617: Scaling to a 7-Figure Sale: Affiliate Marketing Beyond SEO

0:00:04 From a side hustle to a seven figure exit, how the part time projects
0:00:07 we talk about can truly be life changing.
0:00:08 What’s up, what’s up, Nick?
0:00:09 Hello for here.
0:00:13 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, part of the entrepreneur podcast network
0:00:18 because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive.
0:00:20 So for this one, I got to take you back in time.
0:00:22 It is 2019.
0:00:26 We hear from a couple guys on the Side Hustle Show about their little part time
0:00:27 website, that little side hustle.
0:00:32 It’s about a year old and they’re writing these in-depth product review
0:00:36 articles in these product comparison posts, this brand versus this brand,
0:00:39 that kind of thing, monetizing this site with affiliate partnerships.
0:00:43 And they’re doing around 20 grand a month, fantastic results, right?
0:00:45 For a one year old site.
0:00:48 Well, that site was finn versus finn.com.
0:00:54 And it recently sold just a few months ago actually for a seven figure sum.
0:00:56 That’s a million dollars plus for those scoring at home.
0:01:01 Now, co-founder Alex Goldberg is here to catch us up on what’s working today
0:01:06 in a volatile SEO landscape and how website owners can still position
0:01:10 themselves for success while relying less and less on organic traffic.
0:01:13 Alex, welcome back to the Side Hustle Show.
0:01:14 Thanks so much.
0:01:14 Great to be here.
0:01:15 Great to see you, Nick.
0:01:16 Absolutely.
0:01:17 Looking forward to this one.
0:01:20 If you’re tuning in, you’ve been burned by algorithm updates like a lot
0:01:22 of us have over the last few months.
0:01:26 If you make money as an affiliate or if you want to stick around in this one,
0:01:31 we’re talking about the traffic source that really saved finn versus finn.
0:01:36 We’re talking about de-risking your business and some common mistakes
0:01:37 to avoid along the way.
0:01:40 But I got to start off with the seven figure deposit.
0:01:41 What happens when that wire hits the account?
0:01:45 Obviously, it’s been a dream forever to experience that moment.
0:01:48 And that’s often why you might build a Side Hustle or build a business in general.
0:01:50 I can say it’s not super life changing.
0:01:55 Maybe if I had a few extra zeros on the end, it would be, but maybe not as well.
0:01:59 I think my role as a dad and a partner and a friend and all of that kind
0:02:01 of continues on and I like to build things.
0:02:03 So likely not going to change much.
0:02:07 But yeah, you keep refreshing that screen a few times to make sure it’s real.
0:02:08 And it’s not going away.
0:02:11 And then quickly get back to business.
0:02:15 And in my case, selling my business meant transitioning it over to new owners.
0:02:19 So there was still kind of a lot to be done, even in that exhilarating moment
0:02:21 of feeling like a millionaire, I guess.
0:02:24 Right. You see it hit, but the work isn’t quite done yet.
0:02:27 And it’s kind of it’s almost anti climactic in a way, because you’ve been
0:02:30 it’s not a surprise you’ve been building toward it probably for months
0:02:32 in terms of due diligence and negotiations and everything else.
0:02:37 But was there a treat yourself moment or do you go out and buy anything?
0:02:41 You know, it’s funny, I deferred a lot of purchases, kind of clenching
0:02:45 and making sure that it was going to be actually sold.
0:02:47 So yeah, there was a few Amazon purchases here and there,
0:02:51 things for my family that I kept saying, you know, maybe we should hold off
0:02:53 until the money hits, but I like to play golf.
0:02:56 So I plan to treat myself to a lesson and try and get better
0:02:58 and get my wife involved as well.
0:03:00 Maybe we can take lessons together.
0:03:03 OK, and yeah, we went out to a nice dinner, a closing dinner, so to speak,
0:03:05 which is really great too.
0:03:07 Yeah, business as usual is shortly thereafter.
0:03:13 It’s I don’t want to make it sound unexciting, but still, you know, work to be done.
0:03:15 I can’t hang up the jersey quite yet. Well, very good.
0:03:17 There’s always more work to be done.
0:03:19 That’s always the question of, well, what next?
0:03:21 What now? That’s sometimes the harder question to answer.
0:03:25 But I think it’s a really cool and exciting story because, hey,
0:03:30 little side hustle project started 2018, which I would have said was late
0:03:35 to the quote unquote blogging game, but still found a way to make it work
0:03:36 and make it work quite well.
0:03:40 The saving grace or maybe one of the saving graces was kind of like
0:03:44 when we earlier spoke, it was very much an SEO play.
0:03:48 We’re going to write these really in depth, long tail articles,
0:03:52 trying to make the best thing on the Internet for this specific query
0:03:57 and really help that buyer make their decision on this product versus this product.
0:03:59 Or, you know, is this thing legit? Is this going to be worthwhile?
0:04:03 And then saying, well, we could still play that game.
0:04:08 But while we’re doing that, why don’t we see if we can buy traffic profitably?
0:04:11 And it’s kind of the where we want to go in this conversation is this idea
0:04:16 of ads arbitrage and diversifying away from strictly SEO.
0:04:19 And it’s interesting because this was my 20 years ago.
0:04:22 This was like my first side hustle, very much reliant on paid traffic,
0:04:26 driving clicks to these shoe comparison, like, where can I find the best price
0:04:29 of my next pair of shoes type of pages?
0:04:32 And at that time, it was the search landscape or the paid traffic landscape
0:04:36 was a little bit different than it is today, but kind of the same model.
0:04:38 Everything old is new again.
0:04:43 Are you able to speak to when that started and how are you able to ramp it up?
0:04:45 Yeah, I had forgotten that that was your actually your first
0:04:48 side hustle or that you have some experience and that’s amazing.
0:04:50 Yeah. So a couple of years into the business,
0:04:55 we were doing well from an SEO perspective and generating a lot of organic traffic.
0:04:59 But it always felt to me like a flamingo standing on one leg
0:05:01 and just from a risk perspective, right?
0:05:06 Like maybe a big gust, a big SEO update will come and blow us over.
0:05:10 Maybe some competition will come in and that’s always the case, right?
0:05:13 Like your very best keywords, you often can only rank for so long.
0:05:16 And then a bigger publisher comes in and decides to take your cake.
0:05:19 I always just felt like diversity was the name of the game
0:05:23 and needed to figure out a new way to diversify the traffic, the earnings.
0:05:26 In thinking about that, there’s many different avenues to do so.
0:05:29 So a lot of people try and own their audience through an email list
0:05:31 or through a social media following.
0:05:34 And then I think that’s a really sound smart strategy.
0:05:39 In fact, it’s probably the way to go in today’s SEO world being as choppy as it is.
0:05:41 It’s probably the only game in town.
0:05:42 I know you do that quite well, Nick.
0:05:45 You have a large following and keep them engaged.
0:05:47 So I think that’s a really strong route.
0:05:51 But the other one, the social media game is a little weak, but the email game is OK.
0:05:52 Always room for improvement.
0:05:55 And for a time, there was an email component.
0:05:57 But it was, if I remember correctly,
0:06:01 it was kind of hard to get people searching for some super specific brand
0:06:07 named Query to join an email list about the top 10 direct to consumer health brands
0:06:09 or something was a little bit of a stretch.
0:06:10 Exactly. Yeah.
0:06:12 I think it was hard for us to find something that would be interesting enough
0:06:15 for people to follow on because it was too broad.
0:06:17 Our niche wasn’t niched down enough.
0:06:20 Yeah. So that’s also some advice for where to start.
0:06:23 I think for folks listening or interested in is my niche too big.
0:06:25 Is it too small in some ways?
0:06:27 A good way to answer that question would be, would somebody sign up
0:06:28 for an email list for this?
0:06:30 And if so, what would I talk about?
0:06:34 Because if you’re able to kind of niche it down to something that people
0:06:37 are interested in week over week, month over month, then, you know,
0:06:39 that might be worth building an audience for.
0:06:42 But in the case of in versus fin, it’s challenging.
0:06:43 We were health and wellness focus.
0:06:44 That’s very broad.
