Affiliate Marketing and Content Nerding Out

Dustin Howes 0:48

Hey folks , welcome to Affiliate Nerd out . I am your Nerdirator , Dustin Howes . Spread that good word about affiliate marketing . You're going to find me here on LinkedIn Live every Tuesday and Thursday at 12.15 Pacific Time , so please smash that subscribe button on YouTube or just come hang out on LinkedIn anytime . My nerd guest of the day is Michael McNerney , owner publisher extraordinaire over at Martek Record , and he's going to be nerding out about affiliate and content . So glad to have you , mike . Welcome to the Nerditorium .

Michael Mcnerney 1:24

Thanks for having me , Dustin Howes . I'm happy to be here . I've been told I have a radio voice . But you really do . It's impressive .

Dustin Howes 1:31

It's a work in progress . I'm getting there . I appreciate that sentiment and it's not every day I get somebody that matches my flavor for hair . We've got the same haircut here . I did shave it's November season , yeah , by the terms of our contract . Today I have taken down my famous Will Clark sign autograph Jersey because Mike is such a big Cubs fan and it has been replaced by a picture of my son and a Cubs hat . Then Adam Wise also asked that I bring some New York Mets , so I put some baseball cards up there as well .

Michael Mcnerney 2:13

I was 13 years old when the Giants beat the Cubs and to go to the World Series , that's a devastating time in your life to lose . Will Clark was largely responsible for that tragedy .

Dustin Howes 2:26

That will happen . I felt the same pain in that same year , just a couple of weeks later , when the Giants beat the Giants in the World Series . I feel it , but yes , mark Grace is just the biggest legend in your country , as Will Clark is in mind .

Michael Mcnerney 2:44

Two great swing in lefties Beautiful .

Dustin Howes 2:47

All right , we're jumping into live Q&A here . If you want to get in this chat and you want to talk and ask questions to Mike , this is a great opportunity . Anything , affiliate , anything , content marketing please do so in here . Now we've got a question of the day . What do you want to ask the audience here , mike ? Something for engagement purposes . What should the question of the day be ?

Michael Mcnerney 3:11

Here's what I want to know of affiliate marketers what team do they report into ?

Dustin Howes 3:16

Oh , great call . You mean as in the sales or the marketing team .

Michael Mcnerney 3:20

Essentially , or the product team . I started asking a question of affiliate marketers and I was shocked by the answers I got . I thought everyone would say I reported into the marketing team or the performance team or , and I got people reporting to the BV team , the product team Product was the most interesting and so I just started asking that and I'd be very curious .

Dustin Howes 3:43

I am as well . I feel like from the agency standpoint it is almost exclusively marketing , but I could be wrong . Maybe that's my experience , but others could be . Please drop it in the chat . What team does the affiliate program report to ? Great question , mike . Thanks for jumping in there , man . Now , before we get into it , mike , who are you ?

Michael Mcnerney 4:11

Good question . I am Mike McNerney . I'm the publisher of Mar-Tech Record . Mar-tech Record is an independent trade publication that covers affiliate , marketing and commerce contents , and I tell anyone who will listen that my background is trade publishing , so I know how to run a trade publishing organization . My background is not affiliate .

Michael Mcnerney 4:36

Like a lot of us , I kind of fell into it and when I got in here , I found it a fascinating market , one that I thought applied a lot to publishing , something I understood I had a lot of need for transparency and information , and so I founded Mar-Tech Record about four years ago and with the goal of being kind of the best independent resource for affiliate marketers , and I think we'll get in there .

Dustin Howes 4:59

Absolutely . I'm always impressed by the content you guys are creating and the folks that you're bringing in to write . That content is always you brought me in every once in a while and just really appreciate you thinking me in that aptitude that I can write , as I said , anyone who listens .

Michael Mcnerney 5:20

I've never run an affiliate market .

Dustin Howes 5:23

I got to find the people who know what they're talking about .

Michael Mcnerney 5:25

That's the role I've got is bringing the experts together .

Dustin Howes 5:28

Well , happy to do so anytime We've got an answer to a question . Kristen Big Time Evans , big Fan , big , two Time guest on the show Marketing and Brand . You've gone to Brand interesting . I guess that makes sense in the E-Com space where she lives and breathes .

Michael Mcnerney 5:49

That's interesting . I don't think you would have put affiliate on the brand team 10 years ago . And today you can use affiliate to tell a story and enhance your brand and I think that's recognized . I think Kristen's answer is interesting in itself .

Dustin Howes 6:03

Well , she's onto something Absolutely One of the biggest potentials in affiliate marketing is on the branding side . A lot of the affiliate content is top of the funnel brand recognition . That pays off in the long run . I guess it does make sense in a lot of ways .

