Affiliate CRM with Niels Zee

I almost thought of what a perfect affiliate CRM until and I made some notes. Yeah. All the relationships like our managers, the networks programs where where is this log some conversations and commissions you changes contracts in there as well. Performance by uh program also alert you when a program shuts down or changes anything not automatically that would be great. profitability per partner per page and then possibility even tied into Gmail, WhatsApp or Telegram for deal negotiations fast.

Yeah. I'm John Wright and you're listening to AffiliateBI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Stap. Welcome to the Affiliate BI podcast. Today we're chatting with Niles Z. He's an affiliate marketing expert, speaker, and investor. He's the co-founder of Traffic Family and he recently announced a new book he's working on called The Payout Mafia. Niles, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you, John.

Happy to be here. So, I want to get started with like a kind of tough question, which is the reason why I transitioned from an affiliate marketer into the SAS space for affiliates is because I think there's a lot of things that are broken in affiliate marketing today. And I've looked up your background and of course, this is the first question that came to mind. What do you see that's broken in affiliate marketing?

marketing? Yeah, it's an interesting question and it's almost a shame that things are broken because between the advertiser and the affiliate, the incentives are the same, right? We make money for you, we get money. Everything that makes this less aligned or less you get the incentives for money and the other person doesn't get money that's when it get broken. So I think what you can improve, how can you go and be aligned for the affiliates, advertisers should ask, what are certain terms that we can add

outside just a higher CPA or more commissions. You're in the ad pack space. So shorter payout terms are very much welcome. Don't make people wait 90 days on getting paid because before those 90 days in that conversion, they already spent money on ads. They already spent money on content. already spend money on link building. So there's this cash flow problem and this big delay on return on people's cash but maybe also other terms.

Can you give them products so they can make better content? Can you help them with links, mentions or other marketing, co-promotion things? So that's for the publisher but also for the advertiser. Get in touch with your publishers and ask what can we do to get twice the amount of sales? Is my competitor or my competitor is my offer competitive or not? And is it just the CPA that is too low?

Is it my branding? Is it my landing page that is not fitting? What can we do? Or is it one of those side terms that I talked about earlier? It's a shame and I see it from the publisher side that a lot of people they don't even reach out to the advertiser because they just join a network sign up and then they are a member. Sometimes also these people are reaching out but they're not getting a response.

Either they might be too small or they just don't have a proper affiliate manager that actually answers their question. Yeah. get more aligned. It almost seems for some affiliates they could do with like the equivalent of like their own account manager or their own affiliate manager on their side. Like I've heard of affiliates where they've been able to double or triple their business overnight just by having that sales manager where it's okay look we've got some deals that we can put in place and they're doing

like half of what you just described which is like what can I do as an affiliate? like you go to the affiliate program, you start asking your affiliate manager questions like, "Hey, what am I doing in relation to my competition?" It's I think what's maybe partially broken affiliate marketing is this idea that everyone wants to 2x their traffic. They don't want tox their sales. Take your traffic and convert it double that.

Yeah. They're too much marketers who just focus on the top of the funnel because more traffic that's like a shiny shiny gray number. But exactly, John. And I did the same. One of my first hires was an account manager and she was also the person that got a team underneath her for the first time because she made better affiliate deals to be able to make all these partnerships happy.

She needed to change the offers on the page constantly to really maximize the earnings per visitor that we have. And now after three years, she's even running the company because she got such a good overview of the business. Because if you're talking with the advertisers, you're also thinking, okay, how can my traffic earn more? What pages are doing well and which aren't? Why is that? Let's give some feedback to the content manager.

Maybe we should do more or less ads or traffic focus on these aspects of the business. 100%. And I advise everybody to reach out to the people. And if you're getting bigger and bigger, it's a full-time job. It's a full-time job because you are in contact with 50 to 100 to more different companies. And it's a partnership. You want to make them happy. You want to listen to them.

So that takes a lot of time. So Neils, one pain point I see in affiliate marketing is a concept I call revenue leak. And I wanted to ask what are ways in which affiliates or affiliate programs, how are they leaking money and why is this maybe not top of mind for a lot of affiliates, publishers or operators? or operators? Yeah, I think a lot of people are not enough on top of their numbers doing the work and they see a payment coming in and that's what

they take for granted. There are a lot of leaks in the business can go wrong. regularly audit affiliate links if they're still correct both if they go to a 40 or four page if they're configured correctly. Sometimes your VA takes an affiliate link that should be used for one site but puts it on the other site for instance just too much VA work copy paste. Yeah. So that that can happen but also the products can be out of stock or the page works but it's not

the right page anymore and then you need that data. Fortunately some platforms like Amazon or some tools make it visible that platforms like Amazon are out of stock but not all. So you either need to manually check that or build some kind of scraper tool that can help with that. with that. And then also just make sure you measure everything on those bases that the revenue is not dropping, that the product revenue is consistent and something didn't change there.

