Dustin Howes: 0:25

Welcome to affiliate nerd out. I am your nerd or major Dustin. How spread that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me every Tuesday and Thursday here on LinkedIn lives Talking about affiliate stuff and other things. You can also find me on wherever you find your podcast, so please consider subscribing. My guest today, adam reamer, old friend of mine in this industry. We go way back in the days of affiliate some at old, and he's gonna be coming in and talking about affiliate and SEO and we're just gonna have a Great old nerd time. Adam, thanks for being here and welcome to the nerdatorium.

Adam Riemer: 1:10

Hey, thank you for having me.

Dustin Howes: 1:11

Dustin Great. All right, for those of you that are watching, please drop some live Q&A Down below in the chat. Please feel free to heckle Adam and take it easy on me, but we are here to answer questions and we would love to hear from you, so jump on in, but without further ado. Adam, who are you? I'm Adam.

Adam Riemer: 1:37

Perfect.

Dustin Howes: 1:38

All right. Next question.

Adam Riemer: 1:45

It's gonna be one of those shows.

Dustin Howes: 1:47

I know who you are and I expect nothing less so.

Adam Riemer: 1:53

I was like someone asked what do you think? And I just said I don't Perfect. There wasn't a movie somewhere, I just can't remember which one it was. There's a word caught off guard that they realized what I was doing.

Dustin Howes: 2:07

That's not a super quotable like movie quote, but I get it. But three less than three word answers are not going to cut it in this podcast, adam. So let's, let's, let's elaborate a little bit about who you are.

Adam Riemer: 2:23

I run a digital marketing strategy firm and we do a ton of work with conversion rate optimization, top funnel and growth marketing, as well as consumer acquisition and win back in retention campaigns.

Dustin Howes: 2:39

Well, that was extremely well rehearsed. It sounds like you've said that at least a thousand times at a conference. That's incredible, quite possibly Great. I'm gonna put Adam's link in the bio so you can find out where to get a hold of him. If you want to come in, learn more about Adam and have him answer questions, please jump in. So you talked about your agency. I would love to hear about how you got started in this industry. I know you do affiliate. I know you do SEO. I know you do digital marketing. What it, what? What egg before the chicken situation came about this? How you got into all three of these? Essentially so.

Adam Riemer: 3:25

I was putting up websites in the mid 90s and After college, well, so I started seeing traffic coming in from different search engines and things and wanted to learn how to Get more of it. So I found a forum for it was called Cosmos Factory, I think which was a rocky horror picture show forum but had a webmaster sub forum. That was my first introduction to actual HTML, and there were people talking about like, oh, some things. I don't even know if it still exists, but that's how I sort of got started. Then I went to college, which was not necessarily good use of time, and After that was all done, I went to the corporate world, which definitely was not for me, yeah, but Billy.

Adam Riemer: 4:10

I inherited an affiliate program and at the time I had already started monetizing those many websites and everything. But then I got to learn the other side. It was with a program that I think was on be free right before it got purchased by a commission junction and I built more sites afterwards, a couple jobs later and I decided to go be an affiliate full-time. That led to a couple of my merchants. They were asking well, how are you doing this? Why are you driving traffic? You're not the like standard coupon site or something. I was like no, what I'm doing is I'm introducing people to you and I'm driving it through this.

Adam Riemer: 4:46

And it was through my email list. It was through Different posts that I had optimized for specific phrases and then I would match the phrase to the website where I thought I would convert best and I would test those. And then they said well, can you do that for us? I was like I guess I could and then when I started digging, it was like wait, I'm losing my commissions here to people getting end-of-sale clicks. So that's when I started taking them on as clients and I flipped from being a publisher to doing management for other people, as well as helping other companies build their email lists, monetize their own traffic to win back campaigns, and by working with a ton of different companies and organizations over the years, I was able to learn new skills and new channels and, just like one thing to another, just let out.

Dustin Howes: 5:34

Okay, yeah, that's, uh, that's good. I mean doing this for 25 years, you're gonna continue to to grow as a digital marketer, I would say. And, speaking of your clientele, and like who you're taking on, who are you servicing at this point? I like what kind of clients you taking on.