Michael Mcnerney 6:23

Yeah , it's hard to measure , but I think people are starting to learn about it .

Dustin Howes 6:27

True , true , all right . Well , my guess Michael McNerney is here and you can find in the chat a link to his profile , and I'm also going to drop in the link where you can subscribe to Martek record as well . And if you would like to be in my seat , come be my guest . Go to dustin howes . DustinHousecom , slash nerd , drop an application and tell me what you want to nerd out about . We can come and hang out . So , martek record , tell us about the name origin . How did this name come about ?

Michael Mcnerney 7:03

It's a good question . So there's kind of two . There's two parts of the name Martek and record . I'll start with Martek .

Michael Mcnerney 7:12

When I was , I started my affiliate career at a platform called Partner Eyes and I was talking to a woman at Ziff Davis and they were looking for B2B publications to acquire at the time , and I thought this was nuts , because I worked at a B2B publication and it was a really hard way to make money . You know , digital ecosystem changed and so I started digging into why she was asking this question and it occurred to me that there was a basic trend line in e-commerce and that was that things that you bought online were getting more expensive and had a more complicated purchase process throughout time . So if you went back 10 years , you bought books and shoes online . You know , now you can buy mattresses and healthcare .

Michael Mcnerney 8:03

Complicated expensive things , right . And to me it seemed pretty obvious that that trend line was going to continue . And so if you were to start a digital media business that monetized things by affiliate , you should just follow that line and see where it goes . And to me , the obvious end point of that line was enterprise software , right . So if you can find a way to write about enterprise software and eventually someone will create good technology that allows you to track those readers , readers will get more sophisticated themselves and start trusting content , which I think they already have .

Michael Mcnerney 8:36

So the first idea was to simply do something in the marketing technology space that creates value , and the second one was I just stole it from the company I used to work for . I stole a lot of good ideas from them . I worked for a company called McGraw Hill that I'm sure most of your listeners know that at the time owned a portfolio of trade publications and I was in charge of their digital media business . This is before we had anything like affiliate to monetize trade publishing or B2B , and a lot of our publications were the something record , and it had this like gravitas . So I needed something with gravitas . We had a publication called architectural record , which is still around .

Michael Mcnerney 10:17

It's a great publication engineering news record and these were kind of like the preeminent publications in these markets and I knew that it was a great term . We could use it all . The record is just a great term , especially for something that you want to be credible , and so I didn't honestly know that it was going to get into the affiliate space . I was still trying to figure out what marketing technology vertical I wanted to go after , but I knew I wanted to use the term record and Mar-Tech gave me a little bit of flexibility as I kind of figured out what it was I wanted to do .

Dustin Howes 10:51

Awesome . That is a great story . I'm glad you had some kind of thought process in it . I love the .

Michael Mcnerney 10:59

I think any entrepreneur out there spends too much time thinking about the name of their business . Right , it's like after it . It takes you forever , and then you just start to realize you should have made that decision months ago .

Dustin Howes 11:10

Well , I feel like the COVID era also bounced off a rebranding era . Like people took the time to rebrand a lot of different brands and you didn't have to go through that , if you strategically put it in place to begin with , then well now , now you say , why don't you call it the affiliate record or the commerce record or all you know ?

Michael Mcnerney 11:31

maybe , maybe that's more appropriate , given , given what we cover . But you know , at the time you got , you got to pick a lane and stick with it for sure . I mean you know enough of a wide-acture , that we cover a few different things .

Dustin Howes 11:47

Yeah , everybody's a critic , but Define Martek for everybody out there what ? What does Martek mean ?

Michael Mcnerney 11:56

Yeah , it just means marketing technology . I think that there's a couple of . You know there's people distinguished between ad tech , which kind of tends to trade back and forth Advertising it's a kind of average media buying technology and Martek , which tends to be SaaS based and allow you to kind of Manage data a little bit .

Michael Mcnerney 12:16

At least that was kind of how people thought about it probably five , ten years ago . The two have kind of merged , you know , yeah , I probably mean the same thing today , so I would define it as more a catch-all term for technology that marketers use to buy , measure and track Media in some capacity , and what we're talking about that's obviously an affiliate that could have applied to the networks and the Platforms as well , as , you know , any of the integrated technology used to optimize your affiliate programs .

Dustin Howes 12:49

Fantastic , great answer . Love it . So , martek , record what are you guys doing and who are you servicing out there ?

Michael Mcnerney 12:56

Yeah , so our main goal is to make Decision making easier for anyone who exists in the affiliate marketing or Commerce content space , so we try to look at anywhere there's an important decision to be made , whether that's Choosing an affiliate marketing platform , hiring a service provider via an agency or someone from the platforms right .

