Dustin: 0:48

Hey folks, welcome to affiliate nerd out. I'm your host And nerdirator Dustin Howes spreading that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me every thursday At noon here on linkedin live. This is a pre recorded event That's how i'm doing things these days But my guest today is Ishtvan or as I like to call him "That affiliate guy" Welcome to the nerdatorium buddy.

Ishtvan: 1:13

Thank you. Thank you for having me man. It's been a long time coming, but You

Dustin: 1:16

always great to have another nerd in here. And what I love about you is you and I, what have we met? Once, maybe twice, like at events or something. And you're one of those characters that I can run into. And it's we've been friends forever. And we just have a conversation for 10 minutes and we joke around and laugh. And you got everything. One of the best hairs in the industry. So we bond on that. It's always good to hang out with you. I'm so glad to have you today.

Ishtvan: 1:45

Thanks, man. Likewise, I guess I don't have anything to add to that. So that was that was good. Nicely summarized, man.

Dustin: 1:51

Oh, thank you.

Ishtvan: 1:52

Thank

Dustin: 1:52

you. All right. If you'd like to be in Ichfan's seat here, go to dustinhowes. com slash nerd and drop a form fill on what? you want to nerd out about and come be my guest without further ado here is fun or ish she like to be called who are you

Ishtvan: 2:14

nice that's a good question okay so i'll just try and be brief about this one yes i like to be called ish most people just prefer the shortened version because my name is a bit weird so it's hard to pronounce sometimes who am i so that affiliate guy on linkedin i think a lot of people know me like that I might be savage sometimes on LinkedIn, a little bit outspoken hard on some things that that's definitely true. But as you mentioned, in real life I'm actually quite a fun guy and pretty good vibes, right? Yeah that's Istvan as a person, outspoken, but fair and just. Looking out for that's not true, man, trying to pull yourself fair and just somebody else has to tell you Fair enough, but I always try to look out so that everybody wins. I guess that's that's one of my models. Yeah, so that's a strong

Dustin: 2:58

man. I love your posts. I love your angles. I love your. Opinions on things and your boldness. I think that there's just not enough in this. I always like to say professionalism is overrated and I like people and I'm drawn to people that have opinions and are not afraid to tell them. And that's why I'm having you on today. I'm excited to dig in and nerd out with you. But so tell us about that affiliate guy. Absolutely love that branding, by the way. And you turned it into an agency after you started ramping up, like you call it tag, tell us about what you do over there and who you serve.

Ishtvan: 3:36

Again, so I think it's self explanatory. So I guess we are an agency like every other agency in the sense that we serve clients. So we try to get on board brand side. So we act as consultants basically for the brand and manage it from their side. So that's also where the expertise lies. So yes, I started off as that affiliate guy after working on agency side, funny enough. So all my career actually, so my career started off from agency ended on agency and I'm continuing my own agency and tag is an acronym for that affiliate guy. So that's why it's tag. I understood that there's another party called tag, but we are tag marketing. So I guess that's a little bit differentiation, but tag agency. Yes. And we basically help mainly e com brands. So I'm not going to lie. I'll be honest on this one. I like e com because there's a lot of opportunities to optimize. You can play around with a bunch of affiliate types. They're very suitable for e commerce brands. And there's also a lot of optimizations that you can do so you can really play around with a lot of things within the e commerce space. So that's the reason also why I stuck to e commerce. I know things about B2B but we're not going to talk about that today. So we're going to focus more on the e com side of things. And that's basically who we serve. I think you could say mostly six, seven, mostly seven, eight figure brands. So that's where we're at right now. Because there we can also make great impact. So generally they're not starting off, although we can do that too. But if you're a little bit bigger already, we can really make an impact a lot faster. So it takes less time to actually grow things. So that's tag in a nutshell. Oh, sorry. Forgot to say, Small team still. So you could call us boutique, I don't really like that word. I don't like that word. But yeah, so it's three other guys, almost four next to myself and I'm the leader. So I'm doing the difficult things strategy I guess new business. Yeah, so new business processes forecasting, stuff like that technical implementations again, like today I posted about product lead management. So that's one of the things that I do as well. I'll have to teach my team those things, but the guys are not there yet. So I'll get them there soon enough.