Adam Riemer: 5:53

So we can't say who the majority of our clients are, because we don't publicly announce and we have NDAs For affiliate management, for example. We can say who those are. So I manage the smug mug affiliate program, for example, and I manage the ink file affiliate program and we have a few others. Most of them are on share sale and a couple of them are private people ink files.

Dustin Howes: 6:17

Like Always in that top 10 of like the ranking right.

Adam Riemer: 6:22

Yeah, we do a great job with them incredible and they're a fantastic client. I enjoy the project and our partners. They're really responsive. Sometimes I'll struggle when I have a crafting client, for example, because I'm working with people who really know crafting, who can Work a cricket machine like there's no tomorrow and produce some amazing print-on-demand products with 3d printers and laser engraving, but they don't know the technical sides or the business aspect and so.

Adam Riemer: 6:52

But with ink file, I'm working with marketers and content publishers and coders and so it's really easy to get that to grow and scale and basically everything works because we speak the same language. So it's just that one's, it's an. I love all of my clients, but with that one in particular it's easier to get things done because I don't have to find other ways to explain what would. What is a complex thing, because that's the niche that the Affiliate partners are already in. They already know what the jargon is, may already a lot of them know how to code. A lot of them know how to optimize, so we can skip all the basics and go directly to advanced.

Dustin Howes: 7:32

Oh man, that's the beauty of holding on to clients for a long time too is you get so comfortable with those guys that you know who the good ones are, who you can talk to in that kind of fashion and you don't have to go through that same message again. So that's fantastic. And, you know, incredible that you've kept that program so high for so long. I remember I broke into the top 10 with WP engine like five years ago and I remember seeing you up there and I wasn't managing it. Well, I just mean, like in general, I've seen programs that you've run Up there in that top 10 and it's really impressive, man. I just I'm envious of it. And why do you think Sierra sale has a really unique feature. As For publicers to look at a ranking system, right for 1 to 100, 1 to 1000, even, I think. Why do you think more Affiliate networks don't do that kind of thing? I I feel like it builds competition, do you not feel the same way?

Adam Riemer: 8:34

I don't look at it and I don't necessarily care about it because a lot of the times so Brian built that algorithm to rank it and he's never shared it with anyone. I mean pretty sure his original people like Caroline and David Zelkin and them, they know what it was. But it's Not necessarily an accurate portrayal of the size and the volume of a program or the quality of the program. A Lot of it could be zero actual customer acquisition, it's just interceptions throughout the shopping process. That doesn't mean it's not adding value, but it might not be an actual value adding program. Okay, and it could be in the top Tears. It just it's not a good portrayal. If you feel like you should be competing, then there's also seasonality. So affiliate summit their program would hit the top 10 During the peak season for affiliate summit, when sales are happening, but then it would die off for the rest of the year.

Adam Riemer: 9:32

All right, you'll have, probably right now, wedding vendors hitting the top 20 and then they drop off right after wedding season start. So it's it's not necessarily a good or accurate measure, but it's fun to be able to tell your boss or your client hey, we made this list, we might drop out of it. But I agree it's also not fair for everyone, because if there's not that much if you're an amish and there's not that much volume or demand, you're probably not going to be able to meet the algorithm, because more than likely, one or two of the ranking factors for it could be the volume and the dollar amount. You're doing Gotcha, we Jen, for example, and there's no dollar amount assigned. You might be bigger than some of them, in the top 20, for example, but it's not going to show because there's no dollar amount. So you have parts of the algorithm working against you. There's too many factors and that's why I don't necessarily like it.

Dustin Howes: 10:25

All right, so you? It's funny that you rank so highly and you're like ah, that's algorithm doesn't know what I'm looking at.

Adam Riemer: 10:34

What we actually do for our clients versus where we show up in a list. Same reason why I don't put the awards I've won or places I've been featured for the most part on my website or a lot of my bios.

Dustin Howes: 10:45

Or in your background.

Adam Riemer: 10:46

They should be on trophies back by your amazing painting like Come for if you think I have any substance that's debatable and come for that. Don't come because you saw me win an award or love them that go because you'd like what I wrote or you'd like the work I did, or someone told you to come talk to me. I'd rather it be that than you saw me on a list.

Dustin Howes: 11:10

I do subscribe to you and your newsletter and you post maybe I don't know once every two months. It feels like now it's kind of rare, but like when it shows up I'm like, oh Adam, let's see what kind of graphic you were with, like this, like cute cartoony thing that comes up. I love it. What? Are my favorite emails to get.

