Thanks to the following guests from last year's Affiliate BI podcast guests. All of them have contributed to this post in numerous ways. Their expertise covers almost everything from SEO to CRO, from data science to data visualization, from brand building to product design. If you want to know what you should be focusing on for this year then this guide to affiliate marketing 2024 is what you need to level up your business. 

Special shoutout to the following guests for appearing on the podcast and giving their answers on what the future of affiliate marketing brings especially as it intersects with Business Intelligence.

  1. Kevin Hartman (dataviz)
  2. Allan Stone (affiliate program software & tracking)
  3. Sam McKay (data courses)
  4. Julian Juenemann (data courses)
  5. Kyle Roof (SEO)
  6. David Harris & Vlad Bondarenko (affiliate program tracking)
  7. Ian Sims (compliance)
  8. Joran Hofman (B2B affiliation)
  9. Victor Karpenko (SEO)
  10. Matt Diggity (SEO)
  11. Chris Walker (B2B marketing)
  12. Michał Suski (SEO & AI content)
  13. Jean-Michel Azzopardi (blockchain & web3)
  14. Oliver Kenyon (conversion rate optimization)
  15. Lashay Lewis (B2B content)
  16. Peter Loving (product design)
  17. Clemence Dujardin (affiliate program tracking)
  18. Sami Kurvinen (affiliate management)
  19. John Wright (data science)
  20. Simon Dunne (performance marketing)
  21. Fery Kaszoni (SEO & digital PR)
  22. Gabriela Covay (SEO & digital PR)
  23. Sean Chaudhary (SEO)

John Wright: Welcome to the Affiliate BI podcast. I'm John Wright. And this podcast is brought to you by StatStrone. Welcome to 2024. And this whole episode is a best of collection from 2023. And we've had some amazing guests last year, including a lot of well known SEO experts like Matt Diggity, Kyle Roof. Ferry Casoni, Victor Karpenko, we've interviewed people on the design side from, and conversion rate optimization with Oliver Kenyon and Peter Loving.

And we've covered almost every topic you can think of that relates to affiliate marketing, including content marketing talking with Lashea Lewis and yeah. So I just want to take the best clips that we have from the last year. And put together a powerful episode that I believe I've had the privilege of having the opportunity to ask amazing guests their take of what they see as the future of affiliate marketing, not just in relation to business intelligence, but what do they see coming up for this year?

And so I hope you enjoy the show and learn a lot from it and looking forward to doing even more interviews this year as well. Part of the inspiration behind the Feel It BI podcast came from how a course by Kevin Hartman changed how I looked at data science, data visualization, data analytics, and all the data stuff.

It was actually one of the foundations behind the Feel It BI podcast, where luckily enough, not only did I take his course, But it really helps me look at data and affiliate marketing and realize, wait a minute, there's a lot more that can be explored here. So I want to take this insight from Kevin Hartman, who's a former head evangelist analytics at Google, and he runs an amazing series of courses on data visualization.

I highly recommend you check it out. And here's Kevin Hartman. 

Kevin Hartman:

Yeah we've been doing it for about five years. So I think this was a pretty early runner. But I really do believe that prior to the work we've done, most Data visualization education revolved around learning a tool, becoming proficient in a visualization tool, right?

And learning all the functions and features. And what we've done is taken that step back and a harder look at what makes for good data stories and good visualization and how do you ultimately get there. The tool is important, but it's just an add on, right? So what I have seen is certainly growth.

The Every single time we run the course, we get more and more people into it. It's the popularity has just continued to increase. And I believe that it's happening in the market has been really good for business for us. And that is in the market, just further developments of tools, further focus on technology.

To create visuals, to analyze data, right? Particularly the move towards artificial intelligence and all the wonderful things that, that can do. It is effectively I think for many people taking the human a little further away from the process. Because these tools are so great and proficient and effective, you can.

Let it do its thing a little more, get yourself less involved. Because the AI algorithms are able to so effectively discover patterns and collect and analyze, enormous sums of data, you can take you as an analyst a little further out of the process. And so what we are talking about.

The result of that is, is really, at the end of the day, poor data storytelling, poor visualization, right? So what we're talking about is the opposite. It's getting the human really entwined in the story, getting the analyst back into the data. And so we, because of this market trend toward tools, I feel like we're becoming even more appreciated for what we are doing in this course.

It's also it's been amazing to me just how rapidly the tool market moves and develops. And now with data privacy and other concerns coming in many of the tools that we would have relied on. No longer work or have just fallen from the market, right? So it's been a very interesting thing to see how the tool market has progressed while knowing that what we're doing is pretty timeless and it doesn't matter those tools, everything else that's happening are just things that, that the human analyst needs to be aware of, but we're, we stay very focused on the human analyst.