Be heavy on your advertisers regarding invoice payments. We have advertisers going out of business and because my finance guy is just not on top of it enough, we notice it 3 months later. And even though they're going out of business, we've been sending them customers for those three months, which is a shame. And yeah, what helps with this 100% is use tracking software. We use we can track because that is for us it has the most coverage with all our advertisers.

I heard about this cool tool called stats which is very good tool for at least I gaming niche. But also there check the data from your affiliate tracking platform any commissions you're getting and see if that aligns. And there could also still be a lot of small things happening either commissions not being accepted by the advertiser. There's a big delay, wrong invoices going out. A lot of things can happen there.

And lastly, also for the affiliate manager, communicate changes to the affiliates. As an advertiser, you also need to know the terms. I once had an advers me because we received commission for conversions up to 100 days. And I was like, I just joined your program. Don't be mad at me for you enabling this. Be mad at yourself for not being on top of it. But and then if you change it also communicate these changes so we are aware of it as well.

Yeah. What are big revenue leaks? Yeah. You talked about two that are close to heart. Short story. One of the biggest poker affiliates that I know. One of their account managers told me that someone took a wrong tracking link. It was like a sub affiliate link. It wasn't even a link to the poker brand. They put that on their main CTA for a month and it took them a month to notice and they're just like wow that was like they they're like why is this conversion

rate so low? It's the wrong link. And then the one that's why did I want to build stats? So many brands they just keep closing and it's there's the apps that were on the market they weren't really telling you hey the reason why you can't connect to the program is because it's closed. Remove the tracking links. So those are the biggest pains. something that I've discovered almost accidentally like being in the i gaming space you can have positive and negative revenue.

So I just felt that there's some programs where it's I don't know if data manipulation is happening but are there ways in which I can look at more than just a table of data and see stuff. So I'm like sometimes there's you've got winning players at the end of the month and I'm like I want to visualize this the numbers themselves don't do enough. That was one.

And I think another one could be like a feedback loop that I don't think exists yet in affiliate marketing, which is imagine if you're working with, let's say, a hundred affiliate programs and three of them are haven't been paying you for 6 months. If I knew that, I would actually stop sending traffic to them. And if you knew that from the opposite, you actually might even say, you know what, guys, I'm going to cut off traffic.

So I think I want to spend some time going are there signatures in which we can study the the livelihood or the success of a program and can we find signatures that might imply that there's going to be a closure of a brand. We can't predict these things but maybe with a lot of data we can actually look at signatures and go what are the things that have changed that might make us be a bit concerned or the opposite which is a brand has improved their

payment processing and then or maybe like you said the payments instead of three months now they're on top of it great this is so we can help affiliates I think revenue leak exists so many places I just think if the more people I ask the more ideas I get back in return you you've had some great ones yeah Great. Great. Yeah. And and maybe if your platform or if there's data shared about if people pay on time or not, then it could also help if you

have a 15 day payment time and you just notice that like with all these companies, these 15 days are passed. This is a blockchain idea almost because they're headsets and everything. then it'll be nice to get a warning of, hey, this company is on the brink of bankrupt or at least suspicious payment behavior and then you can get an email like hey listen if you're not on top of this right now I need to cut you off.

off. Absolutely. But yeah, who knows will do that cheaper. We'll see. So I want to pivot quickly. One of the hottest topics in content affiliate SEO sites today is what's changing and we've seen some of the different SEO thought leaders Matt Diggity say basically the SEO playbook is dead for affiliate marketing. So what are the other channels you think people should consider if you're going to assume that maybe affiliate content isn't dead but it's not what it used to be.

be. I've been to a lot of SEO conferences and it's definitely true. The first time I went was in Vietnam almost two three years ago and I know there were like hundreds at least 100 people out of 300 were affiliate and now I went last time as a speaker and it was like maybe 5% so 15 20 people. It looks like it's dying. But the thing is then you go to a conference like Affiliate World with 3,000 maybe even 5,000 people and they're all driving but

they're doing paid marketing and they're talking about numbers like spending 10 to 50,000 a day and they all spend about what they're making a day instead of what they're making a month. Yes, SEO is getting harder but there's so many other channels. It's just that SEO's staying in their lane and they're thinking, "Oh, it quits, so I have to change." But again, ma again, ma advertising, Instagram is going big.

You can do funny things with the what we did with Twitter because a lot of advertisers are going away there. So, you get really cheap clicks. Really cheap. Fun story. We There are only like 5 million Twitter users in Netherlands and maybe 3 million are active. Then we said, "Okay, you know what? We're just going to slap an SEO page, but then two Twitter ads on them.