Dustin: 5:39

A couple of things I want to touch tapping on there right there. Like you said, boutique and in my mind, boutique just means like your niche down. You're very concentrated on what you're doing. You're e comm like that is a boutique in my mind. Doesn't matter how big you are. Necessarily. You just. Service your clients in the right kind of manner. That's what I get the vibe from boutique. So I don't see that as like a negative thing. Even if you are small and the other thing, and the other thing is Oh, shoot. I forgot what the other thing was. What was the last thing you mentioned there? Like the teaching things or, Oh this job being hard. You're doing the difficult things. I argue completely. Once you get enough experience in this industry, I think your, The hardest part is going out there and doing the grunt work, right? Like I find the strategy part is so much fun and easy. If I can pass that on to somebody else and you've got to that level, which is great for you. Thank you.

Ishtvan: 6:38

So actually, okay. I agree on that one too. One of the funny things is so recently, so there's a couple of clients where obviously I still also do the grunt work too. So just sorry. So actually this is a really good point you're touching on. One of the things I always keep saying is if you get away from the operations, so doing all the grunt work and doing all the dirty work, right? So all the basic stuff, you're going to lose touch with reality as an agency owner, so what I do is I also still freelance where I actually have the responsibilities of The well doing everything. Yeah, so that's just me doing and then we also have agency stuff where i'm more the overseer of things So I combine those two aspects that's also a reason why i'm able to post about so many different topics on it is because i'm actually still doing them, day to day as well and yes the management side of things so I guess the strategy and all that stuff. Yeah, it is fun but I don't want to let go of the operations. If not, if I'm going to

Dustin: 7:30

never should, I, if you are not cutting your teeth on the strategies and the technology you should be using as an affiliate manager, you shouldn't be qualified to be talking about it and love that about you. I followed the same suit. I'm out there beating the streets myself and pulling in affiliates for the programs I'm recruiting for. Love that concept. And we're digging in a little bit more on affiliate managers soon, but our first topic of the day here is network settings for success. And you're in that income space and you're also in the international space. And I feel like there's a lot of agencies that are in the U S and a lot of agencies that are in the UK and Europe. But you're doing both sides of the equation, and I want to talk about some of those network settings that you're setting up with your programs to be global.

Ishtvan: 8:21

Oh, okay. Oof. Okay. Okay. I understood. Okay. The question initially when you just said it, I thought it was slightly different. Let me see how I can answer this correctly. Basically, there's a couple of settings regardless of which market you're in. Okay. You need to have in your program depending on the needs of the brand. I guess one of the main or the easiest examples I can name is, for example, voucher tracking, right? So if you're if you want to measure coupons and you're using coupons, you need to have voucher tracking capabilities in the network. So there are still some networks that don't have that function, which is yeah, it's awkward to me. So we do work with one network that doesn't have that. And we literally can't properly track the coupons for one of the programs in that specific market with that specific network. The big boys though, so obviously without going through all the list, the whole list of the big ones they mostly do have that. So that's just one of those functions. Then I guess. Before I continue real quick, it doesn't really matter where you launch the program. I think the basics should always be the same across every single program because it's just like a baseline of creating an affiliate program. Doesn't matter if you're in the UK, US, France, Germany, Italy I don't know, Bulgaria. It really doesn't matter to be honest. It should always be the same. There's no real way of saying how to set up your program to be global. I guess other than for example, saying let's just load up the. com website and then have within one campaign, you have different let's say sub campaigns, or you can create different deep link URLs to different markets and countries. That would be like I launched a global campaign and then you can still choose which country you select if you want to send it to specific ones. And then in other cases you do have, let's say. So we like another example we have is we have six different, campaigns or separate campaigns So somebody from let's say if they have a french account They can't go to the uk and grab like the uk tracking link So they need to have a uk tracking link from that network, right? So it just depends on which network you select. It really differs. So not everybody has that same option okay. So yeah, we also have You Sorry. Yeah, we also have options where we make mix the things, but basically, sorry, just to quickly then other settings is, for example, dynamic commissioning, right? So you need to be able to, if you really want to go next level, you should have dynamic commissioning. So based on the margins that you set up of your program, you should decide which commissions you allocate to which products. And then whoever buys, you allocate those things based automatically. So you shouldn't have let's say a flat commission on anybody. It's just things like that basically. So that's. Those are two things that I could say right now. If you want I can name a few more but Go for it. You wanted to say something dude.

