You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by affiversemedia.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 Affiverse, Leanne Johnston.
SPEAKER_03Today on our guest and behind the mic is Adam Rima, who is an award-winning digital marketing strategist, a keynote speaker, a growth consultant with more than 20 years of experience. His agency creates and executes integrated growth marketing strategies based on data points and ROI. From top-up funnel affiliate marketing to SEO, email, and conversion optimization, Adam helps brands of all sizes to grow and scale in a digital world. Adam, it's a pleasure to have you on this podcast with me today. Thank you so much for joining us and for giving us your time and your expertise.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank you very much for having me.
SPEAKER_03Let's kick off this episode and tell us how you got started in affiliate marketing.
SPEAKER_01So with affiliate marketing, I wanted to learn ways to monetize my website, but I didn't really know what it was. Then when I got to the corporate world, I ended up having an affiliate program thrown into my lab. And I believe it was on the Be Free network before Commission Junction had bought the network. And then one thing led to another, and I eventually started incorporating affiliate links into some of my own blogs and other websites at the time. Then later on, around 2005 or 2006, I started building out much larger websites and incorporating more and more links into the content. And one thing led to another. And since then I've managed programs, been an affiliate, and done consulting for different networks.
SPEAKER_03And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on the podcast because you've kind of seen it like 360, right? And it's very rare to find people with as much experience as what you and I have still operating in the space because most people have, you know, sold their businesses, exited out, and they're not really kind of still practitioners like we are. And I mean, 20 years of SEO and affiliate experience working both network and publisher side, what's some of the biggest challenges that you you've seen us overcome in this industry from where we've come from? And what are some of the biggest challenges that you think we're facing still today?
SPEAKER_01Attribution and education is probably the largest issue that never fully gets resolved and moves a lot slower in our industries than it does in other industries. For example, the reason why I started managing programs is I got tired of watching my commissions go missing. It doesn't happen on every sale, but it happened on enough to where it was bugging me to start taking over and managing programs because maybe browser extension would intercept one in 20 sales. I'm just going to make these numbers up. They're absolutely not real. For a person that I would refer to a website at the last second would go search for a voucher code or a coupon. And all of a sudden I just lost my commission, even though I did the work to introduce the customer to the website. I did all of that. I should have gotten a commission. And at a certain point, I just got tired of what I consider it to be stealing. So I took over programs that I was doing well in and I made them safe for all partners. The good news is tracking was updated in the future. So if a vendor decides they want to work with a big diverse mix of publisher types, review sites, top of funnel, mid-funnel, end of funnel, zero value ad partners, quite a few of them, but I don't want to talk about those. Then basically you can now set up different attribution models to do it. The problem is brands tend to put people without experience and without technical knowledge into these roles, and they just make assumptions that it's working when a lot of times it isn't. So it's about getting the technical resources and education into the right people's hands, and then you can get an affiliate program to thrive. That's where we're lacking in our space.
SPEAKER_03I fluffing love what you've just said because I've got to be honest, I mean, and it really does, it is telling when we get somebody with 20 years, 20 odd years experience, or even 10 years experience in the affiliate industry that says what you've just said. Yes, the technical attribution is incredibly important, but more important is having affiliate account managers that understand what to do with that attribution knowledge and how to actually practically apply it into their program for whatever product or service they're selling. So, what do you think the challenges are like we've moved from that? And I think still many clients are still not getting attribution modeling right in in their programs, and many of them are still not educating their affiliate account managers to actually really get into the nuts and bolts of the stuff that we've learned on the job, like for the last 20 years. Do you think that that's still gonna be a challenge in five years' time, or do you think that we're looking at other things that are challenging now in in addition to attribution modeling?
