Hey, folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I'm your Nerdarator, Dustin Howes. Spreading that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me here every Thursday at 12pm on LinkedIn Live, so put it on the calendar and join me and my special guest. My special guest today is Jenny Gonzalez. She is CEO over at Trackfinity. Welcome to the Nerdatorium, Jenny. I'm so happy to be here because I'm a big ol affiliate member. All right, awesome. That's the only people I invite. Start it off hot. Let's go. Who are you? I am a College dropout, snowboarder, bartender that fell into affiliate marketing. Worked my way from bartender to CEO in the first 10 years of my career. I started out as a baby affiliate manager that had no clue. I didn't even know how the internet worked. And self taught, started working in the industry, worked my way up. I learned all the tools of the trade, and today I happen to be running my own affiliate network, and I have a SaaS platform to manage affiliate programs. Okay, great. So you're combining the worlds you're in the affiliate and tell us more about that. So track Vinnie and rock ahead. What do you do and who do you serve here? Okay. So with rock ahead, it came from being on the advertiser side for a whole decade managing affiliates. Seeing what I was missing, how monetized, all of that. Once I quit my CEO role for this big group, I decided to open my own affiliate network and then develop the technology that I felt was missing to bridge the gap between a regular affiliate and a really advanced one. So that's what we do at Rock Ahead. We work with a few different verticals, even though I grew up in online dating. And then at Trekfinity is the evolution. So I partnered up with a bunch of really smart people, and we created a affiliate management platform. So I can now help every advertiser and every person that wants to run a network do so effective, effectively and actually provide a good service to affiliates. Awesome. That sounds great. I always say that the best products out there are built out of necessity, right? And affiliate tracking solutions have got us to a certain point in this industry, but that next evolution is coming. Hot and fast. And it sounds like you're ahead of the game and helping those affiliates gain more commissions. What's this all about? Like I love industries. I love paying my affiliates. I love building those partnerships and making people smile. So sounds like we're on the same team here, which is great. I think so. Our topic of the day is affiliates, dirty little secret, the dirty, the dating vertical. And this is something that I am not in tuned with. I have never been. Or had a dating vertical client, so I don't know the space whatsoever. And I'm so glad you're here to bonus up on this. This is great. Personally, I grew up in the dating industry and I became dislike. public speaker about dating and I ran a software company that had over a hundred thousand dating sites in 22 languages. Like I've been on the white label side. I've been on the affiliate program side advertiser. Like I really know my way around dating and I call it like everyone's dirty little secret because whenever I talk to affiliates, no matter what vertical they're in. They're always like, Oh yeah, I used to promote dating back in the day on Facebook. It was my first campaign because it was so easy, right? It's evergreen. So it was so easy to promote it that even people that didn't know how to be affiliates became affiliates through dating. Eventually, like I always say that dating is like your high school sweetheart. Like you go, you promote, whatever, tactical flashlight of the day, crypto, call it whatever, flavor of the week. But whenever everything gets like rough, you can always come back to dating because it's reliable, it's going to be there, and you know how to make it work. And people are always looking for love. Maybe in the right places. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Let's start off small. What is the dating industry? Okay. So the dating industry and we're talking maybe from 2010. Onwards, anything that has to do with online dating. And there is like different categories based on the country, based on the users, everyone started creating dating apps, dating sites, the match group being the biggest. Player and, eventually you get into like really deep stuff. Tinder came out, but in reality, it was done at a lab from, with money from match. So they were never a competitor. They were just like paying for Tinder to be developed behind the scenes. And I have a theory that Tinder is supposed to graduate people. So you get so sick of dating and getting ghosted and all of that, that you eventually pay for match. As you're like, you know what I'm serious. 100 percent conspiracy theory that 100 percent owns tinder originally. No, I know they own it. No, I know they own it. So imagine for tinder to happen. I think they spend something like 20 million when it was free, when it was fully free, there was no ads, there was no monetization strategy who pay for those 20 million. It was much it was Of course, and at the beginning, we're like, Oh my God, the disgrace. These guys are changing the industry. Guess what? There is much more smarter players behind the scenes. We don't know what we don't know. So the girl that started Bumble actually used to work in Tinder, and that's a whole nother thing, and she did her own little spin. But the match group They have their tentacles everywhere. They own so many sites, like they want to buy in like an acquisition spree for years. And pretty much either acquire and grew competitors or just got them out of their system. But it's a whole thing. It's a, I know it's beautiful strategy when, so when Facebook stopped this is rabbit hole after rabbit