Dustin: 10:53

We'll get into to more of it. Absolutely and Anything that has a flat feed that you can't change is not a network for me Like I need that flexibility with all the partners if you're working with coupon sites I should be making much less than the content sites that you're working with and love vanity code tracking. Go ahead You

Ishtvan: 11:13

Matt, I just want to touch on because you literally triggered me. So another important thing is what I recently, so I guess in the last couple of months, noticed is You need to have flexibility in payouts as well. That's like huge. So if you want to go international and you want to scale not every affiliate is going to be okay with your CPS or not. Every affiliate is going to be okay with your CPA only. So you need to be able to make constructions of I'll pay this guy's CPS. I pay them CPA. I pay this guy's CPC. You need to have that flexibility. So there are networks that are really good at this. And then there's a bunch of other ones, also big ones, by the way, without calling any names out right now, but they don't have that flexibility unless you pay a lot more for their service. So then, yeah, why would I choose that network if I can choose another network that has those options? We can still get everybody on board. I feel is everybody has an account everywhere anyway. So almost so

Dustin: 11:59

true. So true. And I hate suggesting doing multiple networks, but sometimes that's the solution, right? If maybe you work with all coupon sites over here on a rev share, and then you work with all content sites on a CPA over here and you just accept that. You're going to have some overlap. You might de dupe if you do two programs, maybe you don't, maybe you just accept that the double commissions for one sale, if it so happens, but a lot of great points there and. Yes, that flexibility is also the flexibility of locking periods is like that next level too, because the guys I work with that are buying native ads, they want to be paid a lot quicker and I can trust them in my relationship with them. I want that locking period to be 10 days rather than 30 days for the regular sales. That flexibility is also super important. And man, you're opening up a lot of things. One thing I really with affiliate networks that I work with is two tier commissions. I like having an ability to recruit affiliates into a program and be able to be paid in perpetuity with those. I like giving the option, the affiliates I'm working with to invite other affiliates. And I think it is a big motivator in there, at least with the programs that I'm working with. So I love that. And not all networks have that capability and that can be frustrating. Everybody's got their favorites, right?

Ishtvan: 13:25

Fair enough. Okay. That's a good point, man. I didn't really think about that one, to be honest, man. I'm not going to lie. So letting your affiliates, if they refer another affiliate into the program Yeah, that's, I don't really do that as much to be honest. So we,

Dustin: 13:38

okay. As an agency that might be good work around if you're working on a commission basis with your clientele, like I want to be on a performance basis based on my merit and a two tier situation is a really good way, especially if you're, I'm consulting for somebody and I want to charge them less and based my performance on how much money I'm making. I just love the two tier system altogether.

Ishtvan: 14:03

Wait, hold up. Wait, maybe I'm misunderstanding the two tier thing then, actually, because this performance thing we also have, so the better we do, obviously, we take a small cut based on different kinds of agreements, but I understood it differently, is that you have affiliates getting a different kind of commission or an extra commission, the affiliates themselves. So we're talking about the affiliates or we're talking about people like us.