SPEAKER_01In addition to attribution, you're going to have problems with tracking. For example, the new iOS is going to be wiping parameters off of emails automatically as part of their tracking. So now you're going to have to figure out other ways to do that. TV Scientific, I just recently started talking to them as a potential affiliate, we're evaluating if it's going to make sense, is using IP tracking. Kim Salvino, who works for Partnerize now, I believe. I don't remember exactly where, she's one of the best people, my favorite people in the industry. But she brought forth the idea of fingerprinting, which is where you stitch together different people based on devices, IPs, where they're logged in to the product. So that way, if they flip from a mobile device to a desktop, I'm pretty sure it was Kim that introduced this. Like this was forever ago. And then I kind of ran with it the idea and developed systems with clients to actually turn it into a reality, but it took a lot of heavy lifting. And I believe Impact offers similar solutions for that. And Everflow possibly too. So it's like it's just going to be keeping up with the demands and the modern lack of tracking availability to keep the industry afloat, but we're not in any danger. One thing that the affiliate space does is innovate and track. And that's the good news. I don't think we're going to actually get up to where we should be with attribution and showing the true value or lack of value with an affiliate program because brands still assume that an affiliate program should be managed by an entry-level person or an agency. And then there's very inaccurate data. So I was just looking at a study someone did where they said, no, no, no, we can't remove these types of partners because they're introducing 20% new-to-file customers, and I'm making that number up. I said, Are you sure about that? The company that did the study and the platform that verified these were new to file left one big important feature out of the study. The fact that if the program didn't exist, would those sales still have happened? I reset up a new test to show that. And it turns out if we didn't have a program at all, those 20% new to file customers would have still converted. I'm not going to explain how we did that test because then I'm going to get out and ramble for an hour. But that's the big thing is having someone with the experience bring in those extra details. Would these sales have happened if there was no affiliate program at all? Would the track fix still have come? And how can you prove yes or no? And that's where you can really show, wait, if we didn't have this program and we didn't have these partners, then we would be out the money. Or because we have these partners, we're losing money on each sale. They're not actually, they are a touch point that's part of the consumer life cycle, but they're not one that influences the sale. And that could mean top funnel, mid-funnel, bottom. It could be branding, it could be anything. And there's also touch points that people don't even know about. So a brilliant affiliate strategy from years ago, I don't know if it still exists. Someone went around and put up signs along the road with their URL on them. And it's uh it was a dating one, there was an insurance one too. And it brought people directly through the affiliate link from a redirect. Now, there is no advertising disclosure on that, but this was a heck of a long time ago. And it was just such a smart thing to do. People, as they were driving and board, they would go and they'd text to get the URL, or they would just go directly from their phone because what else are you going to do in traffic? And so it was an interesting touch point, very top of funnel, very introductory, but no real way to track uh other than the link or figure out what the affiliate's doing. And it takes the right questions and the right way to reach. And companies don't want to put someone with that level of experience in. And they don't tell people if you get good at affiliate, you're going to develop a background in email, you're going to develop a background in SEO, content strategy, paid media, PPC marketing, and all these other things. It's a great way to go directly from entry level to director level because you're going to learn each channel, and then you can dictate down. You can actually skip the marketing manager phase in a department.
SPEAKER_03Well, a lot of affiliate managers, I mean, people like us, we've gone from account managers managing affiliate programs in agencies or brand side through to being the CMO and handling absolutely every single acquisition channel, as you just said. And the reason for that is because programs have to have a segmented mix of partners so that they're touching every single part of that customer journey. And this is why we talk about program segmentation so much with kind of new affiliate managers that are coming into the space that we train. It's important that you understand where your traffic's coming from. It's important that you understand and look at the lifetime value of where that customer is in your buying journey. And it's important that you make sure that the affiliates that you're working with are spreading that out through the mix because otherwise you're too heavily reliant on any one kind of partner. You're not actually seeing the full picture of what's what's attributing towards getting those customers, whether it is because you've got a partnership program or whether it isn't, or whether it's because you haven't got a decent partnership program, which is more often the case. And you don't get to understand the learnings of what's actually happening in the Ethernet of what we call the World Wide Web. Because it's not just on web anymore, it's on, you know, YouTube and TikTok and all of these other channels where customers are flitting around all over the universe. And I think it's so important. Like honestly, I'm so glad that you're on this podcast this week, because