Mastering Affiliate Recruitment with a Personal Touch with Dustin Howes

[00:00:14] Jake Fuller: Welcome back to the Profitable Performance Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Jake Fuller. I’m really excited about our topic this week. This is a topic that you can come back to and explore and really dive into month after month, as long as you’re in the affiliate game. Today’s topic is going to really cover the pros and cons or more, more or less the to dos and don’ts, of affiliate recruitment, different ways that you can stand out for new affiliate partners, ways to optimize your process and expectations to set around that process.

[00:00:44] When you’re looking for new partners to join your affiliate program excited to have my friend and our guests today, Dustin Howes, how’s it going, man?

[00:00:52] Dustin Howes: Oh man, doing well. Thanks for having me, buddy. Good to see you.

[00:00:56] JF: Yeah, it’s good to see you as well. So it’s been a couple of months. It’s been a busy year since we last caught up and I joined your LinkedIn live podcast a handful of months ago and i’ve seen you obviously around a couple of different conferences. So catch me up. What’s new? What have you been up to and give the audience if they don’t know you a little background on Dustin

[00:01:15] DH: Sure I’m still going strong with my podcast, Affiliate Nerd Out. I’m doing once a week rather than twice a week, so I slowed down that a bit. I still own and co founded Affistash, which is affiliate recruitment software, and things are going really well there. And then I recently picked up a full gig with Inflektion.

[00:01:38] And Inflektion is I got turned on to it, taking a demo with them for a possible client and just fell in love with the software and what they’re doing. The UI and the UX is just next level for the affiliate industry. And I was very excited when they offered me an opportunity to be a director of partnerships over there.

[00:02:00] So we’ve been recruiting partners onto the platform and bringing in new brands in the e com space. And I’m really enjoying my time over there with Hafiz and Andre.

[00:02:12] JF: That’s awesome. I’m glad to hear you’re still doing Affiliate Nerd Out and you didn’t drop that along the way. But a lot of good nuggets of info from that coming out of that podcast.

[00:02:20] DH: I still love it. I still love doing it. It’s people want to come on and nerd out with me. I’m all for it, but as you probably know, like podcasting is… it’s not easy on the time. And it can get a little weary sometimes you might get over it, but it’s all part of building those partnerships and networking with people is, it’s my favorite thing to do.

[00:02:45] So I feel like it’s very worth it.

[00:02:47] JF: And I think for me, A, we don’t do the week to week kind of live events like you do. So we’ll bucket a bunch of recordings in and have a whole season worth of content to produce. And it gives me time to breathe in between which is nice. But by the end of it, you’re definitely tired.

[00:03:00] And, I think like you, the main reason I run this podcast past the networking aspect of it is because it provides value. I never leave a podcast recording or episode without picking up maybe another bit of information maybe I didn’t have before from a guest and giving that opportunity to share out to the greater affiliate space, which is what our channel is about.

[00:03:21] DH: Totally agree, and I didn’t understand that concept until I, I got so many episodes deep of like, this turns out to be my education time every week. And you only have so many hours a week to execute what your things are for your clients and educate yourself. And this hour, hanging out with somebody else that’s super knowledgeable in a space is invaluable and it’s a great part of my education now.

[00:03:48] JF: Yeah, I see it the same way. Glad that our two heads are together and you get to nerd out on our podcast this time. So let’s dive into our topic of the week. Obviously from an agency perspective, we work with a whole list of brands, both big and small, covering a whole span of different verticals and consumer products.

[00:04:06] And part of our day to day, I would say the biggest part of our time goes into affiliate recruitment. And over the years we’ve been able to refine that process and understand what to look for and do’s and don’ts of affiliate recruitment and how to make sure our brands stick out.

[00:04:21] But a lot of people that are getting into this space. And a lot of the times the brands we bring on might have a completely different expectation or fundamentally, they don’t even know what kind of affiliate they want to target. So just diving into this topic, what’s your take on expectations out of the gate that people should set when they’re launching a program or revitalizing a program and they’ve got a big recruitment list in front of them, and they’re like, “all right, let’s get the gears going. Let’s jump on this.” What kind of expectations are realistic?

[00:04:52] DH: Oof. I like to do two approaches when it comes to the outreach portion. So if you have a giant list of a thousand plus targets I’d separate them out first of all. So you got a wish list of like guys you can’t ever stop going after and then you’ve got a bigger list where you can do a wide net approach.

[00:05:11] But as far as expectations goes, I like to say maybe 100 emails a week outbound. That is a really good week if you’re not that busy, right? And when I say 100 outbound, you should be catering and personalizing all of those emails to get the best results. Shooting out a wide net of a hundred emails, pushing play, and letting that do its thing, you’re not going to yield a whole bunch of results.

[00:05:39] JF: Or not the results you want?

