Affiliate Manager Training from Affpal with Stefan Muehlbauer

what landing pages are working for the affiliate but also for you that's another important question you give an Affiliated a landing page works super good for them but nobody of the uses is buying them afterwards you have to track that all down if he is sending to 10 different landing pages you are maybe not even spotting the one that is like the biggest leader and you could increase the affiliate payout in a way if you would know all the kind of things that the affiliate makes

more you make more and you cut this landing page that is at the moment the most successful one for the affiliate but uses half of the graphics and this is again then uh back to the situation um that the market can double with proper of C management but there is nothing that you can do by hand anymore for this you need tools for this you need AI for this you need big data that you are analyzing so I think it's for a companies that are a

bit smaller and cannot afford this setup quite challenging in the future or they are using tools that are like sof related that can give them this information I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by sta welcome to the affiliate bi podcast today we're chatting with Stefan mbow hopefully I said that correctly he's the head of Affiliates for masters in cash he's the founder of a.net which is a Consulting Agency for affiliate management specializing in

Recruitment and we'll get into that soon as the main USD and he's also the author of affiliate management starter kit Stefan welcome to the show sure speak pleas pleasure to be here in your show I like your work a lot thanks we were just joking before recording about our podcasting habits and how we've got like our own routine so maybe we can jump into some podcasting tips soon but I want to get started to actually I'm really interested in what your book is about the field

management starter kit can you tell me what's inside and why did you create this so why I created this is because I I had a lot of requests from people that are actually not in the Ino and they want to join this are especially friends that are seeing something like the affiliate or affiliate marketer lifestyle and it's of course more appealing than a 9 to5 job in the hamster wheel so a lot of people reached out hey I need this advice that advice and the questions

were always repeating plus what I also figured out that when I saw like changes from affiliate managers and companies that are new in the industry they moved mostly away because they didn't got like a proper support from the company when it comes to training on onboarding if you are an experienced affiliate manager you will find your way around especially if you are familiar with the work TR but if you are new there and you don't have a buddy some companies they give you a buddy to

train you or like a supervisor that is really on point or like an internal training program then you are lost and I collected some of the questions I thought a little bit about was what were my challenges and also of course observe the market and I speak a lot with affiliate managers and account man just and I summarized this all in a book and as the original idea was to help people also to end the industry it goes really from how to find a job how

to pass the job interview even but is maybe also helpful a little bit for recruiters to find out uh the right base to find the right people and from there we go then really what are the first things you have to learn how to find Affiliates how to react Affiliates what you do when you take over the Affiliates that are already existing how to behave on a show how to do the follow-ups from a conference and also a little bit of an Outlook of what are

your options to continue with this career or to grow maybe into something like a team lead or a senior affiliate manager a business developer and what characteristics it needs for that I'm very convinced that if somebody does 10 years in the investor reads it they will find like two three things as well that they can take for themselves because during creation of the book of course I uh relied also on help of other people and their feedback that are very experienced I discovered things for myself

as well other the tget group are new p and what makes me very happy is that the book is used in a few companies as like uh training routine for their for their team so they give their new guys the book and say hey read it and with your questions you come back back to us and I think that helps a lot together with reading the right articles and watching podcasts from people that are long in the the the industry would you say that this is

my take that when a film managers are really great at their job they just migrate into a management role like into the overall company like part of management part of marketing and maybe that creates a gap where there's so many affil management jobs available and needed but I just find that the best ones they migrate their way out and there's this deficit of the the best managers because they just kept moving on yeah that was part of my uh recent speech in Italy about uh recruitment

in this field we don't see the problem too much that they are growing into the management position we see it more the best guys are making their own networks or programs nowadays with all the s solutions that you have on the market if you have the right connections and you are appreciated on the market it's so easy to set up a business that it's then really successful it needs way more things than just being a good uh people person and a good aate or Advertiser manager

manager manager because there is finance and Tech and so on even if you have S solutions that has to be like handled in a proper way but I see the risk mod that the really best guys are making even a competition product um or a competition company that they are that affiliate managers have the motivation to grow in the company I see of course a lot and they need potential but I see that actually even more with um growing within the company that's a very big

