Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your Nerdarator, Dustin Howes. Spread that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me here every Thursday at 12 p. m. Pacific, so put it on the calendar and join me. And my guest today is Vic Giorgio and business partner over at Appy Stash. Welcome to the Nerdatorium Mr. Two Timer Club right here, Vic. Yes, sir. Yeah, man. I can't believe it's been like over a year since the last time we did it like so so much stuff changed for the bearer actually, which is amazing. That podcast was like the reason why we partnered up on Affistash in the end. So yeah, I don't know how you I got on your radar, but I do remember. Like our first interaction on LinkedIn is I ignored you. This, some guy from Romania is trying to be on my podcast or said he liked my podcast. I'm like, cool. Thanks. He's Hey, try my tool out. This thing's good for affiliate managers. And I finally took a look at it and I said. Hell this is the best product on the market. Like how'd you do this? And then that sparked a conversation of us being business partners today. So I'm super glad I You were persistent and I love that about you. Yeah, you still have that fire inside of you One of the biggest things I love about you hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, so happy I think I was like just looking for people that had podcasts in the industry, and I'm just like with you having One of the bigger ones on LinkedIn, I think I just applied to be on, but yeah, I'm super happy. And I think we're definitely building one of the best tools out there for affiliate managers to help ease their life and just continue making that tool better. That's what it's all about, buddy. And that's what we do on a consistent basis. And we're going to get into Appy Stash and some of the cool things that we're doing today, but before we do, let's let me ask. Who are you? Yeah. Currently I guess I'm like a high school student, part-time entrepreneur, but if you ask me personally, I'm a entrepreneur, part-time, high school student but just in case my parents say this I'm still like a full-time high school student for most people. And yeah, I pretty much I just love building software. I love everything. When it comes to software coding automations and stuff like that, like I like building products that make people's lives easier, whether it's making their marketing processes easier, making, helping them save time, money, and so on. I'm just like a nerd when it comes to tech and like affiliate, the affiliate industry has just happened to be one of the industries that I felt I could have an impact in and basically help people. Be more successful. Yeah, I and That is what makes you tick like you have this entrepreneur mindset and you're just built different than So many people that i've ever met when I was your age. I was out there you know just chasing girls and playing sports and you Go to high school you come home you work for three to four hours a night. You work on weekends, right? Like you're not out there partying with others. You are hyperfocused. And it is so incredible for me to watch and see you develop your skills in this. I'm just happy to be a part of your life at this point. I know you're gonna go on. Appreciate it, man. Do great things, man.. Yeah. 100%. Alright, Vic, uh, what do you do and who do you serve out there? So I'm, I guess for the most part, I like, like building software. So everybody that needs software in their workflow, in, in their life, that's who I'm serving at this moment. And obviously with Affistash, we're serving affiliate managers. We'll have, we're helping them in their affiliate recruitment and influencer recruitment process using AI and using a bunch of other advanced technologies. So if you're somebody out there, I'm sure if you're following Dustin, you probably already know about the product, but yeah, that's what I'm focused on right now. Like just building software. Yeah. The product is Affy Stash that we're working on together. And we've been business partners for over a year now. And it is really hard for me as a. Creative mind to come up with an idea and not give it to you to go build. I want you hyper focused on AFI stash and like making that product so much better. And I get in these idea phases where, Hey, this could be really cool. And then I ID with you and I'm like, no, we got to stay focused on AFI stash. Let's but that's tough. I love that, dude. I think that's amazing. Like I always like brainstorming with people, I think. Like always expanding ideas and stuff like that. I'm a fan of focusing on one thing, but at the same time like if there's an opportunity right there So that's like always when I see you coming with new ideas. That's why I always get so hyped So who knows maybe in the near future? You might see another product from the duo. I sure hope so. And you've got another product out here. It's what is your podcast product again? It's a tool for podcasters called pod kit. So we're pretty much just helping podcasters build their media kit. Without the hassle of hiring somebody that one it's still relatively new. We just finished sort of the product this month, but hopefully that grows into something pretty interesting. And hopefully next you guys will see the affiliate nerd out podcast in podcast, all the stats and so on. That's right. I'm going to share that in the notes today. Anybody who's got a podcast or likes podcasts can share this and be part of the affiliate program. I'm going to be your number one affiliate because I just believe in this product so much. It's really cool. But all together, like I'll summing it up like Victor is a builder. And once he graduates high school here, he's going to go out and get a job building software in this industry and get some experience working for people before he ultimately turns into that entrepreneur for life. So