John Wright:

The next two clips that I'm going to play for you are two amazing guests that I was very happy to chat with, Julian Juniman from Measure School and Sam McCabe from Enterprise DNA. Both of them run schools and that offer courses on everything from data science, analytics tools, you name it. And I really like following what they do on LinkedIn where I think they're ahead of the game and these are people that I now look up to.

of going what's around the corner for data science and learning about this. So I've taken my own inspiration to learn more. And I highly recommend people check out both of their courses and websites to see how you can learn something when it comes to applying data science in any aspect of affiliate marketing.

Sam McKay: All really good thoughts and points. I like, I, I don't believe that the 10 times is an exaggeration when you put it into the analysis, you could do the apps you could build and the automations that you could build off the back of of a lot of this. Cause you've got to remember that data has been exponentially growing.

Just the amount of data that you have as a business. Like we we're an online business. We're not a big company by any means, right? We're just a a small to medium sized business. But I just think about the data that we churn out, that we don't really have, and then we don't have that much analytic around.

Like I, at the moment, I don't know exactly, the data is probably somewhere, but, or maybe it is. I don't know exactly what each individual user is doing on our platform at each time they come to the platform, right? I have a little bit of an idea based on some events that we track, but not a full idea.

And just think about it. Think about how much more we could know if we could drill down into that individual person. Then we could customize all of the, and automate all of the messaging and the learning plan for that individual person. So I don't, I actually don't think it's that big an exaggeration when you factor in all those different categories.

Like it probably isn't underestimating, underestimating, underestimating it. Because you just think across this, but every business health, healthcare, entertainment. Finance, just totally customized to you as a person. Think about, as a business servicing all of these customers, you want to get down to that level, right?

That's going to make you the most money, but also add the most value to your customers. Like to me. That's where things are going, like there's just no doubt about it. So it's not, it doesn't feel that too, like too far removed from reality. sort of estimation.

Chris Walker: Got a little secret for everybody.

Maybe a hundred years ago, people bought through word of mouth and referrals. And guess what? Today it still happens. Just, it still happens. And it's the biggest driver of business growth. And it's the biggest driver of lowering customer acquisition costs. And it's a signal that you're doing a lot of things right.

The difference is that word of mouth has fundamentally changed over the past 20 years, especially over the past five, with the dramatic scale and maturity of the internet. So in 1995, you could just tell your kids friends parents about the thing that you like at the t ball game. anD now 25 years later, you could post it on LinkedIn and 100, 000 people are going to see it within the next hour.

You go viral on TikTok and 8 million people see it and it drives incredible business growth and that's happened over and over again. Or you post a podcast and people listen to that podcast for two years and over time start to really believe and trust you. And so the idea of word of mouth has fundamentally changed over the past 20 years, which is the core difference.

I really think that we need to make a split here when we talk about this between influencers or key opinion leaders and affiliates. They're really two very different things with different motions that require different ways of measuring success. Affiliates play at the bottom of the funnel and try and make a small transaction fee for a referral.

Influencers start at the top and create the demand that drives accelerated business growth and accelerated word of mouth. Affiliates are not driving word of mouth. They're not. yoU might get a byproduct of word of mouth when they go through an affiliate by the product, have success and they talk about it.

But you'll rarely get the scale of word of mouth that an influencer or key opinion, a key opinion leader creates that ultimately creates demand and drives business growth. I think for for the affiliate game, I think that you have to be thinking about, do I need business expansion? Do I need to expand my capabilities and services?

In order to not just play at the bottom of the funnel when someone searches this category And i'm going to continue to try and win on google being a top three result So they can click my link and I can get 10 of the sale And instead of playing that game which overtime seo is going to change and it's going to leave your business vulnerable and so knowing that do I need to shift to a Add a different service or add a different layer to my service that includes demand creation and influencing people before they're considering buying before they're going to Google.

That would be if I was in the affiliate space, that would be my game right now.

Joran Hofman: How I did it, I think, which is a good way to do it is to do it when you're still working full time or at least have a different source of income. Like I, I first built a website, I think in Webflow.

And then in the end I turned it to WordPress just because there's so much more optimate optimizations you can do. Plus you can outsource a lot of things. So I was really good in outsourcing a lot of things. I have my stable income. So I was able to put some money into place to actually have people do things for me.

So to build a website, to write blogs to add content to just, Make it as easy as possible for yourself. So you can think of new ways to do things. What I would change at a newsletter, like more quicker, because it was a really nice way to, to build like an audience and to keep them engaged with the site, because otherwise they would only find you when they're searching for something.

A podcast could definitely be a good one. Again, like the traction we're now getting on our podcast.

Like I, I wish, I guess I did it sooner. And as soon as you get into this nice vibe, you can actually leverage other people's network to get to get visibility to, to the things you're doing basically.

I think that's the other thing like leveraging other. People or partners or websites more and more

John Wright: You see it a lot, right?

