B2B SEO with Jamie I.F. from Endorsely

and I'm not trying to buy customs I'm trying to buy utter cult-like devotion here and so I'll only ever buy an ad to like a lead magnet that will make you absolutely fall in romantic love with the brand and and the podcast are the same way the level of FaceTime to get to the level of reading a blog post that's top of funnel is like a 100x people think it's like you know three times more it's exponential and everything in this stuff with and same reason

we started a community page views are going to get harder and harder to drive impressions are going to get more and more fickle but if you within an orbit that is the highest level of devotion and engagement and you have and podcast is so Central to that as well and most people just think about real numbers rather than like how much devotion did that buy that intangible like EA that you can get from that level of contact with someone I'm John wght 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 Jamie if and he's the founder of endorsi which is a sass affiliate program So Jamie welcome to the show thank you very much for having me I appreciate it so I want to start off with endorsi because we have a SAS product and anytime I see any sort of affiliate program software I'm interested I geek out on it but tell us uh what

Endor Le is and I know you've got some cool stuff uh from the agency side of things yes my history and affiliate marketing to a recap up to the point of deciding to create the software is that I graduated from uni and I Tred to start a social Enterprise which is like a a a business that helps but and can B profit not like a charity but like a quasi half charity I think they call B Corps or something in in the state or something like

that and they can help but they also State because like when Co hit off I was really annoyed that as soon as an economic downturn would happen like it was really difficult because Charities that rely on donations would suddenly be like three weeks away from having to shut their doors and I hated the idea of something that wouldn't be self- sustaining so my whole thing was creating like a Soup company just it does lead into affiliate marketing eventually it's a funny ironic twist and turn into

it right and so I was I got really into this idea of social Enterprise and so we built like this I used all my 2,000 that was to my name at the time built the packaging the the flavors the recipes and we go to the Sunday markets no one cared and then worst industry ever low profit margins the good spoil in five days and to get the economies to scale to be able to do that the level where it can self sustained to be able to

give one away to a soup kitchen for everyone we sold you needed the economies of scale which required millions and millions of dollars that I didn't have so I was like how do I do this I discovered SEO online because I'd been doing SEO for a French publisher when I lived in France back during my industry year I was like all right I'll give this a guy created the first like Niche affiliate site and the ads came through from Google ads at that before like the

aoic and AD thrives were thing and it got a dollar or a pound in a day and I was like oh this is awesome and then I put an Amazon affiliate link on there at the end and the first day made made made $15 okay maybe this could actually pay itself off because I needed a way to make a lot of the money and I was experimenting and Googling how to make money and all this stuff really luckily by luck not really skilled it grew this

portfolio through in 2022 and 23 we did over a million dollars in profit over those two years just about only just and peaked about $80,000 in December 2022 I think was when we did the most $81,000 in profit from that on we've been hit by hcu since like they're on the back burner I can't really go below 20 30k because of being like being love a bit of being traffic that doesn't go down like Google does so they mostly sit on the back burner but in

doing that I started to tweet about it and talk about it and then as a result of sort of growing a personal brand on Twitter within affiliate marketing got talking to a company called lasso and I joined and headed up the marketing from in 2022 of December the when they were their Peak I left the KN size in to to do four days a week at lasto so headed up the marketing there I'm really happy with what happened there but when I was we were growing

the affiliate like Channel and we did we did a good job in my opinion we've got the full case study on the endorsing website if anyone wants to read exactly what we did to grow that and forx the the revenue from that but I was really frustrated I'm not going to name the software we used because actually was pretty good overall but there was just some bits that W like quite what I wanted in the software regarding some of the data which to be fair we

haven't gone and done crazy stuff with yet we're still a very much a work in progress but just for example like one element would be like you just see conversions and like with a SAS like a conversion is like a Fickle thing like you need to see deeper than just did they turn off a month did they try and commit affiliate fraud there's a million things that you could have done there is like a one is not one like two really good customers that you can