Adam Riemer: 11:31

Yeah, the entire purpose of that blog is so I don't forget stuff. It's basically just written for me. Oh beautiful 40 or 50 posts that are private for clients, so I don't have to explain things and they have a resource when they need to explain or share it. No, it's just, it's a big time saver. They like if I'm out or if I'm at a show or if I'm on vacation, they're able to grab that resource and share it internally at their organization. So that's the reason why the blog exists.

Adam Riemer: 12:03

Okay, and that's why I don't edit it or anything like that.

Dustin Howes: 12:51

Okay, so you're not necessarily writing blog posts for SEO value. You're just never writing it out. That's. That's hilarious. It's your domains, like 61 domain authority, like what. I mean, I know you are an SEO expert and like how did you go about getting it to that level if you're not optimizing these blog posts? Like many of the affiliates are out there?

Adam Riemer: 13:15

I write what I would want to see, and so I can remember things or I could relearn something that I learned, and I just I write for what I would want to find if I was looking for a topic Okay and that leads to really good quality people coming through and reading maybe yourself included. It just I write what I would want to find. It doesn't have to be perfect Some of the things will change over time but it's what I would want to see.

Dustin Howes: 13:47

Awesome. Yeah, I reference your two tier explanation of why companies should do it or why or like how it works. So often I don't write that my own, you just you worded it so perfectly that I just send people to that to explain it a little bit better. Thank you, yeah, you got it. So you've been running an agency a long time, or, you know, doing your consulting and everything, and I feel like agency life gets kind of a negative connotation of having a super demanding culture, if you will, and I don't feel that from you. Like I don't even know any of your employees, I don't know who they are, or like what you do to employ people, if it's all virtual assistance or what. But like, do you feel the same way? Do you feel like it's demanding arena to be in this agency life?

Adam Riemer: 14:43

No, if you set client expectations correctly, then you don't really have to worry. You say here's what we do, here's the expected results. Things could happen in between, here's what we need, and if you spell it all out, things go pretty smooth. There are times where things happen or someone stops doing their work. That's when things get intense and I'll get I don't that's not the right word Like and I'll just I'll start saying I'll start. I don't like to have calls and I don't like to have meetings. But when people start missing their deadlines, that's when it's like okay, we're going to set up every couple of days, or sometimes it had to go to a daily, and it's trying to coach the person back. That can feel intense, because most of the people are used to sometimes we talk once a month and that's it.

Adam Riemer: 15:31

It's just do your job, get the stuff done and turn in a good quality, and you get paid. Yeah, we don't have any problems we actually met three people for my team, okay.

Dustin Howes: 15:43

I like to.

Adam Riemer: 15:44

I always tell people I'm, they're my boss. Instead I just yeah, we, I don't do that whole title thing and stuff. It's just they're people, they do what they need to do and yeah.

Dustin Howes: 15:56

Well, you're in a character and that's why I like picking your brain and about this kind of stuff. So funny that I've met them and can't like put them tied to you like, because I probably guess that way, maybe, maybe, like independent and do their thing.

Dustin Howes: 16:13

Yeah, so you don't find the industry all that demanding in the agency life. But what do you think about when you do campaigns? You'd say this one's going to be a winner and it just falls on its face. Everybody's been there, like, how do you deal with that with your clientele handling this kind of failure? Just tell them.

Adam Riemer: 16:38

Here's what happened. We think this is the cause. If you'd like to try again, we can. Or we don't think there's a reason to go give it another shot. It just doesn't make sense. Or we say if you do feel like doing it, here's another way to approach it. Here's the steps where we probably could have done better, but there's risks with it as well, and it just goes back to setting proper expectations.

Dustin Howes: 17:01

Beautiful. I like how you own it and I always feel like that's the best practice Own your mistakes.

Adam Riemer: 17:08

Situation right now where something didn't work out as planned and I could have blamed the person that broke everything, but instead I pulled that person aside. We took a phone call and I was like I'm setting up this meeting. You're going to be upset Just going to have to trust me right now and what I did was I presented it as the team made a few mistakes. There was zero any possible blame to be put on everyone and I shared different things that could have been done from different people, and that way the person wasn't going to feel they were called out when everything was out in the open because the person was panicked, because they messed up big time and they're an overthinker like me. So I took the extra time to sit there and say here's where we all did things incorrect and that's how I started the meeting. And then I said you know, there's a problem, here's a solution to get us through it.