Michael Mcnerney 13:17

Thinking about which publishers to partner with what into commission . All of these are important decisions that if we can make a little bit easier for you , then we'll do . We're doing our job right and we can kind of monetize that in a number of ways . And so the observation when I started the business was here is a business that had dozens of different Technology players , thousands of publishers , right Tons of different types of brands , was growing into other markets , kind of as as we got into it and had tons of opaqueness , right Like the easiest way to learn stuff was go to affiliate summit and Great , it was wonderful but , that's not the most efficient way to grow a market right .

Michael Mcnerney 13:57

So our simple job is just how do you create some transparency around these decisions ? And so an example is just our buyers guide for marketing for , for platforms and networks . You , as the agency Dustin , are going to make a recommendation to your client . You know that's a core part of your job . Our buyers guide should help them , you know , make that decision a little faster . You may make a recommendation and say hey , by the way , you should just read this and maybe they'll make that decision just a day faster , which makes everyone's job a little easier . It gives people more confidence , right ?

Dustin Howes 14:31

Maybe it's .

Michael Mcnerney 14:32

You went to an event that we threw and you met someone and you built trust through them , because you met them in person At our events , or maybe you saw them speak at a webinar that we hosted . Maybe you downloaded one of our Compensation guides that gives you ranges on salaries . All these things you know made your life a little bit easier . We think , and if we make you know a decision a little bit easier , there's value you can capture there , and so that's what we do we . We create content that gets in the middle of these decisions and helps you make them a little bit faster .

Dustin Howes 15:03

Yes , and it's absolutely incredible content written by professionals that know what they're doing , and I Love the strategy that you have in place putting the right people in the right Articles to that have that expertise and experience . Just love how you guys are creating that content for both sides of the affiliate marketing . It is is built some some incredible , incredible gravity towards you as a company and I think it started first from the content . You started you didn't have monetization and involved or in mind necessarily when you started this out . You came with a content first attitude . Can you tell us about that journey ? When you did start this four years ago , what are the first steps you did like creating a strategy for this and where it was going ?

Michael Mcnerney 15:55

Yeah , well , you know I knew that if you could Develop a strong , engaged audience , you know there are a lot of ways to monetize that , especially in the B2B space , and so to do that , I knew I needed kind of two things . First , one was content , of course , and you just had to make it good , and if you make content good , people will find it right . The second , I don't think we really talked about , was actually came before . That was design . First , you know you have to design really lends credibility to

Publishing

Michael Mcnerney 16:29

A publisher and I think that the kind of offerings that were in the market at that point just didn't look professional . They may have been good , they just didn't look professional .

Dustin Howes 16:38

Okay .

Michael Mcnerney 16:39

You know , I I started my career at a big New York ad agency and , lucky enough , my art director had started her own agency after that and I went to her and I said Katie , you got to make some logos that look like we've been here for a while . Mm-hmm , she did just that .

Michael Mcnerney 16:55

she's fantastic , you know if anyone out there is looking for a great graphic designer . You know she created kind of gravitas right away and that really is important . When you're publishing , you want people to believe while you're publishing it's valuable and don't overlook the design element . So we created design and so we kind of a shell to start with and then sat down and said what would be valuable for people who are trying to make decisions ? And I think the first Thing we did was say , hey , how do we evaluate the , the platforms and the networks out there ?

Michael Mcnerney 17:27

Mm-hmm , we went out and just conducted surveys and got real data and real feedback and have an advantage of not having any clients at the point , was you can publish whatever you want , right ? So One of you know , if you start with clients first , then you get a little biased about what you publish , right ? Okay , I'm paying you , right , so you might , you know , you know , publish something that's a little more favorable to them . But if you don't have any clients , you can publish the information that happens really credible , and then that established , you know a trend , right , people understood that that's who we were . You know the correct information , or information that was from you know people who work in the industry , right ?

Michael Mcnerney 18:07

I've said it a million times , like I've never run an affiliate marketing campaign . So what we publish comes from you . We're just run surveys , we publish what you say , we get experts involved and I'm not smart enough about affiliate marketing to to alter the content . I just believe you and publish it , and then I think what ends up happening then is our clients See that that really attracts people and it's not much higher engagement .

Michael Mcnerney 18:32

Then if you're kind of catering to you know one advertiser or another , and once you kind of establish that independence , it's easier to kind of move forward with that . You know , since you already have it , have it going . So it's kind of design then content , and then next comes people reading it and once that's happening , then you monetize right . You need some patience to do that right . You need to spend a year of your life probably not generating a ton of . Yeah super easy but but I think it pays off in the long run .

