The Affiliate Marketing Podcast – Retail Affiliate Marketing with Industry Legend Kirsty McCubbin

In this week's episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast, Lee-Ann was joined by Kirsty McCubbin to discuss retail affiliate marketing and how the industry has changed over the years. 

Kirsty has been working as a full-time affiliate for 17 years and has travelled around the world. She began working at an agency in 1999 and since then, has become known as one of the top industry experts. Her affiliate marketing blog Affiliate Stuff offers advice to affiliates and much more.

Listen to hear more about:

-          How Kirsty got into the affiliate marketing industry

-          The importance of relationship-building in this industry

-          Kirsty’s blog and some of the interesting topics it covers

-          Understanding the value that affiliates can bring to your channel

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Hi, and welcome to the affiliate insider podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers in the gaming industry. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the insider scoop on what's occurring in affiliate marketing. Join us as we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliate and tech entrepreneurs and discuss the latest affiliates and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started. Welcome to the affiliate insider affiliate marketing podcast with me and Johnston. And today I'm super excited to have somebody very special on the podcast. Kirsty McCubbin, who has been earning a living as a full-time affiliate for more than 17 years. And for two years of that time, she spent traveling all around the world. Her career as an SEO began as an at an agency in 1999. So for those of you that are listening that predates Google with a pivotal moment in early 2003, when she was asked to manage an affiliate program, this quickly led her to quitting her day job and backpacking around Australia. And she's been an affiliate since Kirsty. I'm absolutely thrilled to have you on this podcast. Thank you for joining us today.

Speaker 2: 1:38

Uh, highly on I'm I'm, uh, I'm really pleased to be here. Um, it's great to have an opportunity to have a bit of a chat about affiliate marketing.

Speaker 1: 1:44

I know it's a subject that both of us are passionate about, so to get started, I mean, the history and the knowledge that you've had over this long career in affiliate marketing. Tell us a little bit about your story and how did you get into affiliate marketing and when, when did it all begin?

Speaker 2: 2:01

Well, obviously, as you've mentioned, um, I've started an SEO agency in 1999, like six months before that I hadn't even sent an email, but how new and raw the, that the whole, um, the whole industry was back then, but I could get a job of that nature with so little experience. Uh, so once I had been there for two or three years, um, I find out that I was actually really rather decent at SEO and that I was very passionate about it. Then at that point, um, commission junction opened an office in London and they came and they pitched us to start running affiliate programs for our clients. A lady called Liz flew up from London for the day and, uh, trained me in the world of affiliate marketing. And it was like, it was like a little bomb going off in my head because obviously I obviously already knew how to drive traffic and I just looked and I thought, Oh my goodness, me

Speaker 1: 3:00

Look at this fantastic opportunity. I love asking guests this question about how they got into affiliate marketing, because everybody I speak to has got such a different story about how they've come into this industry and how their lives and their careers have progressed ever since. So let's look back because I kind of want to go back to the future, if that makes sense and, and talk a little bit about what affiliate marketing was like back then, you know, 20 years ago before there were, uh, complex tracking systems and, um, you know, big, massive global networks. What, what, what was the experience getting into this space and how do you think it's changed?

Speaker 2: 3:36

It was hugely exciting. It was all very new in my mind. Now I probably compare it a little bit to the wild West. Yeah, not only because there was a little bit of lawlessness, um, to see the least, but also because there was huge opportunity for ordinary individuals who might not otherwise have had opportunities to, to enter into, um, enter into any kind of business to make a lot of money. It transformed the lives of many, many people. And I was lucky enough to be surrounded by those people who had gone from very normal everyday jobs to making huge amounts of money driving huge revenues. And it was just so exciting

Speaker 1: 4:26

The first time that we really saw people create successful entrepreneurial businesses in incredibly short amounts of time. I mean, if I think back to what the, what it was like back then, you know, anybody that could connect to the internet had a computer and, you know, spotted an opportunity could make some serious cash. And even still the industry is growing at a phenomenal rate. It's a little bit harder now, a little bit more regulated, but it's still a very lucrative industry to work in as a, as an entrepreneur. Um, and you've been doing that for almost two decades. So, you know, T tell us a little bit about what has changed, like in terms of how difficult it is to become an affiliate now versus what it was back then.

Speaker 2: 5:09

When I started as an affiliate, you could earn money just by churning out thousands of spammy doorway pages. You didn't even meet them to be pages. They could be meta refreshes. If you know what those are, you could just come up with a keyword list, churn out through a little online tool, create a mechanism where those pages would be linked to. And you could just send the traffic direct to them action site, and you could put those sites up one day and you would have traffic the next and rankings incredibly easy.

