Dustin: 0:27

Hey folks, welcome to affiliate nerd out. I am your Nerdirator Dustin Howes. Spend that good word about affiliate marketing. You're going to find me here every Thursday at 12 Pacific time. Put it on the calendar. Join me on LinkedIn where me and a guest are hanging out and talking affiliate. My guest today, Will Gaines. Welcome to the Nerdatorium, sir.

Will: 0:49

Hello, Dustin. And hello, everyone listening. Happy to be here. Big fan of the podcast and I can't recommend it enough as a resource for people who are in the affiliate industry. It's like having an extra friend you can consult with and get some good information to help guide you through your affiliate world.

Dustin: 1:05

Oh, that is an excellent compliment. I really appreciate this. And I know you're not just saying that. Our pre recorded session, we were talking a little bit about how much I hate checking out data and you were like, yeah, I've noticed that. Like you said Hey, you must be listening. Yes, this is great. Hey thanks for being here. If you'd like to be in Will's seat go to dustinowes. com slash nerd and drop fill out a submission on what you want to nerd out about. This is how Will got here and. Just so glad he did because we're talking about a topic that I'm not a big fan of and I love to pick the brains of people that are good at things that I am not. But before we get into that, Will!

Will: 1:50

I am Will Gaines. I've been in the affiliate world for 15 years. I've done pretty much everything. Started off as an analyst. So did all the grunt work you can imagine. And my most recent corporate role was global director of partnership marketing. Where I was responsible for affiliate marketing, social, refer a friend, loyalty programs, and now I'm a freelance consultant, consulting with technology companies and right at the moment with some supplement companies helping them figure out their affiliate strategy and guiding them through their social media world.

Dustin: 2:25

Excellent. I am expanding on that a little bit further. I guess you answered this. What do you do and who do you serve? But you're first and foremost, it's like you're taking on clients as a consultant and you're helping them in the affiliate space. Is anything beyond that? Is it digital marketing? Is it anything beyond affiliate,

Will: 2:43

primarily affiliate, but also helping some of my clients come to me and ask what should we do with TikTok. Now that's a whole other matter, coming up right now. But advising on TikTok shop and meta shops, which have been really profitable spaces.. And of course a lot of us are holding our breath waiting to see what's gonna happen on the TikTok front over the coming weeks. Yeah. With the Supreme Court and with everything potentially happening there.

Dustin: 3:10

Yeah, that is a hot topic. I need to get somebody else on here about TikTok that's a master at shops and everything like that. That's a good point. Whoever's out there listening, TikTok shop, you know it. Let's talk. Let's get you in here. Today's topic of the day though is making annual planning surprisingly fun. And when you propose this topic, I said yes to it immediately because I want to, I, I hope you're right. Like I don't, I've never seen this side of things of I've never called annual planning fun by any means, but that's just not me. And I want to pick the brain of somebody that actually does enjoy this kind of concept. So super excited to have you here talking about it. So with that in mind let's start at the beginning. What is annual planning in your mind?

Will: 3:59

Annual planning is taking some time to really think about take your client or if you're in house and you work for a company and you're responsible for their partner marketing efforts, thinking about the whole year. Most often we are tasked with getting past this quarter, right? What are your plans for Q1? What are your plans for this product launch? What are your plans for this holiday? And All critically important, but I find it's a lot more useful when you take a longer term view, look at the whole 12 months for most companies, there are the same landmarks that happen every year. There's the same big holidays that matter to them. If you're in the health and wellness space, that's usually Q1 coming out of Christmas. Everyone wants to be new year, new you. If you're in the technology space consumer electronics, That's usually q4. And if you're in a renewable product where you release products every year, you probably do it on the same cycle around the same time every year. My point is there are these landmarks that happen. You know them on January one. You might not know exactly what date that launch is going to happen, it's going to be say in August. When black Friday is going to be, when Christmas is going to be, so why not take the time at the beginning of the year to lay out those big dates? Review your performance over the prior year and start thinking about what you're going to need as you move through the year and start making those asks early, particularly for budget. Those of us in affiliate know that we are often the last place on the budget scale. So if you can get ahead of everybody else, make your asks early. And support those asks with data that puts you way ahead of everyone else.