uh demand from people to grow within the company but they have to be also a bit realistic the best affiliate managers are not making automatically the best team leads or marketing people or business developers especially business development is often mixed up with sales and with a three management they throw it in one pot but it's absolutely not the case and the character has to fit to the person but yeah the people if they are not getting like a role with their company that is motivating they

move on and if they are really good they make sooner or later their own their own company yeah I think what you just said there is a note I wrote before you even said it which is there's too much emphasis on sales like when companies are putting together an affiliate program they right we need as many Affiliates signing up as possible and then we need as many sales from those Affiliates and on paper yes of course we want that but I think you're missing out on

the things where emphasis on sales could actually hurt relation ship building which to me relationship building is should be the fundamental starting point of affiliate marketing yeah and there is an even more impact when you have a strong sales in affiliate management the strong sales should be somebody that is like a business developer they bring new ideas they bring new opportunities they close they throw everything in the funnel there or you have really like an aate manager focusing on hunting but the best AIG managers I

saw are the guys that are not even screaming the loudest they are the guys that are really there for their Fates and this is not like rocket science this is really a trait that you can learn even easier and they are the ones that have the CRM system always updated proper they are the ones that are crushing numbers for the Affiliates to find the right opportunities but also crushing the numbers for the for the company to see also what things are working for the company just

reliable people that like detailed work are making on the longterm more sense than the loud screamers because if you scream a lot and you're bringing a lot of sales and you are not managing the affiliate proper and reliable sooner or later the EPC and results of the affiliate will not be as good anymore and you can scream as loud as you want numbers don't lie you can maybe always restart them with something new but if you are just maintaining them proper in a friendly partnership way

you don't have to scream because the affiliate sticks to you yeah I agree I have another I've got a ton of questions here when I ran some affiliate sites like some of them were Casino affiliate sites and we'd have thousands of accounts like we just hired one for every program we could get our hands on and what I found frustrating was most affiliate managers they only wanted one thing they wanted to be on the homepage and they wanted number one position because we had this top

list and everyone kind of copies and it's frustrated because no one would take the time to listen to say hey we have two other pages that can drive even more sales and we also the newsletter which actually drives the maximum sales I think this concept of inventory management is lost in affiliate marketing especially with managers how do you train them to spot better opportunities to say it's not just the homepage there are better ways of converting so the majority of people that we work with is

uh media buyers and also with the majority of my clients that I have in consultancy but what is definitely helping you is you are having as many informations about the Affiliates and you can segment then for example in the CRM system in your example with the homepage that has even better traffic on the newsletter if you make this check with the affiliate when you start a cooperation hey what type of traffic you have you run this kind of stuff as well hey I saw that you

have also a sign up for on your on your homepage what are you doing with the data there then you have points really to to work with and if you have like a a framework and something like a way of work you're not forgetting this kind of things and if you have for example this template in your CRM system and you go through it step by step there is no way that the affiliate manager is forgetting it so it's not even about training somebody if I

take somebody from the streets that speak propa mission is not a total fool and I said hey this is an email this is an affiliator this is a theic I'm your write them now this and that and then you ask him some of these points you can do it after 5 minutes but the most people they are not willing to put this effort into that and I have to to say myself it's hard for me to keep up with that in a proper way too but

after a while when you could that when you can do this data mining on your Affiliates and you know everything about that you don't have to proper work anymore in your life everything is served for you on a on a silver plate so the affiliate managers have to understand from day one the better they collect data and informations about their Affiliates the easier their job becomes and the more transform sales in to to to maintaining I agree Mass mail versus personalization this is all in relation

to outreach what is your take on us I can refer here the most to people that we are already having in the system and that we don't have a Skype or a telegram because this is always my preferred way of of working so we send them emails and the emails are a little bit of a mix so you usually make again like this data mining based on the numbers that they did and when they were never locking in to your account in The Last 5 Years

most prob informations are not up to date yeah I think then it's like a must mail okay but if it's just somebody that is just about the minimum payout or something like this you should put the effort and uh check what this guy is doing and the same goes by the way also when it comes to the Outreach for conferences I had here a very interesting podcast in in my in my show with a guy that made an Outreach to me in the most detailed way