Speaker 1: 5:39

Yeah. I mean, we literally went from like a simple referral friend link to, you know, really complex, different digital channels being used from SEO to PPC. Now, I know you work a lot in, in pay-per-click and SEO, um, which is your area of expertise, but talk to us a little bit about how the retail space has changed. Obviously we've got a lot of people from the gaming industry listening to this podcast, but in terms of what's happening in the retail space for affiliate marketers, there's a lot more regulation. That's happened a lot quicker than, than maybe what's happened in the gaming space in terms of like the IRB affiliate council and codes of practices. And, you know, how did that actually change the way that you worked with merchants over time?

Speaker 2: 6:20

Uh, I think that the way that I've personally, what we're merchants is that I've always, um, I've always targeted customers maybe in a different way from other people. Um, so I've always been really quite decent, um, finding new customers from merchants. Um, but I know that, uh, th the retail space has become very protective of their brand. Um, they've really tightened up on the way that you can promote them a lot. I mean, things like brand bidding, obviously. Um, that's, um, that's been long gone for, for, for decade almost, uh, but things like that, they're starting to get very, very particular about how their brand is represented. They may even have controls on, um, how, how you speak about their brand on your website. You have to be incredibly careful, um, higher end brands. Um, the, the, the, they want people who represent them. I think they've really got a strong notion of how they want to be viewed on the internet. And if you fall outside their, their view of who their brand represented, then they simply won't have a relationship with you anymore. You're, you're done.

Speaker 1: 7:27

And that's a key thing about affiliate marketing is that it's all about relationship building. It's not just about the numbers and the technology that sits behind that relationship. Um, and the compliance factor. I mean, it's, it's become quite a complex job. It's not as easy as what it was before. You know, where you mentioned, you could just take your keyword list and go, and, you know, push it through a tool and send traffic to immerse yourself and earn revenue. Now, as an affiliate marketer, you've got all these other things that you need to be taken care of in your business in order to continue to build those relationships, the compliance, the legal, the, the T's, and C's the rules and regulations. So why, I mean, is there still an opportunity for new people coming into the market? Do they, is this still, um, you know, a viable business solution to become an entrepreneur because he hears so many of these get rich quick schemes, you know, you can be an affiliate and earn a hundred thousand dollars overnight. I mean, does that still exist?

Speaker 2: 8:21

Um, I think affiliate marketing is incredibly difficult. Uh, I think that you need to be able to wear so many different hearts. Uh, you need to, you need to have an understanding of content creation, SEO, you need to have good technical understanding. You need to please your merchants, you need to please Google, uh, and you need to compete against everybody else who is trying to rank. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:47

And that's a full-time job, right? It's no longer just, you know, four hour week. I mean, I laugh at that sometimes when people, you know, they're in their, I've got this vision that affiliates are, you know, working, you know, four or five hours a day, cruising around the world, having a luxurious lifestyle. Well, I mean, that just doesn't exist anymore. I mean, let's just put the kind of hard work done into, into reality. It's a full-time job to be an affiliate, right?

Speaker 2: 9:13

It definitely is. Um, I in particular don't really believe in the four hour work week anymore. Um, it's something that I've experimented with outsourcing a lot of, a lot of the functions that I perform. Um, I still outsource, uh, some content production, but if you don't have that personal involvement at every stage in the process, the likelihood is that something fundamental is going to go wrong somewhere. You need to, you need to be really on point to continue to, to please Google and to please your users, as soon as you let it become a sort of cookie cutter solution. And you're very much at risk of, of your system, if you will break and Dane and you losing your, your source of income.

Speaker 1: 10:01

So talk to us a little bit about the relationships, because, you know, we've mentioned that that's a key component of an affiliate in order to be successful is to have that personal relationship with a merchant. What are some of the kind of tips that you can give to affiliates to really ensure that they're building good relationships with the partners that they're working with?

Speaker 2: 10:20

I think that you have to take some responsibility to treat affiliate market like any business. So I commonly hear it affiliates more than the Bay, how merchants don't engage with them, but you know, this is a two way street you can reach out and you can see, Hey, hi, could I add value? And if you don't get a response to that conversation, then you've had some good data there because maybe they're not worth risk and putting a lot of your time into. So perhaps when you've got a new project coming, uh, coming up, you, you speak, try and speak to a few different merchants. And that's one of the ways that you are going to be able to determine, um, who is going to be what's worth working with. Um, as a problem that I have found is communication between the affiliates networks, merchants. There's a lot of parties involved. It can lead to issues and you have to, to really be on the ball as an affiliate. Um, you can't be

Speaker 1: 11:20

Skills because there's all these different channels that you need to be going through and all these different suppliers and people that form that nucleus of that relationship, making sure that you're a really good communicator, very clear communicator is sometimes half the battle won. Right?