Dustin: 5:42

I love that concept. I, it's something that I don't do enough, not necessarily because I'm a, I'm bad at it. I love the creation concept of it. The organization part of it makes me a little anxious inside of trying to sit down and do this. I feel like my time is better spent doing more outreach and like creating lists and stuff like that. So it's not my ballpark. And I'm so glad that somebody is out there doing it. And some of the best jobs I've ever had is somebody. On my team that is like you, that has this kind of vision and helpful thought process to actually do this. Now in, with that in mind, like you mentioned Q1 and you mentioned supplements being in your portfolio and Q1 is super hot. New you, new year kind of thing. Is this the best time to be doing this content strategy, or is it before the new year gets started in December when you're like winding down after Black Friday?

Will: 6:43

Oh, that's a really good point. Depending on your client, depending on your product set, annual planning can happen January 1. It can happen March one for clients in the supplements and wellness space. I consider calendar Q1 really a part of Q4 planning because November is not a time when anyone is thinking about starting new health habits and before Christmas is not a time when people are thinking of starting new health habits.

Dustin: 7:14

Yeah,

Will: 7:14

so I make those Q1 plans for those types of clients really in Q4 and are. Q4 plans for like a consumer electronics company. That's a good Q3 time to make those plans. So when I think about health and wellness Q1 for those types of clients should already be pretty well ironed out. You should have some good, maybe everything isn't baked. But you should have the recipes already picked out and the ingredients ready to go because it is go time.

Dustin: 7:47

Beautiful so it is adaptable to everybody's busy time of the year essentially is what we're getting at and it should be done. And what are some of those really Important reasons to go and do this. And how can you motivate people on the affiliate team to actually go and do this planning when they're busy building those relationships and this might fall off the table sometimes for some affiliate managers what would you say to motivate people to get this done?

Will: 8:19

The earlier you act, the better positioned you will be to be seen as a leader. So for many sectors, starting in February, we're going to start seeing sales drop off. And by March, those sales will really be dropped off from those Q4 and January highs. Now, different sectors, different effects health and wellness. That's not necessarily the case, but for many brands, most of that spending was just done in Q4. And so you're going to start getting asked the questions. So what are we doing? What are we going to do to counteract these dropped sales? And then those sales usually stay soft for many sectors, particularly consumer electronics. All the way through till about June, you don't start to see the sales tick back up again until dads and grads back to school shopping again. Think of computers, mobile phones, things like that. Those are very cyclical products that usually only start to go back up again around major launches. And then, of course, all the ancillary products, phone cases and all the things that are dependent on those big launches. So you want to be in a position to answer that question. Now before the question gets put to you, what are you going to do to get sales back up? What are we going to do to continue justifying this expense? What do you need to get sales up or at least stem that decline? Which is inevitable coming off of those high sales periods, but you got to have a good response to it You don't want to be the guy saying oh, I don't know. We'll see So it's good to have a plan.

Dustin: 9:52

Excellent. Excellent point now with that like You came to this call and said, and like a true organizational pro, you said, I've got a plan for our podcast today. And I've broken it into chapters and I think that's a really good Mindframe to have, like I have the base outline of most of the things that I do on this podcast and that works for me and my organization and what are some of those essential things that you need to do when you're bringing out this annual planning? What are the things that are most important and must do's on this annual plan?

Will: 10:31

I think the number one thing and unsurprisingly is going to be reviewing your data. So taking a look, as we sit here in January, over the next three weeks or so, the major affiliate networks and some of the big thought leaders are going to start releasing their Q4 digest. What happened over the holidays? What did we think was going to happen? What actually happened? What sectors performed well? What sectors didn't? Those are really good resources to take a look at and get a macro picture for just like how the space is performing. But for your specific brands, it's a good time to take a look at. If you have two years of data, three years of data, and I like to layer them in a line chart and just look. All right, January 24, January 2023, January 2022. Did I see the same trends? Each of those years. And when you lay that out over a whole 12 month period, you get a really good picture of what to expect for the coming year, usually. And I've worked with many brands in different sectors. Usually you see the same peaks and valleys as you move through the year. For the reasons we described earlier, product launches happen generally around the same time. The same holidays that are relevant for your product last year are going to be relevant for your product this year. So laying out that data. And then waymarking those dates. That's the first and really the easiest thing to start out with. The answers will present themselves to you very quickly. You'll see the peaks, you'll see the valleys, and you can start thinking now, okay, so there's a valley coming and sales are going to go down in another six weeks for my product set. What's my answer going to be? Oh it may not be. I need to figure out an answer to get sales up. It might be when those sales go down, that's a great opportunity for me to do some testing and spend that time onboarding new partners who may not generate sales during that low sales period, but start nurturing those relationships that when sales go up again, we've got a force multiplier. And we brought some new people out of the ecosystem.