upsell in massive other stuff are worth far more than 10 random people that CH but you couldn't get that data in order to focus on specific Affiliates and so I wanted to build the software that I wanted to use after I left lasto and so took about six months and that is how we came to launch the endorser software now when we were talking to people people in our Network we were like all right want to buy this and everyone was like yeah it's cool but

you don't really have time can you run it for us like ah I've got to build agency but I don't want to have to do and so since then every time we talk to keeps being interested and so we've had to do it and build out the systems and reluctantly accidentally built an affiliate management agency which has actually been really fun um because it took all of the processes that we built or built like having grown the previous programs like the lasso1 and since then some

other brands that I have equity and investment in and lets us play and experiment with things like that and so I think it's good to keep my affiliate game sharp because I was an affiliate marketer and then that mad and then learning from the different areas for example like I've never done igaming but like now I've done all these other industries that are around different SAS niches I've learned so much more that I think can make me a better software founder to understand like the pain

points and the like everything that people would need to know in order to make a better product so it worked out I think uh but it's just not the the a typical journey through to to the end goal I reckon but it does explain why you're in the position you are do three different things although it's been a short period of time I think you've done them very well and I think that kind of that's a superpower I actually think it's really interesting that you've added

the agency component because we've not done that on our side as a company but we had some customers that said okay not only did they want things set up for them they knew that there's an advanced like bigger picture like how do we get this whole bi platform set up and I think we're we could be missing out on that definitely I'm going to uh pick your brain for a couple more things especially this lasso book yeah it depends how in the product management you are

because it is it's a great source of Revenue especially when the software is free and we made the software free because everyone wanted to do the agency oh may maybe like this can pay for this now and it will help with I do think that SAS will Trend to especially zero data Mo sasses in the next two years will Trend towards being free because there will just be less barriers to entry Tech wise but you can't and I'm giving the game away I proba shouldn't say

this but like you can't beat a data Moote and so I I think it's an interesting take a lot of the finance apps let's see profit paddle founder path cap Chase they're giving you SAS dashboards but there's a catch I went through the profit funnel and that was insightful as hell oh here's some free uh dashboards and it's oh you want to optimize your pricing here's how much it costs I'm like I spoke to Patrick he actually gave some really good advice for when we were

building the last bits of end dorely he exit I think he sold profit for 200 milon or something was like oh that's rough I want some of that kind of money and so he was like what you should do is have the beginning bit free and have a minimum of 12 upsells all right precisely 12 all right bear it in mind all right 12 good noted I'll figure out 12 things I can sell people in the future but he said that you have to be so

good at ux design that no one who doesn't need those other 11 ever comes into contact with them and I was like oh that's some really good advice I'm definitely going to listen to this episode all over again let's jump into the lasso so it's get lasso doco you're the CMO there for a few years I followed it like we were just chatting before recording no joke in my pitch deck I actually had the lasso as the SEO go to market we don't compete with blasso

directly but we have some indirect competition so I said look this is what's possible so tell some of the work you did there so yeah uh a lot of the SEO was in place before I joined we just like the re like and so I can't take credit for some of what happened but we did go and redouble down on some other things as well as like a parasite strategy that I don't think people notice how well or like the results from that because like but

yeah so the great thing was with we had a lasso we had an average quality score problem because we had all of these index pages and they were the pages that now are doing so the affiliate program uh list of calls as well as like the individual scraped different like Nike and add affiliate program pages that have cookie and the commission race the general things and we really reoptimized them and that was one of the first use cases of programmatic SEO and AI that I've ever

seen work because you could create these incredible templates with the raw HTML and guidelines have your own scrape data and then from there actually have information gain in juing AI for a rarity where because people usually associate AI with just slot but you can actually use it to hit search intent with the right programmatic templates and things like that and they did really well for traffic and also open the gates for all of the rest of the content that wasn't given the chance to impress because

while we had a good 60 whatever Dr it was diluted over so many pages that it didn't give the actual good Pages the chance to shine and so once we improved the quality score from there managed to get you know tens of thousands of more page views from the actual programmatic Pages which deserve to rank higher now they were better hitting search intent but were programmatically done infused with AI it let the sort of human written unique Information Gain stuff like we had a really good

