#374 – Using Affiliate Marketing as a Secret Weapon with David Katz

#374 - Using Affiliate Marketing as a Secret Weapon with David Katz Speaker 1: Happy holidays everybody and welcome to episode 374 of the AM PM podcast. I hope sales are going gangbusters for you. Don't forget you can see a few days of die off here over Christmas and then it's going to pick right back up again. I do a lot of business. End of the year and first of the year as people are redeeming gift cards and everything. And also, if you haven't yet, be sure to sign up to the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter. It's like a $25,000 mastermind for free in your inbox twice a week. BillionDollarSellers.com, totally free. It's not a newsletter like anything else you've seen before. So if you haven't signed up, be sure you've signed up. This week I've got David Katz on the program. We're going to be talking about a really cool way that you could launch your products now that since Search, Find, Buy is gone and a lot of other things are gone. This is a pretty cool, interesting technique that we discovered in our talk. I think you're going to enjoy this, so make sure you listen to the entire thing. It's some great content. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. David Katz. How are you doing, man? Speaker 2: Doing pretty good. Thanks for having me, Kevin. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd heard all these stories about you. Then I finally got to meet you a few months ago up in Seattle at the Amazon Accelerate show. That was awesome. Speaker 2: One of the better shows, that's for sure, Accelerates. I mean, it's put on by Amazon, so you would expect the grandfather of them all to put on a good one, and they sure didn't disappoint. Speaker 1: Now, you weren't sponsoring that event. You were just up there, right? Just attending? Speaker 2: Yeah, we didn't sponsor it. Just walking the floor and meeting some awesome people in the community. It's a pretty tight-knit community. So, you know, over the years, you kind of get to see a lot of the same people, develop some awesome relationships and, you know, and ultimately meet new people at these shows, which was really awesome. Speaker 1: Now do you get out to very many shows or are you pretty selective in what you go to? Speaker 2: I try. I try. As long as the travel is not too crazy and the timing is not too crazy. I mean, for some reason, I feel like all the shows are around the Q4 time within the same three-week span and it makes it a little hard. And then there's your dead times in the beginning of the year, but definitely try to make it out to as many of them as possible. I think they're really important. A lot of, you know, community relationship building, learning new ideas. I think some, you know, especially for us to meet our current clients and just really hear where their troubles are at, where their heads are at and how they're using our program and all of that is the most rewarding and probably the most important part of kind of what we do and what we're doing. Speaker 1: Yeah, I find these shows, the bigger shows, like I think Accelerate had, I think they said 20, something like 2,600 sellers there, which would make it probably the biggest concentration of sellers ever at any show. I know Prosper gets anywhere from 1,200 to 1,600 or so, it depends in there. But what I find at these bigger shows like that is it's not the content on stage that's actually good. That's how we met. We're sitting there at a table and someone said, Hey, Kevin, you got to meet David that you came up, you know, we met. That's the value, I think, for me, at least. Are you similar or how do you feel about that? Speaker 2: Absolutely. It's a great call. I didn't think of it before, but it's a great call. I was just at the Prosper Show in New York, actually. And there, there was like much more of an intimate setting, much more of like a workshop setting. And there it was awesome. Everybody was sharing their tips, their ideas, their kind of, you know, what their best practices are and all that, as opposed to what you're talking about by Accelerate. Great show, but probably better off for the networking. I personally, You're spot on. I personally didn't attend any of the lectures or presentations there. Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. So, what's your story? I mean, there's a lot of people that are like, who's this David Katz guy? Were you a seller or what? You're a young guy. You were like 20, early 20s, right? Speaker 2: 22, 22. That's right. Speaker 1: 22, you're just a baby, man. I've been selling on Amazon longer than you've been alive. Jesus Christ, I'm freaking old. Oh man, I might've sold your parents their freaking baby diapers or something or something they bought on Amazon for you. So, what's your story? How did you get involved in this stuff? Speaker 2: Sure, good question. So, I started on Amazon pretty early. I was looking for an interning job just to keep myself busy after high school, part-time job. My friend at the time was actually starting up his marketing agency. It was more of a general marketing agency, but it was a marketing agency. It brought me on board. I was managing, at the height of it, the marketing on Amazon for about 60 plus brands. From there kind of transition more into... Speaker 1: Wait, this is at age like 17 or 18? This has got to be... Speaker 2: Yeah, 18, 19. 18, 19 was when I was doing that. I was brought on by a brand in the beauty space from there, more of a consulting role. It was a hair products brand, helped them kind of, they were pretty established in the retail world and distribution and, you know, big box retailers and big box stores. A lot of their products were sold in, you know, hair salons and actual physical retail. They brought me on to focus more on the Amazon side of things, specifically on the marketing. So I have always I tried my hardest to stay out of the Amazon sphere of opening support tickets and inventory management and financials of Amazon and all that dirty stuff and really just stay focused on growth, what I call the fun stuff. So this hair products brand kind of brought me on to focus on that. They were very much in growth mode. What does that mean though? Speaker 1: What does that mean when you say the focus on that? Does that mean helping them develop ad campaigns? Is that helping them develop an image? Or what does that mean when you're consulting and you're doing the fun stuff, not the dirty work? Speaker 2: How to sell more. So all of the above, I would say. How to sell more, everything outside logistics. So they were pretty set up logistically. They had a designated person on team for inventory management, making sure that all the All the stock was there and consistently refilled and whatnot. And it was the dedicated person on the team really just specifically to open cases and make sure listings are up and not getting pulled down and whatnot. And they were at a point where it was they had the budget and they were ready to spend. It was how do we get our sales rank increased consistently month over month? How do we launch our new products properly and effectively? That was pretty much my focus and that included PPC. The listing work, making sure listings were converting, properly setting and scheduling deals and