I ever got contacted from somebody I don't know but the company so the guy was really giving us all the numbers and all the histories and what have changed since we bought the last time there there at click it was by the way traffic stars niiki from traffic Stars yeah I can see she did done fantastic work and I wanted to meet this guy just because it was so detailed I was knowing that I when I will sit with him it will have value so that

is one way but it's also an extreme he most probably took half an hour just to uh prepare the message towards me but if you go through the app or the website where you have all the attendees you cannot do that you should do that for the people that you had business with and you want to reactivate or you already have business with and you want to scale but you don't speak with them on a regular base for all the others I would make a very

Universal approach what are the best things that you offer and reach out to them and say hey I saw that you are attending in Sigma I saw that you're an affiliate we have this and these offers in this markets we pay out this and in the first months we have this and this Bonos and additionally we have at the moment contest um if you send minimum 1,000 clients we sent you a roxs or whatever and in that way it's it's already saying more than the others

like hey I saw you an aate I saw that you're also going to Sigma can we meet and this is something that is steing the time and it's sent out very often and it's not only affiliate managers it's in general people that have to present something because I don't know what this person is doing with without checking in details what this person is doing myself but you right me you want something from me so if you would be interesting for me you would have already got

a message from me hopefully or you will get it in the future so you should at a minimum say what you offer and what you want from me yeah I agree I'm I think we all get frustrated with the spray and prey messages where it's like you didn't even take the time to know if I'm a qualified person uh another thing I get frustrated with is people that want to set up the meeting at a conference and it's we I'm not your customer it's you're going

to waste each other's time but they're so insistent and you're like I would be horrified if that was my program and my affiliate manager trying to set up meetings with just for the sake of setting up the meeting and being busy yeah it's a problem because the kpis all Affiliates affiliate managers are managed by their team are often so wrong from how it should be as you said it's like a minimum of contacts okay when we were taking the people the first time to a conference

some of them they were like 3 4 days in the company we really said hey this is what we need just in business cards we cannot expect something something more at this time but in general the kpi should not be hey just how many how many meetings you have you better don't have meetings and you just stay in the bar and everybody that stops at you you buy a beer and ask what they do at the end of the evening you are drunk but you have

maybe like five six really qualified new talks that are definitely the wrong ideas how to measure with the success it's the same as you said I think in the beginning with a new program that just says hey how many Affiliates is everybody onboarding if you just want to onboard everybody you make like posts everywhere in every forum and the next day you have 100 signups and from this 100 are 99 trash that are stealing your time so you don't even have time to focus on the

one that is like delant so yeah that has to be seen a bit different for the things that affiliate managers can do for their skills and to try to not just drive sales but make them more relevant I believe that more affiliate managers actually had all the trading especially what you teach do you think the affiliate marketing industry could double over in its size and revenue it's hard to give like a real prediction on that but it definitely can be done uh way better just if

the traffic stays exactly the way it is from recommending the best products and landing pages to their Affiliates is making an huge impact if you show the users the clients exactly what they want to see it's increasing the conversion rate and it's also increasing the rate of what is happening then in the product after the sign up or after the purchase and the retention and so on so I think better a f8 management can have a very big impact is it double is it three times

it is only 20% I don't know but there is so much room more from us to do it and I think that is playing now a little bit maybe in the hands of the people that are uh more sales orientated in the future there are tools around um that will help the people to make this a little bit more automatic this or there are tools coming up that are making the things a little bit more automatic when it comes to this ground work like what opportunities

what recommendations you can give to the affiliate and so on and that will help us a lot because when you're are sitting 3 hours per day just to analyze data because you the super reliable AED manager if you get it already on server plate this three hours can be used to speak like to more years yeah I agree do you think that there is a need for CRM tools that focus more on the retention side the customer relationship because my take is a lot of the

existing CRM tools on the market like your Salesforce your HubSpot your pipe Drive they are more sales first it's get the sale and it's I don't feel I know that they are built in a way that can actually help for customer relationship and ret but do you think that we're actually missing this cuz the program software doesn't have CRM built into it most of the time so there must be a market uh for that there are like some guys that are building at the moment a