article we still there still there on a product review template for how to write a product review and that's 3,500 words it took me 3 days to write that and it's really unique information but that didn't rank as well as it should do because it we were it was when you have a too low average quality score over a website wise or and it's too diluted you just will never get like un like it's like having a stone on your head like you like it's like

crushing weight and so you need to free that up in some cases and and let those like actual human written ones do their thing which will much better for converion or putting people into a lead magnet to then go through the the sequences whereas the programmatic was mostly full like Topline brand engagement raw numbers that obviously it doesn't convert as high as some other content interesting so given that you've got a bit more experience now that you're building indoors s what would you keep doing if

you were to also keep working at lasso or selfish question I do this once in a while what would you do in our case as uh as we have like the affiliate stats component we do have affiliate program affiliate program affiliate program we do have some category pages but what are some things we could do yeah so I still own equity in lasso so I'm going to be diplomatic with my answer I actually genuinely despite like Equity or no equity think that I would do what

they're doing now in that there's just if you see what Levan are talking about and assuming that they're not spoofing the revenues there's so much money there that I think they should continue doing what they're doing um even a small portion of that is valuable that the Amazon affiliate network is as long ason don't come and decide that they want to be the only player in town it it looks to be incredibly lucrative right now and I'd be playing in the Creator game that they're trying

to play in that makes sense and so you I think acquired answer Socrates or Socrates I've read about this but I don't know what the tool does I've seen it a couple times before what is that tool because I ge out on SEO tools all the time yes we I used to use it all the time back in like 2022 before some of the other tools got more advanced than before answer Socrates the the original version was neglected because it was just a really good way

of finding new questions that if you have an existing blog post or you're doing a Content brief of servicing information that you might not have originally like thought of or H2 topics or FAQs or anything else like that back in the day when like informational posts were like good and they weren't like getting eaten up by Ai and they were a good source of n site traffic display ads and stuff more now for user answers obious you now you need an e-commerce or SAS brand to

be able to create this informational content that Google still wants to rank to get an AI overview or something like that rather than like for like group click like gain and and stuff like that like it has to be a zero click mostly strategy now for the informational stuff but yeah it's a great way of like finding new questions for topics as well as just getting a now we've improved it a very quick topical map and because you can type in C keywords get 500 a

th000 keywords download the CSV import it into the keyword clustering feature that we offer them for free and then get that put into it like into each cluster for for the main topics I wouldn't say that's the end I don't think you can go I've just saved a grand or five grand or whatever you'd pay for a really good topical map for you know your next 300 articles but considering that it's free and it's done in like under a minute I'd say that like we've changed

the game on that front because everyone else will charge you even the software will be you know inaccessible $100 a month for a lot of this stuff and we made it free and democratized it uh and it's actually good as well some people have built like no offense to them because it is really cool but they've built like custom gpts for clustering it's like cool but like it's never going to be as good as like a machine learning like python library that can actually detect like

eddings compared to a GPT that will just this looks like it's just not the same level of interpretation and so we try to do it the proper way and it's free and anyone can use it and it's an OG at all and I'm like happy with it and we're also trying to grow like it's ironic because I've grown affiliate program I've never grown like viral Loop referral programs and so I'm learning stuff with this now right because because because we're trying to build out this part

where if you refer someone else you get a bunch more free credits and stuff like that but then if they then upgrade you get the 30% recurring standard SAS stuff but putting them together is I'm like how do I figure this out and how do I like communicate this simply because one or the other sounds great but if you sound tell people both they're like oh this sounds a bit confusing I'm not sure I can this and it's interesting because trying to give like the easier

incentive is like difficult to communicate and it's a lesson in doing one thing so well that everyone instantly gets it like the prod out Market fit but like an affiliate Market fit almost it's an interesting lesson learned for that yeah it reminds me of our situation which for the tool we have like lasso I think is easy because it's like it's adte it's of course I need these ad widgets but on the stat side what I personally think to be true could be wrong is that