those types of campaigns, deal-to-date, top deal, all that, and eventually it kind of organically, almost, it's actually a pretty cool story, organically turned into this role where we had taken a chunk, at some points it was most of our Amazon marketing budget, and really focused on gathering traffic and customers and sales from off of Amazon. Speaker 1: What made you qualified to do that? You said you're a consultant. Were you learning on the fly? I mean, I know you're a sharp guy. Were you learning on the fly or is this something that you did, you know, you went to school for or you were playing around with or you just kind of got it and they didn't get it? You know, they're old guys and they don't understand the internet and you do. What was it that made you, that they said, hey, we want this guy making some big decisions on how we're going to boost this brand? Speaker 2: It's a good question. I guess I kind of got pretty lucky. I don't know. I don't know if I have a great enough answer for as great of a question that is. At the time, I mean, a lot of my salary, I guess, was pretty based on performance. So it was like really a percentage of growth. So I told them I can do certain things and they said, all right, put your money where your mouth is. And there was good opportunity and that just Based off of the commissions they were offering on their growth, they really valued growth more than just profitability at the time, for better or worse. I know it doesn't work for every seller and every brand. So, it was probably a lot of luck, met the right people and was willing to take risks, I guess. Speaker 1: So, were you learning on the fly or did you already have a little bit of experience in that first company when you were interning? Speaker 2: Oh, probably both. I think mostly learning on the fly. Absolutely. I mean, consistently Amazon is, even in the short period compared to someone like yourself that's been in the game, I mean, so much changes so quickly. What's relevant now is nothing to do with what's relevant six months ago and it's nothing to do with what's going to be relevant within six months. I shouldn't say nothing, but it's very different than what it was six months ago and what it will be in six months. And even for a master seller, as I've learned, or a very established seller, it's consistently testing new strategies, new stuff and seeing what works and taking risks and learning on the fly. I personally think that most, I should say, Amazon courses are not relevant for that reason. I mean, there's basics that you have to understand. You have to know what a PPC campaign is and all that sort of stuff. It's even for myself, it for sure was learning on the fly and I think for most established Amazon sellers that I speak to, it's consistently learning on the fly, testing stuff, seeing what works, sticking with it and trying new stuff. Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree with you. There's a lot of people that get complacent in their ways. And those are the people that typically get left behind. It's not so much all about the latest hacks. People love hacks, they love little tricks, but it's mastering those fundamentals and then adapting. And that's where a lot of people, they fail. And someone that can stay on top of that and help guide them is an important person in the cog. Speaker 2: Certainly. It is interesting. I just had this conversation actually today with my partner. It's a tough balance, I think in general, not just even related to Amazon. For us, we consider ourselves a startup and for us, it's very important. And I think in a lot of businesses, you always want to stay innovative and implement the new thing and test as much stuff as possible. At the same time, in a certain sense, stay grounded to what works and understand what works. Really push deep and maximize what does work. And it's I think everybody's kind of has to find that balance. Sticking with what works, making sure you have that established and making sure you're maximizing that and at the same time testing new stuff and taking as many risks as possible and, you know, identifying new strategies and staying on top of the game. I mean, especially on Amazon where a lot of the spaces are dominated by, specifically when it comes to PPCs, a lot of the spaces are just dominated by massive brands with endless budgets. I mean, how's a small seller going to go up against a massive CPG brand paying $17 a click on a $15 item? It's not practical and it's not possible. You have to adapt and find new strategies. So it's kind of the balance. And like I said before, it's for me personally, it's probably taking a decent amount of chances, sticking with what works, trusting my gut and getting kind of lucky. Speaker 1: And so a lot of people, I mean, one of the big things is people are like, how do I launch a product on Amazon? That's the number one thing you see on social media is how can I launch? And for a while there, you know, people, there's been a whole variety of tactics. And the most recent one that most people are using was the Search, Find, Buy, you know, issue rebates, find a group of people or a company, get them to buy your product, reimburse them in full for the product and pay a fee to the company for managing that. And Amazon kind of started frowning on that. So that's, it still happens some out there, but it's not nearly as prevalent as what it once was. And then the big thing came, oh, you got to go to influencers and all the social media and get people on TikTok to promote your product. And a lot of people have tried that, user-generated content, and it seems to be hit or miss for some people. Some people have mastered it, but the vast majority have tried it and it didn't work for them, probably because they weren't doing it right or they were targeting the wrong people. But then there's a whole other side of this that most people ignore. And that's what I think you're specializing in now. And there's a lot of sites out there that already have massive traffic, blog sites and news sites and review sites and stuff that have this massive traffic already coming in. So they're masters at SEO. Rather than you setting up your own blog and trying to figure out how can I get eyeballs on my blog that can then turn into eyeballs on my listing, These guys have already got that part mastered. So you partner with those people and then they become the top of your funnel that funnel you in and for a cut. And that's kind of what you migrated into, right? From managing all these big accounts for this brand and now you and some partners have started a company that's doing this, right? Speaker 2: Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, the way it kind of started is a pretty cool story. In this hair product brand, which I spoke about a second ago, was we one day had woken up and it was a decent-sized hair product brand selling hairsprays and we saw a huge spike on sales. It was 10x and it was only 9 a.m. Eastern Time. We're still three hours behind on the Western Time, which is when Amazon reports, and it was already 10x sales that day. After some brief research and some searching around, we recognized that there was an article that had been published on a bunch of, actually not a single beauty publication, but a few beauty publications stating