The Best Affiliate Marketing Guide & Podcast Compilation 2024

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: The Best Affiliate Marketing Guide & Podcast Compilation 2024
Host: John Wright
Published: Tue, 02 Jan 2024 12:19:00 +0000
Duration: 53:41

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: Welcome to the Philly BI Podcast. I'm John Wright, and this podcast is brought to you by StatStrone. Welcome to 2024. And this whole episode is a best of collection from 2023. And we've had some amazing guests last year, including a lot of well-known SEO experts like Matt Diggity, Kyle Roof, uh, Fairy Kazoni, Victor Carpenko.

[00:00:26] John Wright: We've interviewed people on the design side from, and conversion rate optimization with Oliver Kenyon and Peter Loving. And we've covered almost every topic you can think of that relates to affiliate marketing, including content marketing, uh, talking with Lachey Lewis. And yeah, so I just want to take the best clips that we have from the last year and put together a powerful episode that I believe I've had the privilege of having the opportunity to ask amazing guests, um, their take of what they see as the future of affiliate marketing, not just in relation to business intelligence, but

[00:01:04] John Wright: what do they see coming up for this year? And so I hope you enjoy the show and learn a lot from it and looking forward to doing even more interviews this year as well.

[00:01:16] John Wright: Part of the inspiration behind the Philly BI Podcasts came from how a course by Kevin Hartman changed, how I looked at data science. Data visualization, data analytics, and all the data stuff. It was actually one of the foundations behind the Philly BI Podcasts where.

[00:01:34] John Wright: Luckily enough, not only did I take his course, but it really helped me look at data and affiliate marketing and realize, wait a minute, there's a lot more that can be explored here. So I want to take this insight from Kevin Hartman, who's a former head evangelist, analytics at Google. And he runs an amazing, uh, series of courses on data visualization. I highly recommend you check it out. And here's Kevin Hartman.

[00:02:00] John Wright: Yeah, we we've been doing it for about five years. So I think this was, this was a pretty early runner, but I really do believe that prior to the work we've done most data visualization education.

[00:02:14] John Wright: Revolved around learning a tool, becoming proficient in a visualization tool, right? And learning all the functions and features. And, uh, what we've done is taken that step back and a harder look at what makes for good data stories and good visualization and how do you ultimately get there, the tool is important, but it's just an add, right? So what I have seen is, um, uh, certainly growth. I mean, the, every single time we run the course, we get more and more people, um, into it. Uh, it's the popularity has just continued to increase.

[00:02:52] John Wright: And I, I believe that what is happening in the market has been really good for business for us. And that is in the market, just further developments of tools, further focus on, on technology to create visuals, to analyze data, right? Particularly the move towards artificial intelligence and, and all the wonderful things that that can do. It is effectively, uh, I think for many people taking the human a little further away from the process.

[00:03:28] John Wright: Um, because these tools are so great and proficient and effective, you know, you can, you can let it do its thing a little more, get yourself less involved.

[00:03:41] John Wright: Um, because the, the AL AI algorithms are, are able to so effectively discover patterns and collect and analyze, you know, uh, enormous, uh, sums of data. You can take you as an analyst a little further out of the process. And so what we are talking about the result of that is, is really at the end of the day, poor data storytelling, poor visualization, right? So what we're talking about is the opposite. It's, it's getting the human really inclined in the story, getting

[00:04:19] John Wright: the analyst back into the data. Um, and so we, we, you know, because of this, this market trend toward tools, I feel like we're becoming even more appreciated for what we are doing in, in this, in this course. Um, it's also, it's, it's been amazing to me just how rapidly the tool market moves and develops and now with data privacy and other concerns coming in, many of the, the, the tools that we would have relied on, um, no longer work or have just fallen from the market. Right.

[00:04:58] John Wright: So it's been a very interesting thing to see how the tool market has progressed while knowing that what we're doing is pretty timeless.

[00:05:09] John Wright: And it doesn't matter though, those tools, everything else is happening or just, just, uh, things that, that the human analyst needs to be aware of, but we're, we stay very focused on the human analyst.

[00:05:22] John Wright: The next two clips that I'm going to play for you are two amazing guests that I was very happy to chat with. Julian Juneman from Measure School and Sam McCabe from Enterprise DNA. Both of them run, uh, schools and that offer courses on everything from data science, analytics, um, tools, you name it. And I really like following what they do on LinkedIn, where I think they're kind of ahead of the game. And these are people that I now look up to, uh, in terms of going, what's around the corner for a data science and learning about this.

[00:05:57] John Wright: So I've taken, um, my own, um, inspiration to learn more and I highly recommend people check out both of their, uh, courses and websites, uh, to see how you can learn something when it comes to applying data science in any aspect of affiliate marketing.

[00:06:17] John Wright: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, all, all really good, really good thoughts and points. Um, I like, I, I don't believe that the, the 10 times is an exaggeration. When you, when you put it into the analysis, you could do the apps you could build and the automations that you could build off the back of, um, of a lot of this, cause you got to remember that data has been exponentially growing, just the amount of data that you have as a business. Like we, we're, we're an online business. We're not, we're not, we're not a big company by any means, right? We're just a, a small to medium sized business. Um, but I just think about the data that we churn out, that we don't really

[00:06:54] John Wright: have, and then like, we don't have that much analytic around, like, uh, at the moment, I don't know exactly.