I think Affiliates are problem aware but they're not solution aware if you Google affiliate stats collector affiliate stats app all this stuff you're not going to find any of our competitors you're going to find like actually filling network software or you're going to find impact.com so it's interesting yeah I I actually not don't mind doesn't it's not I I want to talk about I gaming I know you're not the I gaming expert but what I'm seeing happen in I gaming space is that I don't think

all affiliate sites are getting smashed equally I think SAS might be somewhat protected I could be wrong but what's your take on SAS focused affiliate sites and should people be still trying to Pivot away from the written content yes I can't speak for I gaming because I and I was actually interviewing an i gaming affiliate managers to join our team because I do and would prefer hiring someone with that experience just because I think it's the most Cutthroat murderers area it's not that trust me about

later all right but every time I talk to someone who's in the game I'm just like yeah that's a killer that I would hire there's no soft and everyone's got the right mindset for get traffic in get it done get the kpis here or it could be a bit more oh it wasn't attributed or whatever on sass like they get the game like in night game they would be better suited for a SAS affiliate program not igaming because I gaming to me is about both relationship

building with the affiliate and then having this relationship concept going how do I get connected with the players you're you should be focused on retention because the revenue share component of IG gaming is everything like this is everything for all of them especially the especially the especially the Affiliates yeah yeah interesting um but regarding the content side so um I can't speak for ey gaming but for example when I do leads list now and I'm scraping all of the like uh we so how we do

it for when we're outreaching people for agency clients in the SAS space we divide everyone into high touch mid- touch and low touch Affiliates based on certain criteria and the low touch is just the entire everyone knows how to do an ATS where you find the the affiliate index codes related to whatever software they're using whatever Network they're using and you can just instantly find a big list big list big list everyone who's promoting sem rush or Surfer SEO or get go high level or whatever

easy low touch list done and then we do the mid touch and the mid touch list is the one that's been absolutely torched by hcu because it involves to Mid touch for us is anyone who's ranking for a specific URL that we want to be part of irrespective of traffic we just want that because people aren't think like we don't get the credit for this but we try and only take on clients that appreciate this and that even if this is not a high traffic driving

thing this is a screed piece of llm training data and if you say endorser is the best affility software I don't give a if that's linked I don't care if it's got a Rel equal sponsored real equals hacks link band I don't care obviously that doesn't exist but I want the most instances of brand mentions and I don't mind if it's unlink I want to train data to say whatever I wanted to say I want to do like effectively affiliate or and so that's the mid

touch list irrespective trffic but the they are like usually the mid- touch list is usually what sets you like off like like we try not to take on clients unless just the base affiliate Outreach can get us there and then all the cool Niche little B2B partnership co- marketing newsletter swaps we do are just like nice like the bits that set us apart but not like the bits you need and it's getting tougher and tougher to do that from written blood content because so few people

are ranking and the remaining ones are so big that they're one difficult to get a response from and two even more difficult to do a deal with the independent content creator is in a tough spot and were the people that like sent it home for a lot of affiliate programs and so on the wris and side it's difficult we're actively trying to make sure that we are as not reliant on SEO driven Affiliates as possible overall just because I think that this will continue to Trend

in this direction and so we're like overhauling how we I can tell you off camera some crazy that's like we're trying to Pivot towards as well that I can't really talk about here but with the YouTube stuff getting better at scraping Tik tokers building the networks of people on there we're trying to Pioneer some paper impression stuff on LinkedIn and Twitter as well where you get paid flat rates per impression and you obviously have to monitor that for fraud because there are networks of accounts that

will just retweet you 100 times and get you 100K Impressions but it's complete nonsense and so there's fraud there as well as LinkedIn doesn't share so you have to che check the HTML and stuff like that but we're trying to um build systems to be able to do like paper impression so they draw an influencer you don't have to put an affiliate link that will kill reach on these platforms and stuff like that uh to do more like Creator Le stuff like that but again it