0:06:47 And what I found to be the case is that most people are interested
0:06:50 in a very specific health condition or solving a health problem.
0:06:55 So hair loss or skin care, those are really broad, but they’re starting
0:06:59 to get niched down enough to build an engaging audience that you can engage over time.
0:07:02 But staying really broad, health and wellness.
0:07:05 It was tough for us to build an audience, an owned audience, my social
0:07:09 media or email list that would be engaged and hard to know what topics
0:07:13 to continuously serve that crowd, given how broad it was.
0:07:17 So the other way that I thought I could diversify the traffic and also
0:07:20 given my experience, I’ve worked as a growth marketer and a few startups
0:07:24 and therefore had a good amount of paid ad experience.
0:07:28 So I thought, hey, why don’t I try to run some paid ads and see if maybe
0:07:31 I can make the math work out such that I buy the ads at a certain cost.
0:07:35 I drive the traffic to a landing page and I’m able to create
0:07:38 affiliate revenue that is higher than the cost of the ads.
0:07:40 So kind of an arbitrage play there.
0:07:42 And it actually seemed easier in some ways.
0:07:46 I know it sounds complicated for most people to think about that and sounds
0:07:48 risky and like you have to watch numbers all the time.
0:07:52 But it actually sounded easier for me than figuring out how I’m going
0:07:55 to get a million followers on social media or newsletter.
0:07:59 Yeah, I mean, it was easier for me starting out too.
0:08:02 It’s like, well, I don’t know anything about SEO, but I could kind of buy
0:08:04 my way to the top of the search results.
0:08:08 It’s a shortcut in a way if you can make the numbers work.
0:08:12 Exactly. So really where to start is another reason I should say it feels
0:08:16 very de-risked is you already know what keywords are working from an organic
0:08:20 perspective from a Google ads perspective or a search ads perspective.
0:08:23 You can quite literally target those exact same keywords from a paid
0:08:28 perspective and you have all the math worked out in terms of what is the
0:08:31 conversion rate on that page and what is the commission rate resulting
0:08:32 from that conversion.
0:08:36 And so you can back into the cost of ads quite easily before you even
0:08:40 spend a single dollar and you can have quite a bit of confidence that maybe
0:08:44 this is worth putting a dollar in to get one and a half dollars out or
0:08:44 something like that.
0:08:49 So it seemed like an obvious play for me at the time because I had a nice
0:08:53 set of partners and a nice set of keywords that we were already ranking
0:08:53 for organically.
0:08:57 So really trying to double down I think was the impetus was how do I get
0:08:59 more from from these keywords.
0:09:02 I already know that we’re ranking for and are quite lucrative.
0:09:07 How do I de-risk my business at the same time as double down on what’s working.
0:09:10 Yeah. Even if you are ranking organically it’s a chance to double
0:09:14 dip and take up more screen real estate on that first page even if you
0:09:16 do have to pay for some of those clicks.
0:09:19 Exactly. And the other thing I guess the other motivation was I just saw
0:09:21 other people doing this when you Google something.
0:09:24 If they’re making it work, you know why exactly.
0:09:27 And in fact, it became clear to me over time that these big publishers that I
0:09:32 was competing against the Forbes, the health lines in my case, but even big
0:09:37 newspapers, whether it’s New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, like it
0:09:38 doesn’t matter USA today.
0:09:43 All of these guys have a big paid media strategy, paid media arbitrage strategy,
0:09:47 which means that they’re buying keywords essentially and driving traffic to a
0:09:49 landing page and then making money as an affiliate.
0:09:50 Interesting.
0:09:51 And it’s primarily affiliate.
0:09:54 It’s not necessarily like a display ads play.
0:09:56 Did you ever have display ads on Finn versus Finn?
0:10:00 I did actually, but I think it’s quite hard just given the economics of the
0:10:02 display ads, how little they pay these days.
0:10:03 Right.
0:10:06 So you generally have to have like a higher ticket conversion moment, but you
0:10:09 can also include display ads on that page to help subsidize the cost.
0:10:13 So it’s not like you have to just have one monetization method, but I do think
0:10:15 that there has to be an affiliate play generally.
0:10:18 Okay. So there was some precedence for doing this.
0:10:19 Big publishers were doing this.
0:10:24 You had some background in doing it at the day job and say, okay, I think we can
0:10:29 make this work and we kind of have a sense of what a page you is going to be
0:10:30 worth on average.
0:10:34 So if we can buy traffic for less than that, then it should work out.
0:10:38 And specifically with Google, it’s, I mean, I always thought this is like the
0:10:40 greatest business model in the world.
0:10:45 Like you can bid on the exact keywords like what your customer is typing in and
0:10:49 you know, get in front of them as long as you’re willing to pay for that before
0:10:50 setting up any of the ad stuff.
0:10:55 Like what we’re using to track the page view value from an affiliate standpoint
0:10:57 on the landing pages or on the site itself.
0:11:01 At some point, our site scaled to hundreds of partners and they’re all
0:11:03 across all different affiliate platforms.
0:11:09 So impact, share a sale, partner rise, ever flow, you name it, hundreds,
0:11:10 all down the long tail.
0:11:13 If you’re just working with one partner or just a handful of partners, then
0:11:15 they’re all on the same platform.
0:11:15 It’s quite easy.
0:11:18 You can just log into the platform itself and see, you know, how many
0:11:22 commissions did you drive from that partner in a certain time range or on a
0:11:23 certain page, et cetera.
0:11:27 But if you’re promoting a bunch of different partners and they’re all on
0:11:31 different platforms, you do need a tool to aggregate all of those earnings and
0:11:35 all that data into one centralized place that you can look at every day without
0:11:35 going crazy.
0:11:37 At least I felt like I needed that.
0:11:41 So in my case, I invested in a tool called Trackonomics.
0:11:45 I guess I used a series of tools before that, but they all basically we outgrew
0:11:46 them at some point.
0:11:47 Okay.
0:11:50 I was using one or I actually still am called affluent.
0:11:54 I think affluent.io, which I think impact bought that one too, where it’s like,
0:11:57 we’re going to pull in the data from a bunch of different affiliate networks.
0:12:01 I think lasso will probably have the same functionality or similar functionality
0:12:05 to where you can pull data in from a bunch of different sources who not trying
0:12:07 to track that across 20 different logins.
0:12:08 Exactly.
0:12:08 Yeah.
0:12:10 Affluent was the one that I used as well.
0:12:12 And then they cut me off at some point.
0:12:12 It’s no longer free.
0:12:15 So I have not reached that tier yet.
0:12:18 So played at a little smaller level.
0:12:21 It’s a good problem to have, I suppose, but they do have direct access to how
0:12:22 much money you’re making.
0:12:26 So they know you can afford it, but lasso is a good one as well.
0:12:28 I’ve used that as well in the past and tinkered with it.
0:12:31 So the key here is that you do need a source of truth that’s reliable and
0:12:35 that’s pulling in from multiple affiliate platforms into one place.
0:12:37 And with that data, that’s actually really critical.
0:12:42 We can talk about it at some point in the conversation, forbid optimization and
0:12:46 passing the conversion data back into Google or whatever advertising platform
0:12:49 you’re using to help optimize the spend.
0:12:53 So it’s critical to have all this data in one place, not only for your own
0:12:56 sanity to track things and understand if you’re making money from your ads.
0:12:57 I would pause there.
0:12:59 Like, do you like giving Google that data?
0:13:04 That has always made me nervous to say, OK, a conversion is worth five bucks.
0:13:08 And you just sent me this traffic for three.
0:13:11 If I’m Google, I’m saying, hey, well, you got $2 a margin there.
0:13:14 So like, naturally, I want to increase your costs.
0:13:17 You know, kind of the basis line of your margin is my opportunity.
0:13:18 I don’t know.
0:13:22 It’s always made me nervous to give them that level of intel and how profitable
0:13:23 or not the campaign was.
0:13:27 If you aren’t a very sophisticated ad buyer, Google very likely will,
0:13:30 like with certain settings in your campaign, Google will eat your margin away.
0:13:35 But that you can also set up kind of restrictions or parameters within your
0:13:38 campaign to target a certain return on investment as an example.
