Applying Product-Led SEO Strategies in Affiliate Marketing with Eli Schwartz

I think um you know personal brand has been huge in my life um it's been something I've mostly committed to like over these last five years I've had you know a couple months where I've I've dipped out a little bit and to taken some time off or whatever but in general I would say it's been a pretty consistent effort and I think consistency is really everything like when I when I started SEO notebook um you know I was I knew the idea was good but like

I didn't really have any experience in doing this stuff and um there was a guy um named Dirk Diggy um he was like buds with Glenn alsop and like I just knew him through like the social social media and I had a conversation with him like prior to starting SEO notebook and you know he just offered me this like one really important piece of advice that was if you don't email weekly um people are going to forget about who you are and if he didn't tell

me that I probably would started a bi-weekly newsletter and not been as been as successful I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by [Music] [Music] sta welcome to the affiliate bi podcast today we're chatting with Steve Toof who is the founder of SEO notebook uh which I'm a big fan of and he's also running an event called SEO IRL in Toronto which I got a ticket for and Steve welcome welcome to the show hey

John thanks for having me excited to be here so how much time are you spending creating your SEO notebook and I ask that because I'm a content creator for the B2B side but what I think is that you're I'm guessing you're putting in a lot of quality time making an amazing product that people talk about and link to and I think maybe your answer might give uh some insights to people on the fic marketing side yeah for sure so maybe I'll just start with just for

those of uh the Watchers who aren't with seu notebook what it is exactly um it's a it's a newsletter but it's not like a Roundup newsletter so essentially what I do and have done for the past five years is um create like one actionable piece of strategy uh and then email that to my list on a weekly basis so I've been doing that for five years now which means I have over 250 actionable strategies that I've sent out and you know hopefully like by this point

we're almost at 20,000 subscribers so do something right and um you know in terms of like how much time I put into this content um it can be as little as 30 minutes or it could be as much as like almost two full working days um it just really depends on uh you know what I'm doing and how I'm inspired uh you know last week what I did was I created a spreadsheet that essentially pre-populated a bunch of URL strings for tools like HFS and Sam

rush and other tools like seliner copyscape archive.org and essentially what you just do is put your url into your domain into the tool it then pre-populates all those URLs for you which you can just open in a bunch of tabs and kind of get like a nice high level overview of how your site's doing and like you know very specific screens and HFS like what are my new backlinks what are the keywords that have declined what are the keywords that have risen and stuff like that

and you know that note was just basically like an idea I had in the shower and it was very quick for me to put that together like maybe only an hour uh but you know when I'm when it comes to things like you know um creating AI Bots and stuff you never know how long those ones are going to go and honestly they can take a very long time to get it right and cause a lot of frustration and I've had things where like you know

I've lost my um my change history on like certain Bots and like had to go back and like you know go back and try to fix stuff so those ones can definitely be a bit more frustrating and I am more cognizant to give myself you know extra time when I am you know creating a GPT bot but for example um one of the ones that was relatively like not too bad maybe only took me like five or six hours uh was um creating a GPT bot

that analyzed Google patents so what I did was um I uploaded the Google leak uh to the back end of the GPT bot and then basically had the bot you know analyze a Google Patent PDF um against sort of a structured way of looking at the whole thing so you know pulling the abstract looking at Key Concepts Etc and then also comparing what was in the patent to the leak as well and uh you know that um it does take a lot of trial and error

but you know I learned so much when it comes to prompting I think trial and error is everything um you know when you're trying to achieve a certain thing and you know you're just kind of like constantly refining um you can just learn so much that way and um you know that that bought yeah like I said maybe took five or six hours but um the AI stuff I always like you know uh like if I'm um have the weekend I always tell my girlfriend like

it's going to be like potentially a little longer than I I can really anticipate so she like when I don't when I'm not doing GPT but think we get so do you ever write a note and then it takes five hours and then you realize it's not going to work and then you just scrap it and throw it out and oh absolutely I'm asking for a friend yeah no seriously like that's a very valid point um last week when I I mentioned I came up with

that note around um pre-populating those URLs that was actually because I had failed on a GPT bot earlier than that so I was trying to create a bot that would predict predict predict whether or not a page could be shown in Google discover and like How likely a page would be to be shown in Google discover and I had you know lots of really solid criteria that I was evaluating the page against and all kinds of things but you know when it actually came down to