[00:07:02] John Wright: The data is probably somewhere, but, or maybe it is, maybe it is. I don't know exactly what each individual user is doing on our platform at each time they come to the platform, right? I, I have a little bit of an idea based on some events that we track, but not a full idea and just think about it. Think about how much more we could, we could know if we, we could drill down and so that individual person, then we could customize all of the, and automate all of the messaging and the learning plan for that individual person. So, so I don't, I actually don't think it that big an exaggeration when you factor in all those different categories, like it probably is an underestimating underestimate, underestimating it.

[00:07:39] John Wright: Because you, you just think across this for every business, health, healthcare, entertainment, finance, you know, just totally customized to you as a person. Think about, you know, as, as, as, as, as a, as a business servicing all of these, these customers, you want to get down to that level, right? Like that, that's going to make you the most money, but also add the most value to your customers. Like to me, that's, that's where things are going. Like there's, there's just no doubt about it. So it's, it's not, it doesn't feel that too, like too far removed from reality, that sort of estimation.

[00:08:13] John Wright: Got a little secret for everybody. Uh, maybe a hundred years ago, people bought through word of nothing referrals and guess what? Today it still happens. Just it still happens. And it's the biggest driver of business growth. And it's the biggest driver of lowering customer acquisition costs. And it's a signal that you're doing a lot of things right. The difference is that word of mouth has fundamentally changed over the past 20 years, especially over the past five with the dramatic scale and maturity of the internet. So in 1995, you could just tell your kids, your, your kids, friends, parents about the thing that you like at the tee ball game.

[00:08:49] John Wright: Um, and now 25 years later, you could post it on LinkedIn and a hundred thousand people are going to see it within the next hour, you go viral and tick talk and 8 million people see it and drives incredible business growth and that's happened over and over again.

[00:09:01] John Wright: Or you post a podcast and people listen to that podcast for two years and over time start to really believe and trust you. Um, and so the idea of word of mouth has fundamentally changed over the past 20 years, which is the core difference. Um, I really think that we need to make a split here when we talk about this between influencers or key opinion leaders and affiliates, they're really two very different things with different motions that require different ways of measuring success. Um, affiliates play at the bottom of the funnel and try and make a small transaction fee for a referral.

[00:09:33] John Wright: Um, influencers start at the top and create the demand that drives accelerated business growth and accelerated word of mouth. Affiliates are not driving word of mouth.

[00:09:42] John Wright: They're not.

[00:09:43] John Wright: Uh, you might get, you might get a byproduct of word of mouth when they go through an affiliate by the product, have success and they talk about it. But you'll rarely get the scale of word of mouth that an influencer or key opinion lead, a key opinion leader creates, um, that ultimately creates demand and drives business growth. So I think for, uh, for the affiliate game, I think that you have to be thinking about, do I need, do I need business expansion? Do I need to expand my capabilities and services in order to not just play at the bottom of the funnel when someone searches this category and I'm going to continue to try and win on Google being a top three results so they can click my link and I can get 10% of the sale.

[00:10:21] John Wright: And instead of playing that game, which over time, SEO is going to change and it's going to leave your business vulnerable. Um, and so knowing that, do I need to shift to a, add a different service or add a different layer to my service that includes demand creation and influencing people before they're considering buying before they're going to Google, um, that would be, if I was in the affiliate space, that would be my game right now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how I did it, I think, which is a good way to do it is to do it when you're still working full time or at least have a different source of income. Um, so.

[00:10:58] John Wright: Like I, I first built a website, I think in Webflow and then in the end, I turned it to WordPress just because there's so much more optimize optimizations you can do. Plus you can outsource a lot of things. So I was really good in outsourcing a lot of things. So, um, I had my stable income, so I was able to put some money into place to actually have people do things for me. So to build a website, to write blogs, um, to add content, uh, to kind of just, I guess, like make it as easy as possible for yourself so you can think of new ways to, to do things, um, when I would change, add a newsletter, like more quicker, I guess,

[00:11:35] John Wright: because it was a really nice way to, to build like an audience and to keep them engaged with the site because otherwise they would only find you one day when they're searching for something.

[00:11:46] John Wright: A podcast could definitely be a good one. Like, um, again, like the attraction we're now getting on our podcast. Um, it's really nice. Like I, I wish, I guess I did it sooner and like, as soon as you get into this nice vibe, you can actually leverage other people's network to get, uh, to get visibility to do the things you're doing basically. So, um, I think that's the other thing, like leveraging other people, uh, or partners or websites, uh, more and more like, um, you see it a lot, right? Where people have like a certain batch on their site you earned from G2 or

[00:12:25] John Wright: TechPond or any other review site, but that's good for both of them. Cause they both get visibility and they both get more traffic and often there's a backlink behind the button. So, um, it's even better for the, for the review side. So I guess there's a lot of things, but like own media, like make sure you own your own channels, distribution channels, make sure you leverage, uh, other people's network is just going to kickstart things and, um, try to like outsource if you can, uh, when you're working full time, try to outsource as much as you can, cause then it allows you to do other things again to grow.