Joran Hofman: Where peoplehave a certain batch on their site you earned from G2 or Techpond or any other review site, but that's good for both of them because they both get visibility and they both get more traffic.

And often there's a backlink behind the button. It's even better for the review site. So I guess there's a lot of things, but own media, make sure you own your own channels, distribution channels, make sure you leverage other people's network. It's just going to kickstart things and try to like outsource if you can when you're working full time, try to outsource as much as you can, because then it allows you to do other things again to grow.

John Wright: 

And that was Chris Walker and Joran Hoffman back to back. And Chris Walker is a B2B expert who is just phenomenal at sales. I wanted to have him on the podcast to see if he, if we could pick his brain and see if all of the things he's learned in the B2B space can apply to B2C and affiliate marketing, and sure enough it does.

And Joran is a I call him a thought leader in affiliate marketing. He has to be, he has reditus, which is a SaaS affiliate program software. And Yoran is just he's basically bootstrapped everything you can imagine building his software on the back of building SaaS affiliate sites. So it's really cool.

Next, we're going to get into a whole bunch of SEO interviews. One of the common things that I asked a lot of these SEO experts Is SEO dead in the sense that all the companies that have a lot of money can buy their way to success? And is it is it too late? And almost all of them said, absolutely not.

That you still have an opportunity to carve your own path in affiliate marketing with content, with topical authority. So let's get into some of these amazing SEO insights.

Kyle Roof: First though, I disagree with the premise. I don't think it's saturated. And I really enjoy when something like chat GPT comes out.

Cause I don't know how old you are, but if you can remember back to February, 2023 SEO is about to die and we're past that. And somehow it has, I've been doing SEO for over a decade. Every six months, SEO is dying. What happens is it's usually dying in a slow death. And then there's the, I would say there are three or four moments I can remember that where something was really killing it.

And in each of those moments, there was a contraction of SEOs and service providers and people that were in the game. And in those moments, I realized that some people, businesses fail in the best of times. And then when there's stress, then more fail faster. And it's very true within SEO, SEOs are failing all the time, even in up economies.

When there's any kind of stress, any kind of down economy, any kind of other external factor, you will see more of a contraction. What I've found in those situations, which I think we're experiencing right now, is that I make more money because more people are falling away. They're thinking it's not worth it.

They don't know how to pivot the, they were struggling to begin with, and now this is just one more thing that they can't handle or really does tank their business. And so in these situations of uncertainty. That's when you can really make a lot of money and you can really be successful because I think there's a contraction of people that are service providers, people that are doing their own SEO, people that are doing their own affiliate sites, for sure.

So I do disagree with the premise slightly that it's saturated. That said in terms of channels. I've always found it interesting that people never look at their own SERPs, they will put their keywords into tools and they'll get their data out of it. But at the end of the day, they never actually go and look at the actual thing.

And that's dangerous because you're going to miss what's there. What's obviously in front of you. And a lot of SERPs have a lot of features that people don't take advantage of, they there's like carousels, there's the people also ask, there might be snippets, there might be a new feature for your thing, there might be four or five features available on each SERP and they're often not optimizing to potentially get into those areas because they never really took the time to look and I do think there are external things you can do, but the very first thing is you're already working hard for this keyword.

You're already trying to get into this cluster. Look what's and see what's there, because there are probably two or three other channels that you're missing. It wouldn't take that much more work where you might be able to land in a couple more of them, and that's just going to increase your traffic right then and there without doing any extra heavy lifting or trying to find a new way to do it.

If you want platforms outside, I think you do need to figure out where your audience is and then go to that place. So by and large, I provide services, I provide tools, I provide education. Underutilized

Michal Suski: features, I would say is the AI generator content because

25 ish, 30 percent adoption among the users right now.

I understand not everybody wants AI content on their websites, but. From what I observe, The content is often better than human written content that is not super expensive. If you compare like 50 bucks article from like a mediocre writer it will be probably worse and 100 percent less researched.

Imagine like we as humans, we cannot analyze. That big amount of information as the AI, like it's just impossible to read the whole book in five minutes and then use all facts and interesting talking points from that book to create a review of that specific. It is just impossible. So I would say it should be used by 50 plus percent of the people.

I'm doubted it should be this way. So even though it's a huge contributor to our growth recently, I would say it's still underutilized feature of Surfer.

Victor Karpenko: I think the more people will grow as a like teams companies, the more they will start to analyze, the more they will start to see like where they are spending money where they're losing, should they not at all do this stuff?

And with the this analytic tools, basically that's the answer just. Just track things that they will start track everything possible, like from the business. For example, we have dashboard in agency for every department with the PNL for every team lead. So they know for example, project head of project says, I want to do this team building, like I need 5k.