Dustin Howes 19:03

Well , yeah , you're through that process . You're through the hard part , right , and I love the editorial integrity portion of what you guys have built out there , of the content first , and you're not , you know , taking money where you don't necessarily ranking Companies above others . I mean , I think you know things like g2 that have Softwares out there that they're pitching . You can buy your way to the top of that and I don't love that . It's not a great user experience and I love going . I will go to a content publication like yourself , way before I ever go and listen to Experts talk about those five stars and like how they got there . I mean .

Michael Mcnerney 19:50

To me , g2 represents exactly what was wrong with , still is , to some degree , the internet right , which was before g2 . You had quality print publications that people posted .

Michael Mcnerney 20:02

You also had bad ones too , by the way , but people understood which ones had higher quality . You know , digital transformation kind of destroyed some the way you monetize content , and there was a gap between Building new or so in the middle of building new content providers that have quality . And in the middle , people like g2 Figured out that if you're just really good at scraping the web and SEO , you can attract an audience and throw up rankings and make a bunch of money . Right , but it's not a long term strategy , right ? I mean , everyone kind of knows right now , those things are bogus . All you got to do is look at one of those graphs they produce and realize no one there has ever worked in that industry , has any clue what they're talking about . Right , they're really good at SEO and they're great at web scraping , which are both automated tools .

Michael Mcnerney 20:44

Right , it's harder to get an audience if you're doing what I'm doing , right , but the audience you get actually listens to you and eventually that makes a difference .

Dustin Howes 20:55

And word gets around the streets too . Like they , they come to your publication because they know it's authentic . So let's talk about the , the content and then the monetization . When is that right time for a company to go and start thinking

Monetization and Timing in Content Creation

Dustin Howes 21:09

about making money with the site and the content that they've already created ?

Michael Mcnerney 21:14

You know I think it really depends on what market you're in , you know you have to have engagement and trust on some level right , and it depends what you're trying to do , right . What I've been trying to do is create , you know , media property , and so you need some degree of scale to do that right . You can't just have two people in your audience .

Michael Mcnerney 21:34

You could take you know , a B2B audience , you know , and turn that into a referral business , you know , then you can have less people . So really kind of depends on how you want to make money and what , what vertical you , what vertical you exist in . So you know , for us it was , you know , between the first real piece of content we put out it was kind of a it's called an eight month process before we started having revenue and probably another year before you're driving enough revenue to be really making money . But that's hard to say , I don't , I don't know . I think if you're in the consumer space it's a totally different game which , on the consumer media space , that terrifies me . You gotta compete much , much harder . You got to deal with Google , which I don't really have to deal with . So you know it totally depends . That's a terrible answer to your question .

Dustin Howes 22:27

Well , I don't think so . I mean , it's all general . Some strategists will say , like , let a piece of content bake for a couple of months at least , until Google console can , like , pick up the SEO value of it and it starts to rank on Google before you ever put monetization into it . If you monetize it immediately , it might hurt that value of the content , of what Google sees in their eyes . So everybody's got a different strategy . But some want to make money quicker , like yeah . I think it really depends .

Michael Mcnerney 22:58

Like you mentioned , like I don't pay attention to Google or SEO right Type community . You know we're way too narrow for for . You can start looking at search terms for you know , this about affiliate marketing and it's a really narrow and not huge audience , so it's not this massive , scalable audience . Like you know , we just try to create really good content for a really tight community , and if I spend my whole time thinking about search and Google , I'd rather I'd rather create good content , right .

Dustin Howes 23:31

Absolutely . I mean Adam Reimer and Leigh Ann Johnstone all have that same mentality , adam Wise as well as like in that content focus , I'm writing things that people want to read essentially and , yeah , you're covering , like you know washing machines , right , it's a different story .

Michael Mcnerney 23:50

Right , there's a formula . Yeah , it takes six months , right . You do all the right things for SEO . Then it becomes every green content . You update it every six months right , there's a formula there and you create great content doing that too . I don't think that formula exists for something as niche as I'm doing . If it does , and someone else out there knows that , just give me a call after the chat about it .

Dustin Howes 24:13

Oh , fantastic , all right , and let's talk about affiliate and where it fits into your strategy . You guys are jumping into it now , but it wasn't there maybe a year or two ago . How is affiliate working for you right now ?

Michael Mcnerney 24:30

Yeah , so it's not right we're not doing anything in affiliate . Okay , monetizing our own content presently . However , it's a very important part of our strategy , as I kind of said a little bit earlier when I started this . You know , I drew that line saying you

Affiliate Marketing Community Growth

Michael Mcnerney 24:45

know , today is healthcare and mattresses . Those are both complicated , expensive purchases , what's what's five years from now ?