We're just going to bid two cents per click." And boom, we got more than a million impressions per week. So, I got my neighbor saying, "Nils, stop spamming me on Twitter." I got WhatsApps from my family of Neils, this is you, right? The whole time on Twitter because they're just seeing our tweets multiple times because so cheaply and it worked. So there's definitely a lot to do.

If you are an SEO and all your content is intent driven and you failed, at least try Google ads because this is the closest and easiest thing you can do. You already know what keywords are working. You already have the page for those keywords. You have the content. You don't need much extra content cost. I do advise CRO optimizations for that. But yeah, try out some new channels.

The mistakes I do see people make go they always, yeah, yeah, I tried Instagram. Okay, cool. How much did you spend? Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, €250. They're like, yeah, yeah, that that that's just too soon. That's just giving up way too soon. You might need up to up to up to €5,000 because after those €250 or 500 you spend, okay, it maybe not work, but it could very well be your landing page.

The conversion rate is just too low. the offer is not good enough and good enough payout. You're still using more like an SEO focus instead of a social media focus which just entirely different or the audience is not a fit. So you do need to test a lot of these different variables and then you can say okay cool now I got something working and then every little optimization you make afterwards that's your profit margin because that's how the PPC game works.

every little 5 cent you make per visitor extra is all profit from that moment on. And yeah, it just needs needs a lot more testing than people think. And what do you think about Reddit? Because I saw you posted recently saying, "Hey, this is a an easy game that people can still tap into and you gave some tips on this." What's your take on Reddit for SEO as well as building an audience?

Yeah. Yeah, it it also works. I wouldn't say so. It's still lended property. The way I've seen it works is not per se by building an audience but do so the way is Reddit took over so many search queries right now. Then if they are ranking for keywords that are close to you or that you ranked previously for okay now get the spots in Reddit. Basically that is how you should think.

And if you make a comment, you either make comment yourself, you can buy an account, you make that comment as neutral as possible because Reddit does have yeah I call it the audience is a bit on a white horse. It's a white ethical horse of this is the right way and you cannot be too commercial, you cannot be too this promotional, not be like a marketer. It's a forum where real people give real advice to each other.

So a neutral tone is very important there and you can even buy up votes. Got to buy a few up votes that will help the rank and that one can definitely help. Do make sure to not it is sometimes a bit hard as an affiliate as your affiliate link can disguise what you're doing. So you can either use some affiliate cloaking tool or you use it if you are the tool and the brand itself because then just having the link out there already in your Google

Analytics or your analytics tool will make sure that it's being tracked for Reddit. Definitely also an option. Do always check how interesting it is by the AHF tools. So you have an estimation of what it can give because the page gets traffic and from that traffic you can get a part of it not every day as you are ranking you will be ranking for that position. Yeah.

Okay. So your answer gave me an idea that I thought about for quite some time which is this concept. Imagine if you put an affiliate link in a Reddit comment. People are like, "Oh, you're spamming me." But what do you think about the idea of having more of these kind of branded landing pages? Let's say, let's pretend we're promoting Seamrush. Now, obviously, if someone sees a link that's, let's say, it's neil.samrush.com, they're like, "That might be an affiliate link, but it also might not be, and

people won't really know." But I think my opinion is people might want to click on that link a lot more than something that's like senrush.com/questark equals 567 blah blah blah blah. That's that's an obvious link. Do you think uh maybe this concept of a landing page that's like a friendlier link could be something that maybe it just might work. It's still hard because there is like why do you have a URL at least that's but it's also hard for me because I'm an affiliate marketer and

I know these things. It's hard for me to have a blind eye and think as a normal consumer who doesn't see that maybe it will. It's definitely worth testing out. What would greatly help in this case is, hey, I found out this discount code or this little extra thing that gives them a reason to click on the link because then it's also giving something. So, it's more, oh yeah, by the way, use this page because I'm a I'm a partner in them or I am something

affiliated to them, but here's extra 10% discount if you wrote news. wrote news. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Pivoting a bit further or just talking a bit more of tools. What tools do you have in your affiliate toolbox? affiliate toolbox? Yeah, most essential tools like not as Slack or all these things is first of all affiliate revenue tracking software and I also always recommend it to everyone I want to work with together because if you do not know how much your pages bring or how the

EBC is of certain products you're just it's just you need granularity to really optimize that. That's the first thing and I always see beginning affiliates not having anything like that like that like that yet. Affiliate revenue tracking software we use for our content processes with a whole system where the briefings all in there and then I just insert the keywords and then someone picks it up and says okay the status is now done and then the editor picks it up and then the VA picks it

up and the quality assurance picks it up and then it's published. Basically slides we use for our internal processes and processes and processes and documentation. It's like a notion with little bit less features. So it's easier for normal people to use. Ahs for keyword research and get lasso for product displays. These are the main tools that we use. Okay. Yeah. It's cool that you mentioned Lasso because that's a company I've been following for quite some time and I know Jamie if we had him on this

podcast and I got to ask them like a lot of questions cuz Lasso is it'll be a future competitor when we get in the ad space and what I think was cool about them is they did adtech first and then they added analytics. We rarely see these two spaces connect the dots and yeah it's just a fascinating company to follow. Yeah. Yeah. They do it well with the product displays.