CRM system especially for this for this market so there must be a need for this but it's called toola they were also on the threee world so I make now a lot of shout outs to all the old homies of me yeah but they are building a CRM system for that because they saw the need I have not seen it inside no no docment on the quality we had a CRM system in the very first company I was that was like extremely basic so you could

just make notes about the affiliate and that's it and over the years we were trying like sales force as well but it was too complex now in Masters in cash we have Soo what I'm not such a big fan of so what I use myself for afal and what I also set up around three times for Giants is something called podium what I like about polio is that it's so easy to customize and it has a look and feel of Facebook because it's also very hard

to force a B8 manag just to to use a CRM if they have never done that before so when you want that they use it you don't want to have something super complex you want to have something that looks and feels like a tour or a system they are familiar with so that's why I use B you it takes me around half an hour to configure it exactly like I want and for sales are Maybe like other tools on the market that are stronger but for

re maintaining a partnership it's in my opinion the best thing to do and you have a really easy task management system for every affiliate you have the task management for yourself where you can use it you create any field that you want and you can uh put multiple filters within a few seconds so for example you can through the directly every affiliate that has traffic in UK and is in lead generation and is at the moment not active and requested API access when you get API

access maybe to your program you press a button and it gives you a list and imagine some theate manager reaches out to you and said hey John one year ago you wanted to have API we didn't have that but now we offer it is to still anyen one you will say this guy is really professional because the others will just tell you like hey John you have no traffic for me but this guy really has everything noted down and the good thing is he don't have

to check all the notes once per month so so to see hey what is sticking now you have a request he puts it in the CRM system when something new is coming into the company he presses one button and it lists him everybody that requested did refering I agree so that was a question that started on the CRM side I don't think there's a lot of really good serum tools natively for affiliate marketers or affiliate managers now I want to f to the other side and

go what do you think about business intelligence tools I think a lot of affiliate program software doesn't have bi built in natively and on the other side with tub spot in Salesforce on the bi side you've got your standards powerbi Tableau looker Studio do you think there's going to be another future where we're going to see some of these tools that are built inside for maybe Affiliates and affiliate managers yeah he was with you already in in the podcast as well and it's the guy is

practically a little bit like my like my like my M hashtag no but really when it comes to all the data related stuff this is Christian from with analytica and I had like a glimpse on the tools that he is building and it is really needed and we for example we used a FES in our company and this morning I had a situation where I had to filter practically every affiliate that is sending us beside a few guys that have like other deals it gives me

not the option to make this negative selection and most programs are lacking this kind of stuff and this is just the affiliate management but when you have then additionally also the data from the product it gets really complicated so at the moment you have to have a own team that knows all this kind of stuff and knows things about databases and how to set it up and it's complex and it's expensive but I think it makes makes the money back on a long term but I

know there are a lot of companies that are not using anything like this at all they work around a little bit with Excel file here they work a little bit around with Google Sheets there and this is not business intelligence you have to analyze practically everything that is happening in the user Journey where you use where you lose the most users where they are buying when you make AB testing what is working what is not working what landing pages are working for the affiliate but also

for you that's another important question you give an Affiliated a landing page works super good for them but nobody of the uses is buying then afterwards you have to track that all down if he is sending to 10 different landing pages you are maybe not even spotting the one that is like the biggest beer and you could increase the affiliate payout in a way if you would know all the kind of things that the affiliate makes more you make more and you cut this landing page

that is at the moment the most successful one for the affiliate but uses half of the traffic and this is again then uh back to the situation um that the market can double with proper ofc management but there's nothing that you can do by hand anymore for this you need tools for this un need AI for this you need big data that you are analyzing so I think it's for companies that are a bit smaller and cannot afford this setup quite challenging in the future or

they are using tools that are like sof related that can give them this information yeah I remember asking a lot of affiliate Manors going do you know the conversion rate of your landing pages and unfortunately most of them said yes and I said okay great so my second question to them is two parts would you like a conversion rate audit after so when I was getting yes to both questions that doesn't make sense because if you do the conversion rate of your landing pages you wouldn't

