Hi, and welcome to the Affiliate Insider podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the insider scoop on what's occurring in affiliate marketing. Join us as we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliates and tech entrepreneurs, and discuss the latest affiliates and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started.
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SPEAKER_02Welcome back to the Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast. And today I've got somebody really special on the podcast with me, Harry Lang, who has recently written a really interesting book with a very catchy title called Browns, Band Dragons, and Bullshit. So close your ears if you didn't want to hear the last word, but I'm pretty sure that if you work in digital and affiliate marketing, you would have heard that word a few times before. And I wanted to bring Harry onto the podcast today to talk a little bit about this book and to share some of his insights in working in both the iGaming and agency world for our listeners to learn a little bit more about digital and affiliate marketing. Hi, Harry. How are you?
SPEAKER_03Hi Leanne. I'm very well indeed. Thanks. Thanks very much for having me on the podcast.
SPEAKER_02I'm super excited because we've got so much to talk about today. So before we get started, I know you and I have sat in on a few interesting panel discussions together over the years. So I know that this is going to be a fun podcast. But I've often admired your no sas honesty about the road ahead as a digital marketer because we've both been in this industry for almost two decades. A lot has changed in that time. And really a lot of our listeners are coming into this space and need to hear some of the stories that we've collected over our careers together. But before we get into the book, I want to start at the beginning of your story. And I'd like you to tell our listeners a little bit about your background and what led you to this point to be here with me today.
SPEAKER_03Sure. Yeah, I'm going to go a long way down memory lane, unfortunately. I started out about 21 years ago. I was in agency marketing, mostly integrated agencies, where I looked after clients like Budweiser, Penguin Books, British American Tobacco, amongst others. And I fell sideways into the gaming career via a consultancy period. I was planning actually to move to Australia and work over in Sydney. And I happened to pick up some work for a poker startup that was linked to absolute poker. Older listeners might recall as one of the sort of foremost back in the day, big success stories in the States. We were sort of the UK arm of that. Bit of a disaster show. I mean, it was the heyday of online gaming, and lots of money thrown around. No one had a clue, myself included. But it introduced me to the industry. And I then sort of moved from there. I got a bug for it really. I got a bug for the excitement of it all because as a marketer, there really weren't any rules. No one knew what was good and what was bad. So you tested everything out, you spent budgets, and if it if it worked, you stuck with it. So I worked for a period for CWC gaming, which was the first significant live dealer casino operation. And I think you know that was partly the acorn from which the likes of evolution grew out. It's obviously a huge entity these days. And then I moved through several roles, both startup style. So I did I did a startup for WMS, their jackpot party brand in the UK. I then went over to Gibraltar, was head of marketing for B-Win Party for all their bingo and casino brands like Foxy and Cheeky. I did a stint for Mecca Bingo as an interim head of marketing over in Gypsy before coming back to the UK, where I was executive marketing director for Pinnacle, which sports betters around the world know very much for its sharp action, basically the place where sharp betters tend to go for the best odds. So that was a very interesting education for me in the sports betting world. After that, I ran a consultancy business called Brand Architects, ostensibly, so I could focus more on the brand marketing side. And I think I've been doing so much hardcore acquisition work. I wanted to do a bit more on the brand building and awareness side. I did a big consultancy period for Gentine Casinos, which was great fun. And then I did some more consultancy work the year before last, in fact, for Buzz Bingo. And obviously it wasn't terrible work because they asked me to come in as marketing director, and that's the role I hold now.
