The Nerd's Guide to Native Advertising with Shaun Hall

Dustin Howes: 0:27

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your narrator, Dustin Howe, spreading that good word about affiliate marketing. You're going to find me every Tuesday and Thursday right here on LinkedIn live at 1215 Pacific Time. So put it on the calendar, smash that subscribe button if you're on that YouTube channel and be here for some live interaction with me and my guests and my guest Shaun Hall, coming from Rev Content. And welcome to the Nerditorium, Sean.

Shaun Hall: 1:02

I am super excited to be in the Nerditorium. I've been a fan for a while. This is a bucket list moment for me, so I feel like my name is now listed among the legends that have been on this show. So I am excited to be here.

Dustin Howes: 1:16

Well, awesome, that is quite the honor. Really appreciate you bearding up today and joining my facial hair prowess as we celebrate November and the end of this month here, and it is an honor to have you on as a guest. You're working on that legendary status yourself, so welcome to the table and excited to have you, man.

Shaun Hall: 1:42

Yeah, you know I'm excited to get into a bunch of stuff that I have no clue what to expect Other than we're going to talk about a lot of fun things. We're going to get into some great topics and, as always, we're going to do nothing but provide value.

Dustin Howes: 1:56

Awesome, love it, love your attitude. Let's get rolling. The folks that are here with us live. You can drop your questions for myself and Sean to answer in the chats. Big question of the day why do they call it native advertising? We want to see some answers. Let's see who's the winner here with the best answer of why do they call it native advertising. We're looking for the first answer and while we wait for an answer out there, sean, who are you?

Shaun Hall: 2:30

Well, my name is Sean Hall. I am the director of advertising demand partnerships here at Revcontent. I am a probably 11 year veteran of the affiliate marketing space. I've literally done it all in this industry. I've been an affiliate manager, I've done business development, I've done media buying and been an affiliate. I've helped get products off the ground. I've done some consulting. I am well versed in all things affiliate marketing. I even got my AFI award right there in the background.

Shaun Hall: 3:02

So I have hit the pinnacles of this industry and I am just one who likes to give back. Anybody that's worked with me knows my first question is usually how can I help you? What do you need? I have thrived on being able to help people solve their problems and just be able to give back as much as I can in this industry. So again, I literally have experience in just about every segment of this industry. There's not much that I haven't done and been successful in, so I keep sticking around and pivoting and I've gotten really good at picking up on trends and understanding the industry as a whole and I'm just happy to be able to help advertisers every day solve their problems with reach and revenue.

Dustin Howes: 3:49

Well, fantastic, sounds like we got another connoisseur of upskilling, just like myself, and that's going to make for some great nerd content. We've got a viewer in here, david, saying hey, and he's got a question, and he says so, native advertising in ad affiliate marketing, how does that work? We're going to go right through that today, david. And then we got another comment here from Michael says oh, native is a paid ad. That looks like it's part of the page. As an example, what do you think? Is it qualified?

Shaun Hall: 4:24

You know, I know Michael very well, I know he's a very intelligent human being and you know what, if I had a bell right now, I would ring it, because Michael nailed that Native advertising is an ad that should look like a native piece of content to the publisher site. That is on. So, michael, congratulations. You are correct.

Dustin Howes: 4:42

Oh fantastic, you just won yourself a lifetime supply of RevConnect ads.

Shaun Hall: 4:51

So regret, oh cut RevConnect yeah, michael, let me know, I will set you up an account over here and I would be happy to have you run some traffic with us Fantastic.

Dustin Howes: 5:06

Looks like Michael's excited about that and I'm excited about this too. This is off to a good start. I like what we're doing here . Sean, if you want to be over in Shaun's seat, go to DustinHousecom, slash nerd and fill out that form. Tell me about what you want to nerd out about and let's get after it. But let's talk about RevConnect.

Shaun Hall: 5:30

RevConnect there you go. Dustin, there we go.

Dustin Howes: 5:32

RevConnect. Why do I keep saying that I'm not a great reader to begin with, but tell me about the. Oh, we're not doing name origin story. We're going straight into what you guys do and who you are serving.

Shaun Hall: 5:48

It's much more fun than a name origin story. Absolutely, absolutely so. For those that aren't familiar with RevConnect obviously they're not following me and any of the social platforms, because I am always throwing stuff out about RevConnect we are a native traffic platform, much like Tabula or Outbrained or MGID or the other ones. We are also one of the biggest suppliers of native traffic in the industry. So what is native? We covered that we are.