very excited to see where your career goes, but for a topic of the day, we're going to be talking about AI automation tools, tricks and tips for affiliate managers. And since you're a builder, you, your mind works a little bit different than most. And. I don't know anybody better at AI and automation than you. And which is really incredible since you are so young, but like you are on the cutting edge of all of this. And I really see you in the future being a chief AI officer at a company. And that's a role that is just being made up at this point for companies, but like you're a fixer, you're a builder, you know how to do this stuff, right? A hundred percent. Yeah. So definitely. And I guess like when it comes to AM's affiliate managers a lot of people are, their mind is towards like relationship building and the more human side of the things, which is amazing. That's how it should be. That's what the role of a manager should be. And so on. And when it comes to like monotone tasks, like repetitive workflow, that's like where I like to dig into it, look deeper and see is there any tech out there that could help this person or this company save save time or save money. So that's like also what I prepared for today's talk. Like I, I have a few processes that I know are like super time consuming or either time consuming or expensive for affiliate managers and for affiliate agencies out there. And then hopefully I'm sure we'll both share a couple of tools, a couple of solutions, and so on, that could help could help the guys watching be more efficient in their workflow. That's like my goal today. Okay, great. And I understand you've got some screen shares prepared for us. So we'll get into that and start talking about these AI tools and some of your favorites that you're using right now that are going to be helpful. So let's the screen share here. Give me a second. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So I. I compiled a quick list of obviously since we've started running Affistash, like Dustin and I, we've talked to a bunch of managers, a bunch of agencies and a bunch of people in the industry. So with that in mind, like we've seen that the most time consuming tasks for AMs and for managers are usually recruitment, sending emails. Spotting fake followers. So like making sure that you put money in the right campaigns and you're recruiting the right people in your program and onboarding new partners. And so my goal with this quick presentation, I have just four slides highlighting some of the top tools out there on the market and also tips and tricks on using those tools. To make your workflow as efficient as possible as a manager and save as much time and money from these processes. So starting up with affiliate recruitment, obviously, I think there's no surprise that like Dustin and I were, we're going to talk about Affistash and what our solution does and everything. So pretty much, and I'll jump right into Affistash to show you guys as well. We can use. A URL of a brand and turn it into a big li list of potential affiliates that we can reach out to. And this is only possible with the power of AI and with the power of machine learning and automation. So if we go right into Alpha Dash, you guys can see here that we have a brand. in the dashboard. Obviously, if you're an agency and you go to set your brand data, you'll have multiple brand slots, look for and so on. So you can switch between brands. And the beauty of this is that you can pretty much just tell our our platform. This is the URL of the brand that I'm trying to recruit affiliates for, and then it will fetch all the data that it needs about that specific brand. So as you guys can see here, I inputted FS com as my brand, and it extracted like all the keywords, the target audience, the description, and so on. And from here, what I can do is I can just go back to the dashboard or go to discover partners. And then I can go to any single one of the multiple partner discovery methods that we have in here. Obviously my favorite one is the AI partner finder. And then from here I can just select two fields. So it will ask me for the types of partners that I'm looking for and for the platform. And as you guys can see here, we support open 10 platforms. From what I know, we're probably the only tool on the market that will let you guys search for affiliates and influencers. On social media platforms as well. So from here, you can see that we get a big list of potential publishers that we can reach out to. This was a search that I ran for a brand that actually sells flowers. So an e commerce brand. So you guys can see here that all these posts are. Top ranking and targeting our top ranking keywords. So this is like a super, super cool thing that you can do without you having to do the keyword analysis, without you having to use any other expensive SEO tools, not even mentioning that you can get all this like really insightful traffic data in a second using gaffer's dash. You get their top keywords, their geographical data and so on. But this is just one feature that you have in here. You can even search for lookalikes and this leverages as AI as well. So pretty much right here, I can come in here, select the platform that I want to search on. So it can be SEO, YouTube, Twitter, whatnot. And then it will find me hundreds of more similar. Affiliates that post on those specific keywords and for sure. And yeah, this is like super powerful. Yeah, absolutely. And lookalike is probably my most utilized tool within the tool. I'm in there almost every day. If I find a good affiliate and I want to replicate it, that's the thing I use. Great. Explanation on appy stash there, like there is some lists that we've built in a matter of minutes that we're putting up as lead generation. You might've seen like this 800 YouTubers list come up and Vic is the guy that can build this. And let's