The Affiliate Marketing Podcast

The Affiliate Marketing Podcast - Affiliate Management Value Bombs with Evan Weber

April 01, 2021 Lee-Ann Johnstone Season 3 Episode 12
The Affiliate Marketing Podcast
The Affiliate Marketing Podcast - Affiliate Management Value Bombs with Evan Weber
Show Notes Transcript

In this week’s episode of the Affiliate Markeing Podcast, Lee-Ann was joined by industry legend Evan Weber, who shared his extensive knowledge of the industry, including how to grow a successful affiliate marketing program and his insights on where affiliate marketing is heading. 

Listen to hear more about:

-          The importance of communicating with your affiliates 

-          Tips to build a successful affiliate program 

-          Keys to be a good affiliate manager 

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Speaker 1:

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 inside 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.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the affiliate insider affiliate marketing podcast with me, Andy and Johnston. And today I'm absolutely thrilled because we have a legend of affiliate marketing here with us today. Mr. Evan Weber. Thank you so much for joining us. How are you?

Speaker 3:

I'm good. Thanks for having me very excited.

Speaker 2:

It's incredible to have you on this podcast today. Um, you are one of the most highly experienced and effective digital marketers that I have known in the affiliate management space. You've been around as long as what I have almost more than two decades, uh, during this hustle and building up brands, um, you know, and experience advertising, which is your own agency that you started in 2007. Um, and it's just amazing that you are willing to come on this podcast and share with our audience here in the UK, all of the value bombs that you're going to be giving us this week. So tell us a little bit, let's start the journey with how you actually got into affiliate program management and affiliate marketing, because I think that's always the best place to start.

Speaker 3:

Sure, sure. Uh, it was at my, uh, my previous company that I was@wascalleddentalplans.com. Um, we, uh, I joined them in 2002 after doing some of my own internet ventures prior to that in the late nineties, uh, had a free auction site and I had some other e-commerce ventures going on, but, uh, decided to join a startup. And it was at that startup that we launched our affiliate program. Um, pretty early on, I would say like 2003 ish, you know, 2000, 2003. Um, we, you know, we joined CJ, we joined a couple of other networks that I don't think are around anymore, but, um, we, we built our own in-house affiliate tracker. Okay. In our, in our backend, we basically built our own, you know, coded our own affiliate tracking, uh, program that we, and then we started reaching out. We started, you know, prospecting affiliates and publishers and growing it. Um, so I was there for five and a half years. And through that experience grew it to over 15,000 total in-house affiliates, over 4,000 individual producers that are produced at least one sale, uh, in the life that they're, you know, in there, uh, since they joined. And, um, yeah, we had, you know, a big CJ account. We had other networks going as well. We had the in-house program, so it was a pretty well developed affiliate program. Um, back then for the types of affiliates that were around back then, we could, we, we did a lot of cultivating, um, you know, what I, what I lovingly call nobody's into somebody, um, which is, um, working with bloggers webmasters and a lot of webmasters back then and bloggers. Um, and we would, you know, had dental sites, had, you know, sites about getting your teeth, fixed, dental insurance, dental coverage, the things, you know, um, we would recruit them as affiliates. Uh, over time we built what we called our work at home program, which was before its time. Um, we had, uh, a B2B program that had an affiliate aspect to it literally had three or four different prongs to it, our, our affiliate strategy, uh, touching completely different channels. And within there we grow each one out. So yeah, when I left there, I was, it was a roaring, um, you know, engine, uh, but, but like anything, it has to be maintained and it has to be revved occasionally, if not frequently, in order to maintain its power and force and deliver the same results had had previously. So I can't speak to what continued, you know what I mean? Um, but what I know to be the fact is you can have a lot of affiliates and even a lot of producers, but if you don't churn them and churn the butter, meaning not, not get rid of them, but if you don't, um, yeah, nurture, inspire, motivate them properly and build a relationship. They're not going to continue producing, um, as well as you always need to be going out and getting new ones, um, prospecting new affiliates and publishers to replace the ones that are dropping off because ultimately some will drop. So that's what, that was the process that we built up there while I was there. So then I was able to get leave there in 2007 and go and do this for other companies, because I knew, I knew how to work with affiliates. I knew how to recruit them. I knew how to motivate them. I knew how to make them happy with a great conversion rate. And