Shaun Hall: 6:16

Typically, the placements are at the bottom of articles on websites like Taste of Home or Reader's Digest or AccuWeather, for example, that look like other pieces of content that then are thrust into the affiliate marketplace and you're able to advertise your goods or services there. So RevConnect is one of the top native providers in the industry in the world. We've been around since almost the beginning and we've got a really cool way of operating over here that's very focused on our advertisers and understanding their struggles and making the process of buying traffic and promoting their offers and services very easy. We thrive on providing a high level of customer service and giving as much attention as we can to our advertisers so that way we can ensure their success via profitability.

Dustin Howes: 7:10

Fantastic, fantastic and well said, and it sounds like you've got some fans out there. I see my own buddy, ben Zucker.

Shaun Hall: 7:20

I love Ben so much. I've got stories with Ben. Ben's been a good friend and a client at many of the different places I've worked at previously, so the feelings mutual. Ben, I love you as well. One of these days, when I get back to New York, we will catch that Rangers game. Oh, you're a Rangers fan. No, I am a Blackhawks fan, but I will never turn down the opportunity to see live hockey at the garden.

Dustin Howes: 7:45

You said you're in hockey zone. See, my only experience hanging out with Ben is we got to watch Aaron Judge hit his 61st home run. In fact, check me on that, ben but we were in Austin to catch that. Was it Austin? I can't remember. I know I was hanging out and watching with him at a bar when it happened Great moment but I know nothing about hockey, so apologize for that.

Shaun Hall: 8:17

We can nerd out about hockey offline. I'll fill you all in on it.

Dustin Howes: 8:21

Okay, awesome. And we've got Will saying you guys are in for a treat. Sean is going to drop some golden nuggets. Absolutely I can't wait for it. Michael seems to be very appreciate you have me at holo, san Diego. Thank you, ben Appreciate you. Oh, Ben, Before the Fodgerys game we were watching that Yankees game right before it.

Shaun Hall: 8:43

Oh see, I thought he was talking about when we were in San Diego and we had a four martini and steak lunch Not far from Padre Stadium.

Dustin Howes: 8:53

Goodness, who drinks martinis at lunch?

Shaun Hall: 8:57

Ben Zucker does, and he brought the rest of us down with him.

Dustin Howes: 9:02

Fantastic, all right, so let's get into it. I've got a feeling we're going to run out of time joking around so much, so tell me about what native advertising? What is it?

Shaun Hall: 9:13

Well, again, we've talked a little bit about the origins of native. It is advertising placements that are designed to look like more pieces of content at the bottom of content sites Could be big news sites, could be small town news sites, content sites, blog sites anywhere that's got you know placements that they're looking to monetize at the bottom of those articles. Those are native placements. So native ads are the ads that you'll see at the bottom of the article. Usually it says sponsored content or promoted content or recommended content. Those are going to be native ads and they're going to appear typically in the middle or usually the bottom of articles on some big name publisher sites.

Dustin Howes: 9:55

Excellent. And with that, how is native and affiliate these worlds colliding?

Shaun Hall: 10:02

How do they make that happen when the worlds collide Natives, natives, natives, natives, natives, natives, natives, natives, natives, natives. On our Facebook traffic too. Native traffic years ago because I got sick of fighting the uphill battle that Facebook breaks right, like waking up in the morning and that dread of how many accounts that I lose overnight. Are account still spending the they stop spending. It was just kind of a nightmare. So I had transitioned over to native and found that native ads are actually perfectly paired for affiliate offers.

Shaun Hall: 10:40

You know the typical flow, which is usually add landing page, offer page, really speaks to the user journey of Native users because they're looking to consume more content. So as long as you kind of follow some best practices with your marketing on native, it can be one of the most reliable, consistent and scalable traffic sources out there. So the two worlds combine very, very well in that those that you know have started on Facebook or started on paid search to have an alternative where they can go. That's easier. You don't have to fight through all of that compliance. You know it's an easier process there of getting campaigns approved and if they get denied, you know we can give you kind of reasons on why, which you're never going to get from other traffic sources that are out there. So for those that are looking to kind of transition a little bit out of the entry level sources, native is a good spot for their traffic.

Dustin Howes: 12:10

Excellent, all right. And who are these folks, the native affiliates that out there that you're working with, that you guys are making partnerships with? Who are these folks?