in the first nine minutes you've dropped all of these bombs and made people think about what they need to be doing. And this is why I love chatting to people like you who are literally OGs in our industry. So let's talk a little bit about this though, because I have digressed into like other channels. There are other channels in the world wide web. There's email, there's all of this stuff that we need to be learning as affiliate managers. We had a little brief discussion about rich media and video, which everybody is like kind of looking at, you know, with Chat GPT taking the content world by storm. Video and content creators and influencers and all of this kind of stuff is important. But I know that you've done some interesting stuff in this. Can you explain the opportunity of video? And can you talk us through how you're currently optimizing video traffic for the brands that you're managing and just give us a little bit of insight and what's happening there with rich media?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there's a lot of different tests I've done over the years. So I'll just give a high-level overview. And then if you ever want to go like deep in, we could do one where we optimize videos together on a podcast or something. So there's a few ways I look at video. One, do I have content that's not doing well or not converting well? Maybe it's because the content on its own is too hard to follow and people are don't have a good attention span in that demographic. So maybe I'll try adding a video in. Another thing you can do with that video then is deploy something called video schema. All schema is a fancy word for some code that you could have AI even start to write. Now there's gonna be errors, so you could definitely use a tool like Schema app or SEO Clarity or something else to create the schema library for you and define to a search engine. This video is about this topic. Here's what you're gonna learn in it, here's who will benefit from it, here's the length of it. And then maybe that's what's gonna convince the person. And depending on if you use a video overlay, you can inject your affiliate links as you're mentioning products. Certain platforms like ShareSale offer video players, but that's only for the merchants. So they could actually take the video, but that would expose you to other affiliates, so it's not a good idea, and put the affiliate links on it for you. It just is gonna depend on your relationship with the affiliate manager. The next thing you can do with video is look to see do video results show up in search results. So maybe it's how do I paint a picture? And then all of a sudden there's no video showing up. So maybe that's an opportunity because a how-to is a type of search query that normally generates a video result. Find some of your affiliate partners that are in the painting, art, and crafting niche, give them a different topic and probably pay them or give them a higher commission if they do this, and teach them how to optimize by using the right wording, the right description, setting chapters, and other elements and key moments if you're gonna upload it to YouTube and then embed. And what's gonna happen now is your goal is to trigger the search result to show a video within it. The next one is to go to YouTube. If they have an active channel, let them cater to their audience. They know what works. We can dictate what we want, but that's what we want. That doesn't mean it's right for their audience. So give them the control. We are not the experts on that. What we could be the experts on, though, is the opportunities they missed. And that's where we add value to them and help them make money. So maybe, so there's a few ways to do research on that. One, look to see who's already showing up. Research the titles they're using, the descriptions they're using, what plays before and after their videos, and keep a track of the themes that are currently important to the algorithm. Now, go in an incognito window and make sure you're logged out of Google and YouTube and start typing the main phrase. So if it is how do I paint a picture, so maybe start with how do I paint and look to see what drops down. Then delete that and do paint A and see what drops down. Maybe picture is not the top result. You can also verify by using a keyword tool. Google offers keyword planner for free, and you can see what the variations are and what the estimated search volume is. YouTube's going to be smaller and it changes because YouTube's more of a question and answer. But this is a great way to figure it out. Now what you're doing is you're optimizing for evergreen URLs or for evergreen traffic that brings money in week over week and month over month and does drive top funnel. But you want to make sure your brand is not included in the title and the description. Instead, have the person demonstrate your product during the solution and say, if you want to purchase the same one that I'm using, maybe it's the paintbrush, maybe it's the canvas, maybe it's a certain type of rag or cleaner. I'm looking at the picture behind me, which is why I came up with painting. And then what you've done is you've one, you've opened yourself up to a much larger audience because the search query is not brand dependent. Two, if that brand shuts down their affiliate program, now you can change the link out for the same exact product at a different store and you may be able to make more money. And three, you can keep the disclosures in place and you can test where am I making more money? Where does it convert better? One thing that a lot of affiliates forget to do is look at the demographics on your content, whether it's a blog post, an ebook, or a video, and then compare it to who shops at the merchant. You might love the store, but if your audience isn't you and has different needs, maybe a competitor to that store has the same audience. And by matching the audience with the product, you may get better conversions and revenue from it.