testing it with my own data and looking at the pages that I knew for sure sh showed and discover and then the pages that I knew absolutely did not show and discover the bot was just a complete complete failure so I I never uh released that that GPT bot and like I'm always very you know cognizant of like you know my success is tied to um how much I can how much value I can provide through SEO notebook and uh you know I'm never going to

release something that I'll think is good or as delivering false positives and stuff like that so that was unfortunately you know probably four or five hours down the drain when I finally realized that this thing just was reliable in terms of predicting Google discover and that's totally fine I just move on to the next thing damn uh going straight into technical SEO um I want to ask you what is keyword verticalization strategy um and I'm asking this because you mentioned that you did some of this

work for consultings uh for mapon and I think it's freshbook so I just want to know if you're able to share examples of that yeah for sure I've done it for mapped in fresh books signatur Le all L lots of uh different companies so essentially um this verticalization strategy and actually I'll mention one thing that uh it's not live yet but I have a five-part email series that really goes into depth with this um I will be launching it on SEO notebook and if you subscribe

to se notebook.com that's probably the best place you can hear about it we literally go into dissecting the whole strategy uh in detail like from from five and a series of five different emails but um essentially you know when there is an industry that Target a company that targets several Industries um there's oftentimes like a really good um opportunity for seos to you know create um the one page on let's say um invoice templates like at Fresh books and then you know uh targeting invoice templates

for contractors for lawyers for graphic designers and even things like file types for PDF for Excel for Google Sheets and uh you know essentially verticalized your content across these different Industries um you know for maap in that was indoor maps for malls for for offices for stadiums and stuff like that um you can really build a lot of solid relevance with Google um and you know when when you have people who are searching for a very tailored solution like I don't want just any invoice template

I want one for a graphic designer um you end up actually having a much higher conversion rate because the thing that you're offering them uh is you know specifically relevant to them so I would say like you obviously like shouldn't just like you know create a page about graphic designer invoice template and not make it you know just be be generic I would I wouldn't suggest that I would suggest basically making it as um tailored as possible and you know we've done that on sites like

signatur le.com which is a site that I helped launch actually in in 2020 that is doing extremely well um since then and um you know we created contract templates so we actually created leral contracts for you know wedding planner contract or photographer contract and stuff like that and you know actually offered a real piece of value to all those um you know different uh vertical so you know when that's a online signature software so obviously you know people who are looking for that kind of stuff

are in the market for um you know getting a legally binding online signature it was another great opportunity for that type of strategy yeah it sounds like middle or bottom of funnel content with high intent yeah exactly so the what you know when we did um when we did invoice templates that was a really unique uh situation just because um you know if you look at a company like fresh books or equip books are zero the total addressable market for those companies is absolutely huge um

you know just Freelancers and contractors around the world right um and uh and that also translated into extremely high volume keywords uh just because there's so many people looking for an invoicing solution right so if you can yeah find a vertical opportunity that is a company that is you know pretty much mass market like you could say that fresh books is B2B but you could also say that it's B Toc when you're talking about like Freelancers and contractors um when you can kind of marry those

two things it can be like you know such a huge opportunity but even on a smaller scale you know like when I've been working with mapin now for over four years um you know there's not that many people looking to make an indoor map but um it it is like you said it's um you know it's high intent and you know people are are like wow well you know I have a stadium and I really need an mapping solution this page tells me all about you

know how to do that and you know shows me that you've done XY andz stadiums Unfortunately they they can't say that they have uh worked with certain professional sports leagues um unfortunately we can't we can't use that but they have um but you know like just basically what I'm saying is like when you see that custom tailored landing page your conversion rate is going to be a lot higher so even in the case where um mapped in isn't super high volume it's still very much worth

it to do that kind of strategy it sounds like it's kind of similar or related to programmatic SEO just maybe a little different yeah it could it could be for sure like sure like um the you you can take a programmatic approach to that um but I would say that you know if it you kind of have to weigh like what what your resources are right so let's say you're doing um you know contract templates and uh you want to take like you know chat GPT

