We shared so many nuggets of wisdom in season four of Affiliate Insiders Affiliate Marketing Podcast. So if you've missed out on listening to the hours of episodes that we've already shared, fear not. This episode is jam-packed with the top bits of strategy and advice that you may have missed from our expert guests to help you launch, scale, and grow your affiliate program successfully today. Seth Rubin shares what SMEs and new brands need to consider before launching an affiliate program and what it takes to make affiliate marketing programs successful. It's not about numbers, it's about quality of partners and strategy planning.
SPEAKER_05What are some of the biggest things that smaller brands should consider before leaping into investing in launching an affiliate program?
SPEAKER_04I think for a small business or a startup, setting up a program is really a no-brainer. Yeah. Obviously, there's certain things that you need to take into account. There's no sort of bullet in online marketing. There's no get rich quick schemes.
SPEAKER_05Love the fact that you've said that because I say that all the time.
SPEAKER_04They're all pretty much rubbish, right? Yeah. What they essentially are affiliate programs in themselves. Sign up here and learn how to make money online. That just doesn't make sense, right? There's three kinds of things that come to my mind. Um the first is budget. So anything in life you get what you're paying for. You know, you should engage with the channel, learning that affiliates are also businesses. They own their own inventory, their tech, and their content. And effectively, when you recruit them onto your programs, you're recruiting an extension of your business into your sales team. So I think that in order to make the most of any of these opportunities, you need to be willing to allocate budget towards the growth of your program and towards building the affiliate program.
SPEAKER_05It's kind of like small businesses need to think that they're actually investing in the long term because a lot of people think, oh, I'm going to start an affiliate program, I'm going to turn it on, I'm going to get into the network, and then everybody's going to want to come and promote my product. And the strategy and the marketing plan that sits behind the technology that now powers them to move forward. And with your platform especially, it's a really cost-effective way to enter the space to test the channel. But if you enter the space and test the channel and you still don't have a marketing plan or a proper strategy of how you're going to grow this program, chances are it's not going to work.
SPEAKER_04It takes time to build those relationships, to nurture those relationships and to let them grow and to flourish. Not to mention, I think in the industry, most networks or any network, we'll tell you if being honest, it takes around three months to kind of get your program started and then up and running, and then another three months to start realizing any form of decent performance. And we do it a bit quicker, it'll grow, but that's because of the miniature of the businesses and our businesses that are driving traffic. Sorry, our businesses are asking for traffic that's water to one with funnel so that it gives conversion and not so much traffic.
SPEAKER_05So a lot of clients that we speak to they don't really understand the resource-intensive time that it takes to go and leverage partner discovery, onboarding, campaign management. There's a lot of background administration work that goes into managing affiliates properly.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and I think also again, this is where at the start having a consultant or specialist affiliate agency really can help. Even if it's kind of like you meet with the client, you decide up the strategy, you plan, you can you can guide that and need that. But then you can also go away and kind of run it in the background and just report in or catch up every now and then to make sure everything is still on track. And again, this kind of leads to the next point. The other thing I see unfortunately is just lack of planning. So strategy is one thing, and that's fine, and launching correctly and all of that. But you need to plan. You've got all these different sales periods in the year, you've got a whole marketing calendar that needs to be filled with smart activity, you need to know which partners to engage when, and this can only really come from experience. And you need to have the tools uh and the relationships, you need to kind of launch this, and that comes through through planning. Unfortunately, another mistake that we see quite often is that I don't know if this is more for larger brands than on smaller businesses, probably is that because they're reporting outputs, they get measured or they get happy about the number of affiliates on their program.
SPEAKER_05Not even relevant. So I totally agree with you. I have run affiliate programs with 30 publishers and have been way, way profitable and did the job that a client wanted to do, versus running programs with and I've run programs with outputs of 5,000.