doesn't have the scale and recurring nature of SEO traffic and so it's so good when it's good but it's getting really tough to do it tough to Pivot away from yeah there's a lot of interesting ideas what would you what are some other things you would do if you've got a SAS affiliate program they're like hey I want to grow my audience it doesn't matter whether it's us or lass or anyone else there's some amazing SEO ideas but what would you say like how can an

affiliate manager be a bit more proactive and to say hey here's a program here's your log here's your links go do your work when they're approaching Affiliates yeah like what I say is we have again mid touch is still like Outreach that will go out through a personalized AI assisted flow that we do whereas the high touch is we have an actual outy specialist that we split away from the affiliate manager whose job is just to make friends with really important people and that will be

differently done so if we're talking like mid touch personalizations but semi a at it's hey depending on how big the brand is we either go from the founder if they give us permission or we go from just like an endorsed affiliate Partners email that just goes hey uh really love your stuff seen that you promote XYZ would love you to but then if like pretty scalable making sure that it's likable as if you'd say it to a friend or a colleague make sure that it's friendly

and and not annoying and then for the high tou it's literally just like commenting on their YouTube stuff commenting on LinkedIn joining their free communities just being like tweeting about them just be like just being a fan and then building that relationship yeah it's just being chill just be a cool person just hire chill people to make friends with all the cool people and then bring them in yeah and the easiest way to get your attention is speak hey you did amazing work at work at

lasso there we go it's wor and now be tweeted about the stat St affiliate program well yeah what's your take like here's my journey of being a SAS founder is I didn't know what I was doing in terms of getting started I'm like okay we got a SAS product I thought it was actually going to sell itself just by existing dead wrong we hired someone for sales and didn't really do a good job we end up spending money no net revenue wasted time the things that

I experimented with that have worked well for us and maybe they're not scalable is we did a podcast I think that's helped build trust which has led to sales we have in my opinion in our case I think sometimes our buyer journey is a bit long and I don't know if there's a strategy for solving that and Linkedin has actually helped out quite a bit when we get people signing up the the top three things are Word of Mouth LinkedIn and and and podcasts nice nice

interesting yeah like the thing yeah they don't scale to like millions of millions so you need to figure out how to what can add like a a million a year you're limited stuff like that these like ridiculous paid strategies is going to Crunch and crunch you every single year really great affiliate stuff yeah like there's not much for like when you talk millions and millions you've done really well with the things that work but they like yeah you just have to do 10 more podcasts every

day yeah to to be fair I I've actually been on a few SEO Focus to fill it podcast as a guest and I've actually had a few signups from that and I was shocked I'm like how do I know where I'm getting more signups and I think if we were a SAS product that was more focused on everything in affiliate marketing rather than just currently we're I gaming we're planning to expand out but I think if we were a bit more focused on everything I would

easily Target like who's the who in affiliate marketing in podcast I think that would be more fruitful to to at least be let me do guessing it's a good strategy to do that anyway in my opinion I would recommend you do it now preemptively just because a lot of people the Stars normal go into I gaming and then they'll know you and they'll Champion you inside the organization they work for and you just want to be reference at the front of people's minds so that someone

else who finds someone else who might be in the news then tells them like there's so much like like non in tangibles with this stuff like even I do random ones sometimes and they someone will come up and it'll be like an amazing opportunity from something that didn't even seem relevant and much less relevant than like affiliate into like a gaming affiliate and so I reckon it's worth preemptively doing those if I would you on a personal brand I would recommend still doing that I know

it's a lot of time and you got to get over the I I I feel the same way but I honestly I've seen so much benefit I recommend it because I think it just goes really well when they hit and when that like right person goes even if they get like 100 views like two of those people are worth like 100 Grand a year yeah I agree like I said I've experienced it firsthand and I don't really I asked a lot of seos I said do