contract everything or you literally just want to like swap out Industries as placeholders across all these different things like you can do that and take more of a programmatic approach uh but I think ultimately you have to look at like what are your resources what's the potential payoff and you know either invest in you know human written content or human AI content that's human edited and just like have a little bit more of a uh sales SL copyrighting angle to it then then just you know

straight um find a replace and going into more of an example like for what we do we have a directory of affiliate programs across many different Industries and we have a lot of Rich data behind it and I'm wondering if there's a right and wrong way of doing programmatic I'm assuming the wrong way is doing so much maybe AI or lowquality or thin content that you have so many pages that Google says hey you're just basically blasting the internet here but I'm just wondering if there's

like a best structure to say okay we've got um a main page that's affiliate programs and then it's like the industry but then it could be the industry in relation to a country or in relation to a commission type so what would your thoughts on that be yeah I mean I think you can certainly rank with the very like you know programmatic low effort content it all just really depends on your competition right so if you're the first um site to go after you know particular

um strategy like a particular keywords in your Niche and you know all you would need is just basically a relevant page and and you would rank but I think um you know over time you're going to obviously have competitors and by this point like it's also improbable that you're the first to do something on the Internet um so I guess you know when evaluating the approach that you're going to take with that you really need to look at the competition and and kind of gauge what

how much effort is going to be required to to rank I think I'll have to do a bit of research on the search intent but I can say that some of those examples where you go super deep haven't really been touched and I I'm kind of surprised on it so because you said be the first I think I'm going to put that as high priority without a doubt yeah I mean like you you can like I said if if you are one of the early Trailblazers

in that you really only need like you know your title tag to be relevant in your H form like that's that's that would get you there right but I think maybe um you know one important point there is like even if you are able to get to a a very like you know advantageous position um by with minimal effort uh you shouldn't just let those pages be you should you know make a make a concerted effort of like at least evaluating the the performance every six

months and and making making making adjustments I agree I like to think that building a product is helpful like applying it to uh affiliate sites and to help them survive and thrive but maybe not everything could be an affiliate product so what else do you think you know just putting you know a pretend affiliate hat on what do you think affiliate sites can do that's not always a product that's going to help them um survive well I think the one big obvious one is an email

list I mean I can say for myself like even not being like an affiliate first my affiliate Revenue through my email list is pretty solid um you know the more captive an audience you have the the higher quality list you have um the more you're going to be able to blast out relevant offers and really monetize that way so you know that also you know it's obviously the landscape is changing quite rapidly with what types of affil what type of traffic affiliate sites are you know

going to expect but um if you build that email list off your tofu content that's ranking um you know you you essentially create like a really viable channel for you to earn a lot of Revenue um I would also say that like it seems counterintuitive but from what I have personally seen you know um like really successful Affiliates are now offering Consulting like literally because they've proven themselves um to be you know super successful they've got a few flipped sites under their belt like they have

you know cred uh in the industry and um are actually just you know offering Consulting to to clients right so I mean that's my um you know main Revenue source is is SEO Consulting and kind of hybrid agency work which is what we do and um you know I can tell you that like as long as you know how to sort of choose the right types of clients and you know a little bit about client management um it can actually be like an amazing um you

know Focus for you uh really like you know I know um you know a friend of mine here in in Toronto um Alex Savvy I don't know if you you know him but um you know he he flipped a site in the mattress industry for over a million and um now he's really looking you know Consulting as being um you know one of his you know primary income sources right because he has that track record and he has that credibility so um you know I think

you know through creating content that demonstrates your expertise um you're going to be able to attract uh those types of um of of clients so you know that would be you know I would say the most lucrative opportunity if if you're asking me but I'm also biased because that's what it might be bias but I think it's a perfect example of going what is the value of a single user or single click like I've talked to a lot of uh SEO personalities and they basically say

when they go on YouTube they might have 200 views and people think this person's not making any money but what you can't see behind that is the invisible DMS that lead to hey I want to talk to you what are your rates and then you know once you have that experience um you know the the quality is kind of implied in the price yeah um once people kind of see you know you like just see a personal side of you like you know I've gotten amazing