hole. So when Facebook stopped allowing dating, it was match in like another brand that we're allowed to promote on Facebook. Later on I had a conversation with someone internally and they were like, do you think that is like a coincidence? This is all being like clearly negotiated. And at the time Facebook said that they would never ever have a dating product because they were making so much money from the dating advertisers. But then Facebook came with a dating product, which is pretty terrible to be fair. But they do have a dating product. Originally was a dating product to begin with. Facebook was originated, right? Like in that concept. It was like, like a spinoff of a spinoff hot or not. All so yes, there's dirty little secrets, just rabbit holes. When I think of the dating industry the first brand that ever comes to mind is Ashley Madison. And I remember, oh my God, , I remember this because it was a big deal that they were on the CJ Network when I was working at cj. And a lot of the, it was. Dirty water. Not a lot of the people that were wanted to be a part of that. And there is higher ups like allowed it, but we weren't sure if we were going to keep going down this vertical and just the conflict of interest was the concept of Ashley Madison is having a side piece outside of your marriage is that right? So let me throw this into your equation. Okay. I ran, I started from scratch the affiliate program for the biggest European competitor, Ashley Madison. Ah, okay. I was in a big old lawsuit with them. They sued everyone in Europe. It was all settled. It was a whole thing. But a lot of like my posts you'll see. There is like a naturally medicine fight behind them. Super interesting. It's a very interesting business concept. Yes. At the end of the day, once you are there, you realize that Not a lot of people are actually cheating on each other. Yeah. It's a lot of economy, especially for women. It's a lot of attention. It's attention seeking is what they're not getting at home, right? Someone that tells them that they look good. Someone that they can talk to. It is like a gateway. If you get rejected in person, you're afraid that you're going to be rejected once you meet this person that you've been talking to online. So a lot of dating is like an ego booster and entertainment and just like something where you find what you don't have in real life. But very few people actually close the deal. Okay. Like a numbers game. I remember from the like affair side that very few people close the deal because it's scary, especially Ashley Madison. Okay. To stop your membership, they will mail you. So of course people like stay forever. The cost of a lifetime, like lifetime value was huge. Imagine your spouse finds this letter. Yeah. No, it's so rude. So rude. And then on top of that, they had the scandal with the bots as well. They found out like a huge. Database of their No. The leak and like ugh. And that the Yeah. The, yeah. To Scandal after Scandal. All of this compounded, and ultimately, what this gets to, and they ended up with a documentary on Netflix Incredible. Ultimately what this gets down to is they put that company itself. Among others put a lot, a big black eye on this industry. And it made it very clear to bigger networks, like CJ and impact, like we're not going to be working with these dating sites. So that puts some big restraints on your industry as a whole. What would you say today looks like in terms of restraints? The restraints are not necessarily like the big networks not taking on these campaigns, even though if you really talk to someone inside of the big networks, they always have a teeny tiny bit of baiting traffic that they don't talk about and they still promote you. But yeah, there is always It's the hush. It is everyone's dirty little secret. Everyone has pubs that have dating traffic and if you talk enough you always find it. It's like a few degrees of separation. Eventually you'll find it. So that's why like it wasn't so much the restraints on big networks not taking you on. It was more the restraints of Like you could only buy on Google if you had a review site, but then the acquisition cost for review sites got crazy like what they were asking for paper lead. It was like. Crazy, because it got super, super high, like the bidding price, Facebook first only allow few people to advertise on dating. I think today they might allow it in like maybe South America places where they're struggling to sell all the traffic, to have enough advertisers, maybe they were allowed there, but for sure not tier one countries. And that hasn't been the case in like over a decade, but it's more your traffic sources. Thanks. People are like, there is nothing more creative than a dating affiliate. You tell me the restraint, I'll tell you the walk around. Are some of the most creative people I've ever met in my life. Yes. And very true. I think that's true in the affiliate sense altogether. Like We find a new hurdle every single year and we have to find a way to get around it or go over it. As an industry, I think that's super true, but I guarantee it's even more true in years. What makes in your opinion, what makes a dating industry different than a traditional SAS B2B or e commerce product collaboration? Okay. It is. So it's a super high volume, low margin industry. Okay. You cannot make the traffic back out only on the product. All right. Every single dating advertiser is also a dating affiliate. Huh? Okay. So they send traffic, whatever they can not monetize. They've got very good at this game. 10 years ago, everyone understood that you could not back out on like traffic alone. So you buy the traffic, you use the one that is going to be good for you. You have to know like your ESP is what is it that works for you? Okay. Cool. And