SPEAKER_02Filled with lots of lots of expertise, which is great because that's really why people are tuning in here. But I wanted to start talking a little bit about the book now because you talk about how society views what a marketer does. And I think in your book you said the marketing industry lives in fear of its own combustibility. And that's kind of where I wanted to start the conversation today. Because as marketers, we're tasked with crafting and directing consumer sentiment about brands, about products, about services every single day in this job. What are some of the big challenges that brands will face in 2022 as our target audiences become more woke and aware and want less engagement and more trust and integrity?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think that it's a very, very interesting question and one you could speak on for a while and still get no closer to an answer. The problem being those words, you know, not such a big fan of woke as a phrase, but you know, how you behave and act as a brand. This goes way beyond following trends. You can't just flick a switch in an ad words module and say make me woke. It has to be something inherent to your business from everything about how you treat your employees, how you organize yourself as a business, how you talk to your customers, and how you act in the marketplace. It isn't something that gets flicked on because you want it to. It has to be a behavior that is acted, not pretended. But I think that's the biggest deal. You know, some brands are formulated from the start to be well behaved, well-mannered, you know, brands that look after people and genuinely careful. And a lot of businesses are out there because they're designed to make money. And it's quite hard to flick the switch from hardcore commercial consumerism into a business that acts well and is known for that. So I think the first thing to realize is it's not an overnight process. I think it's much harder for some businesses in some industries than others. I think, you know, we're in the gaming sector, which has traditionally got a fairly bad rap, wrongfully in most instances, but you know, rightfully in several others, sadly, we're all aware of in terms of responsible gaming and player protection. And ultimately, you need to make decisions from the very top about the sort of business you want to be and how you want to be seen. As a marketing organization within the business, it's your job to be the voice of the customer and to express the intent of the business to customers in the wider world. But you can't just do lip service, you can't express it at a campaign level. If you really want to be seen as being one of the good guys or good girls out there, it needs to be absolutely inherent in everything you do. So it's a wholesale mindset change. But the good news is it's totally doable, it's accomplishable. And businesses out there now who recognize the commercial value of being a good actor in any space, they know it's profitable. They know now some consumers still look for a price point, and that's it. You know, Amazon's success isn't based on it being a lovely, pretty, generous business. It's got its own problems, and the founder is the second richest man in the world still. So some businesses will zig, others will zag. But I think the general, the reading of the room suggests that if you want longer-term success, you have to be more observant about what people in general are looking to spend their money with or who they want to spend their money with. And that tends to be companies that they respect and like and they feel secure and they have integrity. Those are going to be the long tail, the watchwords.
SPEAKER_02And I do love that bit. Respect, like, and have a sense of integrity. Because I want to flip that on the head now, not talk about customers, but talk about affiliates. Because in our industry, I think there's a distinct lack of understanding that the people that you employ in your marketing teams are responsible for building those exact premises around your business. Because an affiliate isn't going to come and work with you if they don't like your brand. They're not going to come and work with you if they don't trust your people and if they don't believe that your brand has integrity to work collaboratively with them. So, as marketers, I think there's an inherent sense of responsibility that you take on working in this industry to represent your company in a way that makes sense and actually delivers that brand message to the end customer, whether it's a player, a consumer, an affiliate, a partner, whoever it is that you're directing your marketing to. Now, you outlined a few points in the book on the power, performance, and affiliate marketing. And let's talk about that a little bit now because we are obviously interested in affiliate marketing on this podcast. What do you think brands really need to do to ensure that they're engaging their affiliates properly and building integrity and trust to improve on relationships? And I know you've got a wealth of experience in the gaming industry. So just kind of kick off and talk a little bit about what you've experienced in the years that you've been in the industry around this point.