S1E21 - Affiliate Marketing Success - Lee-Ann Johnstone Shares Her Journey and Tips

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
I'm so pleased to have Lea-Ann Johnson as my guest today. A little bit of a backstory. So, Lee-Ann and I were both from the same country. We were talking the green room earlier. We established we're actually not that far from each other geographically. I kept seeing Lee-Ann everywhere. I kept hearing about Leigh Anne everywhere and I'd never met her.

Jim Banks [00:00:19]:
I'm like, this is weird. I thought I knew everyone in performance marketing, but I'd never met Leigh Anne. And lo and behold, I just happened to be in a bar in Las Vegas when affiliate summit was on the. And that's where we actually met for the first time. So, Lee-Ann, welcome to the show.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:00:33]:
Thank you, jem, for having me on your mic. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, it was a weird story how we met, because I actually found out about you at a Lincolnite conference in Florida before I came to affiliate Summit west. And then, lo and behold, I looked across the bar and there you were. And that's how we met. So it was fated and meant to be.

Jim Banks [00:00:52]:
I'm always amazed at how many people from the UK are prepared to jump on that ten hour flight to Vegas to go to affiliate summit and brutalize themselves for two or three days for work purposes.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:01:03]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:01:03]:
So, Lee-Ann, you've been a digital marketer, affiliate marketer, for 20 plus years. So what's your backstory? How did you get into digital marketing in the first place?

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:01:12]:
Love that story. Because everybody that I've ever spoken to in affiliate marketing has always lighted up here by accident. And so did I. So, about 20 years ago, I was working for an insurance financial services company doing traditional marketing. So print, radio, tv, or all the usual things. And I literally sat there and I thought, if I do another quarterly or annual report, I'm going to want to kill myself, because it's just the same all the time. All the time. And at that time in South Africa, in case people want to know where this accent's from, online marketing was becoming a bit of a thing.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:01:44]:
And so there was, like, one company in the whole of Cape Town that was doing media buying. And I thought, I have to go and check out what this is. And so I checked in my job, went and interviewed and they did like a round of six interviews or something ridiculous. And I had to answer every question under the sun, made it through to the last interview stage and got the job. And I was like, I can't believe I got the job. I've got no experience in online marketing whatsoever, but I am a good marketing practitioner. Anyway, they're like, we can teach you all of those things. And I started at the bottom, like right at the bottom.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:02:15]:
I was a junior account executive with no experience and had to learn the ropes. But I was so in love with online and the fact that I could make decisions and see impact happening immediately with the customers that were seeing the content that we were creating that I soaked it up like a sponge. And within three months, I was one of the senior media buyers that they had in their team. And from there it really just spanned on and I went into media buying and then I went into performance marketing, did a little bit of paid contextual marketing, pay per click adWords, all the usual things that were slashing around back in those days, and just absolutely fell in love with affiliate because it combined people, which I love, being around people and working with people and building relationships. And I combined the numbers, the stats behind what's working, what isn't working, and I found my niche and I thought, this is what I'm meant to do. I woke up every day and I was happy to go into work. And I thought I found my passion. It was like a light bulb moment.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:03:10]:
And fast forward 20 years later, I'm still in this industry, I'm still having light bulb moments. I'm still loving every day that I work in performance because it combines those two things, combines people and working with really innovative, clever affiliates who are at the forefront of the Internet. And it's also working with brands and the data and the analysis that sits behind all the campaigns that we run. So for me, some people wake up and they know they want to be a doctor or a lawyer. I woke up and I knew I wanted to be in marketing, but I didn't really know what. And then by accident, I found performance and it really just floated my boat. And that's how I got into the industry.

Jim Banks [00:03:46]:
I don't think I'm speaking out of turn here. You are by far and away one of the hardest working people in our industry. Like, you're everywhere. Again, I don't know if that's been by design or what have you, but you're an award winning podcaster. We were talking again, we were talking beforehand about going to the podcast show, and we'll talk about that in a second. But what I found quite interesting. So you're obviously an award winning podcaster. And I know from my own experience of doing this podcast how hard that is, how hard it is to create a podcast regularly.

Jim Banks [00:04:16]:
Again, I've missed a couple of weeks because I've been traveling and so on, but it's tough. So again, kudos to you doing that.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:04:22]:
Thank you.