Dustin: 14:26

Absolutely. You can talk about the affiliates or like us it's just on how you set up. If it's in your contract to earn that much that's great. But there's an alternative if,

Ishtvan: 14:37

Interesting because interesting, man. So basically, so the way we do it, the way I look at it is. We built programs. So for example, contracts, when we sign with the network, it belongs to the brand. So we don't want that contract. We don't want to be in between because one day when we step out, they're the owners of the program. So that kind of, I don't hold anybody hostage either. So I don't really feel like. If I bring them in, I want an extra commission. No, it's just part of my job. We bring them in anyway, but we do take a cut of all the revenue that they make. So that's something else, right? Hostage is a little aggressive, but this is what, this is my business model. Let's, I didn't mean it like that. I didn't mean it like that. I just no, I don't mean it like that. I just meant like when you leave, then you could potentially, take somebody with you and stuff. So then you destroy their program as well. Yeah. That's just something that we never really thought about that way. It's just part of the job anyway. And then we earn on what they earn too. So I guess we have a little bit of a different model. So whatever works for everyone.

Dustin: 16:33

Absolutely. It's how you want to work with companies moving into what do you think some of those e comm essentials are when you are creating a new Affiliate program with an e comm store. You tapped into Hey, I like the locking period and the flexibility, anything else that you find essential when setting up an affiliate program,

Ishtvan: 16:54

Cool. Okay. So I have to think about this. So one of the things that actually surprisingly. Still a lot of networks don't have the capability to upload videos, which is weird, which is weird to me. So they're mostly like banners, right? The standard things that we've been doing for 30 years already. And then basically product feeds. So that's, and by the way product feeds is not possible also everywhere. Like restrictions in some others have really good, like default standards that you need to have at least those fields in your product feed. So you guarantee some minimum quality for the affiliate. So it really, again, depends on the networks and stuff, but things like video it's just not possible limiting. So again, I have to emphasize the limiting payout capability. You can't be flexible in your commissions. That's just crazy to me. So I think every network should have that. Some of them don't have some of the big ones. I think those are the most important things actually. And then Also deduplication as well. So for some reason, some networks don't have automatic deduplication and others do. Which is also somehow, I guess it's not part of their instruction manuals when you do tracking setups, which is to me that, okay, I'm not going to get into that right now, but I don't think that's really fair. So you should have that. So we all know what the duplication means. We all know it's actually what you just literally said. You might be okay with paying two times commission or three times commission, depending on how many networks you have for the exact same order number, right? Order ID, transaction ID, whatever you want to call it, but that shouldn't be happening. Yeah, so those are the main essentials. I think the main essentials and then as a brand. And essential that you need to have set things up correctly in your account is have a solid merchant profile. So I got this feedback a lot from like top publishers as well. They said, dude, your program descriptions are clear. I don't have to ask any questions. I'm not confused about anything. We know exactly. It's because when I look at some really big brands and they're this program descriptions, I feel like it's just go wild, man. They, cause you don't mention it there anyway. Why shouldn't, why should I like do things just because it seems right? You're allowing it. So basically I'm going to do it. And then people are stressing out, Oh, we have fraud. We have this, we have that, but yeah, it's cause you didn't really set it up correctly in your program setting. So that's like super basic stuff, but you'd be surprised man, with the audits, how many times the program settings. So basically the merchant profiles need to be updated because it's just, it's like a mess. It's too basic. Also by the way, another one. It has to do with network, so I guess with the merchant profile as well, but it's more part of the program settings. So it's like slightly different, but it's in the same kind of section. Is for example, I know a lot of brands. So again, I think it was like four or five brands or something in the last six, seven months that literally had social media turned off as a group of affiliates, they don't allow social media affiliates and I'm thinking That doesn't make absolutely any sense. So social media for some brands is like, it's like super hot and you only have one ad account in your business manager as a brand, you're not reaching like you're reaching a specific group with a specific budget that you have. So you're fixed, you're limited. So you're not going to be reaching more people with your budget that you have. So why wouldn't you use social media affiliates that can actually do a great job on top of that? Those affiliates, they know exactly what works type of creatives creating funnels, stuff like that. So native guys, social media display, advertising, stuff like that, man, I'm so big on those guys as well. Now it's crazy. Cause they're super scalable, but then brands just say, no, we don't do it. Cause we have in house this day because we have in house social media, but you don't reach everybody with. 10 20 30 40 50k of budget. There's a lot more people to go around So let affiliates do some more of the lifting man. Let them help you out let them obviously then earn money on it too, but sure. Yeah, you're gonna make even more money So those are just a couple of things like i've seen that too much man.