you get some videos that maybe have 50 views but what's behind it and sometimes they say sometimes my best deals come from those tiny videos that people just disregard and think oh this person's wasting their time on YouTube and it's the opposite yeah yeah yeah people I think that's B metric as long as you're in the front of the right people and there's also like the thing I always tell like the marketing team is think about devotion per page view which is why like I'll never

buy a paid ad to a landing page for aess I might do it for e-commerce cuz you know you put money in you get money out it whatever no cares but for this stuff where it's like brand building stuff like I will never buy an I refuse like morally or like like philosophically because it doesn't give you devotion and I'm not trying to buy customs I'm trying to buy like utter cult-like devotion and so I'll only ever buy an ad to like a lead magnet that

will make you absolutely fall in romantic love with the Brad and and and the podcast are the same way you if you do not like the level of FaceTime to get to the level of reading a blog post at top of funnel is like 100x people think it's like you three times allly it's exponential and everything in this stuff with and same reason we started a community like the like page viws are going to get harder and harder to drive impressions are going to get more

and more fickle but if you like are within an orbit like that is you don't like that is the highest level of like devotion and engagement and you have and podcast is so Central to that as well and most people just think about real numbers rather than like how much devotion did that buy that intangible like ether that you can get from that level of contact with someone and I think those things are almost difficult to measure and it makes me think about not just igaming

but other Industries where it's almost like a pay to play now it's not quite the case I think the world of sales and marketing today is different and the only reason why I know this is because I've done those things like I've been doing things where it's like all right if I want to be a speaker at a conference it's so here's how much you have to pay I'm like what you know and it's if you want to attend you got to pay and I'm like

okay is this where the world is going and I just said screw it like we're a a hustle startup with the minimal budget we did do fundraising but I'm like we need $5 to go as long as possible so I did all the things that were free podcasting and next wait a minute I've got my own channel I've got my own audience LinkedIn 11,000 followers and do you think that's one mistake that a lot of SAS companies make is they think they need to create a

a $100,000 budget raise money for and just blast through random ads and go this is what all my competition does competition does I think it fors on both sides so I think you hang out with different people that I hang out with because I've been like like in barley the last few months with the Indie hacker meetups and they're all really technically brilliant and they're absolutely phobic of marketing and I just tell them do something like anything like spend do the pay dads whereas I presume

you're hanging out with more balanced Founders that are like launch a paid but are as a result not as I guess sensible with making a dollar go as far as possible in the same sort of way and so I think there a happy balance of doing marketing committing to doing this stuff and and then also doing one thing long enough to fail it properly because the biggest thing I think I see with sa is oh that didn't work how did you do every single bit of

it actually so you didn't get like a false negative when it could have got you another 100K AR if done correct and I'm guilty of that as well like I'm only just like I think recently getting to the stage where like I'm able to say no to trying a strategy because it sounds fun and exciting to be able to go no I'm going to do that lead magnet strategy for the next five because this one could work and I'm not going to go like I want

to go and spend more time somewhere else because I want to see if this can drive way more money per hour invested and so I think that's another thing like balancing doing like aggressive marketing and getting value but also like just doing thinking coming up with what you think is going to be the best running through the list in a way that is effective and actually maximizes the chance of correct data so you don't quit before you get to what can really work is what is

my own take on the SAS founder marketing thing I I kind of wonder if there's this weird balance between bootstrap versus fundraise so we're both we bootstrap to get started then we fundraise to step on the gas and if I had to do it all over again I would focus more on a bootstrap mentality because I think with bootstrapping you get creative with marketing you basically go how do I do Z marketing you actually get more focused on maybe results but I just think with companies

that actually fundraise they have this mentality of I I just got to spend my way out of success and I think it I think with the way marketing is today it's just we're in a different space yeah so we have not taken any funding and so I can only speak from that position and I don't ever I've never worked in a business where we just had loads of budget like you complemented the SEO strategy but it was born out of necessity not because we had massive

budgets it's just because it was the way to get free traffic without spending on advertisement to get the same of page fees it's actually like it's I get the difference when you're building something that you own near to 100% of and it's all yours and so it's easy oh I'm going to do this but then it doesn't work that's all that's like that there's a level of like emotional connection when it's your money on the line that like that comes differently and I'll be honest we