Michael Mcnerney 24:53

And to me it was , you know , enterprise level software , which I think affiliate platforms and agencies and all that kind of qualify it . And so I think we're kind of halfway to that point where the consumers and the readers trust the content and that the advertisers , in this case being platforms , networks , other types of technology , service providers would like to set up an affiliate program . Right , but I don't think it's quite . It's quite there , right , yeah , but I think we're like really close to a point . I'd love to have it so that I can track you know who read what review , and you know we get a commission from you know , rackets and their impact or CJ or whomever based on , based on that , but we're not quite there yet . Okay , close .

Dustin Howes 25:38

And once we are .

Michael Mcnerney 25:39

I can really use your . You know someone's help so absolutely Happy to help you .

Dustin Howes 25:43

I love what you're doing and I'd love to be a part of it . So happy to come in . Alright , let's take a quick break for our sponsor the day . This is something near and dear to my heart and it is performed marketing manager . But , more importantly , it is November season and this face is fresh because I'm going to be growing a stash on it over November . November has been a part of my life for the last 13 years as well , and it's all about men's health and getting to that doctor . Go to dustinhowes . com . Slash mauve . You would like to donate to my campaign , and I'm personally putting in a portion of my profits this year to my November campaign as well . Have you ever been a mo bro there , mike ?

Michael Mcnerney 26:34

I haven't , but now I'm inspired . You know I could have . I was going to do Mike did for Halloween , but I didn't get around to it . So that would be a perfect , you know , a perfect start .

Dustin Howes 26:44

That would have been a great start . Yes , you have the bears oh yeah , I got the whole .

Michael Mcnerney 26:50

Thing .

Dustin Howes 26:51

Fantastic , awesome , well , thanks for for joining me in there . Now , pivoting into like affiliate you guys aren't doing an affiliate strategy to beat strategy , necessarily , but for some reason , the affiliate world has gravitated towards your community like something I've never seen before . And Martek Records Slack group is up to like 4,000 people now in there and everybody in there is generously giving their opinions to questions like hey , does anybody have a contact over here ? What do you think about this kind of product ? Is this merchant , is somebody to work with ? Everybody is sharing at a an incredible click and it is a great community to be a part of . How did this happen ? Why are so many publishers and merchants alike coming into Martek Records ? And this is our hub .

Michael Mcnerney 27:49

Well , I mean , I wish I had a great answer . I think , honestly , the easiest and most truthful answer is it's a reflection of people who work in Mart in affiliate marketing .

Dustin Howes 27:59

Okay .

Michael Mcnerney 28:00

You know , that's something I learned when I joined , so eight years ago now is it's just ? With or without technology . It's people who are just very willing to connect to share , to help people out , and you know that's , it's just it's a great group of people and I love working in this community partially because of that .

Michael Mcnerney 28:23

So I think that's the key . There's some kind of other trends right that I think kind of help make this market a place where kind of a Slack community thrives . You know , one is and most importantly , I think that it's a kind of community that when it's growing and it is all boats kind of rise right and everyone kind of sees that and so there's an incentive to help . The second is , it's a market where there's a lot of opaqueness , right . It's not easy to find or it wasn't until we started right the right technology , the right service , the right pricing . You know , when I started at partner eyes , the first thing I said was who are the competitors in this market ? And took me like two months to figure it out . It was like I had to fly around the country and ask a bunch of questions , which was great . I learned how great people are and I learned how hard it was to find information . And so I think the opaqueness of the market , kind of the fact that it's growing and everyone sees that , you know , by sharing information they can grow , and the need for new information , you know those things just help make a community grow , how it grew on Slack is a little I don't . I wish I had a great answer . You know , I wish I had a really strategic , thoughtful answer about how I built this type of thing , but I think it's a reflection of the community more than me , right ?

Michael Mcnerney 29:54

I invited people in the beginning when I needed people to fill out surveys , because I needed something to give them , frankly , and I didn't have much . And then I gave , I invited people who registered for some of our webinars early because , again , I didn't have a lot to offer as I was , as I was getting started , and then I got lucky that the right people started to contribute . And you know , I've been proving wrong so many times looking at that community and thinking I know what I'm talking about , right , I look in there and I see someone post something and I'm like why are they asking that ? And then tons of conversation starts , right . And then I'll post something and , like you know , crickets . So I've been proving over and over again that , like , it's not my content that's doing it , it's other people .

Dustin Howes 30:39

But it is super interesting .

Michael Mcnerney 30:40

I mean , and I almost say too , like before I started , I really didn't like Slack . You know , it's just another thing . Really , things were like I felt old because it was another thing that was alerting me on my phone . I didn't want more . You know , first time I really felt old technology perspective . I felt like my parents being like what is this extra thing ? And then you know I've got , you know it's . You know , 3,500 people or so in a Slack community .

