Dustin: 0:27

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your Nerdirator, Dustin Howes. Spreading that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me here every Thursday at 12. 15 on LinkedIn Live. That's Pacific Time. So stop on by, put it on the calendar, and come and hang out with me and my guest. My guest today is Joey V over at BioOptimizers. Joey! Welcome to the Nerdatorium, sir.

Joey: 0:51

Thank you. I've never been to one, so this is very interesting.

Dustin: 0:55

I got to hang out with you on your podcast not too long ago and we definitely nerded out. So looking forward to having you here.

Joey: 1:02

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Dustin: 1:04

If you'd like to be in Joey's seat, come be a guest with me. Go to dustinhowes.com and slash nerd. And let's figure out a topic that we can nerd out about, but Joey, without further ado, who are you?

Joey: 1:20

I am a father and a family man at heart. So I've got two little boys. But I'm also, I've been in digital marketing since 2007. I left my corporate cubicle cage when I decided that I hated my life and hated waking up on Monday mornings to go to a job that I didn't want to go to. And then I stumbled into affiliate marketing. Started to write blogs for this bodybuilder dude at the time I had my fitness program too and I was doing all that stuff till I got tore apart on YouTube because I was a smaller guy trying to teach people how to build muscle and Anyways, so it led me to perfectly positioning me to finding new people to work with an affiliate marketing and it had a knack for Copywriting had no training in it so really started to get my You know, get my chops and everything going in that time and then continue to progress through the transitions of where that led me, which led me to a bunch of other things, which we can talk about today and influencers and all these new endeavors that are happening at a really building brand awareness and propelling brands with really great marketing, including influencers.

Dustin: 2:23

Outstanding. Can't wait. Our topic of the day is going to be on micro influencers, but we want to talk about your journey and how you got to this place where you are. And where you are right now is BioOptimizers. Really cool name. Want to know what you guys do and who you're serving out there.

Joey: 2:41

Yeah, so by optimizers is a company that I'm a partial owner in as well now. So I invested some money. I saw the longevity of where we were going with it. Back in 2014, we started as a new company. Matt and Wade are the co founders. They started the company in 2004. They were paying themselves in pills. That's all they're. Financial gain was like, they wanted a better product and they developed something called mass times, which is a proteolytic enzyme from there. They stumbled their way into 2015 and they said, Hey, let's build a brand out of this. So the inception of bio optimizers was like five people. They brought me in a book of business. affiliates, email traffic, started to manage their stuff, and the company is really centralized around helping people fix digestion back in 2015. Now we help people end physical suffering by using really highly effective proprietary ingredient formulas beyond just what, The white label supplements are out there today. So supplements have a bad name sometimes. Sure. But beyond the product, I would say the levels of consciousness in the company culture, the values we have in the vision we have of where we're going supplements, being the fuel for the next mission is really profound. And it's something that's attracted a lot of employees, influencers, and everybody to come to the company because of the mission that we're on rather than just the products we sell.

Dustin: 3:59

Oh, fantastic. That aligns exactly with what we're doing over at Inflektion and I'm excited to have you. I know you and Havis are buddies at this point and I'm excited to get into our topic of the day and that is the micro influencer army. Let's dig into this concept. This is I think in that one to 10 K realm of followers, subscribers, whatever you want to call it on Insta or Tik TOK, whatever you might call it. Now we're, where did you come up with the concept of working with these kinds of micro influencers?