[00:13:01] John Wright: And that was Chris Walker and Yoren Hoffman back to back. And, uh, Chris Walker is a B2B expert who is just phenomenal at sales. And I wanted to have him on the podcast to see if he, if we could pick his brain and see if all of the things he's learned in the B2B space can apply to B2C and affiliate marketing and sure enough it does. And Yoren is a, I, I call him a thought leader in affiliate marketing. I mean, he has to be, he has Reddit is, which is a SAS affiliate program software. And Yoren is just, um, he's basically bootstrapped everything you can imagine.

[00:13:40] John Wright: Uh, building his software on the back of building SAS affiliate sites. So it's really cool. Next, we're going to get into a whole bunch of SEO interviews. Uh, one of the common things that I asked a lot of these SEO experts is, is SEO dead in the sense that all the companies that have a lot of money can buy their way to success and is it kind of, is it too late? And almost all of them said absolutely not that you still have an opportunity to carve your own path in affiliate marketing, uh, with content with topical authority. So let's get into some of these amazing SEO insights.

[00:14:20] John Wright: First though, I disagree with the premise. I don't think it's saturated. And I really enjoy when something like chat GPT comes out. Cause I don't know how old you are, but if you can remember back to, um, February, 2023, um, SEO is about to die. And we're, we're past that. And somehow it has, I've been doing SEO for over a decade. Every six months, SEO is dying. But what happens is it's usually dying in a slow death. And then there's, I would say there are three or four moments. I can remember that, um, where something was really killing it. And in each of those moments, there was a contraction of SEOs and service providers and people that were in the game.

[00:15:01] John Wright: And in those moments, I realized that some people, you know, businesses fail on the best of times, and then when there's stress, then more fail faster. And it's very true within, within SEO, SEOs are failing all the time, even in up economies, uh, when there's any kind of stress, any kind of down economy, any kind of other external factor, you will see more of a contraction. What I've found in those situations, which I think we're experiencing right now is that I make more money because more people are falling away. They're thinking it's not worth it. They don't know how to pivot the, they were struggling to begin with. And now this is just one more thing that they can handle or really does tank their business.

[00:15:37] John Wright: And so in these situations of uncertainty, that's when, um, you can really make a lot of money and you can really be successful because I think there's a contraction of people that are service providers, people that are doing their own SEO, people are doing their own affiliate sites for sure. So I do disagree with the premise slightly that it's saturated. That said, um, in terms of channels, I've always found it interesting that people never look at their own SERPs.

[00:16:03] John Wright: You know, they will put their keywords into tools and they'll get their data out of it. But the end of the day, they never actually go and look at the actual thing. And that's dangerous because you're going to miss what's there, what's what's obviously in front of you. And a lot of SERPs have a lot of features that people don't take advantage of.

[00:16:21] John Wright: You know, they, uh, uh, there's like carousels. There's the people also ask, you know, there might be snippets. There might be a new feature for your, you know, there might be four or five features available on each SERP. And they're often not optimizing to potentially get into those areas because they never really took the time to look.

[00:16:42] John Wright: And so, uh, I do think there are external things you can do, but the very first thing is you're already working hard for this keyword. You're already trying to get into this cluster. Look what's and see what's there. Cause there are probably two or three other channels that you're missing. They wouldn't take that much more work or you might be able to lay in at a couple more of them. And that's just going to increase your traffic. Right then and there without doing any extra, extra heavy lifting or trying to find a new way to do it.

[00:17:07] John Wright: If you want platforms outside, I think you do need to figure out where your audience is and then go to that place. So by and large, I provide services. I provide tools. I provide education under utilized features. I would say it's, uh, is the AI, uh, generator content because, uh, it's like 25 ish 30% adoption among the users right now. I understand not everybody wants AI content on their websites, but, uh, from what I observe, uh, the content is offered better than human written content.

[00:17:47] John Wright: That is not per expensive. Like if you, if you compare like 50 bucks article from like a mediocre writer,

[00:17:56] John Wright: uh, it will be probably worse and 100% less researched. Uh, like imagine like we as humans, we cannot analyze that big amount of information as the AI. Like it's just impossible to read the whole book in five minutes and then, uh, use all facts and interesting, uh, talking points from that book to create, uh, a review of that specific, it is just impossible. So I would say it should be used by 50 plus percent of the people.

[00:18:35] John Wright: I'm, I'm down to it. It should be, it should be this way. So even though it's a huge contributor to our growth recently, I would say it's still underutilized feature of, of server.

[00:18:48] John Wright: Oh, yeah. That's like really interesting question. I think the more people will grow as a like teams companies, the more they will start to analyze, the more they will start to see like where they are spending money, uh, where they're losing. Should they not at all do this stuff and with the, uh, this analytic tools. Basically that's the answer. Just, just track things. Uh, they will, uh, start track, uh, everything possible, like from the business.

[00:19:24] John Wright: Like, for example, we have dashboard in agency for every department with the P and L for every 18 leads. So they know, like, for example, project, uh, head of project says, I want to do this team building, you know, like I need five K and now they go and see, can we afford five K to do this team building, or we should like postpone it later and figure out this in a different way, you know, like, cause they see the numbers as long as you like tracking the numbers, you can do some changes if you don't track, come on.

[00:19:59] John Wright: Like, so I was reading books, I had the books there about business and all the books that if you want to make, you know, if you want to make a successful, if you want to build a successful business, you cannot be the technician only in the business. I'm still a technician in a way, because I still work a lot in the business, but my main role is not to be a technician. Now, my main role is to be a systems operator and assistance builder.