And now they go and see, can we afford 5k to do this team building, or we should postpone it later and figure out this in a different way, cause they see the numbers, as long as you like tracking the numbers, you can do some changes. If you don't track, come on,

Fery Kaszoni: So I was reading books, you have the books there about business and all the books that if you want to make, if you want to make a successful, if you want to build a successful business.

You cannot be the technician only in the business. I'm still a technician in a way because I still work a lot in the business but my main role is not to be a technician. Now my main role is to be a systems operator and a systems builder. sHould use the experience, knowledge that I've acquired to become a system operator.

So in 2020, I started posting on LinkedIn. I said, I had a few passive income sites. They were making a few thousand pounds per month. So they made more money. In 2020, like the passive income sites made more money than what the client work did on average in, in, before that. So apart from doing the client work before 2020, I was also building, online assets like income tax calculators, like a relation calculator and scam number sites and those started making money.

And I said, there's no point doing client work now. It's, the craziness that's happening in 2020. Let's just, let me just start sharing my knowledge with the world. And even yesterday I was watching one of my videos there, I was so awkward on video. Oh my God. Even now, maybe I'm awkward sometimes, but sometimes I'm awkward on purpose with, the wigs that I wear, but I was so awkward with some of the videos.

But I said, I'm just going to, share the knowledge and share, everything that I know. And I had a client and the first, real client who reached out towards the middle of 2020 after posting consistently was a, was a. An education client, they said, Hey, Ferry, I've seen your, content.

I think you're great. Can you help us with this site? And I was like, wow, where did that come from? And I said, yes, sure. I said, there's nothing to lose. I'm going to tell them, 5, 000 pounds a month. And if they're happy to, work like this, then we'll smash it for them because that's a.

Greater budget than I ever had from any client prior to that, like clients of a thousand pounds a month or like 500, 500 pounds a month, which now looking back it's not even good for a meeting. It's not even enough for a meeting. And they say, Oh, sure. Send me the invoice.

I'm like, wow. Send them the invoice. They pay the invoice. And then two weeks after that, another financial. Like an IVA company reached out in the same way, say Ferry FCEO, case studies, or your content is great and we have this website, could you help us with this website? Yeah. Five, 5, 000 pounds for a month and we can certainly help.

And I said, they say, yes. And then we had instantly two, two clients who pay 10, 10k a month and I was like, this is crazy. I have to double down on this content, but then I have to do, I have to do the work. So how do we deal with this? And then I had Michelle Austin. Our head of operations now who was messaging me on linkedin before saying hey ferry I want to work in digital marketing, i've seen your content.

I see your local in whitney Do you need some help and I always said no and When the second I think is it when the first i'm not sure whether when the first invoice was paid or The second client joined and I said michelle. I even made a post about this on linkedin saying michelle I think we're we are ready to take you on board now and then she joined And then I've seen when you have a person who's passionate about your mission.

Michelle was like the first actual, employee who I've seen. She would do anything. She said she would work for free. She would do anything just to make this, make this mission a success. And I've seen the power of that. I said, if we could find more people like Michelle, that's where we have a successful business.

And then we started finding new people. Michelle helped a lot, find the initial key employees, and that's where the big boost started. When I started thinking of it as, as you need to find the right people, you need to build the right processes. We started building, processes from the problem up.

So we started the processes from the problem. So we have this problem, how can we build a system around it? So it resolves the problem systematically, consistently, every time this problem appears. So it's not just for that specific problem. But whenever we have this situation, how can we use a plug and play system where we plug it in and the problem is solved?

And that's where we started no really retaking off. And then more clients started coming. And in 2021, so the next year we decided we're going to stop doing SEO and we'll focus on just digital PR. And that's when things started. That's when people started thinking of us, not as an SEO agency who does this and does that.

And then they do some content sometimes, and they also do this.

John Wright: And with our next three guests, we have Jean Michel Azopardi, who is in the blockchain space, but he basically says the future of blockchain really comes down to AI. And followed after him is Sami Kurvanen, who's got the unfair advantage of having spent a lot of time as an affiliate manager, who's now working on the affiliate side of business.

And we also have Ian Sims, who works on a compliance tool. And as much as compliance might be the boring topic, he talks about how compliance can actually help all sides of the business from the operators to your affiliate business. I love this question.

Jean-Michel Azzopardi: I think that AI is what will fuel the growth of blockchain. If we agree that Web3 has multiple pairs as far as technology goes. There's blockchain, there's AI, there's VR, AR, XR, et cetera. Those are all different examples of pillars of WebTree. And we know that each of them are in their relative instance and that they are evolving at a more rapid pace than, than their counterparts 15 years ago. If we look at affiliate marketing, it's very much sales oriented, so if you work with especially the biggest affiliates they often tell you that these are the rates and you want position one, this is what you have to pay and so on.

But when it comes to a medium, smaller sized affiliates, I think what is often lost is that you, let's say, if you take it from an affiliates manager perspective you to move away a bit from just the sales pitch.