Joey: 4:35

Yeah, it's a good question. I definitely stumbled my way into it and it was such a happy accident. But at the time we were like, I think it's 2016 we run a lot of email traffic and affiliates and it was going well, but I didn't see any scalability to it past a certain point. So I was getting worried. I actually thought it was going to be like, let go or had to find new consulting clients. Cause at the time it wasn't really a solid full time gig with optimizers. And then Matt Glant, our CEO, who's like an amazing visionary. He's always got the next thing lined up as to what's coming. So he's we're going to do podcast advertising. And I was like, cool, man. I'm like, at the time, I'm like, I didn't really know what a podcast was. I thought it was guys that like CB radios, you know, talking in their basement, back to each other. Didn't understand the concept. for it, but I was willing to dedicate some time and I started to research and started to outreach podcasters and it took a long time to get the first few. And especially I had no idea what I was doing or what I was asking for or what the payment was going to be and what the return was going to be. There's so much unknown territory and we're going to talk about the micro influencers, but really podcast was the gateway, the segue to getting into influencer marketing, which I consider. Podcasts to be an influencer channel. You think of the influencer umbrella, podcasts are in there. YouTubers are in there, IG, Tik TOK, rumble, whatever else is coming out, in the next couple of years or the next month that's all influencer marketing, that's someone else speaking on your behalf, that's elevating your brand with their opinion and their influence on their channels with their audience. And it's something that you can't necessarily recreate without having influencer marketing. So we started to do podcast ads. It started to go really well and we were early on in on the game. So like now people have caught up. I see Geico actually advertising with podcasts and some of the bigger pharmaceuticals are starting to realize like traditional media is not the way to do it, but really the opportunity if podcasts, cause podcasts can be expensive and they can be scary. And like, where do you start? Micro influencers were really the next key for our growth. Podcasts allowed us to tap into people listening to the shows being like, Oh, who are they? I want to try the supplement. Then maybe they have some sort of influencer program that we can join. And the beauty of influencers at the micro level, which, could be one to 10 K within that range, but there's also people above 10 K that are willing to just be an ambassador because they love being So you really want to find the super fans, but if you can build a solid base of micro influencers going out and just, pounding the pavement for you and paying them in product as well as a commission that there sets the stage for compounded growth over the years to come. And I'd recommend doing the micro play. Before doing the macro celebrity play. Cause the celebrity play is very expensive and it's very volatile. And typically it's not a great deal structure for you at the right phase of your business. It might, but at the beginning, it's really not the play that I recommend to clients as far as getting into influencer marketing.

Dustin: 7:28

For sure. That's such a good solid game plan as well. You're testing the networks and the ICP essentially in these smaller channels that are not gonna be that expensive and oftentimes you're gonna be on a performance basis before you ramp up into those bigger guys and know what your audience really is and how they match up. Super brilliant. Love it. You understand the why we want to work with these folks? Where exactly are you finding them in this space? Are you using certain platforms to go out or are you just hunting down individuals?

Joey: 8:04

Yeah, so there's a couple of things like low hanging fruit, your customers, you'd be surprised how many customers out there have a good social following. And if you can start to get them to post, it gives you practice at playing in the influencer game, right? It's like a good place to go practice some things and see what works, what doesn't, especially if you're new, and you're not sure what you want to pay or how it's going to be received. So customers can be a great starting point, and they can be great advocates for your brand. Then I also think of I love the bootstrappers of the world. So this isn't the penny pinchers, but it's the people that are asked to do more with less and get better results, tomorrow or yesterday for tomorrow. And they're always in this perpetual cycle of having to do more for the brand, especially for like marketing managers, influencer managers, etc. So I always like to start with what's the free tools that I can use? And what I've done is I've developed really robust sheets. I know not everyone loves Google sheets, but it's if you have the right system in place, Google sheets can be really effective in the beginning. Honestly, I've seen like seven figure programs built just on a Google sheet. Google sheets are free. The system that I have just integrates seamlessly with everything from who do you prospect? How do you nurture them? How do you outreach them? And then keeping track of it. And it's a numbers game. You've been in the game for a long time. It's not a matter of what. Software to use is like what system are you using? Are you being disciplined? Are you being consistent? Are you staying focused on it? So what I do from there is like I need a tracking system If you want to get some paid stuff, there are some enterprise level things. I don't recommend getting in the beginnings They're super not cheap. They're super expensive I do use one that I like it's called saral s a r a l and it's 500 bucks a month It's a very low entry Barrier point that you can get into And it does basically what Sheets does on steroids. And it's like a Kanban board project management style interface. If you guys are familiar with that. Okay. But really what that allows you to do is you could prospect using look like audiences, keywords categories, and lookalike audiences is like, if you have an influencer, you'd love to get you might not be able to get them, but now you can find subsets of who those people are following, or People that are following them or lookalikes to their profiles, let the algorithm figure it out. But you just put in the keyword and you could pop out 100 names a day and you're a little bit capped depending on what volume tier you're doing with Sorrel or other platforms. But essentially, you have to define who your ideal customer or ideal partner is and start to really understand that just like your customer base you have to put the same level of intent. In the understanding of that, as you do with the customer and your marketing side of your business. Because if you get that wrong, whatever influencers you get are going to have the wrong message to the wrong audience. In my opinion. So those are a couple ways that I could do it. I love Sheets. I've operated on Sheets. I've built an 8 figure program out of Sheets. We're only now using some softwares to scale us to the next level. But honestly you could use some free stuff out there and even whatever else you choose. Whether Sheets or anything else, just be disciplined and consistent in your approach. Sheets.

