Consistent quality content in affiliate marketing

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: Consistent quality content in affiliate marketing
Host: John Wright
Published: Tue, 24 Dec 2024 12:35:00 +0000
Duration: 7:43

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: I'm John Wright and you're listening to Affiliate BI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Stavstrone. Welcome to the Affiliate BI podcast. Today I'm going to chat about a simple concept, but one that I think is powerful and it's something that I've relied on in the last few years. I don't think I've relied on it enough in my career in affiliate marketing. I definitely should have done a lot more of. I like to think that a skill that I'm particularly good at is pattern recognition. One thing that I've noticed over quite a period of time, it's like I've not always been consistent

[00:00:39] John Wright: with doing repetitive tasks. In particular, things that are important in affiliate marketing are repetitive tasks. For example, it's like doing a podcast. I've been doing that for the last two years. I don't miss a week without doing a podcast episode. In the past, let's say 10 years ago, if I were to start a podcast, I might have actually dropped and maybe not kept up to speed with it. Same thing with newsletters. I've been very inconsistent, but up until this year, when I get a chance to interview some amazing people, my pattern recognition kicks in.

[00:01:15] John Wright: I remember changing my newsletter frequency from kind of random. It was like every couple of weeks. It didn't really have a consistent flow. I had Steve Toth on the podcast, and he's got the SEO newsletter, SEO Notebook. He's been doing this for five years. He said that early on when he got started, he had a mentor that said, you really need to make sure you do this once a week. Don't slip up. Don't stop. I think he said he might have had a period of time where he didn't keep up to the weekly. Five years later, he's basically delivered nonstop.

[00:01:55] John Wright: Not only has he delivered a good SEO newsletter, but he's also put in a lot of quality and effort into it to the point where it's made him synonymous with SEO. He's got one of the best SEO newsletters that you can even think of, and none of that would have happened if he hadn't have stayed consistent. My simple message is consistency. The things that I've been consistent with over the past three years, I'm just going to highlight them in particular. Just three years ago, I started becoming a bit more active on LinkedIn. I said, I'm just trying to do some go-to-market activities to make Stadstron work as a company.

[00:02:34] John Wright: I'm like, I don't really know what I'm doing, but I'm going to give it a try. I focused on one channel, and that advice came from Tom Hunt, who said, pick one channel and do it really well and master it before you consider going on to the next one. With his advice, I basically said, okay, I'm going to do that first. Then after absorbing more of his content, I'm like, okay, I think Tom's on to something. Definitely need to do a podcast. I don't know why or... Well, I think I knew why, but I didn't understand the value of it. I said, let's just get it done and let's try it. Two years ago, I started a podcast, and yeah, it's over 100 episodes published in

[00:03:13] John Wright: that two-year time period. I would not replace the podcast with anything else. The newsletters are great. It's great, but I think the podcast might have had the most impact in terms of getting people to go, who am I? Can I be trusted? I think by putting my face out there for two years has given me the ability to say, hey, this is a trust signal. I'm not going to do this for two years and be working on the side trying to rip people off. It's anyone that goes through this whole exercise, you're basically saying, hey, I'm putting myself out there and you're not just going to do a rug

[00:03:51] John Wright: pull by putting your face out there. And then in the past year, like I said, after interviewing Steve Toth, I said, wait a minute. If I'm going to do this newsletter, I need to do it right as well. So let me just try doing it weekly. And if I'm not able to keep up, whatever, that's on me. But at least with LinkedIn and my podcast, I still had a pretty full schedule of content production and all that fun stuff. But I really did want to give the newsletter a shot. I felt the newsletter could be something that had just as much power just as a different channel. So I spent three years ago getting good at LinkedIn. Two years ago, I've been doing podcasting and those things haven't stopped.

[00:04:30] John Wright: I just got better at them. And then now I'm at the point where I said, OK, this newsletter, it's going to be once a week. I'm pretty big on newsletters. I think there's other people that are thinking the newsletter game is getting a little squash. But I think if you do any of these things that I've done, these can be applied to your affiliate business, but they can also be applied to the B2B marketing space or the SaaS world in the SaaS space. It's done very well for me. I'm ecstatic that I've done all of these things and I'm even more pumped to continue doing them. But I think for affiliates, this is an amazing opportunity ahead.

[00:05:05] John Wright: If Google is going to be causing a lot of problems with not rewarding affiliate sites the way they used to. Well, this is the new reality. Then what's changed? And I think what is changing is people are brands. So you don't have to have like a company brand with one person behind it. You as the person can be that brand and that could be your affiliate channel or that could be an extension of your brand. I mean, there's so many examples to look at. It doesn't really matter how you kind of, you know, skin it. It's you're going to end up with pretty much the same thing with the exception of LinkedIn is, you know, if you had to start a channel, I'd say

[00:05:43] John Wright: people channels over company channels. When it comes to YouTube, I don't know what the answer is, but I think a lot of people channels tend to do pretty well, but it doesn't mean that you can't make them kind of company branded or co-branded. And then for other channels, whether it's a YouTube shorts and all that stuff, it's like kind of figured out, but I like to do market research and go, what's working today and who's built up a lot of a following and what are the ones that are trending very quickly? So what am I going to work on for 2025? I'm not quite sure yet. It's it's probably going to be one more channel that I will experiment with. And it could be YouTube shorts.

[00:06:21] John Wright: So we'll see if a YouTube shorts is paying off in terms of personal brand recognition that extends to the stats drone brand and we'll see what it delivers. So I hope that was helpful. Just be consistent. I think this is probably the single factor that determines if a, if an affiliate is going to be successful or not. And for me, having had the opportunity to interview so many amazing affiliates over pretty much a long period of time, I I've seen these patterns from the early days and I said, how do I, how do I achieve this? So I had to figure it out on my own, the hard way. But what I recommend affiliates that want to get started in anything,

[00:07:00] John Wright: it's kind of like pick one channel, do it well, do it consistent. And then do that before you consider jumping into the next channel. Cause I think what everyone else does is they try a bit of everything. It doesn't work. And then they just give up because everyone wants instant rewards and that's the age we live in today, but just be consistent and don't stop.

[00:07:25] John Wright: 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.