Shaun Hall: 12:22

Great question. So it could be your traditional affiliate marketers, right, guys, that are working with brands or products and they're getting paid a commission to promote those. We have a lot of affiliate partners that we work with. We also have a lot of partners that own other big publisher sites and they're doing content arbitrage, so they're sending traffic from our publishing partners back to their own blog or their own site to increase site views so they can further monetize their sites. We also work with a lot of direct brands and companies that are out there again trying to expand their reach, grow their revenues. We work a lot with them. We also, over the last couple of years, have worked with a lot of search arbitrage, because affiliates and companies to monetize their feeds Really anybody that's got a product or a service or that's looking to get more eyeballs on their offers could be really great native affiliates.

Dustin Howes: 13:17

Beautiful. We got a question popping up Does it connect with share or say on other platforms, or is a tracking in-house? Great question, michael.

Shaun Hall: 13:26

Michael. Wonderful question Again. I told you he was very smart than Michael.

Dustin Howes: 13:30

I always ask him the top questions. Oh, I see you working, Michael Howdy baby.

Shaun Hall: 13:35

I didn't pay Michael for these questions, but I feel like I should. No, yeah, we do connect. We have a very robust API that we can connect in with a lot of the third-party tracking systems out there. Obviously, we've worked with Share Sale, we work with volume, we work with click flare Very, very closely. We also work with, you know, the EverFloose, the HitPaths, any kind of tracking system, because, as you know, data is super important and being able to have accurate data be passed back and forth is paramount to making any campaign successful. So, yeah, we can work with any of those third parties again through our API.

Shaun Hall: 14:10

We do have in-house tracking as well, available if you're not using a third party, so we do have that available. We do have a dashboard in which we can go over, you know, all of your stats and your insights with you.

Dustin Howes: 14:22

Excellent. We will do a little screen sharing a little bit later, after we get into this. What is, what would you say, the percentage of clients that you're working with that are already on a platform that just integrate with you rather than going on to your platform itself?

Shaun Hall: 14:37

Yeah, we do have a lot of clients that are working through DSPs and getting traffic from us through there. I'm not sure the exact percentage, it's not. It's not huge. Obviously you get, you know, a pretty good benefit of working with us directly as far as additional layers of support and service. But yeah, we value our DSP partners a lot. They send us a lot of business. So as long as you're running native and you're out there and you believe in it like I, I'm all for it. We're a big fan of DSPs.

Dustin Howes: 15:07

Beautiful and Michael is appreciative of outstanding. Let's talk after this call. I have clients, it could make sense and oh, we got a master chaos legend that's very in here dumping some Dapper gents.

Shaun Hall: 15:22

Oh, how dare you Wow, yeah, look at that. Yeah, speaking of industry legend, I mean Matt is. He's climbed to the pinnacle several times with several of his projects, so I'm excited to see what's next for Matt.

Dustin Howes: 15:38

Yeah, absolutely, and I'm going to be talking to him in January, I believe. I think he signed up to be in the Nerditorium himself, so I can't wait for that as well. But let's stay on topic. So these folks that are native affiliates, do they have specific niches in this industry or did they work across the board? And I'm just not aware of it because the only opportunity I found is the direct consumer and direct response partners that I've worked with in the past. But can this go across the board?

Shaun Hall: 16:14

Yeah, it can definitely go across the board. As we kind of talked about a little bit earlier, we have a lot of people that are doing content arbitrage or a search arbitrage. We have a lot of clients and advertisers that are advertising B2B services successfully, realistically, if you think about the way native works and where the users are coming in from. They're looking to consume content. They're visiting our publisher partners' websites, they're looking to engage. So, even with B2B, even if we don't have a publishing partner that's specifically for that industry or let's just say we don't have a website that only caters to VP of Sales right? Those VP of Sales are still going on to check highlights from the games, to look at their local news, to see what's going on. So we can still cast a very wide net across a variety of industries and objectives other than just direct response.

Dustin Howes: 17:05

Okay, great. What about best practices? Let's talk about native affiliates, and what are some of those best practices that you like to see from these kinds of partners?