Dustin: 10:58

Oh, great. Great call. This is tools are like my jam, right? I've got blog posts, some blog posts on tools to use for affiliate managers, and especially in that free realm, I've never heard of Saral. I'll have to give it a look. So in that price range, I love using upfluence there. They're like 500 great organizational, like lookalikes and stuff. And then of course I use affy stash on a daily basis. If you're into using those Google sheets, you can just quickly 500 influencers that are lookalikes right in your same realm with them. And they're 100 a month. So it's super affordable for those that are looking for that. Now the targeting is super important, obviously. And the messaging, what is one of the best like tips you can give those affiliate managers for doing the messaging to these micro influencers?

Joey: 11:52

Yeah, so let's focus on micro influencers because that's like the lowest hanging fruit and it's most likely you're going to get some attention versus going after people with 100, 000 followers. Sure, which will come and you should still allocate. I like to do a split depending on your budget of like how much you want to spend on influencers, I would do probably close to 70 to 80 percent of Okay. Shopping for influencer affiliates and then 20 percent should be cast out to your wide net. Hey, shotgun blast. Let's see if we can get onto Joe Rogan's show or other shows like, the bigger ones you want to invest in. But I'll typically set like the criteria is, Hey, let's look for influencers between 5k to 25k range. Okay. That's still micro. Once you get the 25K, there might be some mixed type of payments, commission things you got to roll into. But I like to set the tiers appropriately because who you're outreaching is going to dictate the messaging. If you're not congruent with the messaging, you can't test either. So you can't see what's working, what's not working. And if you deliver the wrong message to the wrong person, Then you're not going to get a good response. So if I went after a person with 500, 000 followers and said, Hey, I'd love to set you up with an affiliate code. They're going to laugh at you and never respond to you. Versus, if I'm messaging people in the micro tier, I'm very specific. What are the benefits of the program be on the commission? What's the mission of the brand mission for influencers is way more important than just another product because they get pitched all day long. If you can paint the picture of yes, we've got these great products. Yes. They've done wonders for X, Y, Z, these testimonials, not just customer testimonials, influencer testimonials. If you can get them of working with you, that highlights credibility of you as a brand, not just another product. And the mission typically gets the influencer more so than the paycheck does in the beginning, especially for those super fan organic influencers that just want to support you because they believe in what you're doing and they love the product. So it's side by side. The second thing I would do in the messaging is be as aggressive as possible in your payouts. If they're not asking you for 100 percent payout, which would be just a complete flat rate deal, then why aren't you offering them the maximum amount of commissions? Because what's going to happen is, yeah, you're going to still pay them commissions, and it might be more so than your basic tier of affiliates. Potentially, but influencers have so much spillover traffic to your Amazon to your Ecom that can't get tracked all the time. So you're actually going to see a spike in organic sales and you should typically see a trend downward on your blended CAC, meaning you're paying less for customers when you start to really see influencer traffic come in. So you just want to be really specific with that. And alternately on the other side. If you're going after macros, like bigger influencers, don't lead with the messaging of affiliate commissions. Cause that's just going to be really unattractive. You should come out of the gate and say, I'm willing to do something with you. We want, we see a long term partnership, you don't have to come out and say you want to pay them, but lead with I know this is going to be more of a long term play. Let's get together and they like to do calls and influencers love to do calls. So if you're not a calls person, you need a calls person. You need to develop that relationship. It's not an email thing like back in the day, email traffic affiliates was just, nobody wants to get on the phone back then. Everyone's like averse. That's why I'm on online marketing.