then monetize the rest, you monetize either inside of the dating sites, you have banners and you have this whole like monetization logic, and you sell that traffic on CPC or CPM, but also on top of that, your emails like there is a lot of stuff that you can just send to somebody else as an affiliate. So I think the level of. Like cross collaboration that there is in dating and haven't like encounter in any other vertical. Is very unique. I would say like Even in like home service goods Like if you get a lead in the home service goods You'd rarely see companies sell that lead off if they're not gonna be able to utilize It just goes to waste which is exactly why not I don't know. And I've made that suggestion to several companies in the past, and it's not an avenue that they want to go down necessarily, maybe it's too complicated, but it sounds like it's innate for this industry which makes me cool. Yeah. That's why, like I, a lot of times I tell people that being in dating is like coming from the future because we learn to collaborate, we learn to use technology to the best, let's say I rock ahead, I don't even send display traffic to anyone. I built a cascade that self optimizes. I only do API on PPL or maybe on CPC. And my system is constantly measuring the APCs to automatically distribute the traffic. Okay, because if I send display traffic and you're not able to convert like every single click at least into an SOI I can make it back up. Interesting. Okay. I didn't realize the margins were so thin for you guys in that space They're super thin but the volume It's huge. So it's still worth it. Love is the number one niche, in volume traffic. And speaking of that who are the major players that are in the dating industry? I assume porn sites, for example are probably big pushers of some of these dating sites. You will be surprised. No. Okay. They are. So you can buy traffic. You can buy adult traffic for like casual sites and like adult sites, but it's not so easy to convert. Okay. So it's like when you're in the heat of the moment, you're in a porn site by the time you land on the dating site, it's a little too soft, too little, too late, so it's not great, but a lot of people buying traffic from. porn sites for sure dating sites and you can have your own flow and go from like most explicit dating to a softer dating like you can just cross sell people across niches across like different things ah this is something else that is amazing about dating anyone that buys on one dating site for sure will buy at least three it's that's what there is so much collaboration because it's not oh, he already converted for me. He's not going to pay anybody else. No, you can actually build a network of your own dating sites. And the same guy will pay you here, and here. It's incredible. That's super cool. That reminds me of another vertical in that space, I would say is Oh, I lost my train of thought. Where you're paying for multiple. Oh how about the. Industry of getting a job. Like you get on Indeed, you get on LinkedIn, you all the other things, right? Like that one lead of a job seeker is four different websites. And that's the only thing I can terrible, right? Yeah, I can see that. I don't know what else, maybe. Yeah. I don't know what all the vertical is comparable, but you will pay several services. All right. It makes sense. Back to the players. Who else is involved in the skating industry? Okay. So back in the day, the biggest players, it was match, it was e harmony, plenty of fish, like all those guys. Lonely, they'd been either bought out one or each other, but they all had huge affiliate programs. When they got really big, they started killing their affiliate programs. They grew with affiliates, but then eventually moved on to all internal acquisition, which. As someone in the affiliate marketing industry, it bothers me. Yes, because I feel like you pump it up like, why do you use affiliates and you had the help of affiliates to grow, but then once you were big enough, then you don't need them anymore. And I've seen I saw the same with flashlight. Same thing. No, I know nothing about that. No, I saw it in a movie once. Yeah. I heard I had a friend who, who would heard of it. Product placement. I don't even know what you're talking about. Nope. Anyway, originally when they started the affiliate program was everything because they spent everything on product research and it was so expensive to run the company. So they grew really big with affiliates, but. As years go by and they print money, like so much money is ridiculous. But of course, the bigger the company gets, the smaller the affiliate program. And I've seen that happen in many different verticals. But anyway, that was the case on dating. So now when you're a dating affiliate, you're looking at new sites. Now it's all about the AI girlfriend. All these players, everyone is like on this like race to see who designs the ideal AI girlfriend. Okay, and I can only imagine what like places like Japan No, it's insane. Like you cannot run. Okay, so there are some countries where you cannot run dating sites Turkey, Japan, like it's more oh make friends It's a dating site, but okay, on the, on those countries you run as a make friends platform. But I think the whole AI girlfriend, nobody's doing it right yet. I'm so eager to see who's going to crack it because I think there's going to be so much money there where people know they're talking to something fake, but they still do it for the entertainment value for what they're getting out of it. We're so lonely as humans, right? We're more connected and lonelier than ever. Not only that, but the aspect of if you're in a committed relationship and this person can keep a secret because they're AI, somebody that builds this AI version is going to have some