Dustin: 20:42

That's a wild Misconception about like pulling social affiliates out of the program because you don't find value in it. That's that's just a education portion of makes our job harder. But I need to make some content on that. That doesn't make sense why, where that thought process comes in my mind at least, makes sense to some people. One big don't. Sorry, don't

Ishtvan: 21:04

don't say things like, Oh, I need to make content. Cause I should also write something down and I'm getting,

Dustin: 21:09

yeah. We'll collaborate on it. Me and you one big thing you mentioned there is data feeds and the uprising of this is making a comeback and it's not just for, content shopping, platforms anymore to pull in all the products. I think it's more these days for the content affiliates to make it easier on them. Tools like affiliate. com and gizmo are super cool technologies that affiliates are using to make content. And so having the data fade that, that pulls in that the calls to action for these super important to the affiliates these days. So I, I also feel like product feeds are a real essential portion of that.

Ishtvan: 21:49

So yeah, I guess the only thing I could add to that right now is man, it's so versatile the way you can use it. It's funny you say content. So basically for example, in the EU, funny enough, a lot of people don't even realize that you can use content affiliates to use product feeds. They always think, Oh, comparison websites or let's say Google shopping. So that's like the only thing that they would think of most of the time, but you can, man, I know affiliates, content guys, they literally pull special deals. So if you have a label in your product feed for, let's say, I don't know Halloween or something. They will pull those special deals with the best prices and pop those on their website. Exactly what you said, man, on specific content things happens way too little to be honest. So optimizing it doesn't just, it doesn't just impact one or two groups of people. It actually impacts almost everybody. Especially those content guys that can be using it. By the way, what about YouTube? Affiliate that can also upload that into their shopping overviews of the products, right? It goes pretty wild, man. It's in

Dustin: 22:46

the description. Now you can put it in the description and that call to action is so much hotter for YouTubers right now. So long story short, like I don't work with networks that don't have the capability of a product feed because I do find it super necessary and income. And speaking of networks that do that, Let's talk about inflection. My sponsor of the day. This is the only platform with personalized funnels to scale partnerships, marketing for brands, agencies, influencers, and affiliates catering to the health and wellness space. This tracking solution is helping build landing pages for partners in a matter of minutes instead of weeks. I personally am recruiting. Partners for the brands that we work with. So you get to work with me if you're working with inflection. So if you have a brand or an agency, come check this out, come check out a demo. And if you're an affiliate, come talk to me about joining programs on our platform, go to dustinhowes. com slash inflection, or you can really. Tap this QR code over here and find out more on our scale formula over there and getting back into the topic. The next topic I want to talk about. We only have a few minutes left, but skills of an affiliate manager. You and I cut our teeth as affiliate managers and then eventually evolved into what we're doing today in like the agency capacity. What do you, in your opinion, what are must have skills that affiliate managers must have?