Dustin: 15:02

That's funny. That's a good point. And I feel like I have. Avoided phone calls earlier in my career as I ramp up and get more comfortable on calls. I want to get on calls more often. And I feel like the micro influencers don't want to get on calls and want to do things on email. So that is a really incredible transition as they grow that they want to, they want more FaceTime. So I love that concept. You said share the mission brand. That's something I don't do enough. I feel like. One of my biggest tools and in my outreach message is always Hey, I come bearing gifts. You want that free thing? I've got it for you. I'd love to hook you up with this. And that's how we start that relationship and that conversation. But the mission brand seems vitally important and something I just don't do enough.

Joey: 15:50

Yeah, but I also think that what you're mentioning is very important, like abundance over scarcity. A lot of people, they're like are you going to post if I send you a product? I'm like, you can't be worried about those little micro things. You have to be willing to invest in this with a bit of faith. And it does take faith. And this is why a lot of people don't go and influence their marketing. They're conditioned to that coin operated, System of a Facebook ad. And it's I put a dollar in, I get a dollar 50 or 2 out. This is, and if I don't see an investment back from an influencer within 30 days, then this isn't working. It took us six to 12 months to build that momentum. From there, we learned a bunch of things and then we rebuilt the system. But had we given up after 30 days, that little meme where the guy's digging for gold and he doesn't reach it. And the other guy actually just keeps going. He's one inch away from the gold. And if you've seen that, but that's how it is. You have to have like absolute faith that this is going to work or else if you decide it's not going to work, then it's just not going to work because you decided that's a mental shift as well. But I love giving out products to start, even if they, I wouldn't leave with a mission because typically actually they don't care in the first message about your mission unless they actually like the product. So it is a bit of like a give a lot of value, be willing to give. And there might be like, Hey, I'm not going to post about you. I don't even know you yet. It's no problem. I just want you to try the product. I think you're going to love it. Product first, try it, and then mention the mission and what's more important than just the sales behind it. And that'll start to real, they'll, it shifts the lens of the company cause there's so many supplements out there or so many companies doing the same thing. What differentiates you and people want to hear you and what makes you unique and your brand and your company and the people behind it.

Dustin: 18:10

Great points. And I will end that conversation here with the macro influencers. I feel like I'm giving them something before I even come out at them. If it's a backlink, extraordinarily helpful and gets their attention so much more often. There anything else that you can dangle that carrots in front of these micro influences that might get a better response rate.

Joey: 18:36

It depends on what the ecosystem of the brand looks like. Like we've offered, Hey, we want to interview you as a guest. Put them on profile. So that's one way resharing their content and really appreciating what they're doing. So like more so in the, after the outreach, after the activation, really putting them on a pedestal. I think it's important because, and you should care, it shouldn't be like pretending to care. It should be, you should be invested into this. Yeah. But I would just say, keep things short. Keep things specific to one thing at a time in an email. Don't bombard them with a bunch of different things in one email because they're not going to typically read it. One email, one mission. Hey, I want you to try the product. No strings attached. Are you interested? Question mark. That's it. They reply back. You keep that. The conversation going one thing at a time. I have to get the product. Hey, we'd love for you to do a sale. Here's the next thing. If you do a sale, we'll give you the next product kind of continuing to dangle the carrot. And just again, less is more in the situation like anything else.

Dustin: 19:33

Oh, the great tips there. I love it. And this brings me into our sponsor of the day. And that is Inflektion. Like one of the easiest ways to scale your affiliate program is to create a high converting landing pages for your partners. Landing page. Options are absolutely necessary, but Inflektion has found a significant increase in conversion rates with co branded landing pages and couple them with special discounts. These things take a matter of minutes rather than weeks for your dev team to start creating them. So beyond that I have managed. Dozens of programs over the last decade and I can tell you Inflektion is the cleanest UI, UX, any AM can ask for. The ease of grabbing links for partners, creating unique IOs, choosing the discount amount and the vanity code. It's all super simple, these things. So if you're facing those same hurdles, growing the affiliate or influencer program out there, Come give Inflektion a look, go to dustinhowes.com/inf Grab yourself a demo today and come check us out. All right. Getting back in one

Joey: 20:44

thing to do Dustin for that. Yeah, go for it. I'm just going to go ahead and praise Inflektion as well. If you have an influencer program and you already have active people promoting that, like you would love for them to have their custom page. When we started to do Harmonized Lander pages, which is basically putting the image of the person with the product, preferably with their testimonial, with their video and every other thing you can do to create a co branded page. It increased conversions by three to five X. It was like a 300 percent increase in split test optimization for us. But that took so much work for us to do as a dev team. And we were able to do it, but for the people that have a leaner team out there. It's done in minutes versus hours. And it costs you like pennies over like thousands of dollars of dev costs. So I love Inflektion the way it works. I would recommend it to anybody who's working with influencers who has an active portfolio, plus everything you just mentioned. It's a no brainer.

