Dominick Keenan | ClickBank
How can brands use affiliate marketing to drive stronger marketing results?
ClickBank VP of Sales breaks down what affiliate marketing is, who it is and is not right for, and what you should know if you’re planning to use affiliate marketing for your businesses.
From how to manage affiliate relationships to ensure they don’t cannibalize your own marketing, to identifying the right influencers, determining how many influencers you should work with, and how to track and verify affiliate-generated sales, Dominick dives into the details of building a profitable affiliate marketing program.
Check out the full episode to hear what Dave had to say.
Resources from this episode:
Visit clickbank.com/podcast to learn more about ClickBank and affiliate marketing
Connect with Dominic on LinkedIn
Dominick and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:02):
Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Dominick Keenan, who is the VP of Sales at ClickBank. Welcome to the podcast, Dominick.
Dominick (00:26):
Hey, thank you very much. Glad to be here.
Kathleen (00:28):
Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. And we're gonna talk about a topic that I'm really interested in, which is affiliate marketing. I you know, as anybody who listens to this podcast probably knows I, I do work in B2B SaaS, but we sell into the e-commerce space and we're affiliate marketing is used very commonly. And we have, we have a lot of listeners who are also in e-commerce, but we also have a lot of listeners in B2B. And I have always personally believed that that while a lot of the tools out there are, are built for B2C marketers, there's so many great lessons to be drawn. So we're gonna, we're gonna talk about affiliate marketing broadly, then we're gonna get into some examples and some advice, but before we do that, maybe you could just give us a little bit of background on yourself and who you are and what ClickBank is.
Dominick (01:15):
Yeah, sure. So VP of sales here at ClickBank. Been here for seven years almost to the day actually. And I escaped the world of commercial banking to come work for this great company
Kathleen (01:32):
Bank in it, ironically.
Dominick (01:34):
It does. And if you look at the footer on our website, it very clearly says some lawyer figured we needed to say we are not a bank. We do not accept deposits. So it's just to be-
Kathleen (01:43):
You're not FDIC insured.
Dominick (01:45):
Yep, exactly. But what I love about working with ClickBank is we spend almost all of our time working directly with entrepreneurs. So primarily we're working with entrepreneurs to scale their businesses. And ClickBank's been around since 1998. So we're known very much as an affiliate network, but beyond that, there's quite a few conversion, conversion enhancing features that we provide. So like one click post purchase upsell instead of add to cart, it comes after the cart, which is a, a difficult from a tech side subscriptions, recurring scaled, merchant processing. We, we process everything. But in the end, as I mentioned, working with entrepreneurs is really what has kept me in this business for so long. ClickBank's provided access to some of the best, you know, one of, some of the most interesting entrepreneurs that we interact with on whether it's strategy or tactics on a, on a daily basis. So that's, that's a little bit of background on me and ClickBank.
Kathleen (02:56):
Awesome. And let's just start out pretty basic. I mean, a lot of the marketers that listen to this are, are fairly savvy. They understand marketing, but I always find it helpful to like define in this case how you define affiliate marketing, because in my experience that term is used very loosely. Sometimes it overlaps with influencer marketing. So how do you in particular define affiliate marketing?
Dominick (03:19):
Yeah, you're right. That some people think influencers, some people think like referral or ambassador program broadly really quickly affiliates our, our professional marketers who refer company or refer customers to a product or company in exchange for a commission in there's several different models. They, you can get into CPA, rev share lead generation CPL. But most often it's used for a company will use affiliates for attaining a level of scale that they can't get on their own and reaching customers and channels that they can't other or wise reach. So if, if you think about a company that is maybe they're great on YouTube and Facebook but they're not really good on display or SEO or email rather than building out teams to do that. Something that they're not comfortable doing, they can, they can use affiliates to reach into those channels in those markets.
Kathleen (04:20):
Great. And you know, when you think about the types of companies that should be using affiliate marketing broadly, who is it right for?
Dominick (04:31):
Yeah, the it's, it's sometimes easier to say who it's not right for. So in general, not always, but super niche companies with really narrow distribution. An example came across my desk earlier this week that we had gotten inbound and it was a $5,000, five or $6,000 air compressor, four welders. I'm sure it's a great air compressor, but that's such a narrow niche market that it's tough for that, for that to work, to get broad scale on it, then likewise, on the, on the other side another example I'd seen was this really cool t-shirt store that had, they have a limited run of designs. Like they have a new design every week and you only have one week to buy it. And it's like $12, you know, for this t-shirt fulfilled. On that side, it it's really difficult to get an affiliate interested because there's not enough margin to really pay them, to pick, get to any kind of scale.
Dominick (05:44):
At 12 bucks, you know, it's five or $6 for the t-shirt, it's gotta be printed package fulfilled plus your overhead. So for companies that it will work for some, have enough margin to pay an affiliate, to acquire a customer for them. And if, if you're not currently using affiliates, you could, you could substitute affiliate commission in for your customer acquisition cost. Instead, these people are, are acquiring customers for you. And at least in our world, something that has fairly broad appeal that that can attain some level of scale in the case of the t-shirt store, I'm sure that it has fairly broad appeal and that's a pretty compelling product for a segment of the market, but it would probably do better in a referral program, you know, like refer us 10 customers and you get a free t-shirt, something like that instead of trying to leverage paid professional marketers.
Kathleen (06:40):
That makes sense. So if somebody is, is a marketer or a business owner, and they identify this as a potential avenue for them and they come to you and say, I'm interested in, in exploring affiliate marketing for my business breakdown for me, how you guys approach coming up with a plan for them?