Dustin Howes 31:03

Yeah that's .

Michael Mcnerney 31:05

that seemed very engaged and it seems seems to be , it seems to be something people like , so it's .

Dustin Howes 31:10

It is pretty incredible . The only way you can get into that Slack channel is to subscribe to Martek record and then you can get an invite . This is an invite , only Slack channel .

Michael Mcnerney 31:21

You need to get invited by somebody in the channel and be subscribed to Martek record , so subscribe . It's in the link somewhere Dustin posted that , yeah .

Dustin Howes 31:30

yeah , it's in the chat there , go go get it , dustin .

Michael Mcnerney 31:33

invite you to Slack channel .

Dustin Howes 31:34

I can uh if , if I approve , we'll see like uh .

Michael Mcnerney 31:38

Dustin is our qualified .

Dustin Howes 31:42

Justin , absolutely . Um , all right , so you don't know the answer , but I do . Uh , it is a . It is the cool club right now , like everybody's coming to this because we've all been looking for it in our career and everybody keeps on engaging and it is . I am checking it on the daily and engaging with other people and answering their questions , and that's the person I want to be , and the people that you're that are gravitating towards it are in that same kind of mindset . So , um , it is a hot place to be . Uh , this , this Slack channel is , is where all the cool kids are right now .

Michael Mcnerney 32:25

I am curious too from your community and people who I'm sure there are people listening who are active members in there is , um , I get worried if it gets too big , right , and what's the point where you fractionalize it ? Right , and how do you do that , right ? And I , since I've been so hands off , my instinct is to just remain hands off about it . But , um , you know , it's closed in on 4,000 people , which is a lot , yeah , and there's a point where you know you want to get into some subgroups . Right , and this is again goes back to my career at McGraw Hill . We we've covered architecture , design , construction , and we would create at the time these , like you know , very tight groups of you know architects who built schools , you know , and you know contractors who did roofing or whatever , and so I'm always wondering , like , when , when's the point where you kind of fractionalize this stuff ?

Michael Mcnerney 33:12

and so , um , that's my second question yeah , for for people .

Dustin Howes 33:15

Well , I think you're doing a great uh job of that already , naturally , like there's a a publication spot , there is an agency spot , there is a uh network and event spot and you can you can post in these freely and you're uh making sure everybody's following the rules on a , we really appreciate when you are policing the . The folks out there that are are trying to be overly uh , promotional . I would say , um , and it's a fine line sometimes , does not be overly promotional .

Michael Mcnerney 33:50

Everyone wants to use it to get business right . So they totally sure you know , we're just trying to be , uh , you know , a friendly , a friendly way of doing it , you know you kind of know when you know right , because , uh , that's my only way of describing it .

Dustin Howes 34:02

Yeah , I don't think you should change anything . Honestly , I can't believe more people don't post questions on the daily on there and just um , really get into it . I , I , I wanted to stay the same , where it is like the engagement today is great , and if it raises up to 5 000 like , so be it . Uh , I just hope more people do engage . Um , so , um . So let's take a step back and talk about lessons for those young entrepreneurs out there that are you had to take a leap at some point and say , hey , I'm going to create this awesome publication , I'm going to do it the right way . I'm going to be taking a break on paychecks for X amount of months or years or whatever to make this happen . What are some of those lessons you want to give to the folks out there that might be thinking about taking the same leap ?

Michael Mcnerney 34:58

Yeah , I'll tell you what the advice I got was from my dad , who worked in some entrepreneurial roles , and I had never thought of myself as a risk taker or an entrepreneur . It was not something that I even considered until I was kind of in my early 40s . And advice he'd given me years before kind of crept up , if you will , and that was if you see a problem , fix it , and if you fix it , you probably have a business , right . So I just haven't seen any problems . I'm sure I had , but I kind of ignored them to that point . And I got into the affiliate marketing space and this problem of lack of information became pretty glaring to me and then I realized that I was in a unique position to know how to fix it . I'm probably one of the few people who's ever run a trade publications , digital media business and worked in affiliate marketing . That was a unique skill set , right . I didn't realize it until suddenly it hit me in the face that the industry needed a trade pub and I happened to know how to do that . And so that advice that I'd heard years earlier , which is , if you see a problem , fix it , I added to it , which is if you see a problem that you know how to fix , go fix it . And so that's how I started and that's advice that I'd pass on to anyone is if you're sitting there and you see a problem , stop complaining and then you'll have a business .