[00:20:27] John Wright: Um, you should use the experience knowledge that I've acquired

[00:20:31] John Wright: to become a system operator.

[00:20:35] John Wright: So in 2020, I started posting a link that I said, I had a few passive income sites, they were making a few thousand pounds per month. So they, they made more money in 2020, like the passive income sites, made more money than what the client work did on average in, in, you know, before that. So apart from doing the client work before 2020, I was also building, you know, online assets like income tax calculators, like a relation calculator and scam number sites, um, and they'll start making money. And I said, there's no point doing client work now.

[00:21:13] John Wright: It's, you know, the craziness that's happening in 2020. Um, let's just, let me just start sharing my knowledge with the world.

[00:21:22] John Wright: And even yesterday, I was watching one of my videos there. I was so awkward on video. Oh my God. I mean, even now, maybe I'm awkward sometimes, but I'm, sometimes I'm awkward on purpose with, you know, the wigs that I wear, but I was so awkward with some of the videos. Um, but, but I said, I'm just going to, you know, share the knowledge and share, you know, everything that I know.

[00:21:42] John Wright: And I had a client and the first, you know, real client who reached out towards the middle of 2020 after posting consistently was a, it was an education client and said, Hey, Farie, I've seen your, you know, content. I think you're great. Can you help us with this site?

[00:21:59] John Wright: And I was like, wow, where did that come from?

[00:22:05] John Wright: And I said, yes, sure. I said, there's nothing to lose. I'm going to tell them, you know, 5,000 pounds a month. And if they're, if they're happy to, you know, work like this, then we'll, we'll smash it for them because that's a greater budget than I ever had from any client prior to prior to that. I like clients of like a thousand pounds a month or like 500 pounds a month, which now looking back, I like it's, it's not even good for a meeting. It's not even enough for a meeting. Right.

[00:22:34] John Wright: And, and they say, Oh, sure. Send me the invoice. I like, wow. Send them the invoice. They pay the invoice. And then two weeks after that, another financial, like an IVA company reached out in the same way, say, Fairey FC, your, you know, case studies, your content is great and we have this website. Could you help us with, with this website? Said, yeah, five, 5,000 pounds for a month. And we can certainly help.

[00:23:00] John Wright: And I said, they say yes. And then we had instantly like two, two clients who pay 10, 10 K a month.

[00:23:06] John Wright: And I was like, this is crazy. I have to double down on this content, but then I had to do, I have to do the work. So how, how do we deal with this?

[00:23:16] John Wright: And then I had to Michelle Aston, our head of operations now, who was messaging me on LinkedIn before saying, Hey, Fairey, I want to work in digital marketing. No, I've seen your content. I see your local in Whitney. Do you need some help? And I always said, no, no, no.

[00:23:32] John Wright: And when the second, I think, is it when the first, I'm not sure whether when the first invoice was paid or like the second client joined, I'm not saying Michelle. I even made a post about this on LinkedIn saying, Michelle, I think we are, we are ready to take you on board now. And then she joined.

[00:23:47] John Wright: And then I've seen when you have a person who's passionate about your mission. Michelle was like the first actual, you know, employee who I've seen.

[00:23:57] John Wright: She would do anything. She said she, she would work for free. She would do anything just to make this, you know, make this mission a success.

[00:24:06] John Wright: And I've seen the power of that. I said, if we could find more people like Michelle, that's why we have a successful business. And then we started, we started finding new people and Michelle helped a lot. I mean, you know, find the initial key employees and that's where the big booth started. When I started thinking of it as, you know, as, as you need to find the right people, you need to build the right processes. We started building, you know, processes from the problem up. So we started the processes from the problem. So we have this problem. How can we build a system around it? So it resolves the problem.

[00:24:44] John Wright: Systematically, consistently, every time this problem appears. So it's not just for that specific problem, but whenever we have this situation, how can we use a plug and play system the problem problem is solved and that's where we started. No, really, we taking off and then more clients started coming. And in 2021, so the next year we decided we're going to stop doing SEO and we'll focus on just digital PR.

[00:25:13] John Wright: And that's when things started. That's when, when, when people started thinking of us, not like as a SEO agency who does this and does that and does that, and then they do some content sometimes and they also do this. And with our next three guests, we have Jean-Michel Azopardi, who is in the blockchain space, but he basically says the future of blockchain really comes down to AI and followed after him is Sami Kervinen, who's got the unfair advantage of having spent a lot of time as an affiliate manager who's now working on the affiliate side of business. And we also have Ian Sims who works on a compliance tool.

[00:25:51] John Wright: And as much as compliance might be the boring topic, he talks about how compliance can actually help all sides of the business from the operators to your affiliate business.

[00:26:03] John Wright: I love this question. So, I think that AI is what will, is what will fuel the growth of blockchain. If we agree that web3 has multiple pairs, right? As far as technology goes, there's blockchain, there is AI, there's VR, AR, XR, et cetera. Those are all different examples of, of, of banners of web3. And we, we know that each of them are in their relative instance and that they

[00:26:40] John Wright: are evolving at a more rapid base than, than their counterparts 15 years ago. Well, if, if we look at affiliate marketing, it's very much, much sales oriented. So if you work with, especially the, the biggest affiliates, they, they often tell you that these are the rates and you know, you want position one, this is what you have to pay and so on.