Adam Riemer: 18:00

And the person was like on the phone before panic no, no, no, don't tell the owners, don't do this. I'm like no, we have to, because if you say we identified a problem, it's going to progressively get worse, but we'll come with you with a solution. Here's how we fix this. The owners are going to be happy that the teams are working together and the people are working together, and they're they say we can fix this if we act now, and that it turned out into a good situation. The person's no longer panicking. I just have to be careful with what I say, so I don't want to accidentally say yeah, of course, or who are we trying?

Dustin Howes: 18:33

Well, that's good leadership. That's like if you try to sweep something under the rug for a client and it comes back a time later, then you're in a real shit storm, like that's not a place you want to be. Just own your mistakes, say we're going to grow from this and and continue on. And is this the same scenario? Like I pulled this up from LinkedIn today because you quoted it and you said something pretty profound in here Like don't, it didn't work, but moving forward, we're going to get stronger here. And this is a beautiful message, I would say, even if the company made a mistake, or like wanted to try something and it failed, not rubbing it in their face. Is there always a good practice, right?

Adam Riemer: 19:25

Definitely not a good thing to tell your client. Told you so yeah, but you wish we're so stupid for doing that. Huh, it's like those are things you probably shouldn't say. I was in a meeting where I had a client where and a new person had taken over the teams and decided they should remove all text and all calls to action from the page because it took away from the brand.

Adam Riemer: 19:50

So they put just images and they wanted to know what. They pulled me into a meeting why have sales dried up and why are we no longer showing up and why is our email bouncing? And instead of saying something like well, why do you think? Or I said so, we have an option to move forward, and I presented it. I pulled up an archiveorg, the way back machine. I said this is one of our peak years and seasons.

Adam Riemer: 20:17

What we did differently was we had a strong call to action here and we had some really good messaging here. It wasn't necessarily on brand, but if we tweak it back this way, we can get a happy medium between where we are now and where we were then. And that's how I approached it. Instead of saying you broke this, you need to fix it or something like that. Like we all warned you don't be stupid, but you were stupid. So, and by doing it that way, we were able to say and then we explained I explained each of the features on the page and why it may make sense to add them back in, without saying you shouldn't uphold this and that's all I'm saying there, and that the post this morning was a different situation. Oh, okay, in a different topic.

Dustin Howes: 21:00

All right, fair enough. Um, I think I'm it like brought up uh, uh, something I think I'm going to start initiating and like, uh, defend your LinkedIn posts. Like, uh, what, uh, I'm going to, I'm going to bring back something from somebody's history and like, hey, you tell me why that's in houses are really nice guy, Enjoy talking to him.

Adam Riemer: 21:24

I'm not going to put that I'm going to have to defend that. I just I'm not a good liar.

Dustin Howes: 21:28

I'm sorry no chance. That's not going to make the show bud All right. We finally got some chatter. Somebody said hi, friends, we don't know who you are. It's a LinkedIn user. Identify yourself now. Tell me who you are and thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Um, so you're in the SEO and affiliate world? Uh, where do you see those things overlapping Like? You're doing a little outreach for backlink, so I would assume, and doing maybe it's the same client that you're doing affiliate outreach for, so several overlap with the clientele.

Adam Riemer: 22:06

There could be. It just really depends. Yeah, so if you're going to do outreach and it's the same type of target we divided up based on what the better opportunity is. So if it's a website that the backlink could be really good but there's regular readership, they write about the topic regularly and it has the ability to rank for more terms, it makes more sense to go affiliate because you can get more traffic coming through and that can drive more sales over time. If it's a site that's not going to have much readership but it's quality site, it has good, relevant content and it's updated and fact checked, and you probably just want the backlink because you're not going to see sales coming through and there's no real benefit.