Jim Banks [00:04:23]:
But you're also running affimedia and then you've also got your program management company as well. So how do you judge all those chainsaws? I mean, I gotta think of it.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:04:32]:
I've got to be honest with you. It is not by design. It's accidentally on purpose again. And it all starts with having one vision and one focus, and that is to help everybody in the world do affiliate marketing better. So it doesn't matter where you are in your journey, if you are new to affiliate and starting out and you have no idea how to get started, or if you're experienced and seasoned and you want to get to that next level and think ahead and be ahead of the trends, we've created a flywheel in our business that helps you no matter where you are. And it was. I'd love to say it was by design, but it wasn't. It was due to economic factors and Covid, basically.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:05:10]:
So there's three streams to our business at this point. The first one is we're obviously an agency, so we're actually an award winning agency as well. We manage affiliate programs for brands, for clients. We launch them, scale them, grow them, migrate them, like whatever it is that you need to have done on an affiliate program. We have a very, very experienced account management team that can help you with that and through the agency, which was the start of our business. So, like any other agency owner, you start as a consultant and then you get bigger and you start hiring people and you start bringing on more clients. And then Covid hit. And so it was a timing issue for me because I was like, oh, I've got this agency, but now I can't go to any events.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:05:48]:
How do I get new business? And so the only way I could do that is I pivoted into content marketing. So we launched the podcast to continue that education process. And then we started pushing out a whole bunch of content and inviting. I got a huge rolodex of people I've been around a long time, people like you even to start coming in and contributing to that conversation. And we ended up building this community around afferverse, where we've got this media publication now, where everybody wants to be in it and advertise on it. Because we speak to affiliates, affiliate managers, agencies, networks that people that are practitioners in affiliate marketing, they're coming to listen and learn with us. And so we became an accidental media company overnight, not by design. And obviously during COVID we wanted to reach our audience and the best way that we could do that was to host virtual events.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:06:33]:
So we started running these educational events and actually just bringing people together to have conversations about what's changing. Because as you know, in this industry, like things change daily. Like you could be doing something this month and in three months time that strategy doesn't work anymore, it's been done. So really keeping ahead of that curve was one of the things that we wanted to do which fit back to that vision of helping our customers to do affiliate marketing better. And then the last stream in our business is the fact that we have a twelve week coaching program for affiliate program managers. So it doesn't matter whether you're working agency side, network side, client side, brand side, but you can come and learn with me all the frameworks that I've learned over 25 years. And it sounds like a long time, but you have to fail a lot in order to build really successful framework. And we give everybody the edge in terms of thinking about their program differently and coaching them through some of the changes that are happening now around them as well.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:07:25]:
So it's almost like a supportive program, membership, community, whatever you want to call it, to just level up and learn with practitioners that have gone before you. Because as you know, this industry is so fragmented, there's no degree in affiliate marketing. You have to learn everything on the job. And so we just really wanted to invite everybody to come with us to learn how to do affiliate marketing better. And so everything that we've built at affiverse is really about helping our community to rise up and to really get access to people, practitioners, speakers, whoever it is that I can leverage in my community that I know knows their thing to just come together and learn. And so we've attracted an audience by just putting out good content and making sure that people can get the support that they need in order to do it better. Because I really love this industry. I've been in it for two decades and I want to see it less in a better place than when I started.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:08:17]:
And so everything that I'm doing right now is about that next gen of account managers coming into the system who need to be supported and who need to have access to really knowledgeable people that they wouldn't know that they need access to. Because when you walk into these huge events and we do have big events in our industry, it's a bit daunting. Like who do you know? Who do you follow? Who do you go and talk to? Who can you get information from. And so that's kind of what I've got is over the last four years I've built this business and that's what we have is this community of people that want to learn and grow and they just follow and come along with us. And I'm very proud of that.

Jim Banks [00:08:57]:
As well you should be. I think it's, what you've achieved is, like I said, nothing short of amazing, especially as you're also, you have a family. You were just saying beforehand, you just come back and speak. I completely appreciate the kind of the time it takes to kind of run one business, never mind effectively, not by design.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:09:14]:
I mean, it just is what it is, you know? And I have to just say, jim, I have an amazing team. Like this isn't just me. Like I've got an amazing team that sits behind me that has helped us to pull this vision forward and they all believe in what we're doing. Like they all believe that. They all come from the industry, so they all know that and have experienced the lack of knowledge and the lack of support. And they really do want to help the world do affiliate marketing better. And I kind of strap. Like, I'm a really simple person.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:09:40]:
Like, I only talk about one subject and that's affiliate marketing. But I love it. I absolutely love, and hopefully that shines through in everything that we do and all the experiences that we've been able to give to people and support them both.

Jim Banks [00:09:54]:
So I think one of the challenges with the industry, you said it's quite fragmented. It's, again, I think it's almost got like a language of its own. Like there's so much jargon, there's so many different names that things are called. So affiliates are also known as publishers, agencies are sometimes called program managers. There's so many different things. Brands are called advertisers and it's that there are so many pieces to it. Affiliate marketing, performance marketing, and is it the same thing? And how, why do you think we've never been able to arrive at one set of industry standards to say this is what everything's going to be called from this point forward and all the other stuff doesn't matter? Affiliate marketing, it's always been affiliate marketing to me. But I think some brands don't want to be associated with affiliate marketing.