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's a fascinating space, the affiliate world. I mean, it was fast moving anyway. And then the last few years, it's moving in all sorts of directions and geographies. In the old days, you know, a lot of my friends who did very well in the affiliate space, they were one, two, three men bands, you know, the stereotype of working out of a basement and then building a business from scratch, because you could do build a WordPress site, you could optimize for some keywords, and suddenly you're making a living. You can leave your job and do it properly. And a lot of those people came out and did incredibly well. The industry has obviously aggregated quite a lot since those days. You've still got the smaller entities, but really, you know, where the bulk of the affiliate spend goes from my experience at least, is towards probably 80% of these larger network groups now, covered up the smaller entities, you know, the better connectives, was it the Excel media's world? You know, and that's happened. And effectively, my personal view is I sort of see those big entities as it's it's a digital media channel. I don't I don't treat the deals any differently than I would treat a paid display or paid search deal or opportunity. You've still got the relationship with your account manager, but it's on a much less personal level than it was back in the day. I think back in the day, the important thing was the personal relationship with your affiliates. You know, if they liked you, if you caught up with them at the trade shades, if you had a good time and they liked you as a person, then you could ask to get on prime space when you had a real need to boost your numbers because you're having a crummy month, then that relationship would help. And from their side, they trusted you to get paid on time, which was the biggest deal back in those days. And now we're talking network deals, the numbers have gone through the roof. You know, you have six figure per month payments going up, and they're worth you know, maybe more. And the key there, you know, it's a proper business relationship. It's hardcore contracts. If you don't pay on time, then you start getting threatening auto emails coming back. And the personal side of it has gone away quite a bit. So I think the relationship part is still valuable and vital because I think how you are treated and how you're positioned by a network or an individual still depends to a great extent on how profitable you make their business, but also how easy you make their life. You know, if you're a business that converts traffic well and your brand is well respected, you're big on TV, you invest in things that mean players will more likely respond to you. Um, and then you express that to your affiliate partner, then they're more likely to give you that higher placement, which will drive the incremental traffic. At the end of the day, like any marketing channel, it's about volume of traffic and appropriate CPA and then the decent lifetime value. So the quality of traffic, and that's the sum. That is the sum of an affiliate arrangement. If you can do all that and you have a good relationship with the person you're dealing with, I think the scope to try more things out, you know, if you move into new markets and they've got a network reach, you're more likely to get a Lego. If they're trying out new sites or new tactics or new media channels, you're more likely to be first on their hit list as I know, you know, Harry, Harry might, he's probably going to be keen on trying this out. So I think it's just a more macro version of the personal relationships that were required back in the day, and a macro version of you still need to pay on time, you know, you still need to have predevancy, you know, you still need to act properly. And obviously, from the responsible gaming and the compliance point of view, an affiliate doesn't want to be dealing with a brand or an operator that's getting in trouble or suffering fines or whatever, you know, bad acts or clauses, et cetera. It wants to be dealing with someone who's consistent and thorough and hassle-free and is generating good, solid incremental revenues month on month. That's what they want. And what what the operator wants is good traffic at low CPAs, high lifetime value, as I said.
SPEAKER_02And I think it was quite tanning, actually, because you interviewed Ian Sims from Rightlander, who is a very well-known affiliate in our space. And I read what he wrote in the book, which was, and this was obviously a quote that you, you know, had a discussion with him on. But as an affiliate, he's also a business owner. So even though, as an affiliate manager, you're coming there with your offer and your, you know, CPAs and whatever it is that you're paying, he still had to make a conscious decision about who he wanted to promote, why he wanted to put those brands in front of his customers, and how many of those brands he was willing to actually put on his website. So the old sort of adage of, you know, I'm going to pay more and get more and you know be in position one, two, three just because I'm paying more actually doesn't work anymore because affiliates on the flip side are looking at what value do they bring to their customers. And that doesn't necessarily mean the operator or the brand that's paying them the most money. So it really is important that affiliate managers are investing and understanding what is their brand value and what is their USP in the marketplace, and then working collaboratively with their top affiliates to try and sort of secure those placements because obviously if they're in good placements, they're getting more traffic. But it's also about understanding what is the affiliate's objectives and goals with their business and then matching and aligning those to yours. So I was quite, you know, interested to read that quote from the book. And if anybody's listening here, I would highly recommend that you go and have a look on Amazon and get this book because there was such a lot of insights in there, which we're going to talk about a little bit more. But as someone who's had a lot of experience in online marketing, you know, you and I both started when we were obviously very young. What do you think the benefits of showing how the industry has evolved since then? And what are the key things that we need to be looking at going forward? How will the new affiliate and digital marketers that are coming into this industry have to apply themselves to get ahead in this space, which is obviously a lot more noisy and competitive than it was when we first started? And I love the part in your book when you uh spoke about when you started your own business and set up uh what was an early search engine just before Google started. But maybe we can talk a little bit about that and share a little bit of that part of the book and just really give people a sense if they're listening to this podcast and entering this space of how things have changed.