can you run us through like how you're building that list here? A hundred percent. Yeah. So I'm taking a quick look at the list right here. As you guys can see we have a a couple of data points that are super, super important for managers to look at. So we have the source, the contact example, the URL, the contact email, and this is for YouTubers as well. So we're scraping like emails from their description and so on. And then you can also see the referral link. So this is like super easy to build with affistash and I'll show you guys exactly how I did it. So right here, you can go for any of the four partner discovery methods. Inside the tool, but honestly, like for this list, I went directly to the manual search engine and I went for YouTubers, obviously. So here I just went into YouTube and right here under keywords to include, I was obviously looking for YouTubers that review like e commerce products, so as you can see here, like we have. I don't know, tech products. We have outdoor products and so on. So in this instance, what I would do is just like coming here and for keywords to include, I don't know, Dustin, you can suggest like just an example of a product that we have best. Sleep. Yes. Like sleeping mask or something or yeah, best sleep tools. I don't know. Sleeping products. I don't know. Okay. We can do something like best products for better sleep, okay. And so the beauty of this is that firstly, we can do multiple keywords at the same time and then we can also do advanced filters as well. So we can exclude a couple of keywords. We can search for hashtags as well if we're in social media. And let's say we do another keywords. We'll do sleep products review, and then click enter and two keywords should be all good for now. So I'll just click on search. And if I didn't have any typos in here, we should have a pretty good list to base this. All right. So as you guys can see, it just loaded. We have 150 results, which is really good. And as you can see here, like all of these are like best sleep products products to help you get better sleep. So like really good quality publishers ranking on the keywords that we're looking for. So from here I can just click export and confirm. I assure one expert 150 leads. I'll do yes. Start export. This will take a couple minutes and they'll get an email when this is finished. But just to make sure that we save time, I'll show you guys what a list will look like. So if we go here under my exports, these are actually the exports that I did to compile this list of 800 800 YouTubers. So I'll just download the latest one and see what data we get right here. So from this one, we have 100, 150 leads. Inside and takes a bit to open because there's a lot of data, but you can see here that I was looking for wireless chargers for cars and so on. And look at this data. This is super, super nice. Firstly, we see here that we have emails for these YouTubers. We also see their referral links. So for this one, it looks like they're using genius link, which highly indicates like affiliate activity. Yep. Same for this one right here. Share a sale, Amazon links, Bitly links. So this is like super, super nice. Obviously we can't scrape. Emails for all of them, unfortunately, because it's a YouTube's policy and so on. So we can only get the emails of the ones that have them public. Now, luckily a lot of YouTubers have their emails public, which is great, but just for filtering more easily, you can just sort this from A to Z or something like that, so you get the leads with the emails first. And then for the ones that don't have emails, you can just leave them for manual outreach or something else. So this is pretty much how I built that list. It's just and how much did this take Dustin? I don't know. You tell me maybe under a minute, literally under five minutes and you can get a CSV file with. All these emails that you can instantly start reaching out to people. I spend a little bit more time. I give thumbs up to ones I'm looking for, and I want to train that algorithm to find more results like that in the future. But that's just me. That's a good practice. One of the most annoying things about finding YouTubers is how many clicks you have to do to get to their email address with a Oh, yeah. Recapture. This is skipping all of that and it's just giving you the greatness there. All right, that's enough of a party about AFI stash. Let's talk about some of those other tools that, that you want to suggest. What other methods for AMs or products do you see using out here? What else you got for us? A hundred percent. Yeah. The next like process that I think we can really. And also improve with AI is definitely like sending emails. And there's a bunch of tools out there that can help you guys automate the emails that you send to partners. So pretty much first, like we have Affistashing here, I won't tap into it because you guys already saw it in the first section of the podcast, but instantly is one that we've actually used internally as well. And that worked really well. So just like to show you guys quickly as well, you can see on their landing page that it will let you personalize using AI prompts. So something that you can do actually with an FS X board, you can put there you can put, let's say I can put their content example under my content variables in, or under my custom variables and instantly and tell it using like GPT or something like that. Tell it like. make a compliment about their video, and then their icebreaker would look something like, Oh, I saw you have a video about fast and efficient car chargers. That's funny because I was just looking for one, for my, I don't know, for my new car or something like that. And you can just see that sounds a lot better than when you're just like bulk emailing and with join my affiliate program, or we have this product, can you review it? Cause firstly, it's