I can't complain. I'm not using their analytics but that is mainly because coverage like core main platform for instance family is is not 50% of my revenue. What I recommend is I mostly look for an affiliate tracking software is like is being tracked. Yeah, because that's the essential these all these extra features but yeah that's the essentials. And what do you think? Are there any real affiliate serum tools on the market?

Anything you can think of? Or how do you see other affiliates put all these things together? Or is this like you're on your own? You got to build your own custom affiliate CRM if there is one. Oh, I don't know of any. Yeah, it's a great question. I'm almost Google sheet with all the different parties. have a lot of manual invoices that we send out as well.

And then what's tracking affiliate network we have if it's being tracked by our tracking software because not everything can always be tracked and it's a messy sheet. I almost thought of what a perfect affiliate CRM and I made some notes. Yeah. All the relationships, the account managers, the networks programs where where it is locked, some conversations, commissions, new changes, contracts in there as well. Performance by uh program also alert you when a program shuts down or changes anything automatically.

That would be great. profitability per partner page and then possibility even tied into Gmail, WhatsApp or Telegram for deal negotiations fast. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz we thought about some of these things as well where it's like we know like more advanced affiliates will actually have like actual contracts that are they're outside of the standard terms condition. So it's like you have insertion orders, contracts, you have the negotiated deals, the invoicing, who's your affiliate manager, and then I think what could be also missing from this whole ecosystem

is this concept of inventory. There's inventory on your side, but there's also inventory on the operator side, which is what are the offers, what are the products, can I get that data where maybe if they update that data, that could actually propagate on your CRM that's more userfacing, if that makes sense. makes sense. makes sense. That makes sense. It's cool. So, we're working on something there. But you've got some good notes there.

Thank you for that. So, when are you going into the CRM space, you think? I think we're technically I'd say we're there already. So, I'll tell you what we've built and what we're adding as we speak. So, we've got the stats aggregation. We have an invoice generator. We have the ability to add alerts. So, if any of your KPIs increase or decrease, you can actually say, "I want an alert." But we're now trying to build that so it's at scale so you don't have to build

2,000 different tiny alerts. Let's see. Ability to manage your deals, flat fees, who your account manager is. I'm personally wanting to work on an annotation system inside. So it's your personal annotations, but then we can actually say here's the global annot annotations like HS where they've got HS annotation, then they've got the Google annotation. We want to have it so it's both. It could be a Google.

It could be, let's say, a program has now added a new brand or they've closed a brand. This is pretty important data because maybe when the brand's closed, you might see the correlation of a drop in revenue. Oh, that makes sense. Of course, link tracking, I think, is a critical component where we've actually added 1,700 gambling affiliate programs in our app in the last four years, and we've closed close to a thousand.

That's a lot. So, the closed stuff is quite a bit. And imagine a link tool that says that just does it automatically for you. Like when the brands close, it redirects. Or it gives you some sort of programmatic logic like, "Hey, I'm going to redirect to my top three brands." Or if someone clicks on a link, it's, "Hey, this brand's closed, but here are three other relevant offers." Assuming you're on the same product chain.

Yeah, there's quite a bit to do there. Even with the last one, if you have the EPC data, the earnings per click as well, you can even instead of being closed almost say, hey, if this one might even be better for you to promote because it's both a bingo slot machine, it's both in the same geo and you don't have it yet. I see on your page that could also be gamechanging for publishers.

Yeah, the recommendation engine is something we want to get into. So we are building also a list of for i gaming to start is like all the brands all the data points with each brand like deposit withdrawal methods games currencies languages terms and conditions licenses and then it's all the offers they have in each language in each market. So it's a giant database but we want it so you can first search for hey I promote free spins in Chile in Spanish.

Can I find more of them? Of course. So that's the first part of the recommendation engine, but that will also be a foundation for adtech because it's you've seen this before. If you use say affiliate table or lasso or some WordPress ad tech, it's like you have to put in the logos of the offers and you then have to maintain all of this as a database. So we're looking to do this as like a one-stop shop where it's the pain point.