[00:27:07] John Wright: But when it comes to medium, smaller sized affiliates, I think what is often lost is that you, let's say if you take it from an affiliates manager perspective,

[00:27:19] John Wright: and you, to move away, I mean, it's from just the same pitch. Make sure that you have a proper understanding of the product that you are selling here and the focus on the other selling point. Like, yeah, it's your company putting a lot of effort in, in conversion rates. Then discuss that with the affiliate that maybe we're not going to pay you the loans, but if you look at our dates and you show the date to the affiliate should talk to you with, look at our conversion rates. So you're going to see that even if we pay less, you're going to still make more. Or maybe the company that you are representing as an amazing gamut education

[00:27:57] John Wright: tool or loyalty program, make sure you learn about the, what's your, what's, what are the strong points of the brand that you are working for and the explain to the affiliates that okay, again, maybe we're not paying the most, but if you look at the overall lifetime value of the players, if you send those clicks to us, it's going to be higher because of this and that. So I think that those are the ways that sometimes is forgotten that it's too much focus on, on this, on the rates, the selling prices, and they sometimes

[00:28:37] John Wright: forget that there's other factors that can affect an affiliate with positions and brands they push. So I think it benefits everyone. You just got to think differently about compliance and not see it as a, as a pain point and see it as how it can help you. And there are other ways, the data that compliance can give you and the way it makes you position the data on your website, the focus, perhaps you put on promotions and terms and conditions and stuff, it shifts all that. You just got to think a little bit differently. It's an interesting take your highlighting, which is compliance could,

[00:29:07] John Wright: well, it's not that it could, it probably does. And it should improve the conversion rate for affiliates, for players, for operators.

[00:29:15] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:29:16] John Wright: Ultimately, everyone's trying to, you know, the whole idea of compliance at the moment, what regulators are doing is trying to protect the consumer.

[00:29:22] John Wright: There's also an element of brands wanting to protect their brand integrity and their risk. And obviously if they get fined threatens the integrity of affiliate programs as well. So don't get me wrong. There are lots of things to think about, um, and, and issues.

[00:29:36] John Wright: But ultimately if you've got happy consumers, you're going to have a happy industry. And our next four guests happen to come from affiliate program, software and affiliate network platform providers. Um, these people are interesting to talk to because they get to work on a unique part of the industry where, I mean, without the tech, there is no affiliate marketing. So next up, we have Alan stone from Intolitics. We have David Harris and Vlad Bondarenko from refer on and Clements do Jardin from my affiliates.

[00:30:09] John Wright: You sort of hit the nail on the head there, right? If I'm, if I'm in a, and this is technology exists now, like we do this. Um, where if a player hits my site and I got them to convert at whatever sports book, when they come to my site again, I'm not showing them the offer wall with that promotion or any promotion, quite frankly, we are sort of obsessed with that retention, like, Hey, we know that this player converted with operator eight. We're going to make sure that all the ads on site are now, to your point, retention ads, not sign up bonus. It's not it's, Hey, come back and play. And we'll give you an additional, you know, $20 back or whatever. Right. It's all retention oriented.

[00:30:47] John Wright: I think the Holy grail of that, and this is what we're pushing towards and exploring all kinds of technologies. How do we, how do we tie the ability to deep link into exactly what that user was engaging with when they were last time they were on that operator's book. So similar, you know, getting used the e-commerce example, if I'm browsing for a particular product and I go there and I, I view a product on a site. Now, when I'm seeing ads for that brands, I'm not seeing ads for the brand. I'm seeing ads for that particular product I was looking for, or if I add it to my cart and I abandoned, right. There are very specific ways that you can target that user who abandoned a card say, Hey, come back in today. We'll give you free shipping.

[00:31:26] John Wright: And you drive them directly into the cart with the item. They're ready to go. Right. That level of personalization again, does, has not, it hasn't reached mass adoption by the operators. Um, and I think it's, I think it's coming and that, that is the type of user experience that look, that's the ultimate user experience. You're going to, you're going to achieve. And it historically that was done with pixels. It doesn't have to be done with pixels. This stuff, the technology exists now where all this stuff can be done in the backend. Let's do just to add on to this. Yeah. Refra on, obviously we're looking at a bit of a angle on affiliate managers from this perspective. And obviously they're getting the FDDs, but no retention, but another

[00:32:05] John Wright: level of what Refra on offers and any platform is actual operators. Operators are using this and they want to see how a brand converts, not just at the individual affiliate manager. Now coming back to the question of building that retention, making sure you have that relationship, if you take the example of an operator comes to platform X, okay. And they don't like it. They're not going to add any more brands to that platform. They're not going to be any more data streams, not going to use it continuously. If you build up the relationship and you show it's worthwhile and they know they can get certain data aspects out of it and they find it

[00:32:41] John Wright: friendly or accessible, they're going to add in and probably get more brands onto the system. So you build a relationship at that angle. And at the same time, the affiliate managers are used to it. You can have multiple programs running through the same kind of URLs. The accessibility and usage of it is multifaceted. It's not just for it manager getting FDDs and showing case clip to FDDs. Okay. I'm done. That's me for the KPIs. It's there's more, there's more layers in the affiliate platform than just the affiliates coming in. I agree with you guys. I was back in time affiliate manager. I was using a halfs and all the stuff.