that some celebrity had used our products in a video she did showing her beauty routine. And a bunch of these beauty publications kind of picked it up, said, hey, check out this celebrity. She was using this product. And that went all over. It was picking up a lot of steam, just generating a tremendous amount of sales on Amazon. The publishers had linked to the product on Amazon. And that's kind of where I recognize there's this huge opportunity with bringing off Amazon traffic. There's this massive amount of audience. That's all making their purchasing decisions, not necessarily yet on Amazon. They're making it with influencers, media publishers, like you kind of just touched on, and bloggers, all these different places. But as an Amazon seller, we never have a way of tapping into that. All our marketing was focused on pay-per-click. How do we target a consumer that's already on the Amazon app looking for a specific product, making sure my product ranks really high on those terms, making sure my listing converts, which is all super important, obviously, still is important, probably will always be important. There was never a way of capturing this massive portion of Amazon traffic and sales that were initiated from off of Amazon with that marketing budget. And that's where this idea and concept came from. Archer Affiliates, the company I created, is in what's called an affiliate marketing network, specifically designed for Amazon sellers. Similar to, I don't know if some of the listeners are familiar with like ShareASale or Impact or CJ, which is these two-sided networks based around a list of what's called affiliates, which can be anyone from influencers, media publishers, product comparison sites, bloggers, YouTubers, people that have audiences that look to them for purchasing recommendations and purchasing and their purchasing decisions. Specifically in this case, it's Amazon purchasing recommendations and Amazon purchasing decisions. And we connect those affiliates directly with our Amazon sellers. Currently, the space and the landscape is that these affiliates are earning a very small fraction commission from Amazon. It averages just under 4% actually. A standard influencer, they promote an Amazon product, they earn about a 3.5% to 4.5% payout directly from Amazon. What we've done all via Amazon Attribution Links in our portal is given affiliates the ability to actually earn that commission from the brand, out of the brand's pocket. What this does is it gives sellers the ability to further incentivize Affiliates to not only promote products, but make sure they're promoting their products, their brand's products, not competitors, not other products, kind of lets them get some skin in the game. Throw in the added value of the brand referral bonus that Amazon pays out on Amazon attribution and all of that. It's a huge value proposition, but essentially we're one of the first, if not the first, Centralized platform and program that gives sellers the ability to focus on converting traffic and generating Amazon product interest from off of Amazon, not just targeting, you know, again, a consumer who's coming onto the Amazon app, already searching for your product and ensuring that your product ranks and displays in front of a competitor, but actually targeting a customer at a whole different stage and a whole earlier stage, technically, in the Amazon purchasing journey. Speaker 1: So just to make sure that everybody listening understands, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it works something like this. If I've got, in your case, the hairspray, you know, you guys got naturally into this, but let's say you didn't get naturally into this and you want to go tap into this, you have this hairspray product. You connect with someone like yourself who's got a list of people who have beauty blogs or beauty sites or whatever. They partner with you and say, I'll agree to promote Kevin's hairspray product over to Amazon. Amazon's going to pay them three and a half to four and a half percent as a commission, but you're going to have them use your brand referral link that has that extra 10% that Amazon gives you back. And you're going to bump that commission up and say, hey, look, Mr. or Mrs. Beauty site, I'll give you, I'll give you that 10% or I'll give you 5% of it or whatever, whatever you want to do. And so now instead of them making 4.5% potentially, they're making potentially 14.5% and you could even juice that a little bit more if you really wanted to. And then as a result, You're not, you're basically lower. It's like your A cost on that is actually lower. And so even though you might be paying them out 15%, Amazon's in effect giving you 10% of that back. Uh, and so it's, it's a win win for both of you. Uh, and then you guys are in the middle coordinating that and you, you take a small fee or percentage or something for doing that. Is that, is that basically the way it works? Speaker 2: Spot on. Spot on. Absolutely. So the cool part about our feel, so just we'll throw in is that we're not charging any upfront fees. We're not charging any monthly fees. In fact, we don't even charge a fee on top of whatever the commission payout is. We take a cut of whatever commissions are already set by the brand or seller, which is really cool. It's, you know, essentially- Do you invoice me for that? Speaker 1: Because Amazon's paying the influencer or the person directly, their four and a half percent, then that 10% Did I pay that then to you? Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 1: And then you take your Scooby snack, as Steve Simonson would say, out of that and then you pass the rest on to the influencer? Speaker 2: Nailed it. Spot on. We bill twice a month. So we bill on the 1st and 14th of every month for the previous day range of reported sales. And then we take our snack, pass the rest back to the affiliate. And again, it's essentially the cool part and the most, I would say not the most, but one of the most exciting parts about our program is, I don't know, another fully performance-based marketing program. That exists today, especially in the Amazon space. It essentially takes no risk. There's no risk involved for a seller to sign up in terms of financial risk. Speaker 1: Yeah, there's some other companies out there, but they have that recurring revenue that you have to pay a membership fee per month and then you pay on top of it. But you guys at Archer Affiliates are not doing that. It's just a straight up piece of the action. If it doesn't work, you don't get paid. Exactly. Speaker 2: Exactly. And back to you. Speaker 1: So how are you finding these? How are you guys building your, how many people, number one, how many people are in your network that are affiliates? Are you partnered with a CJ commission junction? Are you partnering with a share sale or are you going out and you've got a team that's beating the pavement looking for these people or are they coming to you? How are you, if I'm my hair hairspray brand, When I come to you with my hairspray, do you tell me I've got 36 people that can potentially do this? Let me reach out to them. Do I reach out to them personally? Like one of the other tools you can do that? Or do I come to someone and say, hey, I know this guy. You just manage it for me. I don't want to screw