Jim Banks [00:10:39]:
So it's called performance marketing. And you think it's still the same thing? It's still the same kind of outcome that you're trying to derive. So how do you think we need to address that as an industry.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:10:49]:
I mean, I think we're in another evolution now. So you and I in our lifetime in affiliate marketing, will identify with affiliate marketing and exactly what it means. The next generation came in and said it's performance marketing, let's pay on performance. Now we're talking about partnerships. Everybody is a partner. And the reason why it's so fragmented is because the Internet has changed significantly since affiliate marketing first started where it was just a website and a single link. Now you've got sub networks, networks, influencers, different social media channels where you can push content out, email marketers, bloggers, paid media, arbitrage sellers. So affiliate marketing is no longer a channel, it's actually a payment method.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:11:31]:
Like if you think about it in the most basic sense of the word, I. And so it encompasses everything. And I will go on record and say that the hardest job in digital is to be an account manager in an affiliate program. Because you have to have the skills of an SEO, a paid media manager, a relationship builder, a influencer or social media manager. You need to understand all the different social platforms and how they work. You need to be able to look outside of web, mobile and start looking at things like chat and telegram and all of these other places. And so as a practitioner, you're probably one of the most experienced people. And with all of that fragmentation and different terminology that companies adopt internally within their cultural like tone of voice, it has become super fragmented.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:12:19]:
Like, there isn't even a standardized title for an affiliate account manager. Like, you can see head of partnerships, head of growth, affiliate account executive, affiliate account manager, affiliate, head of affiliate accounting. Like, there's so many different words and names and phrases for what you do. It makes LinkedIn very difficult to find people. Like, if everybody had the same job title, it would be easy, right? I think it's just, it's the nature of the beast and it's the way that the industry has grown so fast and so fragmented and everybody's just adopted their own colloquialisms that it's become complex. And what we need to do as an industry is rein it back and go, what is this job? What is this title? What is the kind of function that's associated with that title? Because it does actually also impact career development. If you're starting out as a junior or account manager or accountexec, what are the steps to grow forward and what are the sideways moves that you can make after coming in through affiliate as well? And there are many. So if you are here and you're listening to this, there are many many ways that you can grow your careers.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:13:23]:
So if you've got questions about that, you can ask me.

Jim Banks [00:13:27]:
So one of the challenges I've always found with job titles is I always used to say to people, when I employed people in my original paid search agency, which morphed into becoming an affiliate network, we had a lot of people that worked for us and they were like, well, what's my job title going to be? And I'm like, well, really, your job title is going to be whatever you want it to be. Your job expectations will be whatever the job entails. Again, there's so many kind of components to it. So I think one of the challenges I found when I, certainly when I was running my affiliate network is when you're working with affiliates, and, I mean, I know you did a show recently with Harrison and Adam from Ringba.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:14:07]:
Yeah, that was fun.

Jim Banks [00:14:09]:
Yeah, I watched. I thought, this is a wacky interview, but only, but again, love that. Yeah. Whole vibe that they've got right with the shorts. And you see that, again, I don't really think you should be seeing podcasters feet, but what the hell.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:14:24]:
Yeah, right? Works for them.

Jim Banks [00:14:27]:
It's funny. So Harrison used to be one of our affiliates way, way back. So again, you've, everyone's heard the story of, we started when he was like, really super, super young. I don't know if he was like, 1314, but he had a black Amex card, and he was more proud of being a Google Ads qualified person than he was of having a black Amex and traveling first class and booking himself into hotels. But he was a really good affiliate. But I think one of the challenges when you have affiliate managers working in your affiliate network and they see the sort of money that the affiliates are earning, there's this temptation for them to go, maybe I can do that. Maybe I can make 50 grand, 100 grand a month, half a million a month. We had some crazy payouts to affiliates that we were working with.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:15:12]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:15:12]:
How do you keep people kind of focused on the job at hand when they see this kind of shiny object syndrome going on behind the scenes, if you like?

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:15:22]:
So I recruit really well. I recruit, and this has taken me years to kind of identify the raw traits that make a good affiliate account manager. And let me tell you now, if you think that you can go out there and make millions and, you know, be like, Harrison is like, he's 0.01% of the industry, like, let's just set the record straight. There are some extremely intelligent, successful affiliates out there that know what they know and they've spent years honing their craft. So if you're an affiliate account manager and you're looking on the other side of the fence, believe me, it's not that easy. If it was, I would have done it years ago. Haven't ever been an affiliate. Okay.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:16:02]:
In 25 years. It is damn hard. So really, I think you need to know yourself and you need to know your strengths and you need to know what is your future plan. Like, if you're coming into this industry, you need to have goals and you need to have incremental growth and you need to understand where you want to be one day in future. And if you, if you need help with that, you can talk to anybody in the industry, they'll mentor you. You can contact me if you're an affiliate manager and I'll tell you my story. I went from affiliate account manager to CMO to like vice president of business development and marketing and then left and started my own business and became an entrepreneur. There's so many different ways that you can grow your career and that you can move forward.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:16:41]:
But know who you are first and know what you're good at. And if you're really, really good at something, stick to what you're good at and build a career around that. And that's what I've done. I'm really good at building relationships with people and I'm really good at explaining complex things in a simple manner. And so I've used those skills in order to grow my career in the areas that I enjoyed. Because you might look at that shiny picture go, wow, living the dream. I'm working here, I'm working there. I'm doing everything else.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:17:08]:
But it is very hard and it is very stressful running your own business. So if you think being an entrepreneur is for you, I would say take the leap. But if you think maybe I don't have all the nuts and bolts that make a really successful entrepreneur, then stay on the side that you're on and keep developing your career and your skillset.

