts and stick to only those large affiliates, first of all, that's all gonna crash if at some point I do not believe this is happening anytime soon, but it might. If at some point all those sites get wiped from those serves. Basically, that's all those super affiliates losing a huge part of their traffic, yeah, because of the heavy reliance they currently came to have on those sources, at least those of them who have those deals with the mainstream media. On the other hand, the larger the organization is, less likely they are to come up with innovation quickly and implement it quickly, and be really creative about it, and be likely to experiment and be likely to discover the new sources of traffic. I always enjoy working with smaller affiliates where the actual person you're talking to is the decision maker and the owner and the SEO and the actual person doing the deals with the operators, and the actual person controlling the content on the sites, yeah, and doing everything else. I love working with those people simply because they are so flexible, they are willing to experiment, they are willing to outer edge. They are willing to implement things fast without half a year of approval after approval, which is likely to happen in larger companies. I mean, look at Katina Media. That's a monster. If you want anything approved by Katina Media, if you're dealing with your compliance, yeah, it's tough. It's tough. Also, compliant, yeah, operators, operators might not be able to do quite a lot of stuff that smaller affiliates can do. Also, because of the compliance, yeah. The regulators will cut their hands off if they try to do a deal with the large media publications like this.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the flip side of that is that, and this is why we always say it's best practice to not be overinvested in any one type of affiliate in your program for this exact reason.
SPEAKER_03Put all your eggs into all the different buskets. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02All your risks. Don't discount the smaller guys because they are the ones that are living on the edge, they are the ones that are testing and doing things differently. So make sure that you're including them in your affiliate program. Now, we've got time for one more question, and my question to you is quite it's gonna be quite large and open-ended, so do your best of it. But it is. What do you think the future of SEO and content-based partnerships will be like as we are driven forward into this new AI-driven future? Where do you think SEO is headed? Simply because it's been such a fundamental thing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's no longer just SEO, it's everything O.
SPEAKER_02I love that, it's everything O.
unknownYep.
SPEAKER_02So there you have it. What Jimmy has just said is that it's no longer just about SEO, it's about everything O. And Gary Lee said it best in this short clip from TikTok about what other social channels you should be looking at to drive traffic in your program. Take a listen to his little segment and come right back to us here on the podcast to finish off this season's episode on SEO.
SPEAKER_04Well, Instagram is actually not doing well with organic reach. I'm sure a lot of people are feeling that. Um, and TikTok is still doing well, but Jesus Christ, if only you listened four and a half years ago when I was yelling at the top of my lungs, you could be below average and dominate. Um, Facebook Reels is crushing. Everybody here should get very aggressive with Facebook Reels. My fastest growing audience on Facebook fan page, on my proper Facebook, is 18 to 25, which is completely mind-boggling. So I think Facebook is probably the thing that most people are underestimating here. LinkedIn is such a massive opportunity, even for consumer goods. If you're selling purses and orange juice and anything, like it's not just business. That's a feed that has a lot more attention. YouTube Shorts, if you title your videos very smartly, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world that has incredible long tail potential. You might make a video today that might crush on search three and a half years from now, and YouTube Shorts will be a big driver. So YouTube Shorts is another place. Twitter ads, if you put the URL or the call to action in the copy, is a massive arbitrage right now. A lot of advertisers have run away from Twitter as a political statement, which has created a supply and demand opportunity. Those really stand out for me right now, but they all require something that I we call, I call a banner pack. Platform and culture. You know, everything I just said is right, but many people here will go home to actually do something about it, and it may not work because you're not winning on pack. You don't fully understand how the tone and tenor and the creative strategy of a reel in Facebook works differently than a TikTok. And you may not know exactly the platform nuances of all the things you can do with that reel. Are you using the filters? Are you using, you know, the add-ons? Where is the URL placed? There's an incredible misunderstanding on how much goes into the creative strategy to make all of this work. Especially if you're good at running ads, because the money hides the bad creative. You think you're doing well on your $39 CAC when if you did the creative strategy right, it's actually 16.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so optimizing everything across the channel.
SPEAKER_03Because that's the reality. You have to adjust, you have to adjust. The reality of our industry is we have always been adjusting. You want to stay abreast, you want to stay alive, you want to stay competitive, you want to ring, you have to adjust all the time. If you want to just sit down and relax, this industry probably isn't for you.
SPEAKER_02No, definitely not. Having been in it for almost 20 years, it's constantly changing. Julia, it's been a pleasure to have you back on the mic. Thank you for talking us through some of these anomalies that have been creeping into the SERPS and letting us understand, you know, the impact that this might be having on both operator and publisher side. I'm sure that many other people that are listening to this podcast are going to maybe think a little bit differently about how they're driving traffic and look at some of the innovative stuff that they can do with smaller partners. It's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for joining us.
SPEAKER_03It's been my pleasure as well. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00If 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 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 affiversemedia.com and click on the agency button to book a call now.
SPEAKER_01And now a short message from this week's episode sponsor. Looking to monetize your traffic? Rubek Affiliate is your ticket to success. Apply to become their official partner and start taking advantage today. And now, a breve message to the patrocinator of the episode of this semana. Solicita convertirte in socio official and empiece a sack hoy mismo.
SPEAKER_00That'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.