SPEAKER_03Ori Weiss, founder of XL Media, a global affiliate business and entrepreneur of startup Team Odeon, which has recently launched DegreeChoices.com, talks about what it takes to become a successful affiliate and the thought and planning that goes on behind the scenes to launch a successful website that drives traffic in the hopes that brands and operators can get a better sense for how to work more effectively with their publishers and partners.
SPEAKER_05So you've shared a lot about the thought process, about why you're doing this, about how you see the vision of this business going forward. But I want to wrap up a little bit with a lot of affiliates always looking for ways to grow. And I really want to pick your brains as an entrepreneur now, too, to pivot or switch it to grow their businesses further. So, as someone who's been there and done that, what key pieces of advice can you give to affiliates who are listening to this particular episode about new niche markets and approaching those in a really insightful and business successful way, if that makes sense?
SPEAKER_00Well, look, it's a tough question. And I think that everyone is different, right? So everyone excels, every, let's say, every affiliate that's listening to this excels in something else. So somebody is great at SEO, somebody might be great at uh content development, somebody might be a great marketer, a great PPC person. There's so many things. So I think first and foremost, if you're thinking of a new industry, you gotta find out where your skill set fits into that industry. Now I know this is obvious, but I spent a lot of time personally examining the process of people choosing education before I decided I looked for researches, I asked counselors, I asked so how from your experience, how do people make this choice? And when I realized that a lot of people are actually asking questions and not getting the answers or looking for data and not being able to, because look, um, just to be specific for a second, uh, anyone can go access the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and everyone thinks they should. And a lot of people, I've seen this is something I checked. I've checked that people do that, but they don't come out with answers. So I identified I know how to take complex data and kind of give simple to use insights because I've done that in sports, I've done that in finance. So to answer your question, if you're going to pivot into something, you got to first make sure that your skill set adds value there. And of course, there's the kind of the basic things that everyone will tell you. Is there a market to be had? Do you will you have clients there? Do universities actually talk to companies like us, right? Is this a thing? I was uh fortunate and unfortunate to find my old, I dare to call them nemesis. Red Ventures, a huge company in the US, so many different sites in so many different industries. So we joke around. I don't know if the guys at Excel would appreciate me saying this, but I felt in the past that we were with David to Deregaliath before. So we did pretty well because David David does pretty well at the end, so it's okay to say that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So we did we we went up with them, and when I saw Red Ventures involved in this industry, I was like, okay, there's an industry here because they're the kind of company that only ventures into fields they can make money from. They can make money from. And I gotta admit, on a personal level, for me, I had an extra motivation to do this because on a personal level, I've always been a big believer in impact for profit. I know it's a strange thing to do to say this really uh shouldn't be taken out of context. I'm not a huge believer in philanthropy. Like I really believe that if you can add impact, if you can create impact and create something positive with a profitable business that's way more sustainable.
SPEAKER_03Matt Freire is a seasoned affiliate program manager and agency founder. His take on affiliate marketing and program management as a job function shared a lot of insight on where the industry is heading and just how complex it has become to navigate. Plus, he talked about the different skill sets affiliate managers really need to have under their belts to successfully grow and manage affiliate programs online.
SPEAKER_05I think those are fantastic, phenomenal lessons for anybody that's new coming into the industry to actually take away and learn from. The key thing that I've seen on my side is that, and and you actually coined this phrase when we were speaking earlier, so I've got to just use your own words again. You think that affiliate or partner markets, performance marketers, whatever you want to label us, we're more like funds managers.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_05Because we now own the budget and we need to make sure that that budget is being spent efficiently. And it ties back in with what you've said earlier on the podcast in that there are no bad affiliates. There are only bad affiliate managers. Because it's your job to make those commercial decisions and to understand how to value those traffic sources and when and how to actually use them to meet your company's objectives. And this is a lot about what we teach and train. And it's through these years of experience of managing many, many different programs that you and I have picked these skills up and why it's led me to teach. So, I mean, you've kind of already answered my next question, which was give us your best pieces of advice that you can give affiliate managers and performance marketers and are new to coming into this industry. But I mean, what what do you think, you know, the key thing is for somebody that's fresh out of unique?