Ishtvan: 24:18

Okay. So I'll really try to be quick on this one. Cause this is a really big question. Basically, the reason why I do what I do still, for example, product feed management, tracking implementations, creative briefings, even sometimes optimizations of creatives, and then I send it over to get approvals and stuff like that, or if they make some little fine tweaks because I have more assets and stuff. But basically, all those things came from my annoyance. during my career, at agency side where you had big teams of people doing exactly those kind of things. And then you as a specialist would be like, Hey, we need to fix this. And then it would get sent over to the data team. We need to fix this. It gets sent over to the creative team. But then I hated waiting. So I was like, yeah, but affiliates need it. Now, for example, let's get back to the product feed topic. Imagine product feed breaks or some data is missing, or basically we need to fix the product feed. Why would I send it over to a product feed manager who can only make free time, let's say four or five days from now, when I can fix it right now, myself, just going in there one hour, maybe two hours, depending on the severity of the issue. That's the reason why I, in any case decided, you know what, I'm going to learn all this stuff myself. So that I can actually do it without relying on other people. And I think every single affiliate manager, especially on brand side, because as on brand side, you need to. How should I say this correctly? Affiliates, you need affiliates also, but they also need you, but you actually need them more because without them, you won't be making the revenue that you are making right now. So help them do things quicker, make it easier for them to actually get stuff done. So if you really want to excel teach yourself those kinds of skills. One of the other things that I also really love doing is when you see market trends, or when you see, let's say. Okay, let's skip market transfer now. Let's just keep it in house. So imagine you talk as an affiliate specialist to your search specialist inside in house or to your social media specialist, and you get insights into what audiences work, what kind of visuals work for them. You go talk to your affiliates and you tell them, Hey guys, I have these insights. We see really high CTRs and conversion rates on these kinds of visuals for this kind of audience. And then they're like, ah, but yeah, actually we haven't tested that. Let's give it a try. That's the kind of information you also need to be aware of. That's why you should communicate with your internal specialists as well to understand how search actually works. So intent marketing, right? Then like social media, so more interest based marketing. You need to understand those different levels so that you can actually help your affiliates too and negotiate with them if they need something that you can actually say, Hey, okay, but yes, cool. We need this. I know. Sorry, dude, we tried this before. It doesn't work. It's not going to apply for the company because I know that they're not focused on that. It just improves the level of communication you can have with your affiliate on a much broader level. And then, yeah, obviously the tracking stuff. Imagine tracking falls out instead of sending it again to the data team, waiting a couple days until they have some free time to take care of it. You can do it yourself. So just jump into GTM, jump into any other platform, Shopify, I don't know and fix it yourself. So I can only emphasize guys, please, and girls try and learn that stuff. It will really make you much, much better.

Dustin: 27:23

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a learning progression, right? Like first off as an agency owner, you have to train everybody in the ways that are working right now. And so really good documentation on taking a young, Affiliate manager or marketing specialist and turning them into an affiliate manager is an art. And that's what I've done for years with my course on performance marketing manager. And it is something that you're not going to have all those skills, but you're going to have to develop them throughout time. And that can only happen with experience and the right training. I see. One a big part of what you're talking about, I'm not exactly sure why this is a thing, but in my experience, females are so much better at affiliate management than males are. There is just a finite amount of guys in this industry that are good at their job. I don't even think I'm very good as an affiliate manager. I know I'm really good at certain aspects of affiliate management, but I've seen the best affiliate managers in the world be females. And are you seeing that same trend? Like at this point, like I, if I were to hire another affiliate manager, it's going to be a female, like a hundred percent.

Ishtvan: 28:34

Cool. How am I going to answer this correctly? I guess the answer general answer would be depends on which market and niche you're in, because I think that's also very heavy, like the niche, especially the niche of the vertical, sorry, the best wording in this is vertical, so which vertical you in. But I think I would. Almost tend to agree with you. And I think it's because of the likability factor, man, to be honest. So they get more they get better connection quicker. So guys, I don't know what it is. I know a lot of guys, by the way, that are like really good. But they're mostly, so a lot of, some of these guys are like good at a couple of things, like really good, and they don't know anything about the other stuff. But then, it's funny, I don't know. I don't know, actually. I don't know. I don't know how to say this. It's mixed, I would say, to be honest, so far. helps the ladies for sure.

Dustin: 29:22

I agree. And I, I've even gone as far as like hiring virtual assistants to go and do the outreach. For me on behalf of me and bring in the deals that are getting the responses and their response rates are always going to be better. It's just nature of the beast of what it is. Now some of those skills are what really make them the all stars though. And. I've broken it down into a new blog post of the types of affiliate managers. And I've got eight different types, including relationship architects, guys like me and you, who are just good at talking to people and getting that likeability factor you talked about. There's organizational. There's knowledge fountains, there's problem solvers, there's data heads, there's strategists and like really good partner supporters. Everybody has like their different skill set, but I think you really need like four of these skills to be in a very adequate affiliate manager, right? Or all of them. All of them is nice, but like those are rare breeds of have all of those skill sets and it's hard to find that. And I'm not a data guy, like analytics and me are not great, but I have really good skills in recruitment and relationship building, but. I need somebody to compliment those skills. I need a data head on my team. So if you hire a relationship guru, make sure you hire a data head to fill those gaps of that person, to make a one really good affiliate manager.