[00:33:19] John Wright: I know John, what you're speaking about, because even in my case, like my, uh, with whom I was working before. Yeah. Uh, like to, to start using some tools is always, is always a challenge, especially when it comes to some new tools like deep sea or whatever. Uh, but at the industry becomes more data driven, more such tools will come. And obviously that's, we are speaking now, we are living in AI, uh, century. So to say, I hope I'm sure I'm not hoping, but I'm sure that such tools

[00:33:57] John Wright: will be available or also, uh, for AI. The thing is that I gaming sphere is quite limited. We have really nice, um, like examples of a web three sphere, like, uh, all this cryptocurrency sphere, it's much, much, much, um, is having much more higher expectation. Yeah. A lot of people, much more people are involved in that and much more sophisticated solution, uh, are there.

[00:34:25] John Wright: But even there, even there Binance, for example, doesn't give us proper API. So what we can speak about I gaming where money is big and a lot of money are coming here, but if Binance cannot give us proper API is what we can speak and tell about this small, uh, topic. So this is a matter of time. I so I suppose I hope and more tools will come and I am a fan of chat GPT. I am a fan of new tools. I know that it's, it's quite low amount of people still right now who wants to

[00:35:04] John Wright: use new tools in I gaming sphere.

[00:35:07] John Wright: There is a, there is a problem of human resources. The good effort managers that were there 10 years ago, I've grown, I've taken more responsibilities, I've taken different positions and, uh, and right now there is a struggle of finding people that understand the business. Okay. We haven't done much about it because you know, there are courses here and there. There are online, but there is nothing in depth. There is nothing that is really focusing on how do we make an affiliate manager being a profession rather than something that can earn on an eight hour course, you know, because that's not the way it works.

[00:35:46] John Wright: So operators have problems and I, I say it's, it's going to get a little bit worse before it gets better. Before these new affiliate manager, I can understand the cooks of data. I understand that everything is there are the fingertips. They just need to look at it and say, you know, okay.

[00:36:08] John Wright: And they also need to communicate more with their affiliates. Very often I feel that, you know, it's a bit of a battle. It's affiliate manager against affiliates, you know, and there is always that.

[00:36:18] John Wright: That first issue where one thing is that they are going to steal the other one and, and, and, you know, that trust isn't there after all these years, you haven't managed to sit down all together, open the book and discuss all of these open issues, you know, and, and I can duck. The only thing that needs to happen is actually trust and exchange of information so that, so, so that everybody gains from it and everybody learns and make more, more money, make the whole pension much easier.

[00:36:49] John Wright: But how do we get that? That's a very good question. And the next three guests, they talk about bit of SEO content, topical authority and branding. And these three to four topics somehow kind of come together. And I think it's a perfect segue to introduce Matt Diggity, Gabriela Covey and Lachey Lewis. And yeah, they just talk about, they just make it sound like, you know, content should be a common sense thing that you do. But I do believe that most affiliates, they don't take the extra time to

[00:37:25] John Wright: properly curate their content, to put that brand authority, the topical authority, and to really put that branding hat on where it's like, okay, I'm going to be the best I can be at this, at this topic. And I'm just going to go ahead and nail it. It's, I don't think everyone has the mindset that I'm going to be the best at this and I'm going to go out of my way to help the customer. So I can't wait to share these next three insights with you.

[00:37:52] John Wright: Volatility is like just the name of the game with SEO, right? I've been doing it since 2009 and it's always been volatile. I mean, like the, the first year I got into it and actually started getting success and making a bunch of money and breaking five figures. My whole entire portfolio died that year too. So I'm kind of used to volatility, but today's right now it's an interesting time in SEO because I think it's simultaneously harder than it's ever been before and easier than it's ever been before. And let me explain myself. So it's harder in the sense that it takes more resources to do SEO. And in the world of SEO, resources means content and backlinks.

[00:38:30] John Wright: So, uh, whereas before you could go after a niche site with, uh, 20 pages of content, if it's just like hyper targeted, right. Going after knee pain or something like that, just so I'm going to write really good content, 20 pages and just dive right into knee pain. That doesn't work anymore. So now we're in a world of topical authority where it's like the website that covers the topic more completely. We'll gain what's called topical authority and have an advantage of ranking over other. Websites that only dabble in a topic. So there's the content resource that's ballooned. Um, there's also a link resources that you need to apply to a website.

[00:39:07] John Wright: So it's just kind of ridiculous right now. Google solves a lot of their problems with just, um, who has the most backlinks. Um, I'm referring to the EAT algorithms, product review algorithms, tons of algorithms where they put up a list of things that how they want their algorithm to work, but it really just boils down to backlinks. It worked really well. Um, but I always knew there was like a better approach and I saw the future. All this link farming and all that stuff, like it might work now, but I don't think it's gonna, it just doesn't feel right. It feels like you're trying to scam the system and outsmart it, but you're gonna lose in the end. It didn't feel right.

[00:39:45] John Wright: Like it was, there was something like, I'm like, I don't know. I don't know if I want my client client's website to be on this shady website. Cause I saw that as shady, but it worked back then. So we're like, okay, yeah, if it's working, we can play around a little bit with this, but then digital PR just became this thing over time where it was like, it just became more increasingly important to build that brand and generate those brand signals that are important now, nowadays with the EAT requirements and whatnot now more than ever. So we slowly started building out that service and this past year, I would say two, a year and a half or so just have been really focusing on that because it's just so critical.