Jim Banks [00:17:27]:
So, I mean, I know that the topic of Dei is on everyone's kind of minds and thoughts and everything. Again, I grew up in Hong Kong, so I've never even thought of diversity as kind of like a thing, really. I was the ethnic minority in Hong Kong, right? And clearly that's not the case. Now I'm here in the UK again. I've got stepdaughters that work in the industry have done for donkeys years. So again, I've never, ever thought of the whole equality side of things. It's always been, I've always paid as well as I can. Right.

Jim Banks [00:18:02]:
You know, regardless of whether somebody's like a woman or a man it doesn't matter to me that the kind of most important thing is are they capable of doing the job? Do you think we are as an industry? Because I mean you're a staunch fan of link unite, as am I, even though I'm a, and supporting a women's initiative. Right. And again, I'm fully supportive of any woman that runs a business in addition to obviously a family and everything else. I know how hard it is from my perspective to kind of like try and be involved in the family. Where do you think we are as an industry in that respect?

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:18:34]:
I think we've come a long way. I think we've come a very long way because back in the day when I was joining the industry, women were few and far between, but it was because this industry was traditionally like sales, a business development and sales role. And that has traditionally always been a man's kind of domain. So 20 odd years ago and we, you know, don't know what the average age of your audience is, but like the world was a very different place back then when we, when we first started search. There is still very few female, like senior female CEO's in our industry. I mean a lot of the big agencies are run by like really successful female CEO's and, but I think that we've come a very long way and I think that the equality is to my mind what I see and I can only judge it by the events that I go to and how many people are in the room. It seems to be quite equal compared to other industries. And I'm happy to see that because it is a career that you can have with a family.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:19:29]:
It is a career that you can have flexible working if you find the right companies that offer that. I mean I know of some networks that even work four day work weeks now. So, you know, there's the, the Internet allows you to work remotely, to work flexible hours, to be online at different times in the world. And you know, I think that we've leveraged that. So I'm quite happy with what I'm seeing. You know, there's always room for improvement. But you know, I think we've come a long way as an industry and we're very aware of it in our industry compared to others. I think.

Jim Banks [00:20:02]:
Yeah, I mean like, like I said, I think the, you know, we just need to kind of be constantly aware of it. I don't think people should just be paying lip service to it. It's something you should be thinking about all the time. Always think in that regard. I mean, again, you're an event organizer and I'm speaking your event in September, which I'm absolutely delighted to be able to do. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that event?

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:20:26]:
Yeah. So it's the first time that we're actually going to run an in person event because we've never done it before. But we get about 2000 people coming to our virtual events. And the reason why I'm running it in person in London in September is because it's right about the time when people start planning for 2025. So it's really good timing. But also we're running it for small medium advertisers. So, you know, the guys that don't get to go to some of the bigger industry events, they maybe don't have budgets to go to those events, but they also want to learn what's changing. And I, this here particularly, the theme behind elevate, obviously the word elevate is kind of gross, but the theme behind it is how do you figure out what's going to happen in 2025 when cookies finally deprecate? Because a lot of these smaller advertisers, these Shopify stores, storefronts, they're all relying on kind of Facebook ads and retargeting.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:21:17]:
And if they can't retarget on third party cookies, how are they going to grow their business and where are they going to spend their budget? We really want to bring people together to understand what the next step is. How do they diversify from all of these channels that have been easy to gain access to and to grow their businesses from and what strategies do they need to be putting in place? And so we're holding it in conjunction with lead generation world. So they're coming from the US to the UK to support it. And we've got some amazing speakers, I mean, yourself included, but really we've got like some really, like, I don't know if I can say this, but shit hot. Like practitioners that know their, and they really are there to come and teach, like, the whole premise of everybody that I've asked to come to this event and to be there in person on the day is to teach the nuts and bolts of what you need to do to grow your business. So if you're a small advertiser, you're maybe running your business in house for three to four delegates or people like one of them being a marketer, get that marketer to this event because, one, they're going to get knowledge about what's happening and the changes that are coming in 2025 and where and how to diversify their marketing budgets. They're going to get a chance to speak to industry experts that have been around for two decades who can help them to navigate changes that are coming ahead and really just give them the support so that they don't need to be fearful because a lot of people are fearful. How am I going to keep my job? How am I going to keep my business running? Am I going to be able to grow against some of the bigger brands that have got massive budgets and in house teams? And the answer to all of that is yes, but get yourself organized and get yourself into the room so that you can talk to these people and actually get the advice that you need.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:22:58]:
So again, everything that we do tracks back to helping the world do affiliate marketing better. If you want to do affiliate marketing better next year, come to this conference and actually learn from the people that are contributing their time, their knowledge, their years of experience and helping brands to actually grow. So it's, you know, this, it's not just for advertisers, obviously, it's for agencies. For, and a lot of agencies are talking to me right now about how did they actually increase their revenue by doing performance. So if you are a paid agency or an SEO agency and you're thinking about doing performance management for some of your clients as an existing revenue stream, get to this conference because you're going to get to find out the nuts and bolts of what, what you need to know. You might even be able to educate your people as, you know, post event and you might come away with some really great ideas of how to monetize your business and actually get extra revenue streams in there. So agencies, networks, brands, publishers, we've got some really great publishers lined up already. They're all coming to learn from the people that we're bringing together.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:23:55]:
And I'm very, you'll know me, I mean, you do know me. I'm very, very, like cutthroat about content. Like the content that we put out has to be educational, practical, tactical and none of the fluff. Like, I want to, when I leave this conference, I want to know. I have to spend here, here and here. I need to get this kind of agency in to help me with XYZ. I've got these resource positions that I'm going to need to fill and I've got a tactical plan about how I can move my business forward. So it's all about the nuts and bolts.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:24:27]:
Like, that's really what we're doing at innovate this year.