SPEAKER_03So I want to pick up there's quite a lot of information that you've said in that answer, but I want to pick out the one thing that stood out for me. No, it's good, is allow your partners to have the freedom to create the content that meets their audience. Because a lot of the time when I speak to affiliate managers, they're so hung up about brand, about this is what our PR team says we have to do, this is what our brand team says we have to do. That at the end of the day, they're giving the scope to affiliates or influencers as so small that there's really very little that these guys can do to actually drive volume. So I love that you've kind of broken it down and given some guidelines of what affiliate managers can do when they're looking at these partners and working with these partners. But really, the key thing there for me was let the partners do what they do best, which is get creative and start creating content. The other thing is obviously make sure that you're tracking everything because you do want to make sure that if you are paying upfront costs, which you will have to do with some influencers and and content creators because they are incurring costs to come up with campaigns, come up with ideas and create all of this content for you, that you know, you're looking at the ROI of this at the end of the day as well. It's not just a pay, you know, like a paid sponsorship, and you know, you get your gets what you get. It has to make sense for both parties. And I I think a lot of video content curators are actually starting to understand the longevity of their content because that's the second point that you mentioned there is, you know, you can create a piece of content and make it evergreen forever by swapping out links, by putting in new products. So really thinking about how you allow your partners to create that content so that it's not only about your brand, it actually bodes better with the audience because then it doesn't look too salesy and it doesn't feel too salesy and it's more authentic to the content creator.
SPEAKER_01There's one other really big thing to consider when we're mentioning the brand. If you put the brand inside the title and throughout the description, which a lot of PR people want, that limits the affiliate's ability to make money. So I just created an example. I forget where the article is, but I mentioned best flower subscription boxes versus best flower subscription boxes from Amazon. When you add Amazon to that, whether it's Amazon, Macy's, Best Buy, Nordstrom's, Molton Brown, I was just having a conversation with my friend about Molten Brown. They used to subscribe to my blog and read everything, and then someone hacked my blog and destroyed my email list and they unsubscribed, and I was devastated. But basically, what happens then is if you do something about the best subscription or best flower subscriptions, then what's happening is you're opening up the audience to everyone and anyone looking. If you add from Amazon or by Amazon or Amazon sponsored in the title or something, now you've given a different message to the algorithm. And you said, only show this if someone's looking for flower subscriptions from Amazon. That eliminates the ability to acquire new customers. Because if you're Amazon and you require they put Amazon on there, you're not getting new customers. You're getting people that are already know they want to buy a flower subscription from you, but it's only for you. You're not getting the people looking in general that don't know you don't have a flower subscription, that don't know you have flower subscriptions.
SPEAKER_03Now that's an interesting point because people would use that red Amazon in order to get traffic, right? Because they think, oh, I'll put that keyword in and you know, I'll get traffic because Amazon's such a big name. But actually, you're right. You've actually gone one step down in the funnel in the search process, and that and that probably ties into the psychology behind SEO and content writing and all of those good things. And I'd like to flip that on its side, and I'd like to think about the content that affiliate programs create in order to attract affiliates to them. Sometimes I think that they're positioning their programs and marketing their programs in a way that actually alienates some affiliates from joining because they're not thinking about that top of underlying awareness piece.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So let's talk about some core trends, because I mean you've given like a million value bombs in the first 18 minutes of this podcast, which is fantastic. But what are some of the core trends? We've we've got about 40 minutes. That's that's kind of what we like to have at the optimal time.
SPEAKER_02Just tell me when to be quiet, and I will I'll ramble for hours.
SPEAKER_03People do binge watch the show, and I'd just like to give a shout out actually to uh everybody in New York and Boston, because for some reason we've had a whole bunch of people listening to our uh podcast from um those areas in the states. So hi guys, thank you so much for listening to us. But let's talk about some of the core trends that you're seeing that might help publishers gain more momentum because hey, we're in a recession, markets are getting tough, competitions getting tougher, rankings are getting tougher, content's being churned out by the gazillions now with Chat GPT. What are some of the core trends that you're seeing that might help publishers gain momentum to promote some of the brands? And and, you know, affiliate managers listening into this, like this is really cool for you guys to hear the flip side. So, what do you think publishers need to be doing?