SPEAKER_02I want to just pay attention to what you just said for just a second because I do think it's very important, not because I coined it, because it's something that I've learned over time. It's very interesting. In the financial world, we have to certify a financial planner. So a financial planner has to go through a ton of training, a ton of certification. You're gonna manage someone's money and $100,000 to someone investing with you. Of course, we need you certified. You need to know how the markets move, you need to know the best investments, you need to know the terminology, you need to know like how you're going to invest my money. Why in our industry is the affiliate manager who's managing multi-million dollar budgets, who's investing in certain channels. So I send this dollar out, a soldier out into the world, and I want that soldier to come back with three more captives so that I have four dollars.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_02So every dollar I spend, I want four dollars or five dollars, or I just want more of them to come back to me. Me as an affiliate manager, it's not about how much I can pay the affiliates, which is traditionally how an affiliate manager is incentivized, is how much can they spend of the brand's money? What they should be incentivized on, and what an affiliate manager should be thinking is how could I invest my brand's money so that I send a dollar out and I get four more captives back, and I now have five dollars back as I send them out there. And if you look at search, social, mobile, SEO, et cetera, et cetera, really what you're doing is you're saying, if I spend a dollar there, it's like a stock. So if I'm gonna spend it on the new technologies like Twitch or I'm gonna try to figure out how to do Clubhouse, or I'm gonna try to figure out how to spend my money in those channels, that's like a risky stock because those are new technologies. But then I have to try it into email marketing, and those might be less risky technologies. And so they're less risky stocks in a portfolio management perspective, and I'm getting an average return back from all of those culminating in some best average return. And I've hedged my portfolio. So that's the idea of the fund manager, and that's that's kind of where I go. And if I was giving advice to an affiliate manager, is not what can the role do for you or or what can you do for your affiliates, but how can you create a net profitable customer acquisition channel for the brand that you work for? How can you spend their money judiciously so that you can get a return? If you do that as an affiliate manager, you'll become the most valuable asset at that company. You'll become very valuable in your career, and you can essentially start to name your price.
SPEAKER_05How do you think affiliate management will change in 2021?
SPEAKER_02I think it'll change in that more money's coming into the market. I think we'll be spending more in it. I think the large brands, the Grubhubs, the Doordashes, the Ubers, etc. etc., I think they're spending more. And we're going to become more professionalized with association certifications, training, and so on. That's I that's where I think this is all going.
SPEAKER_05Amen to that, because I'm right there helping people get trained. Network or in-house, what do you think?
SPEAKER_02Well, I'll go one step further. Network, in-house, or agency. I think that you really need someone to guide you. Running something in-house is great when you're really, really tiny and small. But as you become a large brand, there's absolutely, and I'm going to be very controversial here, no way that you can effectively run an affiliate program in-house with one person.
SPEAKER_05Doesn't happen. Absolutely none. And you also need localization and areas of expertise. So totally agree with you there. Next one. How long does it take to launch and grow an affiliate program and get ROI? This is like the golden million dollar question that I get asked. Like if I had a dollar for every time somebody asks me this. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02What are your thoughts? Well, it varies, right? There's no one size fits all. And it almost never happens that the traffic comes tomorrow. So it's not going to happen tomorrow. And it's probably not going to happen in two weeks. So the best answer is the more that the team that I have in place proactively contacts affiliates and isn't just a reactive approved affiliate from affiliate manager, then it's going to be directly correlated to how proactive my team is in affiliate recruitment. And it's also going to be directly correlated to how proactive the team is in establishing lifetime value for a customer for that brand, you know, how the business model of that brand, how they actually make money down the road, and what they want to acquire a customer for. So establishing the KPIs, going out proactively. And then I'm going to tell you 60 to 90 days.
SPEAKER_05That's impressive. That's very impressive. But I think that's when you're when you are somewhat of an expert. If you're just starting out, you're not going to get that kind of return in the first six months.
