Episode 8
Navigating Affiliate Marketing in the AI Era: A Conversation with Dustin Howes
Affiliate marketing has experienced significant changes, especially with the rise of AI and the impact of the pandemic. Brett Deister chats with Dustin Howes, a seasoned expert in this field, who shares insights on how affiliate marketing has thrived during challenging times and continues to grow. They discuss essential strategies for creating effective affiliate programs, emphasizing the need for personalized outreach, attractive incentives, and thorough competitor analysis. Dustin also delves into the importance of maintaining strong relationships with top affiliates, leveraging tools for better management, and the potential future of affiliate marketing as it becomes increasingly relationship-driven. Tune in to discover actionable tips, industry trends, and resources to enhance your affiliate marketing efforts.
Takeaways:
- Affiliate marketing saw significant growth during the pandemic as businesses moved online.
- Creating an affiliate program requires a solid plan and understanding of competitors' offerings.
- Personalized outreach is crucial for successful affiliate recruitment and maintaining relationships.
- AI can streamline content creation for affiliates, but personal relationships remain essential.
- Top affiliates should be nurtured continuously to avoid them switching to competitors.
- Old school methods like manual outreach and keyword research still yield high-quality affiliates.
Links referenced in this episode:
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- SEMrush
- PubRecruiter.com
- Publisher Discovery.com
- ChatGPT
- Jasper
- Impact
- ShareASale
Transcript
That's good.
Brett Dyser:And welcome to new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew, and I'm your host, Brett Dyser.
Brett Dyser:As always, if you do like this podcast, just subscribe to all your favorite podcasting apps and YouTube as well.
Brett Dyser:It always helps.
Brett Dyser:But this week we're going to be talking about affiliate marketing, the favorite thing people don't really want to talk about because it's sometimes hard to do because you're relying on normal people to help spread the word most of the time, but not always.
Brett Dyser:But most of the time, you're getting just your regular customers to spread the word.
Brett Dyser:But I have Dustin here, and he is an expert in this.
Brett Dyser:He's been doing it for many years.
Brett Dyser:He is a nerd, as he says himself, about this, and he just loves about this.
Brett Dyser:So I'm happy to have him on the show.
Brett Dyser:So welcome to the show, Dustin.
Dustin:Hey, appreciate you having me, Brett.
Brett Dyser:Yes.
Brett Dyser:And the first question I ask all my guests is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?
Dustin:Coffee.
Dustin:A hundred percent.
Dustin:And cowboy coffee, if it's available.
Dustin:I actually enjoy adding a little grit to my morning.
Dustin:Like, I'm straight black.
Dustin:I put nothing in it, and I like the bitterness.
Brett Dyser:Nice.
Brett Dyser:You just like to boil the water with the coffee grounds and be like, you know what?
Brett Dyser:We're just gonna have both of them together to get as much caffeine out of this thing as I chew it.
Dustin:Up as I drink it.
Dustin:Yeah, it's great.
Brett Dyser:No worries.
Brett Dyser:I gave a brief introduction to your expertise, but can you give the listeners a little bit more about what you do?
Dustin:Yeah, you got it, man.
Dustin:13 years of affiliate marketing and digital marketing experience.
Dustin:I've ran merchant programs and my own agency over the last five, and I help small companies, SMBs, especially in the SaaS department, to grow and create an affiliate program that actually works.
Dustin:And that's.
Dustin:That's what I'm passionate about.
Dustin:I actually teach a course now that teaches everything that I know and help giving back to the community of affiliate marketing as.
Dustin:As we know it today.
Brett Dyser:All right, and what has changed in affiliate marketing since the explosion of AI and the pandemic in general?
Brett Dyser:Because the pandemic has, as we've all said, changed everything.
Dustin:Sure thing.
Dustin:The pandemic.
Dustin:First of all, affiliate marketing was one of those fields that actually blew up.
Dustin:So in, instead of being a detriment to most of society, affiliate marketing actually profited enormously, overshooting their expectated growth in affiliate.
Dustin:Just because Covid brought everything online so much more and revenue was generated online, significantly increased for affiliate marketing.
Dustin:So, and then I forgot the other question.
Dustin:Brett, what was the other part of.
Brett Dyser:That AI as well?
Brett Dyser:So we had like the pandemic and then like two years later it was, hey, AI is everywhere.
Dustin:AI is everywhere.
Dustin:And affiliate marketing is getting easier because content can produce via AI significantly faster.
Dustin:And there are quite a few programs out there, ChatGPT, of course.
Dustin:And then you've got things like Jasper, AI and some others that are just absolutely killing it out there and helping affiliate marketers produce content at a much faster click.
