Honestly, it didn’t really chime in until the last recent years. I’ve always been a relationship guy, yes, in baseball, I know who is the all time home run leader for Leadoff batters. It’s 81 with Ricky Henderson. You nailed it. You know it too. We know baseball cards and we grew up in that, and that is my first love was baseball and learning that stuff, but statistics speaking, that doesn’t compute for me in an affiliate. That took a lot of time for me to develop that kind of skillset. But my original skillset is relationship building and busting chops, making friends like you in this industry and having fun with people, and eventually I had to turn that side of my brain on and get better at it because you can’t run an agency or a business without looking at statistics and what you’re doing or it’s a recipe for disaster. So yeah, that took some time for me to develop.
I do lots of these types of calls with especially e-commerce store owners, head of Shopify store owner on yesterday where he was pretty early in the process. Usually I chat with people after they’ve got a wrap installed or something and he just wanted me to look at his website and says, I got this up. I made one sale. What do I do now? And by the way, and everyone’s, especially these new store owners are all doing sort of that who’s who of online marketing, right? He’s like, I’ve got Google ads running. It’s really expensive. I’m like, I could picture that he’s got a kitchen product. I’m like, you’re probably competing with Bed Bath and Beyond, so that’s bad. Okay, continue. Okay, I’m doing ads with Meta, I am doing SS e o, but it’s not working yet. Right. So you hear all of these things. Where in your perspective does affiliate marketing fit, especially with, I mean this applies to experience brands also because we chat with them too where they’re trying to scale, they’re trying to get up the next level. Where does affiliate marketing fit in the year 2023 in terms of their overall portfolio of marketing tools?
Dustin:
Such a good question. Such a tough question too. Well, I bulgaria telegram screening would say I tell all people that I have phone calls with that affiliate marketing should not be done until you’ve optimized your site and all your other digital aspects. So do your paid and organic traffic and get a page that is converting before you think about affiliate programs. But what I don’t tell them is influencer marketing is a caveat here because influencer marketing, if you have a good product but you’re not exactly great at marketing it, influencers could be that turnkey for you to get that new solution for you to actually be able to convert. They can convert for you just by their word of mouth and being passionate and having a good product is that first step. So I would go into influencer marketing before I would go into affiliate marketing, in all honesty, and if you do have all those things in place, your site is converting. The biggest reason you don’t start an affiliate program before that is because you don’t want to fail your affiliates. You don’t want to start a relationship with affiliates and then they send a whole bunch of traffic your way and none of it converts. That’s a recipe to burn that bridge and you just don’t want to do that. So have your conversion rate maximized and converting at an appropriate click to your competitors before you start reaching out and bringing in those affiliates.