Affiliate Marketing Defined #SocialCafe 12.49

Welcome to Social Web Cafe's Social Cafe Interactive.

This week we are talking about affiliate marketing.

We're on season 12 and episode 49.

The immersive event that was born from the geeky

entertainment mind of Deborah E.

And it bloomed into a web show, a podcast, also propelling her to be

recognized as a global influencer in video podcasting and all this continuing

to be the number one jazz singer in LA.

So

welcome Gail, welcome Martin and Affiliate Marketing.

That's kind of an old topic and yet it could be a new topic,

depending on how you look at it.

Hey, I have a question for you guys.

One that I don't think I put in the chat.

What is your projection for 2024?

Do you think this is still going to be a popular thing?

Do you think affiliate marketing will kind of die out or do you think it'll

just keep going like it always has?

Well, it's lasted this long.

I don't think it's going away.

Google sometimes makes it harder and people quit, but then they

find some other way to get traffic.

And

so you think if it kind of goes up and down and, and it's got its

ebbs and flows, it's just not, it's, I was going to say, for some reason, I

was going to say it's like toilet paper.

It's still, I don't know why that came to mind, but it's

like, there's always a need.

So before, before we met.

Right.

Affiliate marketing was big.

I knew people that were making six figures because Google gave their content

traffic and then one day Google kind of took all the traffic away and so their

sales tanked and some of them had to take on other jobs or work and, but,

but there are still people that make big money with affiliate marketing.

Most of the people I know, they just have.

You know, they'll, they'll have a link for something they actually use,

or they'll have a page on their site about these are the things I use.

And here's my links.

And then if I mean, no pressure, like they're not actually affiliate marketers,

they're people who do something who happen to have a few affiliate links or maybe

a lot of affiliate links, but their, their primary focus isn't affiliate.

It's kind of complimentary to whatever they're doing.

Like, Hey, this is what I do, but.

This is something else that I sell that also goes with what I'm doing.

This is a definition of complimentary.

I just

Right.

So Kristi Hines has a really good page of like 200 great affiliate

programs for bloggers to look at.

And so if you go to, I think it's at kristihines.

com, just put in affiliate programs and she has a page and

it's got all the programs on it.

So you do like, affiliate programs, in quotes,

site, colon, kristihines.

com, in your Google search, and there you go.

Yeah, I don't think you have to get that fancy with it.

I'm a geek, what can I say?

I

mean, if it's hard to find, that would be one way, but I

don't think it's hard to find there.

Welcome, Tom.

Welcome.

And I want to come back.

I love the stuff that you were saying in the Twitter chat, the

controversial aspect of affiliate marketing, but pop over to Martin.

Martin was putting his thumbs up on the, you think affiliate marketing

will be going strong in 2024?

Yes.

If it's provided any value, it will.

So if you could save money on good stuff and you could earn money.

And live a good life, use good products.

I think it's more valuable for S A A S because like

some, some products are so complicated that even people that use them

don't know how to use everything.

And so I think there's a lot of room for like an SEO type person

could, could have post after post on features in SEM rush, for example.

On how to use it, because I don't think most people that have a SEMrush

subscription have a clue what it does.

They, they have a couple of things they do, and they don't

know all the other stuff.

And so I think that there's a lot of value if you actually use something

and you can actually provide, like, step by step instructions, how to

do something or, or an overview of this is why I have this tool.

And this is what it does for me.

You know, some actual applications of the tool.

I think that that's valuable.

And if I'm looking for something and I'm reading your post and you give me the most

information about it, I, why should I mind if you get a small, small commission after

you did all that stuff that helped you.

So like Ann Smarty should be recommending, you know, SEM Rush.

Right.

Yeah.

So anything that, that you want to, anything you actually

use, the, the problem with affiliate marketing is all these.

Top three, whatever's posts online, where they just picked the two, the three

that pay the best and ranked them by how much they get paid commission, right?

There is no value to that, except to the person who did it.

It is like hosting companies is a common one.

You don't have any idea whether those are good or bad.

All you know, is.

That, you know, that, that guy recommended those three, but there

are some real affiliate program sites for hosting where they actually test

the hosts and they have a graph and it says uptime, outages, speed, you know,

and, and they rank them by, do they have their, their servers overloaded?

And is that slowing down your site?

Right?

So there is, there are valuable, you know, Um, like a hosting related website where

they actually tested a bunch of hosts.

It's like having KPIs.

Yeah, right.

But those sites where it says top three, whatever, I don't trust those because I

don't believe those are the top three.

I think those are the top three that pay the best.

What about the sites that I've seen somewhere, for instance, and I

know I'm not picking on Riverside, it's just easy to say Riverside because we're

actually recording this on Riverside.