Shaun Hall: 17:17

Oh, this is one of my favorite topics. I literally talk about this on almost every phone call that I have. So, obviously, if you look at like Facebook, for example, right people users on Facebook are looking to scroll, right, they're typically not going to stop, they're going to look, they're going to consume things quickly. So you need to be very aggressive with how you get them to A stop scrolling and B get them to click through to whatever it is that you're trying to move them towards right With native. And one of the best practices that I see people breaking all the time is they run that same heavy clickbait angle that they would run on Facebook. They run that on native right, which doesn't necessarily work, because if it's overly clickbait you're not going to get access to a lot of our top tier placements or publishers, which is going to hinder your results.

Shaun Hall: 18:07

But a lot of times with those angles there's no congruency. That goes from the ad to the landing page, to the offer itself. So we've all seen those ads right, it's got a weird slimy picture of something that you don't really know what it is, or it loosely resembles something, and they all have the same headline right, like top heart surgeon, are you overweight. This one household ingredient will change your world. And then, in parentheses, try tonight you know like, and they run that because they see it on spy tools, right. They assume that this is working and what ends up happening is, when you click that ad, it goes to a page where they don't even talk about the common household item that you should be taking to lose weight.

Shaun Hall: 18:50

It's a completely different angle. So what happens is they have a really good click-through rate, but their conversion rate is in the basement because they didn't keep persons there. If you see an ad for something that you like, right Like if you saw an ad that said you know, top facial hair trends for no shave November, you know you're going to click on that because you're like I want to see the tiger tail right, I want to see what's there. But if you get there and it talks about beard grooming, you're like this isn't at all what I want. You're going to bounce out.

Shaun Hall: 19:20

Right, yeah and going back to what native is, it should look like a native piece of content like. The reason the list of angle works so well on native Is because people are looking for that type of content. So if you ran something up front that said, hey, there's a household item that can help you, you know, achieve your new year's resolutions on weight loss, and you go there and it talks about listen, open your pantry, there's apple cider vinegar in there, you know. Obviously, if you don't want to drink it, you can take it in capsule form. We recommend this over the counter supplement that you can take that gives you all the benefits. Right, it scratches the itch, it answers the question, it helps them push through.

Shaun Hall: 19:57

So that's one of the biggest best practices is just to Cater your ad and there's a guy named tom bell, who I've done other podcast with, who talks about creating the campaign from the offer back to the ad, which I think is one of the best practices you know for native and any traffic source really to captivate or to capitalize on the user journey and to get not only a high click through rate but a very good conversion rate. Make it look like a piece of content, like if you go to give a dog a piece of you know a pill or something, the dog is not going to take it. But if you wrap it up in cheese and you give it to him, they'll swallow it instantly beautiful with native.

Shaun Hall: 20:35

You don't want it to look like an ad. You want to look like content that has the ad sandwich in there so they consume it without realizing they're consuming.

Dustin Howes: 20:43

Outstanding and great representation of how it, how it looks and from the perspective of the affiliate. Let's say we're drive some traffic to our WordPress blog and we've got a list of coal and we want to add in native ad advertising into the mix. Like what's one of those first steps that they can use to like start implementing in the list is this is a plug in form that they can put into their ads or some other way that to implement this?

Shaun Hall: 21:13

Yes, so rev content. We actually have two halves of the company. We have the half that I've been charged of, which is out, you know, finding advertisers to advertise on our ad units, but then we have a really amazing publisher team who does, I mean, a really great job of getting us some very good publishers that have a lot of high intent users. So there's a whole other half of the business where, if you had a site that you wanted to monetize with native ads, you could talk to them and get set up and get those ad units added to your site.

Shaun Hall: 21:39

If you wanted to start advertising with rev content, it's a very easy process. You would go to our website, you would create an advertising account or you could reach out to myself directly or my team here and we could do a demo of the platform. We could help you get signed up. We could go over the best practices with you, look at your creatives, look at your process and just make sure everything is set you up for success. But it is a very easy process to get started on. It's nothing like you know complicated things where you've got to have a master's degree in online marketing to understand, or a very you know, crazy dashboard that takes a three hour orientation. We make things very simple for our advertisers.

Dustin Howes: 22:19

Awesome and, speaking of that, that's a great tie in. Why don't we take a look at that dashboard? Can you share your screen?

Shaun Hall: 22:26

I can.

Shaun Hall: 22:27

I've actually I've saved this because I knew it was coming on.

Shaun Hall: 22:29

Today breaking news here in the nerd or you are going to we are going to announce our very New feature that we just rolled out platform wide to all of our advertising accounts, called rev GPT.