want to audit after and I actually believe that most affiliate managers and operations they actually don't even know they're not even looking at the conversion right data because we know that not only you have your conversion rates when you make changes to your pages conversion rate is not a standard thing that just is like a straight line it changes over time and it could change for good or bad reasons I actually believe that there's a a whole other space of optimization on Just landing pages alone

that also needs to come from the V8s to speak a little bit about them I stay still in hundreds of chats from the Masters in cash Affiliates and our managers and when you onboard somebody you often the biggest question is what is your best performing offer what is your best performing landing page and this is like all landing pages this is like a very useless question because the best landing pages that we have are usually from the review sites and from the mailers but if you

are like a media buyer sending like the cheapest top traffic this landing pages will not work out for you and additionally to this if we give them to you out of the sudden we have 10 times more traffic there but like 100 times lower conversion rates of this laming cases will also look for us out of the Su bad so Discretions have to come from all sides but here's the problem also that the Affiliates itself have changed a lot from these individual guys that were like

maybe 15 20 years ago building like cop pages and then it developed into smartlink networks and now we have a gigantic amount of Affiliates that are like media buying groups two 300 media buyers so the person that is speaking with you is not even knowing something about media buying it's just like a representative of the company that is asking the wrong question so the training that we speak about for the affiliate managers should be also done for the account managers that are on a different position

like um Advertiser manager and if they ask the right question the affiliate manager can also give the right answer and even if the if one of them is not that experienced but the other is super experienced this problem is maybe also solved because if the advertise manager is super experienced the figure manager is a newb and says okay I have mailing traffic what you recommend me for mailing traffic the affiliate manager is hopefully not that dupid and gives like just the best conversion rate will really

check what is working with mailing traffic and on the other hand if the account manager is not experience but the affiliate manager is like an OG it says okay best landing P offer what type of traffic you even have yeah we are specialized in pop traffic ah okay for this we have this very simple thing that is like Blinky your something like this like really attention catching you should use something like this and then it's working and then you have a fruitful fruitful fruitful partnership and

you mentioned something there about the different types of traffic like you've got the media buyers which is high volume and the conversion rate could be variable then you have like reviews which are maybe lower volume but High uh conversion and my experience in trying to build going from an affili company to ass SAS company is bottom of funnel content like stat drone alternatives to stat stone ststone versus our competitors and so we've been building up this content do you think that affiliate programs could share these

insights or should they be more proactive at saying hey we're looking for more of this content and and it needs to come from your side I just think this is a massive missed opportunity so we have this in in two situations The Situation Number One is the review site that you are already saying they expect us to give them the review practically and it has to be in the language that they are running it of course that is something tricky we are extremely strong in Slovenia

that's from Roi Wise It's for us like a gold M but this a small country and you have to find somebody that is translating the stuff then to slum because if you use de or something like this comes out some trash and you came out I would not even say compete with the competition because there's barly competition for us in Slovenia but then the users are not converting and the prices are too high to send the traffic on the review side or they can use the

the seal traffic they have in a different way so that's already one thing where we have to give out the content the other content what we have like reest is like Co Affiliates that are saying like Okay we want to rank better for you but we need like profiles and we need like other Affiliates that are giving us backlinks so you are connecting them with other groups of Affiliates and together they are ranking up for you these are the things where I see mostly content requests

from us and one other thing that is maybe not content but more promo tools if you have new aat especially that are mailers they usually expect you that you provide templates this is something I can say now from from our experience and the reason for this is if you are like starting new to work with them they don't want to put an effort into it so if you say okay can you get email lists for let's put Slovenia as well they don't want to test Slovenia

and find now a translator themsel to translate their templates for this small market and not even knowing if Masters in cash is a good company maybe we convert bad maybe we don't pay out there are many reasons why in not to work with somebody that later on so why to put on effort when you already put money and work so they expect you that you give them the templates when it's a new partnership if he sends ALB the epcs two in Slovenia the guy will hi