Adam Riemer: 22:50

Another time could be. Sometimes we'll do outreach for an affiliate link, because an affiliate link is not a backlink at all and what we'll do is if there's a toxic link, even though the site could be good, we'll encourage them to become an affiliate and that's to get rid of the backlink from the site because we feel that the backlink is doing damage. We say, hey, you're already linking here. Why don't you change it out for an affiliate link and make some money if someone comes through and that's so we can clean up backlinks. That should be gone. There's like, like I said, there's a lot of different crossover and it becomes situational.

Adam Riemer: 23:22

Okay, that's kind of the rule of thumb what's the best for the business. Other times it could be. We want the backlink. They're not going to give it, so then we invite them to the affiliate program.

Dustin Howes: 23:32

Okay, great, I thought that was pretty brilliant. So the ones that are hurting what's that? I think you're pretty brilliant too. I didn't say that at all, I'm just taking a liberty. Whoa here. Compliments when you need it, buddy, I do.

Adam Riemer: 23:54

It's almost vacation time.

Dustin Howes: 23:56

I'm like I'm burned out. No, it's uh, it was pretty funny. I like that You're. You're taking the bad backlinks and you're trying to convince them to make affiliate links out of them instead. That's a pretty unique concept. I don't think I've ever thought of that or or done it myself. But why not just um, eradicate it from like using an SEO tool and say we just want this link gone, uh, from a association with us? There is no SEO tool that will do that.

Adam Riemer: 24:27

You could technically use a disavow. Okay, disavow can be more dangerous. So unless you actually know what you're doing, do not touch the disavow tool. Interesting Plus, it's only going to work for Google, you'd have to go to Bing, you'd have to go to Yandex, navar, beidu, whichever search engine you're trying to optimize for and figure out things that way. This is a much easier approach. Okay, so what happens if they?

Dustin Howes: 24:51

don't have an affiliate program and you want it and you can't disavow, or you're telling me not to disavow. What's the next solution? You can just ask them to take the link down.

Adam Riemer: 25:05

I wouldn't recommend trying to attack the page because it's uh bad practice and sounds really rude.

Dustin Howes: 25:11

I don't even know how to do that.

Adam Riemer: 25:16

It's just doing negative SEO and a lot of times that can work against you. I mean, most of the time, a toxic link, at this time, that point or a bad one's just going to get ignored and you're not going to have to worry too much. But it's sometimes it just really bugs you that it's out there and those are your best chances and your best bets.

Dustin Howes: 25:33

All right, Looks like our buddy there. Oh, it's Patty Miguel, the original affiliate nerd that talked me into doing this twice a week and, uh, you know, making all this great content. Welcome, patty. Thanks for being here, buddy. So let's talk more a little bit about the SEO. Like you mentioned to me earlier that you're using something like 15 different SEO tools. I wanna know what that tech stack is like that you're utilizing for what you're doing.

Adam Riemer: 26:13

It's all different. So if you need to build so I use Buzzstream a lot to manage the contacts and the process and the flow and tagging people back and forth. I have accounts at SEMrush, which is the one that I prefer for just a quick overview or glance of a website, but I also have an account at Ahrefs and at Moz. I use multiple crawlers and I sometimes I cancel and then restart, like I've done that with deep crawler a couple of times and with on crawl. I use site bulb all the time, screaming frog. I canceled that and then I renew cause I need it, like twice a year. It just always changes out and it just depends on the project. On an enterprise level, you can't run a crawler off your desktop. You have to use something in the cloud and vice versa. It doesn't make sense to use a cloud for some for a smaller site like under a thousand pages.

Dustin Howes: 27:06

Beautiful, all right. Well, you hear to hear folks Adam Reimer using SEMrush. Get out there, use SEMrush. Use my link, dustinhousecom, for an extended free trial. Go check it out and use it for your SEO and scraping purposes. Nice job, thank you. I want to talk about a little bit of a hot topic that's going on in the industry right now and something that showed up just a couple of days in my inbox. I talked to the Ember Spears on Tuesday about it, and it's about trimming of affiliate programs, and what happened is some new company or a company that I'm an affiliate of that I've built content for, sends me an email that says hey, we're no longer working with people that are not within this parameter. Sorry, we're going to discontinue our relationship with Now. Trimming of affiliate programs makes sense in some points, especially if there's like fraud going on. But outside of fraud, do you think this is a good practice or do you just think this is busy work when you're trimming down the affiliates in the program?