Shaun Hall: 22:44

So in a moment I will show you exactly how that is. But rev GPT is an automated headline generation I tool that we've added so advertisers can instantly produce a range of compelling headlines, and that's going to reduce the amount of time and effort that's traditionally required in the creative process. On top of that, you can also get enhanced campaign performance with rev GPT. So the variety of headlines generated by rev GPT will allow for more robust split testing, and that's going to lead to improved engagement rates and higher ROI, which is what we're all looking for right. And on top of that, it allows the advertiser to focus on more strategic goals. So if you can automate the headline creation process, basically rev GPT will free you up from having to cons, to free you up to concentrate on more high level strategic and optimization strategies. So we are really excited. We've been testing this over the last few months with select accounts and the results have been great. So I would love if I could to kind of run through how that works.

Dustin Howes: 23:46

Yeah, let's do it, man Breaking news Can you push? That screen share button there I sure can, which we would have prepared for this.

Shaun Hall: 23:59

But I prepared for. Oh, great, great. So I'm going to pull this up real quick, and do we?

Dustin Howes: 24:06

have a website for this. So revcontentcom slash anything. I should do this before.

Shaun Hall: 24:14

Yeah, so you can go to basically revcontentcom, and then we do have a blog section that this is going to be. I wanted to make sure that I got it out to you first before we put it out there. So excellent.

Dustin Howes: 24:26

I'll find the blog while you go through.

Shaun Hall: 24:27

this shows the blog post isn't live yet, but we are going to push it live. I wanted to again announce here in the neuratorium about this. I wanted you to break the story and then we'll put it out and I'll share that link.

Shaun Hall: 24:39

I appreciate you, thank you. So in here this is just kind of our dashboard for, you know, advertisers to look at. I've got a couple in here. I just created a little dining room ad, just a generic campaign here so we can look at it, and I've got two headlines and one image that we're testing in there. So what we've got here is the little ask rep GPT button down here. So what that's going to do and what it's going to entail our advertisers to be able to do, it will use this headline there as a query and then with a click of a button it is going to pull up five to around 20 other headlines that you could use in this campaign. That will also work. So you can see hurry limited stock available. It takes the guesswork out of it. Now, the best part is when we were testing this in house, these headlines actually performed about the same, if not a little better, the ones that we were writing here in house.

Shaun Hall: 25:35

We have some absolute legends in house that can write ads, so these are really good. Now, even if we just gave you these to copy and paste in there, that would be awesome enough. But if you wanted to add these into your campaign, all you have to do is click a button and they're automatically added right into your campaign.

Dustin Howes: 25:55

Fantastic, and are they going to automatically AB test each one of these in a certain frame to see what the winner is going to be?

Shaun Hall: 26:03

Yeah, so our algorithm will go through, and the reason that we always recommend our advertisers having as many creative combinations in here as possible is because it'll give the algorithm and the system enough data to go through and find the best combinations for you to boost your CTR and also boost your ROI. So the more you can give the system, the better. But just coming up with these 10 or 15 or 20 headlines might take you an hour two hours, depending on how well your copywriting skills are.

Shaun Hall: 26:33

So, what this does is just free you up. It takes the guesswork out of it and allows you to move on to other tasks quickly.

Dustin Howes: 26:40

Science. So and then?

Shaun Hall: 26:42

you can just easily go in, update the image and you're all set. You could have 20 plus 30 plus headline and image combinations done literally less than 10 minutes.

Dustin Howes: 26:51

So we are very excited.

Shaun Hall: 26:54

The initial results on this have been great. So, yeah, literally this week we rolled it out live and then press release went out and we wanted to break the news here with you.

Dustin Howes: 27:05

That is amazing. Thank you so much for doing it, kristen. Big time Evans over here. Justin brought the story. That's right, the power of the monkey tail wins again. She thinks this is so cool yeah.

Shaun Hall: 27:18

Thank you, Kristen. I appreciate that greatly.

Dustin Howes: 27:22

Awesome, all right. Well, now that you've done that, what about native affiliates? How do we find them Like? Who is using this technology, and how do we, as brands, go out or agencies, for that matter, go out and find these kinds of native affiliates?