[00:40:23] John Wright: It's such a critical component of SEO nowadays. So it's, it's part of a successful strategy for building like a brand. And you need to build a brand now. There's no way around it. You have to have a solid brand that stands the test of time that will, you know, survive these algorithm updates. Cause now they're happening all the time. Like you just gotta, yeah, you gotta think long-term if you're ready to win it. Yeah. I used to do it with my affiliate sites all the time. Like I would create like an alias and pull on the website, like fake name generator and generate an alias for that. But I always built my affiliate websites with a brand behind it.

[00:41:01] John Wright: I think branding is a super strong play. It builds trust. Yeah. I think branding is very, very important. I think it needs to play into as far as it playing into the actual content strategy, it can, but I'm looking at branding more of like a higher level type of thing. So like, for example, when I would do my affiliate sites, like I would get a logo made on Fiverr and I would, you know, have color schemes going on and things like that, but natural reality, when people come to the website, they're reading the article, they want the information again, not saying branding

[00:41:40] John Wright: isn't important, but I think it's really just like spices it up, especially for affiliate websites. And we're talking about B2B. Oh, you totally need branding around the, you know, from the job, just because the sales cycles are longer. People are going to their peers to ask, you know, is this a good software? You know, this, this and that, but, you know, so there's some nuance and different, you know, differentiation there between like affiliate websites and SaaS. But I do think branding is still an important play all around. I've always done it. And it's funny because I never thought about it until you just said something about it, but yes, branding is something that I stand on pretty, pretty hard for sure.

[00:42:18] John Wright: And the next two guests, we're going to continue on with that branding theme and go into first design and then conversion rate optimization, which definitely has a lot of design elements built into it. So next up is going to be Peter Loving, who is a UX designer and he's the, his company is behind the redesign of Stadstrom. So we're very grateful for having connected with them, highly recommend them. And next up was, I'm a big fan of conversion rate optimization. So I was really pumped to have Oliver Kenyon from conversion wise on the show. And you know what?

[00:42:55] John Wright: When it comes to product design and design itself, this really goes right into branding. It goes into branding in every sense that it really controls your content itself. I mean, you're not going to have an amazing design and substandard content. You're going to put the maximum effort into it. So I'm very happy to segue into these next two topics, which are very near and dear to me.

[00:43:17] John Wright: And it's, it's because fundamentally when we're designing, we're always thinking about the end user. So we do our best job to really understand them and their needs and their goals. Um, so the more intimately we understand them, the better we are to then think up from their perspective of giving them the things that they need. So, um, what, at the beginning of any, any product or website, that's the process that we go through. It's really getting to understand those people. Um, what, what are they looking to achieve and what result do they want? And then when we understand how they usually get that result, we can create

[00:43:57] John Wright: something that replicates that process and delivers that result for them online.

[00:44:02] John Wright: So whether it's a website or a product, and, uh, it takes, uh, time getting to know them while spending time with them. We usually do user interviews or, uh, and research, or we might ask them questions or ask them, uh, find out a bunch of information about how they currently achieve the results that, that, you know, we're looking to help them with.

[00:44:24] John Wright: Um, and essentially we, we, we create, um, an automated way of doing that or an alternative way of doing that, um, whether it be a website or a platform.

[00:44:34] John Wright: Um, and that's really the fundamental part of getting good design is understanding the user, knowing, knowing the problem, we really define the problem. I mean, that's really key because then, then we want to solve that problem for it. So like if these are affiliate marketers, we want to know that they'd be, we problems and we'll solve those in design. And that's kind of going to be part of helping them achieve their goals. Yeah. So when it comes to like ongoing CRO, I split CRO into two categories really. One is the planning page design. So that is like building a landing page around best practices and best frameworks,

[00:45:11] John Wright: which we have kind of pioneered over the last 10 years to say, like, if you put X, Y, and Z in this order and this layout, it should convert better than if you just got a random good looking design of like nine designs, for example. You then have the other side, which is when you have a certain amount of volume of data and traffic per month, you can start running exactly as you said, these kind of AB tests and for those of you who don't know what that is, it's literally where you hypothesize that like this would convert better than this. Use a bit of software that spins 50% of your audience towards version, if 50% towards B and you soon find out which can convert. Now it's a good question. It's a question we get all asked a lot. It's like, what volume of data do you need?

[00:45:51] John Wright: We suggest that anyone below 50 to 100,000 hits per month sticks to landing page design. You can take bigger swings because you haven't got enough data going through the test, you can afford to take bigger swings, bigger changes. And you can, you can, you can build something that's based on a high converting framework. If you have over 50 to 7,500,000 per month, that's when you can kind of unlock AB testing effectively and quickly, because basically you need, you need at least two weeks to run for a test. And the reason that is, is because external factors can sometimes, contradict your test.

[00:46:30] John Wright: For example, if on a Monday, there's a bit of news about the product that you're selling in the market, there's probably going to be more people who are trending, going to your pages and buying your product. There might be something, you know, external again, that kind of affects it like a sale or a prime day or something, you know, something on that specific Monday may alter your test. So you need to let it run two Mondays, just so you can kind of counterbalance that and say, okay, it wasn't just a sleep on that Monday.