clients through podcast appearances that you know in on my own website I even have like a press section you may be watching it through that right now and the future but um you know I even have a press section that just has all my podcast appearances and you know I I've had multiple clients say that they've discovered me through podcast I've had clients tell me that they've discovered me because someone else mentioned my name on a podcast like you know so there's the the thing about

um you know inbound marketing and all that kind of stuff is it's really impossible to predict you know where your next lead is going to come from but um you have to kind of take the approach that you know you're sewing seeds and eventually those seeds are going to spray and you know start paying back to you um you've just always got to kind of be planting them I want to go back to what you said about newsletters do you think that by having a newsletter

audience that when you post something and let's pretend it's going back to your website that it's kind of like an indirect signal for Google that says hey we have real traffic coming back and you're not fully dependent on the search traffic traffic traffic yeah I think that's definitely potentially a very positive side you know when you say you know you don't really have an email list you have a Gmail list is what you really have right so you're you're you know Google's like keeping tabs on

how many people are replying to you what your open rate is and all that kind of stuff they would never do that I think yeah um that you know you you you essentially yeah have like you know a new traffic Source it really legitimizes you you're you know you're when you have a new post you're losting it out and you're getting a bunch of um you know traffic it's just like social media traffic too right um yeah it's uh you know there's obviously not Google Plus

anymore but um you know I think Google has a good idea about which websites you know have legit like natural signals like that and which ones are you know just expressly for the purpose of ranking and banking then similar topic on newsletter do you think people should care about the SEO value of their newsletter or maybe care more about the social value because I mean we have tools like beehive and uh like there's convert kit and some of them they're not always websites they're kind of

like they might be a website but they don't really seem to care much about being indexed or being SEO optimized so what's your take on that well personally for me I don't even launch any content on my website I keep it all in the newsletter and through notion right part of that is that like you know I really give away my best stuff on SEO notebook and I don't want like it to be always out in the open all the time right it's also hard to

optimize for certain things like nobody's searching for uh you know Google Patent analyzer GPT right so I personally just take the like social um and just content first approach to all that and uh and don't really try to rank things um and yeah I I mean I'm not saying that it's like not a wise thing to do to try to rank for um you know Lo page SEO tips or best Lo building strategies or whatever you want to kind of rank for but um I I

would say for a newsletter audience um they wanna like they appreciate good copywriting um they appreciate brevity getting to the point and then you know sometimes when you're trying to optimize an article a little bit it's a bit counterintuitive to to creating the content that that makes sense because I mean like just another example of of my side where it's like okay I maybe I want to have a community for my audience which is affiliate marketers and you know what are the options there's Facebook where

the Facebook page could rank itself uh but the content inside might not Rank and then I could use discourse as a forum which is more of an SEO Playbook but I'm just wondering if you think the tide has changed where people don't really care about these old forums maybe they're actually going I want to be in a community where if I want to be anonymous or private it's n of your business um the the the what's the question there though sorry the the question is more

like you know you have two options like whether it's a newsletter or a forum where it's like they're kind of Community Based and you could either care about the SEO component or you can say I don't give a damn and I'm wondering if the like the trend for people especially um the younger generation is they're not really caring about hey I found this as a discource Forum that's fully indexed in Google they're finding it in maybe Facebook communities or more like Discord telegram that sort of

thing right um yeah I think uh actually like you know even like stuff like WhatsApp channels are probably a pretty underrated source of traffic considering um you know how ubiquitous WhatsApp is and how easy they are to set up and just blast out your content through there um and you know probably a very also a very intimate channel in terms of like you know reaching your audience through something that they don't really consider as like a you know a Facebook or a Twitter um feed right

so I definitely think there's you know other channels that uh that can you know help basically um Propel your your content and your brand and I also think that um you know even though like SEO notebook is somewhere around a dr50 with like no conscious leak building there's also like certain spaces are so saturated right like you you look at like even like a guy like Matt Diggity right um it's hard for his blog to complete compete against you know search engine land and search engine

journal and all those you know really well established sites for like SEO tips and tricks and stuff like that so I'm not saying that Matt's not doing a good job with his site it's just that you know even somebody of of that stature is going to have a harder time uh you know ranking and competing in such a saturated market right so um I think you know if you're going to go that route I mean I would try to mirror somebody like a Brian Dean um