SPEAKER_01Publishers need to evaluate their value and then learn how to quantify it, to speak to corporate people versus other publishers and our pods and our groups that we complain to and vent to on social media, especially behind closed doors. And one of the ways you could do that is a forecast. So if you show up number two for let's say Leanne's glasses, which has 200,000 searches a month, what you can do is you can take the amount of traffic that actually comes through your website. And if you have a list of all of Leanne's glasses and you track how many people click from the top three results on that list, you can say, okay, we can drive 500 clicks. To here, 200 clicks to here, 100 clicks to here out of the total. Now, see if your affiliate manager will give you an average conversion rate on that particular style, or even better, if they can get the conversion rate from PPC ads. Now, what you can do is you can say, I can drive 500 people. We know the average order value is $100 and we have a 5% conversion rate. So now what you can do is say, look, I'm going to promote you on this post, and here's your potential revenue opportunity. If you give me this level of commission, you could have this much in sales if these numbers hold true. If you don't, you don't currently have this traffic, and I do. I can promote it here where they will. And that's one way that you can do it. Now that's a little bit threatening for the affiliate manager to have to approach because you're kind of being aggressive. So be cautious. Don't come across as too arrogant, and that's my fatal flaw. I get so excited when I have a good presentation that I approach it the wrong way every single time.
SPEAKER_03No, but I think an experienced affiliate manager on the flip side, I know. I mean, if somebody had to approach if my publisher had to approach me in that respect, that'd get A, my respect first, and B, we'd get down to some serious commercial negotiations because that partner has done the effort to come and tell me whether they can plug a gap. And my role working brand side, network side, agency side, whatever, is to make sure that I am getting more sales every month at the right price point and with the right type or quality of customers. So I think that's fantastic advice is to come prepare to meetings, but also do your research and make sure that you understand where you can actually provide value. Because that's the one thing that I think that gets forgotten sometimes is that this is a partnership. And in a partnership, both sides need to be cognizant of the other's, you know, pain points, possibilities, potentials. And we get stuck around the price point all the time and the this is my data and that's your data, and we forget about the actual collaboration that should be happening in between. So let's hope that we see a trend of collaboration, and let's hope that we see a trend of a little bit more professionalism in the affiliate industry as publishers mature and as programs mature. What other core trends are you seeing in the SEO world right now, especially with all of this change around automated content and how we move forward? Do you think that things are going to change? Do you like are we expecting another, you know, big algorithm update? Are there things that brands or program managers need to be thinking about in terms of their management of content-based partners and SEO?
SPEAKER_01You should never encourage your content-based publishers to use AI to write their content. What you can do is have them rewrite things that sound odd or rewrite things for a certain reading level. Like if they write at a PhD level and it's just not understandable, but it's supposed to cater to the core audience, have it rewrite and then have them fact-check. But don't ever let AI rewrite your copy or write it from scratch. You're just gonna fall off the face of the earth. AI also is currently not able to write code effectively and efficiently. And there's been some instances where it's leaking code and private code and private topics. So you need to be really cautious because we're in the infancy stage. People are blowing up the indexes with AI copies. So there is going to be, it's going to probably be part of helpful content. It's also probably going to be part of fact-checking and what's real and what's not, which goes into Mom and Bert, which are two algorithms Google uses. They're not algorithms, they're learning systems that Google uses to really determine what is and is not value adding and helpful. There is nothing wrong with having AI write your copy if it's factual, if it's value adding, but if you want to get traffic from it, you have to add in the human elements, which shows you have hands-on experience. You actually know what the product or service or topic is. That's something AI is never going to be able to do. It could fake it, but it's going to be findable.
SPEAKER_03And there's other, there's other times and places, like there's a right time and a right place to use tools, AI, anything that makes your life a little bit easier as an affiliate manager. But what it can never really do is replace the human-to-human element in terms of working with your partner and having just a basic conversation about what is it that I can do for you and like how do I serve you today? That's really what every affiliate manager should be asking their partners. How do I serve you today? And how do I help you to help me do better?