You're an affiliate manager and you want your affiliates to change all the offers. It's like you email them and you pray that in six months half of them have done that work and then if you're the affiliate you're like wait a minute we all have to do the same work and whoever doesn't do it the affiliate and the operator they're you're suffering more losses and commission. Yeah it's weird to try to put this all in a single CRM but we modeled it in Monday and we're

like wait a minute we can do this better as an app. So we'll have to show you some stuff and get your feedback for sure. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think we should be moving towards streaming of data for affiliates? So what I mean by that is many programs that give you data every 24 hours like in the back end saying here's your clicks, here's your sales, here's your revenue, but I think streaming could be a powerful thing and same thing for the concept of

click IDs. You're using we can track. I think they have more advanced tracking than other platforms. Do you see this space moving into both streaming of data and we're going to have like maybe this future click ID system where you can actually do high level attribution of your traffic. Yeah. So with streaming you mean instant access to the data, right? Instead of Yeah. Almost like a web hook but it's like you don't need the web hook because it's instant.

So you just get the data fed into your back end whether it's stone we can track or you build something bespoke. something bespoke. Yeah. Yeah. So what you're saying is basically do we want faster data? Yes. The faster the better. But I even have sometimes networks they screw up and the data comes in 48 hours or 3 days later and then all the ad platforms they get feedback and they think oh no conversions and I have row campaign and they just the ad spending stops and

I'm like a not again. They have also data based on previous previous time periods. So it it sits for a while too because they don't are afraid to get spending up because they're all automated for these campaigns. So the faster the better. Also when you do any new campaigns when you're just testing things out is okay cool. Is it helping already? Is it helping? You can pass things things faster.

And the second thing with the click IDs that just makes sure all the data is more granular and that's how you win by an affiliate because you're competing with brands with others and have bigger margins by default. The more specific data we have the better because we need to find all these gaps that are still open. If I have better data on every product page, product on the page, channel, device, etc.

I know exactly where I need to spend and that helps me and that is what sets that clickb apart. So I definitely think it's both basically can I make the feedback loop faster and more detailed and again what I said before every little improvement that is your profit margin. Yeah, I can only be a fan. Yeah, I think one of the issues when it comes to affiliate networks is sometimes they're working with multiple affiliate programs.

So they're aggregating the data. So sometimes that data comes in maybe every 24 hours, but sometimes there's reconciliation of the data which is in three days. So maybe that's why they actually don't want to feed the data. But I actually see it as one of the big pain points where people that have talked to us and said, "Hey guys, can you build us affiliate network software?" Almost all of them are saying that look, we don't want to have this one or two day gap.

we want to have it so we have the data because it's either affiliates accept that we don't have the data coming in on real time or anything reasonable or it's they expect it and they think that the second that you with withhold any data they're actually questioning you they're not questioning the affiliate program they're questioning you as a network going you're the aggregator here it's like why are you not showing me the data and that's actually yeah a big pain I'm hearing hearing yeah I have

it often too I always go to my affiliate tracking software, not because I think they're at fault, but they have faster response and a better response than the network. So, they always know the middleman. Hey, no, so we're not we can't send it through. Oh, your site because it's even being sent out a request. I do think as a tracking software you have this responsibility to know but that is because you see and everything what's happening.

So I think it's only strong and I'm only happy tracking solware that they always know the answer because are so on top of it and I get a fast response. So that is why I stay a customer. So and for us the irony is that we do this all the time like we're answering these questions and if we don't answer it one we always will answer it but two sometimes they think we're broken and then when we explain like what's running behind the scenes of why

the data isn't there or why like something we explain it and then we're like oh I had no idea and then they now trust us. Yeah. Yeah. Because then you see oh they're on top of stuff the knowledge evolved. out. That's great. Okay, so there's the stat floating around that I think the affiliate marketing industry will be worth something like $ 36 billion by 2030. And I like asking this question every once in a while.

Knowing what you know about affiliate marketing going, hey, if we improve X, Y, and Zed and if we do this in let's say 5 years, do you think that this number of 36 billion, we could double it or do something greater than? Because I think that I forget what the words are. It's like this C A G R like we have this compound growth that just do does this but maybe if things get better and automated maybe this could be maybe we could double this 36

billion. What are your thoughts on this interesting? I think on the one side, yes, tracking software can help make people have better decisions, but there are also a lot of factors against us like the death of universal analytics, Facebook and cookies, Apple becoming more privacy focused. So, it's nice that you guys provide first party data and help it. There are a lot of aspects against it. I think the growth of the affiliate channel as a whole will more be determined by the quality and the strategies

and entrepreneurs as entrepreneurs as publishers cuz that is like just as a marketer you have traffic at the top line and that is the top line you know what I mean you can do amazing ass job but still the act real growth will be in the top line so to say so I definitely think you help the industry forward But again, I am super happy with that.