kind of blackmail aspect to it that is going to tell your spouse if you don't continue the subscription, like it's going to happen. Yeah no. I think that's like. Murky waters. If you're in a relationship, keep your pants. You're felt like, no, not even with an AI girlfriend. I'm sorry, but that's a no go for me. That's where it's going to go. That's where it's going to move. A hundred percent. Yeah. No, I see the uses of AI. Like I think it's going to be a natural evolution. First, they'll crack the AI girlfriend, but then I can see how this could evolve into companionship for older people for Why not having a friend you talk to, and then there is so many ethicals that's a rabbit hole. But I think whoever cracks, yeah, whoever cracks the AI girlfriend, it's going to crack other verticals as well. A hundred percent agree. And it could be this year who knows, it could be a lot of people. Channel technology is amazing as well. Yeah. It's incredible. Like you, you're seeing it and you're like, you're talking to a fake like AI, but at the same time, it's so realistic and it's so good. And the way it talks to you, you're like, Ooh. And speaking to AI there's no other sponsors that I can promote today besides AFI stash, and this is my company and. I can promote it on this because you know what we find affiliates for you. And even in the dating vertical, we can go and hunt down sites that are ranking online today for the keywords that you're looking for. Appy stash is a great way to find influencers and affiliate partners and their contact information in a matter of five minutes. So go build your list today with Appy stash, go to Justin hounds. com slash Appy stash to learn more. And. Moving on, I want to learn more about Trackfinity and Rockahead. Who are who else who are you looking to work for with these companies that you have? Okay, so in general with Rock Ahead I'm looking for direct advertisers and affiliates in the verticals that I'm in. And I want to add value as the network and for the affiliate with the technology and with the way that we Bronson's, but for the advertiser, because I was on the advertiser side for so long, like giving them consulting. Because a lot of times, most of the issues that you have with campaigns not performing have nothing to do with the affiliate, but right. Like we've built all this system to like your system broke down last night. And they'll be like, Oh no, I'm like no. I'm not asking you. I'm telling you your system broke down last night from this time to this time. And because high volume, because I run such high volume, I can see the matrix. I know exactly when there is like a little glitch. And so we try to give some yeah, consulting to the advertiser, helping them run a better affiliate program, make it more profitable, but then on the affiliate side to make it all run smoothly for them. And then Traxfinity, I'm looking for anyone that wants to run a network. Any person that has an offer and they want to build an affiliate program for this is the software that you can use to manage that affiliate software in the affiliate program. But the thing is like the software came from me being on the battlefield for so many years. So it's done. It's super flexible and it's scalable. You can run the affiliate program, just like a one person, let's go to battle and it has everything you need to run it, but it can also grow with you to where you're a big organization and you have all these multiple layers and you can run internal media buys versus affiliates versus everything. It just combines everything, but it's made to scale and it's just flexible enough to work for wherever you are in your journey. Okay, great. And. Brands only in the dating space, or could this expand out to like CBD things that might have more restrictions? I would love for CBD to, because it's terrible. I tried to promote CBD like back in 2019. And the tracking was horrendous. Honestly, as an affiliate, I couldn't crack it because the tracking was just not good enough. There is a few verticals, what I would love to tackle because I haven't been able to promote them as an affiliate. Because they don't have the proper tracking. So part of that is why Trackfinity came to be. To help people that need to be helped. Funny thing, CBD industry executives didn't know what CBD was. They thought it was marijuana for a while, until the education came out that it wasn't getting you high. And then so they weren't allowing. Any CBD products into affiliate platforms. And then one day I remember share sale opened up the floodgates. And then all of a sudden there's just hundreds of CBD products on their platform, and they're going to be looking for a place to live here shortly. That might be a a niche for you to go attack here, but Anyway, that's that's sad. Yeah, another rabbit hole. All right. So I love your personality. You seem like a relationships first person and folks like us that are in that kind of space, sometimes it takes us a while to figure out. How to optimize our talents. Is there anything you can suggest to people out there that are looking to hone in on what they're really good at in this industry? All right. I'll go with what worked for me. Funny enough. I hate math. I absolutely love math, hate a spreadsheet. I hate numbers, but I love them. Like I learned to love them. I learned to work with them, but it's not my jam. I don't like the day to day operations. I learned very early on and because I needed to, the first few affiliate programs that I worked with, I didn't have a marketing budget. So I understood that with my personality, public speaking. was my thing, right? I started doing a lot of public speaking and never promoting myself, never promoting the product I was working with, but teaching people, helping them, good, just showing