with him. I don't want to deal with him. How does that process work? Speaker 2: In a certain sense, all of the above. So we have a network of just over 500 affiliates today. I think at the time this podcast is launched, it's probably going to be way higher. But currently, at the date of recording, it's about 500 affiliates and rapidly increasing month over month. We are also going to be connecting with Very soon, we're going to be connecting with some larger networks, such as the ones you mentioned, which is going to give us the opportunity to tap into their existing networks and just be able to promote the network of Amazon products that we have in a really substantial way. And we do have our brands that kind of come with their own lists of affiliates and say, hey, we're already working with these. A hundred influencers, we're sitting here manually creating attribution tags for them every month so they can post about the products. We are sending them reporting manually. It's a really weak process. There's no transparency. It's very inefficient and they kind of just bring in their network of influencers. For the most part, people are utilizing us for our network. So, you know, they'll add their products, add a commission offer, and our network of affiliates has the ability to browse through all the products that are in our program and decide which ones they want to work with, decide which ones will be a good fit for their audience, and instantly create an attribution link to start promoting them. And then additionally, like I mentioned, there are some brands, mostly on this more established side, who already have some sort of influencer program, some sort of affiliate program, and they're bringing in their own affiliates, so I would say either or. Speaker 1: So how many of these 500 or so that you have right now, I know that's growing, are actually like blog sites, or are these TikTok influencers, or Instagram people, or Pinterest, or what's the breakdown? Speaker 2: Good question. We break it down into three top-level areas and then from there, we break it down more. So number one is we break it down to three top-level areas are influencers, media publishers and deal sites. Influencers could be anyone from TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, mostly content-based. TikTok specifically, actually, we've found a lot of problems with the linking. It's a severe technical issue that happens with TikTok where if a user clicks on a link in the TikTok app, it actually opens up that link. In the TikTok app. So it doesn't let's just say it's an Amazon link. It won't direct that consumer or that user back to the Amazon app or even Amazon.com. It will open Amazon.com in the TikTok app. And the problem with that is that most consumers and users are not signed into their Amazon from that app. We've seen very, very that's one of the reasons that we've seen very, very bad tracking when it comes to TikTok specifically. So we haven't really focused much on TikTok simply for that reason, even with deep linking and different technology that we've tested, it's been not great tracking. Where we focused a lot on the influencer space specifically is YouTube. We've seen a lot of success there as well as Twitter and Facebook, a lot of Facebook groups where they promote Amazon products that fit their audience, whether it's deals, beauty, kids, a lot of like baby products and baby groups that post, you know, trending Amazon baby products. So we've leaned into those three, I think, on the influencer side. Deal sites have actually been our biggest niche of affiliates just in terms of revenue growth. So it obviously doesn't apply to a lot of brands that are in our network or a certain portion of brands that are in our network. They just simply don't have the capacity or are not willing to provide coupons, deals and discounts, promotions, whether that's for a branding reason, they don't want to kind of sacrifice their brand image if they're a luxury item or it's simply just a profitability issues. It's not relevant for every brand, but where we've seen the most traction for sure in terms of revenue and revenue generated in units sold has been in that deal site space. They convert really well. The traffic that they send to Amazon a lot of times converts better than PPC traffic. It's high intent buyers, people that go to these websites such as Slick Deals, Hip2Save, Deal News, these types of Deal blogs are very high intent. If they click on a deal, it's because it's a good deal and they're probably going to post it. Again, not for every brand, just really where we've seen a lot of traction in terms of affiliate sign up and in terms of generating sales. And then the final piece is probably at this point are Smallest of the three, honestly. We just are building out some specific tech to really tap into that niche, which is the media publishers. So more bloggers, mass media, which is probably the most exciting of the three. When we do, you know, kind of jump into that space and really start to tackle that, it's going to have a huge impact in just the sales velocity that we're able to generate for our sellers. But we do still have a few Larger publishers signed up and some minor ones and bloggers and SEO focused publishers, so they'll target different types of Google searches related to Amazon products and push out SEO based content to promote those Amazon products. Even within these three spaces, like I mentioned, there's kind of A lot of different niche and specific affiliates and different ways that they push their products. But that's kind of the general, keeping it somewhat top level, a general breakdown of the different types of affiliates that we work with and that we have. Speaker 1: What about these deal sites though? Why do I need you to apply to a deal site? I can just go to Slick Deals myself and they've got some criteria there where you, I don't know, I haven't used them in a little while, but used to be you had to have so many such and such user feedbacks on Amazon before they'd feature you or so many reviews or There were some criteria before they would feature their product. Number one, do they still have that? And number two is, do you have special relationships with them that lets you get more deals in there than what I could maybe do on my own where they might turn me down or what's the advantage there? Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't want to name specific deals just for privacy reasons, but keeping it general, I would say, is absolutely each one's got their own unique set of requirements that either it's on the seller feedback or the product feedback or what types of products or a lot of them won't post every single deal that has to be a deal of a certain magnitude. strength that will attract our audience to actually purchase. We definitely do have very unique relationships with these deal sites where a lot of them are willing to post on a commission basis which they won't do for a standard seller that reaches out. And I would say we have just a large network of them instead of, you know, the advantage to a seller would be that instead of having to reach out to, you know, the top, to reach out to every single one of the hundred ones, hundred plus or a few hundred plus ones that we have in our network is that we, you know, with a few clicks of a button, you could have your product up and live and gain exposure to that massive world of deal sites. Speaker 1: So one of the big issues that a lot of people have on tracking right now is deep links. When you're promoting on TikTok, like what you said, it wasn't working too good. And where it opens up, you want it to open up in the Actually app, the Amazon buyer app. versus going to a website. And when that doesn't happen, a lot of times that brand referral tracking gets lost and doesn't get referred back. And that's been a big issue. One way to avoid that is just don't use TikTok or something like that. But what were you all doing? Do you have a deep linking system in place for everything that's sent over so that if someone is looking at Instagram or Pinterest or something on their mobile and they click, It actually will open up in the app on the phone. Do you have that involved in your linking system? Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. It's really, we have a few different, I don't want to get too into the technical side because it is pretty complex, but it's kind of up to the affiliate. A lot of these affiliates are the ones that are pretty aware of this because in order for them to earn revenue and earnings, they actually need to make sure these sales not only happen, but that they're trackable or else they don't get credit for it. So we have a few integration set up with different tools specifically that the affiliates use as well as our own set up that they kind of use. And it's, we kind of leave the options up to them as to which type of deep linking, different ones have different pros and different cons and which type of link and what style of link they want to use in their content. And we, We adapt to fit their needs. They're the ones promoting the product. We need to make sure that they're, you know, happy and that their content is working and their links are working. And that's kind of who we leave that decision up to, if that makes sense. Speaker 1: Cool. What about stacking of these links? Can you actually, there's some debate whether, can you stack an affiliate link with a brand referral link in the same link or is that some sort of technical wizardry that you have to do so that you get both of those applied? Speaker 2: Really good question. This has been the talk back and forth probably since we've launched our program here. Our approach, and this kind of differentiates between different programs and different people that work with Amazon affiliates, our approach is we've never pushed affiliates to do that. We don't think it's really sustainable from an Amazon perspective and it kind of doesn't make sense. Technically speaking, it is allowed and it does seem to work, but it's not something we've pushed our affiliates to do simply because it just doesn't make sense. We've told them we have this really strong and exciting opportunity for you to earn Massive commission payout directly from the seller and from the brand and that's really what we've promoted to them and that's what we've pushed them to work with. Speaker 1: So they're not using the affiliate link then, they're just using the brand referral link? Speaker 2: The attribution link, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, the attribution link. So they're just using the attribution link, not the brand referral link. So in my example earlier where I said Amazon's paying them out a little bit, Amazon's not paying them anything. All the payments are going basically through you guys, right? Speaker 2: It would depend on the affiliate. I'm not going to say every affiliate is set up like that. For the most part though, yeah, the most part, most of the affiliates we're working with, we try to avoid double tagging is what we call it internally. And 95% of our affiliates that we're working with are solely using attribution links. I will say that in our testing and our extensive testing that we've seen, there's been weird discrepancies between attribution and associates when using both tags. And we do suspect that it kind of interferes. It's not always like that. And sometimes it really depending on the product category, depending on what the purchase path is and different things like that. But the reporting definitely has been a little shoddy when you do use both tags. So we've really pushed affiliates to stick with our attribution tag as much as possible. Speaker 1: So if I'm at a brand with my hairspray, and I'm like, I'm willing to take a tacos of 20%. I'm running PPC on Amazon, like you said earlier, spending $15 to generate a $17 sale. That's just crazy. Tacos, that's like 90 something percent tacos. But I'm like, I really want to be at this 20%. So if I'm at 20% tacos, what I'm willing to accept, And I'm using the brand referral link and I can get 10% of that back. That means I can really go up to 30% as a commission to one of these affiliates and still be at my target. Is that correct? Speaker 2: Yeah. And it gets even crazier a lot of times when we're working with sellers who are focusing on newly launched product or also really inventory reduction campaigns. Newly launched products, like you mentioned before, in the past, a lot of sellers were Giving, technically speaking, a 100% plus commission in terms of a rebate program. So they were, you know, having consumers purchase the product and then selling them a full rebate for the product just to kind of, you know, build that initial sales momentum and increase that sales rank. And we're seeing a lot of that carry over into our commission based campaign or affiliate. Unknown Speaker: Very smart. Speaker 1: So they're, they're, they're getting using instead of the Search, Find, Buy, they're using legitimate channels and just juicing these affiliates with some pretty sweet deals. Speaker 2: We have products in there newly launched at 70-80% commissions. Exactly. It's honestly cost-wise a bit more effective than a. Speaker 1: I will say, Kevin, as a caveat to this is the one disadvantage when using this as a rebate campaign is the product needs to be legitimate. Speaker 2: The advantage that you have with a full rebate campaign is that you control everything. Everybody's going to purchase a free product. I don't care how crappy that product is. You send them a full rebate, they'll purchase it. With something like this, you do still need to make sure that the product is legitimate enough and good enough to where a publisher is putting their reputation on the line. They don't want to be promoting garbage products. But if a product is legitimate, If it does have, I would say at some level of reviews, at least 10, 15, 20 reviews most of the time, even honestly, we've seen products with even less than that being published. But it is a huge way where sellers and a huge opportunity, I would say, where sellers are, we're starting to see them pop up and, you know, promote these newly launched products at a crazy commission. Speaker 1: And so do they do that? So if I, if I wanted to launch my new product and it's a good product, it's not some piece of crap. It's my, some really good product that I, I know is great. Got some good reviews on it already. I go out and I can probably even do this without reviews because if the affiliates pushing and he's vouching for it, that's basically