Brett Dyser:Gotcha.
Brett Dyser:And so do you have any like latest stats, like just an overview stats or just like affiliate market?
Brett Dyser:You said it blew up.
Brett Dyser:Is it still blowing up now as we've seen it or has it kind of like plateaued a little bit?
Brett Dyser:Are we seeing that type of like slowdown there?
Dustin:There is no end in sight to its uptick in growth.
Dustin:Companies every day are figuring out the power of having a army of sales reps that are paid on a commission basis.
Dustin:Because that's exactly what affiliate market marketing does.
Dustin:And no, the it continues to scale.
Dustin: I want to say: Dustin:And I like to say a good affiliate program will cover an additional 20% of your revenue that you have existing by just adding in those kinds of partnerships that are going to be a good fit for, for your product.
Brett Dyser:Yes.
Brett Dyser:And that actually leads into my next question.
Brett Dyser:How do PR pros and marketers create a great affiliate program?
Brett Dyser:Because everybody can create one, but not all of them are good.
Dustin:Oh absolutely.
Dustin:And they're not all built the same.
Dustin:There's 50 different softwares to choose from.
Dustin:The management aspect which is extraordinarily important.
Dustin:There's this very odd thought process the industry that you can just go out and create an affiliate program and all these affiliates are going to come on in and join your program.
Dustin:And that just couldn't be further from the truth.
Dustin:Like companies very quickly realize that it doesn't matter how good your offer is or how you think partners are going to swarm on in.
Dustin:You have to beat the streets and get the word out about your program and expand your brand.
Dustin:And it's a lot of hard work.
Dustin:Affiliate managers, affiliate management is a full time job if you're doing it right and you really want to expand with it because you can never have enough recruitment to your program.
Brett Dyser:So does that mean for creating a great affiliate program is to actually have like good incentives?
Brett Dyser:Is it good to have like a great onboarding process?
Brett Dyser:Like what other things should Marketers know if they're just trying to start it out.
Dustin:Yeah, absolutely.
Dustin:The all of the above.
Dustin:To answer your question, yes, you have to have an appealing offer, have to check your competitors.
Dustin:You have to make sure that your competitors are not offering something well above what you're offering to your partners.
Dustin:And if they are beating you out, you just can't handle those margins.
Dustin:Then you have to figure out other ways to incentivize them.
Dustin:Maybe that's free accounts, maybe that's free products, maybe that's an SEO link backlink to them.
Dustin:Just whatever you have to utilize to get them into your program rather than sending traffic to your competitors.
Dustin:It's what you're going to have to learn how to figure out.
Dustin:So best, best case scenario is getting help before you create in a program and just try to make it happen on your own.
Dustin:It's almost always a recipe for disaster if you don't get some kind of consultant in there to help you build this thing out right the first time.
Brett Dyser:Like you said before, how AI has changed at all.
Brett Dyser:How can you, I guess, implement AI into that affiliate marketing where it actually is useful?
Dustin:Yeah.
Dustin:From the brand's perspective of things, using AI, it hasn't hit the ground like it has for building content on the publication side.
Dustin: ingle day to help them create: Dustin:It has been in the past.
Dustin:But on the affiliate management side, most of the tools are from scraping websites and contact information.
Dustin:That's, that's probably best.
Dustin:Where we're utilizing AI is building lists a lot easier and building lists to contact the right publishers that are right for your program.
Dustin:But nothing's, nothing's perfect at this point.
Dustin:You, you could, you could search by, you know, keywords that might be super relevant to your industry and try to find a bunch of affiliates that are ranking for those keywords.
Dustin:But a lot of this is still some, some manual processes that you're going to have to get into.
Dustin:And, and you still need a full time affiliate manager to handle all of that and make decisions.
Dustin:So AI isn't perfect from this perspective yet, but it is getting better every day.
Brett Dyser:And then what are some old school ways of actually doing affiliate marketing?
Brett Dyser:So we talked about the new ways, but I'm pretty sure there's a lot of old school ways that actually are really just as effective or even more effective right now than AI.
Dustin:No doubt some of the best old school ways is just simply take your biggest keyword that your brand wants to rank for and type it into Google and let's look at the search results.
Dustin:Take the top 30 pages that are ranking there today and let's figure out which each one of those is actually an affiliate or if they're a competitor, we're not going to have to worry about it.
Dustin:But if they are affiliate, they have affiliate links, they have outbound links that might be organic.
Dustin:These are all potential partners and you want that list of 30.
Dustin:And you're going to have to figure out who the right contact is at each one of those.
Dustin:So one of my favorite tactics is I build a giant list first of all these keywords and people that are ranking there.
Dustin:And then I go to each individual one and I use a tool called Hunter IO, it's a Chrome extension and it will give me a list of people that work at that company and their email addresses and things free.
Dustin:And it's super easy to use.
Dustin:I copy that.
Dustin:I go to LinkedIn and I figure out who the right person is to contact at that company and then I go into emailing and set them up with a drip campaign that is going to get their attention somehow.
Dustin:So, but that's the old school way and that's still the way I go about doing a lot of my processes throughout the day for the clients I work with.
Dustin:And I don't see that changing in the, in the near future.
Dustin:And automation is helping that process get faster and cleaner.
Dustin:But there's always going to be something to be said about, you know, manually having that connection to the person you're reaching out to.
Brett Dyser:And then when messaging those people, I, I know the easier ways to do like an automated message, but a lot of people can figure out that it's automated.
Brett Dyser:So how do you like try to message as many people as you can without feeling like you're a robot?
Dustin:Good question.
Dustin:I don't have a great answer for it today.
Dustin:It seems like the more I try to shoot out that wide net approach, the worse my results get.
Dustin:If you have a wide net approach and are batching and blasting through your email Service, expect a 10% response rate or less.
Dustin:That's, that's what you can expect.
Dustin:Now if you cater each one of those messages, especially the first message that you're reaching out with with something that is pertaining to their LinkedIn profile or their website that they are utilizing or working at, whatever it may be, if you do something just in one or two sentences that shows them that you took the time to care about them, your response rate will dramatically Go up into that 30 and 40% if you're doing it right.
Dustin:So that's something that you should be always keeping in mind if you're failing at recruiting affiliates, get more personalized and you're going to have a better success rate.
Brett Dyser:So I mean, could it be just like batching it down to like maybe like 10 a day and then doing some research and then that could actually help because I feel like we always try to do a lot as PR pros and marketers are like, we're just going to do a hundred a day.
Brett Dyser:We're going to just like look like we're awesome and then it's like what you said, 10% or lower actual response rate.
Brett Dyser:So would it be just like niching it down to be like, let's say we do 10 a day, let's say we do five a day and then really customize that message?
Dustin:Yeah, I mean it's a little bit different in the PR space because you're giving a pitch and you've got that two, three sentence pitch that you're always bringing to their attention.
Dustin:And it's kind of similar in the affiliate space as well, except your pitch has to cater to giving them money as commissions for the sales that they're bringing in rather than like a flat fee that you're willing to pay.
Dustin:So the message is definitely going to be a little bit, I think you can get away with it a little bit easier in PR than you can with affiliate.
Dustin:And the reason is it is more of a PR folks are more accustomed to getting those kinds of requests where affiliates, they get hundreds of them each day from each.
Dustin:From individual brands, depends on how big they are to go and promote new products.
Dustin:So it can be a little testy and I think the response rate suffers because of that.
Brett Dyser:And then like content wise to actually like advertise it.
Brett Dyser:Should they be using like podcasts, should they be using like email newsletters to actually like generate that stuff?
Brett Dyser:Besides just like using what you said, should they be using other stuff to actually bring awareness to the affiliate program?
Brett Dyser:At the same time they can.
Dustin:I haven't seen a huge uptick in getting additional exposure on joining an affiliate program.
Dustin:The best affiliates are going to figure out that there's a vertical that they need to add to their website or go and promote.
Dustin:Maybe they're digital marketers or media buyers that want to get into a specific niche and then they're going to research those brands and whatever comes up first as like the best affiliate program for those verticals is the list that you want to be on.
Dustin:So getting on some of those lists could be helpful, but it hasn't been a gigantic uptick, in my opinion.
Dustin:Now you might find some success in like taking your vertical, let's say, let's say you sell mushrooms, you know, whatever terrible example, we'll stick with it.
Dustin:Mushrooms.
Dustin:You just say mushroom affiliate program and you bid on that campaign.
Dustin:You know, maybe it's like a quarter 50 cents or something on Google, but people that are trying to get into that space might accidentally look that up and click and go to your affiliate program.
Dustin:That might be one successful story, but really nothing beats manual labor of going out and finding the people that are actually ranking on Google first and getting their attention somehow.
Dustin:Because the ones that are just going to come in off a whim few and far between, are they going to be really worth a lot as an affiliate?
Brett Dyser:And then what are some ways of not doing to create an affiliate program?
Brett Dyser:Like we've said, like all the great ways, but what are some things just to avoid entirely, just so you don't waste your time?
Dustin:I'd say the biggest pitfall folks go through is not coming up with a solid game plan to begin with.
Dustin:So if they just create an affiliate program and figure like people are just going to sign up and give it an arbitrary like 10% I commission rate without a plan of like looking at their competitors first and seeing what their competitors are, often that program is much more likely to fail.
Dustin:But if you go in, get a consultant like get, get fresh eyes on your brand and make sure that they know what best practices are for this industry and have them come up with a plan to, you know, get the right affiliate manager in your, in your system to be that representative or just specifically which platforms are going to be the best for your product?
Dustin:That's important.
Dustin:Like there's 50 platforms to choose from out there and if, and if you choose the wrong one that isn't to your specifications of what you need for last click or first click attribution, you're going to go down a bad road.
Dustin:So pre planning is the most important step of it all.
Dustin:And I can't emphasize enough to get somebody who's a consultant that's done it time after time again to help you in this journey.
Dustin:Because if you try to do this on your own, you're going to have it in your own brand lens and it's going to be an uphill battle.
Brett Dyser:So would you also say like going through the affiliate programs that you may actually be doing and seeing like what's difficult to go through how many clicks you go through and seeing like from your own personal experience like how people may drop off.
Brett Dyser:Because I feel like a lot of times we just like set it up.
Brett Dyser:We don't actually test ourselves or like this is awesome.
Brett Dyser:And then you're like, why is nobody signing up?
Dustin:Yeah, yeah.
Dustin:Test and retest is always important in the affiliate channel to make sure all the tracking is right.
Dustin:Every platform out there is going to help hold your hand during the situation.
Dustin:So that shouldn't be that big of a problem.
Dustin:You can get affiliate program launched in a day.
Dustin:I've done it before.
Dustin:But some, some are a little bit more dynamic in the tracking values and a little more aggressive with commission rate and adjustments to commission.
Dustin:Like they might pay a CPA and they might pay a, a revenue share and it can get really complicated.
Dustin:And some programs have taken two months for me to launch.
Dustin:So it's a wide range.
Dustin:It just depends on what you need out of those partnerships.
Dustin:But again, that game plan, coming up with your ideal magic wand scenario first and then getting somebody that can execute and make that plan come, that vision come to life is super necessary for the success of an affiliate program early.
Brett Dyser:On and then for just maintaining it.
Brett Dyser:What are some of the best tips to maintain affiliate programs?
Brett Dyser:I feel like you can start it and it's great and everything and woo.
Brett Dyser:We launched it.
Brett Dyser:But the maintaining part is probably the hardest part because you want this for like 10 years or longer.
Dustin:I'm pretty sure, yes.
Dustin:For, for sure.
Dustin:Maintenance is a matter of taking your top affiliates that are sales active and making sure that they are taken care of.
Dustin:Do not let these guys slip through your fingers or go to a competitor.
Dustin:Do whatever you have to to take your top 10 affiliates out there and continue to work on them.
Dustin:Ask them what they need from you, ask them what you guys can be doing better if.
Dustin:Set up landing pages for them, give them more assets for marketing, give them email swipes so that they can tap into their audience of subscribers.
Dustin:Do whatever you think the sales active affiliate partners especially early on and that's going to give you a better vision of what new affiliates are going to be looking for.
Dustin:And that way you can automate those things that they are looking for when they come into the program and you get new partners that could be difference makers.
Dustin:So it's a continuation of, you know, getting on monthly calls with your top affiliates and just listening to what their needs are can be super beneficial to your program in the long run.
Brett Dyser:So yeah, almost like highlighting your top sellers and making sure that they're taken care of will actually help with your affiliate marketing in the long run.
Brett Dyser:So would that be like like you said before, but also like highlighting it through email newsletters or something like that, your top sellers and like making them feel like special?
Brett Dyser:Because I'm pretty sure when you make them feel special, they feel like they're part of the process instead of like just a number in the affiliate marketing cog.
Dustin:Absolutely.
Dustin:The more personalized you can get.
Dustin:Like for example, I take everybody that's ever been an affiliate, a sales active affiliate in a program that I've run and I have them in my personal CRM.
Dustin:So they I have notes in there about what verticals they're interested in and I have notes about any kind of personal message that we've had in the past.
Dustin:Maybe when you went out to dinner or had a drink.
Dustin:I'm writing all those notes down for the future so that I can go back to that relationship and tap into it if I have a new client that would be a fit for them or even for the client that we're existing and working with.
Dustin:Like I pass that off into the CRM for the next affiliate manager that takes over so that they have a good understanding of where that relationship left off when I left that company.
Dustin:So CRMs are almost are highly suggested.
Dustin:Even if you're using just an Excel sheet, it is super important to keep track of your partnerships along with the your deals for the people that are buying your product.
Dustin:And if you can piggyback off of your existing CRM that you're using, whether it be a HubSpot or Salesforce, if you can add the affiliate channel and partnerships into that and just tag it in a certain way, that'll help ease the cost of not having to bomb the affiliate program itself.
Brett Dyser:And are there some tools that could help manage this?
Brett Dyser:I know you said hunter for finding people, but is there some tools just to maintain the affiliate programming that marketers and PR pros should know about?
Dustin:I'm always a big of SEMrush.
Dustin:SEMrush is almost always the first tool that I use and for the keyword research and the sites that are ranking for those keywords, that's how I build my biggest list is using SEMrush.
Dustin:And then there are a few tools out there that are super helpful.
Dustin:PubRecruiter.com is helpful.
Dustin:Publisher Discovery.com is super helpful.
Dustin:And within each affiliate network you're going to have a large publisher pool that exists already that are on the network and that you can reach out through their platform.
Dustin:So when you go with an impact or a share sale, you have a baked in list of good affiliates that are in the system that you can tap into.
Dustin:But I would strongly advise and not trying to reach out to the masses, find the ones that are going to be relevant to your vertical and niche that are in the platform itself.
Dustin:So those are some of the tools that I use every time I start going recruiting for a program.
Brett Dyser:And what is your prediction for the future of affiliate marketing in the next five years?
Dustin:Solid question.
Dustin:I believe it's going to get even more relationship based as AI starts taking over a lot of capabilities of, of what publishers and affiliate managers are doing.
Dustin:I think the relationship portion of affiliate management is going to actually grow because you're going to find ways to make more time for more interaction personally.
Dustin:And so those websites that might not be getting the most love right now because you just don't have time as an affiliate manager now that time that you have been absorbed creating, creating reports for executives or doing your daily report evaluations, a lot of that time is going to be caught up and you'll be able to have more phone calls with partners.
Dustin:So don't think that affiliate management is going away.
Dustin:This is going to be a long time coming because people are going to continue to crave that kind of personal relationship with the brands that they're working with.
Dustin:And I think it's going to be even stronger and the demand for affiliate managers is just going to continue to grow.
Brett Dyser:So I mean it's almost like affiliate managers should understand how to use AI because AI could be just their little assistant doing most of the back end work while they do most of the relationship management work.
Dustin:Keep that in mind.
Dustin:Virtual assistants are also super beneficial if, if you're getting paid full time as an affiliate manager, you should consider looking into a VA to do the work that you really don't want to do all that often.
Dustin:And AI is going to help with this in the future.
Dustin:But virtual assistants can get that done job done today for you if you train them well.
Dustin:If you find a good one, don't let them go.
Dustin:Just, you know, keep them on board for 10 hours a week to recruit on a bigger basis or do the things, the tedious processes that you don't want to do.
Dustin:And that's going to be a great time saver for you as well.
Brett Dyser:All right.
Brett Dyser:Where can people find you online to learn more about this?
Dustin:My online course is Performance Marketing Manager.
Dustin:Com.
Dustin:It is a, it is everything I know about affiliate marketing smushed into eight hours of video training with all the templates that I utilize on a daily basis for my programs and along with a community of affiliate managers that are working together to help pass each other good leads on affiliates and, you know, sharing their industry knowledge.
Dustin:So it's a great community to be a part of.
Dustin:And then for, for me personally, if you want 15 minutes of my time, I give it away for free.
Dustin:So go to dustin house.com/pod15 and get a free 15 minute call with me and I'll answer any questions you have about affiliate marketing.
Brett Dyser:All right, Any final thoughts for listeners?
Dustin:Boy, I don't know.
Dustin:I've said a lot here.
Dustin:I didn't.
Dustin:No, I really don't.
Dustin:Brett, I think you've asked a lot of really good questions here and I got to brain dump a bit.
Dustin:I appreciate you having me and this has been great, man.
Brett Dyser:All right, thank you, Dustin, for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on affiliate marketing.
Dustin:You got it.
Dustin:Take care, Brett.
Brett Dyser:And thank you for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.
Brett Dyser:As always, please subscribe to all your favorite podcasting apps for this podcast and subscribe on YouTube, Rumble and everywhere else that there is video to be had.
Brett Dyser:And join us next month as we talk to another great Zelda in the PR and marketing world.
Brett Dyser:All right, guys, stay safe.
Brett Dyser:Get to understanding your own affiliate marketing.
Brett Dyser:See you next week.
Dustin:Later.