Dustin: 12:36

It's super smart. And one of those things that. I've been a part of this process before where I was at WP Engine and we had this real bad lull at the end of December where people were not buying the product and it could be part of the concept of, everybody's on Christmas break, nobody's shopping and or everybody's bought the product. All the things and they're out of money and they're not going to invest in web hosting right now. But we came up with the concept of created a holiday and called it, uh, since it was the best, I don't remember what we called it, but it, since it was the best time, since everybody has this downtime, what a better time for you than, When you don't have a lot to do, to switch your hosting into something better, right? And so we came up with a week holiday that we called, I can't even remember the campaign, but it worked very well. And so I've always come up with that concept of creating holidays is a good idea, but I love this idea maybe for every brand, but if you're seeing a lull, is creating a holiday, like a good concept for you?

Will: 13:44

Absolutely. And you can tap into pretty much every sector. There's a national pie week. There's national internet security week. There's a national cyber security week, different from international security week. So taking a look at some of those unconventional places. Where your products that could be valuable. You make a fitness tracker. Q1 is great, but summer could also be an opportunity for you to look at creating a 10, 000 step challenge and promoting that through another part of this planning is here's what happened in affiliate or partnership marketing. Where are some areas where I can work with some of the other. Marketing areas for my client. Are there some suggestions that I can say for their email team? Hey, we saw this as being a great sales period. It might be an opportunity in your email side of things to work with me and work with your paid media team and maybe together we can create a holiday like you described or a campaign that is integrated that might fall out of a big holiday period and might fall out of a big sales period And what's great about that is there's less noise. At Christmas time and at black Friday time, your costs are through the roof. Your CPAs are going to be higher. All of your AdWords bidding are going to be much, much higher. And there's going to be a lot of you, all your competitors are going to be coming out of the woodwork at the same time. So when you can find these periods where. Things are quieter from a marketing standpoint, where the market generally is quieter, and maybe in a soft sales period for your company or for your client, that's a perfect opportunity to try creating a holiday like you described, or tapping into some other National holiday that doesn't get a lot of attention. There's a lot of them. There's women's health month. There's tons of them. If you do a little research, there's something out there for every product.

Dustin: 15:44

So true. I think there's a holiday for every day of the year. If you go and look at a calendar I don't know what you call it. Like fake holidays or created holidays or something of every day has a day and every week has a week. And every month has a month, go and check this out. Maybe I'll drop a link in this below to help you out. But get creative with it is the whole concept of it. Now what was that? Content calendar. Does this coincide with the, after you evaluate that data, now we're going to create these holidays and campaigns that are going to work. How do you go about attacking this content calendar?

Will: 16:33

Oh, there we go. What happened? Disappeared for a minute. I don't know. That was strange. That was strange. Did you push something? No, not nothing at all. That's funny, but we're back. So creating a content calendar.

Dustin: 16:45

Let me reask the question and then I'll just cut this section. Cool.

Will: 16:49

Okie dokie.

Dustin: 16:50

We're not live let me just get back into it. The content calendar is this an important portion of man? I forgot my, I lost my train of thought. Do you remember it

Will: 17:46

was, um, doing some of this planning is creating a content calendar also a part of this process.

Dustin: 17:53

All right, cool. Run with it.