Ishtvan: 30:57

100 percent agree with you. We don't always have to be the best at everything. And so there's other people that will be better at something than you anyway. So yeah, get those on.

Dustin: 31:05

Yeah. And for all those affiliate managers out there that, that seem like it feels like you're missing something, like you, you're not as good in one skill set. That's okay. You must find somebody to compliment your skill set if you want a successful, like the most successful program I've ever run is WP Engine, right? And I'm the relationship guy, I'm the outreach guy, and my buddy Ashwin is the data head, and he's the guy talking to executives and explaining what our work is and why we're doing so well. And you absolutely need that. If you're going to be super effective great topic, man. And as we're winding down, it is time for you to explain your posts. So I'm going to put something in from your background and you're going to have to explain this. So I, I saw, yeah award winning. Does not equal quality. We need merit based award shows, brand requests, an audit on an affiliate program run by an award winning agency. And the brand receiving that audit gets Michael Jordan crying. So explain yourself. Why are you posting this?

Ishtvan: 32:08

Two things, I guess the first one is I've done quite a few audits this year that were led by, so sorry. The current. The managers of the program were award winning agencies. And when I saw the quality of the work, I almost cried. Like I couldn't believe it myself. And I thought, no way. How did you ever actually win an award with this kind of quality in 2024, to be honest. So I'm just using, I compare my quality of the programs versus what I saw. So I think that was one of the biggest frustrations is just that, yeah, I couldn't believe it. And then. I think the first point was merit based so the merit based thing is not all the companies that do exceptional work have the funds to pay for events and to pay for entries. They just think they can't pay four or five hundred pounds just to have an entry and then potentially lose out. So it's not going to work. So yeah, obviously the companies with more budgets that can just blow it out Are going to be doing the entries and the ones that are actually doing much better work sometimes never get the spotlight. So I think that was the cultivation of those things right there. And I hear you.

Dustin: 33:15

That's why you're that's why you want to work with boutique agencies, in my opinion, the ones that give you the most love and the most bang for your buck. Good real quick.

Ishtvan: 33:26

So one of the funny things is. So I'm very savage on coupon sites as well and like subnetworks and stuff. Coupon sites, we have one program, but we actually have three coupon sites left. We are handling it like super, with like high levels of scrutiny. Program terms have been updated, like hardcore. People know they still want to make money cause they know how it works. So they're still make money, but actually most of the time they don't make money. I don't know. What was I going

Dustin: 33:50

to say

Ishtvan: 33:50

with this? Actually?

Dustin: 33:51

Oh, coupon sites are on the downtrend is what you're going with. And inflection only takes on clients that, that wants content.

Ishtvan: 34:01

Okay. So that's a really good one, man. But no, what I was going to say is that all our programs are growing. Even though, and I'm talking about double digit, triple digit growth year on year, every single month without using coupon sites. So we're doing that with quality affiliates, man.

Dustin: 34:18

And that's why I invite you to this two peas in a pod there and the way we think, all is how do we connect with you?

Ishtvan: 34:25

LinkedIn, the main source to go or the website that affiliate guy. com. Feel free to check it out. Otherwise LinkedIn, that affiliate guy, obviously.

Dustin: 34:33

All right. Go find him. Hey, such a pleasure hanging out and talking to you. Thanks for nerding out with me and we'll see you at that next conference, buddy.

Ishtvan: 34:41

Yeah, man. Likewise. Thanks again for the invite. And I'll talk to you later, man.

Dustin: 34:44

All right. All right, folks. Keep on recruiting and we'll see you on the other side. Later.