Sami Kurvinen: Make sure that you have a proper understanding of the product that you are selling here and focus on the other selling point, is your company putting a lot of effort in conversion rates. The product can be anything like online casino, iGaming or personal finance. 

Then discuss that with the affiliate, that maybe we're not going to pay you the most, but if you look at our data and you show the data to the affiliates, they should talk to you. Look at our conversion rates. You're going to see that even if we pay less, you're going to still make more. Or maybe the company that you are representing has an amazing gamification tool or loyalty program.

Make sure you learn about the, what's your, what's, what are the strong points of the brand that you are working for. And explain to the affiliates that, okay, again, maybe we're not paying the most, but if you look at the overall lifetime value of the players, if you send those clicks to us, it's going to be higher because of this and that.

So I think that those are the ways that sometimes is forgotten that it's too much focus on this, on the rates, the selling prices. And they sometimes forget that there's other factors that can affect and affiliate what positions and brands they push. So I think it benefits everyone.

Ian Sims:

You just got to think differently about compliance and not see it as a pain point and see it as how it can help you. And there are other ways, the data that compliance can give you and the way it makes you position the data on your website, the focus perhaps you put on promotions and terms and conditions and stuff, it shifts all that.

You just got to think a little bit differently. It's an interesting take you're highlighting, which is compliance could it's not that it could, it probably does, and it should improve the conversion rate for affiliates, for players, for operators. Yeah, Ultimately everyone's trying to, the whole idea of compliance at the moment of what regulators are doing is trying to protect the consumer.

There's also an element of brands wanting to protect their brand integrity and their risk, and obviously if they get fined, threatens the integrity of affiliate programs as well, so don't get me wrong. There are. Lots of things to think about and issues at hand, but ultimately if you've got happy consumers, you're going to have a happy industry.

John Wright

And our next four guests happen to come from Affiliate Program Software and Affiliate Network Platform Providers. These people are interesting to talk to because they get to work on a unique part of the industry where, without the tech, there is no affiliate marketing. So next up, we have Alan Stone from Intellytics.

We have David Harris and Vlad Bondarenko from ReferOn and Clements Dujardin from MyAffiliates.

Allan Stone

You hit the nail on the head there, right? If I'm in a, and this technology exists now, like we do this where if a player hits my site and I got them to convert at whatever sports book, when they come to my site again, I'm not showing them the offer wall with that.

Promotion or any promotion, quite frankly, we are obsessed with that retention Hey, we know that this player converted with operator a, we're going to make sure that all the ads on site are now to your point, retention ads, not sign up bonus. It's not, it's Hey, come back and play. And we'll give you an additional, 20 back or whatever.

It's all retention oriented. I think the holy grail of that, and this is what we're pushing towards and exploring all kinds of technologies. How do we tie the ability to deep link into exactly what that user was engaging with when they were last time they were on that operator's book.

So similar, again, use the e commerce example. If I'm browsing for a particular product and I go there. And I view a product on a site. Now, when I'm seeing ads for that brands, I'm not seeing ads for the brand. I'm seeing ads for that particular product I was looking for. Or if I add it to my cart and I abandoned, there are very specific ways that you can target that user who abandoned a cart and say, Hey, come back in today. We'll give you free shipping. And you drive them directly into the cart with the item. They're ready to go, right? That level of personalization, again, has not, hasn't reached mass adoption by the operators.

And I think it's, I think it's coming and that, that is the type of user experience. Look that's the ultimate user experience you're gonna, you're gonna achieve and it. Historically, that was done with pixels. It doesn't have to be done with pixels. This stuff, the technology exists now where all this stuff can be done in the back end, just to add on to this.

David Harris

Referon, obviously we're looking at a bit of a angle on affiliate managers from this perspective. And obviously they're getting the FTDs, but no retention, but another level of what Referon offers and any platform is actual operators. Operators are using this and they want to see how a brand converts, not just at the individual affiliate match.

Now, coming back to the question of building that retention, making sure you have that relationship. If you take the example of an operator comes to platform X, okay, and they don't like it, they're not going to add any more brands to that platform. They're not going to be any more data streams. They're not going to use it continuously.

If you build up the relationship and you show it's worthwhile and they know they can get certain data aspects out of it and they find it friendly or accessible. They're going to add and probably get more brands onto the system. So you build a relationship at that angle. And at the same time, the affiliate managers are used to it.

You can have multiple programs running through the same kind of URLs. The accessibility and usage of it is multifaceted. It's not just affiliate manager getting FTDs and showing case click to FTDs. Okay, I'm done. That's me for the KPIs.

There's more layers at an affiliate platform than just the affiliates coming in.