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, I know that's how I think it was findmy.com with a hyphen in the name because I couldn't get the the regular.com. I mean, you know, I've got no tech background at all. I've got no idea how to build anything that would do any sort of searching online. So pipe dreams like that were rather fun in my early 20s, but totally useless. I think the accountability piece has come a lot more, it's a lot more competitive. I think, you know, in the early days of you know, when digital came out and then integrated marketing, you know, initially I sort of working in consultancy in my first job, which was you know working on whatever clients needed you to work on, which then sort of evolved into integrated marketing when you had to have an idea about all the channels and how they could play together in harmony. And you take it on 20 years from there. I think you and I have spoken previously on this. You know, the new routine is the T-shape marketer. You start off in a single discipline. Uh so for example, you start off in content marketing, then you evolve into an SEO, and then you get the top of the tree there, either in an agency or client side as a head of SEO, and then you spread out in T-shape across other disciplines. It's actually quite hard to do. You haven't had that exposure across the board through your early career. You're very specialized with an awareness of them. And then you have to kind of rely on your own else to learn other disciplines and learn how they fit together. Because ultimately, if you want to be an agency owner or if you want to be a head of marketing or director or CMO, you can't just have a working knowledge, you know. And I think someone years ago used this wonderful phrase about having enough knowledge to be dangerous. You know the buzzwords, and yeah, you walk into a meeting and say, right, SEO, right, here's what we're doing with content, and we'll do some linked stuff. And then you sort of run out of juice because you don't know anymore. And actual SEOs look at that and go, Christ, they don't have a clue. These days, you probably need to sort of look at yourself about how you educate yourself beyond your core discipline. And I think the other big, big chunk of this is the data attribution side, you know, the the availability of data, the ability to attributes against your channels, how quickly the data is available between implementing a campaign and being able to measure, attract, and evaluate, and then optimize it. It's near real time these days. And back in the day, it was, you know, at the end of the week, you look at your reports and go, well, that campaign was good. Let's do more of that creative in that style. It was very manual. It was hit and miss in terms of accuracy. And to an extent, sometimes the data still is, you know, we still have database falling over and issues, which is a bit sad considering everything else has moved on so far. But I think as a young marketer coming into the game, whatever channel you operate in, you need to have the finger of the pulse on where the money is. Because ultimately, our job is selling. You know, our job is selling a product uh at the lowest possible cost. So having your finger on that pulse and be able to gain the confidence of your peers and your manager and your big, big boss, that actually, when something's happening, you are all over it. This is the best version of events that your channel could possibly be deploying at any one time. And the only way to do that is to have your finger on the data pulse and be really astute in that manner. The creative stuff, the strategic piece, all of that comes with time. And, you know, arguably, it can come more naturally to some than others, as it does with the data piece. Some people are more data astute than others. I have to work with it. I lean on BI teams and data specialists an awful lot because I'm not a natural data analyst. Luckily, I knew that years ago. And so I've always lent on these professionals and they always know the right questions to ask to get the answers that I need to make good decisions. But I think uh for anyone coming through, investing in that capacity to attribute and prescribe value against what you're proposing and showing where the value is and demonstrating the reason behind that decision, that's going to get you through a number of difficult meetings and give you the answer you want. Because ultimately, what you want is the big boss or the client or whoever might be saying, Yep, that makes sense. I buy it, go do it. And when it goes well, because you've been really on the case, then invest more money in it. And then you become a hero, and then you get promoted, and then you get more money, and then etc. etc. etc., your career will flourish. So um, so I think those are the couple of things I think I've put on a flagpole and recommend.