lose like low to mid five figures a month on on the development at the moment and that is like a thing to think about I lost 30 grand that month but it comes from like a a tam future expectation and and a willingness to to commit that risk but it does absolutely make you like coales around like this marketing has to go into the right places and has to be stress tested correctly because it just hits differently when it's not other people's money right it's it's

like a weird respect for money if that makes sense yeah it was it's still scary but like I I choose to do it because it's like what I think is the best and I want to get ridiculously rich and you have to put it on the line to get rich and is what it is but it definitely gives the the the respect and different perspective on it and I think even if you're funded you should have that because so many people just doing it for funding

sake and just spending money just to get $60 per 60 Cent per dollar back on ad spend just to show revenue and that to me is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life congratulations you just burned value like in order to show something and I just I that's why I never like I invest in VC funds as an LP to get access to the network but I'll never take VC money because I'm just like this is just the most inefficient way of deciding

where you're going to go and and not even to mention some of the contracts and what are in there for preferences I I won't comment on that it's not your company anymore even if you earn 60% after the first phade yeah I've seen that so that's another discussion what did I want to talk about Community you mentioned Community uh what do you think about Community as a whole is this something that I think you if you're going to do it you have to grow organically but

would you advocate for companies say build your own kind of community community mode yeah very good question so what we actually did is not that but I do recommend that people do that we me and I think James oliv has been on this yes absolutely built a SEO focused affiliate and SAS tilting and agency tilting elements within that but like mostly SEO orbit uh Community called the conversion Collective and just because we it was really annoying after hcu everyone had an opinion but no one had

any data and so I wanted to get into a community with people that were actually testing stuff I want to I based on one page I think it's this you have anything more empirical here and started this private community and then after we which is great again for the like the devotion per page view in that like you have real vetted people that like are the best network to have and it's been great for that sort of stuff as well as I'm learning from people who

are in there who are really high level as well but I would do it differently for a SAS than starting your own if you're doing your own one it's for your own pure business goals and the great thing about an Socrates is it's a great Le gen funnel into the community because it's you want to learn more come here like it's a lead gen machine that thing like absolutely like it's got 40,000 emails in three months on answer so season so I'm pretty happy with how

that went yeah a quarter of a mill this in 2025 off that one for like just emails just the seos in and similar space but with the community how I would do it for different for SAS I think there's really good example Sasha forier who runs J finder is an example of someone who I think has done it really well so he's it's a digital PR SAS and he has a circle so Community which is the best community software in my opinion is better than school

and all the other ones everyone should use circle in my opinion obviously don't own it we chose it and it is the best and it is just for customers to go in and talk about digital now for us if if no one posts in the community for a couple days we get stressed oh this looks like there's no momentum and communities are fair momentum based you got to if people disengaged that encourages other people to disengage there's a whole another pressure when people are paying and

truly we can do a better job than we've done for that to be honest but for him when there a SAS thing and everyone's there on just joining and it's a free addition you don't have that same pressure which means the community can just organically Thrive and even though there'll only be one or two posts a week the the there's not like it works really well because it's high quality discussion especially for a SAS that's priced above $100 a month where like it's serious good customers

that are coming in no time waste is no nonsense like for his case it's just professional digital PRS refreshing hangout which is a pretty exclusive Club because not it hasn't been flooded by anyone who can join and has created not something that like is like necessarily like an educational thing for the SAS but it's just a place of people to hang out with which then builds that Affinity to the Sass in return and makes it stickier as a product which is very interesting how that's that's

that's developed that is super cool yeah and I've heard about the conversion uh group I think I've seen some ads where it's starting to pop up everywhere well hopefully if it's not in everyone's face then we haven't done our job right yeah awesome so I want to uh finish this with the the question I usually ask all guess with is what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence if we're talking as in like so let's split this up