Vlad Bondarenko: I agree with you guys I was back in time affiliate manager. I was using Ahrefs and all the stuff. I know John what you're speaking about because even in my case like my With whom I was working before. Yeah To start using some tools is always a challenge, especially when it comes to some new tools like deep sea or whatever.

But as the industry becomes more data driven, more such tools will come. And obviously that's, we are speaking now we are living in a AI century, so to say, I, who I'm sure I'm not hoping, but I sure that such tools will be available or also for AI, the sink is that I gaming sphere is quite limited.

We have really nice examples of Web3 sphere all this cryptocurrency sphere, it's much is having much more higher expectation. Yeah, a lot of people, much more people are involved in that and much more sophisticated solution are there. But even there, Binance, for example, doesn't give us proper API.

So what we can speak about iGaming, where money is big. And a lot of money are coming here But if binance cannot give us proper apis what we can speak and tell about this small Topic so this a matter of time. I so I suppose I hope And more tools will come and I am a fan of chat gpt. I am a fan of new tools I know that it's quite low amount of people still right now who wants to use new tools in iGaming sphere.

Clemence Dujardin: There is a problem of human resources. The good affiliate managers that were there 10 years ago have grown, have taken more responsibilities, have taken different positions. And and right now there is a struggle of finding. People that understand the business. Okay. We haven't done much about it because there are courses here and there that are online, but there is nothing in depth.

There is nothing that is really focusing on how do we make an affiliate manager bigger proficient rather than something that you learn on an eight hour course, because that's not the way it works. So operators have problems and. I think it's going to get a little bit worse before it gets better, before these new affiliate managers actually understand the cooks of Vega, understand that everything is there at their fingertips.

They just need to look at it and say, okay. And they also need to communicate more with their athletes. Very often I feel that, it's a bit of a battle. It's athlete manager against athletes, and there is always that, that trust issue where one thinks that they are going to steal the other one.

And, that trust isn't there. After all these years, you haven't managed to sit down all together, open the book and discuss all these open issues, and I can, the only thing that needs to happen is actually trust and exchange of information so that so that everybody gains from it and everybody learns and make more money, make their operations much easier.

But how do we get that? That's a very good question.

John Wright:  And the next three guests, they talk about a bit of SEO, content, topical authority, and branding. And these three to four topics somehow come together. And I think it's a perfect segue to introduce Matt Diggity, Gabriela Covey, and Lashay Lewis.

And, yeah, they just talk about, they just make it sound like, content should be a common sense thing that you do. But I do believe that most affiliates, they don't take the extra time to properly curate their content, to put that brand authority, the topical authority, and to really put that branding hat on.

Where it's okay, I'm going to be the best I can be at this at this topic. And I'm just going to go ahead and nail it. It's, I don't think everyone has the mindset that I'm going to be the best at this. And I'm going to go out of my way to help the customer. So I can't wait to share these next three insights with you.

Matt Diggity: Volatility is like just the name of the game with SEO, right? I've been doing it since 2009 and it's always been volatile. Like the first year I got into it and actually started getting success. And making a bunch of money and breaking, breaking five figures, my whole entire portfolio died that year too.

So I'm used to volatility, but today's right now, it's a, it's an interesting time in SEO because I think it's simultaneously harder than it's ever been before and easier than it's ever been before. And let me explain myself. So it's harder in the sense that it takes more resources to do SEO. And in the world of SEO resources means content and backlinks.

Whereas before you could go after a niche site with 20 pages of content. If it's just like hyper targeted, going after knee pain or something like that. Just, I'm going to write really good content, 20 pages and just dive right into knee pain. That doesn't work anymore. So now we're in a world of topical authority where it's like.

The website that covers the topic more completely will gain what's called topical authority and have an advantage of ranking over other websites that only dabble in a topic. So there's the content resource that's ballooned. There's also a link resources that you need to apply to a website. So it's just ridiculous right now.

Google solves a lot of their problems with just Who has the most backlinks? I'm referring to the EAT algorithms, product review algorithms, tons of algorithms where they put up a list of things that how they want their algorithm to work, but it really just boils down to backlinks. 

Gabriela Covay: It worked really well but I always knew there was like a better approach and I saw the future, all this link farming and all that stuff, like it might work now, but I don't think it's gonna, it just doesn't feel right.

It feels like you're trying to scam the system and outsmart it, but you're gonna lose in the end. It didn't feel right. Like it was, there was something like. I was like, I don't know. I don't know if I want my client's website to be on this shady website. Cause I saw that as shady, but it worked back then.

So we're like, okay, yeah, if it's working out, we can play around a little bit with this, but then digital PR just became this thing over time where it was like, it just became more increasingly important to. build that brand and generate those brand signals that are important now nowadays with the EAT requirements and whatnot, now more than ever.