SPEAKER_02And I think that's one of the reasons why I liked your book because as somebody who's had as much experience in lots of different digital channels, because I've worked across content marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and that's obviously where the lane that I ended up staying in. I had that opportunity at the beginning of my career to try lots of different digital channels, and I knew what fitted my personality and my skill set, my natural aptitude, which is to build relationships and to connect people. And I chose a career path that actually is all about that, which is affiliate marketing. So I think that a good piece of advice is to maybe get this book read it and look at all the different some areas of marketing that you can go into and how they all fit together, because self-development and self-learning is a key part of any marketer's job. It's really not your boss's job to educate you. You need to educate you in order to further your career. And I think all of us that have been around as long as what we have, we all still develop our skill set. Like I'm still reading about, you know, blockchain and NFTs. And even though it doesn't directly impact what I'm doing right now today, I've got to know what's going to happen so that I can impact what's going to happen strategically with my clients going forward as all of these things evolve. And to me, it's also a kind of career path where you kind of have to have ADHD and want to keep learning, because if you don't, you're going to fall behind and stagnate very quickly. And you also mentioned that in your book as well. So I want to kind of bring you back to the book a little bit more because I found what you wrote on page 326, which is obviously right at the end of the book, a few details about personal notes to the reader that you mentioned, the fact that as a marketer, you're going to be working in contradiction a lot of the time. And you talk about what it's really like to do this job. And one of the quotes that I pulled out here was, We work hard, we try our best, and we learn as we go. This resonates very highly with me because I'm literally kind of sick of seeing people promote themselves as experts. You will never see me put expert next to my name because even though I've got 20 years of experience, I am still very much learning how affiliate marketing works. And everybody around me, all the experts around, or all of the people around me that I think are also experts because of the years of time that they've had in this industry, are also saying the same thing. So nobody yet is an expert in affiliate or digital marketing. We are all still learning how to move along and keep up with changes. How do you feel about that point?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, I think it's one of the beautiful things and the nightmares of working in a marketing career, is that you can never be perfect. I think this is start quoting myself, which would be an awful thing to do. But it is in the book somewhere. I think this phrase that marketing is never perfect because there's so many elements that affect the outcome. The elements, whether they're customer related, people related, geography related, financial data, product, all of these things affect the end result you're going to get. And then you could get it nearly right, and two seconds later, the same methodology, exactly the same deployment, wouldn't work at all. And that's the key. The beauty of it is it stays fresh, you don't get boring data. Days in a marketing career because every day you're gonna go back in and rework out. Now, obviously, that's not practical. You have to sort of build a strategy and then execute a strategy and largely keep to the foundational principles of that. But over the top of that strategy come your campaign levels and you can change those. And Q1 didn't quite hit it. Okay, Q2, we're gonna change it. So it has to be at that level. And then on a daily level, it's the tactical shit to do. And some channels are easier to amend than others. So in PPC as an example, you can go in and your PPC team or yourself, you change the uh the profile and add words and you manipulate, tweak and puppeteer it because you've noticed you're dropping off in some sectors and you're you're helping in others. So it's great in that respect. The nightmare part is because it can never be perfect, and because elements of it outside of the ones you can prove through data can be highly subjective. And I'm speaking, especially on the creative side, everyone else can be a thought-of expert. You know, everyone's got an opinion. So you don't go into uh a C-suite meeting, you know, you're called the business review with your C-suite, you don't find anyone arguing too hard with a CFO. When they present the numbers, it's black and white, it's totally binary. Here's where we are, we're in deep trouble because the numbers are showing this. All things are going great, and everyone goes great, super. The marketing team comes in, marketing expert or whatever by channel, and say, right, here's what we're planning to uh deploy in the next quarter. And everyone looks at it and goes, I don't like that. And so you have to have that conversation, which is well, you're a 49-year-old man who doesn't play bingo, so good, glad you don't like it. You're not meant to like it, it's not designed for you whatsoever, but you've still held an opinion, and that opinion is actually going to start influencing people in this room because it's negative. So people management upwards and downwards and customer-wise is absolutely vital to it. But you