[00:05:41] DH: No, not the results you want. So taking your time and doing 10 to 15 a day and pacing yourself a couple of hours, if you’re running a full time gambit as an affiliate manager, that’s realistic for a brand. Now when you’re an agency, things are a bit different. You’ve got clients, you’ve got assignments, you’ve got other time that you’ve got to spend on managing the existing relationships rather than recruiting. Don’t burn yourself out.

[00:06:10] Just set a goal of we’re going to do 50 to a hundred new outreaches each week. And that’s going to start filling that bucket for the future.

[00:06:23] JF: Yeah, I totally agree. And you touched on one thing about personalization and really catering those emails, regardless of volume. And that kind of falls under a category, in my opinion in preparation. And really being prepared to start that affiliate recruitment process. So to back up a bit, before a brand starts to recruit affiliates, one thing that we always take a look at as an agency is a prep checklist.

[00:06:44] And so there’s a lot of best practices on making sure you’re ready to start recruiting. For example, before we ever start recruitment, one of the biggest things I work with on clients is, can you name your ideal affiliate? And a lot of clients will come and out of the gate and a lot of people listening might think, okay, great.

[00:06:58] I can sit there and discern what category of affiliate. I think I want to get into all the way from coupon and deal sites to loyalty sites, to sub networks, to tech partners, to search partners, to content influencer, et cetera, et cetera. That’s great. It’s good to have a starting point and you can start by categorizing what you know about those types of affiliates, but a lot of times we work with brands on identifying how does that affiliate reach the consumer? What is their content like? What is it that you’re really looking for from that affiliate? Are you looking for more of an awareness play? Are you trying to capture consumers across their funnel?

[00:07:32] Are you really looking for top line revenue and kind of bottom funnel conversion partners. And so a lot of brands don’t realize they need to have that defined so they can strategize and personalize that outreach moving out. And that’s just one area of what I would consider preparation. Do you find that there’s other ways that you can prep for recruitment ahead of time and know before you start pushing your brand or your offer out there that’ll help attract those affiliates?

[00:07:56] DH: Yeah, absolutely. And you’re spot on with identifying what an ideal partner is. I call them partner personas. And before I take on any brand, I start wrapping my head around the top three partner personas and things like what’s their motivation to partner with you and where can I find them? Who’s the ideal job title of the person I’m reaching out to at this company that I’m trying to get a hold of and partner up with?

[00:08:25] So those are things you really need to think about before you jump into writing out a script of an email. I like to do three ideal partner personas early and then try to go after 10 others as well, put them on a list, but let’s focus on these three first especially early on in the recruitment phase.

[00:08:46] And each partner persona, is going to be a little bit different and your message to them is going to be a little bit different. You mentioned like coupon sites they’re going to be a little easier to get a response from so you don’t have to take near as much time with them and cater that message as you do with the big publications out there that are generating content and you’re going to have to gift them something and you’re going to have to get their attention and you’re going to have to do a PR pitch and you’re going to have to find the right person at that company.

[00:09:21] There’s a lot of work to do with those content partners in comparison to those coupon partners. So identifying is the first step and then your time allotment for each one of those partner personas is going to vary differently.

[00:09:35] JF: I think that’s all spot on as well. I think you have to understand those personas and who you’re reaching out to within that ideal affiliate list, because each category and each type of partner is going to have a different level of work and preparation to get out there and get in front of them and stand out.

[00:09:50] And on that note how important do you think competitive analysis is to start driving a compelling offer out of the gate prior to that recruitment outreach?

[00:10:00] DH: Yeah, extraordinarily. And that’s another one of those precursors that you do when you get a hold of a brand is go check out at least three competitors that have affiliate programs. And I always suggest to people that you go and join those programs, add your website and join the program. See what kind of funnel is coming through as an affiliate and the experience you’re getting from that company and emulate all the good stuff.

[00:10:25] And take all the bad stuff that you see from them and make it better and make your offer more appealing. If they’re offering 15 percent and you can only offer 10, we’ve got to figure out something else that we can motivate affiliates with so that we can get them in the door. Because that’s an uphill battle, but love goes a long way.

[00:10:48] If you’re giving them other assets outside of just commissions and maybe your conversion rate is up you’re gonna have to gather the statistics that are gonna make your campaign appealing in comparison to your competitors.

[00:11:01] JF: And I love that note because that’s almost a secret weapon that I feel is underutilized. When we’re doing competitive analysis, I’ll utilize our affiliate logins from several different networks, apply to the program, see what kind of welcome newsletter I get, what kind of automated communications and details they send me.

[00:11:20] And we’ll find there’s a lot of good nuggets in there or some bad ones that’ll help us squeeze in. Start sculpting the offer we’re putting together for a brand. You talked about metrics too. I think in a competitive analysis, it’s easy to look at the really quick competitive analysis of this is the commission rate and the cookie duration that my competitor is offering.

[00:11:39] This is what, where they’re at and what they’re using. I think if you want to dive deeper and this won’t apply to every single partner, but especially if you start branching out into partners that are going to drive traffic and a bit more awareness, you really want to focus on conversion rates and EPC is overlooked in my opinion.

[00:11:54] So for those who don’t know, that is earnings per click. A lot of us are familiar with cost per click or price per click, however you want to categorize that. But earnings per click are the average earnings per click that the publisher is going to see if that rate is higher for your offer than your competitors, that is quite compelling.

[00:12:12] Even if your commission is not quite on par. Now there’s chances for that specific partner to earn more by driving traffic to your site instead. So there’s a lot of different metrics you can get play with. And then another thing that I find more common than not, when we take over a brand, is they either don’t have one, or it’s very outdated and is not, call it optimized, and this would be their affiliate page, right?

[00:12:35] So having, a lot of brands, if they have a program, you might scroll down to the footer of their page and you’ll see affiliates or affiliate program. You click on that and there’s a landing page that talks about it. And it’s very underutilized. But those get some attention.

[00:12:48] Do you think there’s importance on making sure that’s fresh and compelling as well?

[00:12:52] DH: Extremely like it doesn’t have to be perfect. If you’ve got the great offer, then your landing page and signup page doesn’t have to be perfect, but you do want to highlight your program as in the best light possible. This is your… this is your first impression with the brand. And if they get the impression that you don’t mean business, then they’ll move on to your competitor, right?

[00:13:17] Have your stuff together. Make sure all of your functionality works, first of all. If there’s call to action buttons on your landing page for the signup that aren’t working, that’s gonna be a bad experience for an affiliate who will move on to something else. And I would say there’s really important portions of the landing page itself for the signups that are essential and then there’s some that are secondary.

[00:13:44] It doesn’t have to be a very overcomplicated big page. If you want to try to rank SEO wise for that page, that’s one thing, but I keep it short and simple. Hey, here’s what you get. This is what platform we’re on. This is what we’re offering. Here’s our incentives. Here’s a one, two, three step process of how you’re going to get money and join right here and make sure that functionality works and you’re good to go in that front.

[00:14:12] But it is a step that people sometimes forget that might lose your conversion rate of pulling affiliates into the program and it shouldn’t be overlooked.

[00:14:24] JF: I 100 percent agree. I think one thing I pull from that too, is keep it simple. I don’t know how many times, whether it’s in an outreach email, or it’s on that program page on your site, or even when someone looks at the program terms and descriptions within the network, brands like to talk about themselves and fully understandably, they’re trying to promote what they have.

[00:14:45] But sometimes they get way too into the weeds trying to sell that product to the affiliate as if they’re going to come and make a purchase that day themselves, you want to keep it simple. At the end of the day, affiliates want to partner with you because your product fits their audience and because they can earn money. And so make sure those are your talking points and how are they going to do those two things? So yeah, I think that’s…

[00:15:06] DH: Speaking of signups, like I want your opinion on this. Do you set up two tier situations very often with your programs? Granted that the affiliate platform is capable of doing it, do you set up a two tier system so that other affiliates can, or affiliates can recruit other affiliates and earn a commission off of the affiliates that they bring in?

[00:15:28] JF: That’s a good question. Not common. Once in a while we have brands that come to us and if the network or the software they’re using is capable. They might look to us to build a general affiliate program, but also, what I think could be better referred to as an ambassador program or a referral program in some sense, where there’s secondary tiers where those affiliates bring in additional affiliates and get paid off of those affiliate sales, it starts to get a bit convoluted.

[00:15:55] It’s not common that we set that up, but I think that is an interesting strategy to help affiliates become part of your sales arm as well. Have you seen success doing that yourself?

[00:16:04] DH: I have seen success. It’s not all that common. In e com space, I would say in the SaaS space, it’s pretty hot.

[00:16:11] JF: I can see there for sure.

[00:16:12] DH: I am finding some real success in Facebook groups and like talking to the admins and having them become a two tier affiliate and having them motivate their audience to come and join my affiliate program is there’s a lot of power in that so. Facebook groups are a hot venue for me right now in that econ space and I want to do everything I can to help the people that have built those communities make the most money as possible.

[00:16:41]

[00:16:42] JF: That’s really interesting. Cause we definitely utilize and target Facebook groups, but I’ve never put together, the strategy of turning those into more affiliate recruiters on our behalf and behalf of the brand. But I think that’s smart. And I think that goes to the idea as well, there’s always new opportunities and new ways to think about this. Recruitment is, I think the baseline of what recruitment is and some of the best practices behind it when it involves the affiliate channel, they’re timeless, right? You always want to have some personalized outreach. You want to do your competitive analysis. You want to have a compelling offer.

[00:17:17] That’s never going to change. But the ways in which you incentivize those partners to be more than just a single recruitment, those opportunities can change with technology can change with, perception. There’s a lot of different factors that go into that, but it’s that always be testing mindset that applies to every aspect of the program, including recruitment.

[00:17:37] DH: Yeah, and that’s why I always emphasize like the use of hiring an outside agency and OPM like yourself. And it is important to the growth of that program. First of all, like I, I really advocate that every brand should have some kind of in house manager running partnerships that are existing. But I want to hire agencies like yourself that have a Rolodex of affiliates already existing. They have those partner personas ironed out for you in a very short amount of time, and they can do the outreach in bulk. And that’s just such a winning combination when it turns to scaling up the program is and you guys as aspects of other affiliate management things as well are super essential, but I’m a big fan of hiring agency. If you want to scale to get there to a quicker place.

[00:18:33] JF: I don’t disagree, but I’m also biased on that matter.

[00:18:36] DH: Okay.

[00:18:36] JF: Of course I want everybody to hire an agency, but we also know that we’re not going to be a fit for every brand. And I think a lot of agencies offer this, one thing to bridge that gap is I love getting a phone call from a brand who actually has someone dedicated in-house for that affiliate program. Because a lot of times brands just don’t have someone. It’s the guy or gal who runs the search department or the email marketing department or something else. And they’re thrown, Hey, you need to take on this affiliate program. And they have no experience doing that.

[00:19:03] And they might be doing a good job jumping in, but when you have someone dedicated to that program, you can tell just when you log in and run an audit that it’s gotten a little bit more care and love that it needs as a channel. And so a lot of the times we’ll come in and say, “Hey, this looks great. We could really just jump in and assist you with recruitment efforts or optimization or activation ideas and things to help you move the needle. If you don’t need that kind of full white glove service and there is good opportunity for brands to take advantage of that.”

[00:19:30] Even just seasonally, Q4 is right around the corner, and that’s the kind of time of year where recruitment I think becomes a lot more difficult. But you’ve got to be on your A game from here on out if you’re trying to recruit partners, if you’re trying to activate them or optimize with them. They’ve got a lot of choices right now, especially in that B2C space.

[00:19:50] And so you want to be on top of that.

[00:19:52] DH: Great point. And with the holidays coming up with Black Friday, like getting the, “what is your deal going to be as soon as possible? It’s super helpful information for the recruitment front, because if you’re going to offer a 20 percent discount on Black Friday, And you can use that as a carrot for the affiliates that you’re going after and saying, “Hey, we’ve got a big deal coming out.

[00:20:16] It’s going to be industry best. Like here’s what’s here’s what it is. And we’d love for you to be a part of this and promote it to your audience. We think you can make a killing and start feeding that fire early on.” That’s, this is a great time to recruit partners for your brand.

[00:20:34] JF: Yeah, I agree, and actually, that jumps into my next question. What are some bargaining chips you can utilize to help that recruitment process or activation process to get affiliates in and actively promoting your brand?

[00:20:47] If you’ve got a good promo coming up, there’s a specific holiday coming up. Use that as a recruitment tool itself in a bargaining chip. Do you find that there’s additional bargaining chips that help just push you in front of the line and get that attention of a publisher you’re trying to target?

[00:21:00] DH: Yeah, my first suggestion here is always know your numbers with, you gotta know what your conversion rate is, the EPC is super helpful for affiliates that really know what they’re doing, but maybe some of the, longer tail affiliates might not understand what EPC is, and you might have to explain that explaining, hey, our conversion rate is here, our affiliates are seeing an average order value of this, our brand is paying out this much as an average commission.

[00:21:31] These are things that are going to pop out in a very short email to these guys trying to recruit them. And then I offer up like I’m always asking a question in my first email of, “Hey, what does it take to work with you? What, how do you work with other brands? Do you think this is a fit for your audience?”

[00:21:51] We’re not coming to them and saying, Hey, I want this. I want this. I want this. I’m asking them legitimately do you think this is a fit? And do you think that we can make some magic together in some kind of capacity?”

[00:22:06] JF: I completely agree with that. I think it’s very easy to get in the mindset of I want, I need, and this is, what I want to take from you. Come work with me, you can earn a buck. And there’s three categories in terms of affiliate communication that we really break our efforts into. The first being recruitment.

[00:22:23] The second being activation. So this is for partners that have joined your program, but you haven’t seen traffic driving or any kind of results coming from them yet. And you want to activate them and start seeing clicks and conversions. And then those that are actually producing some revenue for your brand and conversions that you’re looking for, optimization would be the third one.

[00:22:41] But in every single case, every communication starts or ends with, “how else can we help you? What else can we get for you to be successful?” And I think it’s really important to make sure that when you’re talking to publishers, you give them that little bit of, A dangling carrot or at least a cracked open window or door to let them know there’s more opportunity here.

[00:23:02] And I’m more flexible to meet you where you need to be. And we can work on something together. So I think that’s a good point.

[00:23:09] DH: I’m a big fan of helping others and using that as the biggest carrot. My helping them make more money is going to be the biggest carrot that you can possibly offer up. And there are other things, right? I offer up backlinks to their content. Sometimes the brand allows it, giving them a backlink is going to help them improve their SEO value.

[00:23:33] That’s a very valuable tool for SEO affiliates that are working on organic traffic. And if Sometimes if we bring out a really good piece of content, I might pass them some money to arbitrage that content to the top of Google and offer up that in exchange for a good piece of content. What are the things am I missing as far as carrots that you dangle?

[00:24:00] JF: I think we touched on a lot of the main carrots. I think a lot of the times. We, again, there’s a twofold approach and I have this posed as a question, but also just say it as a statement. Recruitment never stops, at least in our opinion. There’s never a point in a program’s maturity where you go, “I don’t have to recruit new partners anymore.”

[00:24:17] That just doesn’t exist. There’s too many affiliates that are popping up that are new. They consolidate to a larger company. They change strategy and start offering different ways to target consumers. So you’ve always got to be on that hunt. That said, we always look at again, what kind of carrots are we offering current partners?

[00:24:35] So one thing that we’ve seen success with is we’ll run a contest or a bonus program for two weeks or for a month. And every time we’ve done that on a program even if it doesn’t, blow it out of the water, it’s amazing to see how many partners might activate and start producing revenue that weren’t producing the previous few months, or maybe not even responding.

[00:24:54] Maybe they didn’t have a ton of interest in promoting the program. As soon as we dangled a secondary carrot of, “Hey, your commission’s here. But now we’re going to give you this bonus. If you can hit X revenue or sell this many, product number of SKUs on this category”, whatever it might be, all of a sudden they activate. So when we see success there, we turn that into a recruitment strategy as well. And it goes back into, how can we help them earn more money? A lot of the times we can turn that into a recruitment tool is “hey, this bonus program proved worthwhile for our productive and active publishers in the program.”

[00:25:26] Let’s now make a recruitment program that bonus is their first conversion. Or once you join, if you produce X amount of revenue in your first 30 days, we’re going to give you this bonus. And that’s a nice carrot to get someone go, “Oh, maybe it’s worth giving this one a shot, because if I can produce enough traffic or hit this specific, target in my first 30 days, I’m going to get a nice little bonus at the end of that.”

[00:25:50] And sometimes that works really well for recruiting partners that have been difficult to get ahold of.

[00:25:56] DH: Yeah, and that’s the key to getting them content active. Everybody’s got their own motivation, but if you can say, “Hey, I’m going to give you a couple hundred dollar bonus for your first sale.” Like now we’re listening and now we’re getting up on the top of that content schedule that, that you were just like hanging out on the bottom, I can get to this whenever.

[00:26:19] Love that strategy and adding that into possibilities is great if you can get that thumbs up from the brand for sure.

[00:26:26] JF: Yeah. Yeah. You have to get the thumbs up from the brand. And to be clear too, it doesn’t have to always be this huge financial bonus, right? If you’ve got an AOV of 25 on your product, you’re not comfortable saying here’s 250 bucks for your first conversion, right? That’s going to drive you nuts.

[00:26:43] And it’s going to be a negative ROI at the end of the day, if you’re recruiting a lot of partners, but you can sit there and figure out how do I make sure their first conversion, their first 30 days of converting for our brand gives them an extra 50 percent in earnings, compared to what their normal baseline might look like or whatever it might be.

[00:27:01] And you can also get really specific. So again, if you build out those affiliate personas, you can identify who’s the most valuable type of affiliate we want to recruit, typically, those are going to be also your most difficult ones to recruit. So maybe that’s where you offer those bonuses. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a complete blanket for all recruitment partners.

[00:27:21] DH: Yeah, and speaking of bonuses, I don’t know your strategy on this. I am of the school of instead of giving everybody 10 dollars for some very simple post task or maybe a social… let’s do a contest for $200 for the best of that thing.

[00:27:40] Do you guys do that one way or the other? Like I’ve never found a lot of value in the small amounts.

[00:27:47] JF: No the really small amounts, not so much. If you’re a hundred dollars plus in a bonus and it’s something that’s attainable, I always look at a few things from both a brand perspective and publisher. I look at how can we make sure we stay within the margins of the brand, but make something just hard enough where we know not every affiliate is going to earn this bonus.

[00:28:06] But it seems attainable from every affiliate that we reach out to. And so there’s a fine line there, but a lot of the times it is either the first five folks that hit this goal, you’re going to get a $200 bonus and that creates urgency and so then everybody activates very quickly. And once we cap out at five, we notify.

[00:28:23] Who won and that we’ve capped out for the month. Other ways to do it are a contest where based on different parameters, like you said, if we’re doing a content push, “Hey, the best piece of content is going to get $200, but we’ll also throw another carrot. The first three to have any content rated is going to get a hundred dollars” and so again, it puts urgency into pushing out that content from our partners and having them create those blips or whatever it is we’re looking for.

[00:28:48] And if they’re quick to run it, they’re going to see a bonus, even if they’re not that best-of winner.

[00:28:54] DH: For sure. I’ve got a great strategies. I love those all

[00:28:58] JF: So they’re fun to play around with. I love testing like that. I love working with brands that are open to testing and, not to get off of recruitment, but this all plays back into recruitment. The more open minded you are as a brand to try new things the more firepower you’re giving yourself in that ongoing recruitment process, in my opinion.

[00:29:15] DH: Totally, completely agree. And it’s always helpful when the brand is open to ideas, at least if, you can only bring them to them, and if they can’t see beyond the numbers early on into the investment of the affiliates in the future it’s going to be a difficult conversation, but when that brand gets it, that’s when real magic happens.

[00:29:38] JF: Yeah, that’s always fun. We’re kind of wrapping up on the questions here, but on the flip side, we’ve talked about best practices, which automatically answers part of this question, but are there any red flags or, you’ve seen recruitment, you’ve done a lot of demos and audits and consulting in your time and as an agency, we have as well.

[00:29:55] Is there anything that really sticks out that is like, “Ooh, that’s a big red flag. We have to change that immediately when it comes to recruiting new partners and working with, new affiliates.”

[00:30:05] DH: Red flags. Uh, I think only with time, do you really recognize what potential is? So as you get older as an affiliate manager and see more websites and more influencers and what’s working, you’ll develop a sense of what is going to work rather than what isn’t. Obviously, like, cat blog isn’t going to be promoting SaSS products, right?

[00:30:30] Recognizing that the site is a fit to compared to what your brand is first and foremost, a good idea to like, if it’s not a fit in your opinion, if your first impression is not a fit, stick with your gut a lot of times, but you should be inquiring a little bit more. Sometimes there’s really bad sites that have really high potential and giant email lists or incredible digital marketers in the native space that can have a huge amount of volume.

[00:30:59] Don’t just go through your applications and have a black and white thought process. Like you have to look for potential in everybody and it’s like a guilty until or innocent until proven guilty kind of situation where you consider these guys a player until they show that they aren’t. So what are the red flags?

[00:31:24] I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer it. I don’t have a good answer there, Jake. What do you have in, in opinions here?

[00:31:29] JF: No, maybe that was phrased wrong as a question. I think, you’re right though. You have to learn as you go. I think the only… and again, red flag might’ve been the wrong phrase. The only thing that I do look for is some brands will get caught up in this. I need 500 affiliates for my program.

[00:31:45] And so any effort they put out is again, going back to one of your original statements is a spray and pray, throwing spaghetti against the wall, seeing what sticks and you’re not really putting any controls or parameters around how or why you’re recruiting certain partners.

[00:31:59] And so we’ve had brands work with us in the past saying, “Hey, we want a hundred affiliates, active and promoting and recruited in the next 30 days. Great, I can do that for you, but you’re not going to like 97 of them, right? You’re not going to like the majority after we’ve already talked about what you’re looking for, KPIs, goals, etc.”

[00:32:16] We always try to focus on how are we getting quality partners into your program over quantity. And then other red flags it’s less from a recruitment. I think best practice from an approval from point is looking out and red flags where it’s on auto approve and programs are just inundated with affiliates that shouldn’t be in there.

[00:32:34] You should be vetting every application, even if they were on your recruitment list and you see them come through and apply for your program, do a double take, click on their link, make sure everything looks good. Make sure you like what you see and they should be in that program, and categorize them.

[00:32:49] Gosh that’s something a lot of folks don’t do. They don’t go through the network time to categorize their publishers and tag them. Yeah. But that’s, we’re getting that goes a little bit deeper into management of those affiliates.

[00:33:00] DH: The auto accept is maybe the worst thing you can do with your affiliate program. First of all, like you’re just letting anybody come in and you’re not paying attention to them. That’s a recipe for disaster. That’s a recipe for fraud. If you’re talking about red flags, like you’re going to find them real quick if you let the floodgates open.

[00:33:20] But the bigger portion of that is you’re not going to be able to read potential by auto applying. If you’re just letting everybody in, there might be a killer in there who applied for your program and then got a bad experience and left. If you are vetting every one of these affiliates and you see this killer come through and you’re like, “Oh, let’s get an extra email out here. I want to reach out to them immediately. See what they want to do and try to get on a phone call as quick as possible.”

[00:33:49] That’s a big opportunity that would be missed on auto accept that it’s just a very bad practice.

[00:33:56] JF: Yeah, I agree. And I think for us, when someone joins the program or moving more towards management now, but we’ve got automations that tell us when to reach out to affiliates, if they’ve been an active for 30 days or 180 days, or they’re a low performer, there’s a ton of different areas where we can reach out and do another vet and see what we can do to optimize, but we apply that to recruiting.

[00:34:17] So I think one mistake that people may also make is they’ve got this ideal list, right? There’s a ton of brands where yes, there might be a hundred affiliates we want to work with. There’s 10 that they’re passionate about working with that. They can’t seem to get ahold of, and so when they bring us on, we’ll say, “great how many times have you reached out? We shot a few times to a couple of different addresses over the course of 30 days, and then we gave up and that was six months ago.” I think it’s one thing it’s important to think about when you’re looking at recruitment.

[00:34:45] If you have some ideal partners, always keep them in your rounds. It doesn’t mean spam them. It doesn’t mean send out 20 emails a week until someone tells you to lay off because that’ll just push them away. But you never want to necessarily give up on an affiliate partner that you’re considering as a top ideal target. You just have to be a little more innovative and find ways to get in there.

[00:35:05] DH: Absolutely. And big players, they’re going to have new employees every six months come through as well. And they might be an old employee that you’ve worked with in the past, or there might be a change in the organization and theory within the organization, so keeping up with them and just checking in every three months on a partner that didn’t work back then could work now. So never give up on those.

[00:35:34] And now that you’re bringing up like, “Hey, what’s it, what’s a good affiliate manager and they’re like structure of how do we recognize that they’re doing good work”, right? Like the portion of recognizing talent is a big portion of the recruitment phase, but I like to think of it in, into three, maybe four phases really.

[00:35:57] And the first one is: we’re gaining interest. So we’re doing it, whatever we can. And then they’re interested. They’re replying back. That’s phase one. I like to mark all my phase ones so that my boss can see ” Hey, I’m getting into this phase. Next phase is actually making friends with them.” So like doing something for them having some kind of exchange of goods and content of something that matter that’s in that making friends phase. This is where you should be living this is where a lot of your time should be spent in the recruitment process because you want that friend for the future of your career, and then the last things we’ve got some content scheduled and we’ve got some content live and sales made.

[00:36:43] Those can all come later. The making friends portion of this industry is the most important in my mindset at least. Sales, of course, all the brands want them, but they don’t know what’s happening in phase one and two that is making you so productive as an affiliate manager.

[00:37:01] JF: I agree and it goes into my final question which revolves around the different ways you can find affiliates, and create relationships. I want to touch on two parts of that. One being events, webinars, conferences. Which by the way is how we met was at a conference. I flagged you down. I was like, “I want to talk to this guy.” And we’ve been talking since.

[00:37:22] So, I’ve never left a conference without learning about an affiliate I didn’t know existed or I didn’t know enough about and took value from that. There’s never been a conference where I didn’t leave it with at least one of those. But beyond that, there are so many tools on the market today to find affiliates, right?

[00:37:40] You founded Affistash, one of the newcomers in this space to go out and find targets that you’re looking for and find contact info and utilize in your recruitment process. So tell me about the evolution of the technology we have or the tools we have at our fingertips now to make that process and finding our personas and ideal affiliates that maybe we didn’t know about. What’s your take on those and do you have some preferences?

[00:38:04] DH: Yeah, the evolution of AI and tools for affiliate managers over the last five years is exponential. Like I remember using 5IQ, which was a, an early database of affiliates. That might’ve been 10 years ago and then they sold their company. And then I worked with Media Rails and Publisher Discovery and those tools had their own value.

[00:38:28] And some of these are still around with Impact has Media Rails and Publisher Discovery is still around, um, with AI coming into play and APIs getting easier to create, and Affistash came around and I looked at this tool and thought, “this is really impressive stuff for the price point. I want to be a part of this.”

[00:38:50] And I signed on and became co founder and CMO, and we’re doing really good things and making that a product that affiliate managers are really going to enjoy and spend a lot of time in to… honestly, like I’m building that tool for the tool that I want to use. I use this tool every day when I’m recruiting for the brands that I’m working with.

[00:39:10] I practice what I preach and I utilize my own tool and I’m building the tool that I will want to be using. The evolution of these tools has come around extraordinarily fast in my opinion, over the last few years. And I highly suggest people keep on trying new tools. Like Social Cat right now is super hot.

[00:39:30] It is a very good platform to create collaborations with other influencers and cut them gifts. And I’m using Upfluence on a daily basis as well. I love to but hashtags in and see who’s talking about certain topics that are going to be relevant to the brands that I’m working with. So there’s just so many tools out there that you should be testing and trying and luckily I get to build content around those because I’m trying a lot of them.

[00:39:59] And then I just spin up like, “Hey, this is what I, my thoughts on it. Keep on trying, keep on testing. What are you guys using right now that’s hot?”

[00:40:07] JF: Like you, we’ve tested everything from Publisher Discovery. A lot of the networks since we’re agnostic, have tools they either built in or they’re piggyback off of like LinkConnector’s partnered with Publisher Discovery. So some of our link connector partners, we can utilize that tool.

[00:40:20] Impact’s got some tools. There’s some different AI tools that are more recently released by Rakuten and Awin both that are unique at finding similar programs in your market, what affiliates are producing and actually driving sales for those programs. It won’t tell you the client name, but it’ll be within your vertical if it’s a brand we’re working with, and give you a kind of a general list of here’s the productive publisher list from some of these competitive markets that you’re in and the affiliates that are doing well for them on our platform. So it’s an inside baseball look into “great, if they’re doing well for my competitor, I should probably recruit those.”

[00:40:56] But we’ve tested a bunch. So Modash is one we’ve used, Social Cat’s big for a couple of our clients and user generated content and some different stuff that they’re doing. Doing with influencers and getting those on board. But we never stopped looking. I think every time there’s something new to try.

[00:41:11] I have my entire team usually, cause for those listening, a lot of the times you can find one week, two week, or even 30 day free trials of these tools, take advantage, go try as many as you can figure out what sticks, what is getting you the results that you’re looking for, what’s creating some efficiencies in that process of recruitment, and then refine which ones you end up using long term.

[00:41:32] But we’re very flexible. So I don’t know if we ever commit to a single tool long-term, we’ll have some managers that use one tool and others that like another. And so we don’t necessarily as an agency say you have to use this one recruitment tool or AI tool. We try to look at what’s working for each level of manager that we have.

[00:41:51] Are they an assistant? Are they a senior with experience? What kind of brands are they managing that kind of dictates what they might want to use and what’s going to be useful for them?

[00:42:00] DH: You mentioned flexibility. Absolutely. Don’t get stuck on one tool. There’s going to be another tool that is going to be cheaper and better next month.

[00:42:09] JF: Yeah.

[00:42:09] DH: Uh, it’s another UI and another system you’ve got to learn, but that’s part of the process. And one of the things I love so much about Inflektion is how easy it is to for affiliate managers, like talked about UX just being like really clean and fresh and intuitive to go in and manage and for affiliate managers and brands, but for the affiliates as well.

[00:42:35] We’re trying to um… traditional affiliate networks may be a little bit complicated for the common person, and we’re trying to alleviate and simplify that. And we’re doing an incredible job and building in tools that are helping out with that conversion rate from your affiliate manager standpoint, all your numbers are going to go up.

[00:42:56] One of the biggest hurdles I’ve ever had was co branded landing pages, like getting them ordered and the brand taking two months to build it out for a partner, and that’s a bad experience for the partner. That’s a bad experience for the affiliate manager that wants to get things done. And we know that conversion rate is going to increase with co branded pages and pages that have dedicated, exclusive coupons on them for the fans of this person.

[00:43:25] We know that’s going to convert better and Inflektion has built a product that helps affiliate managers and affiliates themselves be able to build that page in a matter of minutes, rather than asking the dev team to make it happen in a month. I’m just really impressed with the tool kit that Inflektion has created and it’s one of those next products that is going to make this industry better. Just like all the things that are in this network of recruitment.

[00:43:54] JF: Yeah, I’m excited to check that out.

[00:43:58] DH: Awesome.

[00:43:58] JF: Have not yet done that. But I agree. I think again, anything as a brand, anything you can do to assist the consumer journey and make it more seamless between the publisher and the brand, how that consumer is finding you through that affiliate. If that’s a seamless process your conversion rates, everything’s going to be more successful.

[00:44:17] If it’s really clunky, obviously conversion rates aren’t going to be good. Affiliate’s going to back out. They’re going to go somewhere else. So I think that’s a really smart idea. I’m looking forward to checking that out.

[00:44:26] DH: Yeah. Let’s get you scheduled for a demo, man.

[00:44:29] JF: We’ll do that. Hey, I know we’re out of time we covered a ton today. So I hope everybody who listens to this gets some good nuggets on recruitment and some best practices. Really can’t thank you enough for joining. It’s always good to see you, Dustin.

[00:44:41] DH: Thanks for having me. This is always fun. I appreciate your nerd time. Let’s do it some more here soon.

[00:44:47] JF: That sounds good. You enjoy your week and prep for Q4 cause it’s coming. It’s right around the corner and I’ll be heads down for sure.

[00:44:54] DH: All right, here we go. Good luck to you, dude.

[00:44:57] JF: Alright. Thanks, Dustin. Talk soon.