So we slowly started building out that service and this past, I would say two, a year and a half or so just have been really focusing on that because it's just so critical. It's such a critical component of SEO. Nowadays, so it's part of a successful strategy for building like a brand and you need to build a brand now there's no way around that you have to have a solid brand that stands the test of time that will survive these algorithm updates because now they're happening all the time, like you just got to, yeah, you got to think long term if you're in it to win it.

Lashay Lewis: Yeah, I used to do it with my affiliate sites all the time. Like I would create like an alias and call on the website, like fake name generator and. Generating alias for that. But I always built my affiliate websites with a brand behind it. I think branding is a super strong play. It builds trust. Yeah. I think branding is very important.

I think it needs to play into as far as it playing into the actual content strategy, it can, but I'm looking at branding more of a higher level type of thing. So for example, when I would do my affiliate sites, like I would get a logo made on Fiverr and I would. Have color schemes going on and things like that. But in actuality, when people come to the website, they're reading the article, they want the information again, not saying branding is an important, but I think it's really just like spices it up, especially for affiliate websites.

And we're talking about B2B. Oh, you totally need branding around the, from the job, just because the sales cycles are longer. People are going to their peers to ask, is this a good software? This and that. But so there's some nuance and differentiating, differentiation there between like affiliate websites and SaaS.

But I do think branding is still an important play all around. I've always done it. And it's funny because I never thought about it until you just said something about it, but yes, branding is something that I stand on pretty hard for sure.

John Wright: And the next two guests, we're going to continue on with that branding theme and go into first design and then conversion rate optimization, which.

Definitely has a lot of design elements built into it. So next up is going to be Peter Loving, who is a UX designer and he's the, his company is behind the redesign of StatsRome. So we're very grateful for having connected with them, highly recommend them. And next up was, I'm a big fan of conversion rate optimization.

So I was really pumped to have Oliver Kenyon from ConversionWise. On the show and you know what, when it comes to product design and design itself, this really goes right into branding. It goes into branding in every sense that it really controls your content itself. You're not going to have an amazing design and substandard content.

You're going to put the maximum effort into it. So I'm very happy to segue into these next two topics, which are very near and dear to me. 

Peter Loving: Fundamentally, when we're designing, we're always thinking about the end user. So we do our best job to really understand them and their needs and their goals.

So the more intimately we understand them, the better we are to then think up from their perspective of giving them the things that they need. At the beginning of any product or website, that's the process that we go through. It's really getting to understand those people. What are they looking to achieve and what result do they want?

And then when we understand how they usually get that result, we can create something that replicates that process and delivers that result for them online. So whether it's a website or a pro or a product, and it takes a time getting to know that while spending time with them, we usually do user interviews.

Or and research, or we might ask them questions or ask them find out a bunch of information about how they currently achieve the results of that, that, we're looking to help them with and essentially we create an automated way of doing that or an alternative way of doing that whether it be a website or a platform.

And that's really the fundamental part of getting good design is understanding the user, knowing. Knowing the problem, we really define the problem. That's really key because then we want to solve that problem for it. So if these are affiliate marketers, we want to know their big problems and we'll solve those in design.

And that's going to be part of helping them achieve their goals.

Oliver Kenyon: So when it comes to like ongoing CRO, I split CRO into two, two categories, really. One is the landing page design. So that is like. Building a landing page around best practices and best frameworks, which we have pioneered over the last 10 years to say if you put X, Y, and Z in this order and this layout, it should convert better than if you just got a random, good looking design of nine designs, for example, you then have the other side, which is when you have a certain amount of volume of data and traffic per month, you could start running exactly as you said, these kinds of AB tests.

And for those of you who don't know what that is, it's literally where you hypothesize that this would convert better than this use a bit of software that spins 50 percent of your audience towards version 50 percent towards B and you soon find out which game converts. Now it's a good question.

It's a question we get asked a lot. It's what volume of data do you need? We suggest that anyone below 50 to a hundred thousand hits per month. Sticks to landing page design, you can take bigger swings because you haven't got enough data going through the test, you can afford to take bigger swings, bigger changes and you can build something that based on a high converting framework.

If you have over 50 to set 7, 500, 000 a month. That's when you can unlock A, B testing effectively and quickly, because basically you need at least two weeks to run for a test. And the reason that is, is because external factors can sometimes contradict your test. For example, If on a Monday, there's a bit of news about the product that you're selling in the market, there's probably going to be more people who are trending, going to your pages and buying a product.

There might be something external again, that kind of affects it like a sale or Prime Day or something, something on that specific Monday may alter your test. So you need to let it run two Mondays just so you can counterbalance that and say, okay, it wasn't just a fluke on that Monday.

As far as sample size and volume. You're really looking at around about at least a hundred thousand hits at least yeah, 50 to a hundred thousand thousand hits. But also you need to look for statistical significance. So you can actually become stat sig a lot shorter time of volume, but you need to make sure that it is like that 85, 90 percent up on, okay, this one is statistically proven to convert better.