know, you have to take that on the chin. Everyone can look at something, everyone can look at a piece of copy and go, they like that. Or even worse, they find a typo, which is actually a mistake. You know, it could have been rectified, but you missed it, or your team missed it. But everyone's going to have a take on it, which is easy to express and easy to formulate and impossible to prove wrong. And that's the thing, you can't argue against subjective opinion. You just have to build a case for influence. And I think this is one of the key skills. This is the kind of skill when you go from a channel manager into a sort of head of level, these are the skills you need to be honing everything on. You should be great at channels by then. You should be good at presenting your work and executing it. It should be second nature, running your budgets and controlling the money. Then it's about influencing people. How do you influence people to come to your way of thinking? Because that's on a base level, and ultimately why a lot of businesses have quite bland marketing, because it ends up being done by committee. It's beige output because everyone's had a finger in the pie and going, Oh, I like that, I don't like this. And you end up going, Oh, I've been beaten to a pulp. I'm just going to do this generic version of events, and it's going to be safe and it's not going to do anything dramatic, but it's not going to fail dismally. And I probably have my job at the end of the year. So that's what we'll do. Whereas ultimately, if you want to generate brand fame, you've got to go above the parapets, you've got to take risks, you've got to be quite brazen with it. But to do that, you've got to take people on the journey with you. They've got to understand the risks and then allow you the money and the time to go and do it. And that's where it gets really difficult because you notice a lot of the hero brands out there that went big very, very quickly. The brand was driven by probably one of the founding teams. So they said, This is how we're going to play it, and no one could get in their way because they were the man or the woman, they were the end player. But that's one of the key cruxes of uh a career in this world, and it's very difficult. And you know, I'm 21 years in, and I still get this this bit wrong, I'm still nowhere near the finished article.
SPEAKER_02You have to learn how to evangelize the people around you to believe in the story that you're wanting to tell. And I think, you know, working brand side, client side, that's part of the course. But in the affiliate industry, we haven't quite got there yet. It's still very much driven by numbers. And I think that's something that has to change, especially now with the way that the pandemic has impacted the way that consumers engage with brands online, how self-aware we are about what it is that we want and who we want to purchase from. And I think what you've just said now is like really, really important. And if there are any affiliate managers listening to this podcast, press pause and rewind again because what Harry has just explained here is probably one of the biggest reasons why you stagnate as a senior affiliate manager instead of becoming the head of. You need to be able to envisage the journey that you want to take your program, your brand, your people on, and then be able to explain that back up to the C-suite in exactly the way that you've said it. I want to ask you, and this wasn't really in the questions, but I hope you're gonna answer it. But what made you actually want to write this book now?
SPEAKER_03I've written a couple of novels in the past, like rubbish novels. I mean, I've always enjoyed writing. So I've always done the side, I've written for the marketing press, the gaming press, all the ones that you do too, Leanne. You know, I've done thousands of words there, and a lot of that has been partly for personal DR, partly for client benefit, you know, it's been part of my job, and partly for enjoyment, because I enjoy the writing process. So I had all that in the background. I'd done a couple of novels, which hadn't been particularly good, but I enjoyed the process. And this time around, facilitated by lockdown, number one, I believe. You know, I had a young daughter, I had time at home. And with my consultancy, I had zero client work because no one was powering at the time. So I had the capacity to do it. But I really thought I'd focus on something I could write about very honestly, but from the first person, which was related to my job. That was it. And you know, I've always been keen to try and you know do mental programs where I can. I lacked any sort of mental figures in my early career, and I really made a lot of mistakes because of that. I didn't have anyone who could tell me, no, this is probably an error. Following the money, that's probably an error. That job there is probably risky. I didn't have anyone to lean on, really. So I thought if I could use something that was a brain dump, and really the whole premise of the book and really the structure of the book was driven by an article I did for campaign or marketing week, I can't remember which one, probably three or four years ago now. It was called The Letter to My Younger Self. I think it was around my 40th birthday. So I was obviously hitting a midlife crisis. It was either buy another motorbike or write this article. So I chose the NASA and I put a brain dump down in this article about all the mistakes I've made and all the things that I wish I'd known when I was 20, 21 years old. And that that really expanded out into the book.