SPEAKER_01One other thing you can do as an affiliate manager, and this goes to the level of experience you have in the business world, is to ask for help. There's a couple of large programs, some of our friends in particular, they bring me in on the background. I don't say I work with them, nobody knows, but they bring me in when a site gets penalized or when people have trouble with their emails and getting it to convert or even getting click-through rates and open rates. They bring me in to work with their partners behind the scenes. And nobody knows that I'm not part of their company. I'm not saying hire me. Find people in your network or find people from other departments in your company and bring them in to fix the problems. If your affiliates get penalized and no longer have SEO traffic, bring in the SEO person from your company or the agency and have them look at the site and provide a list of actionable items to recover. This is some way that you build loyalty with the publishers. A lot of people that work at big brands, when they leave those big brands, they don't realize nobody's loyal to them. They were loyal to the big brand. You're on your own from square one.
SPEAKER_03What are some of the cool hacks that you've done to create better monetization techniques for your clients recently? Like I'm really nailing you on giving us all the nuggets in this one, but hopefully you don't mind sharing. So, what are some of the best monetization techniques that people can do right now, especially considering that we're in a recession, thing, you know, budgets are tight, people are pushing to kind of make sales. What are some of the quick hacks you've seen recently that are working on other brands?
SPEAKER_01Do what's going to make people want to subscribe to you and want to become a destination, want you to become their destination for advice, for tips, for laughter. If they want to be depressed, you know, there's something for everyone. So it's just be that destination that people want to go to, and then you'll always be able to make money if you don't abuse it, if you don't go too far off tangent. You can always develop and evolve. Look at Madonna, look at Taylor Swift, you know, they're people do it all the time, but they stay relevant to their audience. Billy Eilish, I think that's how to pronounce her name, you know, they morph themselves on a regular basis, but they keep their audience. Be like them, whether you're in technology, whether you're in marketing, you can change, but just make sure to be authentically you. I hate saying that, but it is.
SPEAKER_03It is. And I I have to be honest that it is, because the things that work the best are when you show up consistently for your partners, for your boss, for your family, whoever it is, like whatever it is that you're doing in life, like it doesn't have to be complex. It doesn't have to be game-changing. Not every brand has got huge budgets to do crazy things. But when you show up consistently and you give good service and you keep your customer, and when I talk about customer, I'm talking about your affiliate, at the center of your universe, and you make sure that you are delivering a service that helps them to perform. That's really like it's keep it simple, stupid, you know, like that KISS methodology. Like you really just need to keep it simple and do the basics well in order for your program to succeed. And that has been the experience of 20 years of my life. Like, and I'm pretty sure that I mean you're shaking your head, you're not saying it, but you're shaking your head at the moment. So I think we can both agree on that. What's the one piece of advice that you'd like to give to affiliate managers working with SEO affiliates right now?
SPEAKER_01If the person's not gonna listen to advice, don't force it on them. If they don't want to change a strategy, even though it doesn't work and it's why they're failing, and they're not gonna listen, they're never going to until they have that aha moment. But if you force the aha moment, they're never gonna listen to you and come back for you to help them. So give them the advice. If they get offended and they say, that's not cool, you don't know what you're talking about, don't take it with a grain of salt. They just lost their traffic. They're just they're in a hyper-emotional state, like their income dried up. It stinks for everyone. Wait till they do more research, then they'll find if what you said is accurate. And when they're ready to test it or it starts working, they do come back. If you constantly force it, have you tried this yet? Have you tried this yet? You're just gonna exacerbate it when they said that's not gonna work, you're stupid, like blah, blah, blah. And there's nothing you can do.
SPEAKER_03And I think that's the the the other part of being human with your with your partners, you know, like there are emotions involved when things go wrong. Both sides, when a campaign fails and you have to go to your bus and say, Hey, I spent five grand and I got like one customer, and also when you know your traffic fails, when you've promised a client that you can deliver 100 clicks and you only delivered 50, those conversations are tricky to have, and being human about it and being pragmatic about it is the best piece of advice that that we can actually give because ultimately timing is also an incredibly important part. Like things can get turned off in a heartbeat online, they're not always guaranteed. Tracking can fail, everything is kind of stacked against your favor, but being human about it and talking about it and just being cognizant of each other's feelings is sometimes the best part that makes a relationship work. And I actually wanted to bring that up because you changed from network and and went to publisher side, and then you've started an agency, like you've seen all three sides of how this economy interacts with one another. What are some of the lessons that you've learned in making those changes in your career?