Jim Banks [00:24:30]:
I'm really excited to, to take myself back on stage. At one point in time, I spoke at lots of conferences and then I didn't take a, it wasn't a sort of like a forced sabbatical. I just took myself off the stage because I kept saying I was too white, too old and too male. I just wanted to give more people an opportunity to get on stage. But I realized that there's still things that I'm, things that I know, things that I'm doing that has not been talked about because people are not doing the things that I'm doing. And I've, again, I don't want to, to kind of eventually get to the point where I stop working and leave the knowledge behind. I'd like to leave the knowledge so that people can continue the industry again. I'm like you, super passionate about ensuring that our industry continues to evolve and grow.

Jim Banks [00:25:13]:
It's grown pretty well. When I first started, there was less than a thousand people in the whole of the UK that probably did digital marketing. Recently I heard that there's over a million people in the UK that are doing digital marketing. Far more than that in other parts of the world. Right? So it's become a huge industry. It's very much in demand. A lot of people are switching from maybe an industry that they've been in for a long time. I mean, I started in financial services and I made good money, but I hated the job.

Jim Banks [00:25:42]:
Compliance just drowned me with just dread. I hated every second of that last few years of being in it. And then when I got into this industry, it was so refreshing, new, challenging. It was a goldmine, an opportunity. And again, even 25 years later, it's still that. I still think there are massive opportunities because it keeps reinventing itself. Something new will come along again. At the moment, I think paper call is a huge opportunity.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:26:09]:
Massive here in the UK. It's going to hit our shores. We're probably like five years behind the US in terms of pay per call. If you think about how we are going to have to capture data and all of the things that are happening with consent, especially here in Europe. Paper call is the next evolution, I think. And in actual fact, the next is going to be at our event, the response of our event. And we need to educate people on how to leverage all of these ways to find first party data. And the theme of elevate is where lead gen and performance will finally collide, because we have kept lead generation separate I to performance or to affiliate marketing, because we thought it was a different channel.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:26:50]:
And remember, I don't believe that there's a channel anymore. There's no digital channel called affiliate. It's now a payment mechanism. Like if you're paying on CPA or you're paying on revenue share, that is performance. It's paid on performance. And so PayPal is just yet another string to your bow of social paid content. All the rest of the stuff that you work with and partnerships and everything else. And we need to get ahead of that stuff and learn how to leverage it because the times, they are changing, and you and I know this, and we're comfortable with the changes that are coming because we've been through multiple iterations of it before in our history.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:27:25]:
But new people coming into the industry don't have access to that history. They don't have access to the times when we had to work through recessions and had to learn new things they don't have access to when social media channels launched and everybody was like, what the heck is this? How do we integrate it into our program strategy? Now you've got huge influencer networks that you're working with and it's like half of the course every day. But we're heading into this newton, this next changeover, again in 2025, when cookies deprecate. And the way that consumers are searching for products on the Internet means that your strategies have to change and the channels that you're using might have to change and you might have to implement new technology. And that's what elevate is all about, is about understanding what is coming and what's changing and learning from people that have gone before you.

Jim Banks [00:28:10]:
Yeah, its interesting. You talked about influencer marketing. It was really quite interesting because I remember way back in probably 2006 or seven, something like that, the first sort of idea of influencer marketing came out, I think I was working with a company and we got Kim Kardashian at the time because she wasnt that well known as she is now, but we got her to endorse and put out some posts about a lip gloss and again, we paid a ton of money for the privilege of putting the ads out right and you couldn't track it 100%. But we reckon that there was probably like a ten x uplift in the value of what she delivered in sales, incremental sales, based on the that she put out there. I think the challenge became that there was this, you know, influencers were great for a period of time. Now all of a sudden the influencers are becoming the brands. They're the ones that they don't. They need to go and work with you and you pay me a commission on whatever, I can just have the brand.