Will: 17:55

Yeah, I think it's content calendar is right up there with data. The data answers the question, how did we do what did we do? Content calendar answers the question of how should we do it. What are the key things we should be drawing attention to for our clients or for our company. And you'll find if you're inside of a company and you're managing affiliate for a company that provides services or products usually there's lots of material inside of the company. There's all kinds of creative resources available that their product marketing team might be creating for you. You might even be able to look at your client, look at your own company's blog, where whoever is generating that content to get yourself some ideas. Another thing is to. What I love to do is to take a client. I look at their top five competitors and I just Google them like crazy. What are the things that they're saying? What have they been doing? What did they do last year? You can use some great tools inside of the meta universe to see what sort of ads did they run for holiday last year? What did they run over the last six months? What are they running now? And that can give you some good ideas. A, it tells you. Hey, what's the space doing? But it also tells you what are consumers seeing because these messages are being put out by their competitors, by your competitors. So that's a good way of just getting some of the creative juices flowing as you're starting to put that together. And then again, it's the same with the data. You. Know what's going to happen at holiday time. You might not know exactly what offers you might have available. You might not know exactly what the market conditions are going to be, for most products between November and December, that's going to be your most heavy promotion period. And again, for health and wellness that moves to after Christmas into all the way through till March, it, it's the same every year. So going through reviewing some of the content from years prior, and if you're new to a company or you're new to a client, you don't have that historical knowledge, that's where looking at the competitors can give you a really good jumpstart. Beautiful.

Dustin: 20:04

Excellent. All right. I'm going to switch gears here and talk about our sponsor of the day real quick, and that is AFI stash. Now, AFI stash has nothing to do with content planning, but you can plan to get new affiliates into your program. Using AFI stash, come use our super cool tools such as partner lookalikes. This is a great feature that we brought on over the last couple of months. And. You can plug in any URL to any affiliate and we're gonna find hundreds of more like it. Come check out a demo with us. Go to afi st.com or go to dustinhowes.com/afi and go get that demo. Now, switching gears a little bit, you brought something up about being a leader in your organization, and I think this is a super important aspect of why and what motivates people to do this. Content calendar and annual planning. I feel like affiliate managers get pigeonholed in a company on a, if they're on a team of a marketing, like they know affiliate, they're just going to stay in their lane. But content and annual planning like this is a great way to show initiative. To the executives and your CMO that you can go up to that next level and you can be a director. Can you explain what you've seen work as is it a good idea for those affiliate managers to be doing this and taking the initiative?

Will: 21:31

Absolutely. What we are uniquely positioned an affiliate to see is not just what the consumer is doing, what the customer is doing. Everyone who has data, the email manager can see what the customer bought, the paid search team can see what the customer bought. What we have that nobody else has is what partners are saying. What's the feedback that we can hear from lots of others in between us and the customer? No other channel really has that. And so in the partnership world, that's insight that we can bring that literally no one else can from social media to comparison sites. We just have a lot richer reservoir of feedback that we can give. So bringing that forward, what are we hearing? What's feedback we're hearing from partners? What are they saying worked? What are they saying didn't work? And also having that data plan here's what we've seen specific to our channel and asking the question being a little provocative in the sense Hey email, what did you see over the last 12 months? Paid media. What'd you see over the last 12 months? That is how Leadership looks when you're the first one, you're usually seen as the leader.

Dustin: 22:47

Great point. And so part of that planning and you're talking about data and like checking it out and really digging into which affiliates are working and which aren't and what you're bringing the incremental value and what you're not and which are having multi touch and which there's are. Closing immediately, like all of that data should be evaluated and shared with organization and like putting that together in that annual plan is a really good concept that you should be considering, right? Absolutely. And with that data, like you talk about clean data, oh, I don't understand this concept. How do you keep data clean in your mind?

Will: 23:29

What I mean by that is data that is really well verified data. You've taken some time to do a little bit of analysis on. So instead of just sales were up, sales were down, sales were up because of these five publishers, these five products over this period of time. And these specific tactics that I deployed during that period. So having the complete story. They say information is data plus analysis. So having information and not just data, there's all, everyone is crazy for data, but data on its own is worth much without some analysis to make it actionable information. So having some. Clean information, some clean data that you can then save and reference back throughout the year and years to come. So that's great if you get to work on the same piece of business a year after year, but it's also great when you work with other clients. And you get a new client today and what should we do for this year? You can go back and look at your data for the last few years for other clients and say, ah, this kind of sector saw this performance during this period. From that, I can extrapolate a plan for this client who maybe I've just started with and they haven't shared a lot of information with me yet, but I can still start developing a plan. And again, show them early in our relationship. I'm going to lead and be a resource to them early.

Dustin: 25:02

For sure. And one of the best ways you can do that, I think, or is adding in sub IDs. I think this is a very underutilized component of affiliate marketing. If you don't have an affiliate tracking solution that has sub IDs that you can verify you need to get on one essentially. And this is the best way to, to keep that data clean so that you can visit it a little bit further down the road.