No, I'm not.

I, okay.

I'm an affiliate of Riverside, but I can't remember what my link is.

Um, but for instance, Riverside would put out an article.

I think they do have an article like this where they'll say, The best places

to, host your, your, you know, like what we're doing, your live stream and

they'll actually list themselves and they won't put themselves at the top.

They'll actually put themselves at the bottom.

I've seen several different companies do this and they'll, they'll list

other companies and they will actually evaluate the different features.

They'll come up with kind of like KPIs and they'll, it'll be a thoughtful.

I've seen several different articles like that where the, the company

that is hosting the article will put themselves at the bottom.

Um, or, or even if they put them at the top, it's, it's actually well thought out.

It's not like they put a bias towards themselves.

What do you think of those, Gail?

And then Martin, yeah, I wanted to hear, obviously, Martin

and Tom, your thoughts too.

I'm just sitting with Gail, brought up.

No, go ahead and let, let Martin say something.

Julie was messaging me and I was answering.

Uh, and I seen that and I think that's pretty okay, but

I, many of them are pretty same thing.

So I, I said, as Gail is saying that you're doing it in a

personal way, I'm using this.

That's a good, good thing, but I think that's good and it's good for

SEO and it's good for having a list.

You could find some other and getting curious.

What's that service?

I have, I have found that thanks to a blog post like that.

Do you think it's a, it's a buyer beware kind of thing where you

look at, Hey, are they really evaluating the KPIs or the, the met, you know,

And the same thing with KPI and others.

I mean, at least in Sweden, lots of regular hosting companies, they

have all these kinds of lists.

Right.

So, so yes, it's going to be worse now because of AI, right?

So now anybody who knows nothing about anything can regurgitate.

Basically kind of copies of 10 compiled, whatevers that AI is doing, right.

And publish, but generally speaking, hopefully people get wise.

They can, they can recognize AI, AI tends to be repetitive, right?

So if you see content that says such and such, blah, blah, blah,

such and such, blah, blah, blah, such and such, blah, blah, blah.

If you see that, you know, that an AI generated that and you have

to like interact with the person.

Like, you have to know it's a real person.

If you see someone that you know, and they have published something,

hopefully, even if the AI generated it, they at least made sure it was right.

But if you see some random site, and you don't know who that

person is, I would not believe.

AI apparently makes stuff up.

AI is not an accurate way to generate content.

At least not now.

And so it is always buyer beware and people are always a little,

are always a little biased.

There's no way to be not biased, right?

If you had a hosting company and you had a bad experience, you may be down on

them, you know, but sometimes things fail.

And then.

You know, you may have a hosting company, you would never personally had

a bad experience, so you think they're okay, but there's a zillion negative

reviews of people that had really bad experiences with that company.

And so, you know, you always have to read.

It's like when I, when I evaluate products, I go to Amazon, I read

all the negative reviews first.

Then I read the positive reviews and if somebody's just blasting something, I'll

go read their other reviews because a lot of times people that just like to bash,

all the reviews are pretty much bash and you know that person you can ignore.

Right, right, right.

So it's like if you're evaluating something, even if anything

affiliate, right, go to G2.

Used to be G2Crowd.

Go to g2.com.

Read the reviews there.

You'll learn a lot of stuff, like you'll find a limitation that you didn't

come across anywhere else in, in a comment or review on G2 or on Capterra.

There's one other one, right?

There's Capterra, there's G2, there's, there's a third one.

I can't think of name.

It eludes me.

I'd have to go back in time.

Yeah, but there's three places and they have extensive reviews.

They have video reviews and they have all kinds of comments and rankings.

And so, yeah, but I think affiliate marketing done well is, is legitimate

and it's good for everybody involved.

And you know, and then the other kind just, you know, if you see a site

and it says top three, anythings.

Probably assume that's probably one of those template, pick the

top three and don't go there.

There you go.

And Tom, you brought up.

Some concerns on the Twitter Chat?

Well, it depends on whether we're talking about specifics of

a particular affiliate arrangement or affiliate marketing in general.

Um, there are some good matches.

There are some overlaps in, in the, and let's just use the email list.

That's not the only way, but the email list that, that people might

share and say, Hey, my good friend, so and so has got this great product.

I've seen it.

It works.

If, if they are on similar paths in terms of.

A high potential for overlap of interest between two separate

mailing lists that can work.

And I've seen numbers and people have promoted that.

I've dabbled in a little bit myself.

I've got, um, I have a subscription with, um, an author network and they

have all kinds of resources that I've used extensively from little animations

that, that have my book cover and, and all kinds of stock photos that

I can put my, my book in it, you know, just good, good resources.

And I got in early and it's, you know, it's a good deal.

And they've, they approached me and said, Hey, would you like to

join the affiliate marketing for our, our next big package sale?

And, and I tried it a bit, but the truth is, while I may have some, some authors

that, that follow me or I follow them in the, the Twitter world, excuse me,

my email list is focused on government contracting and leadership and not

leadership writing so much as leadership.

Developing leaders.

And so I had no success.

I literally none came out of that.

So that made me think it through a little more thoroughly and say, well, who would

I know that would have a list I could use?

Ironically, in my market.

Having been around as long as I've been around, nobody compares.

My list is probably the best one out there.

And when I've chatted with others about that, just exploring and

say, Hey, you know, I, have you ever done any affiliate marketing?

I get this, I've heard of that, but I really don't know anything about it.

You know, I wouldn't want to do anything.

It's like, well, you know, that's not going to be a productive arrangement.

So what I've also experienced is on the reception end of it.

I may be on six different people's lists because I think each one

offers something different.

And then something comes up and I get this, Hey, don't you think

you would benefit from this?

My friend, Joe does this.

And within an hour, I get another message from one of the other six.

It says, Hey, my friend, Joe is just put out.

And I ended up with five different messages.

over the same dang thing, which by the way, I have no interest in to begin with.

And so what's happened is in a couple of those cases, like, okay, these are

clearly redundant, delete, delete, delete.

And I, I get off the list.

So I think there is some long term damage that can be done to your brand

if you aren't really careful about it.

I think the bulk of the people doing it are not careful about it.

And so while I can agree that the concept makes sense and it is good marketing

approach, if executed properly, my experience on both sides of that says

this really isn't something I'm going to dig into, I could make, I can do

better marketing myself in ways other than affiliate marketing, because who

else has a list that has a concentration of the people that I market to?

That makes sense.

That, that seems odd that that would happen though,

because if I were wanting to send something to someone's list.

I wouldn't send it to a bunch of rel, you know, related lists all at the same time.

I see that a lot.

I mean, I think

I do, I'll get like six different people send the same

thing all in a row in my email.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

If they're, okay, so if it's some kind of big push for Black Friday or

something, maybe, but what, but in general, though, it would make more sense

for, like, one to send it on in January and another one to send it in March and

another one to send it in May, right?

Because, because you're gonna have that overlap.

Well, and Gail, I agree with you completely.

Then they should realize the overlap.

I think they don't realize it because it's like one

person, like for instance, in the PLR market, everybody seems to know

everybody seems to know everybody.

So one person will say, Hey, I'm going to have this little thing about puppy dogs.

I'm going to let you know that next week we're going to have this

little PLR all about puppy dogs.

Oh, great.

We're going to do it about puppy dogs.

And all of these 10 people, . Send it out to all of their lists

about the puppy dog PLR.

And it just so happens that I know all of those 10 people because they

normally sell things about kitty cats.

So all on their lists about kitty cats, I get the email that says,

Oh, this week, we're going to have this PLR from this wonderful

person over here about puppy dogs.

And so I get 10 emails.

that's normally about kitty cats, different kitty cats, because there are

10 different kitty cats, but now we have this thing about the 10 same puppy dogs.

It's like, all right, I got it.

I got it.

I also heard about the puppy dogs because I also know the gal that

knows the puppy dogs and that's how it ends up always being the same email.

Yeah, that would be a problem.

We should, we should strive not to do that.

Conceptually, I agree with what you're saying.

I just feel that as it's executed, that's really poorly done.

And it's, it's rare to find the one that seems successful.

And of course, that's the one you hear about, you know, one time, two people

got together and really did a good job of it and had a success and they go, you

know, we made 10, 000 sales because great.

I'm happy for you.

It's not my thing.

Yeah, but to do it all at once in the same niche,

you're going to dilute your results.

Exactly.

And that's how I see it.

That's why you shouldn't do it that way.

Agreed.

It's bad execution.

And some don't.

Like, for instance, I was, I was thinking about a, um, this came

up Black Friday, unrelated, but I was thinking about a coupon.

I looked at it on a dashboard thing I had and the coupon was Ileane,

Miss Ileane, as in Miss Ileane Smith.

And the coupon was that, and I thought that was a program that was set

up just for her, only her, because not everybody's name is Ileane.

And that, that would be an example, Gail, you know, where obviously only that

one went out for Miss Ileane and maybe, you know, more affiliate marketers.

...where not affiliate marketers, but the, the parent company should be doing

that where it's like, Hey, we're going to have this, but we're only going to

have it for this particular affiliate marketer who happens to have 10, 000

people on their list or whatever.

This is a special coupon at this time for this puppy dog this week,

and we'll do something over for this person, this puppy dog in two weeks,

you know, with this special deal.

Is that feasible?

Yeah, I mean, they have, they control the timing.

When that happens, that is the person that's making the deal to send it

to a list that made that error.

Because the guy who owns each list may not have any idea that he's doing that.

Maybe that's something someone at the parent

company is not thinking about.

That they're flooding the market and then they're not getting Apparently.

Because they could have, you know, if they do that, they might

get multiple puppy dogs sold.

If they actually spread it out.

Well, let me, let me pose it from a little different angle, too.

We still make jokes about the Nigerian prince, and the reason we make the jokes

is because people, people are still taken in by it, and, and the point is

that no matter how often we joke about it or talk about it or warn people about

it, somebody's going to give into it.

And that's the reason why the Nigerian Prince emails keep

showing up because they work.

And so to some degree, affiliate marketing, and maybe I'm making

a bad comparison to the Nigerian Prince in this process, but, but

I think you understand my analogy here in that the reason affiliate

marketing can work and will continue is because it can be well executed.

I just don't think it is.

I think too many of them are Nigerian-Prince-like more than credible

affiliate marketing arrangements.

Well, affiliate marketing has a serious problem that if you're

on the buyer's end, you have no clue.

And that is that there are a whole lot of ways to steal people's commissions.

And so.

If you were a serious affiliate marketer, you could have a serious problem because

there are sites that overwrite the code.

Like let's say I give one of you my code and you go to buy something and you

click on my link, but you have something installed like a free toolbar or a free

tool of some kind, or some hacker type person put something in your browser.

And even though you clicked on my link, I don't get the credit.

It goes, the credit goes to someone else.

And so there's that problem.

It's the same thing.

Like if you're an ecommerce store, you have an advertising problem.

If you have listings on a shopping site.

Like Google shopping and you have, you're paying per click on Google

ads and you're on comparison sites.

The same buyer could click on your ad and then go check the prices on some other

site on Google shopping and then go check the reviews on some comparison site.

And you're actually paying for that same customer four times.

And when that happens, you better be selling them something

expensive or you just lost money.

Wow.

Yeah.

And we've got a lot of those things now where I'm all the time.

Something's trying to get me to install some toolbar, CitiBank or some, some bank.

Capital capital

Capital One.

Yeah.

Right.

So those kinds of things, I have a feeling steal the affiliate commissions.

I don't know that that one does, but I know that there are some that do.

Yeah.

That one's always trying to check to see if like Amazon's

the lowest or eBay or yeah.

It's always checking the prices everywhere.

Right, so if you install that in your browser, it could do lots

of stuff and you wouldn't know it.

Mm hmm.

You don't, you, unless you're a programmer, you don't know what

anything you have installed is doing.

And we're not all honest as far as, if I hear about something and I

know someone's an affiliate and even if I'm an affiliate, if they told me about it

first, I want them to get the commission.

So I'll contact them and say, could you please check and make

sure you got the commission?

Cause I went and purchased this and you should get the commission because

you told me about it first, but I doubt that, that everybody does that.

Definitely not.

Yeah.

Like everything else, it gets complicated.

But, but if you're going to be a good marketer, you need to have wise

strategies and blasting it to a bunch of related lists with this, with a

similar overlap is not a good idea.

That's a good point.

Tom's right about that.

Well, Hey, you know what, we've come up on the hour and this

time I'm actually remembering to ask you Gail to mention what we're

talking about tomorrow on Tip Talk.

You know, I don't know because we changed directions

again and now we are, we are trying to associate the TipTalks with

what happened at Small Biz Fluence.

So actually this challenge this month is overcoming your fear of failure.

All right.

Well, I still want to invite people that aren't already

members to join us at bizsugar.

com forward slash mastermind.

Doesn't cost anything.

You can come ask any question.

You can share your experiences.

And if I don't know the answer, I know somebody that does.

So I would really like us to invite all the small business people and

freelancers and agencies to come and be active there because it really

can be a very valuable resource.

There's a lot of people there.

I've known for what, 10 years now, 11, 12 years.

Uh, 12, 13, 14.

The years are flying by.

So yeah, a lot of, a lot of good people there.

Even, even they pop in or gone for three weeks, come back.

There's just a, it's great community there.

So, so yes, I second that.

And with that, thank you for tuning in.

Those of you watching us on YouTube and, um, we'll be streaming in other places.

Uh, we're adding things, but I won't bore you right now.

You can catch us next week, same place, same time.

And we'll see you in other places.

Weeks go on.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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