0:13:39 OK.
0:13:42 Google knows that if you’re not achieving your marketing goals,
0:13:44 you will pause spend altogether.
0:13:48 So I think the incentive for them to keep the money flowing is larger
0:13:50 than for them to eat your margin.
0:13:53 Although if you don’t watch your ad spend and you leave it up to Google
0:13:57 just to spend freely, then very likely they will eat away your margin.
0:13:59 They’re happy to do that for you.
0:14:02 The M.O. seems to be to have all these like entry level employees
0:14:06 on a quarterly rotating basis, be your ads account rep.
0:14:09 And they always call you up and they’re very eager about selling you
0:14:09 on the next thing.
0:14:12 And the answer is always, well, have you tried performance max?
0:14:14 So, you know, have you tried increasing your budget?
0:14:15 It’s like, I don’t think you understand.
0:14:18 Like you said, there’s these ROI parameters we’re trying to operate in.
0:14:22 Yeah, I constantly joke with the new rep who gets inevitably gets assigned
0:14:25 to you after two months of the previous one working with you, right?
0:14:27 With no context and no handoff whatsoever.
0:14:30 At this point, I just tell them I’m really not interested in working with you.
0:14:32 I’ve really negative associations.
0:14:35 I haven’t had a great experience with most of my Google reps.
0:14:36 You’re probably an exception.
0:14:38 You’re probably great and often can provide a lot of insight.
0:14:42 But I just want to be clear that I’m not going to try a performance max campaign.
0:14:46 I’ve already run that experiment unless there’s really things that you can
0:14:48 move the needle on in the short term and that you can send me over email.
0:14:50 I’m not interested in spending the time.
0:14:52 I know it sounds really jaded.
0:14:54 Yeah, they never we got some suggestions for you.
0:14:55 We got some recommendations for your account. Cool.
0:14:57 Send them over email. No, we can’t do that.
0:14:59 Like that’s like big red flag.
0:15:00 Totally, totally.
0:15:02 And, you know, at the end of the day, you understand their incentives.
0:15:03 They’re hired sales rep.
0:15:06 They’re not a consultant that’s just there to help you.
0:15:08 They’re looking to increase your spend.
0:15:11 So almost all the recommendations are going to lead to that outcome.
0:15:16 More with Alex in just a moment, including the highest performing types of landing pages
0:15:19 you can send traffic to and the dollars and cents math it takes
0:15:23 to make this profitable in your niche right after this.
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0:16:39 OK, so would an example landing page be brand X versus brand Y, like that type
0:16:42 of comparison posts, the stuff that was ranking organically?
0:16:45 Or is it more this specific product review?
0:16:48 Where did you see the best results in sending traffic to paid wise?
0:16:52 Kind of going in line with this idea of seeing this out in the world
0:16:54 and kind of basically copying what’s working.
0:16:58 I would Google things in my niche, this brand versus that brand
0:17:02 or the best XYZ for ZYX or this review.
0:17:05 I’d Google all these things and I would see paid results.
0:17:08 And they almost always, in almost every single case,
0:17:12 the paid results landing page was a top five or top 10 landing page.
0:17:16 So just a list of links and with a few bullet points on each,
0:17:21 maybe a rating or a review, maybe a link to a review in some cases.
0:17:25 But for the most part, it was really just here’s the number one option
0:17:27 for that query at the very top of the page.
0:17:29 And then there’s four others.
0:17:33 And, you know, very likely that top option is the one that’s paying
0:17:35 the brand or the affiliate the most.
0:17:40 But in all cases or in most cases, the brand or the publisher, whoever’s
0:17:43 running these ads and creating the landing page is likely partnered
0:17:46 with all four or five of them so they don’t really care which one of them.
0:17:47 Sure. Click on.
0:17:49 But that’s the general setup of the page.
0:17:52 And you can sort of see from the economic incentives of the publisher
0:17:56 or the advertiser, the affiliate in this case, they want to give you
0:17:59 a lot of options, but make it easy for you to choose one of them.
0:18:02 And that’s how the math is going to work out for them to outlay
0:18:04 that I’d spend in the beginning.
0:18:08 OK. And did you end up creating separate pages, paid landing pages versus organics?
0:18:12 Like, maybe I don’t need 3,000 words of copy if I really just want somebody
0:18:14 to click this thing from an ad landing page.
0:18:16 Yeah, exactly.
0:18:19 Thinking about it more as a landing page rather than content is key.
0:18:23 So really, really separate work streams and in the indexed rather
0:18:26 than sort of in the Google index and getting muddied or not muddy,
0:18:31 but basically and not having a clear transparency on where the traffic
0:18:33 is coming from and where the conversions are coming from.
0:18:38 So so really creating a separate page just for paid that has as few exit
0:18:41 ramps as possible, except for to the affiliate partners.
0:18:45 So you’re likely trimming down the navigational bar at the top,
0:18:49 likely minimizing the footer in the bottom, definitely minimizing
0:18:52 the content on the page other than just what is needed to get somebody
0:18:55 to understand their options, choose the one that’s best for them
0:18:59 and then go on to that partner and do a little bit more research on the road.
0:19:01 OK, did you ever get in trouble?
0:19:06 Like my ad account early on for the shoe business would occasionally
0:19:09 get slapped for being like a bridge page account.
0:19:13 They say the sole purpose of your landing page is to drive traffic
0:19:15 to another page, another site.
0:19:19 And it’s like, well, yeah, that’s how I get paid.
0:19:21 I don’t know, they wanted something else.
0:19:24 We would have to rework the landing pages every now and again,
0:19:26 and like try and add more content.
0:19:31 And it was all going to be template driven or what you might call programmatic
0:19:34 because it’s like, well, there’s 100,000 pairs of shoes or 300,000 pairs of shoes.
0:19:37 Like we’re not going to write an individual article for all this stuff.
0:19:41 So we’re going to have to pull that copy from the feeds,
0:19:44 from the product catalogs provided by the retailers in a lot of cases.
0:19:47 Is that still a thing or they are less strict about that now?
0:19:49 Maybe I just didn’t start it early enough,
0:19:52 but I haven’t ever gotten that block from Google.
0:19:55 Yeah, in general, they’ve been pretty happy to take the ad spend
0:19:57 and even help you increase it right through the account reps.
0:20:02 It’s sometimes been hard to describe to the account reps exactly what the flow is.
0:20:07 And the fact that a conversion doesn’t happen on my side, it happens on a third party site.
0:20:11 It’s hard sometimes for the Google rep or for internal teams at Google
0:20:14 to understand this flow, but in general, it’s become so common,
0:20:17 which is surprising if they’ve got Forbes in New York Times,
0:20:18 they’ve got other big publishers doing the same thing.
0:20:24 It’s become so common now that I think it’s no longer on their list of not allowed kind of advertising.
0:20:27 There are some restrictions and I can get into that specifically on brand names
0:20:30 in my niche on drug names.
0:20:35 You’re not allowed to bid on drug names, things like Viagra or Finasteride for hair loss.
0:20:38 You cannot bid on those keywords unless you’re a pharmacy.
0:20:41 So you need a specific kind of certification called legit script,
0:20:45 which costs tens of thousands of dollars a year and you have to be a real pharmacy.
0:20:50 You can’t just be a normal person paying this money and then going to town and bidding on drug names.
0:20:53 So there are some restrictions like in that case, you could go a little bit broader.
0:20:58 You could say, you know, the best hair loss products or the best things to prevent hair loss is something like that.
0:20:59 Exactly. Yeah.
0:21:05 As long as you’re being broad enough, things like even like a rectile dysfunction,
0:21:07 like even just the condition itself.
0:21:11 But as long as you’re not specifically talking about the brand in some cases
0:21:14 or the drug name, the actual kind of technical drug name.
0:21:16 But I think there are other restrictions.
0:21:17 Just to be clear, it depends on your niche.
0:21:19 I think that there are likely other restrictions.
0:21:22 I know you can’t bid on things like CBD.
0:21:24 There’s restrictions there.
0:21:30 And there’s also federal restrictions against discrimination in real estate and housing.