do you mean in terms of like the dashboards that the average person has in front of them or in like data that like you don't have to hand that you want to get access to both I want to know that you actually asked a really good question which is like a rabbit hole question of um dashboards in affiliate marketing I think most of them are broken that's a topic I'm we're guilty of actually have uh a not a pleasant dashboard but we're looking to rebuild that

and I think most affiliate marketing companies they're just copying each other what do the next five dashboards look like oh we're gonna make it our version and it ends up being the same there's no insights that had come from dashboards knowing that you think like this we could talk about that all day I've got some I and like the reason we built this our software was because of my ideas for certain things that we haven't been able to build yet just cuz it's like real slog

and we need to hire more developers to accelerate this but I have my own personal opinions on this stuff that I wish I could talk about that I just don't want to give away anything that I want to be the first to build but I just do think everyone is building like stuff for stuff's sake and the best thing you can delete it the best thing you can do in most cases not for you I'm not saying you like I'm not talk just generally in most

of the software that we use just like most of it can be deleted and nothing will be lost it's just I'll tell you what which software I'm talking about but we competed with them before and we obviously we had secret accounts in that as you do in any clever not functioning business is is back door it and it was like this looks amazing it's pretty it's beautiful it's directional and I've not got to find anything actionable from it yeah and that wasn't me sounding biased because

we were like like because I was worried I was really worried I thought listen they cracked it like we could have struggle here and then by the end of it I was like this beautiful but once you spend half an hour in it like I it doesn't get you from A to B and doesn't make you make more money and like the actual big like person that always talks about you need like your time to wow to be like under 30 seconds they need like that

dopamine hit of like crack cocaine level oh my God this is going to change my life and if it doesn't do that then you'll just like like life is built on momentum a moment if you need that so then you make it back and then you go and tell your friends about it and it had that but you also need enough action bless to like as a I would say it's actually not as important to most people as the initial like retention of it but like

you need enough and to me it didn't have enough behind the hood that it would have got it would it get found it would get found out and I would assume that they had retention issues from there because it if they could have removed most of the products and it would have been more useful and so that's my opinion on some dashboard regarding to other we talking about Big Data I think there's a huge thing with especially with AI like data analysis of finding stuff that

like right now what we do is we have to go and data to find who is sending more clicks to find out why who's sending less clicks who's sending too many conversions to sound a bit like that needs investigating per for conversion rate and it's done manually for some of the fraud detection could be done but for the most part the standard affiliate management doubling down on what's working and generating more money still manual I think there's so much to be done with I don't want

to talk about it some stuff there that I want to do with our software that will help with that awesome I'd be happy to share some of the ideas and uh plans we have on our side and um yeah stop that we go on quite a bit as well yeah I think there's a lot of spare capacity and I think for the level of what out there on average has not been done to a high enough level considering how mature this industry is and how much

money is in it yeah there's way too much and my personal belief is I think everywhere you look there's an ability to optimize everything like you can optimize a landing page on the affiliate side there's a lot of broken links that exist out there as space jump there's a lot of offers that are just wrong and expired look at all the the different SEO courses that are just shutting down because of SEO content sites all these links are going to dead spaces yeah lot of Revenue

Le Jamie thank you so much for doing this I want to pass it back to ask how people can get a hold of you yeah I go by Jamie if it's not my real name but if was the initials of the sep company that I tried to start and failed and so I decided that no matter how successful I get I would never leave that and I would return to it so I decided to tattoo it on my name and brain and do that and so

that's why I don't go by my real net I am jamore if on Twitter my website that I blog on is called increasing. comom you can go to increasing. comom nwet if you want to hear my weekly rambling takes I also founded a software company called indors le.com which is a free affiliate software if you are a SAS company looking to grow your SAS affiliate program recruit track and and pay Affiliates more is coming it's free up until $220,000 a month in affiliate revenue and so

if you aren't at that stage yet you'll save yourself about $100 a month if you do that versus using the Alternatives brilliant that will be in the show notes thank you so much for doing this thank you so much cheers John 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

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