Speaker 2: 11:36

Absolutely. Um, and I think that you should never assume that all the parties in the relationship that you've got are effectively communicating. Um, very, very recently, one of my merchants had to St. Migration on, I decided two or three days after the sate migration to check my, yeah. When I did that, I realized that their state migration had gone wrong. They didn't know the network didn't know, but I knew it was me who alerted them to it. So you must never assume that the, um, the know everything because they don't, you have to share responsibility for that.

Speaker 1: 12:12

Well, and that's also a very key thing for affiliate managers listening to this podcast, because finance plays such a big role in your marketing function for that exact reason. I mean, not only are you acquiring traffic and getting, you know, the brand in front of new customers, but you're also keenly watching all of the kind of technical stuff that goes along with it to make sure that nothing's broken in that, in that flow. Um, and so partnering with your affiliates and really treating them as part of your marketing. Uh, awesome. Even if, if you want to call it, that is an incredibly important thing to think about when you're building new relationships. It's not just about the traffic, but it's about what is the holistic relationship actually bringing to the table between the two parties?

Speaker 2: 12:55

Yeah, I think so. And I think as I, as a former affiliate manager, I'm aware that quite often there can be some, um, on top knowledge and Sage affiliate pool, particularly these days. Um, I know that there are a lot of really talented SEOs with long-term experience setting and people's affiliate pools. And wouldn't that be an it an enormously powerful resource to tap into. These are SEO's with decades of experience, um, who I, who I know, and I have a chat to every now and again about affiliate marketing. They're really keen to get into the industry. So these people can be sitting on top and your affiliate pill. You might not even know that they're there until you start that conversation. We get affiliates and see, Hey, how are you? Who are you? How can I help you?

Speaker 1: 13:46

That's something that us oldies, I mean, excuse the plan, but people that have been around in affiliate marketing for a long time, we never undervalued anybody in our, in our pool. Um, you know, that whole 80 20 rule is just flown out of the window no longer exists as far as I'm concerned, because if you're, if you're spending all of your time on the 20% of affiliates that are driving 80% of your revenue, you're missing a massive opportunity for all the new people that are coming into your program. So for affiliate managers that are listening, I mean, you and I both agree. It's important that you're looking at that long tail all the time and looking and asking the question, Hey, who are you? And how are you? You know, how did you get actually get into affiliate marketing? Because you'd be surprised at how much talent is there, um, from lots of different areas of the, of, you know, the internet and leveraging all of that in your program. Strategies is incredibly important. So what about the future? I mean, we've, we've spoken a lot about the past and where we've come from in affiliate marketing, but where do you think the future of affiliate marketing is going to go to, especially with, you know, micro influencers and all of these new social channels that are coming out, and how, how is that changing the way that affiliates relationship manager and work with different partners?

Speaker 2: 14:54

I think that Brian's a hugely, hugely excited by micro influencers. You can see them chasing after them wildly, and I can see why, um, I, I like to follow my career influence, sort of just watch what they're doing, because when you see that the conversion power that they have, when you see how the interact with their users and how they build up trust and how they'll then go, Hey, look at this product, look at this offer. And you see the conversion rate that they get even a very, very small Facebook page, for example. Um, and you know, if they've got maybe a couple of thousand users and they put up an offer, they might make 10 or 20 sales, and that is without them sponsor any posts. It's just because they've got engaged users. And I think that as affiliates, whilst we're always going to be different animals, we, we need to watch what maker influencer influencers are doing and we need to learn, um, because I think that user engagement having this two way conversation will become a lot more important for our long-term survival.

Speaker 1: 16:01

Absolutely. I totally agree. And I mean, a inference just for anybody that's listening has anybody that has 5,000 followers. So technically speaking, I mean, you and I could be micro-influencers you with your Twitter account and me with my LinkedIn account and, and really thinking about how we leverage those cancers is incredibly important. Now, for anybody that hasn't ever read, Kirsty's blog affiliate stuff, I would highly recommend that you go and have a look at some of the stuff that she does. Um, there's a lot of, I mean, I was just reading this morning on your blog about your PPC, um, experiment that you did a little while back and how quickly it took you to, um, to, you know, make a profit, um, using pay-per-click. And these are things that newer affiliates should be kind of migrating towards and looking at in order to learn from the past, because the problem that I feel in our industry about moving to the future is that we can't understand what's coming ahead. If you don't understand where we've come from, and really that history of affiliate marketing sits with people like me and you, it's not written down in any books anywhere. And that's why I was so excited to get you on the show today, because I know that there's a wealth of knowledge and expertise that sits behind everything that you've learned to the last two decades. And we, we don't talk about it often enough. So, um, you know, in terms of the future and where we're going, I mean, do you think affiliate networks still play a massive role in the ecosystem that we work in? And especially now that brands are able to contact affiliates direct because they are becoming influencers. You know, it's very easy to reach out to somebody on a social media channel. So do you think that network function, you know, the tracking, the payments, the account management, do you think that's still going to play a really important role going forward?