And sometimes you can actually make a bit more of a quicker decision if the test should win. You can do A B testing on any volume of traffic. It's just going to take you longer, to get to that 50, a hundred thousand hits, if you're only doing 20, 000 hits per month, it's going to take five, six months, whereas if you're doing over that a hundred thousand hits, you can just get statistically significant, a lot quicker, and then you can make a decision on whether the test won or lost and implement it on your store.

But I would always run it over two weeks, just so you have two Mondays, two Tuesdays, two Wednesdays, two Thursdays.

John Wright:  And the last two insights I'm going to share are with Simon Dunn from Your 10K, who's got a lot of experience in performance marketing. And he gives us some really interesting insights when it comes to what affiliate managers don't know about their own business and what they should know.

And I'm going to finish this off with another Matt Diggity quote, which just has another great tip that I think most affiliates just don't take to heart. Which I'm just going to summarize as knowing what to ask your affiliate managers, which personally, I believe most affiliate managers don't have the answer to, but if you ask them and they're good, they're going to get that answer for you, that's going to help you give you a competitive advantage and be part of your feedback loop.

Simon Dunne: Yeah. So for the most part, they are for affiliate programs and the most shocking thing, and it's like, it happens time and time again is. Affiliate managers paying wrong rate and to, to affiliate. So quite often for people who are inexperienced with affiliate management, they will say, okay, my target cost per acquisition is 50.

Therefore, I'm going to launch a program. I'm going to pay all the affiliates 50. So what they don't actually understand is what a lot of affiliates do is play in what we call a bottom of full space. So they will go and quite often they'll just like. And someone will even do, let's go back to the gambling example.

So someone will Google, or they'll bid on Bullet's Bingo coupon code. And what that affiliate is doing is they're just converting over someone who's already searching for the brand. It's not necessarily that incremental. The affiliate, the novice affiliate manager doesn't necessarily recognize that they just pay like their premium rate to people who are just like closing off the sale.

And they'll look at the program and they go, wow, we're getting so many sales through our affiliate program. But what's actually happened is someone else in the business has paid big bucks to create awareness for that user. And that affiliate is just closing them out. So we've often seen where, brands are choosing to pay 50 for a sale where they could easily be paying five or 10 and the affiliate won't be happy enough with the delay we've got in it.

Program burning tens of thousands of dollars every single month just

Matt Diggity: by getting the right, the biggest thing that they can help me with is just steering me towards the right products to promote. So we're just guessing when we log into that dashboard and we see their EPC numbers and stuff like that, but.

The, they really know the behind the scenes and especially how to relate that to the content I already have. So steer me towards the profitable products is the big thing. And then the second best thing that they can do for me is creating like a creative offer that's better than buy this, get this, so buy three, get one free or sign up for 12 months.

And let's have someone kind of recurring aspect to it. So that's one of the biggest things that can add another zero to the income I'm making with a product.

John Wright: 

And one more tip we got is on delegation and having a chat with SEO expert, Sean Chaudhary. He is the founder of Alchemy Leads, and he's a really cool guy.

We had an impromptu chat talking about SEO, about creating offers and guarantees for agencies, for affiliate sites, and for SaaS companies. And simply put, we basically said we need to do more delegation for 2024. So that's going to be another important tip to sign off with. 

Sean Chaudhary: For his story, but I also think that story is relatively common in our space, which is awesome.

If you look at some of the fastest growing companies, I would bet most of them that were in our space, just in a digital space, branches off into different things. But I think delegation, that's such a huge point. I'm trying to get better at it. I don't think I'm anywhere near where we will be in five years.

So just welcome back five years. Yeah, but yeah, no, delegation is something that's super key. I think, have you read the book? I think it's buying back your time, Dan Martell, buying back your time. And it's pretty interesting. And also the Elon book also, I think is a good story. And so what I'm trying to do more simplify.

And if you look at what Elon does, he tries to eliminate everything. Any task that he has to do, he's trying to eliminate it. That's really what he's trying to do. So there's a thousand parts of the process. He wants to make it one or four as simple as possible. And yeah, I think there's a simplicity and delegation systems and also the structure, right?

Like having people in place to be your support so you don't have to do all the nitty gritty. I think that's what this upcoming year, I think that's the next,

John Wright: that's the next phase. That was an amazing collection of insights and I'm just super grateful for having the opportunity. To get to ask these questions to some of these amazing guests over the past year.

And it just gives me a lot of inspiration for what's to come over this 2024. And just looking forward to interviewing even more amazing guests. If you want to do a big favor, if you've reached this far is if you can leave a comment or rating wherever you listen to your podcast, that helps us leap frog our podcast to get more.

More listeners get well known and it's going to help us land some amazing guests. So leave a comment, ask any question you want, and looking forward to giving you more amazing insights in 2024.