them how to do things, how I do things, what works for me. And I've been doing that for 15 years. And that has worked so well because I don't have an outbound strategy. I have an inbound strategy and it's always been that way. Now what I'm doing is leveraging that same like strategy, but online. So I'm working on my personal brand on social media, but it's the same thing. This is what I know how to do. I hate people that pitch them. Like you are at a panel and they're just pitching their product. It does my head in. If you're good, I will find you. Yeah. If you see me, you know what you're doing, I will find you. Yeah. Nobody likes that guy on the panel. Nobody. Teaching first, educating first, always a good format. Great suggestion there. Time for you to defend your posts. So this is where from your LinkedIn history. And I found out you said affiliates who play silly games, win silly prizes, biggest affiliate. Okay. Affiliates make chasing high payouts. Yeah. Chasing high payouts without minding EPC. What do you mean by this? Defend it. Okay. So when you go into the post, I go into why it's silly for an affiliate to come like guns blazing and telling you because this happens a lot. This is the payout I need and no reasoning behind it. So a lot of times when you come in like that, you either get ignored or advertisers are not stupid. They're going to optimize their flow. I will give you the payout, but guess what? Your APC is going to be identical because on the backend there is scrubbing. They're doing like other things, or, when push notification came out, like how you were not being given money from the push notifications that they collected. Oh, because you were asking for this super high payout in order for an advertiser, you need to understand like basic math. The advertiser is running a business. They need to be profitable. No one here, no one in this industry is a charity organization. We're all super nice people, but we all like money. Your advertiser likes money. You like money, we get it. How do you make that negotiation? Always needs to keep in mind that your advertising needs to be profitable. Last week. Someone is like, Oh, I need an SOI of 1 in Mexico. And I was like, are we talking about the same Mexico? Like pesos? Like, how can I give you an SOI for a dating product? Which is super easy to get a lead. Very difficult to get a conversion. Like it's not as easy to get a paying customer. And your customer lifetime value in Mexico, you'd be lucky if you get to 70. Easy math tells you the pesos don't back out. No. So that is my, that's what I meant with this quote. Like you need to understand the flow and what you're asking for and what there is on the other side because our job as affiliates is to drive customers to the advertiser and the advertiser has way more cost than just the affiliate acquisition. That's just like a part of the puzzle. Understand who you're talking to. If you come in with solid math and you're like, okay, I think because of my conversion rate, because of this, and that, I think I should get paid this much more. If you do that, I can increase traffic by 20%, even if it's a little like crazy. You love it when an affiliate comes like that with a strategy, with a plan, you're like yes. I love when affiliates show up with something a buddy of mine actually came on board to this podcast. His name's Justin Moore came up with Sponsor Magnet. Now I'm not a big fan of sponsors, but what Justin's concept speaks of is that you come to a brand with an idea. That is, they can't say no to and they're going to give you what you want as long as you perform and create a case study out of that and then repeat it and do it again. And it's really smart and it's something that affiliates out there, the educated ones are doing right now and it's a good concept. So I love it when affiliates come to me with their ideas. So that's my whole point behind the post. Awesome. Same page. Playing a silly game. Playing a silly game is just calm and guns blazing asking for a higher payout with absolutely no logic behind it. Yeah. Yeah. And I've seen it hundreds of time before too. We all have. Awesome. Jenny, this has been so much fun. Thank you for being here. How do we connect with you? So I am online Jen in all my social media, easy to find me and then Trackfinity and RockAhead. It is same thing. Trek Finney, Rock Ahead, and all social networks. LinkedIn, also online gen, you can find me there. And that's my current place where I live at the moment. I'm very LinkedIn heavy right now. Me too. I'm always living there. Online gen. That's a, it's a pretty good username pretty short and memorable. I love it. Okay. So my personal one is offline gen. Yeah, you are a nerd. You deserve to be in here. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. All right, as we sign off, you got it. As we sign off we just finished this recording of the episode. What's the one thing you can't wait for the folks that are listening to hear from your episode today? Think things that we can learn from other verticals that we might look down upon, but we can actually copy. Today I was talking to somebody from the travel vertical. For finity or whatever, and I was like, ah, this issue that you're having with travel advertisers. It's exactly like casino. And he was like, Oh no, I'm like no. It is this is your problem and this is how you solve it. And he's I never thought of that. So a lot of times I think the best part is understanding that you can look at other verticals and perhaps you don't have to promote them, but at least understand how they work so you can copy the good things and bring them to your own. Beautifully said. Jenny, thanks so much for your time. For you folks out there still watching, keep on recruiting, and we'll see you next time. Take care.