Speaker 2:

It's kind of a science. And it's something that I do want to talk about because the most common things that we get brought to our table when we have clients that ask us to help them with their affiliate program is to fix broken strategy. Okay. Because that's why our program doesn't work. So today I wanted to talk a little bit more and dig a little bit deeper with you because this is your area of expertise, but I wanted to talk about the partner participation and partner discovery section of running an affiliate program. And then talk a little bit more, um, a little bit later in this podcast about the whole activation piece, which is what you've just explained. Um, a lot of the people listening to this podcast have either launched programs and have stagnated or they've launched programs, and they've scaled it to as far as what they can get them. They're looking for new opportunities to expand. So partner discovery and partner participation is a really big part of that. So can you talk us through some of the strategies and, and things that you've done that, um, really help programs to engage with their partners more effectively?

Speaker 3:

So, so there are, in my opinion, you know, defined processes that need to be in place for managing and working with affiliates and publishers from the time they stepped through the door, right at the time they sign up for your affiliate program, they apply, whether you reach out to them and they accept the, you know, fill out the application or they come to you, they find you, they apply and you screen them. Um, they should be screened heavily screened and look at their website, evaluate what they're doing and try to get them on the phone. Um, one of the strategies we use is to call every in-house affiliate that applies, call them off the phone. Hi, how are you? And just talk all that, talk about, you know, what you had planned to do with us. And we'd like to, you know, work with you more closely and build a wonderful relationship together. Um, and that's that

Speaker 2:

Simple tactic is actually often ignored because we live in a virtual world and we live with, you know, Skype and Slack and zoom and everything else, but actually making that human contact is the first real impression that an affiliate gets about your program. So skipping that point and maybe taking the lazy affiliate managers way out by sending an automated email is something that's become quite common in programs. And actually it's something that is so simple to do. And so easy to kind of master.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, there's, you know, sometimes you do get their phone number upfront. Sometimes you have an in-house signup and in-house program, but you should always ask for their phone number so you can vet them and you can actually, that's how you discover fraudulent potential publishers. It is by doing that. And that's the whole reason that I, you know, that we came up with the idea at my previous company to call them all right. Um, and to just see who they were, what they wanted to do, and we have the staff to do it. So by all means, um, come to find out it was a great way to build the relationship a great way to kick it off, off completely the thing to do, um, in building the relationship, you know, cause Mo the vast majority of them were legit. They weren't, you know, potential fraudsters, so to speak. And it was just a great process to have. If you couldn't reach them, then they don't get approved. Period. I'm story, send them a follow-up email say, Hey, we tried to call you, left you a, give us a call so we can meet each other. And then we'll approve your application that was on the in-house program. Cause we didn't want to get, you know, hammered with fraud potentially from a publisher. So, and we won. So that was the impetus for the process. And then it became completely the thing to do to build a relationship. It was a great idea. Um, and on the networks, you don't always get their phone number. So what you do there is once you approve them or even send them an offer on some networks, if you send them an offer, you get their email and name, you can send them a followup and say, Hey, we sent you an offer. This is what the publisher manager should be doing. We sent you an offer, Hey, how about setting up a phone call or zoom with us? What's your number love to set up a call or a zoom. And nowadays it's all about setting up the zoom. The video conference is even better because now you can see the publishers. I mean, it's amazing, right? So,

Speaker 2:

And, and this is kind of an art industry and the gaming industry. Um, this is kind of what events are for. We go to events to go and meet our publishers and actually get a sense for them because it's a little bit more secretive in our space, but even still with retail programs today, you know, with all the automation that the networks have plugged in there, isn't that human contact right at the start, which is something that's incredibly important for newer affiliate managers coming in to actually realize. So we've spoken a little bit about the partner kind of participation, but, and, and, you know, you've given a really good, valuable, valuable I'm here in terms of, you know, making human contact as quickly as possible.