Michael Mcnerney 36:30

The second one is , yes , scary . It's not having a salary . I was not a risk taker . I've never been out of a job and suddenly there I was , without a job , trying to start something that , frankly , most people I knew well did not understand and thought was totally nuts . But you got to have conviction right . You got to know in your heart that this is the right thing . I just knew this was the right thing . So I think that's important because it takes all of the effort you have in the world and if you don't have that energy in you , you won't make it . The third thing is really simple , but you forget sometimes because you wake up plenty of days kind of wondering what the hell you're thinking .

Michael Mcnerney 37:16

It's just do one thing right , one thing at a time , and Dustin , you run your own business , and so I'm sure you can relate to this . Like you know , sometimes they have a hard time getting started . It's just do that one thing right , and whatever that one thing is , we'll leave , do another thing , and you know , pretty soon that gets the ball rolling . So it can be a simple thing , but just just do one thing and do it right away in the morning . And he ended up , you know , publishing a lot .

Dustin Howes 37:42

That is a great tip . It is something that's taken me a long time to figure out . I get this anxiety . I call it a case of the Mondays Like yeah , we've all been there right , we're somewhere out .

Michael Mcnerney 37:56

It's hard to do one thing , it's hard to respond to an email sometimes , and it's amazing what doing one thing can do . And then , on top of that , do one thing at a time . Okay , because it gets really easy to get overwhelmed with the 100 things you've got to do , but you're not going to be able to do more than one at a time , so just do one thing and then do a second thing .

Dustin Howes 38:18

So so true , All right . What's the affiliate future hold ? What do you have in mind here ? Where do you think this industry is going ?

Michael Mcnerney 38:27

Yeah , I mean . I think the general

Future of Affiliate Marketing and Impact

Michael Mcnerney 38:29

prediction that I have for three or four years ago is still proving out and still correct , right , which is the affiliate tactic , as I'll call it in this case , is something that almost any content provider who's trying to monetize content can and will use , and in some capacity , and I you know that was five years ago that was seen as a future looking .

Michael Mcnerney 38:55

I think we're in that space now . So I think we're kind of still on that slope of like affiliate tracks e-commerce growth and will be kind of leveraged by any content providers out there . What I think the second phase of that that's starting to happen now is , if that's true , then the corollary of that is pretty much any marketer whether they're an affiliate marketing team , you know a PR team , an influencer team , a brand team , you know a BDE team that's setting up deals should have affiliate in their tool belt , right . It's a tactic that helps , you know , amplify a lot of the things you're doing , and I think that's starting to be recognized . I think that's the kind of new thing that's going to be talked about in 2024 , which is something we all kind of know deep down right . Like if you're using affiliate to write reviews and those reviews are filling up you know the internet , then that's a branding tool that impacts your branding .

Michael Mcnerney 39:57

Sure , there's no question that people are reading dozens of reviews and then making decisions . A lot of those budgets are coming from affiliate , and that is impacting you know how people perceive your brand , and so that has a lot of implications in terms of marketing teams and how you structure your team . Krista made a point that she's on the brand team . That probably wasn't the case five years ago . The person I was referencing is on their product team , right ? These are all reflections of organizations that are trying to figure out how to pepper , you know , affiliate throughout the organization . On the flip side , you have the publishers , right . How does that impact their business ? Right ? Well , how do they sell affiliate ? Do they put together a totally separate ?

Dustin Howes 40:41

team .

Michael Mcnerney 40:42

Do they start selling hybrid ?

Michael Mcnerney 40:44

deals which are already happening , a lot of times by accident . We had a webinar about this a couple of weeks ago , and so I think the proliferation is what you're going to see . I think that where the risk comes in right is that you know what has traditionally been , you know a siloed market , kind of sitting in its own space , can now kind of be pilfered by other channels , right ? So you know you're going to start to see brand teams taking this budget . I mean , they're good at that , and so if I'm an affiliate marketer right now , there's both great opportunity to start working across channel , teaching people how to kind of use this . But there's great risk that other people are going to take the budget and run with this . So I would get really good at you know what they call cross functional behavior . All right , getting to know your whole team . It's sooner or later someone's going to figure out you know how to kind of amplify brand or how to measure it . It's already happening , right ?

Michael Mcnerney 41:42

And there's already people doing this , but I think it's going to kind of be bigger and bigger , and so that's the general where I think it's going . I think the one other thing I would say here is I'm really surprised we haven't seen more conversation from affiliate marketers about , you know , retail media , media on Amazon , right , because at the end of the day , they're both paying commissions to distribute a product to a customer , right ? There's some differences in how you work with those platforms . But if I'm an affiliate marketer , like , why aren't affiliate teams and agencies , you know , partnering or working on those budgets as well ? So I think we'll start to see a little bit of that collide . I mean , those are huge , huge markets .