Jim Banks [00:29:08]:
You know, if you look at sort of the Paul brothers with their, their kind of their energy drinks, and there's so many people that have got their own products now, so they've almost like cut that piece of the puzzle out of the equation altogether. Right? And again, I think that's going to continue to evolve and change, but that doesn't mean that there isn't still an opportunity to do collaborations with people that fit nicely with the audience that you have for that purpose, for the purposes of trying to get their influence to rub off onto your customer base.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:29:40]:
I mean, if I look at the way that I've built affable, everything that we've done has always been about putting the customer at the heart of what we do. So helping the world do affiliate marketing better. So everything that we do has to help whoever is coming, listening, tuning in, subscribing, whatever it is, has to help them do affiliate marketing better. And if you think about the future, the next evolution of how brands need to be engaging with their consumers and also the next generation, so Gen X, they're not the same as millennials, they use the Internet differently. Community based marketing, okay, is going to become one of the most powerful marketing methods that you have. And even to this day, word of mouth marketing is still the best form of advertising. Okay, so how do you leverage all of these influences, these content creators, and work with them in a capacity that is unique and individual to them, the one size fits all affiliate program is like long gone. Like anybody that's paying a standard CPA or standard revenue share and expecting every affiliate in the world to conform to that.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:30:42]:
You are sorely misguided if you think that your program is going to scale, because it cannot. So finding tech solutions, finding different ways of collaborating with partners and this industry still very much built in relationships, like, I can't force you to do something, I have to build a relationship with you and make you trust me, and then you can actually promote my product and look at things. So we have to flip everything on its head. It's not about he who pays the most gets the most affiliates anymore, because affiliates are wise to that. They don't want to work at brands that they don't identify with, brands that don't treat them like an extension of their business. Brands that treat them like suppliers and just pay them at the end of the month, like they're too busy for that. They're building a brand themselves. So really thinking about what your future strategy is.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:31:24]:
And again, reason why we're running eleve, getting you to the table to actually have these conversations with people that have gone before you and people that can advise you about how things are changing because they know what has happened in the past. And it's almost like being like a trader, how to read the market, you know, when things happen, how that impacts and what the leverage is going to be three months down the line because you've got the past history. And that's the bit that we're trying to share that isn't written down in books, it's not available anywhere online. It's only going to happen at this event because we're creating all the people that need to be there to have this conversation. So it's like a one time only drill. Like if you don't get there, you're not going to get the information. And I think hopefully it'll help people. It'll help people to get over the fear, because the fear can be really stopping you from actually innovating and changing and doing new things, but it can also help you to think about what your strategy is for moving forward.

Jim Banks [00:32:23]:
Yeah, I think, I mean, I've always kind of maintained that if you're going to hire somebody to help, you should be hiring them for their expertise, not for utility. Just don't hire them as kind of like a. I just need an agency. I just want you to do all this stuff that I don't want to do. You're hiring somebody for their expertise. Again, if you're running a program, like a program manager like yourselves, it's a case of you, you can bring expertise to the table, a different view in terms of how you can acquire new sales for their business that may be outside of the kind of current scope of what they're doing as a business. And again, if you work with people that are email marketers, or PPC specialists, or SEO specialists or chatbot specialists, I mean, there's so many different ways people can drive traffic incrementally to your brand to help boost your sales. And some of those will be things that would be far more difficult and expensive for you to try and implement on your own.

Jim Banks [00:33:18]:
It's much better to kind of part with somebody who is an expert in that particular discipline and actually get them to be the person that delivers that piece from it. So it's not cannibalizing anything that you've got going on at the moment. So again, I think it's usually there's the silos within the business. There's usually a somebody that maybe runs their current PPC is threatened by the thought of other PPC people coming in to run traffic for that particular program. And I've always maintained, if you're a brand, I'd rather have me and seven of my affiliates promoting my product than Google choosing me and seven of my competitors, because they're not going to just leave the ad spaces blank, they're going to fill them up with other stuff. And I would much rather the spaces were filled with my products and my affiliates rather than somebody else's. And any brands that kind of, like, run a program that do that, I mean, that's where that consultation with a program manager like Lee-Ann can actually explain why that's a beneficial strategy to employ.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:34:20]:
Yeah, totally agree. I mean, time for money and time for expertise. Like the two very different things. Like, we work with some clients where we just give them the insights. We take a fresh look, and I can't express the value that a fresh set of eyes can have on looking over your program. And it's not. It's simply because as marketers, we get into blinker mode. We do things that always work.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:34:44]:
We want to continue the iteration of everything that we're doing. And sometimes getting an outside perspective in can really open up your eyes to thinking about things differently. And that's another reason why I always tell people, get out to every single event that you can get to, whether it's online, virtual, in person, whatever. Like, if your budget can afford you to get to every single event, get to them, because it's not only the speakers that you're going to be learning from, it's your industry peers as well. Like, everybody is going through the same journey you are. They all have different perspectives of the entire marketplace that we're working in and leverage all of those conversations to learn.

Jim Banks [00:35:16]:
Yeah. As much as you can learn from online education, you gain so much more by actually being in person at an event. And again, I'm glad that we're getting back to some sort of normality.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:35:28]:
Me too.

Jim Banks [00:35:29]:
Funny enough talking about that again, Lee-Ann and I were talking beforehand. We both went to the podcast show, didn't actually meet. Had we known that we were going to be there, I'm pretty sure we could have met up, had a drink, and maybe grabbed a bite to eat or something. But I was curious. I mean, I had my own thoughts about that particular show. I was curious to know what your thoughts were as a more well established podcast. I mean, my podcast is pretty new, but yours is far more established. What did you think?