are an internal person just from Slovenia to translate it but not in the first step so they are expecting that from you as well yeah this was usful at taking some notes and this is going to go into a future article pivoting because we both do podcasting I wrote an article and published it today about how to help an affiliate stand up from the crowd in a very competitive Nissan I gaming and basically said here's what I think would be a good go to market strategy

for building a a podcast for an affiliate site but more importantly how to basically become number one in an alternative traffic so Google's super saturated SEO sites are everywhere and I actually think uh podcasting is another Channel where people can get to connect with you build trust so what's your take on podcasts as a channel for affiliate marketing for you mean to to make sales or to just bring your name out sales first but the secondary benefit is you definitely build your name out too maybe

I cannot say too much about the podcast to make the sales as an affiliate I know it's used for S Solutions and so on a lot of the S Solutions are putting now a lot of focus on content marketing and podcasts I I'm invited to so many podcasts just because out of the sudden there are so many I've enjoyed them all but the most I enjoy them when somebody has like a different approach like you we speak here now on a very high level of affiliate

management so it's very interesting for me so this is this is of course one course one course one to use to sell s Solutions if you podcast and you invite people there that are are experts so another thing is of course if you have like podcasters and streamers and people that are making shorts and so on and they are marketing your affiliate offers that's of course an a completely different story that you use three as an affiliate marketing tool there are even a lot of igaming

companies that are fully focusing on this influencers and the streamers and so on and they make traffic from this if you are in affiliate marketing and you want to build your brand and maybe sell your sof Solutions or your uh you use the podcast people are watching it and say hey John is like a good guy this St St must be like a cool tool so I look into that or so that is one way other are watching my stuff and they say okay the guy

knows a thing or two I buy his book I sell not a lot of books because it's a very Niche but I sell books over the podcast I said consultancies about it I buil practically the entire recruitment business out of that also the girls that I have in the gy I motivate them that they are recording here and there some shorts it's not podcasting yet but I want that they are recognizable because in this Industries one of our trust uh one person has to trust the

other you either are like prepaid then the advertiser or network has to trust you or you are paid uh later on and then you have to trust the person that is paying you the Network or The Advertiser so when it's just like an unom person it's a different story than if you have somebody that has 20 podcasts out there it would be for me let's say I can cheat somebody for €100,000 it would not be worth to destroy my brand for 100,000 if I would be

just an unim person it would be worse to cheat somebody for €1,000 so people trust me just because they know that I will not play around due to the publicity that I build and I can recommend ComEd to everybody I had a few guys that I motivated to make casts as well and it never took off I think but it was making me quite happy to see some of these guys trying something yeah I what you said there to me resonated because if you're an affiliate

manager and you're doing like these YouTube shorts or shorts or shorts or Instagram I think it only helps because think about how much it compounds over time hey you now see that person in the conference because you happen to follow their Instagram page and even if they're making silly videos that like more comical and humor you can choose your go to market whether it's I'm going to either be educational or humor and entertainment but I think the stuff extends to LinkedIn I think these things add

up it's uh it's the way to differentiate so it's you're not just a name or an email you're like more of a yeah person and then their Outreach when I actually do Outreach and send a message to you you're going to have a stronger connection without having made the effort you you gave me now another thing to uh comment on you said hey they have to it's good when they are out no matter if it's commet or educational everything helps but what I think is often

a bit annoying and counterproductive people are trying to put out a piece of content and it's so basic so these are the trends for 20025 in a few marketing number one network number B educate yourself number c know the market so it's too basy you have to put a little bit more effort in come up with stuff that that the people are not aware of otherwise you will get a lot of comments from the link inputs um yesterday I posted a few new roles that we

had in the system and I got out of the S the S mob comments there from people that I have not even a second connection a third connection and it was just an ey that was repeating what I already wrote there when I made like a sophisticated post these Bots are not reacting to it because they can even digested so it shows me how how how inflated this industry is often with their uh knowledge that they are sharing and I think then you better make just

posts of yourself and say see you in Malta see you in Bangkok see you in Bina God knows where you are going and the people just see your face before you just repeat something that everybody knows because nobody likes to hear the same uh story over and over again that's a great point it's either be funny be entertaining or be super insightful but don't be in the middle middle middle yeah and tell us about the recruitment work you do for apal I know this is a