Adam Riemer: 28:26

It depends on the reason why they're trimming them down. If it's because they don't produce enough sales, they should probably look at what their top partners are doing and seeing. Are they actually introducing customers or are they not, and is it value adding? But someone that's going to kick out the lower tier? They probably don't know that and they're not actually in the right role for themselves. And so basically what I would do is I would approach it back and be like I control this traffic. I understand if it's not high volume enough, but is there something else that happened? And then I'm just gonna. I'm not picking on you, but if you open a million support tickets and you're always asking for things and you're not high volume, you're probably eating time away from someone that is a larger potential. And I'm not saying you in general, I'm just saying I'm not saying you in particular, I'm just saying in general. Sometimes it's the lowest volume that also demands the most and you just can't handle it anymore because you have other things to do and other tasks to do. If the lower tier that's only doing maybe one or two sales a month or even 10 sales a month, is not bugging you, there's no reason to remove them, especially if they're driving top funnel or even mid-high touch points and they're still adding. They're building your company for you and if the bigger partners ever leave, that's how you still have sales coming into your program.

Adam Riemer: 29:46

Removing them if they don't require a lot of bandwidth from you is just stupid. Other times it could be the finance team they don't want. If it's an in-house program, they don't want to have to deal with the W-9s or 10-99s at the end of the year. They don't want to have to deal with cutting checks or paying the dollar for an ECH transfer and it's just them being finance. But that's your job as the manager to then go and talk to them. I understand you don't want to have to take those two minutes and you don't want to do this. So your lifetime value of a customer is worth this. By saving $1, you're sacrificing $2,000 a year and that. But the affiliate managers in most programs are just out of college or inexperienced marketers. They haven't had the time and experience to develop a full business persona in their hide so they don't know. Here's how I could approach this and resolve it, and so they just do what they're told and they kick out potentially good partnerships.

Dustin Howes: 30:40

Absolutely. And you never know what those long tail affiliates are going to be capable of five years down the road if their SEO value of their page takes off and they catch an algorithm that supports them and brings them up. So I just think it's really kind of silly to do that kind of trimming. Patty mentioned that. Yes, I am a prolific PPC brand bitter and secrets out. Oh, you caught me. Yeah, amazing, patty. All right, so switching topics. I know attribution. You love talking attribution. What would your ideal scenario be If you were to wave a wand and make a perfect program, creating from start? What's a perfect scenario in terms of attribution? Look like Everything's top funnel, top funnel.

Adam Riemer: 31:38

Click to check out done. The person hasn't been on the website before or hasn't shopped in years. They introduce them to the site. It's the very first touch point on the way into the server and you track it straight through the log. They visit multiple pages, they read multiple pages, they actually learn and explore the site. It's not just a quick checkout and you build a customer for life because they trust your site. Ok, the affiliate person goes out and they talk about the brand. They introduce it as a solution. They pre-sold and put the trust that they provide into your site. So the customer is even more trusting and that increases the conversion rate from the program too.

Dustin Howes: 32:21

All right. And so you're saying first click is the right way to go? No, never. I mean there's the last click. There is the last click. Ok, so what is the right click?

Adam Riemer: 32:35

It's going to be situational.

Dustin Howes: 32:37

OK.

Adam Riemer: 32:38

And so there was one audit I was doing on an affiliate program where they said you can't remove these partners because they have 20% new to file on making the 20% up, but they have 20% of new to file customers coming through. And so what I did was a deep dive into the analytics, because the program was only a couple years old and we were able to see wait, all of these partners were just intercepting the traffic and the customers that were already shopping, and before the program existed, all of that traffic was coming directly to us. So we ran a few tests with and without a program, and it turns out all of those customers were still shopping. The conversion rate was still the same when we removed the specific types of partners or the specific partners, and what happened was, yes, there are 20% new to file customers coming from this specific partner set, but those people were going to shop with or without. So even though that click would be a high value click, it didn't actually influence the sale. Even though it was a part of the customer lifecycle and the customer journey, it wasn't one that actually adds value. By closing that section of the program down, the company is more profitable and there's no loss. But it's all about doing the right tests with the right data.