SPEAKER_02You can't fast track those mistakes, and that's something that I tell a lot of the people that I even employ in my own company is yes, I love the fact that you're eager and you want to, you know, head on up that career ladder, which is absolutely amazing. But let me tell you, you can't fast track that because you have to go and make those mistakes, which is why we know what we know. It's taken us 20 years to learn those things, and it's gonna take us another 20 more to learn the rest. So it's really important that if you are investing your time, your life, your livelihood into this industry, that you're going in with your eyes wide open. And I I really do believe that if you can get this book, you're gonna start with a really good first foot forward. So after publishing this book to the universe, what's one of the key messages or pieces of advice that you want to give our listeners to take forward to help them amplify their performance as marketers in the year ahead?
SPEAKER_03I think one of the key elements is taking a breath because especially early in your career, you know, it's all very exciting and wonderful, and you're working at a million miles an hour and it's a bit crazy, but it's great. You know, the excitement is all there. But actually putting your foot on the brakes, harming the gas, and taking the time to think about right, where do I want to take this? You know, what is this doing? And um, I used to use an exercise that, you know, sort of it's hacked psychology, really, but I'd sort of lay out a list. I it was almost a shopping list of you know the areas where I was happy with the way I was going. And it could have been my personal life, professional life, family, financially, roof over my head. Those are the five areas loosely. And I'd look at each in turn and go, right, you know, and normally I could pick out one or two of those, maximum two that needed help. They'd been sacrificed for the benefit of the others in terms of my time and my thinking capacity. And so I'd consciously spend the next three months thinking about those two areas until they were back to a past score. And I think for the young marketers and young affiliate um managers out there, taking that time to sort of think about right, what would I love to do? Because this is the great thing about this business, digital marketing and affiliate marketing, is that you know there aren't any blockers. This isn't high banking, you don't need you know the extra qualifications necessarily, although you know the educational part does help greatly. And you don't need formal qualifications for universities, you don't need the MBA, you don't need uh, you know, the job at the highest ranking bank in the city. If you decide that what you really want to do is be head of affiliate marketing at Bed 365 in five years' time, that's totally doable. Now you'll be up against some stiff competition, obviously, but it's totally doable if you lay out the foundations. If you if you become the right person for that, which you can create, you can create your profile, or if it is potentially more likely, you want to have your own affiliate business, build your sites out, concentrate on some new markets, potentially, you know, away from the highly congested UK or the incredibly expensive US. But there's you know 300 other countries out there, probably half of which have still got some sort of opportunity available. So just building that list out and working out exactly what it is that really flicks your switches. What is it that you'd love to be doing in five and ten years' time, or three years' time even? Get the list down, work out what the blockers might be to that, whether it's education, whether it's contact, whether it's your own profile, your own experiences, the success metrics, the stuff you've done up your own back to stand you out in the crowd. You know, any affiliate manager out there, I'd suggest having your own affiliate website, just keeping you in tune with how to run one successfully. It's a pretty good idea. So all of these things I think are good exercises to do. But just yeah, taking the time to plot out the path that feels like it's going to take you to where you aspire to be at uh your professional life as well. You know, professional life, it pays for the fun stuff. You know, it isn't the be all and end all, it should be a Lego piece in the building that is your life. So make sure you're planning for the full picture and not just one microscopic linear path.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I love that. That's really good advice. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. It's been my pleasure to have you on my podcast today. Thank you so much for writing your book, for putting your experiences out there, which is a pretty vulnerable thing to do. So I commend you for that. I hope that our listeners will enjoy the book as well. And yeah, just thanks for being here with me today.
SPEAKER_03That's great, Lee. Listen, it's been an absolute pleasure staying. Thank you so much, and best of luck with your affiliate event as well. I look forward to seeing you soon.
SPEAKER_02Thank you.
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