[00:46:59] John Wright: As far as sample size and volume, you're really looking at around about at least a hundred thousand hits, at least kind of, yeah, sort of 50 to a hundred thousand hits, but also you need to look for statistical significance. So you can actually become statistic a lot shorter time of volume,

[00:47:19] John Wright: but you need to make sure that it is kind of like that 85, 90% on, okay, this one is statistically proven to convert better. And sometimes you can actually make a bit more of a quicker decision if the test should win. You can do AB testing on any volume of traffic. It's just going to take you longer, you know, to get to that 50, a hundred thousand hits, if you're only doing 20,000 hits per month, is going to take five, six months. Whereas if you're doing over that a hundred thousand hits, you can just get statistically significant a lot quicker.

[00:47:50] John Wright: And then you can make a decision on whether the test won or lost and implement it on your store. But I would always run it over two weeks, just so you have like two Mondays, two Tuesdays, two Wednesdays, two Thursdays.

[00:47:59] John Wright: And the last two insights I'm going to share are with Simon Dunn from Your 10K, who's got a lot of experience in performance marketing. And it gives us some really interesting insights when it comes to what affiliate managers don't know about their own business and what they should know. And I'm going to finish this off with another Matt Diggity quote, which just has another great tip that I think most affiliates just don't take to heart, which I'm just going to summarize as knowing what to ask your affiliate managers, which personally, I believe most affiliate managers don't have the answer to, but if you ask them and they're good, they're going to get

[00:48:36] John Wright: that answer for you, that's going to help you give you a competitive advantage and be part of your feedback loop.

[00:48:44] John Wright: Yeah. So for the most part, they are for affiliate programs and the most shocking thing, and it's like, it happens time and time again, is affiliate managers paying the wrong rate to a CEO. So quite often for people who are inexperienced with affiliate management, they will say, okay, my target cost for acquisition is $50. Therefore, I'm going to launch a program. I'm going to pay all the affiliates $50.

[00:49:15] John Wright: So what they don't actually understand is what a lot of affiliates do is play in what we call a bottom of a full space. So they will go and quite often they'll just like, someone will even do, you know, let's go back to the gambling example. So some of them will Google, Google, butters bingo or the bid on bullets, bingo coupon code. And what that affiliate is doing is like, they're just converting over someone who's already searching for the brand. Not necessarily that incremental. The affiliate, not necessarily a manager doesn't necessarily recognize that it just pay kind of like the premium rate to people who are just

[00:49:53] John Wright: like closing off the sale and they look at the program and they go, wow, we're getting so many sales for our affiliate program. But what's actually happened is someone else in the business has paid big bucks to create awareness for that user. And that affiliate is just closing them out. So we've often seen where, you know, rounds are choosing to pay $50 or sale where they could easily be paying five or 10 and they say you will be happy.

[00:50:20] John Wright: So like we've got an image, you know, program burning tens of thousands of dollars every single month, just by getting the right. I mean, the, the biggest thing that they can help me with is just steering me towards the right products to promote. So like we're just guessing when we log into that dashboard and we see their EPC numbers and stuff like that, but the, they really know the behind the scenes and especially how to relate that to the content I already have. So steering me towards the profitable products is the big thing. And then the second best thing that they can do for me is creating like a creative offer that's better than buy this, get this.

[00:50:56] John Wright: So like buy three, get one free or sign up for 12 months and let's have someone kind of recurring aspect to it. So like, that's like one of the biggest things that can add another zero to the income I'm making with a product. And one more tip we got is on delegation and having a chat with SEO expert, Sean Chaudhary. He is the founder of Alchemy Leads and he's a really cool guy. We had an impromptu chat talking about SEO, about creating offers and guarantees for agencies, for affiliate sites and for SaaS companies.

[00:51:35] John Wright: And simply put, we basically said we need to do more delegation for 2024. So that's going to be another important tip to sign off with.

[00:51:45] John Wright: For his story, but I also think that store is relatively common in our space, which is awesome. If you look at some of the fastest growing companies, I would bet most of them are in our space, just in a digital space, branches off into different things. But I think delegation, that's such a huge point. I'm trying to get better at it.

[00:52:03] John Wright: I don't think I'm anywhere near where we will be in five years. So just looking back five years.

[00:52:09] John Wright: Yeah, but yeah, no delegation is something that's, that's super key. I think, have you read the book? I think it's buying back your time.

[00:52:16] John Wright: Dan Martel buying back your time. And it's pretty interesting. And also the Elon book also, I think is a good story. So what I'm trying to do more simplify. And if you look at what Elon does, he tries to eliminate everything.

[00:52:29] John Wright: Any task that he has to do, he's trying to eliminate it. That's really what he's trying to do. So there's a thousand works of the process. He wants to make it one or four as simple as possible. And yeah, I think there's a simplicity and delegation systems and also just structure. Right. Like having people in place to be your support. So you don't have to do all the nitty gritty. I think that's what this upcoming year, I think that's the next, that's the next phase. That was an amazing collection of insights. And I'm just super grateful for having the opportunity to get to ask these questions to some of these amazing guests over the past year.

[00:53:06] John Wright: And it just gives me a lot of inspiration for what's to come over this 2024. And just looking forward to interviewing even more amazing guests. If you want to do a big favor, if you've reached this far is if you can leave a comment or rating wherever you listen to your podcast that helps us kind of leapfrog our podcast to get more, more listeners get well-known and it's going to help us land some amazing guests. So leave a comment, ask any question you want and looking forward to giving you more amazing insights in 2024.