What is product?

Or rather, what is the role of product in affiliate marketing?

Product might be too wide of a keyword so let’s niche down a little with a few other jobs we see in the product space.

  • Head of Product
  • Product Owner
  • Product Designer

Ok so what does product have to do with affiliate marketing? I’ll start with the conclusion and work backwards with my supporting points.

In between I’ll share some stories of how I went from ‘is this even a real job?’ to ‘product will be the next person we hire for’.

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Why affiliate marketers need a product person on their team

I’ll start with 2 points on why I think you need a product person in your affiliate marketing team.

  1. Google is rewarding more sites that can be categorized as products
  2. The growing companies are investing by hiring for more product roles

Let’s start with the SERP proof before we go into the social proof.

If you’ve not been under a rock, you’d know that Lily Ray and Glen Allsopphave covered winners and losers in SERPs the last 12+ months. SERPs is SEO speak for Search Engine Results Page.

Google kicked things off with the Helpful Content Update(HCU) in September 2023 and ever since it has been Google bowling ever since.

If you start experimenting with the keyword explorer in Ahrefs, you can check for what pages rank for a keyword today and do a time comparison going back in time. If you roll things back 1 month, you’ll see drastic changes. If you roll it back to over a year ago, you’ll see that maybe half of the top 100 results for any keyword has changed.

That is the previous ranking sites are gone and replaced by others sites.

What other sites are we seeing take up more SERP real estate?

  • Forums like Reddit
  • Social media
  • YouTube
  • Apps
  • Quora
  • LinkedIn
  • More Reddit
  • And even more YouTube

You can check the results in Ahrefs or other similar tools like Semrushand of course you can search for this yourself by testing Google to see what you get.

I did write a previous newsletter that talked about how forums were big winners of more search traffic over the past year. This includes sites with their own hosted forum as well as sites like Reddit and Quora.

Let me double down on SEO.

Follow the leaders

I always find insights when I look through a company’s LinkedIn profile.

I don’t care how many followers a company has but I’m looking for their hiring or firing trend, average tenure of their employees and the roles they hire for.

I used to zero in on the data roles within a company being a data geek myself but there is one prominent role I started to notice at some of the most respected affiliate companies in iGaming.

This is any product related role.

When I look at leading companies like Better Collective, Legend and Game Lounge, you can really get an understanding of what the owners and management value in terms of human resources.

You can also see these changes over time.

My product journey

My product journey is a long one and I usually tie things back to design.

I’m a self-taught designer that built sites on Photoshop, then on Sketch and then on Figma.

I designed our very first version of the StatsDrone app. When we raised money and could afford to hire a designer, I wasn’t looking for a product designer but that is exactly what I got.

As a student of SaaS everything and a fan of designers, I found Peter Loving from UserActive.io.

At the time, I just thought UserActive was a SaaS design agencyand technically they are. They will do all your SaaS designs. It was only through working with them that I realized they were product designers. What made them great is they treated our designs like they were the product owner. They spent as much time trying to understand our users and it really educated us in the process.

Shoutout to Amadeu Thomson and Mariana García for their work on the project.

My realization and appreciation of the product roles only grew from this point on. After relaunching StatsDrone in November 2023 and getting the feedback we got, I was convinced that our next hire wasn’t going to be sales or tech, but rather for product.

Had I remained a little naive on the value of product roles, I don’t know if we would have ended up getting Joe Hatch join our team as Head of Product.

Now, every time I meet product people at other companies, I don’t feel I always know what they do, but I know they are important people and I’m eager to learn anything I can from them.

Product-Led SEO

Earlier this year I got the honour to record Eli Schwartz who’s the author of an amazing SEO book called Product Led SEO. I’d go as far to say this is not just an SEO book but a solid business book that applies to anybody from affiliate marketers, agency owners to SaaS companies.

When you read through Eli’s book on product-led SEO, you’ll realize that more of the sites that are ranking well in Google are in fact more products and less informational sites.

I’ll share something Eli taught me from our podcast recording. You can access that recording over here.

CreditKarma, a product-led SEO example

He said think about a site like CreditKarma as a perfect example of product-led SEO.

They don’t really need SEO because their product is so powerful, it generates all the leads they could ever ask for.

Except that they’ve naturally built as many links as they could have done without trying. By being a superior product, it has then given them SEO power.

Product job boards

Having a quick look at some product related roles in iGaming, they seem to be everywhere and pay very well.

I’ve done some research on this but not extensively and would be interesting to hear what Cordelia Morgan - Cooper thinks.

Herry Stebbings on product

AJ Tennant said the 2 most impactful roles are are product & sales

I’ve only been listening to the 20VC podcast for the last week as a new follower and Harry Stebbingstalks about how he isn’t an investor but he’s building products.

The most recent guest was AJ Tennant whom is VP of Sales & Success at Glean. He is someone who’s experienced in sales but his praise for product being a critical part of any company was the surprising takeaway for me.

When a sales guy with immense experience says product is just as important as sales, it is worth paying attention to.

So what is product and why is it here to stay?

I think product is quality.

I think Google is trying to prioritize quality websites.

I’ve had well respected SEO friends tell me they are prioritizing a few quality sites and dumping their smaller sites.

I think product is both misunderstood and overlooked because I don’t think it has as much industry attention like sales, marketing and SEO does.

When you have a good product, it benefits all other departments: sales, marketing and SEO.

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