Shaun Hall: 27:41

Yeah, there's a couple of different ways that you can do it. You could, obviously, if you're savvy enough, to hop on a spy tool. There's ad beat, there's ad plexi, there's a few of them out there. If you're savvy enough to track them down via the tracking links, you can totally do that. I've found, starting off, if you're a brand or you're an advertiser out there who's looking to get native traffic, reaching out to some of the bigger affiliate networks that are out there in the space, like a Max web or a buy goods or Jumbleberry or any of the ones that are out there Envious media there's a bunch of really good affiliate networks that are out there that you could reach out to and say hey, we know you probably have a lot of native affiliates, We'd like to work with them. Now, concurcely, if you are an affiliate and you would like to run native traffic to your affiliate offers, please I encourage you to reach out to me directly or to visit revcontentcom and fill out an advertiser account and we can reach out to you. We would love to help you get set up there.

Shaun Hall: 28:40

If you're an affiliate that doesn't have an affiliate network that you work with, you want to work with a better one. I've got a host of contacts and affiliate networks. Again, I'm a problem solver. If you come in and you have an issue or you want to advance in any way, please let me know directly and I'm happy to help. But native is a great traffic source for brands, great traffic source for advertisers. Quality is going to be a little bit higher than you're going to see in some of the social channels. Again, we have a lot of really good high intent users. Any brand or advertiser out there should look into bringing on native traffic for their offers.

Dustin Howes: 29:15

Beautiful Sarah Malo. Love us some. Sean Hall, our Link Unite Ambassador Beautiful.

Shaun Hall: 29:25

I love myself some Sarah Malo and Amanda, her partner, and the entire Link Unite organization. I don't think there's been anything as impactful or beneficial for this industry Since I've gotten in 10, 11 years ago. Now, then the Link Unite movement that's happening, and I am one of the biggest supporters. If you're a woman in the space who's watching this, I would definitely highly recommend reaching out to the Link Unite team and joining them, because they are moving and shaking. One day, dustin, you and I and everybody else in this industry will probably end up working for a Link Unite member.

Dustin Howes: 29:59

I don't doubt you. Sarah honored me with an invitation to come and speak to that crew. I'm like I don't know what to talk about, but absolutely I want to be a part of it On a Ferris out here. Love you too. Oh man, you've got a lot, even an agreement from Robert Sherman here. You've got a lot of fans here. I love this interaction. Thanks for being here, folks. Yeah, let's tie into our sponsor of the day and let's see who should it be. Oh, I've already got the link.

Shaun Hall: 30:36

Yeah.

Dustin Howes: 30:37

It's going to be Fnxa, which ties in beautifully with what you guys are doing. I know you have some stories about Fnxa, but in our ever evolving space, one game changing company stands out and that's Fnxa. They're all in one affiliate and performance marketing automation platform. Fnxa offers eight products within one suite that helps publishers, affiliates and affiliate networks scale their operations with called tracking, lead distribution, click tracking, email, sms and more, with resources and partnerships to help users scale their business. Fnxa is the partner in the performance marketing success. Help support my content creating addiction here by using my link, dustinhousecom. Slash from next and schedule yourself a demo today. Tell me about Fnxa and your experience, sean.

Shaun Hall: 31:34

So Fenexa's been around for a while, obviously big in the paper call space, which has exploded over the last few years. My actually one of my best industry friends and trade show partner and crime, patrick Boyd, heads up their business development over there. So I recommend everybody blowing up Patrick's inbox after this and setting up those demos. But they've been great. The whole team's been great. We've had a lot of clients that have worked back and forth over the years when I used to work in tracking platforms myself. Nothing but great things to say about the team over at Fenexa. Definitely hit them up, support them. They obviously support Dustin. I support Dustin. So I'm a good person. They're a good company. Dustin's obviously a great content creator.

Shaun Hall: 32:18

So support him with all the tricks and traffic and monies.

Dustin Howes: 32:23

Yeah, it's not a go spending bad rumors about me here, but I love that they are supporting what I'm doing out here. I have an addiction to creating this content and they've been super helpful in helping me get there, so I appreciate you guys. Now let's switch gears and talk about those next steps for affiliates we talked about the brand and how they can work with you guys to go and find some affiliates that will work in the native space. Let's talk about being an affiliate. What's the first step for them? If they have a nice website that's got some traffic, has some listicles want to try this out, what's their first step to do?

Shaun Hall: 33:07

First step is to reach out to myself or a member of my team, like Will, who's watching and just setting up an introductory discovery call. We want to know what the site is, what your product is, how you've promoted it currently, what your experience is like, and then we want to be able to kind of learn more about that so we can help guide you through it. One of the things that I think makes Revcontent absolutely amazing is our account management team. This is a group of individuals who are in the platform every day working with our top advertisers, and they're going to be able to assist you on those campaigns and getting them off the ground, getting you through the testing phase and getting you to the promised land in the quickest amount of time possible. The great thing about working with the account managers here is we're all very highly motivated to make you successful.