Adam Riemer: 33:58

And the one question a lot of affiliate managers forget, because it could eliminate their job same with agencies and networks is would these sales have occurred without the affiliate program existing? Did the traffic already come through? Will it still come through if we don't have a program at all? And those are the types of things there's other times where I've been taken off guard, where I didn't think a touch point was going to add value. And when we remove those touch points, we did see the sales actually drop. And when that happens, yes, the partner was reducing revenue and margin a bit, but at the same time that one specific partner was actually building value for the brand and building trust, because it was a known, incredible person that they could go and they could research and that person actually did influence it. And so I was like cool, you know what, let's partner with them more often. Even though the sales are going to have a reduced margin, we're going to win some extras over because we watch a small conversion bump.

Adam Riemer: 34:59

So again, you've got to test. But you've got to remember what would happen if there was no program and what happens if we move social media ads. What happens if we remove email remarketing? Because maybe it's the combination of an affiliate review with an email campaign that goes out if the person didn't shop, and maybe that's the magic formula right there. So now you know let's actually an extra 30% and split that there, so each one on the touchpoint line gets an extra 15%. Sorry, I'm starting to get excited. And yeah, and then now you have an actual weight system that's going to show you where you're getting value and where you're not, and that's why there's no one right answer.

Dustin Howes: 35:37

Fair enough. So if there's a the affiliate manager that is looking for to try to find and evaluate this kind of information, what would be one of the first steps for them to do? Granted, it's like an internal affiliate manager that has access to all of this capability. If you're an agency, it makes it a little tougher with clients to get that kind of information right.

Adam Riemer: 36:02

Just depends. Yeah again setting expectations. In your contract, you should say here's the data we need, here's what we're going to have. If you have questions about this, we may need to expand our technology reach. If you don't provide that with us, we will not be able to get you the answers you look for.

Dustin Howes: 36:17

Okay, so setting expectations. Great point there. Beautiful. All right, let's switch gears. You're getting a little too handsy and emotional about attribution. I'm going to switch gears all together here just to throw you off. All right, we're going to go into automation. I know you love AI and building content with it. Tell me more about your real thoughts on AI and what to do with it. It can be helpful.

Adam Riemer: 36:46

Okay, but you have to use it the right way. Llms, which I'm assuming you're are you talking about LLMs like chat, gpt and barred and stuff?

Dustin Howes: 36:55

Yeah, jasper, and the such yeah.

Adam Riemer: 36:57

Yeah. So basically, it's not factual and it's not accurate, but it can save you time, it can help you format, it can rewrite paragraphs when you're stuck and it can change the tone and the voice and the tense so that it matches a style that's going to resonate with your audience. That you can't have it try to use slang and things you can't expect it to be factual. Ryan Jones from St Pete Razorfish just tweeted out today he decided to show people know it's not factual. Oh my gosh, I can't talk. Sorry, it's not factual. What is factional? Is that a word Factual? I don't even know.

Dustin Howes: 37:33

I'm trying my best to be here.

Adam Riemer: 37:34

I am, you're just a funny joke around with and just be stupid with. And I'm trying to be professional here.

Dustin Howes: 37:39

I am most factual. Down on my nose Am I on the Coray. I think that's how you see it.

Adam Riemer: 37:44

He typed in what's the phrase, the sentence, like the lazy dog jumped over the quick fox or whatever that is. He removed the S's from it and said does this have all the letters? And LLM just makes the assumption that, yes, it does, but no, if he removed the S and there's a lot of examples of this where it's not factual but it's going to confidently tell you it is and Ryan gave a good thread where he showed a bunch of examples. So use it. Don't use it for research. Don't use it for writing, use it for rewriting and use it to help find ideas and things that you wouldn't have thought of to include.

Adam Riemer: 38:20

But do your own research after and make sure it's factual, make sure it's topically relevant. And just because AI bot tells you it's relevant, you have to look at the entities and search you have to look at. Doesn't make sense. Are people relating this on Reddit in real time? Are they doing that inside social media? Follow the hashtags. If yes, then it's probably topically relevant. If it not, then it's just LLM feeding you ideas that probably shouldn't exist within there.

Dustin Howes: 38:50

Beautiful. I like that concept of letting it rewrite for you after you've already created that content. That's a really smart way to go about it, and it's going to read a whole lot better as well, like a normal human being would write an article.

Adam Riemer: 39:09

You don't like the good old days out there.