Dustin Howes 42:22

So yeah , Well , I mean , it is a $15 billion market . That number can't be by mistake . I think one of the most used cliches I hear from potential clients is like affiliate marketing doesn't work for us and our company and maybe you didn't do it right . The first time is always my combatant , because I'm working . I've never figured out a solution that doesn't work for some kind of company . And putting the motivation to publishers with the commission structure , that is a bit it will work if you turn the right screw .

Michael Mcnerney 43:02

So well I think too , it's important . This is how .

Michael Mcnerney 43:05

I think about affiliate as somebody who came into the market from marketing channels was , you know , affiliate is just distribution , right , you are just buying distribution . Right , you are finding partners who are you are going to pay commissions to sell your product and if you go back a generation right , a marker owned . You know , building the products , promoting the products , finding distribution partners , and that kind of got chopped up by all these different digital channels . Digital straight marketing . It made just search teams , it just did search and social teams , it just did social and then there was branding over here .

Michael Mcnerney 43:44

That's not the way marketing is supposed to work . You're supposed to sit there and say , how do we get this product to market ? And we'll think about that holistically . And in many ways , affiliate kind of covers all of it because it's distribution and saying , okay , which of these partners out there am I going to work with to get into market ? Should include Amazon , should include Walmart and should also include all these great websites out there . So I think one way of thinking about it is as a distribution which raises the conversation up the level in the organization .

Dustin Howes 44:14

That is such a good point . That brings me into my lesson of the day . It's just what you said here is affiliate is part of all of these channels , and the strategy , the true strategy here is to be a part of brand , to be a part of marketing , to be a part of sales . It is encompassing all of it and you're under utilizing it if you're just siphoning it into one bucket . Essentially and that's my big lesson and takeaway from our conversation here Mike , you have to defend your post very quickly here . Since Honey Acquisition , I've been wondering is this just a maturation of coupon channel , now fully digital , or has it matured to the point of being able to rival other digital acquisition channels ? Do you still feel the same way ? This is a four-year-old comment , mike , but do you still feel like coupon channel has its realm in this place ? What say you ?

Michael Mcnerney 45:14

Oh , okay . Well , first of all , I'm obviously quoting Mike Giacchini , who's a much smarter guy than I am , and so whatever he said was obviously correct . Well , what I think , what I'd love to go back and read that article is , I mean , first of all , yeah , coupon is definitely part of this space , right , and it's a vital part of this space . I think people forget that coupons before affiliate were massively important to people's marketing strategy and are today . I think what's happening a little bit is that affiliate has now gotten to be something that you apply to everything , right , and what people kind of refer to as affiliate is kind of the old coupon cashback loyalty market which existed for the internet right that was bought coupons and papers .

Michael Mcnerney 46:02

My first job was selling coupons in the Northwestern University , which was not an easy job because people don't exactly use the yellow pages in their university phone book , which I learned after I took the job , when I was the teen or so , that's , I think what I was saying there was it . Did someone come in and say , oh my God , this is the digitization of the entire coupon market and we're going to capture that ? And I think the answer was yes . And then there was some extra valuation added on top of that . Yeah , because you say , oh , if we plop PayPal on top of this right , we can also kind of create all this value at checkout right . I don't think that's quite played out . I don't know if that was an execution or a strategy issue . I think we're probably still seeing that play out .

Dustin Howes 46:54

When that acquisition happened , I was terrified Like PayPal was going to be , like the new coupon , loyalty , like distribution of it all , and I was scared to say the least . But not much has come of it and I'm okay with that .

Michael Mcnerney 47:14

I think , just talking to people , I think a lot of people have told me at least that it was more of an execution issue . They got into it and realized it was difficult and got distracted by other stuff .

Dustin Howes 47:28

Collecting people's money .

Michael Mcnerney 47:30

I think in this program we think of $4 billion as a lot of money that would force you to really execute an acquisition and in PayPal's world it wasn't a big thought , that's right , that's something I love . That was one of the first posts I think I put up after I started . Mark Tech Records Awesome . You said it , it's right . That's all I know .

Dustin Howes 47:52

Yeah , great episode , says Kristen . Thank you for joining us , kristen . Appreciate you All . Right , as we wrap this up , my next week's guests are Sarah Bundy and Marshall Nyman . Stop by on Tuesday and Thursday for that . If you would like my personal affiliate program checklist , use this QR code up here . Go to Dustinhowes . com slash checklist . Here's signing off . Thanks for joining me . Mike and everyone else out there , keep on recirculating .

Michael Mcnerney 48:24

Awesome , Dustin . Thanks so much for having me . It was a lot of fun .

Dustin Howes 48:28

You got it , man . Take care Later . Alright , I'm off to work .