SPEAKER_01Try to let it roll off your back. There's always gonna be drama, there's always gonna be stupidity, there's always gonna be amazing ups and massive downs. Just hang in there. It's a great space, there's room for everyone. Just because someone says one thing, test, don't listen to it.
SPEAKER_03And also because it's not always the same. I mean, you know, 20 years' experience in we've managed similar kinds of programs, and what worked on one program, even though the product lineup is exactly the same, simply hasn't worked on another because there's so many variables that happen between output and conversion that you know you could be tweaking and testing all the time to get to get the right metrics. I always like to sort of liken it to when you're making a cake, like we've got the great British bake-off that's coming off soon, so I'm getting a little bit excited because I do love me a piece of cake. And you know, everybody gets the same ingredients, and then you see the results at the end, and you're like, goodness me, like some cakes don't rise, some are like lopsided, others are beautifully perfect, and you think, but everybody had the same ingredients. So what the heck happened, you know, but there's so many variables to running a successful affiliate program that it really is a sort of suckin' and see scenario. You start with best practices, you start with a clear strategy that's well thought out and and maybe a little bit innovative, and you kind of just go from there and you're constantly reiterating. Last question for us now as we close off this week's podcast, which you have been an awesome guest on. So thanks very much for being here with us. Why where do you see the future of affiliate and partner marketing headed? Because I know you see many sides of the ecosystem, and obviously you're based in the States, so a lot of different things happening over there to what's happening here in Europe. But where do you see the future of affiliate marketing head?
SPEAKER_01I don't see it changing. It's always just where's a new place for traffic that's doesn't have a problem being solved. Where's everyone flocking to, whether it's permanent or temporary, and how can you meet the needs of the audience while they're there? Sometimes it's gonna have a matro affiliate, sometimes it won't. But you have apps. Apps are advertising with solutions in, you have quizzes, you have widgets, you have a lot of different things. Technology can change in advance. It's just a matter of how you do it in a natural and value-adding way without forcing it onto people or interrupting other channels so that you can continue to add value and thrive. If attribution in the affiliate space and actual measurement and actual touch points make it into the mainstream affiliate, which would be against a lot of preconceived ideas, then that would shift the industry substantially. But I don't see that happening. And that's okay. I kind of like the fact that we can all live in an ecosystem and get along. And that's what I like. There's models for everyone and every purpose. Some models are pure customer acquisition and top funnel. Others are how do we increase conversions and how do we make things work? And that's where you sometimes need that end-of-sale touch point because it's how you can test more effectively. So every one of us has a place in this channel, even if we have different points of view. And the points of view are on where we make our money and how we add value. So a lot of people will say I'm anti-this or I am anti-that. I've seen some people write articles about me. And it's the furthest thing from the truth. What I tell everyone is do what's right for your needs and your company's goals, and that's the best you can do. I don't see us shifting. I see us continuing to find ways to work together. So it's mutually beneficial for the entire space, but more importantly, for the entire company and for the publishers, because that's where it matters the most. That there's not going to be any shift in evolution because we're hesitant to take on the proper technologies.
SPEAKER_03I think that's also because we're stuck not in a rut, and uh, I can be a little bit controversial too. I just kind of say it as I see it. But we've been stuck doing the same old stuff that we've been doing for the last 10 years in certain industries. Other industries not. Like they're really forging forward and they're making big strides and they're changing and doing the things very differently. But especially in the e-commerce space, I've noticed that like we do it this way because we've always done it this way. And I'm waiting to see if there's going to be some big changes, especially with the advent of new technologies that are coming in, the transparency of data that we're seeing now with you know bigger companies opening up and actually being a little bit more transparent with partners, the change in customer behavior in terms of how they search, where they search, how they do their research online before they purchase products, and the touch points that are coming in. I think I said something like 28 touch points now before a client converts. And TikTok claims that everybody that clicks buys, and I know TikTok has made me do a few crazy, you know, acquisitions, but all useful stuff for the kitchen, of course. But you know, it just it just does make me wonder like, are we headed for a little bit of a revolution where we become more open and honest about how this partnership economy should be working? And do we set proper outcomes? Because you you mentioned that you said it's not just about sales, sometimes it's about conversion, sometimes it's about reactivation, sometimes it's about you know getting clients to repeat purchase. And partners play a role in all of those parts now, not just about bringing the customer to the side. So are we gonna open up our programs to actually be a little bit more in-depth and not just about net new sales? That's what I'm waiting to see, at least.