Dustin Howes: 39:13

Alright, last question for you, Adam, before I let you go Continued education. I don't see on a ton of forums or like out there. You know I'm always looking at you to be that leader out there, but every leader still has to continue their own education. What are you doing out there to continue to get better at your job?

Adam Riemer: 39:38

I go and I attend sessions at conferences and I go to workshops and I attend all skill level seminars and I always put myself into one or two where I don't feel comfortable. I don't know the topic or if never looked at it. Like I was at one show and they had predictive analytics courses and it was all about HR and what can you do in someone's career path to ensure they quit within the next three years but stay for that, like it was some crazy cool data modeling. And those people are me, the HR teams. Wow, yeah, they were vicious in that session. It was like and here's how we can mess with them just enough so that they stay for the rest of their career and retire with like it was crazy, but the modeling and the analytics were cool. And then I was able to sit there and say, well, could I apply this to a website? It's just out of your comfort zone and things and learn from different subjects you probably wouldn't have thought of. I think you do apply that to your website.

Dustin Howes: 40:40

I feel like your give, give zero shits. A model like really presents itself well in your website. On your blog, posts like I'm just telling you what I'm thinking, I know I'm right and you feel free to read it. And joy to feel like like that's been your attitude, your whole, as long as I've known you, at least.

Adam Riemer: 41:02

I don't say I'm always right.

Dustin Howes: 41:04

I know you don't say it, but I can see it in your face, not every time.

Adam Riemer: 41:08

No, I say I'm wrong when I am. I know a lot.

Dustin Howes: 41:12

I know you do. Yeah, we just talked about that.

Adam Riemer: 41:15

you own when you are your mistakes and whatnot, but the blocks just what's in my head at the time and if it comes off as American than it does, and that's unfortunate. But if I am wrong in there, people have called me up before and I go in and that's the one time I really edit it. Or when something's updated and I know for a fact it's not factual anymore and I'm personally going to go reference it, then I go and I update and correct it. You'll find articles where I scratched out and I did the cross out and I put it in the correct things, and a lot of times if it was someone, I'll ask hey, do you mind if I call you out and say, hey, thank you for correcting this or telling me something was wrong, but I also go in and I check it.

Adam Riemer: 41:52

There was an article I wrote on search engine journal where someone asked a specific question. I gave them a specific answer. Someone didn't like that answer because it went against their ideas. So they asked in a very different way to John Mueller and John said Well, no, this is incorrect. The question they asked and the question that I was asked were very different. What John answered was a correct answer and I agree with him 100%. That's not the question, and so there's a big difference on right and wrong.

Adam Riemer: 42:19

It depends on why you are asked in, the situation the person was in, and it goes with blog posts too. Is this situation also relevant to yours? If it's not, the answer that I wrote or the topic that I wrote about, it's not going to apply to you. So it does apply to the situation I was facing. So maybe a different way is I could ask you what are you facing and is, or I could say Is this the situation you are in? If no, please explain it, or what situation are you in and can you tell me why? This would not work for it, and then I can give a better answer or an addendum I think that's where it's called and add something onto it.

Dustin Howes: 42:56

Beautifully said.

Adam Riemer: 42:59

Yeah, if I get something wrong, I get it wrong and I'll own it.

Dustin Howes: 43:03

Absolutely. It's what I love about you, and you know why we get along in this kind of fashion is because we're opinionated and we have opinions. I think you're fun and entertaining.

Adam Riemer: 43:15

That's why I like you.

Dustin Howes: 43:16

Well, I, oh, so you don't respect my opinion. That's what you're saying now. So rude, just class. Of course I do.

Adam Riemer: 43:25

I wouldn't talk to you for this long if I didn't. There's maybe air again. I just said I like five times.

Dustin Howes: 43:34

Adam, appreciate your time. Man, Thanks for being here. Always great time to talk to you. Can't wait to see you at the next conference. Appreciate it.

Adam Riemer: 43:43

Sam, thank you for having me. You got it.

Dustin Howes: 43:45

All right, and for those of you that enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to the podcast. My guest next week will be Delkan Dunn and Brian Hawkins. Stay tuned for that. If you would like to be an affiliate nerd and hang out with me, come and push this QR code or go to the DustinHousecom slash nerd. Fill out the form and I will take a look at what you want to talk about. All right, folks, thanks for being here. Have a good one, take care.