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:35:56]:
First of all, I didn't know that I had an established podcast because I just assumed that we were ticking along tickety Boo, like really nice, nice little community that we've got there and some interesting people that come on. But it turns out that we actually have something pretty big. So the numbers in podcasting are way different to the numbers that you'd expect in like web. Okay. So, you know, if you've got like, we have a quarter of a million people downloading our podcast, which I thought was tiny if you think about Joe Rogan and Stephen Bartlett and all of these big, huge podcasters, but apparently we're quite big. And that's great because it means that we're reaching lots of people and we're giving valuable information. Again, everything that we do is centered around the customer that we're trying to talk to. But it's not something that you, the podcast isn't something that you make money from.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:36:42]:
It's something that you use to actually leverage and grow your brand and build your audience around you, around what it is that you're trying to do. For me, it was interesting. There was a lot of AI, a lot of tech there, which was also quite interesting, but a lot of people that also didn't really know what they were talking about. So seems to be it's an industry that's fashionable because there was a lot of people there, but everybody, but fragmented. So very similar to how affiliate marketing is, and everybody's still trying to find their feet. One thing I can say though, is that it's quite easy to build your podcast listenership and ad revenues because I was talking to some of the ad networks that were there. The value for money that you get off of podcasting and advertising on podcasts is phenomenal because the retention rate of people listening to what you're selling instead of visually. We're so sight blind now because we've been bombarded for years of visual stuff, that audio actually has a much higher ROI rate.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:37:46]:
So, yeah, if you want to get your business seen and heard and you want to get in front of practitioners that can use your tools, get yourself into podcasts and advertise and sponsor them, because it's very good value for money compared to other digital channels. And it's evergreen.

Jim Banks [00:38:00]:
Absolutely. Yeah. And I thought it was quite interesting, that sort of, I think a lot of the events were sponsored by YouTube.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:38:08]:
Yes.

Jim Banks [00:38:08]:
Right. And again, I sat on some of the panels where people were talking about YouTube coming into podcasting. They're replacing, say, replacing their, using YouTube music as being their sort of podcast platform of choice. And I think there was somebody from YouTube there, and they came up with a really great terminology. I think it was eyes optional. So in other words, create a video. Right. But it's got to stand on its own as an audio only.

Jim Banks [00:38:37]:
So again, don't say, and what I'm showing you on here is this. And what I'm showing you on here is that, because that won't fly if somebody's just listening to the audio. So it's got to be the video will enhance it, make it a better experience for those people that watch video. Right. And it's quite interesting, I think, that there was some stats that came out that basically said that Gen Z, about 40% of them prefer to watch videos rather than listen to videos. And I think it was something 50% of people watch a podcast episode on a tv. So again, so it's got to be, it's almost like you've got to think, well, maybe in that case, instead of me just shooting on a phone or something like that, maybe I need to kind of invest in higher quality audio and video, because then that way, if somebody is watching it on a 85 inch tv, you don't really want it to be like a 360 p kind of grainy experience. That's not really going to fly.

Jim Banks [00:39:32]:
Again, I think that's probably where you look at the Joe Rogan's and Stephen Bartlett's. They've kind of obviously gone, well, they've.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:39:39]:
Got their own studios.

Jim Banks [00:39:40]:
Yeah, I mean, they've gone studios, but they've also gone heavy on kind of video as well because it helps to kind of really sort of put that, that sort of different feel on it. I think. I think Stephen Bartlett's editor was talking about. They've gone from, I think, a million subscribers on YouTube. They've now got 6 million on YouTube. Virtually every episode that he puts out is a podcast. So it's almost like his, his entire presence on YouTube has become podcast related. So you mentioned about not making money.

Jim Banks [00:40:10]:
I'm pretty sure he's probably not covering the overheads of the number of people he's got running the business, but I'm pretty sure he's making decent money on the back of the stuff that he's doing. And again, a lot of the advertising for his podcast is actually embedded in the content. It's almost like become the content in the podcast, rather than it being the pre roll, mid roll, post roll. It's actually embedded in there. And again, I think the kind of the, there was a lot of conversations on at the podcast show about whether host Red is the best format for the ads to appear in, the sponsorships to appear in podcast. And again, I think a lot of it is if you have a podcast host, they know their audience, so they know what the ads should be like, and they shouldn't prostitute themselves by selling their soul by having sponsors on that aren't going to be a good fit for that particular audience because it'll switch the audience off pretty quickly and they'll just bail off and go somewhere else.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:41:08]:
Yeah, and consistency, like, that's the one thing that re founders worked for us, is consistency. Consistency on the format, consistency on what you get when you listen to it. So tactical, practical advice, like, everything that we've done has always been about, like, if I'm going to have a conversation and we're vertical agnostic, like as a business, we're vertical agnostic because affiliate marketing is like shoes. You can wear trainers, you can wear high heels, you can wear flip flops, you could, but it still fits on your foot, basically. So we don't like focus on any vertical, but even the verticals. And we've got like a 50 50 split of, you know, I gaming and non igaming everything else. But even the I gaming episodes get as much downloads as the non I gaming episodes. Because every single episode is always about learning something new, whether it's in your vertical or not.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:41:54]:
And so the perspectives of people that we interview is what's actually become interesting on our podcast. And I suppose because the podcast is hosted by a practitioner. So I'm not just like a host, I'm not a content creator, I'm actually a practitioner. I know what questions to ask. I suppose that's what makes it more interesting. So, yeah, I think of quality over quantity, basically because we only do one podcast a week. Like every week we have a podcast. And it's always somebody that I've either found or has contacted me that I think is interesting.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:42:24]:
And it's even people that are like totally off the radar that have never been to an affiliate event, but have like 25 million followers. Like, we did an amazing interview with Sharon Rafter from first Media and she, her pr company actually contacted us and said, you know, she'd love to get on your podcast. And I was like, well, who is she? I've never met this woman, 25 years in to the industry and she's just super phenomenal. So if you haven't listened to that podcast, sorry. To listen to Jim's and then go and listen to that one because it was super interesting.

