How an affiliate consultant used Affistash recruitment tool to scale into a thriving agency with Ivan Tijerina

Dustin Howes: 0:28

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out, a special edition of Affiliate Nerd Out. This is Affiliate Management Walkthrough and my guest today, ivan Tijerina. He is an owner of his own consultancy, an agency that he's been building, fan of affiestash and we're very excited to have him to showcase his process using affiestash to scale his agency. Ivan, welcome to the nerdatorium man. Hey dozen, good to see you, awesome and tell us your story. Man, how'd you get started in affiliate and how'd you get into the consultant realm to where you are today?

Ivan Tijerina: 1:13

Yeah, the history is kind of all over the place, how it probably is for most people. I think the common answer is I just fell into affiliate marketing right For most folks and that's kind of what happened to me. I was working retail managing a Starbucks way back in 2015,. Actually, working retail managing a Starbucks way back in 2015,. Actually, and it was kind of just by happenstance the CFO of a really large online bicycle retailer that was in my area was a regular at my store and we became friends.

Ivan Tijerina: 1:41

He knew that I was an avid cyclist and loved the sport and said hey, I'm growing my marketing team. I know you know cycling and the product and the culture. I know you know nothing about digital marketing and e-com, though, but I think you can learn it and we'll teach you in-house. So he made me an offer that was a lateral move from what I was doing. I thought I was going to be with the company forever and running Starbucks stores in different areas, and that was my entry into e-com and digital marketing. I took over affiliate marketing, uh, in house for someone that was leaving that put in their two weeks, and they left on great terms.

Ivan Tijerina: 2:18

They, um, you know, created a handbook for me and educated me and, like I, set up one-on-ones with them even after they left the company for the training. So so I spent five years there, left for an agency that I had a very brief stint at, about three months, who was a full service marketing agency. That then was they wanted to offer an affiliate marketing partnerships marketing is what they called it a service line. So they recruited me in to help develop that service line and department. I was like, soon after I was made an offer by what was a client of mine at the time I have kind of was always freelancing while I was holding down a full time job, kind of whole. Nother story for another day. But a client of mine that I had while I was at the agency said hey, what you were doing at Jensen USA, the online cycle bicycle retailer, we need your help recreating that here. And so I continued managing their affiliate program in-house while managing the rest of their performance channels as well. So I always kind of had this combination of affiliate marketing and performance marketing in general kind of set of experience, excuse me, and I was with them for two years. They're a large e-bike brand, kind of top two, top three in the space now.

Ivan Tijerina: 3:42

And after that I, after those two years in 23, at the end, late 23, I moved over to another online retailer to help them test out some new performance channels that they wanted to. They had some budget, it was new to them, they had never really done it and unfortunately, almost a year in, I was caught up in a round of layoffs. They had gone through a couple and then got caught up in a third one there and decided you know what? I was laid off with a couple clients still on my roster because I was still freelancing on the side and said I kind of have this case study, I've proven it out, I can manage. You know, as an OPM I can manage a couple programs at once while doing the full-time gig as well. Why not see if I can scale this? So it's been a year now. I was laid off last April and get the ground running. So let's do this full-time. And now here we are.

Dustin Howes: 4:37

So oh, my gosh 12 months sober of W2s. It's great man. All right, so you started your consultancy and then you ran into AppyStash at some point and tell me about that story, like how it changed your workflow.

Ivan Tijerina: 4:56

Yeah, I mean, as you would imagine, working for yourself, you're wearing all the hats and you have to find solutions very, very quickly. For the most part, I had solved for a lot of processes that I wanted to use for my weekly syncs with my clients with how I reported on performance. But the pain point that always existed, and probably is the case for most affiliate managers, is just the recruitment. Even if you have a team, like just partner discovery, you know everything into, to the outbound, to the nurturing of those partners, then onboarding them and optimizing them after the fact, it's just that's so much work, right, and so the element of okay, well, I'm operating an affiliate channel now, or a program, excuse me, for a client. The name of the game here is to. As an example, I had a client where I launched a program for them and I'm like, well, I'm going to spend hours just recruiting because it's a brand new program.

Dustin Howes: 5:58

I can do a lot of in-platform recruitment.

Ivan Tijerina: 6:00

But after that we all know that we kind of go out of network or out of program to start recruitment as well and try to get some affiliates in that way, and so it just came from. I honestly don't even remember how I came across Vic or Affie Stash, but I was just like in it. I was able to do large scale partner discovery on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok where I just otherwise couldn't before.

Dustin Howes: 6:49

Outstanding. That's a great story and we appreciate you as a customer and a client, and we're always trying to help each other out as much as we can, and today you're going to help us out even further and showcase your workflow and AppyStash, how you're using it for yourself and your business today, and let's go ahead and do the the screen share and have you give us a walkthrough of how you use Zappy Stash today.

Ivan Tijerina: 7:17

Yeah, that's great, let's do it. So I have a client here. They are obviously in the fitness calisthenics kind of space and this was an example of a partnership that we can. You, we can uncover opportunities with content sites, with review sites, things like that, but there isn't a play of working with creators as well. That could be valuable for them and has been um for all kinds of reasons, not just, you know, uh, referral traffic, um, and getting the product awareness um increased in in them, in their vertical, but also the repurposing of UGC. That's always super valuable when working with creators across social media, youtube, et cetera.