he's vouching as the review person. So it's a great way to launch without very many reviews. He goes out, he pushes it to his audience who already trust him or her and they go and they buy it. Then by default, some of them are going to leave reviews and hopefully you got a decent product and that doesn't come back and bite you. But if I give him, let's say 80% commission, he's like super motivated. Like, heck yeah, if it's a $30 item, He's like, he's like super motivated to get that out there and post it a few times and not just once and, and really motivated to talk about how cool it is. I get my launch and I get my ranking going, then what do you do? You have deals with these affiliates where then you come back and you say, all right, now that it's launched, I'm only going to pay you this 80% for the first 30 days. But after that, it's going to go to, I don't know, 25% or something like that. More of a maintenance level and a sustained level. Or does it stay at that 80% the whole time until you shut this guy's link down? Because this could get carried away. You could get wiped out on something like this. How do you put in those safeguards? Speaker 2: The safeguard is that the seller, technically speaking, can change their commission at any time and that includes for live links. There is important to note in this case, it's a good thing you're pointing it out, is there is a 30-day delay for live links. So the way that works is technically in our marketplace for a link that's not yet created, a seller can come in, they have an 80% commission. Set up, they can come and change it down to 20, 30% more sustainable rate once they have reached whatever level of sales velocity they're trying to reach on a newly launched product. If there is an active link with that 80% commission, it is important to note that that commission will stay active at that rate for 30 days from the date that that commission was changed. So it is important to keep that in mind when launching. These campaigns, especially if it's at such a high volume, and there's really no guarantee that an affiliate will or will be interested or not be interested or how and where and when they will promote that. Once you do change that or even before you change that, it's really important to note and this plays a lot of relevance when it comes to sending product samples. A lot of these publishers, affiliates, like you mentioned before, deal sites certainly, they are very used to being paid a decent chunk of change for an upfront placement. And in which case then a brand has, you know, is guaranteed a certain amount of content or guaranteed a certain amount of reach, a certain amount of impressions, whatever it is. And they have, you know, they know when the content is going to be posted, all of that. When it comes to our affiliate program, nothing is guaranteed. We're not paying upfront for the content. We're essentially purchasing sales. But what that means, and we really stress this to brands a lot of times, like I said, when it comes to product sampling, just because you send an influence or a product sample, just because Influencer creates a link. It's no guarantee as to when they'll post, where they'll post, how they'll post, which platform they'll post on. It could be just a quick feature in their Instagram story. It could be a whole independent YouTube video just dedicated to your product. It's really out of your hands. It's important to understand that you're kind of paying them for the sale. You're purchasing sales here, which is unique and exciting, but at the same time, it doesn't guarantee anything. It doesn't guarantee any input or work from the affiliate. Speaker 1: So if I'm launching next week my product and I go through you guys and I line up, let's say five affiliates that all agreed to push it for 80% commission or something. As soon as I go live and my honeymoon period has started on my product, there's no guarantee that, unlike a Search, Find, Buy or something else, that that day they're going to actually start pushing it. They might do it that day. I can correspond with them and beg with them and get on my knees and say, please, please, please, but there's no guarantee. And it may be a week later, two weeks later, so you may be sitting there twiddling your thumbs until something happens. And then there's no guarantee once they do it, if their audience is even going to like it or not. So you might get two sales, you might get 500 sales. Speaker 2: Exactly. That's the disadvantage, I would say, of not paying up front for a placement. So it does kind of protect you from a certain element of financial risk, which I keep talking about. But on the flip side, if you are Really trying to go deep and aggressive. I would say an affiliate program is probably a supplement to a standard external traffic and off Amazon marketing campaigns. Speaker 1: I would just do a contest. I would just get those five affiliates or 10 or however many from you guys and I would tell them all, look, I'm having a contest in this two week period. Whoever sends the most traffic, I'm going to double it. I'm going to give you 160% or whatever. Has anybody ever done that? Speaker 2: We are not yet. We are implementing, we're testing it on our end, just out of our own pocket. And we're going to be rolling this out for brands, the ability to include bonuses. So exactly kind of like you're saying, where if they hit certain thresholds or Certain units sold or some level of a tier to the next tier within a brand, they do get a certain cash bonus, which has been really exciting. A lot of affiliates have been super motivated to give that product an initial push after a first post, give it a second post just to hit that tier and it gives a nice kind of boost. We haven't done anything like you're saying yet though. That's a cool little thing where we got like some sort of competition going and create some competitiveness. That sounds awesome. Speaker 1: And then it gets you into a window of actually a launch or a promotion or something because they all got to push it within a certain amount of time. That could work. So what about on the, I know a lot, you said, you know, there's no upfront, but I know several influencers. I know one influencer in our space that she makes about $70,000 a month just as an influencer. She doesn't do very many commission based things anymore because what she found is that was totally hit or miss. So now it's more of she wants an upfront fee. So she's like, you pay me, I'll promote it. If you want to give me a little bonus on the backside of commission, that's great, but I'm not going to base my work on getting commission because you might have a crappy product or you might not convert well, or you might, whatever the reason is, how are you overcoming that when everything is no upfront payments, commission based? Speaker 2: Great question. Speaker 1: Are your affiliates being very selective? Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's exactly it. Speaker 1: When I come with my hairspray, they're like, nah, I don't think so. Speaker 2: That's exactly it. We give them, since they're the ones in control here, so most of the time they really have a good feel for their audience. They really know what's going to work and they can be pretty certain about that. If it's a deal site, they'll tell you, I can send them a product, they'll say, this is not going to work. Or I can send them a product and they'll say, we need a 40% discount, a 20% is not going to work. Publishers and affiliates really know their audience well, that's their business. And if you kind of, what we've seen is, you give them all the data, you give them the tools and the opportunities, they'll make it work. And, you know, we've, part of our value to them is just our rapidly expanding and massive catalog of almost 30,000 plus Amazon products now. And it's going to be increasing tremendously over the coming months. And, you know, since just, I would say the value to them is our massive catalog of products that they're able to choose from. So it's not a singular brand reaching out to them and saying, Hey, we'll give you 20% commission and here's our product. They have an opportunity to, almost everyone can find something with our catalog that will probably work for their audience. Speaker 1: So there's probably quite a few. I mean, there's sites out there like Harrow, help a reporter out and some others where I know every, you know, like we're, we're right now towards the end of Q4, but back in, in October and September and August, there's a lot of influencers or blog people, influencers going, Hey, I need to make a holiday list of the five best gifts for beauty, stocking stuffers for beauty or whatever, and put that out there. What should I promote? Instead of them actually choosing what might actually be the five best, they go and they look to a service like you or Hero or something else, and they go, who can I make the most money from? And so they're looking through your 30,000 products going, okay, this makeup brush, this hairspray, this curler, this eyelash thing, because this guy's giving me 100% commission, this one's giving me 50, and that's what becomes the five best of the 2023 season. Kind of works like that, doesn't it? Speaker 2: To a certain extent. I wouldn't throw their entire credibility out the window. Honestly speaking, especially as you move up the ladder, there are some publishers that really take their credibility seriously and it really doesn't play as much as you think. It obviously plays some sort of a role and it really depends on the publisher. I would say where it matters most and what I've seen is if a brand is going to be willing to put a decent amount of budget behind it, an affiliate is going to be willing to put a lot more work and potentially their own budget behind it in terms of promoting that specific article, pushing that specific article with specific placements on their pages that they give that specific article. Let's just say it plays some level of a role in what specific products they choose, but once they have those products locked in, whether they're If they have an article where they're earning X amount, $100,000 of revenue from because of these high commissions as opposed to an article where they're earning $10,000 of revenue from, you best believe they're going to push that $100,000 article because it has those higher commissions and whatnot. So I would say that's kind of probably more where it plays a role. The choosing of the products, it does play a role. I'm not going to say it doesn't at all, but it's honestly, especially with the bigger publishers, not as much as I personally would have thought. Meaning you can have, you can have, if you have a crap product, you can give them a 200% commission. They're just, they're not going to put it in. Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What, what, what are some of the products that work best that you see? Are there certain categories that, man, we, we try to get this. It just doesn't really work in this model. And there's other categories that just crush it. Are you seeing, what are the good ones and the bad ones? Speaker 2: Bad ones, the supplements is really hard. Just a lot of, Specifically on different social platforms, there's a lot of gray area as to what you can post and claims and all of that. And we do have a lot of supplements in our network. So it tends to be really hard. The good areas, innovative products, tech products, stuff that just looks exciting. We have a robotic pool cleaning vacuum. Stuff that have a high price point is also a really good spot. A $400, $500 product, if a seller is offering a 15%, 20% commission on that, it's a lot more incentivizing than a $10, $15 product with a 20% commission. And then universal products, kitchen knives, kitchen products, stuff that everybody needs, no matter age, gender. Where you live, everybody needs a good kitchen knife. And the final spot would be products where sellers are able to go deep on promotions, whether that's because of an inventory reduction or new product launch or just the brand has evergreen good promotions on subscribing, safe stuff. Like I said, a nice chunk of our affiliate network is deal sites, and that's specifically what they're looking for and what we help them find. So if a product is able to offer a 30% subscribe and save coupon, affiliates will run to that a lot of times. Speaker 1: So there's basically three areas where the seller should be considering using something like Archer Affiliates. It's a new launch to get the ball rolling, something to clear out some inventory that just ain't moving. And then third is something just to supplement and maintain rank, something that can just get you that little supplement to keep you boosted up a little bit in rank. Are those pretty much the three different? So the launch might be heavy, heavy discounts, like, I mean, not heavy discounts, sorry, heavy commissions. So like 80, 100% commissions, it's get that, get that fire started. The clearance might be just at a commission base. That's just to get rid of the stuff and hopefully break even. So you might not be doing an 80%, maybe you are because you just want the stuff gone, Most people would probably be doing that more a break-even type of level or slightly below break-even if they're paying storage fees or something on it. And then a maintenance one would be more like, I want just a reasonable tacos, a reasonable ROAS or whatever. Are those the three basic areas that you're seeing that the biggest use cases are? Speaker 2: Yep, nailed it. Absolutely nailed it. The cool part about a program is you can set the commission on a product level. So you're absolutely spot on. Sellers will set their newly launched product ridiculously high, set their inventory reduction campaigns. It really depends on the circumstances. Sometimes they're like avoiding Q4 storage fees, in which case It's a little bit different than if it's a discontinued dead product that they're just trying to move out and essentially throw out. So that specific strategy kind of differs, but that would be the second one. And then the third one would be kind of just maintenance. So yeah, essentially if you're running your catalog at a 20-30% ACOS in unbranded terms, definitely set a 20-30% commission. It's supplemental sales at the same profit margins that you're currently running your PPC campaigns at. Speaker 1: I know you can't say names, but can you give me an example of someone that's just crushed it. They did a million dollars in sales or something from your affiliate network. And then on the flip side of