you know who did obviously backlink co.com and uh you know put tons of effort into a very low number of pages right so his uh guides were really you know off the charts in terms of um you know how in-depth and thorough they were and you know he also wrote I I think at least you know before he sold the semrush I'm not sure now um at you know all those piece all those articles like on his own right um to keep the quality level super

high so um if if you are looking at um you know uh a strategy like to try and rank and and get views that way I would be like really selective with what you do and like make sure that you know you know exactly who you're up against and that your quality is topn is topn is topn and also you know develop a solid brand for yourself because that's also going to really help you just basically set up my next question which is you Steve Toth

uh Matt digity um Brian Dean I mean these are all personal names and it's kind of like you know who who do I want to actually look up for um people in Theo space for Thought leadership it's I I I do run across articles like search engine land and things like that but um it's kind of like you know I think is why your notebook is as popular and why people follow Matt's uh blog and Facebook posts and YouTube channels you think uh this is um

Google and everything else people are just always naturally gravitating towards people yeah definitely I think um you know personal brand has been huge in my life um it's been something I've mostly committed to like over these last five years I've had you know a couple months where I've I've dipped out a little bit and to taken some time off or whatever but in General I would say it's been a pretty consistent effort and I think consistency is really everything like when I when I started SEO

notebook um you know I was I knew the idea was good but like I didn't really have any experience in doing this stuff and and there was a guy um named Dirk Diggy um he was like buds with Glenn alsop and like I just knew him through like the social social media and I had a conversation with him like prior to starting SEO notebook and you know he just offered me this like one really important piece of advice that was if you don't email weekly um

people are going to forget about who you are and if he didn't tell me that I probably would have started a bi-weekly newsletter and not been as successful um so you know I think um people look to people um versus you know just thinking that you know MOS is an authority or sej is an authority or whatever or whatever and uh and and then on the flip side of that if that's what you're trying to do um like consistency really is everything and obviously you have

to pair that with like super high quality content and really give it your all um but if you're if you just decide to like if you don't have like a a tight schedule in terms like a consistent schedule of of when you're want to share you will just be forgotten like you know you're not speec that makes sense sense I I would agree to that in the sense that I've been doing podcasting for a year and a half straight I don't miss a week my newsletter

was bi-weekly but it's kind of becoming every three weeks and I pay attention to a lot of people that you and a couple other friends that have weekly newsletters and they just seem to get stronger because you're consistent you're always top of mind so um good lesson for me and I think good lessons for a lot of other people yeah I mean um like I said if I didn't get that piece of advice I might not be you know as successful as I have been with

with that's good um I I've studied a lot of some of the most successful Affiliates in I gaming and outside of I gaming and I try to look at patterns of like what do I see as part of their success and I think a lot of times SEO is a part of it but I think other parts of it are brand and one thing that I started noticing when looking through like okay who's working for these companies like what are the jobs they're hiring for and

one that starting to come as a pattern for me is like product at a product product owner um what is your take on it do you think this is something that a lot of like everything in digital marketing people might be overlooking yeah I mean like you know product people traditionally are the ones that um help help the company understand its users right like where you know achieving that like classic like product Market fit right is is it there isn't it there um and you know

those people have that like you know hopefully they have that ability and they have that experience to really you know understand like who the different people are that that uh that frequent the site and you know what are their needs right so if um you know and they and they will they their job is not to like you know do the SEO per se but their job is to guide the the the site in terms of like what it actually produces to meet user needs right

so um I think it's a incredibly important role and you know in the way that that kind of marries with SEO is like well what are the landing pages that are going to meet the user needs not just like you know being a product person and saying that you know our Freelancers need double entry accounting and and that's that's something that we really need to do to get more market share right but it's like you know what what uh what front-facing assets do we put on

the site to you know help attract those types of users next question is I want to know if you can share one or two notes from your Su notebook whether it's recent or in the past five years where you're working on something and something just kind of hits you and you're like wow this is unreal you feel like you've discovered like a I don't know a cheat code or something uh what's one story that comes to mind that you just say this is unreal this is

an amazing story or a case study yeah there there's uh you know there's there's a few like I really I know when to have something like based on somehow excited I have about that week um and you know usually I do a pretty good job of of giving myself the time to really figure out something that you know I I want to publish um and uh this was a while back but um what I what I realized would be like a really good way to kind