Speaker 2: 17:44

I think that there's, it's always going to be a thing affiliate networks will always be, but I think that there's probably a number of things that could erode their influence. Um, and speaking of influencers and content creators, one of the things about affiliate networks, the weakness that they have is that it is quite difficult for people with lesser technical abilities to monetize their content via an affiliate network. That is one of the, the major weaknesses that I personally see for an affiliate network. This is an advantage for me because I've got that technical ability. So as a reasonable content creator, I have got the technical ability to tap into those, into those areas that other people aren't able to. Um, I also think that Amazon it's

Speaker 1: 18:34

Absolutely. I mean, it changed the way that affiliate marketing works basically,

Speaker 2: 18:39

Um, 43% market share apparently. Um, I, I discovered the other day, but how accurate that figure was. I don't know, but I believe it. Um,

Speaker 1: 18:50

And that's the scary thing is that overnight our industry changes literally like in the space of what three years, four years, it can make such a massive difference. I mean, we were talking about that just this week with, um, was a booboo that bought out Devin hymns. I remember when booboo came to market in the early to mid two thousands, there was some new brand that had come, you know, not a high street, uh, model and look at them, they've just bought out Debenhams. So it's incredibly important not to dismiss the venue that affiliates can bring to your channel to help you to grow. Um, and, you know, taking that into account, taking a brand from no name to, you know, international superstar. It's incredible. I can happen in just a very short space of time.

Speaker 2: 19:36

I think our sauce was one of the prime examples of that back in the day, wasn't it. And I watched one of the original, our sauce affiliates, um, the, the, uh, the, the, um, one of my early kind of projects. I didn't do as much for them as some other people that unfortunately, but, um, they were part of my early kind of, um, retail activity. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:57

I mean, if air source ever had to open up an affiliate program again, would you work with them? No. Okay. And why is that? Can we just share that for people that maybe don't know about what happened, where they suspect? Yeah.

Speaker 2: 20:08

Um, the, uh, I can't even remember who the gentleman steam was, but he, uh, he had opinions and he called us grubby affiliates

Speaker 1: 20:16

That will get down in the annals of history.

Speaker 2: 20:18

Well, I can still get a massive reaction on Twitter if I make a reference to drop your affiliates. And it's all the old skill affiliates who I'm still privileged to, to be friends with and be in contact with the, the old, the old, get the joke. We have a shared sense of outreach.

Speaker 1: 20:36

This is the thing that makes me so, um, crazy about affiliate marketing, the misunderstanding, the misconception of the value that affiliates bring in the marketing channel. I mean, it starts as a clear example of that, um, in our industry, we've had, you know, situations where programs have shut down and it's not because they devalue affiliates it's because they don't actually know how to manage the channel properly. The strategy is lacking. I mean, I always say there is no bad affiliate. There's only bad affiliate management. Um, because if your strategy isn't right, your terms, aren't right. You know, then it's, the onus is on you because all the affiliate is doing is getting paid for sending the traffic. So, you know, I just think it's, it's a lack of education in terms of what this channel is and how it can work. And only when you've worked in it, as long as what we have and grown, you know, massive affiliate programs, I mean, I've grown multimillion dollar affiliate programs all around the world that you see the value that this channel can bring throughout the entire buyer journey, not just at the start, which is, which is predominantly where people kind of lump affiliates at the acquisition stage of, of sales. Um, but I think that that's changing now with the data and the analytics that we have, where we can do retargeting. We can use our partners to actually speak to customers more, um, engaging the, as you said, you know, this whole micro influencer sort of channel that's coming to play now. Um, so I think it's, it's an incredibly exciting time to be joining the affiliate marketing industry. And I'm sure you're going to agree with me. It is a lot more difficult than what it was back in the old days, but there's still so much opportunity to be had, whether you're working, you know, in any vertical, there's always going to be new ideas, new channels, new pockets of traffic to go and target. So I just, I want to thank you for sharing your knowledge and your insight and your experience. And I want to invite anybody listening on those podcasts today to go and check out, post his blog, go and have a look at some of the stuff that she's doing, um, and connect with her on Twitter. You know, I'm sure you can, you'd love to connect with some of our audience and answer some of the questions that they might have. Um, and it's just been an absolute thrill to have you on this podcast today. I'm just so happy that you agreed to join us. Thank you so much for having me and thank you for sharing all of your, your back to the future stories about affiliate marketing and where we've come from and where are we going to head to in the future. So, um, have a great day and thank you very much for being on the affiliate insider affiliate marketing podcast, flexion. That's a wrap for this week's affiliate insider affiliate marketing podcast. If you've loved what we've been putting down in this podcast series, head on over to Apple iTunes and give us a five-star rating and subscribed to the podcast channel that way. You'll never miss another insightful episode cheated next week for more digital marketing insights and traffic driving trends.