Speaker 3:

Wait, talk about messaging real quick. Cause because there's, one-off sending of emails, personalized messages to communicate on. There's a lot of that needs to be done. And then there's the mass messaging, the mass personalized messaging that like setting an affiliate newsletter, publisher newsletter, that's done with mass mass messaging. And then there's the personalized one-off messages that needs to be sent emails and Skypes or wherever you have them connected, WhatsApp, whatever the case may be, wherever you're connected to your publishers and affiliates, you should be messaging them wherever they like to be. Whether it's text, Skype, phone, whatever, um, LinkedIn, I don't care where it is and you shouldn't be, you know, not using any of those or potentially all of them. So with in this day and age, you know, especially with digital marketing and, you know, there are no boundaries with messaging in my opinion. Um, so you re my, my approach is the 24 seven approach, but that's not everyone's approach. I'm not going to say every affiliate manager will live by that. I think they should. That's, what's worked for me. And what I know, because you might have someone overseas, you might have someone on the weekend that wants to get on your project. They need to be approved. So they shouldn't have to wait until Monday. But, you know, that's how I believe in running an affiliate program, not every company will subscribe now frequency. So frequency is always the key to getting uptake and participation levels up. Yeah. So weekly, weekly publisher newsletters and one-off emails all throughout the month strategically let's contact the top 50 producers and offer them a higher commission. If they can increase their sales, let's contact the top hundred publishers that are producing clicks, but no sales yet, and, and try to work with them and see if we can con convert their, you know, sales into, into, uh, their clicks, into sales, more readily with conversion tactics and a different promo code, a different landing page. So there's strategic ways to reach out to publishers directly with one-off emails. And then there's mass messaging of the whole whole, you know, everyone in the base on a free, I recommend weekly, weekly messaging on. The other thing is that, and I have another saying that affiliate marketing is promotion driven, meaning every affiliate and publisher likes a promotion or a coupon, you know, um, so that you need to be proliferating them out there on a frequent basis. If you, if you do coupons, if you don't, then it's not applicable

Speaker 2:

For like promotions on products. And, uh, you know, like, uh, players, uh, you know, times of the year, like today, you know, some Patrick's day or whatever the case may be. It's still information that should be shared with your partners.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Every, I have another saying, every holiday is another reason to run a promotion. So she on your site, your affiliates, um, and yeah, messaging frequency, but, but you have to do it properly. You have to do it with a lot of tax. A lot of friendliness, a lot of helpfulness, most affiliate managers don't do the friendliness thing. Well, enough, they're not, you have to be, Oh, this is what I was going to say. You have to be overly outgoing. This is my saying, you have to be overly outgoing in order to get any response, even a little bit overly, overly outgoing, right. Have a great day. Let us know if you want to get on the phone, I'd love to help you analyze your site, give you some tips, some feedback, but see, not every publisher managers capable of imparting that with like a site feedback side analysis, giving them tips on how to be a better digital marketer. Um, I can, and people I work with can, but, uh, every publisher manager is that another, we talked about this last time, the level of their abilities of digital marketing, how to work with HTML, how to build sites, how to publish content. You know, there's not, you know how to do social media. There aren't too many skillsets, but you know, publisher managers should be honing their honing, their digital marketing skillsets. So they can work with the publishers and not just look at them as a means to an end, but look, look at them as someone they could potentially help become, do better at what they do.

Speaker 2:

I mean, that's the one thing that I do agree with you on, you know, having spent two decades in this industry, this job is not a job that you learn. One time only, it's a job that continues to evolve because the strategies and the tactics and the channels that affiliates are using to drive traffic change constantly, and, you know, looking at how you run your program, how you onboard your partners, you know, the, the tactics and the steps that you put in place to prevent fraud, uh, you know, um, poor margins, all of the things that happened with broken affiliate programs, other things that we've had to learn over time, you know, that we've, we've failed at, in order to make better. So for new people coming into the industry, it's important that we share these stories because it managers need to learn by our mistakes. If that makes sense.

Speaker 3:

Uh, it's really hard for a new publisher manager to really learn that history though. You know, uh, it would seem like a daunting task to really understand the evolution, what processes needed to be in place. Now, if they went to a company where that had great processes in place, they could just plug themselves in and, and, you know, then they, the continuing education would it have to, you know, learn about social media and affiliate marketing and SEO and media buying and the type of topics that might pertain to their publisher base. So whether they would do that or not highly questionable, um, but we could, we could ensure we can, you know, let them know they should. We, you know, um, things right.

Speaker 2:

It should be mandatory. Some sort of, I mean, training and basic media buying skills should be mandated mandatory for any affiliate manager coming into the role because a lot of people come in from the sales side, they're really confident and they're good at, you know, building relationships, but they don't actually understand the theory and the, the kind of science behind it behind what we do, um, to make an affiliate program grow

Speaker 3:

Well, the, the reality of it is, you know, the people that get hired as publisher managers are really intended to go find new ones, right? So they're scouring around, they're creeping around, they're hustling around trying to find networks and publishers and affiliates to work with. And, you know, as long as they can find them, it's fine. It's all good. Um, that's because that's what they've been tasked with. Right? Then you might have some people that are tasked with managing the current, the current base of publishers, so different, different usages, you know, utilizations of different people's skillsets. A newer person could go around and scour around and try to do recruiting and reaching out, reaching out, reaching out, you know, till they're blue in the face, that's what they should be doing. And then you have people and then there's people that could be doing both. But to be honest, you know, those are specializations. You, you've got publisher managers that are of the current PR, and then you got outreach people that reach out recruiters. That's what, that's how we handle it. Um, and, um, and I tell companies this all the time, you know, we do, we do the recruiting, the heavy lifting, and you can do the hardcore publisher relationship building, which is getting on the phone, but, but we'll get on the phone also and do like a three-way call the client, the agency, the publisher, we'll jump on a video call and it's amazing, right? It always goes well, does that mean it's going to transpire into a whole bunch of sales, not necessarily now in the gaming, um, in the gaming community, you know, listen, if a publisher wants to work with, uh, with, uh, with, uh, an advertiser or they should be willing to get on a call or a video, cause why wouldn't they, what are they hiding? What are they hiding? You know what I mean? They hide it. That's a way to prevent fraud in my opinion know. So, you know, and not even have to deal with it.

Speaker 2:

I mean, we've had a lot of legacy problems with, you know, bad traffic. I mean, you name it, it's all happened. And, and Dan and I industry, but most of those problems come down to bad affiliate management rather than, you know.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. They, they let anyone through basically and let anyone through, they let their traffic through, uh, they rack up a bunch of commissions. They hopefully didn't pay them, but sometimes they pay them. And then the company realizes a few weeks later that those were all bad sales. They're all, you know, that I can't tell you how many times I've seen that over the years.

Speaker 2:

So even, even, I mean, that's, that's the crux of the matter when you run an affiliate program, it texts investment. And even if you are running your strategy through a network, which is usually considered to be more protected, um, you know, you don't have so much risk because the network is already vetting the publishers before that.

Speaker 3:

No, they're not though. They're not though. That's a flawed premise in itself. They don't let the publishers, some networks do some that just do the ones that are really manicured and really, you know, um, tight with the, with the application process. But, but the majority of them don't scream their publishers at all. They have, they allow whatever's going to transpire, transpire and kick them out later. Yeah. So that's fine.

Speaker 2:

I need to be aware of, as, as a new affiliate manager, don't always look at networks for your traffic sources because unless you can see inside and actually bet all of your publishers, there's still a risk associated to that.

Speaker 3:

There's a risk when you can vet them even. Um, but it's less, it's far less w when you can fit them, there's the risk is a lot higher, is much higher. And so you have to have contractual things in place that say, we don't, we don't want incentivized traffic. We don't want this type. We don't want that type. These are the only types of traffic we'll accept. And if they don't, and this is the quality metrics that we need to hit, if we're not hitting these minimum quality metrics that publishers not getting paid at all, no, not for anything. Right. You have to have very strict in my opinion, very strict contractual rules in place with these networks where there's no transparency in order to even work with them. But lot, most people, a lot of people know that that work with them, but some people don't, like you said, newer people in the industry saying, Oh, I can put my offer at a hundred networks and it'll do a whole bunch of volumes, but what will come with that? It's, that's a huge gamble. If you dress a huge, you know, fraught with your opening Pandora's box.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the worst strategies and tactics that you've seen in your time as earnest agency. Talk, talk us through some of the big, no no-nos that are happening on program strategies that you've seen in your time

Speaker 3:

Program says no. I mean, I think it's, it's just, you know, I'm not personally managing the publishers, not sending frequent enough messaging. I would say not sending frequent enough messaging is, is probably number one on the list, uh, and, and sending it well, sending it very friendly, helpful, and facilitating it. In my opinion, publishers should be spoonfed, right? Like little babies and their hand hand, I called spoonfeeding and handholding. That's what you should do when your new publishers come on board, you need to get them, whatever they need not see them as just an entity that see them as like someone you really want to build a relationship with, not just send the links to you, do need to send them the links, but you need to see what they need if they want to get on the phone. If they want to say hello and become friends, I believe in becoming friends with all your affiliates. So I'm just going to just flat out, put it out there, you know,

Speaker 2:

Did you keep your friends close and your affiliate's even closer, but also there's that old, that old school teaching, you know, that 80 20 rule that everybody bandies about, which I think is a load of rubbish. And I'm just going to put that out here on my podcast. I do not believe in the 80 20 rule of an air program management, and most people are spending so much of their time on the top 20 affiliates that I suppose if you're driving 80% of the revenue that they're missing, this concept that you've just said where you need to get to know the new people that are coming in at the bottom of the funnel so that you can nurture them and grow them and actually expand your program because it doesn't rely only on the top 20 or 50 publishers in your program, like your whole premise for growing,

Speaker 3:

Correct. You, you that's been one of the biggest issues with agencies. OEM's in-house affiliate managers, even the company itself on the corporate level will tell their people only focus on the top people. Can you imagine, um, now what I've, what I've seen and what I've demonstrated myself over and over again, especially going back to my last company was you can have 500 people producing one sale a year that's 500 extra sales a year that's that's no nothing, right? So

Speaker 2:

To make that too, it's very little compared to the apathetic texts.

Speaker 3:

Then you have to get them to, to right. Then you have to get them to too. And that, so that's another great aspect of affiliate management bucketing, right? You put them, you don't just manage the top producers. You put them in buckets. The top producers might be one bucket. The coupon publishers might be one, the content publishers, the email publishers, the technology publishers, or affiliates, you know, the people that are producing clicks and no sales, the people that are not active at all yet. So you bucket you bucketize, if that's even a word, all the different groups of affiliates, like segment, basically bucketing you segment. And then, and then you can strategize on each group on how to increase their participation or production.

Speaker 2:

Not often operators, merchants, you know, the advertiser, whatever you want to call them. And we do use a lot of jargon terminology on our podcasts. I will explain all of this in the, in the blood that comes with it. Often they will segment their program by top affiliates, affiliates that are new. So like under six months old, and then also segment by geographical region. So we're talking about a lot of different ways to strategize your business. Now, operators and merchants and advertisers do so much detail on this for their customers when they're segmenting their customers, they forget to segment their affiliates in the same way, and then communicate with their affiliates the same way. So everything that you do on the, on the player or customer front, you should be doing in your program as well too, to actually manage your database and publishers. And I think that's a very important point that, yeah,

Speaker 3:

That's, that's a very important point. And, and along those same lines, I, I call affiliate programs, your Salesforce on the internet, um, your Salesforce. So, so what would you do to motivate if you had a sales team on the street going door to door? Well, they wouldn't be doing that now necessarily, but, um, you know, out there locally marketing, you know, companies have this, they have salespeople, right? So you should look at your affiliates as your salespeople. And, um, and also also they need to know the company, but see if it was a gaming company, they may not have this, you know, company news. They may, you know, we just acquired this site. We just built this site. You know, there's stuff that could be publishers should always be kept abreast of the company news, the latest with the company. And a lot of, a lot of that isn't done that. That's no one does that. You know, very few, very few do that. Um, so why that's important is you have to educate your, what the company does, not just say there's 20% off coupon and here's the link and here's the banners, but say, this is how we do what we do. These are the new products we just hired this person. I mean, really communicate what the company is doing to your affiliates. So they know what the hell your company does, that that can old,

Speaker 2:

Right? I mean, absolutely dam, publisher, affiliate managers often forget that, that publishers working with 10 other companies to 20 other comms, 50, a hundred, however many, depending on what kind of site they run, how are supposed to keep abreast of all of this stuff, unless you feed it to them.

Speaker 3:

Well, you have to, that's brings up another really good aspect is just staying in their consciousness, which is, goes back to messaging and building the relationship. So a publisher affiliate is always going to do for who is putting in the work for them. That's a very important concept. It does come down to money. At the end of the day, the commission is being earned on the traffic. They're sending, you have to have a really strong conversion rate for your affiliate traffic. If otherwise you'll lose out to a competitor. So you have to constantly improve your CRO, your conversion optimization on the affiliate landing page, um, and give your affiliates a fighting chance. And then you have to back it up with a lot of relationship building, a lot of phone calls, a lot of emails, a lot of personalization there. And that, that, that combination should ensure that that affiliate or publisher doesn't ever leave, continues to grow the relationship, make more money, offer them, motivate them with more money. If they can produce more. These are the things that will gain traction, quote unquote, um, and keep people engaged on board. So you can then go get new people and then grow it like that because, and that segues nicely into recruiting. Um, but you definitely have to put in a lot of great processes and people power into managing the current relationships with affiliates, as well as going out and finding new ones simultaneously.

Speaker 2:

And this is really the point that gets made. You know, when, when people are running affiliate programs in house that maybe don't have the expertise, they have young inexperienced teams, and then they wonder why their program isn't working. This is the work that goes into the background of building a program. It does not build overnight. It takes hours and hours of dedication and time and expertise in terms of selling in terms of, you know, media buying commercials, optimizing campaigns, figuring out where you can, you know, fix those pain points, meet those objectives of the, of the publisher to, to prefer, to promote your program over everybody. Else's, it's a constant battle, a constant journey that needs to be invested in, in order for an affiliate program to grow too often. People think that if other programs I'm building it and then they're going to come and it never happened.

Speaker 3:

They don't, they don't the only, the only they, they, they perceive to grow on their own to the extent that you connect some coupon and browser extension publishers in there, and they capitalize off the website's traffic. So, but that's not where the beauty or the power, in my opinion of affiliate marketing really lies, utilize it in the multitude of individuals out there, publishers and affiliates and technologies that, and companies that you can partner with on a reciprocal basis would call reciprocal partnership marketing, where you, two companies promote each other as an affiliate noncompeting companies and, um, you know, drive revenue for each other and go find a hundred of those. And you'll never need to question what your affiliate program is doing. Again, even if you have five, 10, it would drive a tremendous amount of revenue. That's a very under utilized, um, that's partnership marketing, which they, you know, are talking about nowadays a lot out there. And it's finally getting its due, but the company, the company affiliate marketing play is gold.

Speaker 2:

Okay. Let's get down to the rapid fire questions to kind of round off our podcast today. So the one thing that I want to ask you is what do you think the future of affiliate marketing is going to look like? Affiliate, marketing, partner, marketing, whatever you want to call it, what do you think, where do you think we're headed?

Speaker 3:

Well, it's just been a constant expansion, you know, um, technology affiliates, um, like, uh, site tools and widgets that you can pay as an affiliate and they provide like, um, uh, what's, what's a good one. Um, ad shoppers, it's like an email retargeting play, and then they're engage, um, engage tack with like a product suggestion widget, and they do it on an affiliate basis. You know, there's things like that. Um, I like a lot, those were more of those will come on. I think more mobile, mobile, mobile stuff will still come on. As mobile apps are looking to monetize through affiliate links. Um, I think that will continue to grow, uh, the influencer play. We'll, we'll continue to grow at a, you know, probably a relatively slow pace, but, you know, steady, steady, slow pace, which is fine because most channels, you know, sub channels that affiliate marketing grew at a steady, slow pace over time, they kind of got added on, right? So that's just another, you know, sub channel of affiliate marketing that a company can grow out with influencers as affiliates or paid, you know, influencers, they use their content in their own ads, things like that. So again, you know, you work with an influencer partially as an affiliate, partially as a, you know, a content creator you're paying and you're using in your own ads. So you just have to work. Every relationship could be maximized if you tried hard enough. Um, and, and the company's open-minded Oh, back to your, um, investing in your affiliate program, most companies, they don't want to, I tell you re looking on my articles, you know, um, about how to grow an affiliate program. And they all mentioned the fact that companies need to invest in their affiliate program, need to invest in growing it with people, bringing in people, hiring the right agencies, the right outreach service, the right things, you know, uh, tools, you know, like I'm launching one called publisher finders.com, there's publisher discovery out there using all the best databases of publishers, blog, databases, you know, things like that, going through there and suddenly sending a whole bunch of well-written outreach emails and putting people on just recruiting outside of the networks. There's, there's recruiting on the networks, then there's, then there's off network recruiting, all of which needs to be going on simultaneously in an ideal situation.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So a lot of growth, a lot of diversification, a lot more, uh, resource intensive in terms of getting to know your publishers. Um, what do you think, do you think networks will continue to add value? Or do you think that programs are going to start to move things more in-house so that they can control that?

Speaker 3:

What a great question it'll continue to be both. Um, it will continue to be both because the technology behind affiliate tracking has, it has seemingly evolved a lot in the last few years, um, networks like impact, um, partner eyes, um, um, in the U S so this is what I'm rattling off. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

That more or less the same here, um, income access and that refer.

Speaker 3:

Right, right. There's, there's more, there are more partner platforms to do this on, to do this through, to, to facilitate it. So just because of that, more companies are going to do the in-house thing more, more and more in my opinion, but they'll run it simultaneous to the networks because they don't have the networks publishers necessarily. Um, now sometimes they'll go and take them and bring them in-house nod, nod, wink, wink, say more. Um, and, um, but that could never be, you know, if, if the network is that's all they're good for anyway, then that wasn't a very good network anyway. So, um, there will be some networks like CJ, in my opinion. Uh, but there are others that have publishers you'll never be able to have without access to it. And then there's growing the in-house accounts, you know, whatever tracking platform you may use in house tracking platform, or, you know, that type thing. So I think there'll be they'll they'll can both continue to be done simultaneously, but it depends on the company and what their needs are and what the, the strategy is going to be for some companies just being on one network can be they're everything right? And it's very convenient. Some companies want far more diversification of, they want in-house, they want multiple networks. They want CPA networks, you know, so different, um, you know, companies, different strategies.

Speaker 2:

So thank you very much for sharing your knowledge, share, coming on board and talking about how to grow successful affiliate programs, which is what everybody wants to do. Um, and thank you for giving us your insight on where you think affiliate marketing is headed.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for having me. It was so much fun. Let's do it again sometime soon.

Speaker 2:

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 subscribe to the podcast channel that way. You'll never miss another insightful episode. She, and then next week for more digital marketing insights and traffic driving,

Speaker 1:

[inaudible].