0:21:32 So there’s protected categories, so to speak.
0:21:34 And you have to every niche is a little bit different.
0:21:40 But the restriction around brand names is both on the Google side in some cases,
0:21:42 as well as the affiliate partners themselves.
0:21:47 So the brands themselves may not be super happy for you to be bidding on their brand name
0:21:50 and therefore driving up their own cost of ads, right?
0:21:51 Because it’s an auction system.
0:21:56 So if I bid up a lot on a brand’s brand name, they are likely paying a higher cost
0:21:58 on their own brand name as well.
0:22:00 And so brands can be quite particular about that.
0:22:04 And it will require some persuading, essentially, to convince them
0:22:08 that the conversions you’re driving them are incremental and that it’s still worthwhile
0:22:12 to allow you the third party affiliate to bid on their brand name.
0:22:15 OK, because that’s something I see very, very commonly.
0:22:16 Here’s our affiliate terms and conditions.
0:22:20 No paid traffic bidding on anything related to our brand name.
0:22:24 We don’t want you to jump in front of that traffic that they, in theory,
0:22:27 were going to get anyways if somebody was looking for that stuff.
0:22:32 And so it’s kind of this you open the negotiation to say, I do this, I do this.
0:22:34 Well, it’s going to be incremental.
0:22:36 I mean, you show them some.
0:22:40 How do you convince somebody to say, OK, we’ll make an exception for Finn versus Finn?
0:22:45 The amount of objections or the objections that you’ll get to brand bidding,
0:22:49 they call it TM plus, trademark plus bidding in general, or myriad.
0:22:53 There’s a number of reasons why brands are not very interested in you doing that.
0:22:56 They generally come down to you’re driving up the cost of my ads.
0:22:58 It’s not brand safe.
0:23:02 So we don’t want you as a third party to be discussing us.
0:23:05 We want to just have the control over how our brand is presented.
0:23:08 And then this idea of incrementality, which you mentioned, which is like,
0:23:09 we’re going to get those anyway.
0:23:12 So regardless of you drive up the cost, regardless of what you say, if it’s safe,
0:23:16 we have a feeling we’re going to get those anyway, so we don’t want to pay for you for them.
0:23:18 That’s kind of the broad based ones.
0:23:22 And I’ve been quite successful in convincing brands that there is a space
0:23:25 between all of those concerns, which are very valid and legit.
0:23:28 And then there’s a very narrow space, but there’s a space between that.
0:23:32 And what actually I as a third party affiliate
0:23:37 can be more successful in promoting than they can be promoting it themselves.
0:23:40 So an example of that would be comparison content, right?
0:23:43 Like this brand versus that brand.
0:23:49 Will the average consumer be more persuaded by one of those brands
0:23:53 screaming from the hilltop, saying, yes, I am so good compared to my competitors.
0:23:54 I am the best.
0:23:57 Yeah, this is really going to be an unbiased article that is coming from our domain.
0:23:59 Right. Exactly. Like we are the best.
0:24:00 We know we’re the best.
0:24:01 The other people are horrible.
0:24:05 Is that going to resonate with people or is it going to be more plausible,
0:24:10 more authentic, more reasonable to hear from a third party saying, hey,
0:24:13 we’ve done the research, we’ve compared all of the top options.
0:24:15 And after all of that time,
0:24:18 we actually think that option A is the best for this kind of person.
0:24:21 And option B is the best for another kind of person that seems more credible.
0:24:24 It actually is more helpful to the user than it’s biased,
0:24:27 but it’s less biased than the brand talking about it themselves.
0:24:30 I think that’s actually a really sound argument.
0:24:33 I’m not just saying that because it was lucrative or that it’s a good strategy.
0:24:35 I think that’s actually the case.
0:24:38 And a lot of brands can be convinced to at least try it out.
0:24:42 The other way I’ve talked brands off the cliff is to say, you know what?
0:24:45 You’re worried about the price of ads increasing.
0:24:46 You’re worried about me bidding on your brand name
0:24:49 or other key terms that you’re bidding on.
0:24:54 And you’re worried about that inflating the costs because more advertiser entering the auction.
0:24:56 Well, why don’t we just test it?
0:24:59 Why don’t we just run it for three weeks and see how much your ads go up
0:25:02 and how many conversions you get and how many conversions I get.
0:25:05 And we’ll just do a quick look and see, you know,
0:25:09 is this did you get net more conversions for the same amount of costs?
0:25:12 Like what the cost proposition is it the same as it was before?
0:25:13 But what’s the total number of conversions?
0:25:16 Like we’ll just run the test and almost inevitably,
0:25:18 almost, I think with very few exceptions,
0:25:21 the test came out in our favor to say that, yeah,
0:25:25 this is a good activity to invest in and spend money on from the brand’s perspective.
0:25:28 So yeah, there’s a couple of ways to sort of not take no,
0:25:31 an immediate no as the answer and instead continue the conversation
0:25:34 and see test into it or persuade the brand
0:25:37 that this is a worthwhile use of their time and effort.
0:25:42 Yeah, one thing that is fascinating to me in the world of paid ads
0:25:47 is a lot of these bigger companies will have pretty strict monthly budgets.
0:25:52 Like, oh, maybe we’re only allocated 100 grand a month for Google Span
0:25:55 and we blow through it by the 25th of the month.
0:26:00 And so those last five or six days are like wide open for the affiliates.
0:26:02 And it’s like, if you were buying profitable traffic,
0:26:05 what difference does it make if you spend 100 or 115?
0:26:08 If your cost per acquisition was fine at 100.
0:26:09 It just didn’t make any sense.
0:26:12 But it’s like the bureaucracy of some of these bigger companies
0:26:16 where smaller publishers can be more nimble, more thoughtful,
0:26:17 and especially at the end of the month,
0:26:20 maybe the auctions become less competitive, you get cheaper clicks.
0:26:21 Have you ever seen anything like that happen?
0:26:24 The bureaucracy can both work for you and against you, right?
0:26:26 There’s many cases where you convince somebody internally
0:26:30 that this is a great idea and they’re really gung-ho, but you can’t get it.
0:26:35 Approved by the brand safety team or the PR team or somebody else,
0:26:38 some other stakeholder who doesn’t see this as a good use of funds.
0:26:40 So the bureaucracy can work against you.
0:26:42 And in some cases, yeah, there are opportunities.
0:26:44 There’s some seasonality is what I’d call it,
0:26:49 where there can be a feasting opportunity, you know, less advertisers in the auction,
0:26:52 more activity on the conversion side and earnings go way up,
0:26:57 as well as sort of winters where it’s like, wow, everybody is advertising
0:27:00 at a certain time of year, usually Black Friday, Cyber Monday,
0:27:03 kind of end of the year is like the peak of advertising,
0:27:06 at least in my health and wellness niche.
0:27:10 In those cases, sometimes the cost of ads gets prohibitive for arbitrage.
0:27:12 It’s too expensive.
0:27:14 And there’s no matter how much you’re making on the back end,
0:27:15 you’re not going to be able to cover your costs.
0:27:17 So there’s highs and lows to this as well.
0:27:20 Yeah, talk to me about the math side of it.
0:27:24 Like the expected earnings minus the cost per click.
0:27:27 What’s a typical cost per click?
0:27:28 Like what’s a page you worth?
0:27:31 Is there a target ROI, obviously, the higher the better?
0:27:34 Like what are you looking at on the dollars and cents side of it?
0:27:35 It really is niche specific.
0:27:39 So in some cases, we sort of talked about it in the very early stage.
0:27:41 Like maybe there’s a niche where the traffic is so cheap,
0:27:44 it’s so uncompetitive that you could actually arbitrage
0:27:46 through a display ad or something like that.
0:27:47 That may be possible, I don’t know.
0:27:53 In my particular case, essentially the formula you want to work on
0:27:56 or make work is expected earnings per click.
0:27:59 And that has to match the CPC or it has to be higher
0:28:02 than the cost per click to your landing page.
0:28:06 And there’s one extra step in your calculation for each of those sides.
0:28:10 So your expected earnings per click would be whatever your
0:28:12 click-through rate on the ad is times the click-through rate
0:28:15 from your landing page to a partner times the conversion rate
0:28:18 with that partner times the commission you get.
0:28:22 So in a normal flow, you have to maybe subtract one of those
0:28:24 conversion rates because the conversion is happening on your site.
0:28:26 But if it’s happening on a third party site,
0:28:28 you have to add in the click-through rate to the third party site.
0:28:31 That’s an extra bit of math that a lot of people miss.
0:28:33 But OK. Yeah.
0:28:36 So if I have the top 10 hair loss products,
0:28:41 maybe two thirds of the people are going to click on option number one
0:28:44 and something like that and say, OK, the expected earnings per click
0:28:46 for that is two dollars and fifty cents or something.
0:28:48 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
0:28:50 So in my case, just to make the math a little bit more firm,
0:28:54 our average CPC is actually quite high because we’re in a health and
0:28:57 wellness, your money, your life category, with a ton of competition.
0:29:02 An average click is anywhere from say three to six dollars, right?
0:29:04 It’s the range can do a lot.
0:29:06 So you better be pretty certain that for that visitor,
0:29:09 they’re going to click through and a high rate click through again
0:29:11 and then at a high rate convert and that the commission is there.
0:29:13 And ultimately, by the thing, wow.
0:29:16 Yeah. So it can work in really competitive arenas as well.
0:29:18 You don’t have to think about this as just being like,
0:29:20 if there’s competition, this is kaput.
0:29:21 That’s fascinating.
0:29:23 I was buying shoe clicks for like 25 cents.
0:29:26 And so it’s like, oh, three dollars a click.
0:29:29 Like, oh, I really got to have that landing page dialed in for sure.
0:29:29 Yeah, for sure.
0:29:32 You want to make sure that you have high confidence before you spend your first
0:29:35 dollar and that you’re then your landing page is pretty dialed in.
0:29:38 Luckily, there’s lots of good examples to copy from.
0:29:41 But one other thought I had is because you were kind of describing
0:29:44 how you would do the math, what is your expected to click through?
0:29:46 What is your expected earning rates for this partner?
0:29:48 And then this partner and then this partner, that is true.
0:29:52 That’s ultimately like the ultimate formula that you’re trying to optimize for.
0:29:54 But what I like to do to keep it really simple
0:29:58 is to try and make the math work out just for that number one spot.
0:30:01 If you can break even with or you can make the math work out
0:30:04 such that you’re breaking even just with that first partner,
0:30:06 that position in who’s in number one.
0:30:10 That means anybody who clicks on position two through five or two through 10
0:30:13 and generates some commission is just profit.
0:30:14 It’s just gravy.
0:30:15 So if you have it, if the math working out,
0:30:19 it’s more conservative to model it out by a break even point
0:30:23 with just that first partner or that position one partner
0:30:25 and everything else is gravy. Yeah. OK, OK.
0:30:30 And then is there a target like I’m going to trade a dollar for two dollars
0:30:33 or trade a dollar for a buck fifty like where you feel like to play and like,
0:30:35 OK, if I’m at this number, I’m really going to scale up that campaign
0:30:39 to the extent that Google will take my money there or there’s search volume there
0:30:43 versus like I want to tweak some things and optimize it
0:30:47 because there’s it becomes a cash flow challenge, perhaps
0:30:50 because you got to pay Google now or they’re going to swipe your card now
0:30:53 for the ads and you’re like, well, am I going to get paid from that affiliate
0:30:57 for 36 days, like depends on their different payout terms.
0:31:01 In the beginning, I just started as like, can I break even or can I make 10 percent profit?
0:31:04 Like, I don’t really know what the profit margin is.
0:31:08 In our case, it became evergreen at kind of 25, 30 percent.
0:31:11 And at different times of year, you could get up to like almost 100 percent.
0:31:15 So basically, like for every dollar you’re putting in, you’re getting two dollars out
0:31:17 or like really, really incredible.
0:31:21 Yeah. And so at that point, you’re like, I want to step on the gas as much as possible.
0:31:23 But there’s a law of diminishing marginal returns, obviously.
0:31:27 So the more money you spend in advertising inevitably, at some point,
0:31:31 the less efficient it gets that incremental spend for the next dollar.
0:31:33 It’s not going to go as far as like, say, the first dollar went.
0:31:36 But it’s hard to know where the ceiling is.
0:31:38 In some cases, there’s not a lot of search volume.
0:31:40 And so you know exactly where the ceiling is.
0:31:43 There’s only so many queries, only so many lucrative queries.
0:31:46 And you’re going to cap out on those pretty quickly.
0:31:50 But in the case of like best hair loss product or something,
0:31:53 I mean, there’s like practically infinite number of queries.
0:31:58 And so the question is, is there a certain profit margin where I maximize my profit?
0:32:03 If the profit margin held firm, then I would want to spend as much as possible
0:32:05 to maximize that overall profit.
0:32:08 But knowing that the profit margin decreases as you spend.
0:32:10 So there’s kind of like this efficiency point.
0:32:16 Yeah, kind of curve, you know, go back to like economics 101 in college or something.
0:32:20 There’s maybe some math around that, but there’s a lot of variables as well.
0:32:25 The cost of ads, the products offered and the brand awareness of each of those products
0:32:26 and the price points of each of those products.
0:32:28 And those are all changing throughout the year, right?
0:32:31 I mean, so my point is, is like, there’s a lot of variables there.
0:32:33 It’s hard to know.
0:32:36 Yeah. I mean, meanwhile, like my chasing preferred,
0:32:40 one of these cards is like triple points on ad spend up to a certain limit every year.
0:32:42 It’s like, oh, flying for free, baby.
0:32:45 If I can spend money profitably, that’s amazing.
0:32:45 Yeah, exactly.
0:32:48 And so going back to the cash flow discussion really fast.
0:32:52 So typically, you know, the affiliate terms so that you get paid out,
0:32:55 30 days would be pretty typical, but often it’ll extend into 60.
0:32:58 The thing about a credit card is the card is charged today,
0:33:00 but you’re not expected to pay it for about 30 days.
0:33:04 So in some ways, without paying a fee or without paying interest, right?
0:33:06 Those things kind of line up.
0:33:11 It is true that you need a little bit of working capital to start this process, right?
0:33:15 You have to be able to risk or wager a few thousand dollars in the beginning.
0:33:16 You might lose it all, right?
0:33:17 That’s sort of like gambling.
0:33:20 But if you can figure it out, if you’re willing to iterate a bit
0:33:25 and then you figure something out, the gold at the end of the rainbow is like, wow,
0:33:27 this thing is scalable and it’s evergreen.
0:33:30 And for every dollar I put in, I get one and a half dollars or two dollars back.
0:33:33 And I’m not relying on organic algorithm.
0:33:35 Yeah, you’re just breathing a little easier.
0:33:38 Every time there’s an algorithm update, you’re not freaking out,
0:33:40 hitting refresh on the reports.
0:33:41 Like, did I get hammered on this one? Yeah.
0:33:45 Yeah, there is a cash flow crunch or like a cash flow thing to manage here.
0:33:48 But it’s not as challenging as e-commerce, for instance,
0:33:50 where you have to sort of front load all of your inventory spend
0:33:53 and hope that somebody buys it over the next 12 months.
0:33:54 Sure. Yeah.
0:33:57 There are more capital intensive businesses to be sure.
0:34:02 More with Alex in just a moment, including possibly the most amazing affiliate strategy.
0:34:04 I’d never heard of before right after this.
0:34:09 One thing that you mentioned was going a little bit higher in the funnel,
0:34:13 especially for the brands that are somewhat restricted on trademark bidding.
0:34:18 And it could be best hair loss products or even just hair loss or erectile dysfunction.
0:34:21 Like somebody just kind of in their beginning research phases
0:34:24 or like they may or may not be ready to buy.
0:34:27 I got to hope that the cost per clicks are lower for that kind of stuff
0:34:30 because I imagine the conversion rates would be lower too.
0:34:33 Yeah. Is it even worthwhile to play in that space?
0:34:34 Because it’s like very early research phase.
0:34:37 Yeah. I mean, it just depends on how things are cookieed
0:34:41 and how people are shopping for a particular product in a particular niche.
0:34:45 I won’t say it’s impossible or it’ll never work to hire up the funnel you go.
0:34:48 But I do think that you want to start as low in the funnel as possible.
0:34:52 And you want to understand these keywords have already been working for me,
0:34:53 right, from an organic perspective.
0:34:55 So that’s where you start.
0:34:59 You don’t start like, let me go really high up and then middle and then bottom and see what works.
0:35:02 I don’t know. Start with what you know works and then expand from there.
0:35:06 And that will deep risk your ad spend outlay.
0:35:11 Yeah. Because for me, it was shoes would have been horribly unprofitable.
0:35:13 Women’s shoes would have been horribly unprofitable.
0:35:20 Women’s running shoes, best women’s running shoes, all the way down to like new balance model XYZ.
0:35:22 Like it would have to be super, super specific for it to work.
0:35:24 That makes a lot of sense.
0:35:25 Like start at the bottom of the funnel.
0:35:28 Start with what you know is going to convert high buyer intent type of stuff
0:35:33 and then see if you can crawl your way up and to the point about affiliate cookies.
0:35:35 Like, is it going to be a three month cookie?
0:35:39 If somebody clicks on your link and ultimately converts, like, OK, that’s cool.
0:35:40 You’re still going to get credit for that.
0:35:44 But again, you got to pay for that click up front, maybe a while before you see
0:35:46 the eventual conversion down the road.
0:35:51 The other thing I want to ask about is Google is one ads platform.
0:35:55 High search intent target the exact keywords that you’re looking for.
0:35:59 You play around with Facebook ads at all for Fin versus Fin as well.
0:36:00 Just a little bit.
0:36:04 So it’s harder to make work on Facebook for a couple reasons.
0:36:05 One is the creative.
0:36:09 It’s actually easy now to create visual creatives with Generative AI
0:36:11 and the Canva and all these tools, right?
0:36:14 But historically, it’s been more challenging, at least for someone like me,
0:36:18 who’s not a designer or very design inclined, a text ad in Google is easier
0:36:21 to manage than a Facebook ad, basically, ad campaign.
0:36:23 So that’s why I always skewed there.
0:36:26 And also, there’s generally higher intent on Google or search platforms.
0:36:30 Somebody is actively typing something in the bar to actively find an answer
0:36:33 or a product on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok.
0:36:37 They are going there to be entertained and to zone out and avoid procrastinating a bit.
0:36:39 They can be convinced to take action.
0:36:44 Don’t get me wrong, people make huge brands and lots of sales on these social platforms.
0:36:46 But it’s lower intent.
0:36:47 There’s no question.
0:36:49 And I would say start with search.
0:36:50 That’s pretty smart.
0:36:54 We did end up moving over to the metaproperties and dabbling a bit there.
0:36:58 The motion that we really saw a lot of success with is called social white listing.
0:37:03 So for anyone who’s not familiar, the idea is that you’re able to give
0:37:07 your brand partners access to advertise using your handles.
0:37:11 So your Facebook page or your Instagram account and serve ads
0:37:15 that look like they’re coming from you, but they’re actually managed
0:37:19 and the ad spend and the targeting and the creative is all managed by the brand.
0:37:20 The advertiser itself.
0:37:23 Dang, that sounds amazing.
0:37:26 If somebody else is going to run ads through your affiliate link,
0:37:27 where’s the lose in that?
0:37:28 Where could he go wrong?
0:37:29 Exactly. Yeah.
0:37:31 And you know, a lot of people, if you’re on social media,
0:37:35 you’ve likely seen these ads and they can come from big influencers,
0:37:37 but they can also come from small publishers like Vin versus Finn.
0:37:42 It’s a similar concept to what we were talking about before in the paid search space
0:37:46 where in a versus query, for instance, the user will find it more credible
0:37:51 to read an answer from a credible third party than they will from the brand itself.
0:37:55 And so it’s leveraging this third party, this I should say,
0:37:57 that’s the same motion just on Facebook.
0:38:01 But the difference is that you don’t have to run the ads for the brand.
0:38:04 The brand can run their own ads because they’re doing that anyway.
0:38:07 Every single brand out there is running Facebook or meta ads.
0:38:11 You give them access and then they select a new handle to run the ads from.
0:38:15 Instead of running ads from their own handle, they’re running it from your affiliate handle.
0:38:18 And yeah, it’s all paid traffic going to your site.
0:38:22 And so it’s diversifying your overall traffic source mix,
0:38:24 as well as your revenue mix, and it’s very hands off.
0:38:25 How do I sign up for this?
0:38:28 Like, what’s the conversation look like with Rayon XYZ to say,
0:38:30 have I got a deal for you?
0:38:33 You’re going to run paid ads through my affiliate channel.
0:38:36 And the users are going to find it more credible.
0:38:37 How do I even wrote that subject? It sounds awesome.
0:38:38 It sounds crazy, right?
0:38:40 Like, it sounds like I just made it up.
0:38:42 But actually, this has been going on again.
0:38:43 I wasn’t the first person to pioneer this.
0:38:45 This I just noticed it happening.
0:38:47 And then I started to ask the brands if they’re interested in it.
0:38:48 And you’d be shocked.
0:38:51 I mean, depending on how fast that brand is looking to grow,
0:38:55 depending on how much they’re spending on meta today, which probably is a lot.
0:38:56 You’d be surprised.
0:38:58 OK, they are kind of started.
0:38:59 So maybe that’s a starting point.
0:39:01 Look for the brands that are already spending money to the extent
0:39:04 that you could see them in your feed, or you could see there’s probably
0:39:07 estimator tools to see what they’re spending or what their ads look like.
0:39:09 Yeah, the Facebook ad library, it’s a free tool.
0:39:11 You just Google it, Facebook ad library.
0:39:13 You type in the geography that you’re interested in.
0:39:16 And the brand that you’re interested in it will show you all the ads
0:39:18 that they’re running currently in for the last few months.
0:39:21 So you can see both like, OK, are they running it from their own account?
0:39:23 Are they running it from third party handles?
0:39:27 You can also just see, are they really active on Facebook or meta in general?
0:39:31 I think it’s fair to assume that if a brand is big, if a brand is growing,
0:39:32 they are very active on meta.
0:39:35 It’s basically table stakes at this point for any growth team.
0:39:38 So I think it’s fair to say, like, hey, you’re already running
0:39:40 meta ads, have you tried social white listing?
0:39:43 Depending on their experience, they may be very well versed in it.
0:39:44 They may not understand it.
0:39:46 You explain to them how it works.
0:39:49 And again, you sort of position it as a test while we don’t know that it works.
0:39:53 And this would be reaching out to you or like starting with your affiliate manager?
0:39:54 Yes, exactly.
0:39:56 Whomever is met, your point of contact at the brand.
0:40:00 Just kind of to go back to the Google side of things that I wanted to mention.
0:40:02 There’s another way, another part of this, because we’re talking about how
0:40:07 to persuade partners and brands to get on board with this and then how to sort
0:40:08 of de-risk your initial spend.
0:40:12 One of the interesting things that I found, especially with high growth partners,
0:40:15 so brands that are really looking to grow fast and willing to experiment.
0:40:16 That’s a lot of brands these days.
0:40:20 It’s not like a unique, a fairly unique thing is that you can say, hey,
0:40:25 I would like to find this win-win situation where I’m going to drive you
0:40:28 a bunch of conversions on Google or Facebook.
0:40:33 But in order to potentially find this evergreen fountain of revenue
0:40:38 and traffic and conversions, I need to test with some ad spend.
0:40:42 And so would you be willing to, I don’t know, spend $2,000, $3,000 on ads
0:40:44 to fund this experiment and see if it works.
0:40:48 And $2,000 or $3,000 sounds like a lot to an individual side hustler
0:40:50 or to somebody running a small business.
0:40:56 But to a brand, $2,000 or $3,000 is what they paid some small influencer
0:40:58 to create a post one time.
0:40:59 It’s like a rounding error in many cases.
0:41:05 OK, so to pause, that would be if you were starting out your own ad campaign,
0:41:09 but kind of reaching out like, look, I want to find this long term evergreen
0:41:11 campaign, but it’s going to take a little bit of budget.
0:41:13 Would you help me with the startup costs?
0:41:16 Would you help me ramp this up without hearing that correctly?
0:41:16 Yeah, yeah.
0:41:19 So you can think about it for both platforms.
0:41:23 So in the case of Google, you as the affiliate will have to outlay the cash first.
0:41:27 And so in order to de-risk it further, you can ask the brand,
0:41:30 hey, would you be willing to sort of reimburse me for that ad spend?
0:41:32 And then we’ll learn together, basically.
0:41:35 But the prize at the end of the rainbow, as I mentioned,
0:41:39 is like we find this evergreen, scalable, mutually beneficial channel.
0:41:41 But on the Facebook side, it’s similar.
0:41:44 You can if there’s any pushback to that for social why listing, you can just say,
0:41:47 well, how about you just start with a very small spend on your end?
0:41:49 Just to test it, just to see if it works.
0:41:50 Don’t go crazy.
0:41:51 We’re not asking to get married.
0:41:55 We’re asking for the first date, you know, let’s just see if this works.
0:41:58 I mean, I think it works for a lot of your competitors.
0:42:01 Here are a bunch of screenshots of your competitors running similar
0:42:03 campaigns for months and months and months.
0:42:05 Do you think that they’re running them unprofitably for a bunch of months?
0:42:06 I doubt it.
0:42:07 Yeah, gosh, I never know.
0:42:10 Like I’m going to be paying much closer attention to the ads that I see.
0:42:12 If you’re like, oh, is this a social whitelist ad?
0:42:15 I had no idea this was a thing.
0:42:16 This is fascinating.
0:42:18 Yeah. Once you know about it, you don’t stop seeing it.
0:42:20 It’s everywhere.
0:42:23 Those disclosures as well, like you should say that it’s a partnership
0:42:27 and you should say that it’s you want to be up front with people on the ad itself.
0:42:30 But there’s a lot of blindness to that on social media as well.
0:42:33 So that doesn’t necessarily impact the conversion rates on the social
0:42:34 whitelisting side.
0:42:37 You’ll it’s really one of the surprising things I learned is just how nasty
0:42:40 the comments are on Facebook or any social platform for that matter.
0:42:42 So you run these ads, right?
0:42:46 And they’re like, you give a brand permission to run ads using your social
0:42:48 handle and they start running these ads.
0:42:52 And if you don’t have somebody on their side managing the comments,
0:42:54 it doesn’t matter what the ad is.
0:42:58 It can be the most innocuous thing ever, but people will get vicious
0:43:01 in the comments, just absolutely vicious.
0:43:03 And so if you don’t have somebody either on your side
0:43:06 or usually it’s on the brand side managing those comments
0:43:09 and responding to the angry people and boosting the happy people,
0:43:13 you will get this polarized like, wow, that thing is so fake
0:43:15 and it’s never going to work for anyone.
0:43:18 And oh, my gosh, this like helped me become the best version of myself.
0:43:20 Kind of dichotomy.
0:43:22 It’s actually pretty hilarious.
0:43:27 Interesting. Now, this was years ago, but I heard, you know, rather than
0:43:30 delete the hater comments, rather than delete the negative comments,
0:43:34 kind of engage, like send that engagement signal back to Facebook that, oh, man,
0:43:36 people are really into this ad.
0:43:40 Maybe they were not reading sentiment at that point where you are on that.
0:43:43 For the most part, if it’s not being managed, so if I see a brand doing nothing,
0:43:46 then I’ll ping them and be like, hey, we need to figure something out.
0:43:48 Like this can’t go unattended.
0:43:51 But I think the best strategy is kind of what you’re saying.
0:43:54 You want to respond and show that you’re helpful, be like, oh, you know,
0:43:58 I really respect that opinion, but also respectfully disagree.
0:43:59 Just a small pushback.
0:44:02 But for the most part, you’re saying I respect.
0:44:04 You’re not like looking to brawl on a Facebook comment.
0:44:09 You’re just looking to acknowledge that you’re there and that person has been heard, basically.
0:44:12 All right. Yeah, I love reading the comments on different ads
0:44:16 because it is exactly how you describe some people say, hey, this changed my life.
0:44:18 And other people like, this is 100 percent a scam.
0:44:20 Like, well, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
0:44:22 Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
0:44:24 So this is an interesting phenomenon there.
0:44:27 One of the common pitfalls, I would say, for social whitelisting, but
0:44:31 overall, just to summarize, social whitelisting is an extremely easy thing to turn on.
0:44:33 It’s a few clicks.
0:44:35 It’s persuading a partner that they want to try it.
0:44:37 And then it is just a few clicks.
0:44:40 And then the ball is in your partner’s court to drive paid traffic to your site.
0:44:41 It’s amazing.
0:44:45 On the paid search side, there’s quite a bit of setup.
0:44:49 There’s a lot of nuance to both getting it off the ground as well as
0:44:52 getting it to scale up and then getting it to stay consistently profitable.
0:44:57 So it’s harder, but I would also say, in my mind, it’s easier than
0:44:59 building a large email list in many cases.
0:45:03 So it just depends kind of what you’re good at, what your orientation is,
0:45:06 where you want to spend your time and potentially risk your dollars as well.
0:45:13 Yeah. The analytical brain side of me really likes it from the standpoint of
0:45:19 shortcutting the path to traffic to, okay, if I put a dollar in, can I get a buck fifty out?
0:45:24 And then tweaking and optimizing all aspects of the campaign and the landing page,
0:45:26 like that sounds really fun.
0:45:29 And then kind of the negotiation side of it, like trying to develop these win-win
0:45:32 partnerships, I think it makes a lot of sense.
0:45:36 Any other common mistakes or pitfalls or even expensive mistakes that
0:45:38 you ended up making along the way?
0:45:40 I tried to de-risk things as much as possible.
0:45:45 So I don’t have any stories of just like, wow, I turned this thing on,
0:45:47 and I jacked up the spend, and I stopped watching it.
0:45:49 And then 10 days later, I lost my shirt.
0:45:53 So luckily, I don’t have any experiences of that.
0:45:57 I’ve definitely had partners be upset about the keywords that we’re bidding on,
0:46:03 and basically told us to change our course, either to stop or to, in most cases,
0:46:06 they just say, hey, please stop bidding on this keyword.
0:46:10 And in some cases, they would say, we agreed, these are in our terms of service,
0:46:13 and it’ll be very kind of threatening the language there.
0:46:15 But in every case, I’ve been able to say, I’m really sorry,
0:46:17 like, ask for forgiveness.
0:46:18 It’s immediately paused.
0:46:21 Let’s figure out a path forward that works for both sides.
0:46:25 And a lot of cases, it can be unintentional, because Google to their credit
0:46:29 is trying to like broad match your search terms in a lot of cases.
0:46:33 And unless you specifically add that brand term as a negative keyword,
0:46:36 you might still show up, even if you weren’t intentionally trying to bid on it.
0:46:37 Totally true.
0:46:38 Yeah, exactly.
0:46:40 They’re constantly broadening your match types.
0:46:42 Depending on how much control you give them, they will, like we said,
0:46:46 before eat away all the margin and spend all your dollars unprofitably.
0:46:51 So I’m curious, just going back to your dabbling in this category.
0:46:54 It was your first side hustle or one of your early hustles.
0:46:58 Why did you stop or what killed that business for you?
0:47:01 It sounded like you had some success early on, and maybe you found bigger
0:47:03 and better things to do, just kind of curious.
0:47:08 Yeah, it was over the course of nine years, the margin in between that cost of traffic
0:47:11 and what that traffic was worth in terms of the affiliate conversion,
0:47:14 like that margin got narrower and narrower and narrower,
0:47:17 and it became kind of a challenging place to play.
0:47:24 And it was a mistake of mine and not learning SEO earlier or not reinvesting
0:47:28 some of those earlier profits into diversifying traffic sources.
0:47:31 Like you said, I want to de-risk this as much as I can,
0:47:33 but I was still very much reliant on that one traffic source,
0:47:35 and it became less profitable over time.
0:47:36 Yeah, it makes sense.
0:47:37 You had the reverse course, right?
0:47:40 You were like, “I want to de-risk away from paid media.”
0:47:44 I was like, “I want to diversify into paid media.”
0:47:45 Yeah, because it depends where you start.
0:47:46 That makes sense.
0:47:52 Oh, good. Well, that’s a place to transition to paidmediaaffiliates.com.
0:47:54 You got the big payday from selling the site,
0:47:57 and you say, “Hey, the work is not over yet.”
0:48:00 Now you’re helping other people get started and grow with this strategy,
0:48:02 paidmediaaffiliates.com.
0:48:05 What else has got you excited these days, or what’s going on over there?
0:48:09 Basically, as I figure out my next project to work on,
0:48:14 I thought this is actually a really unique time for this skill set,
0:48:18 given what’s going on in the SEO world and how challenging it’s been lately.
0:48:19 And the more I talk to people like me,
0:48:23 both individual site owners or just affiliates in general,
0:48:25 at every level, both people are just starting,
0:48:27 as well as people who have been in the game for decades.
0:48:28 You and I were talking about this,
0:48:33 how SEO is just a challenging time for people trying to build SEO traffic at the moment.
0:48:35 This is an interesting category because it works.
0:48:37 It’s just as ever green.
0:48:39 I have lived that experience,
0:48:43 but it seems to be like very few people are thinking about arbitraging paid media
0:48:46 and figuring out how to diversify their business with this channel.
0:48:52 Yeah, it just would be interesting to create an online course around it
0:48:57 and help other people potentially see the light on other avenues
0:48:59 to take their business that are maybe a little bit less obvious
0:49:03 than grow your newsletter or build a social following.
0:49:05 So that was the impetus there.
0:49:07 The course is launching soon.
0:49:09 It’s on paidmediaffiliates.com.
0:49:12 And if you’re interested in learning more about this,
0:49:16 even just chatting to me about if this could work for your niche,
0:49:18 feel free to sign up there and we’ll be in touch.
0:49:19 Very good.
0:49:22 We’ll link that up, paidmediaaffiliates.com.
0:49:23 You can check Alex out over there.
0:49:26 Well, let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip
0:49:29 for side hustle nation 2024 edition.
0:49:31 De-risk as much as possible.
0:49:34 So whether you have something that’s working well,
0:49:36 don’t think that that will work well forever.
0:49:38 And whether you’re thinking about starting something from scratch,
0:49:43 I think just think about how do I de-risk that first step as much as possible.
0:49:46 So my tips for getting brand partners on board
0:49:49 before you spend your first dollar,
0:49:51 getting them to even maybe fund the spend.
0:49:55 It’s sort of a specific piece of advice.
0:49:58 But the general piece of advice is de-risk
0:50:01 and think about how to kind of stack the deck in your favor
0:50:03 before you spend a lot of time or money.
0:50:07 It’s so true and it’s kind of one of the common threads of the show.
0:50:10 Keep your risks low, keep your goals high and get after it.
0:50:14 2019 tip we had was be extremely persistent,
0:50:16 something I think that has obviously paid off.
0:50:19 And then we had a little, where are they now episode in 2020?
0:50:22 We talked about figuring out the first model
0:50:24 and then the challenge becomes thinking outside the box,
0:50:28 which I think is a great illustration of what we’ve been talking about today.
0:50:29 Hey, we found something that worked.
0:50:31 We found content that converted.
0:50:33 How do we get more eyeballs to it,
0:50:36 even if we have to pay for those and do that in a de-risked way?
0:50:39 So again, appreciate you joining me.
0:50:40 Some of the notes that I wrote down,
0:50:41 some of the soundbites that I wrote down,
0:50:43 don’t be a flamingo standing on one leg.
0:50:44 It’s fragile, right?
0:50:46 You don’t want to get blown over by the wind.
0:50:49 See if you can diversify your business that way.
0:50:51 And we talked about in the wake of Google updates,
0:50:55 you’re building a larger brand and maybe that’s through social media.
0:50:56 Maybe that’s through an email list.
0:50:57 Maybe that’s through video.
0:51:00 Maybe it’s through paid traffic in this case.
0:51:02 I like the call to copy what’s working.
0:51:04 Look, if there are big publishers in your space,
0:51:07 if they are small publishers in your space who are spending money on ads,
0:51:09 if they’ve been doing it for any length of time,
0:51:11 they’re probably not losing money, right?
0:51:12 So copy what’s working.
0:51:13 You can do that on Google.
0:51:14 You can do that on Facebook.
0:51:15 What does their landing page look like?
0:51:17 What does their ad copy look like?
0:51:19 Copy what’s working in a lot of cases.
0:51:21 You probably don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
0:51:22 And then take away number three.
0:51:25 A lot of it depends on finding the right partners
0:51:27 where the math is going to work out from an affiliate standpoint
0:51:30 where they’re investing in growth.
0:51:32 Maybe they have raised some money
0:51:34 and they’re spending money to acquire customers.
0:51:37 Like, hey, how can you get some of that flowing to you
0:51:40 to help them achieve their goals through social whitelisting,
0:51:43 through having them front load the experiment?
0:51:45 Maybe even it’s just paying you extra affiliate commission.
0:51:47 Hey, if I can drive more volume, would you increase my rates?
0:51:50 Lots of different levers you might be able to pull
0:51:51 on finding the right partners there.
0:51:54 But this is Alex’s third appearance on the show.
0:51:56 If you want to get more of the backstory,
0:51:59 I encourage you to check out the previous two episodes.
0:52:02 His co-founder, Healy, was on those as well.
0:52:08 Those are episodes 367 and 410 in your podcast feed.
0:52:10 367 and 410.
0:52:11 Go find those.
0:52:12 Give them a listen.
0:52:15 If you’re new to the show or if you’ve been listening
0:52:16 for a long time, don’t matter.
0:52:19 You can go build yourself a personalized playlist
0:52:22 of the most relevant episodes for you.
0:52:24 All you got to do is go to hustle.show,
0:52:26 answer a few short multiple choice questions,
0:52:29 and the little quiz is going to spit out this cool curated
0:52:33 playlist recommendation based on the answers that you gave.
0:52:35 Again, hustle.show for that.
0:52:38 Big thanks to Alex for sharing his insight once again.
0:52:41 Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free
0:52:41 for everyone.
0:52:44 You can hit up sidehustlenation.com/deals
0:52:47 for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
0:52:50 And thanks for supporting the advertisers that support the show.
0:52:51 It really does make a difference.
0:52:53 That is it for me.
0:52:55 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:52:56 If you’re finding value in the show,
0:52:58 the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
0:53:00 So fire off that text message.
0:53:03 Hey, I think you got to check this out until next time.
0:53:04 Let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:53:08 And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show.
0:53:08 Hustle on.
0:53:13 As a side hustle show listener, I know you’re driven.
0:53:15 Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.
0:53:18 But I also know you can end up hustling and driving yourself
0:53:21 into exhaustion, overwhelm, and even burnout
0:53:24 if you don’t stay anchored to why you’re doing it.
0:53:26 That’s why I want to recommend another podcast
0:53:29 that will massively support your side hustle.
0:53:32 It’s called What Drives You with host Kevin Miller.
0:53:33 Kevin’s a former pro athlete.
0:53:37 He’s a lifelong entrepreneur who started 19 different businesses.
0:53:41 He’s a father of nine kids, an author, and a mountain adventurer as well.
0:53:44 He knows both the glory and the dark side of drive.
0:53:47 And has devoted his life to helping people who want to drive
0:53:51 further, faster, but also enjoy the ride every single day.
0:53:53 He brings on today’s most influential people
0:53:56 in personal and business development to see what drives them
0:54:00 and get their guidance on the key ingredients that power our own drive.
0:54:02 If you want to fully harness your drive
0:54:04 and find peace and fulfillment in the process,
0:54:07 go find What Drives You with Kevin Miller,
0:54:09 wherever you listen to podcasts.