Without software like you, you're not even able to do advertising spend. So that is definitely fuel on the fire. But yeah, it will also be mainly determined by the quality of the publishers and how much people are also getting into it. SEO as industry will be dying because the whole the whole yeah, how do you call it? The atmosphere is not nice anymore. It was a party.

Everybody was drunk and now it's everybody's hangover and oh, I'm never going to drink again. I'm never going to rank bench again. I'm quitting. I love it. That's probably going to be the only sound bite I need from this recording to share on social because it's so true. Neils, as an investor and affiliate marketing expert, sure you'd like to check out the stats strong pitch deck. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I do investments now mostly with my time because as the stock market is not very great so I like to have something good cash on the side but if you take a value send it over definitely chat and it's you know it goes without saying it's it's been a really good chat just following you in the background but knowing what you're about and I actually think we need more people like you in affiliate marketing that that can basically dissect the business from either

the affiliate publisher side as well as the operator side like we we talked about what's broken in affiliate marketing today. And another answer that I've got for that one is I think a lot of affiliate managers are coming into these operations. And it's sales first. It's not relationship building with both the affiliate as well as the customer. And I think I think there's a lot being lost where it's okay, yeah, sales is great, but I get frustrated with the outreach.

Think about how much how many outreach messages you get of people saying, "Hey, I want you to join the program." and they're just like then they're not speaking to you in the way like you want to you probably want to critique their email and be like listen you're doing it wrong. Yeah, it is so bad. The the worst I even find is just those invites via affiliate network where it's just like some irrelevant company that that wants to work together and because there's so much bad

outreach, you almost feel less inclined to really listen to other outreach. Unless it's proper personal, hey, I am a dog food brand. You have this top ranking dog food page. I am here to talk about commissions. We have a unique value proposition. So, let's talk. Then I'm like, hey, cool. Yeah, that makes sense. But else if just, hey, let's work together. I'm like, I don't even have crypto websites, so why are you pitching me your crypto offers?

Yeah. Or the worst is in the gambling space when we used to run our affiliate sites, we'd have 2,000 casinos. We had all of them listed, but all affiliate managers all wanted the number one spot. I'm like, you think we don't get that question often? And what anytime I tried telling them it's so frustrating I bake the pages the three channels on where we would deliver you the most valuable players and the most players was our newsletter not the homepage but two other pages and then

the review page itself was doing does pretty good but the newsletter was like instant big you just talk to me the right way and it's if I like you I'd actually be like let's just do a newsletter blast like I'm actually doing them a favor and then of course it's doing me a favor but I'm just surprised no one's actually chasing what I think is ideal feel like a newsletter for example, it's like why not start there?

Like you your message will bypass all the other space junk that's floating out there. Yeah. Yeah. And I also liked what you said. If you idiot, if you like someone and you have fun conversation with them, I am so much more inclined to just you know what normally if I didn't know you, I wouldn't put you on this position, but let's just test it out and you have the benefit of the doubt and we start high and then we look at the numbers and maybe I

give you some feedback too on your page so you prove the numbers so you actually are deserving of top three spots. Well, normally you you you start at number seven. Yeah, it is definitely a thing because we're humans. We're not rational. We're just Yeah, we're not just not fully rational. Yeah, we're emotional, but we try to pretend like there's a logic behind that emotion when you use the logic to justify the emotion.

emotion. Yeah. Two rapidfire questions. Do you think there's a need for education for affiliate managers? And then the second part of that as a rapidfire question, do you think there could be any threats to the affiliate manager position as we get into AI or maybe more networks make these jobs obsolete? Like where do you see the space going? Yeah. So the first question, do affiliate managers need better education?

Yes. Yes, I think so. It is just oh let's just send out a few emails and see if it works or not. They're not really thinking as marketers or they're not being critical about their offer. Also for them sales is not just sales. There's also a marketing aspect if they can get exposure that can help other they are in the end a marketer. So that could help the rest of their marketing team with their targets as well.

It is sales, it is outreach. So you have to be on top of that as well. I am even thinking of creating an affiliate management agency because I am from the publisher side and I know what I like to hear to receive why I will choose person offers over other offers and I just don't see a lot of companies picking up affiliate marketing seriously enough and then there's also the old problem of okay yes let's for instance do advertising but how do you hire a good

advertiser you know what I mean so you get an agency same with affiliate management. That is the first thing. Second Second was what's the question again? Yeah. Do you think there's like a threat to affiliate manager jobs if if we have better automation or maybe like someone could do an agency better and just be look if your agency is able to 10x the results rather than these other affiliate managers using spray and prey techniques.

Do you think yeah this job is at risk of being replaced by someone else or automated or done at scale? No, in the end it's sales and account management and that is such a human job. We just talked about how we could have relied someone will put their offer high on their page and that that comes from a conversation but comes from a love and then you give that person the benefit of the doubt.