basically like telling them that, okay, my content helped this person and they have an opportunity for me to make money on. So I definitely suggest instantly. Great tool. I know people working there and they have a great mission with the tool. We also have we also have smart lead right here. They are also a similar tool. So I dunno, just based on the preference you can go for any of these. Yeah. But yeah, very affordable prices as well for you. And it really helps my workflow as an affiliate manager when I'm doing that bulk outreach great suggestions there. What what else you got outside the emails? Yeah, probably my favorite one spotting fake followers. I just posted like a LinkedIn carousel about it and people like enjoyed it a lot because it's a big problem in influencer marketing. So a tool that I love about this is Hype Auditor and what I love about their tool right here is that you have a lot of really insightful data. So firstly, if we go to their website, you'll see here that they have. a pretty complex platform. Now, their main feature is check any influencer. And the beauty of this is they can just come here and enter. I don't know if I want to do mr. Beast or something. I have no, it's a, he's a, obviously a big YouTuber out there. But for this example, I picked like one of my personal favorite content creators, like MKBHD, Marques Brownlee. And what we can see here, this is completely for free, by the way, which is just crazy, but we can first see the engagement rate, which usually indicates if we have a suspicious activity of fake followers, but the beauty about it is that it will compare it to the industry standard So right here we can see that for marquise's channel Like it's right around the average and we can also see that like the subscriber growth rate And the crazy thing about this is that if they bought followers or views at any point we can just look for peaks In this one right here. So let's say on January 22nd, if we see like a big spike and then like a super slower growth, it can either mean that they had a super viral video, which that could be the case. We can check that. Or it means that they likely bought like followers or something like that. We can also see their total video views and average views, which is. A lot of really nice insights. And then we also have something similar in FS dash. So if you guys want to fetch audience data, you'll be able to see like number of views and the number of likes, as well as like audience interest and so on. But we're like checking the stats. I definitely recommend you guys like run this through a hype auditor. So this is like a super powerful tool when it comes to spotting fake followers. All right. Great suggestion. Love that. And then he got one more slide for us. What's the last thing? Yeah, last one is just like onboarding onboarding new affiliates, right? So whenever somebody joins your program, how do you make sure that their support is top notch and so on? And they get activated properly and start posting. And actually here, I have a couple of tools like. Firstly, we have MailChimp and MailerLite, which are your standard like email marketing. I'm sure Dustin managing like you, you've managed a lot of programs when you get a new affiliate, it should go into an email sequence like onboarding email sequence, right? Yeah. So with that in mind, I definitely recommend MailerLite super, super cheap and affordable MailChimp. I guess if you guys are looking for a more enterprise solution. It's super great. But basically like when it comes to onboarding, like probably three things that you want to have in mind. So like sending emails, onboarding materials, and then affiliate support. And there's actually a tool right here started by somebody from our communities or Roo from Australia. I actually. Spoke to him and I'm a big fan of what he's building at Boostbox. And they're a smaller tool just starting out, but I love the idea of what they're building. So they have a really good tool for affiliate materials and affiliate support that is made with AI. So pretty much what this means is that you can train a chat bot on your materials, on your past work with affiliates on your policies and so on. And then you can basically tell your affiliates. Like you have any questions, go ask this AI and it will help you immediately. And then if you have more questions, reach out to our affiliate manager or to our support team, which this is super, super nice for the affiliate managers, because obviously. The last thing that you want to do is have like a bunch of support emails with like repetitive questions. And this is something that like can be automated by AI. So when Roo told me about what his building, I instantly thought okay, this is super cool. And I wanted to include it in today's quick presentation. That is great. Cool tool. That is on that cusp of like how much is too much automation. And the last thing we want to do in partnership marketing is take away the aspect of face to face and the partnership relationship. And that one's close to it, but I think the effectiveness of it is super valuable as well. That's that's great, Vic. Thank you for all those tools and suggestions there. I want to pivot a little bit into while we're wrapping up here about your entrepreneur struggles here. As you are as I mentioned at the top of this episode, like you're out there. Hustling like I've never seen before, right? Like you go to school every day and then you come home and get some work done. What are some of those struggles that you're having to work through? And I guess AI is a big part of your life because you are limited on time. Yeah, dude, for sure. Honestly I, I don't think that now that you brought it up, I don't think I realized how much like AI helped me I definitely wouldn't have been able to like ship features as fast for FS dash, like ship new products and fix bugs. So definitely