of like achieve like topical relevance which obviously parlays into topical Authority would be to like Google a keyword right so Google a keyword let's say like car insurance and then you look at like what are the top sites that are ranking for car insurance so you might see things like guo all state Liberty Mutual stuff like that and then from there like perform another search that is a site search for site geo.com car insurance sitecon libertymutual.com car insurance and then basically what you're seeing there are

all of the articles on that website that um are helping it be relevant and ranking for that head term of carence right so um you know just even that like little insight there is like a really quick hack I mean you can you can scan account a million ways like you could do Gap analysis you could do all these other things but in terms of like just sheer speed and efficiency of understanding you know what articles are causing a site to rank for super high competitive

terms like car insurance um I I love that one so I recently uh I I did I put that on YouTube and it did fairly well and then I recently republished that on link did a few weeks ago and it did very well as well so that that one comes to mind as as kind of an interesting one um I don't know I have like just a lot um I'm looking at my my things here um let's just see what else have oh yeah this one

I really liked as well um I called it why Google is the go keyword research tool um so basically what you would do is like you'd start and like I love using the Google Sur in case you haven't noticed to to do keyword research and um what what I what you start with is like Googling a keyword like best mortgage rates and then once you've Googled that you go back up to the SE far and start typing things like what is when does what or and

and and Google because it knows you just searched uh best mortgage rates starts to give you things like what is a mortgage tracker what is jumbo mortgage what is a good credit score and basically starts to try to anticipate the types of questions a person would ask directly after asking best mortgage rates into the search engine right so um that one's a really fun one and uh on SEO notebook essentially what I did was um I I shared a list of interrogative Words which are those

like words that begin questions like what is when does can you stuff like that and uh and the amount of amazingly relevant keywords you can get to something like best mortgage rates after doing that exercise it's just insane and it's also something that we know we've automated completely at my agency um but you can even just get started on your own just doing it manually so I mean those last two tips what I think you're going to get is you're going to get reverse engineer what

the big companies are caring about like so if you use GCO as one example you're going to pick why did they create 40 pages around car insurance yeah and how relevant are those pages I think it goes with that saying you know you got to assume that some of these larger companies have invested a lot of time in a market research and they wouldn't really keep these Pages uh for the hell of it I think they're they're creating these things because they're one testing and two

um understanding the value that could be like high conversion maybe lower volume yeah I mean there's just going to be also very obvious Pages like you know firsttime driver car insurance or student car car car best car insurance for students or you know things that you may just not have on your site that are like obviously like monetizable pages right so um even even if you don't go the full like I need to you know recreate um the best of strategy between Geico All State and

Liberty Mutual you can at least get some ideas of you know bottom funnel Landing gauges that you can then produce a challenging question uh just putting you on the spot what would you do for a company whether it's an affiliate site or SAS company doesn't matter where people are problem aware but they're not solution aware um I guess uh like problem okay so they are I'm just they know of a pain point I can't articulate it yeah uh oh um I actually I actually know um

a really good uh um strategy for this so in your Google search console there is a wealth of data that I don't think enough people really leverage and um actually this isn't no is not going to answer your your thing because it's like what I was going to say was I'm listening you search console let me let me just go here for one second in Google search consoer there's a wealth of data um and people might be describing your product in a way that you actually

aren't even aware of so using synonyms for things like system tool platform software app um you and you basically look at all your keywords that use those different you know SAS qu qualifiers you can get like you know a multitude of new ways that people are actually searching for your product um so those people you know it it may be a case where like they don't actually know if something exists and they're like you know um you know like a PowerPoint for or like you know

apps like PowerPoint for your phone or something like that right like maybe maybe they don't even know that that this that this exists but they're trying to describe what they want that's the type of um uh uh strategy that can kind of uncover those keywords um in terms of like you know um uh Pro not solution aware those people are still going to have questions that they're trying to solve like how do I do X or what what's the best way to do why um you

basically try to put yourself in the shoes of a user and like the common things that they encounter um and and then go after that um there's other strategies whereby like you can even look at like you know error codes that people get in certain platforms and like start to optimize for those and like you know metion your competitor so there's there's all kinds of things um that I I think you know are around that sort of sphere um but in terms of like your specific