SPEAKER_01But you know, that's gonna depend on if you put an experienced and knowledgeable person in the affiliate role, someone who only does affiliates, someone that only works with, like, let's say, cashback or coupon or something, they're not gonna have the knowledge to actually prove it. If you take a full digital marketing strategist with five and ten years of experience, I have a good example. I have a client that wanted to shut down their affiliate program, and I said that would be one of the dumbest things you can do. And the reason why was I showed when we run, so the program had a robust amount of social media influencers in it TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, a lot of different channels. And when we would launch a specific promotion, so here's the test we did, and I have a case study with this on my blog. What we did was we broke them out by niche, and each month we launched a different type of product with it or a different theme. And what we did was we made sure there was zero search volume for that specific phrase and zero natural demand for it. We just wanted to build the exposure. Now, it wasn't driving a lot of sales, so I did offer a small upfront fee and a commission on top to these partners. And of course they added they disclosed. And what happened was when we would launch these campaigns, we would go inside Search Console and we would look. So we'd just search by the branded search queries, and we would see that after this campaign would happen, for the next couple of months, all of a sudden, brand plus, I'm just gonna go with Leanne's glasses, brand, Leanne's glasses would all of a sudden go from no searches and no queries at all to having people type in actual Leanne's glasses with the word brand. And that means even though we didn't see it from the affiliate channel, the sales come in, we did see it come from SEO, we did see it come from paid media, and the affiliate's the one that does that. And because we have the affiliate program, we can do this for pennies on the dollar versus a media buy. And then we did it again, and maybe we did black shirt, for example, or painting. And so then we see a decline. And the affiliate channel influenced the brand and influenced the sales through other channels. And that was an important touch point right there. But you can't take someone that only thinks it's the coupon sites, that only thinks it's about the actual sale, because they don't have the knowledge or the brains or the experience to actually say, here's where the program and here's where the channel adds value. That's where someone like yourself comes in.
SPEAKER_03Hallelujah, brother, from another mother. That's why you invest in agencies, because this is the kind of data and information and benchmarking and expertise that you're tapping into. And that's all I'm gonna say about this because we're coming to the end of the podcast. But Adam, it's been my pleasure to have you on here. I've absolutely loved the last 35 minutes of talking to you and having you here just to talk about some of the nuggets of wisdom that you're sharing. It's been an absolute pleasure to host you on this podcast and be here with you today.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you so much for having me. Am I allowed to say what my website is if people want to read the case studies?
SPEAKER_03Do it because we'll link to it in the blog.
SPEAKER_01Oh, it's adamreamer.me. I mean as in like me as a me as a person, I guess. So yeah, adamreamer.me.
SPEAKER_03Perfect. We'll link to it anyway from the blog transfer. Everything that you've mentioned will link in into the podcast. So it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00Are you ready to take your business to new heights? The Elevate Summit is coming this July. Brought to you by AppleBush. Elevate is the virtual event to attend. Save the date for July 18th and 19th. This unmissible live stream virtual summit will run for two days. Bringing the best and brightest affiliate and performance marketing practitioners together to help you grow your affiliate marketing program and partnerships. Why is this right for you? This virtual event is for publishers, affiliates, affiliate managers, and SaaS suppliers who work within the partnership economy. Your ticket gives you access to world-class speakers and industry experts who will share tips, strategies and learnings. The Elevate Summit is for you if you want to learn with real industry experts. Learn new ideas and tips to grow your program and learn new skills in our master classes. Discover new business leads, showcase your tech and services and network with industry peers. Let's elevate your affiliate marketing together. 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.