Jim Banks [00:42:51]:
Again, that's one thing that came across to me loud and clear at the podcast show, is it's the collaboration, it's being a guest on other people's podcasts. And you were very kind to invite me to be a guest on yours. And again, for me, it was a no brainer to kind of have you as a guest on mine, you know? And yeah, I mean, like, for me, I become a big podcast fan on the back of creating a podcast. And again, I've got so much more admiration for the people that make good podcasts because I know how hard it's been for me to try and get to that point.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:43:22]:
Right? Keep doing it. Perseverance pays off.

Jim Banks [00:43:27]:
That's always been the kind of the mantra. I mean, my 25 years in digital marketing, I mean, when I first started buying traffic in a particular vertical or particular offer, sometimes I might lose a ton of money to begin with, but I'd eventually work out how to make it work, recoup the losses, and then make good profit. But equally, I think you can't rest on your laurels. You can't expect it to just be like that forever. There's usually a limited window of opportunity. You've got to try and capitalize on it and then learn from it and try and make sure that when it does eventually start going south that you're ready to pivot on. To try, either try some alternative method of traffic generation or whatever it might be. Don't just sit there and let it just wilt on the vine.

Jim Banks [00:44:10]:
It'll just, it'll die eventually because that's just the natural evolution of things.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:44:14]:
I love that piece of advice for affiliate programs, too. Like if you take exactly that clip and apply it to your affiliate program, you'll probably inject some new life into it over the next couple of weeks. So it's quite.

Jim Banks [00:44:24]:
Yeah, it is. It's just literally constantly keeping an eye on what's working great if it's working, but constantly looking for the next thing that's going to come to either complement that or replace it if the original idea kind of goes by the wayside. I did some gambling offers way back in the day. I woke up one day to find that Google had basically said, we're not taking gambling ads anymore. I'm like fuck, what the hell do I do now? I've got like a whole site that was generating a ton of money and I'm thinking I do now. So basically I created a website because I was running, I think it was like bingo and Tombola. And I'd done some kind of audience analysis and it was primarily housewives sitting at home with small children. Children had gone to bed and they'd have a game of Tom Bowler because it was good for them.

Jim Banks [00:45:12]:
They would go on and just play. And I was getting paid decent money for each new player I got signed up. I'm like, what do I do now? So I created a recipe site and all the ads on there were for basically Tom Bowler and Bingo. So I had banner ads all over the place. Not so outlandish that it became crazy like you've got on some of the.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:45:32]:
Sites now, some of these publishers, horrible, horrendous.

Jim Banks [00:45:36]:
But it was certainly enough to give me decent numbers of impressions that I could then potentially try and monetize. And my keywords that I was buying. Instead of buying tombola bingo, stuff like that, I was buying like ham and cheese sandwich recipe or banana avocado onion. People would type in onion for me and obviously the cost of that traffic was like pennies to the panel, but, and I had to convert, I think I worked it out. I had to convert something like one in 6000 clicks into a paying customer to break even on my sort of, you know, I think it was like $200. I was getting paid for a new, new player. I was buying traffic four or $0.05. Literally.

Jim Banks [00:46:17]:
I just had to convert one in 5000, 6000 people to make profit. And then eventually Google said we'll take money for ads again for gambling. And I'm like, okay, great. I don't need to have the recipe sign back to it, but it's, I.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:46:31]:
Mean that's pivot that needs to happen.

Jim Banks [00:46:34]:
I could have just left it and said, well, I'm not going to do gambling anymore. But there's always a way, there's always a way around a solution and that's where again I think a good program manager can help find those solutions to problems that, you know, everyone else is struggling with. Right? But there's always a solution, there's always a way to kind of get around it. Totally cool. Anyway, Lee-Ann, like I said, we could talk forever and I'm sure when we see each other in September we will talk forever again. I'm so excited to come to the show.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:47:04]:
Thank you.

Jim Banks [00:47:04]:
As I mentioned at the beginning, all of Lee-Ann's contact details and information is available in the show notes, which will be available when we post the episode. Only remains for me to say you've been a fantastic guest. I've loved having you on the show and look forward to seeing you at some point in time soon.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:47:20]:
Thank you so much for having me on, Gem. It's really nice to be on the other side of the mic for a.

Jim Banks [00:47:23]:
Change, and you know what I mean. My podcast is called bad decisions with Jim Banks. I think this is one of the best decisions I've made, having you on as a guest. It's been phenomenal.

Lee-Ann Johnstone [00:47:32]:
Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.