Shaun Hall: 33:57

Retention is what we strive for with our advertisers. So whatever we can do here to help our advertisers and our affiliates get started whether that's giving them advice on best practices, giving them a tour or a demo of the platform for setup, best practices, understanding how things work, how they should promote it better, and really kind of giving them that white glove concierge service will help them propel their success. So being able to talk to me initially, or a member of my team, and having us be able to set you up with one of those account managers is definitely the way to go here.

Dustin Howes: 34:34

Sean, I love everything about your attitude, man, thank you. We don't go way back. We've known each other in this industry a bit, but we've never had a relationship. I can't wait to expand on this. I just love your attitude towards helping this industry and I appreciate you, man.

Shaun Hall: 34:53

I appreciate you as well. Maybe one of these days we can get Ben Zucker to take us to one of those martini and steak lunches together.

Dustin Howes: 34:58

All right, ben, you're on the hook. Let's do it. All right. Let's talk and switch gears here and talk about trends. What are you seeing out there in affiliate marketing that you would consider like hot and upcoming here?

Shaun Hall: 35:15

Yeah Well, right now obviously being almost December, kind of being in the full swing of Q4, anything gift, e-com related is just blowing up right now. Obviously, everybody's going online to search for gifts and the people that are running E-Com especially E-Com listicles that have a good angle they are absolutely dominating the marketplace right now. As far as that comes, obviously, the holiday season is going to end here pretty soon another two, three weeks but as you probably know, and as a lot of people know, once January 1 hits we are in a neutral gold rush. Health and wellness, health and fitness offers anything to make you look better, look younger, feel better, feel younger. All of those campaigns are going to explode.

Shaun Hall: 35:59

So the really savvy marketers out there are starting to test those campaigns and getting that optimized now. So they hit the ground running. So if you are one of those advertisers that's planning on jumping into the neutral gold rush and Q1, now is the time to get set up and to get tested and optimized and ready to go. So once you flip that trigger on January 1, you're going to be off to the races. So right now, a lot of E-Com, a lot of gifts, a lot of that type of offers and campaigns and then going right into the Q1 neutral gold rush is what we're seeing and what's happening.

Dustin Howes: 36:35

Oh, fantastic, and if you are in that space, you've got to be a part of a traffic tribe Amber Spears and the East Fifth Avenue through incredible value for just sharing things that work in that community and I'm really proud to be a part of that. I will add a link into this description and tell you more about it a little bit later Amber Spears.

Shaun Hall: 37:01

she's another legend.

Dustin Howes: 37:03

Oh, absolutely. She was one of those early adapters in here. After she came on, we started doing a lot more business together, which I'm very grateful to have her in my life. She's one of those very powerful and super passionate and super great attitude. People in this industry love her to death. Looks like Ben is agreeing I think that's him blinking twice and agreeing with Martini's lunch and steak Outstanding, moving into as we close this thing out. It's time to defend your post here. Oh man, nothing too serious here, but this is you correct. That is me Beardless, glassesless, and you have the same trophy that's in your background. I absolutely love this, but defend yourself. This is a totally 180 degree look difference that you're bringing to the table today. I didn't recognize yet first. How do you defend yourself here?

Shaun Hall: 38:15

So I've got this weird tradition that I've been doing for about a decade now where I don't like because it's not even a tradition, it's a tradition and a superstition I don't like to take an old beard into a new year. So every year just before New Year's Eve I've had the same barber forever now. He moved away a couple of years ago, but he still comes down for this. I do a beard shave every year, where I shave the beard all the way off and I pamper myself here. Dustin, I like to go hot towel straight edge. Really do that.

Shaun Hall: 38:51

Shout out to my barber, big Ron, for the last nine years for being the one to be able to take this off. And then I go, I get a facial at this place here in Delray Beach called Bellarena Spa. I go get a facial, take care of the skin underneath and then, starting in January, I start growing it back. So when I won that award, it was at Affiliate Summit West in 2019 in Vegas, which we know happens in January. So that was coming right off of that, and at the time I was wearing some contact lenses.