big part of what apal is set out for yeah I'm uh very blessed here with with a super strong team in the meantime are four people involved in uh a because it's Masters in cash is a lot to do with Just Launch the US and a lot of other things so it's put to hand all stuff in trusted hands it started all like this that I I became quite like an a person that catch attention in Industry through all the speeches andol with conferences I attend

up to 25 conferences per year and on most of them I speak so you get some uh connections also the podcast so people started to ask me for like jobs or candidats and I connected the people and I did it just to help and I was happy of course if somebody starts to work at a media buying company for dating and I hit up this person hey congrats to the new job by the way you never sent to master in cash come on now let's kick

it off together and here is a special campaign because we know each other so for this it was helpful but then it became more and more that recruiters asked me also for contacts I gave them the contact and they were brokering the people and they were earning a ton of money and nobody of them offered me something like a kickback or even to say hey on the next conference I take you to a nice Sushi or something like this when I found out how much they

made I asked for the next deal to be IM so not even for the old stuff because that I should have defined before nobody wanted to to give me something so I said okay the next person I would just ask for money and it went from having three four people per month that were requesting help and maybe two companies into something that summed up in the meantime to yeah we should be at around 500 contacts that we have now in the database plus around 2,260 on

off chops what is like a board from for affiliate marketing jobs and this is like extremely successful because a lot of companies out there they started as like one affiliate together with two three friends and then they recruited another friend and so on now their company has 20 people and they cannot recruit from their pool of friends anymore and they have no idea about how to pay how to select the right person and so so they prefer to Outsource it to us pay something and then

use this Intel that we give them to make the right decisions also if you have four people that are focusing on that we have a boost on I think this year we have on four or five conferences a boost just for the recruitment this gives you access to completely new talents and new companies that you would otherwise not have then the job or a jobs where there a partnership with the affiliate world so the affiliate world is sending our jobs in their newsletter from the affiliate

World forward it costs 10 20 30,000 media buyers so when you have an open open open now we have a new partnership with the native Hub so everything that the search Arbitrage and Native is going over them you cannot do that as another company and uh we give them all choices they either in make an advertising on a chops and they pay us a onetime fee and they get maybe 30 candidats they can do with them whatever they want this is if you have a bigger

company usually and you have your own HR or they hire us and they pay us a fee once it's a successful deal and this is going like super successful I think in 20 24 we will end it with something like 40 50 deals that we closed I guess that's your way of making recruiters making recruiters nervous we should not make them nervous because the biggest recruiters are anyway in igaming and this is not something that we are involving ourselves too much it's a microcosmos itself so

you have affiliate marketing and you have I gaming and I love I gaming and we have clients from there but it's still like a different thing it's a different thing from tracking how the traffic is generated how even at the boes are looking different everything is there a different world and there are a there are recruitment companies that are like specialized in this and they do a fantastic job they do fantastic speeches for example I think her name is kilia so she's for example a great

person I made met her in in Athens it's not that we are doing this and we are coming now and and taking something from their plate because they are so Hy Lish there and they do such a great work with all aspects of I gaming um if you meet somebody like like a legal guy they can organize these kind of things we bring aate managers advertising managers media buyers marketing managers and now we have the first I think 15 developers also but it's not that we

are like specialized in a certain field and the market is also big enough for everybody to to work into that but I'm extremely proud that we could build here a team of four within one year and this is mostly also related to to to Tina that is managing the project and does here a great work coordinating everything and of course also that we had the opportunity to take over the management of off jobs all right Cordelia is safe yeah not only Cordelia I met a few

of them but she's the one that I I had the most touching points in the uh longest talk and also when you meet sometimes people in said ah you are a recruiter yeah okay we have some guys and sometimes he get let's say 15 people that we have no jobs for let's say something like VIP customer support we don't have openings for this kind of stuff so you stick to some of the other recruiters and say hey if I send you the guys and something comes