Dustin: 21:36

Joey Vee with a glowing representation of Inflektion. Appreciate that. So glad to have you on as a partner and glad you're utilizing to its best capabilities. Transitioning here. Let's get into breaking the affiliate rules and your journey. I've heard an awesome story about you utilizing affiliate marketing and something clicked one day for you. And I'd love to hear about how you're breaking the rules to make that happen.

Joey: 22:06

Yeah, we touched on a lot of it already. For me the breaking the mold was like looking at affiliates a lot differently, like affiliates, everyone has a different definition of what that is. They think Oh, it's a champion. It's just an ambassador. It's an email affiliate. I look at like our affiliate department became partnerships department and partnerships had affiliates and email traffic. It had bloggers. But then we had YouTubers, we had podcasts, we had influencers, we had events. And so some of these might become different departments, but ultimately what changed the game for us was like how we shifted our approach and lens of looking at affiliates, Beyond just the email traffic affiliates at the time and the way you pay people and the way that changes depending on what traffic and channel it is. And for one example so first off, think of affiliates as all those segments, influencers, affiliates, email, bloggers, and podcasters, YouTubers, et cetera, they all have to live within your ecosystem and you have to decide which ones you want to take on based on, I call it the investor profile of a company, like where do you want to invest and what kind of return you need Type of cash flow cycle needs to come back to you, but like YouTubers, YouTubers are very long cash flow cycle return. So you pay YouTuber, they have to do a video, it might take a couple months for it to build up some steam, but that video lives on forever. And if that channel And that video take off, you're going to see compounded gains beyond anything else you've ever seen in only traditional email marketing affiliates. Cause what happens to an email gets deleted. It dies. The link's gone. YouTube lives on forever. Until something happens to YouTube, hopefully not, but like I've seen an influencer who's made six figure checks every single year from one video over the past four years. And he hasn't done any other promotions for us. And if that doesn't give you the power of a YouTube influencer, not every one of them is going to make that kind of bang for their buck back for you, but it's just broadening, like your perspective on affiliates and really redefining it and setting up specific criteria for each of the ways you work with those types of categories of affiliates. That's why I broke the rules and redefined it and then built a massive team to help support this growth and put people and captains in charge of each of those categories of affiliates or influencers or partners.

Dustin: 24:25

Yeah. Excellent point. And I feel like the more Influencers, you get to create that content, the bigger possibility you're going to have to ranking for a keyword and something really taking off with those micro influencers. It's going to last for years. Some of my biggest affiliate partners at. Some of the SAS companies I've worked with throughout the years are YouTubers that have one video a year and just absolutely clean up with it forever. And super, super powerful in that. And just the more that you can get into that army of partners, the better, like you're going to find lessons every time you do something new with a, an influencer in that space. So great points. On top of that, like you're a guest on podcasts like this one today. You like to take advantage of that spotlight. What are some of those things that you love to do to really seize the day when you get on podcasts like these?

Joey: 25:22

I think it's, it depends on which show you're going on, what your mission is. For me, it allows me a platform to go and talk about the wonderful culture of optimizers. So depending on which podcast that can mean something more for HR and people looking to recruit people. What are the core values of your company? How you set up cultural diversification on like including more people into things. I really look at it as a great connection tool, which is why I developed the podcast in the beginning was just to have great conversations on a platform that made sense for us to have it beyond just the private zoom meeting. So I think that, if you have a personality behind your brand podcast is a really great place to start go advertising, even if you're not, if. If you don't want to get in the podcast ads, that's fine. But I would definitely recommend some sort of spokesperson going out on the road, the virtual road and finding shows to go beyond because You're tapping into such an authentic, engaged audience. Like podcasts are a rarity. You think about the cycle of attention we have where it's like we're scrolling if someone's listening to a podcast for 30 to 60 minutes, that type of person, whether it's a customer, a partner, or just want to synergistic person that you want to involve in what you're doing is going to be much more engaged than any other platform out there. So for me, it's just a leverage. A lever that people need to pull more on and start to go out and do those things because I think they're undervalued. People don't understand the power of that.