So I don't think it will be replaced by hype. I think a lot of tooling will help and in the end but that's with everything with AI. If instances get more of an edge and more of an advantage via AI, then it would still be the case that yes, maybe you have less smaller players, but then that relationship would still be super important to make it top of mind to listen to the publisher and make that offer good and then to be cost to leverage those

relationships and be the person in the middle and yeah, have that. No, I think it will be enhanced. I think again the boring stuff you can get rid of that. Yeah, maybe with email and outreach tool and better for that. But you still need to be a good account manager, build relationship, have fun. And that is also why these conferences like affiliate world, it's so much partying, it's so much ranking, it's so exclusive invite only parties.

Sounds terrible. That is where the deals happen. Yeah. Yeah. I like it when people guess give me answers that I think are opposite of what I thought because I actually think affiliate manager jobs could be at risk. But I actually think you're also right that it's the personal relationships. Hopefully this changes and like you said, you send the right message and you know what, I'm not going to give you this package where you have to pay to play.

I'm just going to gonna put you in the newsletter and we're just going to get started because you stand out and you want to connect to that person. Yeah. Yeah. And I do get what you think. Definitely think the level of manages could be replaced, right? Because spray and pray work and they're not really any better tools for instance or automated AI agent, but yeah, the real relationships.

I'll chat with you after about the agency because you touched upon something there and I think there's a massive opportunity there but I want to pivot to the last question which is what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence. I do like that question. So I really thought about section of affiliate marketing and marketing and business. I definitely think that again beginners really lack these parts.

If you know about a tracking tool and you have some comprehension of how to use metrics and an understanding of the numbers, you can work with it. I hope more tracking tools will do a better job educating people on what to do with the numbers and why they are essential. I think that will definitely help. But where do I see the future heading? on again on one part it's against us as in Apple becomes more privacy sensitive all this GDPR cookie banner excuse my English Google

ads not giving you all the keywords even though you pay for it all that stuff but with the affiliate tracking software things will get a proper upgrade and data will get more granular and that is basically what I would like to see is more EPC data EPC per page, by device, by channel. Ideally, even a heat map for you to see how far people scroll and where people click.

You can even see the EPC number where every offer. So, it's also easy for people in my team that are less understanding of the data to just say, hey, we want the product with the highest number at the top. If it has a lower number, get rid of it. If it's lowest, just replace it. That will be very nice. also for more product for the team instead of just in spreadsheets and everything.

Lifetime value prediction for products with a yeah lifetime value commission software that will be more profit focused instead of just revenue focused. You know what? If you also insert things like your content cost, your link building cost and your advertising cost on a page and you don't even only see the revenue, but also these insert cost and then per month you see how much time it takes for it to be to be get a profit.

You can even add parameters on these pages like writers, niche, topics, specific offers if you really know your over performance performance and your underperformance. something which you already mentioned these alerts are very important not just generic alerts of all these websites make less money but specific pages even offers products preferably we also want to know if even a company gets bankrupt pays too late but also if just the offer somehow doesn't convert anymore that will also be very valuable and and then maybe even the predictive

side what you touched upon on is the recommendation. If I have an offer and it's working well with you can recommend me. Hey, five other sites in Canada or the US North America region are using this officer offer and it's giving a higher EPC. Try it out. Maybe you can even get a percentage of the cut from making that making that recommendation and then the difference. That could definitely be cool.

So that is what I would like the future to go to because in all these data that is where you can really be in control of your business and you just really want to see it like an investment where I'm going to put more chips in where less and will that help how can I make it easy for to understand because we are very numbers driven but a lot of my team members are not and that is either a lot of education or we need to

make the tooling simpler for them to just see. Oh, that that's way bigger and why am I writing all this content about topic Y if I should be writing about Z example why promoting this offer 10 cents versus 50 cents per click. Oh yeah. Oh, now I know. Yeah, it's I took a bunch of notes while you were talking. I think the visualization of the numbers even to superimpose that with both the heat map as well as these are all your CTAs.

Imagine being able to mouse over and see the data or see like even a revenue chart. Like you would know exactly what to change. And I'm not saying you would ever do this, but you could technically if you want you could even potentially share that with an affiliate manager to say this is what you have to do to get inside here or these are the things that you can do that will help you get inside a better deal or a flat fee or whatever it is.

It's I think if affiliate managers saw that that's what they're missing out on. I want the number one spot and it's like you can ask for number one but that could cost a lot but I think they're missing out on the visualization that it's like where are can we understand traffic flowing through a website. Are you missing out on hey here's two pages that you probably will get on that because they only have three listings versus 20 on the homepage which is like probably going to

cost you money. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also interesting if you even have that that that number two number three spot and the profit the advertiser makes and then the profit you make and you can split it even in the middle so you don't have any equalist and indeed we also communicate stuff like that. Hey, listen. It's not just the percentage people make, but also the again the earnings per click because some offer just convert better because they have a lot of branding and TV commercials.