Will: 25:25

Absolutely. Since I'm just saying this overall publisher, this publisher and this particular tactic that we did with this publisher, this link in this place that we've deployed on this day that's really important. So keeping those records as you're going through and executing on the plan is just as important as the planning on the front end. Yeah,

Dustin: 25:46

and if you don't have those in place today, like today is the best day to start getting that data and keeping it clean for the future. And along with those things that worked. Equally important is probably the things that didn't work, right?

Will: 26:02

Absolutely. You don't want to repeat them again. And you want to have part of marketing is trying things. You do your best to make a plan and research and hope that it's going to do well and do everything you can to make it a success. But sometimes it doesn't work. For whatever reason, that partner didn't work, that partnership didn't work. And you want to understand why. Number one, so you. Can be ready to explain it. You could ask, Hey, what happened to that 10, 000? And also you want to understand why? So that when you're going to try it again, you have a better sense of what to not repeat the problem. Wasn't the partner. This is a great partner. We have a great history with them. The problem was we picked the wrong product at the wrong time, or we picked the right product the right time, but we didn't go for the right audience. Or we didn't put enough budget into it, or we put too much budget into it with the wrong ROI expectations. So understanding why it didn't work is critically important.

Dustin: 27:05

Beautiful. One also holidays your holidays that you make up, they might fail miserably, and you don't want to try that again next year. I remember at Retail Me Not my wife was working there and the marketing campaign. Came up with pumpkin headed turkey mess. Like they tried to combine all the holidays at once into this one just terrible mascot. I can't, I don't have the picture of it, but it was a disaster of a campaign and that didn't happen the next year, but it was fun. Like you've got to try those things out on the marketing side, especially if you've got some budget to play around with. It's fun to be on the marketing team sometimes.

Will: 27:47

Absolutely. And that it didn't work out. You can, if you can understand why, Hey, we tried it. Here was our goal. Here's why we tried it. It didn't work out. I have found that most, whether it's a VP of marketing or director of marketing and director of e comm, whatever, they're looking for the big ideas because we're all trying to contribute to a bigger number. And we all know that sometimes you've got to hit a little harder. You've got to take some risks to hit that bigger number. So I wouldn't be afraid of trying those bigger things that you got to do your research. You've got to have a good plan. And again, we've got to do the postmortem at the end to understand what worked and what didn't, but I wouldn't be afraid of trying those big things. And you expect to be, you might be afraid of being punished for not working out, but I have found even if it doesn't work out, if you had a good plan and you had a big vision and you really applied something that made sense, there's no negative consequences. People appreciate you going big and trying something. Love people wanna hear that story just as much as they want to hear when. Dustin: I love it. Yes, I totally agree on that point. All as we wind down here it's time for you to defend your post and I went through your LinkedIn profile and here's what I found. Nothing will like . This is the most embarrassing LinkedIn profile I've ever seen. I know. Five connections. No posts whatsoever. I know years in the industry. What are you doing out there? This, I am the worst with social media, my own personal social media. And I was saying earlier it's one of those things where it's I love working on other people's stuff. I love working on clients. I love. Everybody else's stuff. And then you look at your own and say that doesn't feel as important. So one of my goals talk about planning for the year. One of my goals for 2025 is to not be as embarrassing. So I have a plan. I actually have a plan to do better in 2025 because yeah it's not great. It's not super up to date. My links are, I've got. A bunch of people that I'm just needing to go in and click, except, so I'm going to go in and clean out that list. So if you're there wondering why you haven't heard from me, you will soon.

Dustin: 30:11

All right. I'm going to hold you to that. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help, to get you to that 500 level of respectability. So good luck in your journey this year as you do that. And. Lastly, how do we connect with you?

Will: 30:25

You can still reach me on LinkedIn. That's 2025. I'm going to be much, much better responsive on LinkedIn.

Dustin: 30:35

Good.

Will: 30:36

So that's probably the best way.

Dustin: 30:38

All right, go get them. Thanks so much for joining me for this fun conversation and making the, your annual planning a thing of a necessity that all affiliate managers should be thinking about. Appreciate your time, buddy.

Will: 30:53

Thanks, Dustin. Happy to be here. Awesome.

Dustin: 30:55

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