Ivan Tijerina: 8:03

So with Affy Stash, what I was able to do, and where Affy Stash is really powerful, is in really understanding the nuance of the vertical that you're in if you fill out the company profile appropriately. So here we can see that these are all the fields that Affustash requires to be able to do partner discovery a lot more effectively for any given business. So we have things like the URL, obviously, the business model, their location, a target audience that you would include, price range, certain keywords as well, and then not too in depth but still kind of keyword rich, and profile description excuse me, description of the of the business here.

Ivan Tijerina: 8:54

And so once that's created, um, you know you could always go back and modify it and edit it. But, um, in the partner discovery, uh section of Affie stash is where things get really powerful, uh, having that profile built out. And so I've created I've already run um kind of a, a discovery, of a discovery list here, okay, just to kind of pre-stage this. But where I typically am using Affysash the most is in finding content creators across the platforms that are available here. So with this last search, I focused on YouTube, but I've used Instagram, I've used Twitter and I've built up a prospect list Great, pretty, pretty significant prospect list that way.

Ivan Tijerina: 9:40

So what I like to do is, once your list of leads is generated for you, I export this as CSV, okay, and I then add it to a Google Sheet. I, how you see it formatted here for the most part, is how it comes out of Affy Stash. I added a few more columns, qualified and logged and what I? I have VAs that help me out and I do some of this work as well, but I have VAs to help with the scale of getting this done here. So what I like to do is.

Dustin Howes: 10:12

So this list, essentially, is what Affy Stash is finding you as relevant results for the content that is being created on the keywords that you guys are looking to rank for right, exactly, yeah, exactly that we're looking to rank for that.

Ivan Tijerina: 10:27

We're, you know it's it searches. You would do anyway, but in a very manual process on YouTube you would be using keywords that are relevant to the business to find creators, um, in this example on YouTube, and, uh, this really accelerates the process of finding all these different channels and all these different creators that would be relevant, uh, as as potential partners. And so what my VAs will do for me is they'll do one final spot check of the YouTube channels here to make sure there's no duplicates or just anything randomly that showed up that maybe we wouldn't be relevant for the brand. Just kind of a human, human touch there. What they'll do is they'll identify them as qualified and they will actually add them to my CRM as well, and then we'll identify if they were logged or not. Once they do that, the CRM that I use is BuzzStream and we will actually add websites, social media creators, youtube creators as individuals, as individual contacts here in BuzzStream, and once they're added, what we can do is solve for mass outreach as well once our list has been qualified completely, and so in the process of adding them to the CRM, we also identify, you know, the point of contact at that channel. Sometimes that's shown on YouTube.

Ivan Tijerina: 11:56

When you're on social media it can get a little bit more difficult, but there's ways to find emails for these folks and then I have sequences that I would send out right to ask them. Hey, rubber bandits, in this case one of my clients is really interested in working with you. They'd like to make an offer for you to join their affiliate program. In this case, they are willing to send out product for review in some cases to those that qualify. And what is really beneficial about working with BuzzStream as well integrating this into the workflow is that I can automate my follow-ups as well. So all the mass outreach really can happen pretty efficiently and then just be ongoing over time. So I probably do this once a month, I'll generate a new list of prospects with Affy Stash and I'll add them to my CRM. My VAs will help. Mass outreach goes out and then, as interest comes back from those that were prospecting, partnerships are then ultimately created for my clients and their affiliate program scales this way.

Dustin Howes: 13:05

Awesome, awesome. Thank you for all that information. I see that you're using this as lead generation, essentially for your outreach and some of the factors that you're not using on the SEO side for the results that give you all that contact information. You utilize those as well, but just not as much. This is like the main feature that you like to utilize, right.

Ivan Tijerina: 13:34

Yeah, exactly, it depends on the client, right? I have a client in kind of the SaaS vertical where working with content sites, seo sites, things like that, is a little bit more beneficial for their programs.

Ivan Tijerina: 13:49

In this case it's kind of DTC right Lifestyle fitness brand and the types of partnerships that I mean number one are honestly coveted by. Any DTC brand is going to be that influencer, creator kind of category that that'll include TikTok, youtube in general. And so my initial use of Affy Stash and ultimately primary use, really is for partner discovery across those platforms that I just haven't seen solved for or come across anyone that's really doing it well, and so it's honestly been a really core, you know, function of my business at this point to be able to leverage AppyStash for this.

Dustin Howes: 14:35

That is awesome. And what would you say? Like you use this every month for each one of your clients. What do you think this would save you in time, Like if you were to estimate how many hours per week or per month you would save.

Ivan Tijerina: 14:50

I mean there's a lot of hours dedicated to um across myself and my VAs, um to partner discovery, uh, logging them in our CRM and then doing the outbound and then communication after the fact as they reply Um, but what it's all for? For scale. So if I were to match the scale through a very manual, a more manual approach that historically I was doing, I mean, we're talking about days, weeks, we're not even an hours anymore.

Dustin Howes: 15:20

Yeah.

Ivan Tijerina: 15:21

Like it's. It's really solved for for me to be able to run a really lean operation and manage, at least focus on, recruitment at scale, at meaningful scale for my clients and their programs, in a way that you would just need a team to do this truly if it was all manual.

Dustin Howes: 15:41

Awesome. Thanks for your words of wisdom. Really appreciate you giving us a breakdown and pulling back the curtain, showing us your style and techniques of how you're doing things. Appreciate you, ivan, and if anyone out there would like a demo of Appy Stash, please sign up with the link in the comments or the descriptions below and our team will create a customized demo just for you and will happily give you 20 free prospects to go along just for showing up to that demo. So please sign up for that today and for all those affiliate managers out there. Good luck to you, keep on recruiting and we'll see you out there. Take care.