Then we also say yeah I want to put you at the top but just can't because look at this data. So it can work if let's say these commission percentages then we can and that is definitely how we like it to be true just all because in the end we are a business they are a business who want to make a good value for the user and a good thing for a company and yeah bo quick bonus question and then we'll wrap this up.

Do you think I I've seen this happen before where some affiliates they get so big that they go to operators and say if you want access to our network it's not just a flat fee we also want an equity stake in you and then they become like a partner because I think a lot of operators they would actually gain a lot if they actually had it's a catch 22 but they would gain a lot of insights from that affiliate if there's an equity stake they have

incentive to share all the data and be like look here's our partners here's how you stack up against it do you think this could be something where maybe it binds some of the trusts like are would affiliates be asking for too much or do you think there's a there's some sort of weird equity playbook where affiliates could actually say hey let's work together and have some equity slice what's the term for like crowdfunding you get like a small piece but you're you've got ownership and you

feel good about it yeah I love it equity percentages because that's the whole how I get incentivized yeah you know what I mean I'm only commission based no flat fees I never think about flat fees. So if you then also ask for percentage of the company. Yes, it does align the incentives eventually and that is why I like affiliate marketing is the incentives are aligned between you and me.

We both want the same thing. So let's go and get it. Let's communicate how we can get there and see if everything is all right and the data works and etc etc. Yeah. And that's why I did the same. I consulted a lot of affiliates and actually also had a problem as in I charged €500 for one hour and not many people booked but the people that booked they got so much more out of it than that 500 euros an hour that I'm like yeah okay

I I only consult if I get a small percentage of your company and now I have more in people because the incentives are aligned there's no upfront cost and but I also know the value that they have. So awesome Neils, thank you so much for doing this. I want to pass it back to you to ask how can people get a hold of you and tell us about some of your websites and I know you've got an upcoming book too.

Yeah, it was a pleasure. How to best be connected with me? LinkedIn or Facebook. That's why I post a lot now. Just LinkedIn at NeilC. We'll put it in the show notes. If you have an affiliate site or company or publisher, check out neilc.com because I also advise some publisher on how to grow bigger. I am the co-founder of the Traffic family, a company that is now doing e-commerce in the Netherlands, affiliate e-commerce in the Netherlands.

It's completely outsourced and we do over 2 million a year in commission. And I'm doing an I'm writing a book called The Payout Mafia. how the top these top 20 affiliates are robbing the bank in 2025. It's basically because what I said to you is I go to these SEO conferences and suddenly I don't see any affiliates anymore, but the affiliates that I do know are making a ton of money, including me and my own company.

So, I'm like, come on guys, it's stop it if it's still possible to go big in affiliate marketing. And that's why I'm just reached out to all the big affiliate guys that I know and got right now 17 to say, "Yeah, I'm going to help you and answer questions like how to start in 2025. What mindset do you need? What if you had €10,000 to to spend?

What is your number one channel? What tools you're going to use exactly for beginners or people that are still wanting to go big that can really help them become big in affiliate marketing. So that's been a pleasure. It will be my first book. We're also going to make sure they'll be available physical. That's also nice and we'll see where it takes us. I hope the because the SEO part the industry quite negative right now.

But there's so much more than SEO and that's the second thing. I don't just want to invite talk with bunch of SEO guys, but also the guys that do Reddit or Parasant SEO, BBC, YouTube, all these other things because the game is changing. Right now I am reading a lot about investing because also the stock market is quite volatile as everybody knows. They have this guy called Benjamin Graham.

He's considered one of the most successful investors and every 10 year he basically wrote a book about his method of investing and it completely changed every 10 years. He's known for value investing which is last book about he is the intelligent investor. That's the book in in 1976 about value investing and that won't work today either. And it's the same with affiliate marketing. It will change all the time.

That is fine, but it doesn't mean that you either have to quit or that there's no money to be made. made. Yeah. And I agree like some of those people you have lined up are some of the smartest marketing minds I've talked to. Like you talk to even a friend like Victor Carpeno and it's like he's SEO but then when he starts talking you're like wait a minute it's next level marketing that applies to it's not just SEO anymore.

It's I think good SEO was always meant to be good marketing but we got lazy and the game was just ranking and if it worked but the irony it's marketing and affiliate marketing here we are. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. It's been a pleasure to be on the show John. It's very good talks. Yeah. Nice chatting with you. Thanks a lot for doing this and yeah, looking forward to meeting you in person somewhere around the world.

It'll be one of these conferences. Yeah, it will happen. It will happen. Thank you for tuning in to the AffiliateBI podcast. I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. That helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners.