Runway and Access: The Publisher’s Dilemma with Jamie Birch

[00:00:00] Jake Fuller: All right. welcome to this episode of the Profitable Performance Marketing Podcast. PPM is what we call it for short here. I am your host, Jake Fuller. Our guest today is, the one and only Jamie Birch, founder of JEBCommerce.

[00:00:29] And you’re your last host of this podcast, a bit of a full circle interview here. Our topic of the week is navigating the affiliate landscape as a publisher, which is something, you Jamie have now jumped into and are experiencing firsthand. great to see you again. I’d love you to jump in and tell the audience who, if they’ve listened to before, we’ll surely know you, but give us a take on what you’re doing now and how things have been going since the start of the year.

[00:00:58] Jamie Birch: Yeah, this is great, Jake. It’s good to see you and hear from the team and glad to be on the podcast. And it is different to be on this side, but, way less stress and way easier to get that done. So I’m excited to, to be here. Yeah. After exiting and moving on and giving you guys the reins, I took some time to, to… first, I’ve been making wine.

[00:01:25] So what if you’re watching on YouTube or you’re watching this, you’ll see the wine behind me. So that’s a lot of what I’ve been, been doing. But…

[00:01:34] JF: I’m oddly thirsty all of a sudden.

[00:01:37] JB: Yeah, me too. And I’ve had to watch, I shouldn’t start drinking it or tasting it before noon. I’ve had to, I’ve had a conversation with my wife about that.

[00:01:47] it’s hard when you’re making it, not to taste it. but having the time freed me up to think about it… I wanted to do next. And, I’ve always been a problem solver. the other thing that my family does is, we show horses and our daughter races, barrel races. So if we’re not, if we weren’t working, we were driving a horse somewhere, driving to watch one of us on a horse, driving to a vet, thinking about horses or talking about horses.

[00:02:20] That’s, pretty much what we did. So while we were, I was coaching one of, our family’s trainers. We have a few, on, some business things, it became apparent that there was a way for me to merge my passion in life with my life’s work. And we saw an opportunity where, horse trainers and equine professionals all day long, they are referring product to their client.

[00:02:52] So if you listened to this podcast before now, you probably know where I’m going with this. but they refer product to their client all the time and they’re not, they’re not known to be an incredibly tech savvy, they’re not luddites, but they’re, it’s not a tech savvy, industry as a whole.

[00:03:11] And they don’t have time. So they’re overworked, they are referring products to clients all the time. They’re underpaid, and they really only work or they only earn money when they’re moving their hands or they’re in the saddle. So as we were talking about optimizing, her business and, and things like that, I had the idea of, man, can we create something that allows these horse professionals to do the same thing they’re doing.

[00:03:41] Look on their phone, find a product their client needs and text it to them and get paid for that. And so that became, I started it, started thinking about it last July of 2023. and we had a site live called EquineRevShare sometime early 2024. And we just finished our first round of testing.

[00:04:08] We’re buttoning a few things up, but we launched EquineRevShare and that allows horse professionals, trainers, clinicians all of, anyone in the horse world that refers products to other people, to get paid on that. if you’re in the affiliate community, we act as a sub affiliate network, but then we add, a twist.

[00:04:30] It’s not a shopping site, consumers are not shopping on our site. So it’s a site where these people on horseback while they’re letting their horse rest. Can be looking for a bit, reins, a bridal, saddle, anything like that. And they go to the site and they have a big button that says, copy the link.

[00:04:49] They copy it and they send it in a text message, just like they’re doing right now, before this was up. So really created something that, a group of people I’m really passionate about. These guys they work so hard. And literally blood, sweat and tears. And they don’t get paid enough, but the market isn’t such where they can necessarily double their fees.

[00:05:13] Horses are pretty expensive. And so this allows them to, to add maybe 10, 20 percent to what they earn a year and change extremely little in how they do it. So that’s what I’ve been working on. Really passionate about right now. We’re headed to a big horse show and, on Tuesday. So in a few days.

[00:05:35] We sponsored a buckle or two there and we’ve got our polos and hats being printed out. And I just broke the first podcasting rule by not, not silencing my phone. Let’s fix that right now. But yeah, that’s what I’ve been working on. So I’m on the affiliate side now, which is completely different and I always used to preach, since I started, the company that you now own: every affiliate manager has to have their own site. They have to, be an affiliate. Doesn’t have to be a successful one, but you’ve got to be in there to see what, half of or a third of your world, what it’s like for them. And, I had done that time and time again, but never really trying to make it a profitable successful business, just getting in there and seeing it.

[00:06:24] And once you do that, man, you learn a whole lot and a whole lot of what you know, you guys are doing and what you guys preach, is super valid and works really well. And there are so few, really so few advertisers doing those fundamental things as an affiliate, it drives you crazy.

[00:06:46] And it’s, yeah, it just drives you crazy. So there’s a lot of those things going on.

[00:06:51] JF: And I love the perspective and I’m interested to dive deeper into some of the hurdles you may have run into just so people can understand what publishers have to go through and that obviously from a, an affiliate standpoint, they’re in this to make money. They want to be successful.

[00:07:07] I think from the agency side, it’s very easy. And even from the network, so as, an agency, if you’re out there and you haven’t worked for an agency, or maybe you haven’t worked with an agency as a brand, our job is to really advocate across three different sectors, it’s, brand first and brand dollars really are what feed this industry from a revenue perspective.

[00:07:26] It comes from the brand. That’s how networks make their money. They take a cut from that. and then that’s how publishers make their money. And that’s typically how, how agencies make their money. So you advocate for the brand first, understand what are their, concerns, what roadblocks are they having and how to make sure we facilitate, a strategy that works for them within this channel and that it’s built off of the brand side first.

[00:07:49] But you also have to really advocate for the other two parties involved, one being the technology, the networks, and understanding where they come in and how they play a role. And then really the publisher side and advocating for understanding how is this publisher going to impact, your bottom line? How are they going to target your consumer?

[00:08:06] How are they going to drive results? And, and more I think where people get lost, and I think what we see sometimes is it’s easy for a brand to come in and think, “Hey, this is how I want to set this up. This is how it’s going to run.” And they lose sympathy or empathy maybe for what the publisher’s actually going through and how hard they have to work to actually drive that traffic and be successful, which is what they want to do.

[00:08:33] And so we got to make sure that we equip them with the tools they have to do and when you take those tools away, they may go somewhere else or they just not may not hit the kind of goals or, ROI that you’re looking for from that particular partnership. So it is a fine line. It’s a fine balance.

[00:08:47] I think, I find myself quite often trying to advocate for and better understand how the publishers are reaching that audience, how they’re developing their own audience, because truthfully, they’re their own companies and brands freestanding on their own. And so how do we bridge that gap and really make sure that education goes across the board?

[00:09:07] But I can imagine diving in with all of your energy, more from a business perspective, trying to make a profitable company, and it’s something you’re passionate about. So you want to make it work, you’ve probably run into some hurdles where you thought, “I never realized it was this hard or that publishers may have had to go through this many hoops to get the ball rolling.”

[00:09:27] JB: Oh, yeah. So often in our lives, we don’t realize like what we’re really good at, not everyone is really good at. So I just hopped in thinking, “Oh, everyone is going to be running good fundamental affiliate programs. And they’re going to love to talk to this new affiliate that’s building its own audience. And they’re going to exist. There’s going to be someone on the other side that you can talk to.” And so you dove in with gusto and none of those things are accurate.

[00:09:55] So it, looking how JEB has run programs and how available they are to publishers and then seeing what most what I’ve seen out of all the partners we work with right now, there’s only two one has an in house person that I can talk to, and he’s, really responsive and the other one has an agency and they’re really responsive.

[00:10:24] All the others, it is. I’ve often called you, “Hey, how are you finding contact info for people? Because it’s I’ve had to get back into hunting the right contact down.” So there’s a bunch of things. I put together a list of what’s been, eye opening and maybe frustrating, from the publisher perspective that maybe your listeners, it’ll really benefit them.

[00:10:47] I don’t know if you want it. What might need to go into some of those.

[00:10:51] JF: Yeah, no, I would, my goal for this is the, obviously this is the topic of the week. So I really want to dive into and shed some light on how publishers are operating their business and what hurdles they have, because I think one even misconception when you have a responsive agency, when we have brands that we represent, we can say, “Hey, here’s, 20 target publishers we’d love to have in the program, and they would love to have them in the program.”

[00:11:16] They think we can just send a single email and everything magically happens. But these publishers are, they’re fielding probably, dozens, if not hundreds of emails, depending on the size of the publisher on a daily basis. and even if we have a relationship with them, they’ve got some different guidelines on how they work with different verticals, different brand sizes.

[00:11:38] And so we have to make sure in order to get that relationship started. Obviously we know how to run this game and how to play this game. We’ll have those tools lined up and ready that we know we’re going to attract those publishers and get things moving. but I think there’s a misconception on, the flip side where brands may want to see publishers up and moving, but their response times are very slow, if we say, Hey, we need these three things to get this started.

[00:12:03] And it takes 30 days to get that done. That…

[00:12:06] JB: If at all.

[00:12:06] JF: …faith and find a competitor, or if at all,

[00:12:10] JB: Let me, tell you how that works. So we, we are building a very specific audience when, you get prospective clients and the clients you have now, I’m sure the clients I’ve managed in the past. For two decades, I’ve always said I want new audiences. I want new customers. I want exposure to people. I can’t get exposed to.

[00:12:31] Everyone wants that. That’s why influencers have been so big and or the idea of the influencer has been so big. So when I come to someone and I apply and I broke this down, one of the categories that advertisers and networks can do a better job is this innovation.

[00:12:51] So one thing affiliates have always been really good at is being at the tip of the spear. They’re always trying something new. This is new. No one has done what I’m doing. No one has lived in both of these worlds in a way and put this together. So we’re creating an audience that it exists right now, but digitally it is disparate.

[00:13:13] There’s no place where all these horse professionals can come together. Some people aren’t going to care about this. They’re not going to look at that audience, but for the people that audience is really important, you should want to work with a site like that. So what we’ve run into is we’ve had networks that either didn’t approve us because we had no traffic or gave us a very short timeline to generate consistent revenue. So think 90 days.

[00:13:46] We’ve run into advertisers that have said, “you don’t fit what we’re trying to do right now. You don’t have enough social following.” We haven’t even launched anything on social yet. We’re, just, we’re just putting all this package together. And so the way that I’ve always managed programs and what I’ve found successful is you have to get with those… when you, get with those publishers early, before they’ve built their audience, they’ll work with you forever.

[00:14:16] JF: And it’s a long game.

[00:14:18] JB: And it is a…

[00:14:19] JF: how many over 20 years, how many publishers now that are huge and well known. And if you’re in the affiliate space, you can start dropping names and say, yeah, of course I know that publisher or that affiliate. How many of those in the last 20 years, did you know when they were one man shops or one or two or three person teams that were just getting started and treated in the same manner?

[00:14:39] And now you’ve got to have five grand just to think about working with them as an advertiser because they garner that big of an audience.

[00:14:46] JB: I’d say 80 percent of them.

[00:14:49] JF: Yeah.

[00:14:50] JB: There’s a few, it’s a good friend of mine, the example I always give is he reached out and he was, like an affiliate manager at another affiliate branched out on his own, reached out to me, and said, “this is what I want to do.”

[00:15:01] I’m like, “this is great. I’m going to supply you with some things to keep the ball rolling and you just tell me what you need. It’s not, these resources aren’t costing me a lot, but I’m going to help you build this because I know when you’re, big, you’re going to remember that.” And this is it’s a relationship game.

[00:15:18] We remember the people who help us out. We also remember the people that declined our application. So we worked with him, he sold to an organization that also bought Fat Wallet, and, and then that organization was sold. We, I wasn’t the reason he was successful, but we were part of him at the early stage and every time all of our clients benefited from that too.

[00:15:44] And so what I would say to the networks is: for emerging platform, emerging affiliates, you’ve got to give them time. You’ve got to give them resources. You’ve got to have good contact info. And for those advertisers, if you want new audiences, invest. You have to invest. And I’m not saying you need money.

[00:16:04] But allow that new affiliate that you’re not sure about, that doesn’t have the social, really we’re declined because we had no TikTok followers. We don’t have a TikTok account and they said no, and it’s a perfect fit. They’re actually an advertiser that some of our users, two trainers, said, “Hey, if you get this advertiser in, that would be fantastic.”

[00:16:27] So we reached out to them. You, if you want new customers invest in and, allow have a playground or research and development playground, and you can treat it, those affiliates a little differently, but let them in and see what happens. There’s like you said, there’s so many of those affiliates that came up with something new that those advertisers that JB worked with over 20 years benefited for a very long time and that we were one of the first to work with them.

[00:16:56] So that’s what I’ve seen over and over again. Is this I want it now.

[00:17:03] JF: Yeah. Yeah. That was the thought on my mind is I think we’re in this world, and I think affiliates always been, we’ve always had to fight an uphill battle in, kind of an educational 101, because a lot of the times, even today, an advertiser will launch a program and they think I’ve got a great product.

[00:17:21] People are going to want this product and they might be right. and overnight we should be able to turn this on like a light switch and get moving, and they want fast results. And so I can see that line of thinking, being more of a demise when you’re trying to bring those partners on. But what I find interesting to your message to networks is I find… it’s hypocritical in a sense, right?

[00:17:44] Because let’s flip that around and you’re an emerging brand. You’re a two man shop, right? Two woman shop, whatever it might be. You’ve got a brand new product in market. You’re maybe you’re selling, $10,000 of goods every month online, right? You’re a drop in the hat when it comes to the brands that are on these networks.

[00:18:01] You’ll never be denied a chance to set up an advertiser profile, get into these networks and be discoverable by affiliates. And even if you just sit there for a long time and you’re trickling a few dollars here and order per, one order here, one order there. And I’ve seen this. So we’ve consulted with brands and you’re aware of this that are very small.

[00:18:21] I’ve consulted with brands personally that, we knew our services were not a fit yet because their size, it just would not have been a profitable relationship, but I’ve also worked with clients that we represent today that I’ve been consulting for three or four years now, and just giving them some tidbits of information, yes, get this program started.

[00:18:40] Here’s a network that’s not going to cost you unless you start producing and slowly just start chipping away at it. And as you grow organically as a brand, and you continue to work with some of these affiliates, you’ll notice traction picking up, but it’s going to take time, especially if you’re a young brand, you’re unknown and your revenue is still quite small.

[00:18:59] Some of those brands now are doing several million a year in e-com revenue over the last three year period, and now they’re primed to really have someone come in and optimize an affiliate channel, but they were given that time. They weren’t kicked out of the network. They weren’t told, “Hey, you’re not producing revenue as an advertiser, so get out of here.”

[00:19:18] So I find that interesting that on the publishing side, there, that it’s that much more difficult to get started and get moving.

[00:19:26] JB: Yeah, and it’s runway and, and it’s short sightedness on both parts. The networks aren’t too much of a problem with that, but there’s one that was an issue. But there’s a lot of advertisers and they’re like, you’re not big and I want to talk about it. we’re not big yet and we will be big in this space.

[00:19:46] We won’t be big compared to some other affiliates, but in this space we’ll be the first to aggregate this community. And, I’m not threatening anyone or anything, but it is like I’ll remember. I’m going to bring you in because at the end of the day, we have a product and that product is breadth and depth of product that all these different people are looking for.

[00:20:10] But it costs you nothing as an advertiser or a network. And I know there’s a lot of worry about fraud. There’s a lot of worry about coupon jacking and cart sniping and all of that stuff. But it’s very easy to see when you have a… you have an emerging affiliate that looks like it’s legitimate.

[00:20:29] And hey, if the orders don’t look good, then kick that affiliate out. But, you and I have seen this with clients we’ve worked on together in the past. And a lot of shortsightedness because we’re afraid of something that we’re, I don’t know what that is. So it must be something I should be afraid of.

[00:20:44] So let’s kick it out. And, and not allowing for enough time, because one, it takes a lot of time to log into the network, especially if you’ve not done it from that side before and figure out the technical aspect of integrating data feeds and sub IDs and all this technical stuff. There hasn’t really been one network where there are help files have been overwhelmingly helpful. It’s…

[00:21:10] JF: Or they’re skewed toward helping the advertiser, right? More so than the publisher.

[00:21:16] JB: Yep. And it’s we spend so many hours… like the one of the reasons why it hasn’t been live for longer than it has been is because we’ve had to spend so many hours sifting through, help files and poor support documents to find some pretty basic stuff. And that’s overall, that’s what I’m surprised about.

[00:21:38] There’s some foundational and basic things that affiliate marketing does on all sides of this ball. And it is not as clear as it has been. And then the other thing is just getting ahold of people. A lot of the networks want to shuttle you through a form on their website.

[00:21:57] Fortunately, since I’ve been doing this since 99, I have contacts. I can be like, “Hey, can you answer this question for me quick? I’ve waiting six weeks for an answer from your team.” And then on the, advertiser side, the advertisers, they’re always talking about new incremental sales.

[00:22:17] There’s opportunities I guarantee coming at you every week. And if they can’t get ahold of you, if they’re spending four hours on LinkedIn, and searching, and I’ve used ChatGPT to find contacts and even email taxonomy to try and find somebody. Eventually you’re right, you said this earlier, I’m just gonna move on to somebody else and find someone else.

[00:22:40] And you’ve now missed an opportunity you don’t even know about. There’s this huge opportunity cost with having no contact info and not an easy way for someone to reach out to you.

[00:22:51] JF: Yeah, accessibility is pretty key on… and that’s on both sides, and, you know this as good as anybody, when we’re looking at the unique or niche Affiliate partners for some of our brands, and some of our brands are in, different niche verticals, pet verticals, EDU verticals, and you find some niche partners that show some promise or that come to the brand and say, “Hey, I want to promote this.” They have no experience with an affiliate network.

[00:23:16] And it’s, mind boggling how little help they may get, and a lot of the times they just come back to us and say, “can you walk me through how to get set up as a publisher, how to pull my links, how to properly set this up on my site,” and we have to go through some of that with them and make sure they’ve got some kind of support there.

[00:23:34] And I, do know, I will say times of the past 12 months or so, I’ve seen a handful of networks that have done some different updates and they’re starting to update on that publisher side, but even more interesting is, I talked to the guys, Steven over at a Moonpull, they do some really cool work with tracking.

[00:23:53] So there’s obviously, there’s a whole nother conversation and this will be a whole nother podcast topic when it comes to tracking analytics and attribution of our channel, but it’s getting muddier and muddier. Like on, on one hand, you’ve got better technology today than we’ve ever had in the space to really understand the consumer’s journey, how these affiliates are interacting with consumers through that purchase funnel, from discovery all the way down to a conversion, but properly attributing it back to the affiliates in a fair manner is not always done very well.

[00:24:26] And it has to do with a lot of reasons, but again, the advertiser gets the carrot at the end of that stick and the publisher just gets the stick, “sorry, we didn’t track 30 percent of that properly, you didn’t…”

[00:24:38] JB: Or they don’t even tell the…

[00:24:40] JF: Or they don’t even know. And so there’s some different partners out there like Moonpull that are trying to fix that and run audits and help certify programs that confirm links are properly working.

[00:24:50] So that’s good to see. I just think there needs to…

[00:24:53] JB: Yeah, and…

[00:24:54] JF: Resources that are designed to truly help the publisher, because what you’ve explained before, I’ve heard you say this on a podcast, and I’ve said this directly to brands, the publishers want to be successful, and without them, we don’t have a channel for you to make additional revenue anyway.

[00:25:09] So if we’re not taking care of those publishers, why are you in this channel? Let’s just be honest. If we’re not willing to advocate for those affiliates and those partners, we shouldn’t be doing this.

[00:25:22] JB: And it is a partnership and the partnership isn’t, “I’m going to throw out some, I’m going to go join a network and ghost from there on out.” But one thing you mentioned, like, why is it that Moonpull has to put that together? How many times… you and I have had conversations with networks of I don’t think this is tracking, and they’re like, it shows it’s tracking.

[00:25:43] I’m going through that right now, where…

[00:25:45] JF: And they have the data. The networks have all the…

[00:25:47] JB: Have all the data. One network, I’m, I’ve been waiting for them to respond since February. Another network, and they’ve been great, they don’t fit into any of the issues that I outlined. They’re fantastic. And they are working through a tracking problem, but even when I managed programs now being the affiliate.

[00:26:12] It is amazing to me at how many networks and how often they’re like, everything on my end is tracking. And I’m like, I’ve got these 10 orders that were placed this way in these browsers, these time of day, this operating system with these links I grabbed from your network. They’re not tracking.

[00:26:31] And they’re like, “everything I show is tracking.” And I don’t know if that’s like a the individual that I’m dealing with, but it’s been like, I’d say 60 percent of the platforms. That’s the response that we get and it’s that’s frustrating from a publisher perspective, but because there’s a, and even at the agency, like I was always frustrated with that.

[00:26:53] I’m like, do you have a contractual contract with this advertiser. I’m showing you it’s not tracking. The, advertiser is saying, the network says I’m tracking. The network isn’t interested in it. And I have all these real world examples. And so like, Why would an outside, why should an outside person… the network has the incentive to make sure it’s tracking. the advertiser has the incentive, but we’ve worked with some advertisers in the past that was like, “I’m, it’s tracking pretty good. And that’s good enough for me.” But I’ve run into that on both sides of the ball is… really wish the networks could step up in that regard of okay, you’re right.

[00:27:34] You give me this stuff, let me go find that out, let me contact the merchant. Let’s all get. On the phone and figure that out.

[00:27:41] JF: I think that’s one thing that can be drawn from that specific topic to get on a phone call. A lot of people try to solve things via email and it’s, secondary in some manner. If you want to move the needle and get something done. Cause when you get on a zoom call, you meet someone in person, even just calling them on their cell phone, if you have that information, you get more done, you get it done quicker.

[00:28:02] And when you’re talking to somebody, it seems to hold a little more weight. Excuse me. But we’ve run into that as well. And I think it goes into, again, there are so many anomalies, right? So, Shopify clients that use Shopify, their checkout extensibility update that came out within the last couple of months broke certain levels of tracking, depending on how checkout was being utilized on Shopify.

[00:28:26] We saw that across the board with really any of our Shopify clients on any given network. So it was something that the network had to tackle, the client, the advertiser themselves had to go in and reupdate their apps. And so things like that happen and we’re aware of that, but then as you run down some of these errors, you’ve got changes in privacy laws, Google updates, cookie depreciate, depreciation. When you say that word enough, you start, just screwing it up.

[00:28:54] But, and that’s been extended and then now it’s changing into kind of a consumer choice, but now you have the rise of consent platforms. So there’s all these different technologies, rules, regulations, privacy policies that are at play on how this properly tracks.

[00:29:10] But the point I’m getting at is if you see these anomalies and they can’t be fixed, the one thing we tried to advocate for and, now I think you could probably speak to it more directly than even before, we don’t live in a world where it’s just black and white and affiliate where it’s here’s your CPA, here’s your commission rate, go after it and you’ll get paid for whatever we track.

[00:29:32] When we see those errors, if you can identify… now we’re dropping 20 percent of these conversions that should be accredited to this partner and we can prove it through other analytics to get that picture. How else can we hybridly work with them? Can we do some different flat spends with them to keep them producing and continue to keep growing with that affiliate partner? Can we pay them on a CPC?

[00:29:52] There’s a lot of different triggers you can pull today, and technologies out there to allow you to do that seamlessly through some of these networks as well. So do you find, I don’t know if, you’re going through testing right now, do you find that as a topic that’s front of mind?

[00:30:07] How can I work with these advertisers and give them more than one opportunity to make sure that you guys are obviously rewarded and then those partners are being paid through your sub network as they promote products for horse riders if you will.

[00:30:21] JB: Yeah.

[00:30:23] JF: Are you…

[00:30:23] JB: Now we haven’t run into that, but I anticipated as we build a gravity around in the industry around what we’re doing, and we’re totally open to it. And I think that’s a big mistake advertisers make is, we get these orders are ready or I don’t want to do this and they just get the affiliate out.

[00:30:46] That phone call could find another way to work together. And in the end, you’re really talking about what the cost is. So if, if the way that you measure things are new customer percentages or value of new customers based on the channel and the partner, then, evaluate that affiliate as its own channel and can you make it work?

[00:31:11] Is it, you mentioned we have so many tools to see what’s going on and everything’s very convoluted on how… it’s the user, how are they getting to purchase. Now there’s more channels than ever to do that. And at the end of the day, everyone’s making, every single person is making a gut decision on whether that person gets, or that affiliate gets credit for the sale.

[00:31:33] I don’t care what tools you’re using. I’ve seen so many of them at the end. It’s all what do we think the intent was? There’s nothing going to track my thought process of buying something, and I don’t think anyone would want to be up there anyway, how I bought that and what thing made me buy it.

[00:31:51] So at the end, you’re making that decision. Why not test out different alternatives? And yeah, we’ve seen, I’ve seen in the past, we haven’t encountered it now, but we’re totally open to that. At the end of the day we are… we are a sub network and it’s like a loyalty kind of thing, and it is really a new audience.

[00:32:13] So we’d be open to it, but we just have to make sure that our sub affiliate isn’t an affiliate. So we just have to be sure to explain it clearly so that they can understand, not that they’re idiots, but they don’t live in our world which is why they haven’t done this before.

[00:32:31] No horse trainer wants to go, “okay, I need to send this five inch shank correction bit over to, to my show client. So I’m going to log into. I can’t find it there. I’m going to log into LinkConnector. Oh, there’s nothing there. I’m going to log into Pepperjam. There’s nothing there. And, oh, there it is. Now I got to find the link and I, which part of that link do I text it? That’s not going to happen. So, it’s a little different.

[00:33:01] We just need to make sure that they get paid. But those alternative, if you’re an advertiser and you don’t know how to make it work, you outlined a few: CPC, flat fee, you can back out based on new customer percentages, all those things, but get on the phone and talk to the person.

[00:33:19] And they just say, “this is the problem I’m having.” A lot of times they’ll make a, what I’ve seen from clients, is they’ll make a moral judgment on that affiliate. They’re just trying to literally just trying to build an audience that they can monetize. It’s what we’re all trying to do. And, there are some that do nefarious things, but most of them are just trying to build their audience and then monetize that where it benefits the audience, benefits the advertiser, and they get a cut of that.

[00:33:49] Just get on the phone and talk to them. I take every single phone call. Even people, advertisers that aren’t in in our niche. Yeah, if you think that horse trainers will want to recommend your skincare product for men, sure, let’s talk about. I don’t think it’ll work, but I’m willing to hear it.

[00:34:13] JF: It may be, but, that makes sense. There’s a lot more I could go into, but just for the sake of time, a wrap up question: and you’ve been doing this long enough to probably have a decent answer. Do you feel that launching as an affiliate, a publisher, and anyone out there listening who is working on a side project, or you’ve been thinking for a while I want to test this out, I want to get in this space, regardless of what category you might fall into or how you’re going to do that or what niche or vertical you’re looking at, do you feel that it’s easier to break into affiliate marketing now or 10, 15, 20 years ago as an affiliate specifically, and is there more opportunity now to do so?.

[00:34:54] Yeah.

[00:34:56] JB: That’s a good question. I really subscribe to like the opportunity’s there all the time for you. I think in some ways it’s harder because there’s so many new unique tools available for you to use. But it’s easier to get started. I’m having a blast. So, I’ve always struggled with the technical aspect. I’m not a programmer, so that’s always been like, okay, how do we integrate all these things?

[00:35:31] And I’m never coming up with an idea that is so simple anyone could do it. So it’s always a bit complicated, but the tools available to do what we’re doing so easily, not just within the network, but we built something that I think 10 years ago would have taken six figures, a development company, and a lot longer than what we’ve been able to do.

[00:35:55] There is so many, so much automation that we’re able to just plug into. and even in outreach, ChatGPT does so much. I wrote an email, an outreach email the other day, I gave it like four prompts and it wrote a better email than I would. It was great, but Zapier and wordPress, and all these, all the things that you’re able to do or that you have access to.

[00:36:19] So yeah, now that I’m thinking about it, it’s probably a lot easier to build something way cooler, way more helpful, than it has been in the past where you literally, most of these things you were developing on your own, literally programming on your own. Now it’s okay, how do we get this website to integrate with this?

[00:36:41] My co founder is very technically astute. But he’s not a a developer by trade. And so he’s been able to do stuff that I think for us, and we’ve built a bunch of things in the past, and we… this is one that’s actually working and out there and doing great things because all these automation tools are out there to plug all this stuff together.

[00:37:06] So it’s probably allowed us to do it more cheaply, and to test like, “Hey, is this going to work? Let’s get a minimal viable product out there.” It’s taken a lot of his time for sure. He does an amazing job. But yeah, so I think it’s a lot easier now. There’s a lot more tools available then it was 10 years ago.

[00:37:26] I’ve tried it 10 years ago with now looking back kind of some lame stuff. I’ve tried to build affiliate sites and it’s not taken off. I would say, yeah, that probably mean it would be, it would be, yeah. Yeah, it is easier now.

[00:37:41] JF: I think there’s a ton of good takeaways here for both networks that might be listening, folks on the brand side, folks on the publisher side, a lot of good nuggets on, A, just giving people runway and being able to foster new relationships. And again, the one thing that has not changed in our industry, and you’ve made that clear through this conversation is the power of relationships.

[00:38:04] And it’s, I think when you’re up and running, it’s easy to maybe forget that. This is what this channel is really built off of. So when you’re looking for new audiences, incremental traffic from a brand perspective, when networks are looking at ways to obviously marry both publisher and brands and connect those two and be the middleman, you’ve got to be able to be A accessible, make yourself accessible.

[00:38:28] Make sure you’re giving both parties some runway to figure things out and foster relationships because you don’t know what the next big thing is going to be. And some other great nuggets along the way. It’s been great to see you again and have you kind of full circle from host of this podcast to one of the guests for season four.

[00:38:45] Yeah.

[00:38:46] JB: I’m the affiliate begging for someone to contact me back.

[00:38:50] JF: And I just noticed at the end that not only do you have the wine you’ve been making in the background, your shirt says Tillamook. So now wine and cheese, A, it’s…

[00:38:58] JB: Wine and cheese. Yeah, I didn’t notice…

[00:39:00] that

[00:39:01] JF: I think that’s going to be on the, docket tonight. So

[00:39:06] JB: I’ll send you some… we’ll get you some of the wine so you can have it with your cheese for sure. We just bottled 65 bottles of peach Chardonnay two nights ago, so that’ll be ready soon. Yeah, no, I appreciate it. It’s been great to be on the other side. It is an exciting time. what’s really cool is I’ve been doing this 25 years since 99, I wouldn’t have thought I would have found something new to do in the space.

[00:39:39] And…

[00:39:40] JF: you never get bored in this space.

[00:39:42] JB: You never get bored, and I remember like every new program we got, there were partners I’ve never met before up until the day I, I handed it over to you guys, there were always new partners. And then to see “Oh, there’s, a new space that can be created.” That no one’s done it before that blows my mind.

[00:40:00] And that’s the power of affiliate marketing, and you never know who’s gonna one day, they’re an email that you don’t want to answer. And then the next day, they’re one of your top producers with an… and bringing you new customers you would never have access to. That’s what’s really exciting about affiliate marketing.

[00:40:17] JF: Yeah, I totally agree. And I don’t, I don’t, wake up in any given day thinking it’s going to be just like yesterday. There’s always something new there. There’s no, it’s, never happened thus far for me either. But, I love that. That’s why I am sitting where I’m sitting. Great seeing you.

[00:40:35] I appreciate the insight and joining us. Thank you to the listeners for jumping on for another episode of our podcast. And until next time, next week, we’ll be covering another guest and another topic. So have a good one and stay tuned.