out can we do something and it's not that we cooperated there now also but V is always like a nice discussion but with others when you say something they are not even giving you feedback when I had my first developers I had people that were writing me I need this developers I make group I make in introductions Tina is making her following ups and the people are not even following up or giving comments and this is something sad and this is with a lot of people

like this and the people that are professional they will go up and the people that not taking care of the people but it's sometimes also hard to keep up you have a lot of requests they will die out this recruiters should be nervous but not because of me they should be nervous because the clients will not be happy and the candidats will not be not be not be happy agreed and last question is what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects

with business intelligence so I see it practically very very automized I think that there will be in every bigger company and every biger in every bigger Network there will be tools and departments integrated that is serving in informations to the affiliate manager and to the company to make qualified decisions and it will also give the team leader other information to see the quality of their affiliate managers to throw really down which affiliate manager is growing their amount of active Affiliates how are they growing their amount

of quality Affiliates and all this kind of stuff because just having an affiliate manager that makes the most sales with their team is not automatically meaning that this is a good guy it can be one affiliate that this guy has a very good relationship with and that's it you have to see really the quality and the amount of Affiliates what is the average revenue and so on and all this data is already there it's just not easy accessible for the people so I think that is

like one thing and I think what will also happen is to automize a mod sprs like for example the aate is getting automatically suggestions what offers will work for them that is one thing what landing page will work on them I think also there will be API connections to change payouts to notify the affiliate and say hey this subsource is not able to to keep up with this 50 EUR CPA we can only afford 40 within 48 hours we will change that but this kind of

stuff I think is happening it takes a lot of time for us to make all these changes at the moment manually but I see it in the future that this is definitely something that is happening more automatically and it's happening already in some companies but it has to be done in the right way I read recently an article about somebody that was promoting don't even remember what offer it was but over the weekend practically this algorithm stopped an offer I think and was not even you

cannot stop an offer Friday night and on Monday there they look into it and see there are zero sales so it has to be done in in the right way and we will have for sure a year or two more until this is like all established but I think this is really the future and also what is of course the case is that a lot of work that the affiliate managers are doing is taking too long because it's manual offer link creation and so on statistics

discussing payouts so on you meet that with with one click you must have features to to find out every detail about the affiliate you have to find problems in your system and where you have set the wrong payout where you are paying out the affiliate more than you are actually learning so I think all this kind of stuff will become incredibly important and additionally of course information about the market itself I send the Masters in cash every month the newsletter to the entire field about all

the changes that are in the market that can be regulations that can be also personal movements so somebody that was like a big affiliate manager is moving somewhere else that can be like competitors are making promotions competitors are closing down products and so on and I think based on this information with your own Intel you can really find golden situations if you see that that that you for for f example in our case Poland if you see that your polish offer is doing quite okay but

not dominating the market and out of the like a few competitors that are stopping this or lowering the payout you know that you're out of the s in the King of the Hill something like this so you can push that if you just rely on your own data that will take way longer to realize because of of the something more more leads coming in but if you have this information before you can tell your team hey in Poland I think we have there like a nice

chance let's prepare a lead rate Let's test it for one week and so on that's like a lot of um stuff that you have with inside information and outside information and how the outside information are blending in all of that it's nothing I can at the moment maybe you have to invite Chris because he yes for sure so you yeah I think the three of us should chat and it's yeah it's funny you mention all these things and just for contexts we haven't shared with Stefan

our pitch te in business plan so we're working on a few of those things that's good yeah Stefan I want to throw it back to you thanks for doing this how can people get a hold of you the best is actually to go on any platform and check for AFP it's on Facebook it's on Instagram it's on YouTube you can also write me an email Stefan at AFP net yeah that's I think the easiest ways to reach out or just watch out for the guy that

is wearing the most colorful suits on the conferences because that's also me but not this time in my unfortunately okay no worries that's awesome I'm going to put those links in the show notes and we're purple in the conference it's nice to know that great minds think Al like in terms of how do we stand up from the crowd stepan thanks a lot for doing this John thank you very much also for this really great podcast we had together very inspiring thank you thank you thank

you for tuning in to the affiliate bi podcast I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a Reading and Review wherever you listen to your podcast that helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners