Proven Podcast - Profit With Affiliate Marketing - Lee-Ann Johnstone

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

In this episode, Charles sits down with Lee-Ann Johnstone of Affiverse Media, a seasoned affiliate marketing expert with over 25 years of experience in the industry. Lee-Ann shares her invaluable insights on navigating the complex world of affiliate marketing and offers practical advice for businesses looking to scale their affiliate programs. Discover the key differences between affiliate marketing and paid advertising, and learn why affiliate marketing is a powerful long-term strategy for sustainable growth. Lee-Ann breaks down the essential questions to ask before launching an affiliate program and reveals the critical components of a successful affiliate marketing campaign. Throughout the episode, Charles and Lee-Ann dive deep into the technical aspects of affiliate marketing, exploring the various tools and platforms available to businesses. Lee-Ann provides guidance on choosing the right affiliate marketing solution based on your business's unique needs and budget. Gain valuable insights into the common mistakes even experienced affiliate marketers make and learn how to avoid them. Lee-Ann shares her proven 5-step flywheel for perpetuating success in affiliate marketing, offering a simple yet effective framework for businesses to follow. Whether you're a business owner looking to scale your affiliate program or an experienced affiliate marketer seeking to enhance your skills, this episode is packed with actionable advice and expert guidance. Tune in to discover how you can leverage the power of affiliate marketing to drive long-term, sustainable growth for your business. Key Takeaways: Uncover the little-known advantages of a marketing strategy that can outperform paid advertising in the long run Learn the crucial steps you must take before embarking on a campaign that could make or break your business Discover the surprising pitfalls that trip up even seasoned marketers, and find out how to steer clear of them Head over to https://provenpodcast.com/  to download your exclusive companion guide, designed to guide you step-by-step in implementing the strategies revealed in this episode. Key Points: 0:24 What is affiliate marketing? 3:37 When is affiliate marketing right? 5:42 Questions before starting 12:02 Consideration phase leverage 13:44 Leveraging network for trust 23:55 Profitable affiliate programs 32:44 Affiliate managers as funds managers 36:08 Front end website visibility 37:40 Affiliate onboarding experience 39:44 Loyalty and retention 48:56 Long-term agency relationships 50:28 Authentic agency partnerships 52:21 Constantly evolving industry

Today's guest, Leanne Johnson, built a career in affiliate marketing, proven there is a way you can make money in this game, but it's far more complex than most people realize, and without very specific tools and strategies. Today, she shares them all, unfiltered, direct, and for some of you, the terrifying truth behind those false hopes and Instagram ads. The show starts that. I am excited to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me, Charles. I can't believe I'm on the other end of your mic. Super excited. It's amazing. We finally got to do it. So one of the reasons I brought you on is you are in a very simple. We're people who don't bullshit. We want to get directly to the point.

When it comes to these things, we don't want to flop. We hate people who scam. But before we get into all of that, the hell is affiliate marketing? I know you're the queen of it. We've already just talked about your power. The hell is it. All right. So what's affiliate marketing?

Very simply, it is a stream of digital marketing, like paid media, like SEO, like pay per click, where you are actually using other people, other people's websites, assets, mobile apps, whatever, whichever way they drive traffic to leverage your own sales. So I'm going to work with you, Charles, because you've got a website that has a whole bunch of customers that buy products that I sell. And we're going to make a partnership. And every time you send me a customer from your ecosystem platform, Instagram page,

whatever it is that you are curating this audience to, I'm going to pay your commission, a percentage of whatever that person purchases on my site. So let's say, for example, you've got a book in the background. You've got an Instagram community all about the book that you've written. And one of the things that they want to purchase is a secondary book that complements the book, you know, takes into the next level in their journey after they've read yours. You'd send all of those customers to me. They'd purchase on my website and you'd get a percentage of all of the sales that I've made.

So in the most simplest form, it's a referral agreement, using other people's traffic. So you're renting other people's traffic and every time a purchase happens, you're paying them for the privilege of having that brand space or having that customer come into your ecosystem and capture that lead.

And there's many different ways to monetize this referral partnership from a cost per click, a cost per acquired customer, a cost per lead, or even a percentage of whatever that customer spends, which is typical for kind of retail clients. And it's really a fun place to be. because it's pay on performance.

You only pay for the sale of the good, but you leverage all of the branding and the marketing and the promotion that happens behind that at the start. So for me, it's kind of better than paid media because you've got to put the money behind the paid media before the campaign starts. This way the campaign starts and you put the money down when the sale happens.

What I love about it is there's so many things when it comes to affiliate marketing, where like, hey, go to this website, type in these three things and magically you're an affiliate marketing and magically money is going to come out of their toilets and it's going to make your rich forever. And you and I both know it, that's complete trash. And one of the reasons I want to bring you on here is like, listen, there's a lot of potholes. There's a lot of things that you need to know from when to do it, how to do it, what tech to do it,

who to do it with, how to set up the relationship, all these things that people just completely don't understand. They're like, hey, I want to make sushi. So I just go buy rice. I'm like, oh, God. No, there's so much more that you need to know in building that final output. So I wanted to have you come on and really just say, hey, how are you going to scale whatever it is that you're going to do with affiliate marketing for your individual product, here are a bunch of the potholes, here's what you're going to run into, here are some of the

stakes, and then ultimately we'll get to what we think you should be doing, which you would, I both agree on that already. It's a really simple idea. So when it comes in and there's... Yeah, I was going to say, let's start at the beginning because there's quite a lot that you unpack there and I don't want to kind of like news tech spread, but the first thing is maybe deciding when is affiliate marketing right for you? Because I think a lot of people, they do hear the hype, they do see all the TikToks, they do see the YouTube videos and everything else that's out there on the interweb about how easy it is to become affiliates, how easy it is to make money in an affiliate program. And I think the first thing is to just tell the honest truth that that's not

the case. It can be incredibly complex. It can be costly if you don't know what you're doing. But I think the first step is to figure out is an affiliate program right for me. So figuring out where you are in your business journey and what it is that you're trying to achieve, like what is your why? Are you trying to get more customers? Are you trying to borrow brand awareness for your business? Are you trying to just leverage like business to business partnerships where you work with other companies that are similar to you and you want to be able to do a referral agreement? Having that clear in your head first will tell you what road you go down to actually create an affiliate program for you or whether is the right time to give you the ROI that you need versus perhaps doing a pay campaign on Facebook, for example, or any other. you know, a native advertising network.

So I think what you need to think about first is where are you in your business journey? What's the investment that you can make? Because the other thing to consider about affiliate marketing is that it's not pay, you know, you pay your money, you start getting your traffic. You're working with other companies, other humans, other entrepreneurs. Their timelines are not always your own. So to get the campaign started, to get the technical integrations put into place to track all of this and to actually compensate people for the sales that they're bringing you,

there's a timeline in place for that. So understanding where you are on your business journey, understanding what other marketing channels you're currently leveraging and whether affiliate is the right time for you to get it to kind of extend that. And then understanding the price points and the kind of budgeting that's going to be required in order to launch a program, because whilst you pay your affiliates on performance when they deliver traffic, there are upfront and costs that you need to account for as well. So I think let's start with when is the right time. So I think really the right time.

What are the questions that before you start everything, before you do an outreach to say, hey, I'm going to go to the website. What are like the five or six questions? I need to, as a business owner, have these bulletproof. I need to know what they are. Do you have those that you kind of, when you work with your clients and you help and you've been coaching people

and you've been doing something here, 26 years, I think, at this point. You know, what are the questions that you're like, hey, these are the ones. Answer these first. Before you even bothered me, these answer these five or six. So the first thing is, have you got a product that you can pay a reasonable amount of commission on? So, for example, if your product is $5, nobody's going to really be able to drive eyeballs to your website for 20p. Okay? So is your product robust enough to pay a reasonable amount of money

for a new customer being sent to you? And you would have that understanding of that if you had done a little bit of paid media in your business, because you'd know more or less what the price budget is that you're acquiring a customer for. Now, there are many different ways to commercial, a referral agreement. So, you know, I would say if there's anything from like five pounds or $5 for a lead is more or less average.

So if you can afford to pay $5 for a lead for a smaller product and up to $1,000, $2,000 for whatever it is that you're selling depending on whether it's a product or a service, then you're pretty much in the range of, being in a space where you could potentially open up an affiliate program and look at it. The second thing is do you have a budget? So do you have money in place to invest now for the long-term gains that an affiliate program is going to give you? Because if you've got, and the amount of money that you'd need to kind of put together or put aside to actually start

an affiliate program is anyway, depending on the infrastructure that you're going to use, anywhere between sort of 10, 20 grand to 50 grand. So if you don't have 10 to 50 grand just to invest in getting the infrastructure right for an affiliate program to actually launch it and start to track it and pay it and manage all of the administration and everything that needs to happen technically for the referrals to go between you and all of your partners, then this isn't the channel for you. I'd rather, if your budget is limited, said you should rather take that money and spend it on paid where you're going to get upfront income coming back in immediately. So timing as well is also important. How quickly do you want an affiliate program to actually start bearing ROI for you? Because

typically what happens with the setup of an affiliate program, and this is where we need to educate customers, is it takes anything between three and six weeks to actually just set that technical integration up? So is your website robust enough to actually integrate with the tracking solutions, whether it's a network or a SaaS product that you're going to be implementing in-house, and there are two, you know, different schools or thoughts as to which way you're going to run it? Is your infrastructure robust enough to actually accommodate all of that tracking? Because that's the first thing. Do you have the budget? That's the second thing. And thirdly, do you have the resources to actually manage all of those when it's live? Because you might think

you're only going to get 10 affiliates signing up to your program. What happens if you get 100? You know, if the product is robust, if the revenue is attractive and people start to go, hey, this is a great product and I want to promote it, how do you then leverage to support all of those partners in your program? And this could be things like customer support. You know, how do you answer things like I've lost my password, I can't log in, I don't know how to get my tracking link, I need a new banner. Have you got design, design, you know, or an agency that can help you with creating banners, content, all the things that your referral partners are going to need? So I think there's actually only three really. You are special sire, but I think it's three

to get you started. It's, is my infrastructure robust? Can my tech actually, you know, can my back end actually track all of this stuff? Do I have enough money to invest to actually get the infrastructure in place and have I got money to invest now for the long-term gains that an affiliate program brings me because it will take you anything between three to six weeks to actually just set up the tracking solution to enable you to actually house the affiliate program. It'll take you another sort of three to six months to actually outreach and sell the affiliate program into referral partners and get them onboarded and maybe another two, three weeks for them to then set the campaigns to live and then go.

So your first six months of investing in an affiliate program is really the cost base that you have to put up front to actually get the whole program started. So you could be funding that for, you know, 10 grand a month, for example. So anything between, let's say, 10 and 50 grand. There are cheaper options to launch into the affiliate space as well. If you've got a very simplistic program, just in one region, you know, maybe it's just one or two products that you're selling. So it really depends on what your business is and how complex the, the program has to be. And that's probably one of the reasons why we would say, if you are thinking about getting into an affiliate program, set up a call, set up a strategy call with an agency

and actually investigate what are the minimum parameters that you're going to need before you just go ahead and launch yourself onto a network, which is incredibly easy to do, by the way. I love that we did all that. One of the things you hit was paid advertising versus affiliate program. If you don't have the budget, don't go to affiliate program. That's not your niche. That's not your niche. That's not your job. Go over here.

Why would someone ever choose, because I've done a lot of paid advertising versus affiliate programming? Why would I choose affiliate versus paid? If someone's listening, it's going, okay, you just told me there's all this upfront. There's all this back end that I have to have set up. All these resources that need to be there. Why would I even do affiliate programming in this environment if paid is so much

easier? It is easier at the beginning, but it gets harder to scale. And you tap out on. certain communities that affiliates aren't even touching. So you're actually by extending your marketing plan from outside of just paid channels, cost per click, you know, Google keywords and paid media through social channels or in app or wherever you're going to be buying paid advertising, there's still customers that are being brought to you through lots of other different channels.

I mean, they say now that customers have anything up to a 26 point touch journey. So they're going to, you know, buy awareness and then consideration and then they purchase. Now, affiliates help you in all three of those categories. So whilst paid media might help you with branding and purchase, like the actual purchase model, what's happening in a consideration phase? So depending on the kind of product that you have, this is when you would leverage affiliates

because they can not only push your brand for nothing where they put your campaign live, they only get paid when they send your customers, but they can also help you at different touch points within their customer journey based on the content that they're creating. They can also help you leverage other social channels. So if all your money is invested in Facebook, for example, what are you going to do on Instagram?

You can leverage affiliates to actually help you grow that channel instead or use content creators or brand ambassadors and you can compensate them in different ways and still leverage those other channels into your marketing mix. So you wouldn't just do any one form of advertising to grow your business. You'd be doing a little bit of SEO on your own website to get direct traffic. You'd be doing a little bit of social media to talk to people about your products, your services. You'd be doing a little bit of pay-per-click advertising on strong keywords the customers are looking for you.

And affiliates is just another feather to that boat to expand your reach to customers that maybe you aren't able to touch with the finite budget that you have for immediate spend. I think what's great about that is the paid advertising gets a car rolling, but it doesn't have the other stuff that is so important in the psychology of itself. We talk about things like inherited trust. We talk about things like KLT, which is no liking trust, the idea that if I walk into a room and I go, I'm amazing, no one talks to me, no one buys me, it's not going to happen. But if Leanne walks in and no one knows who Leanne and she still says, hey, Charles is amazing, I automatically get this inherited trust. I'm like, oh, he must be amazing.

Affiliate programs have the ability to do that where you're leveraging a network, because remember your network is your net worth, paper click doesn't do that. You're just going to know that's going to buy for me. I'm great. Give me $1,000. Buy for me? That doesn't sustain. As you said, really well, you can't scale that. And this is about how you long-term scale it,

is you're building that relationship. Because if I bring you it into my network, and I'm like, hey, listen, yeah, Leanne, it's just, she's absolutely a queen of. She's the absolute goddess. You don't have to sell yourself anymore. It's done. And that's really what I love about the affiliate world is you're barring and leveraging that network that already has that trust buildup, that already has this idea.

So if you go on and you can leverage someone else's audience, That sale from 26 touch points drops down to a lot less. And that's why it's so much more important for affiliate marketing. Now, how money in the bank, as you were mentioning, it takes a little while. You've got to get that engine built. You got to have everything sustained. You've got it. It takes a little while.

So again, I think you said it really, really well. Do your paperclip. Get your money going. Do your paid advertisement. That's fine. And then if you actually want to scale this long term, you've got to get yourself in the affiliate space to actually hit those higher enough. And also, if you've got the kind of business where you've done exceptionally one in one

country where you are maybe based, but now you want to take your product into another country, leveraging affiliates in that country to actually do that without having to spend up front to test the market, to get customers on, to get testimonials. And it's a great way to actually expand your reach at a lower cost than paying for advertising in a country that you're not maybe familiar with, or that you don't understand the localization so. So affiliates play a really important role in not only brand reach and brand awareness, but also in terms of localizations. So, you know, they speak the local languages. They can talk about your

product in an authentic way or your service in an authentic way. And that's really what you're tapping into is the long-term authenticity and the long-term branding and brand reach that affiliates can bring you. And you're only paying for that when they deliver your customers. So you're getting that bit for free. And we're also getting to leverage their network and giving them something in return. You know, we talked about before we started recording, you have access to XYZ person. That XYZ person has, 50,000 people and it is now.

Well, if you set up an environment with XYZ person, you say, hey, I'm going to give you affiliate feedback of that. He's going to open up that now. And that's not something you're going to get through paid ads. You're getting that leverage trust. And leverage is a huge word when it comes to everything

in scaling that business, but especially when it comes with Philly. Now, we also talked about there's some tech behind it. And there's some things that people need to know tech-wise. Like, hey, what app should I use? What should I use canvas? Should I use this? What is the tech when someone goes?

in and they're going to do affiliate. They're like, listen, clearly this isn't just one website that I drop 50 bucks in and completely live my money. I need to go through what is the tack that I'm walking into? Okay, what are the tools that I should be using versus the ones? Oh, we shouldn't be used. So there's two schools of thoughts. And this is really going to be depending on your price, okay? Because in affiliate marketing, I always are liking it to when you're buying a house. Where you buy a house, you always want to buy the absolute best house in the best neighborhood. So even if it's the smallest house in the best neighborhood, that's what you can afford. That's what you're going to go for versus buying a huge house in a neighborhood that

maybe isn't so nice. Okay, so long term, you're going to think long term with affiliate marketing because it is a long term play. So there's two schools of thought to launching a program. You can either do everything in-house and use what we call a SaaS solution to track everything, where that is just an off-the-shelf solution that you can get. They wipe label it up for you. You plug it into your affiliate into your website backend and it tracks everything. But that SaaS solution will not do personalised customizations for you. So if you wanted to maybe, you know, they've got all the basics and basic features that pretty much everybody uses. But if you had a business that you wanted to compensate affiliates in a different way to the basic model of what the SaaS solution does,

then you'd need to start to do workarounds and you'd need to start to like find customizing and development and things like that. A SaaS solution is going to be a lot cheaper for you to plug in and go. So if you're doing a beta test, for example, and you're going, I'm not sure if it's a liaids or if I want to go all in. Just want to test something. There are so many great SaaS solutions that you can plug into to just test the waters quietly in the background and get your feelings out. As you like. There's loads. There's so many. But I mean, depending on what your business is, there would be different ones that I would recommend. So for e-commerce, there would be different solutions that are built specifically for e-commerce.

for B-to-B SaaS products, there would be certain solutions that are all. They all customize. It's kind of like shoes. Nike, Puma, Adidas, they all do the same thing. So SaaS is one way, but then you're going to have to do everything in an hour. So you're going to have to pay all of your affiliates yourself. You're going to have to run all of the customers' support for all the affiliates. You're going to have to design all of the creator for all of the affiliates.

You're going to have to, you know, upgrade your systems yourself because all they're giving you is the technical solution that sits between you and the partner, okay, and the reporting suite that happens, the tracking and the reporting. Slightly cheaper to launch, but where you're going to spend more money is on the recruitment to bring new partners in, to find them and bring them in, okay? So that's one way. You own all of your own relationships in that solution. There's no override fees or anything that you need to pay other than the technical

cost of the tracking solution. So it's like a subscription-based model. The other way to launch your program is to go into what we call an affiliate network. So it's the tracking solution plus access to all of the partners that they've already recruited into their platform. So you save a little bit of money on when you launch, going out and finding 100 affiliate partners to invite into your program because they already have a partnership platform that you can plug into.

Now, the problem with that is that not all of the partners in that network will be suitable for you because there's thousands of publishers in there. so maybe only 20 of those publishers are suitable for you, you're still going to have to do recruitment, but you've got a little buffer to get you started. Slightly more expensive, though. And out of all of the networks, they will have different things. Again, she's issues.

So A-WIN would be a specific retail platform. CJ would be a specific retail platform. Then you've got something like Cheriselle, which is very geographically focused into a certain region. So lots of different choices to make in terms of whether you go direct and you're going to do everything in-house and you've got the skill set in-house, developers, designers, resources, account managers to manage that, or whether you're going to leverage the benefits of an affiliate network to go into,

which will be slightly more expensive because you're getting all of these add-on services. And, you know, you still have to dictate your own strategy as well on top of that. So both of them are much of a muchness that's going to be down to price. There is no school of thought of one is right and one is wrong. It's what fits you at this point in your kind of. a customer journey into affiliate. It's interesting because having scaled businesses for a very long time, people will come to me like, hey, I'm a chef. I'm like, congratulations, you're a chef. Cool, I'm going to do

the accounting for my company. I'm sorry. What? I'm like, you're a chef. Don't do that. This is one of the things you and I share are very strong belief on. I think it was Ford. The Ford of Rockefeller, he talks about where he came in and got interviewed. And they said, hey, what is the, we're going to interview. We're finding out if you're really the genius guy. what is this circumference to the moon? And he reached over and he pressed it button and he was, hey, send Jeff in and Jeff, like, hey, Jeff, what's the discomfort to the moon? And Jeff said it. He's like, okay. And the interviewer was like, um, okay. And then he asked him another question. And they brought somebody else in and like, dude, you're cheating. They're not cheating.

I hire people smarter than me and I get out of their way. One of the things that's important when you're trying to scale anything ever. And this will, this is a universal thing that you'll hear a bazillion times. Hire the person who's smarter than you. Get out of their way. Don't try and do it on your own because you might save a couple of dollars, but it's either out of pocket or out hide and it's going to eat you alive longer. And that's why I think when you first brought up the conversation of paid versus affiliate is, okay, get the money to the bank, make sure that you can keep the lights on, and then play the long-term game, have someone else who already knows what they're doing

and do that. And it's one of the things when we first started talking about this of, okay, does this make sense? I love to have you on and all that. We hit very quickly, we're like, no, this is their act. There's a way that works, that's proven to work. Yes, people are going to be different parts of their lifestyle. their businesses and their life cycle of their businesses.

But it's like, this is what work. I'm not going to throw fluff up your butt. I'm not going to say this book is the ideal book. And let's get directly to what actually works. So I guess for me, that's really the question we have now. We know what affiliate marketing is. We understand the difference between paid and we understand the long term game. We understand there's these things.

If someone sat there, down your head, say, listen, I need this to work because my family has to pay their bill. What do you do? What are the things that you're like? This is what happened. This is what is the next step. Okay, so I think it's very important to just go back on what you said a little bit earlier. You wouldn't hire a doctor if you needed a dentist.

Okay, so there are digital marketing agencies out there that will tell you that they can run your affiliate program for you. But what you're getting down is very low-level water down account management support. And unfortunately, in the affiliate marketing industry, because it's such a complex channel, we need to know everything about everything, all different types of traffic sources, all different types of. of commercial negotiation. The price, like if you pay peanuts, you're going to get monkeys in this industry. That's unfortunately the truth. So if it's too cheap and it sounds too good,

it's probably not going to be great. Okay, you're not going to get the best results. So you're going to spend money, spend money, spend money and not actually see quantifiable results with that. Now, bear your mind that affiliate marketing does take time to ramp up because you're dealing with other humans. Their timelines are not your own. You've got all of these technical things that you need to get ready

and in place, you should start to see ROI on your investment within six to nine months. I mean, if we, I can do it in three to six months because I've been doing it for 25 years and I know exactly what trick is to pull. But if you are not seeing a return on investment within six to nine months, there is something fundamentally wrong with your own for the program and you need to get it fixed. What's a good ROI? I mean, you're up to there. What's a good RO1? Well, senior programs should be profitable in terms of if you look at all the expense, the cost of your tech, the cost of running it, the cost of your promotions that you're giving to affiliates to push, because you obviously have to deduct all of that off of the cost of the sale of goods,

plus the cost of the resources behind actually managing all of these publishers. But within 69 months, your program should, that initial investment that you put in place to actually get the program started should be paying back dividends and you should start to see the revenue line raise. So it's kind of like, have you ever heard of the Fibonacci sequence? Yeah. Where the Fibonacci sequence grows like this. Okay, and that's how an affiliate program grows.

So the first three to six months or three to nine months is really just the set-up cost in technical integration, the brand push, the sell, the launch and everything else to get you going. Then you start to mature in that and that's where you start to build the relationships, grow the scale, find which partners are actually bringing you the right value customers, tweak those to increase them a little bit more like you would with a paid media campaign. If you're running an ad campaign, you tweak it all the time, right? Same thing before a phoenix, except you're dealing with humans.

You're asking humans to do a thing. And so you really do need to start to see a result within six to nine months. And if you're not, then something's wrong with your program. Either you're not commercializing it correctly. You're on the wrong tech. You're overpaid because there are instances where I get clients who have got the roles, voice of technology when actually all they needed was the mini cooper. So they're spending all the money on the tech and not enough money on the promotions.

And that's why you need to really deal with an expert because you can burn a lot of money if you don't have the right strategy in place with this really. Same like you can burn a lot of money if you don't have the right strategy in place with the CEO. Same way you can burn money with paid media. So why would you go to a generalist when you actually need a specialist? And that takes me back to the why do you need, why would you go to a dentist who's also a doctor if you actually needed a doctor, a GP? So in affiliate marketing, in my experience, it has always been good to either get an initial upfront strategy session with an expert you can actually direct you and you're paying them to direct you. Then by all means take it in-house if you want to have a go at account managing and doing the kind of day-to-day stuff or hire an expert and get out of new way and let them just crack on with it and give them the budget and kind of sense check with them every month what you need them to do. So during that initial strategy session, what are the questions that someone should be asking?

When they go and they meet with someone who, again, you've got 25 plus years experience. What are some of the questions? And say, hey, these are what are the questions they should ask? Because most people don't even know what they don't know. So what are some questions you should expect, not only that you should be asking your potential affiliate individual that you're working with, but also that they should be asking of you. So you know, hey, this is probably a good person. Because in the IT world, we know there's some litemate tests.

when I showed on an IT company and we were interviewing somebody who was a database engine, we knew that there were certain questions that he had to ask me. There was just no way around it. They were good. If he didn't say certain things, I knew that he didn't know what to do it. And then vice versa. The biggest secret for those of you guys who are looking at hiring anyone in the IT space, hire the person who's annoyed.

When you're asking a question and they're annoyed that you're asking the question, that's the expert. He's like, oh, my God, you're asking about this again. There's a bonus there. the person who's annoyed and doesn't want to deal with you, that's the person you want to hire. Anyone who's trying to sell you, they're fluff, it's BS, don't hire that person. Hire the person who's actually annoyed. But back to the affiliate world, what questions should I be asking someone to?

And then what should they be asking me? So I wouldn't expect a client to ask me questions that validate that I can actually deliver and understand their product. So if I was the client, I'd be asking me, how will your team manage my program? What do you suggest that I go in-house or network and why? Always ask the and why, because I can give you any answer and how would you know that that's correct? You're not the expert I am. So always ask the quantification.

Like, why would I go in-house versus network? Why are you suggesting that? The other thing is also quantify what your budgets are up front, because if you come to me and you give me, it's kind of like an organogram, like a flow diagram. I start with a whole bunch of questions and each time you give me an answer goes, yes, no, and then down to another option, yes, no, and then down to an eventually re-arrive at a conclusion. And sometimes it takes me upwards of like half a day in a strategy session to figure out what is the best strap plan for this client because, and the other thing to also check about is,

does your agency or strategist or consultant or whoever it is that you're walking to, are they asking you about what you're doing in all of your other channels? Because if your agency strategist consultant is not interested in finding out what else you're doing in the other marketing channels, they're not the right partner for you. Because what I do is I consider what the client is doing in all of the other channels that they're working in and how do we best then leverage the affiliate program to augment everything else and improve everything else. So if they're spending money on link building and SEO, what am I going to do in their affiliate program to find partners that can do that for them for free? upfront so that they can reduce the SEO and spend budget and maybe plug it into paid media a little bit until we get the program up and running. So you've got to be looking at your strategy holistically across all of your digital channels. And if your agency that you're talking to is not asking you

about what's happening in the rest of your business, they're probably not experienced enough to take your program on. That would be the big red flag for me. Yeah, absolutely. You talked about in one of the things you were sharing before, are you a hunter or you're a guy? gather. And the reality is you got to be buff. You know, there's some people who want or the other, but you're ideally find someone who has the ability to play both worlds or at least have team members that can play both worlds because this isn't, hey, I'm going to teach a Facebook. This isn't, hey, we're doing SEO. This is, and again, I have so much more empathy for your world and the people who work in your world because I feel to, I'm like, oh my God,

that, that sucks. Because, you know, it's the difference between a doctor versus a vet, right? A doc becomes a doc in four years. A vet takes seven years because it has learned all these different anatomies versus one anatomy. When you talk to someone who's a proper affiliate marketer, they have to learn so much forever. It's a forever way. Actually, you know what?

That is the best analogy I've ever heard somebody say of what the skill set that an affiliate marketing needs to have because you are 100% correct. We are the vets of digital marketing. And we have to learn everything that goes on in every channel from influencer marketing to B2B marketing,

to SEO, PPC, paid advertising, because our partners work across all of those channels and bring us traffic from each. And that's one thing that, you know, I've spent 20 years kind of beating my drama about because more often than not, affiliate marketers have always been the people in the shroom room. Nobody really understands it. They don't really know how it works. Yet it is the only digital channel that is growing by double-digit figures year-on-year worldwide. So more money is being invested into the performance marketing slash affiliate channel by brands, by big advertisers around the world than any other digital channel at this point. And that number keeps growing.

And, you know, because we've got a recession, we're changing the way we spend our budgets. Because we had COVID, we were changing the ways we were spending our budgets. But honestly, this is the only digital channel that I've seen continue to grow in the last 20 years where budgets have continued to pour in because it is the most efficient. There's also huge psychology built in behind it. People don't understand this. When you're selling, people don't buy products or services. They buy stories, identities, and ways that of pain.

And they don't buy from complete strangers. They buy from people they know liking trust. And when you're just doing ads, when just the new thing that, hey, Instagram's new or Facebook's new or whatever that new thing is, that's not going to sustain you. You've got to have the psychology of selling behind it. So when I first walked into it, I was like, what that was affiliate marketing? And then I was like, oh, wait, the psychology made sense. to me like, this makes it. This is sustainable. This is going to give me long-term results versus what you have with people who do one sort of paid media. Sooner or later, that car

starts sputtering. That engine starts ticking out because you've already hit that well so many times. There's just nothing else. You've dried out that well versus so it is an affiliate environment. It's like, okay, which well do you want? Like, all of them. Like, okay, we have access to all of them. Let's decide what works right now based on your goals and having that strategy session and kind of going through there. So that's what I need to all of do behind. hiding. 100%. And affiliate managers are actually more than just practitioners. They are also funds managers. They need to know at any given point where do they spend the performance budget more or less. It's like marioneting the puppet strings all the time. Do I spend more on brand ambassadors at the

moment because we've got a new product that we want to launch to market or do I spend more on content and review-based sites because I need to increase my SEO rankings and build brand awareness and push my competitors out. Or do I spend more on affiliates that are doing paper thick because there's a whole bunch of long-tale keywords that all of a sudden people are searching for us for. So they're constantly having to move the budget in between all of these different types of referral partners

and figure out where is the ROI on the program as a whole on average. So it does become a little bit complex. And I'm not saying that that's what's going to happen at the beginning when you first launch in month one, two, three, and six. But when you get to months 24, you know, 48, and you're going into multiple regions and you've got multiple products and maybe launching multiple brands

within your affiliate program, that's going to start getting a little bit complex, and that's when you're going to want to have an expert on hand. If, and I don't think the intro, like, hey, if you've never done this before, there's going to be people listening to this who are affiliate mark. And they're like, hey, you would do this a long time. I'm never going to have access to Leah,

and how are we get access to Leah? What are the biggest mistakes, I guess? If I'm an experience of affiliate market, I've been doing this for five years, maybe 10 years max. What are the things that when they come to you and you're like, oh, God, what are you? Okay, sit down.

Let's pivot you around here. Okay, love, let me help you out here. What are like the major mistakes, someone who has experience as an affiliate marketer who is maybe working for an organization or doing it on their own, that you're just like, oh, God, please stop doing that. So what are the things that they run into? The complacency, and that's not a criticism. It's when you're working internally in your own business all the time,

you become a little bit side-blind. So often when we take on clients, we see that there's complacency and heavily reliance in just a few top publishers, which is never a good idea. So we call a program segmentation. Your program has to have a really good diverse mix of publishers because say, for example, Google changes the algorithm and you're heavily invested in SEO affiliates at the top of your program. Your numbers are going to go down overnight and how do you plug those numbers back up again? How do you maintain that stability? So there is complacency. in terms of not recruiting new talent in. There's forgetting about the long tale of publishers

that sometimes go dormant for whatever reason and just not understanding how to reactivate and re-infigurate those relationships because you're too worried about the top guys who are driving the bulk of your revenue. And then also simple things like not actually just marketing your program. Like the front page of your, or the shop front of your affiliate program

doesn't actually sell why affiliate. should effectively be working with you. And it's not just always about money. You know, sometimes the clearest USPs of the program and the products that they're expecting affiliates to promote aren't clearly marked on their website anywhere and or easy for affiliates to find. And then they wonder why they're not getting a lot of affiliate sign-ups to their program. Well, how they're finding you?

You're not even listing it on their website. There are even clients that come to us that don't even have a link to the affiliate program in the future on their page. Now, you sit in there wondering, why do affiliates, not sign up to a while are we struggling to find affiliates, well, it's nowhere on your front-end website, which is kind of where an affiliate are going to look. So just really

basic simple marketing principles that sometimes just get lost because you're overwhelmed with the kind of day-to-day of managing the admin and the kind of going with the daily tasks that go with managing a program that gets big. So in every industry and every

company that I've worked with, there's always kind of this running joke. When you go in there, like, okay, where there's these top five or ten things that you're like, oh, God. Like, when in the IT world, like, hey, my printer doesn't print. We're like, did you put paper in it? They're like, no. Good job there, but I don't.

Well, time. Well, done. So there's this kind of laundry list. You know, when, you know, I go in law and where does it work. I'm like, is there gas in it? They're like, no. And they think it bad at that hang up. I'm messed it. So there's kind of this, their laundry list are just like, did you do this? Can you just, I don't, I don't we didn't talk about this before it in,

but are there's kind of like these, like, God, did you just do these? the hot five, like the biggest mistake, whatever they are. One of a start. Okay, so the first thing, I'm going to kind of do like a little fly, mini flywheel here because I always think if you do it easy and, you know, people can follow step by step, it just itself perpetuates itself to continue success, right? So the first thing is think about the front end of your website,

what I've just said. Like, are you actually actively selling your affiliate program and are you upselling the really key benefits that affiliates need to know before they sign up to your program? what they're going to earn, you know, what the benefits are, how they're going to be treated, and are you giving them a great onboarding experience? So the first part of the flour meal is, is my onboarding experience for my affiliate partners, absolutely beautiful and giving them the great first touch experience. And how I want you to think about that is when you start a new job at a business and you come to your desk on the first day, there's a beautiful gift box saying,

welcome to our company, you've got your pen, your laptop, your Mac all nicely. up on your desktop, you've got a nice notebook that's branded and you're ready to go and you've got your land yard or your key fob or whatever the case may be. That makes you feel special, right? So what are you doing to make your affiliates feel special when they join your program? What's that onboarding experience that you're giving them? And, you know, how are you educating them in order to promote your brand? Because they're going to look at everything that you give them. And from that, they have to go and create content. They have to go and figure out how they're going to reach the customer that you're looking for. So are you even giving them a customer profile of who

you're trying to attract? So they can then take that away, investigate it and then build their campaigns around your program. So think about the onboarding experience. Next thing is think about how do you contract and commercial with them and commercially negotiate with them? Do you just let them register into your program and they have to take the bare minimum and then only when they start delivering revenue, do you then maybe reach out three to six months later go, hey, I'm your manager, would you like to talk about a deal now? Like, that should not be happening. You should be contacting every new affiliate that comes into your program and actually identifying how can their drive traffic, what kinds of customers are they looking to get to you, and how you can

leverage that opportunity. So how are you managing that in the program process to contract with them and actually get value up front rather than waiting for them to first deliver? And only then you pick them up in your kind of reports and say, hey, you know, I notice you've got some. on traffic. Well, it's a bit late now because I tried that campaign for three months and you didn't contact me. So think about how are you contracting with them? And then how are you keeping them active and loyal? So that would be the third step in the flywheel. So and what do I mean by active and loyal? Sometimes affiliate managers go through years without ever doing something basic like a SWAT analysis on their program. So where are your strengths, weaknesses,

opportunities threats against your nearest competitor. And you should really be doing something like that with your team or your affiliate, like your affiliate database, once a quarter at the minimum. Because stuff is changing all the time around you. Your competitors are developing products. You're developing products. Your price points are changing. Your messaging is changing. So how are you doing that analysis so that you can help educate your affiliates to continue to doing the right things for you to bring you the right customers? So really doing that, loyalty piece, that reactivation piece that I spoke about earlier, which kind of just gets left off the radar because you're so focused on the guys that are bringing you sales, which is the

right thing to do. But you can't forget about that long tail of partners that suddenly drop off or whatever reason because maybe they didn't like your customer service. Maybe they had a bad campaign and you didn't contact them and say, hey, how can we work this out? How can we make it better? So they went off to your competitor to promote them instead. So first one is onboarding. second one is contracting. Third one is loyalty and retention. How do you actually keep them active? And then the fourth thing is education, so keeping them educated.

Things change in our industry all the time. Even for certain types of programs, compliance rules change. Like we've just recently had a really big announcement in the US where the FTC is putting guidelines in place so that consumers have, accurate advertising from any kind of publisher, brand, anything that goes online, you have to have certain disclaimers that are in place. So how are you investing to actually help your affiliates to continue to promote your program and to continue to grow with your program? Because they're working with hundreds of different brands. How can you possibly expect them to keep

on top of everything that's relevant to just you? So there needs to be a continual education process that happens with your affiliates. And then the third step is having a regular touch base. So, you know, reviewing everything that's happening, looking at campaign analysis, and that should really be happening once a month with the big guys and once a quarter on the program as a whole. So having that time to actually look at all of your analysis, look at the lifetime journey of all the customers that your affiliates are bringing into you, and assessing whether

those are the right customers that you need and want. Because just having a first sale might not actually be what you're doing. you need the program to do. Having repeat sales from that customer is something that you actually want to go after. And then assessing where are you spending your budget every month? Are you spending it with the right partners in your program? Or are you spending with the partners that are bringing you the most customers, but not the highest value ones.

So if you stick to those five simple steps, that could be a really easy way to continue to your first steps. I mean, they are, I'm breaking a down to a very... It's been 25 years. simple all of that happens. But it kind of self-protectuates success. If you just keep doing those so same footsteps. Use the word simple well.

It's interesting because, you know, I bought and sold companies. I bought and scaled companies. I tell people all the time. Like, you know, there's this stuff down here in Florida. There's the opportunity to buy these little boats. You sit two people in the little boat and they go on the water and you rent them out for a hundred bucks an hour and like, buy. You know, you buy these mobile little dog grooming thing.

Really simple, really, really easy. you acquire them, you scale them, you let them go. There are certain times, even in the IT world, I would tell people like, listen, you don't really need an IT guy for this. You just go to YouTube and it'll tell you what to do because that's what we're literally doing when we go into the server closet. Do we have some problems really? Oh, really?

We're walking through that white paper, whatever, and we're just doing it on our own. So this is the hand-up. There are ways, and there are businesses where you can cut the corner. There are businesses when you can do that. You and I have had many conversations. I have access to some of your training material. I know where I sit on it as a business owner, as someone who scaled multiple businesses. There isn't a chance in hell.

I would ever try and do this on my own. It's overwhelming. I think someone who is an affiliate market or someone who becomes an affiliate manager and someone who does it, this is a special breed of people. So I think there's two worlds. There's the people who, if you have this on your team and there's a member in your world and you're like, hey, you know what? We've already got an affiliate marketer.

We love Susie. Susie's great. She's doing that. Um, Mazelphal, thank God you found it suits me. These are very rare human beings. And then there's the people who are like me who are like, I'm going to try and do this. And the minute you listen to this, hopefully we deterred you from, don't try and do this on your own. You're going to, yeah, this is, yeah, this is, don't try at home. What would be the, you know, if you're ever here saying, okay, you're trying to learn more. You're trying to optimize who you know, your affiliate

manager helping them out. Or if you're affiliate manager, hey, I need some of this knowledge because it's a lot versus the business owner who's like, okay, I thought this would be fun, but I clearly don't know how to scale it. What would be the two avenues that you would recommend for those two years? So for the CZ, Cam, so I've got somebody in-house, they're doing a great job, they're managing everything on a network, maybe they want to scale it, maybe they want to get into different markets, maybe they want to understand, you know, different types of publisher, publishers that Cusi hasn't ever worked with or doesn't have the experience. So that's when you would kind of send Cici on a training course or, you know, bring in a strategic consultant to come

and sit alongside Susie to augment whatever Susie's doing and just give an extra set of hands and some insights on how Susie can maybe leverage and go forward. Whether Susie wants to hire in-house and send them on a training course, that kind of like, I would say coaching almost is kind of what you want. You want to send Susie on that coaching course and just go, here's the top line things that you can maybe do a little bit better and tap into some of the other strategies that maybe Susie hasn't ever done before because Susie's learning on the job as she's going. Okay, everybody's learning affiliate marketing on the job as we go,

because the entire industry changes all the time. We've got new channels, new things happening. So Susie can, in fact, nobody, 25 years experience, I'm not even, I'd never ever call myself an expert. Nobody can ever be an expert in affiliate marketing because tomorrow it changes again and the next day it changes again. So tapping into that knowledge base and going on like a coaching journey with somebody who's gone before you and has a lot of experience is a,

very valuable thing for you to invest in in your business if you want to scale. The other camp is the people like you and I who hire experts and then get out of their way. That's the time when you go and find an agency. And when you're going down the agency routes and you want to work with an agency that wants to partner with you and actually really handle this channel for you, so you pay the budget, you set the ground rules, you explain the KPIs that you're trying to reach as your business. And the agency takes that on to actually go and deliver it with the staff that they're investing in and training and getting done. That's the other option.

So it's kind of done with you and done for you. Those are the only two options that you have. And you can decide how much or how little of each you want to do because you can do them both together and you can also do them either all. Or you can do a little bit of this and a little bit of that because most agencies will tailor a package based on whatever you already have in your business.

They would never try and take it on and not work with your marketing team because that's just country turtive to everything that we would want to be doing. what to ask those agencies. We've shared some of those questions, but I think the biggest thing that you need to think about when you choose an agency, for me anyway, when I take on a client is chemistry and an authentic belief in the product or service that they're selling.

Because if there isn't those two things, it doesn't matter who you are, and it doesn't matter how much money you're paying them, if you are not aligned in terms of what the outcomes and the goals need to be, it's never going to be a positive relationship. You're going to be paying money down the toilets in never getting the response or the return that you need. So finding an agency owner or an agency team that really understands your product is excited

about the product, wants to market the product as if they are employees of your own company, and more importantly he has ideas around how to actually take that product or service and expand it and add strategy into the meeting when you're meeting with them rather than just taking a brief and going, yes, we can deliver that. that's what I look for when I work with new clients. I want to hear what their thoughts are. Then I want to add my thoughts, and I want us to have an amazing experience together.

So for me, chemistry is everything when choosing an agency. Well, yeah, because you mentioned this is a long-term game. This isn't a campaign. This is a long-term relationship. And that's a difference for I think for paid versus affiliate. And you know, I'm going to bother you. And I'm going to say, hey, you've got this wonderful wheel. I'm going to make you give me a copy of the wheel on.

And you're like, hey, there's examples of what the websites are look like. And then what your link? You know, I'm going to bother you. I'm like, give me the examples. I want to see, like, share with everybody. But I think the examples and I think the flywheel and we talked about, that's barely stretching the surface to your point. If you've got to have someone when you sit down where they understand your product,

they resonate and connect with you and they see a vision that could even take your vision above and beyond. Because when you get in bed with someone, this is, what really what this is, this isn't, hey, I want to make a website. This isn't, hey, I want to have a new computer. This isn't, hey, I want to do, you know, I need to do a look. logo. This is a long-term relationship in order for this to be effective. So sitting down and meeting with someone who is the best that you can find is important because, yeah, it might cost

an upfront a little bit more than pay-per-click, but use your paper, you know, you're paid ads to fund it so you can have this long-term relationship so that when it doesn't work, you don't have to pay attention to that. You can go back to doing what you're supposed to be doing. So if you're a doctor, go be a doctor, don't be an account. Don't be the guy. You know, we talk about this all the time. If you're a high-end entrepreneur, if you're a high-end business owner, why are you mowing your loan? Why are you making your own meal? Why are you doing your old laundry? It just does not make sense.

If your hourly rate is $500 an hour, why are you doing anything below $50? And it's not a matter of ego. It's just a matter of, hey, you either should be working on your business or working on your health. It's really simple. It's either health or well. That's what you should. Working on your relationship, working all this dynamics.

Mowing your law than doing things that are outside of your wheelhouse, it's kind of like when Michael Jordan stopped playing basketball and then decided to go play baseball. It's like, what are you doing that? Just over there. Oh, grab that ball. Not this. What are you doing?

So when it comes to this one, this is one of those rare times where I tell people, I would never do this on my own. I would never try and do this. I'm like, just get out of the way. Find someone who's an expert that you resonate with, that you want to have a relationship, that you enjoy talking to them that's going to give you examples and find the most authentic person you can. I mean, one of the things that, because we've had lots of conversations before about

this, you're saying, yeah, you're not my person. Cool, awesome. Or hey, you are my person. Let's get together the wrong. It should be that hell yes or hell no pretty instantly because this is someone are going to be in a dynamic with for an exceptionally long period of time because how we know what affiliate marketing is, it's a long-term relationship that helps you scale your business versus Facebook ads.

This makes you talk. And do you know what the funny thing is? I've been in this industry for so long. I mean, I actually looked on TikTok the other day for the term affiliate program management. Because we use type in affiliate marketing as all of these people that I'm going to show you how to make money on Pinterest and that's kind of not my bag. But when I typed in affiliate program management, there was very little content on TikTok, which actually spoke me to think, well, I need to be making some TikTok videos.

But also the content that was there was actually rubbish. Like, and I could spot it in seconds, you know, and I was like, this is not good content. And it's actually derailing the good work that happens in the affiliate industry because people that don't understand affiliate marketing are now trying to become content creators. And people like me can spot the BS, like, 10,000 miles away. And so it really, and I've spent most of my adult life in this industry. Like, I'm extremely passionate about it and I spend a lot of time training the next generation of account managers coming through because I care about what happens to this industry when I,

when I one day leave. I mean, one day I'm going to retire. But all that knowledge, that brain drain is going to leave with me and all the other practitioners that have learned this craft on the job because there is no school of affiliate marketing. There's no university degree either. You have to learn on the job by doing. And so that's why you're investing in value. You're not investing in hours for money when you build and when you work with an agency. You're investing in the value and the knowledge that they bring to you to fast track your own success. And what you were mentioning before, yeah, I agree. What we went before is that even if you have all this knowledge and some school or some person taught you're you, you went to a coaching program. Great. Six months for now, you're like, oh crap, I need to go do this again.

because it's constantly evolving. It's constantly changing. I mean, threads came out and then crashed out. So it just is what it is. And I think, and again, for complete transparency, I have more access to the back end. I have more of what you're doing and I'm seeing your coaching programs

and I get to see all of that. And it reminds me when I was a young kid on one of my first cars, the fan belt, making noise. And I was like, it's a $10 fan belt. I was like, I'm just going to go install this. And I threw a little temper tantrum. And then it's like, come with me.

And he popped open the hood of here. It's solid. I looked and I was like, uh, he's like, go for it. I'd install the fan belt. I was like, okay, I'll pay it. I wanted to do it. In this case, pay the first. Like, you know, if I went back 10 years ago and said, hey, install a hard drive into a computer,

now it's too screwed. Blug it in. Years ago, you had to change so many things. It was a nightmare. Yeah, and this brings me to you, and you'll probably resonate with this. Show and tell, there's a difference. There's a difference between telling you what you need to do in your affiliate program. and me actually showing you what to do it in your specific affiliate program.

So whilst there are frameworks that you can learn in affiliate marketing, you are always going to have to apply those frameworks in a very different way in a very different situation. So it's kind of like skiing and snowboarding. Like they're both gone snow, but you need totally different skills to do them. It's apparently, it's a lot easier to learn how to snowboard very quickly and to be efficient and go down the slopes than what it is. to learn how to ski because you need a whole different set of skills to actually get going.

It might be the other way around. I don't know. Very good way of got it. Going down. So someone who grew up in Florida, I'm phenomenal. I just fall down and then gravity is over and over. Yeah, you get down. How do you get down?

How about nature? The other thing is, you know, we talk about snowboarding versus skiing. And again, I'm just sharing one of your examples. You brought people when you had to do an exercise. And you're like, hey, how would you sell this specific thing? in this case, like, how would you do it? And the people give completely different answers. So when you're working with an affiliate market or an editor,

when you're working with an agency, making sure that their ideas, they spit out, resonate with you, because each one is going to have different ideas. Just because someone has, you know, two decades of experience, trust me, you're being interviewed as much they're being. Because they're going to decide if they're going to work with you or not instantaneously. And they're going to have different. And that's what strategy does.

And that's the difference. between show and tell. So you could, I can have 25 years experience. You can put somebody right next to me who's got 25 years experience. So we will give you two totally different strategies for your program because we are the sum of all of the experiences that we've had. And luckily for you, I've worked across multiple different industries, multiple different verticals, and across multiple different regions in my lifetime. So I know what works in different regions and I know why things don't work as well. And that is really the value that you're buying into when you work with the performance marketing agency or an OPM as we called in the US, because there's also a heck of a lot of jargon in affiliate marketing.

An outsource program management company is the same as an agency, which is what we call it here in the UK. So. So. So. And this is the thing. This is why affiliate marketing is so contextual and unique because every, there is no right or wrong. There is no, this is how you do it and you follow those steps all the time. There's not cookie cutter like playbooks.

There's frameworks that you can use, and even those frameworks get applied differently, as you saw it, as you gave in that exercise, at the fundamentals of marketing and the psychology of sales and all of those things still apply. And I don't know if you saw the last episode that I did, well, you've got access to the back end, but I was a little bit shocked that none of the affiliate managers that were coming into my training program had had a basic marketing background. They didn't know about the basic principles of marketing. And that speech was traditionally account managers come into affiliate marketing by accident.

They either come through a customer support stream where they've worked in customer services and they're really good at building relationships or they come in from a sort of business development sales stream where they're used to going out and finding net new partners. but none of them have had marketing training, basic principles and not how they're in any way shape, or form.

They don't understand the human behavior. They don't understand how them. And that is what... Yeah, it's important. And that's what makes a good affiliate managers if they actually have

a mix of all three. And then you've got to add in analytics and kind of numbers and commercialization and stuff like that as well. So it becomes a very complex role. It is. And having behavioral science

knowledge and all that. This is where I talk about, you know, if you're in this industry and you're in this niche and you're doing it, don't work in an vacuum. Find a community where there's other individuals who are affiliate marketers. We can sit there and say, hey, I'm working on selling oranges. That's my affiliate. What it is? Go in the environment where you can have this community, where you can talk to each other and say, hey, what do you guys think? What are your ideas? Because I guarantee you if Susie has ABC ideas, Bob has XYZ ideas. And you're going to get things. Don't work in a vacuum. Find the community, wherever it exists, find them, work with them, have someone who's done it for a really long time that can give you that instance. Hey, I love your

idea. I didn't think of that idea in any way, shape, or form. This is how we can implement the idea because I'm paying attention over here. We talk about this all the time. Your network is your net worth. If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together. And it's, I really think that's the narrative. That's an African proverb. Do you know that? So you know, I'm from Africa. And it goes, it goes, that's an old African proverb. And it's something that we actually have on all of our proposals. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

And that principle is 100% summing up affiliate marketing. If you want to go far, work with multiple partners, work with people that are experts. If you want to go fast, you can do it yourself, but it's not necessarily going to be very successful. You're not going to go far. You're going to get up, the spike and it collapse. But again, if we talked about the beginning, that's your paid ads. That's your initial. Okay, let's get the engine going.

But after that, find an electronic community that can do this with you, so you can go far with them. And even if you're doing it on your own, if you're an experience of affiliate marketer, or whatever you're going to find a community that knows how to do this, connect with an agency that they've been doing this for a really long time. Bring your ideas. Your ideas are valid. But they've been doing it for a really long time. It's this running joke that, you know, Jesus didn't walk on water.

He knew where the rocks were. Find someone who knows where the rocks are. And if someone's been doing it, that's what I would do. So I'm going to make you give me all these examples. You know me. I'm a pain in the ass when it comes to that. But how do people find you? How do people get a hold of you if they want to ask you more questions?

What's the best way to reach out and get all of you? Anyways, so first, contact me on LinkedIn and connect with me on LinkedIn because you'll get so much free information and like I pump stuff out on LinkedIn all the time, stuff that I'm learning because I genuinely do have a desire to help people around me to learn how to do affiliate marketing better. In fact, it's our strapline. A strapline is Aparovirce we're helping the world to do affiliate marketing better. And the second way to contact me is to just come onto our website, Afibusmedia.com.

Come and sign up to the newsletter. You'll get a constant stream of weekly stuff that isn't spam, but actually educational and informative that will help you to do your job better. And or email me on LJ. My name is Diane Johnston, so just my initials at Afibus.com. Simple as that. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

I know we gave so many examples, and for a lot of people, this is going to be overwhelming, but welcome to the world of 50 at Marchbeat. There's so much there. You've got to get, it's trying to drink from not a fire hose, but from a tsunami. And having someone who's learned how to ride that tsunami is important. So thank you so much for coming on. I really agree. Thank you so much for having me.

It's been so much fun being on the side of the mic. Another episode is in the books. Success leaves clues and the best clues come for people who actually walk the path. Stop guessing. Start leveraging what is proven. And remember, it's not proven. It might just be pretend.