question I would just basically try to optimize for the questions that a person has like how do I do X or how you know how what's the best way to do y um and then and then just go from there that makes sense I mean I was listening to a podcast on Chris Walker who does B2B sales I think it's Revenue vitals and he talked about uh how do you be how do you solve this where it's like you've got problem aware but not solution aware

and his answer was like he didn't say topical Authority but he kind of implied that he said you know be the person that people go to when they think of your your core topic where that they can't articulate those questions and I think it's difficult for people on the side of the business to go how can they even know what they're looking for you know I think that requires uh like a little bit of intelligence emotional intelligence to kind of go I need to think like

a user and it's not easy like here's an example that I just thought of right like say you're LMS you're a learning management system and somebody wants to create a course and they're like the what's the best way to teach X or what's the best way to create a course like you know do I have to create a PowerPoint or do I have to film it or do I have to upload my thing no there's actually like real solutions that you know like kajabi or whatever

that that uh that make the whole process easy so you know trying to figure out like in the process of a person who wants to create a course but isn't really you know familiar with with LMS tools like what are the different challenges that they're um you know trying to tackle right are they be saying that I have to create this on YouTube or whatever like you know there's there's all sorts of um all sorts of different Avenues you can kind of Target to get in

front of that person yeah I think in my situation for what we do with our software company is we don't have a lot of examples of competitors that have already mapped out that whole Space of what content to create so we had to kind of uncover it on our own and I think just by talking to Affiliates and uh trying to create some content around it I think that's where we we had some accidental discoveries and in our case it was creating some content that we

didn't really know what was going to work and then realizing hey how did you hear about us well I was looking how to build an API to connect with this affiliate program and you showed up like great it's well I wish we could have known that at from day one one of the other um like really key things especially that I noticed with my B2B clients is we'll always ask them like what are the common questions that your salespeople are getting asked over and over again

and basically try to optimize for what those are right because you you can't really oftentimes like you only find those types of keywords in search console but um you know the the salese at these companies um they've basically got their list of common questions and then they you know obviously their answers to what those questions are to effectively handle them and uh that can be a really great resource um if you can tap that and last question is what do you see of the future of

affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence um well I think um you know getting your finger on the pulse of where Google is going um I think that ultimately we're going to have to brace ourselves for murkier data and I mean that I think that trend has already been going for a long time um in terms of not having the complete you know picture of what's going on like you know with AI over views or you you know you may have a number one ranking

but you may not even be above the fold anymore okay so um stuff like that that I think you've basically got to prepare yourself um for you know having you know murkier data than than ever um but at that said like you know murkier murky data is definitely better than no data and um and you know using tools um you know like yours or um like looker studio and and bring in different data sources and really trying to make something meaningful uh is you know stuff

that we do for all the sites that we work on we have a an amazing data analyst on our team um who essentially creates you know dashboards custom to whatever um site that whatever the site really you know wants to track or needs to track so if that's a local business site we've got Co rail in there if they're a HubSpot site then UPS spot or all those types of things um but I would also say that like um you know having the data is one

thing but you know actioning on that data is is a totally other thing and uh and you you have to basically have you know a good team in place who's going to be able to you know harness all the things that you're tracking and you know do the digging right because um a while back I worked as a product advisor on keyword. comom I'm bringing in a share voice feature into that tool and you know it's great to have shared voice it's great to know you

know where you stand but um if you don't actually you know look at the sites that are beating you out in share voice and are able to kind of reverse engineer that and uh you know bring your site up to parody then what's the what's the use of having that data right so I think just you know getting getting the best data that you can from all the all the different sources that you can and then having it having a team that actively you know optimizes

against that awesome uh Steve thank you so much for doing this um obviously we're going to put uh everything in the show notes but how can people get a hold of you seon notebook.com is the best place um and then I would say follow me on LinkedIn because that's where I'm most active I'll add that and of course uh just another shout out to SEO irl.com which will be in Toronto looking forward to that Steve thanks a lot that'll be October 4th uh 2024 in torono

so we hope I will see you there but I hope to see others as others as well 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 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