Shaun Hall: 39:23

So, yeah, no glasses, no beard, but it was great to get out there and winning an AFI award is definitely one of the highlights of my career. So, to defend myself, it's a superstition, it's a tradition where I and in fact I'm talking to Big Ron now about when we're going to do it in the next couple of weeks, so I will be beardless again come the end of December.

Dustin Howes: 39:48

That's fantastic. I love that story and I love, I love people that share the facial hair prowess that I do. I think it's. I like to think that I look like somebody in section one of the Hunger Games with this thing on my face and it's all for a good cause. It's for November. I like your strategies on a fresh base for the year. That is Mon Brand. Like I can get on board with that. I love the tradition. If you would like to help support my Movember campaign, go to DustinHelmscom slash Moe. That's dropped in the link. Yeah, I'm overly emphasized on our post here, but great defension of yourself. Is that a word? Defension, defension.

Shaun Hall: 40:41

It is now Alright, defensioncom slash. Dustin, you can go there for all of your defending post.

Dustin Howes: 40:49

Making up words Defension.

Shaun Hall: 40:51

Alright, I think it is a real word I don't know.

Dustin Howes: 40:53

Alright, how do we connect with you, Sean?

Shaun Hall: 40:56

Best way to connect with me would be here on LinkedIn. I'm very accessible and easy to reach out to, or you can shoot me an email. Email is Sean shaun at revcontentcom. It's a direct line to me there. I'm on all social platforms. I'm on Skype at Sean Hall dot five four. You can get me there. However you want to reach out, I am available. I was an affiliate manager for such a long time that I sleep in shifts. I answer just about every Skype, telegram, whatsapp, slack message most of the waking hours of the day, so I'm not hard to find you know I was thinking the other day like it's so annoying to be on seven different Slack channels and Skype and LinkedIn.

Dustin Howes: 41:43

If somebody would build a tool that used to be like ICQ, where we can pull this together, I would pay $100 a month for this. I can't find it on the internet I just want all the API's to talk to it, and so I have one screen where I do all of my chatting. That would be amazing.

Shaun Hall: 42:02

If you know, I miss ICQ so much.

Dustin Howes: 42:05

It was the best.

Shaun Hall: 42:06

It was the absolute best. Oh, we can dirt out over that too.

Dustin Howes: 42:13

I mean, yeah, we're from that same era. Like the younger kids don't don't get what ICQ is or that reference, but us older generation do, in a veteran space. All right, lesson of the day Give native a try. This is a really easy one and I'm convinced I'm gonna set up a call. I'm gonna actually set up a demo with you and record it live for my YouTube channel so other people can see it as well. Can't wait to do that. We'll set up some time. But, native, give it a try. Like there's nothing to lose here. Love what you guys are bringing to the table. So all right, and that wraps it up for today. My guess next week is gonna be for next time.

Shaun Hall: 43:00

Who are you talking to for for next week?

Dustin Howes: 43:02

Oh, one of them Two of them. Oh my gosh Let me tell you I wasn't prepared for this, so excuse me and my rudeness. Here looks like Dave Pickard, dave Pickard.

Shaun Hall: 43:27

Oh nice, yeah, you're gonna enjoy that a lot. Dave's a great guy.

Dustin Howes: 43:32

Awesome, awesome, and we got some more chats coming in here. Mark and oh, do we have questions? Mark two, mark two.

Shaun Hall: 43:41

Anybody have any quick questions they want to throw out there?

Dustin Howes: 43:47

I mean they would have. They would have had it. We got one minute. Dustin is a better host than Caesar Flickerman.

Shaun Hall: 43:56

Will's young. He has this you know, pop culture references from the young generation that he hits me with a meld of the other time. I don't understand.

Dustin Howes: 44:06

Awesome, hey, Will I agree yeah?

Shaun Hall: 44:10

But yeah, hopefully it's a compliment. If it is great, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll Google it and then we'll do shots of Metamucil later, once we figure out who it is.

Dustin Howes: 44:21

Well, I appreciate the compliment and, john, great joke Very nicely done.

Shaun Hall: 44:28

My RC. Yes, yes, michael, yes, oh, countless, countless hours of my life I spent an MRC.

Dustin Howes: 44:37

Hunger Games reference. Oh, is that the actor in that? Well, yeah, you nailed it. Nice job, fantastic. All right, sean, we're gonna wrap this up Perfect. Appreciate your time and all of your knowledge and, for those of you out there, keep on recruiting and take it easy.