that, can you give me an affiliate? So there might be people listening to this that aren't sellers, but they're affiliates. And like, yeah, we have this one dude that he made like half a million bucks last month. You know, he's pushing stuff. Can you give me a couple like just crazy real life examples of people that have just knocked it out of the park? Speaker 2: Yes, on the affiliate side like I said it's been deal sites for when this wasn't the the the kind of I think deal sites have succeeded not specifically because it's just a commission opportunity. One area where deal sites have lacked is on the communication side. They've never been able to communicate with a brand to simply ask them to create a promo code for them, which is a little ridiculous. If they wanted to promote a product, they had to find either the promo code online or somebody from the brand had to directly reach out to them. With our program, we kind of give that layer of communication. So they're essentially able to browse through all the products in our network, identify a product that looks cool to them and then request a promo code from that seller, which has been really cool. Speaker 1: Oh, that's brilliant. So they know their data that we did something like this in the past. Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 1: This one looks pretty cool. So we know we can do a good, Hey, Mr. Seller, if you'll give me an extra, you'll give me 50% instead of 40%. I'll run this for you. That kind of thing. Speaker 2: Exactly. So simply because of that feature outside of just the commission thing, deal sites have loved us. That's kind of been taken off. So I would say as a general thing, that space has really popped off for us. Speaker 1: What kind of numbers though on that, like someone done a million dollars in sales or half a million dollars in sales or what's a number that has blasted through that? Speaker 2: Our top one is probably doing half a million monthly, touching on that. Speaker 1: Okay, cool. Speaker 2: We're in that range. It is pretty inconsistent, honestly. Months where there's a prime day involved. A prime day, within two days, they'll hit a general two months trailing revenue on a deal site. Q4, Black Friday, they have these events that their revenue growth is insane because Black Friday, everybody's looking for a deal site. Their traffic is 20, 50x. Insane. So it is somewhat inconsistent considering those types of events. But yeah, I will say that that's probably our bread and butter. On the brand side, I would say this probably doesn't apply so much to your audience here who's listening to this podcast, but one area where we've killed it, again, I can't really name specific brands, but one area where we've killed it is a lot of larger, higher priced items in like specifically the furniture space for some reason. It seems to be an area where a lot of consumers are making Like quick impulse purchasing decisions, which is very important for affiliates. Some level of, you know, a lot of research, like a supplement probably falls into this category. It's a very competitive space. They're looking at different supplements. They're looking at the nutritional facts before they make that decision. And just because they see something on TikTok, they're probably not going to necessarily purchase it. As opposed to, you know, you see a cool couch that's retailing at a good promo code or a good pool cleaner vacuum with a good promo code and a good deal. And you know, you need that, you know, it's a little, it seems to me to be a little bit more of a quick impulse decision. What we've kind of seen is those tech, higher price point with a promo code, outdoor, maybe that's just because the summer just kind of passed, but outdoor, home furniture products have really done well, as well as beauty and personal care. Beauty seems to be a good space where these publishers play a pretty important role. A lot of people do make impulse decisions in that area. So I would say those two off the top of my head. Speaker 1: This is cool stuff, David. So if people want to reach out or find more or see what you guys can do for them, how would they, how would they go about doing that? Speaker 2: Everything's on our website. It takes a few minutes to sign up, add your products. We pull in all your agents from your brand store and you're just able to set commissions on those. Sign-up link is directly on our website if you want to schedule a call with myself or somebody from our team. It's calendar link is on the website. Pretty straightforward sign-up process. Everything is pretty much there and we love consistently communicating with all our sellers and new sellers and existing sellers and all that. Speaker 1: And that's Archer, like A-R-C-H-E-R affiliates with an S dot com, right? Speaker 2: Nailed it. Archer affiliates dot com. You can find myself on there and David Katz as well. Speaker 1: K-A-T-Z, David Katz on LinkedIn. Speaker 2: There we go, man. Speaker 1: Hey, I always remember that name because we used to, I live here in Austin, we used to have a place called Katz's Deli, never closes. There's a 24-hour deli that was right in the heart of downtown. About, I don't know, 10 years ago or so, it just suddenly closed. But it was like a go-to place at like 3 o'clock in the morning after hitting the bars or something that everybody would go and get a nice pastrami sandwich or something. So that name Katz always is in the back of my mind. Speaker 2: I'll take it. My name's synonymous with pastrami sandwiches. Sounds pretty spot on. Speaker 1: There you go, man. Hey, well, I appreciate you coming on and spending some time with us today, man. It's been great. Looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming event somewhere. Speaker 2: Likewise, Kevin. It's been an absolute pleasure and thank you so much for having me. Speaker 1: Some great information there from David. You know, there's several companies that do similar things, but he's got a kind of unique take on it. So if you haven't, go over to archeraffiliates.com and especially what we got talking about there towards the end about how you can use this to potentially launch products. Now, you don't have total control, so that's one downside, but it sounds like there's some ways you can do that. And after we got off, he actually even said, you know, my little idea there of having a contest within a short period of time actually might work. So who knows they might build that into their tool, but it's great stuff. Be sure you've signed up for the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter, BillionDollarSellers.com and coming up in February I have a virtual summit as well where we're gonna have some amazing amazing speakers delivering next-level stuff so you don't want to miss that. It's gonna be the virtual Billion Dollar Seller Summit at BillionDollarSellerSummit.com you can get all the information and it's coming up in February. Before I leave you today, I hope you have a happy holidays and everything is going great. Have a very safe celebration and remember these words of wisdom, especially when it applies to what David talked about today. People connect with people, not products. People connect with people, not products. See you again next week. Have a great one. Unknown Speaker: Thank you for watching.