a big part now that I'm thinking about it, but yeah, other than that, just like definitely like juggling school and like work is it's really tough and it's really easy to lose that balance, so if there's like anybody that's like trying to do something outside of school in high school. I would still a hundred percent recommend it. And I think it's definitely something to go for, but I'm just like, I can't emphasize enough how much you should avoid that burnout because burning out at 16, 17, 18, it's probably like most, one of the most unhealthiest things that, that can happen. I'm not even like entirely sure if I ever experienced like a full on burnout, but I definitely had a lot of moments where I was like I don't know if this is, if this still goes, or if I should still. And then obviously customer support, product issues and so on. It's a lot, but when you look in like the grand scheme of things, you've got to realize that having a bad day in terms of like sales or in terms of having bad feedback from customers. Just try to see the bigger picture, like where we were a year ago or where we were like. Two years ago or something like that. And just realize it's been a long journey and we've come really far. So I think even in, in those lower moments, just realize that, and if you got to take a break, like definitely go for it, I don't, I think that like it's definitely necessary and I don't judge anybody, especially teenagers that are trying to going to business to take a break, but also like you got to realize that you should take advantage of the fact that you're still low on expenses, you're like. You don't have many expenses and stuff like that. You're still either living with your parents or just moved out or whatnot. There's a couple of things that like impacted my journey out there. Yeah. And it's something I'm always. Cautious of you working too hard. I'm always telling you make sure you get some life experiences in there. I don't want you living behind a computer and burning out because you have your entire life to go and work. But you only have one time where you're in your childhood and you're in your college years. Those are some of the greatest times of my life and some of the happiest. And I hate to see. People burn out like that and I'm super glad that you're cautious of it. Any tips out there for those people that are in that entrepreneurship for what you are doing as with your limited amount of time that, that you set aside for your free space? Yeah, I think like definitely firstly, find quality people that you can work with. So like it, it's super tough to do. in, in your business. So like in the beginning, I'd say just focus more on growth rather than profitability, so if you can pay somebody to run your, I don't know, your social media, do that. If you can pay somebody to implement a feature for you, do that. If the budget allows you. So I think that's something, especially because. Money should not be an option if you're still like a teenager or not an option, but not a problem. Yeah. Obviously if that is the case, then I don't know exactly I probably don't have the best tips, but, like just try to outsource as much as you can try to build a quality team. I like to work when it comes to like product and like building and so on. I love to work with people around my age. So try to surround yourself. With people like that then definitely take breaks travel. I love like traveling that's probably my favorite way of spending my money and then also you know travel party have a good time to keep that balance. And that's pretty much it I guess in terms of like tips I think like outsourcing is really important and a lot of people say oh you're starting your business out like just Non stop work. You're doing this, you're doing that. But I think if you learn the fundamentals of business from the beginning, even if your business is not doing like astronomical numbers, It's super, super valuable. And if you surround yourself with the right people, you will find other people that are willing to either work for not a full time salary or even for free just. To be part of something cool of like a grander mission. Great points. Love it. All right. It's that time of the show for you to defend your post. So I dig into your profile and I found this and this is a video that somebody brought up to me of you were just scribbling and you had your nose strip on. I'm like, He brought it to my attention and I just laughed what are you doing with this nose strip thing? Why? Why Hermosia this up with your videos? Yeah, dude, I have I'm allergic to a couple of things including like dust and stuff like that Okay especially like during the March April usually around that time I can remember when that video was posted, but you know when it's like the season with more Allergies and stuff like that. It's tougher to breathe sometimes. So I was like I know people will find this gimmicky and maybe think that I'm mocking like Alex Formosio and they're trying to beat him, I'd rather that than sneezing during the video and doing, blowing my nose and stuff like that. So I just went with it, but it's good that some people found it funny. I think it's the only time that I recorded a video with a nose strip because nowadays they just wear them probably during sleep. Yeah, all so is that a necessity? Not vanity or like you just forgot? Oh, no, not at all. All right, fair enough. All right Vic, how do we get a hold of you? LinkedIn, Twitter, that's where I'm mostly at and then affistash. com slash Vic if you want to talk. I have a calendar there. So Anything about like affiliate recruitment, automation, anything in terms of software. I'm happy to have a chat. Fantastic. All right, buddy. Thanks for your time. Thanks for being here and we'll see you on the other side. Appreciate it. All right. Take care of folks. Keep on recruiting. We'll see you out there.