Dustin: 26:47

I totally agree. I love being on a podcast, especially guesting on one. It's a whole lot less work for me than producing and repurposing all the content from this, even though I love all those concepts. But it is great to be on others and appreciate you having me on yours earlier. But tell us about Our partner up profits Alliance. This is something I'm super excited about and want to hear more about it for the audience.

Joey: 27:16

Yeah. So partner profits is like my brand. So that's where I teach people how to build six, seven, eight figure influencer marketing programs through courses, through podcasting. And also I do some consulting. So with. By optimizers, we've got the model it's built. Then it started to do consulting with a few people that needed it to understand and develop that faith. Like we talked about that, that unwavering belief that this can work because they have now they have an understanding of how to do it, the systems, and then we install people and we can make it all work, but I'm capped at how many people I can help and consult with because one on one consulting is time consuming. So I was like, what if we just developed an Alliance? a community of people that wanted to learn the same methodologies, learn the same frameworks, get in the influence of marketing or advance where they're already at. And we can come together in a group of non compete brands so that we don't care about sharing like what's working, what's not, because we're not defensive and really just dive deep in the influence of marketing. Not just influencer marketing, like marketing at large, there could be a split test win. There could be a new campaign you've ran that you saw success with. There could be some sort of headline that comes out. There's so many different things that we want to share within the community. So it's a bi weekly meetup of people traditionally who have physical products that are non compete to each other and just share wins, share Rolodexes and networks and come together for a greater good. And we're trying to do a thousand cross collaboration intros for each of those brands within the community.

Dustin: 28:44

That's it's incredible. And I'm very excited to be a part of this community and this group. I have tried this myself with my own course and community, and it is just been so difficult to scale and convince people to come in and, but the people that do once I get that group up to 20, people see an incredible amount of value and I'm very excited to be a part of this new community and and sharing my knowledge with others and getting new tips from others. Just super excited. When is this getting started? How do we sign up?

Joey: 29:16

So if you go to partnerprofits. com slash alliance, there's a, there's an intake form because we are a little strict on who we bring into the group. We want to make sure it's a fit for both them and the community, but go there, fill in the intake form. We're going to book a call. I'll get on a call to make sure it's a good fit. From there, we're looking to start probably near mid November right now. It just depends on how many commitments we have. And I want to start with a solid group foundation first, before we actually get going on it. So go ahead, partner, profits. com slash Alliance.

Dustin: 29:45

Okay. I put my own short link. I've already got it. Dustnows. com slash pup, easy way to find it and let them know that you found them. You found it on Dustin's podcast over at affiliate nerd out. So go give it a check up and see if it's going to be right for your brand. Improving your visualization of the affiliate program and getting connected with others that are doing the same kind of work is extraordinarily powerful to your career. So do what you can to get in this group and hope to see in there. Lastly how do we connect with you here, Joey?

Joey: 30:24

Yeah. So if you guys are interested in learning more about influencer marketing, we've got a YouTube channel with a lot of content on it, just on like freebies on all the lessons that I've put out there. There's also a bootstrappers guide to influencer marketing, which is a free course. So anybody that wants to just get into it, doesn't understand it, wants to learn the terminologies, all the basic foundations. Go to partner profits.com, you'll find the bootstrappers guide there you can download. And then Dustin, we haven't talked about this, we're actually rebranding partner profits. It's gonna be called Real Influence, more focused on like the journey that I've been on, personal development as well as influencers. Okay. And how influence takes apart in our lives, as well as how it transcends over to other people's lives as through the process of it. So real influence now.com will be something else if anyone's interested in that side of the business as well as influencer marketing.

Dustin: 31:13

Outstanding. All right, Joey, really appreciate your time today. Thanks for coming in and dropping all these nuggets of awesome. Thanks for being with us, man.

Joey: 31:22

Thanks for having me.

Dustin: 31:23

All right, folks, keep on recruiting and we'll see you out there. Take care.