SPEAKER_02You're not going to. It'll take six months if you're just starting out. For sure. For sure. And it needs to be thought of as an investment. You invest in other technologies and other divisions of your company. Why wouldn't you invest and take the time to set it up and invest to being affiliate?
SPEAKER_03Evan Weber has been in affiliate marketing working in the US for under two decades. And he came onto the show and talked about the need to not be afraid of over-communicating with your affiliate partners to stimulate your program success and relationship building in this snippet taken from season four.
SPEAKER_05So today I wanted to talk a little bit more and dig a little bit deeper with you because this is your area of expertise. But I wanted to talk about the partner participation and partner discovery section of running an affiliate program. And then talk a little bit more and a little bit later in this podcast about the whole activation piece, which is what you've just explained. A lot of the people listening to this podcast have either launched programs and have stagnated or they've launched programs and they've uh scaled it to as far as what they can get, and they're looking for new opportunities to, you know, expand. So partner discovery and partner participation is a really big part of that. So can you talk us through some of the strategies and things that you've done that really help programs to engage with their partners more effectively?
SPEAKER_01In my opinion, the five processes that need to be in place for managing and working with affiliates and publishers from the time they step through the door, right? The time they sign up for your affiliate program, they apply. Whether you reach out to them and they accept, they fill out the application, or they come to you, they find you, they apply, and you screen them. They should be screened, heavily screened. Look at their website, evaluate what they're doing, try to get them on the phone. One of the strategies we use is to call every in-house affiliate that applies. Hi, how are you? Just talk all to talk about what you uh plan to do with us, and we'd like to work with you more closely and build a wonderful relationship together.
SPEAKER_05That simple tactic is actually often ignored because we live in a virtual world and we live with Skype and Slack and Zoom and everything else, but actually making that human contact is the first real impression that an affiliate gets about your program. So skipping that point and maybe taking the lazy affiliate manager's way out by sending an automated email is something that's become quite common in programs. And actually, it's something that is so simple to do and so easy to kind of master.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there's sometimes you do get their phone number up front. You should always ask for their phone number so you can bet them. And you can actually, that's how you discover fraudulent potential publishers. Yeah. It is by doing that. And that's the whole reason that we came up with the idea at my previous company to call them all, right? And to just see who they were, what they wanted to do. And we had the staff to do it. So by all means, come to find out it was a great way to build the relationship, a great way to kick it off. Completely the thing to do in building the relationship, because the vast majority of them were legit. They weren't potential fraudsters, so to speak. And it was just a great process to have. If you couldn't reach them, then they don't get approved. Period of story. Send them a follow-up email, say, hey, we tried to call you, left you a voicemail, give us a call so we can meet each other, and then we'll approve your application. That was on the in-house program because we didn't want to get hammer with fraud potentially from a publisher. So that was the impetus for the process. And then it became completely the thing to do to build a relationship. It was a great idea. And on the networks, you don't always get their phone number. So what you do there is once you approve them or even send them an offer. On some networks, if you send them an offer, you get their email and name. You can send them a follow-up and say, hey, we sent you an offer. This is what the publisher manager should be doing. We sent you an offer. Hey, how about setting up a phone call or Zoom with us? What's your number? Love to set up a call or a Zoom. And nowadays it's all about setting up the Zoom, the video conference. It's even better because now you can see the publishers and it's amazing, right?
SPEAKER_05This is in our industry, in the gaming industry, this is what events are for. We go to events to go and meet our publishers and actually get a sense for them because it's a little bit more secretive in our space. But even still, with retail programs today, with all the automation that the networks have plugged in, there isn't that human contact right at the start, which is something that's incredibly important for newer affiliate managers coming in to actually realize.
SPEAKER_03Tune in for next week's episode where we share some of the pertinent facts and figures that were shared by our guests around affiliate marketing that may be of interest to help your own program grow.