Dominick (07:01):
Well, the first thing, I mean, take calls like this all the time. And the first thing I always want to be really clear about is affiliate marketing is a, a distinct channel. And in that case, it requires investment of time and resources into that channel. There's not, you can't get into any new channel cost free, you know, if you had a business that said, all of a sudden we wanna be great at YouTube it's a lot more than I just filmed this video on my iPhone and, and published it on YouTube. And we're good. Right? So it's that mindset that this will oftentimes for the right company will pay off, but it does require some investments. So what, what are those investments typically affiliate traffic, especially at scale is gonna need a pretty specific and compelling sales page for it to work.
Dominick (07:56):
And in that case, that page, you know, that sales funnel needs to be optimized for affiliate traffic and in the, in the broad, broader context, any, any businesses, all businesses are competing for customers competing with each other for customers, however, in the affiliate space those businesses are also competing with each other for affiliates. So it, if one, one, we take two very similar companies with very similar products and one has a really poor conversion rate. And it, they're basically just sending people to their regular normal page, generic page. And oftentimes we'll see it's, it's far too cluttered with no call to action. And it's not optimized for affiliate traffic, whether that's capturing a lead or, or making a sale it's not gonna perform nearly as well for the affiliate. The affiliate's gonna be more attracted to, you know, business number two, which has clear calls to action, a clear path to get that conversion leader sale because it'll perform much better, whether they're running paid media or it's email or personal referrals.
Kathleen (09:11):
So I wanna dig into that a little bit customizing your let's call it your landing page. And this is something that I I've also, I know it holds true if you're doing pay per click as well. Like you wanna make sure that you're optimizing the destination that you're creating for the channel that the traffic is coming from in the case of affiliate marketing, aside from like landing page, best practice of, you know, matching the value prop to whatever messaging the affiliate is using. And, you know, making sure you have clear calls to action and as few clicks as possible to get to a conversion and all those normal kind of landing page best practices. Are there other things that are important to keep in mind with affiliate marketing? And I'll just give you one or two examples of in my head and you can tell me if I'm going down the right path or the wrong path. Sure. Like, like, should you be customizing the page per affiliate? Should it be like welcome fans of so and so to, you know, so you're acknowledging somebody came from that affiliate or should it, you know, exactly like how cus are we talking and is it one page for all affiliates? Is it different pages for different affiliates? Like, can you dig into that a little bit?
Dominick (10:22):
Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. So we, we do see quite a few of our customers that will be custom or our sellers that will be customizing landing pages to the requirements of their biggest affiliates. But not every single affiliate. So for us, a big offer could have, you know, eight, 10,000 affiliates promoting it. And that would be almost impossible. A nightmare in reality, the top 10% are really meaningful. The long tails still meaningful, but certainly not worth customizing every page for them. It's more cause, and I should have said this in the answer to your last question, we're really a strong advocate for deep relationships between sellers and affiliates. A lot of that is initially driven by, you know, somebody who's just getting started driven by a really solid what we would call an affiliate tools page or an affiliate information page.
Dominick (11:22):
And that would include here's exactly what our sales funnels look like currently. And if you want one offs, then let us know, but don't make, 'em go through and try to find where everything is. Here's the link to this. And then this is the next page. Here's is what the call to action looks like. Here's the rate that it converts at. And here's the value of that conversion. In, in the case where your, your conversion is an actual sale through the entire funnel, what, what is the average order value of a customer and what do we expect that conversion and average commission to be? Then beyond that if your, if your affiliates are paid media or display, here's all of the, here's all of the banners that work for us. Feel free to customize 'em, you know, or don't use them in XYZ manner.
Dominick (12:14):
If it's email, here's all the swipe copy that works for us. Oftentimes those affiliates will modify it for their audience on their own. So for example, we're pretty heavy in the health and health and fitness space. So you might have a fairly generic offer, like a, a greens juice, for example, a and this is a DTC example, but that, that offer may be getting traffic from all different kinds of audience segments. So an email traffic let's say like a middle aged female list is going to different, different messaging than somebody who's very keto focused. And so a lot of our vendors are just putting out here's the swipe copy that works for us, feel free to modify it, just hit the bullet points. Then beyond that, on that affiliate info page, we recommend that people, people put or sellers put on there what they don't want affiliates doing.
Kathleen (13:21):
So I want to ask about that. Like, you're talking about allowing them to customize and modify, but in my head I'm like, Ooh, I could see that going very wrong.
Dominick (13:28):
Yeah, exactly. So what don't you want, I'm doing like, if you, what I'm using that exact swipe copy, tell 'em that, but also probably the most common is don't bid on our branded keywords, right. Or we, you know, that the business may be great at Facebook. You don't want to compete against your affiliates on Facebook, so no promotion on Facebook at least in our case.
Kathleen (13:53):
Promotion or no.
Dominick (13:56):
So we have, we have sellers that'll do both. They don't, they wanna control everything that has to do with their business on Facebook. Or they just don't wanna compete for cost purposes. In our, in our case, that's entirely up to the seller to establish that but they can establish their rules. Then if they ever catch somebody breaking 'em and this is pretty standard for any network, just go to the network and say, Hey, I caught this affiliate, just ban them. And we do that right away. But I, I would say all of this hinges on building really solid relationships with affiliates, particularly when you want to when you protect your brand, you want to know who that is. That's delivering a message to a potential customer. So we recommend that people engage an affiliate manager and that, that affiliate manager not be tasked with calculating what they owe somebody in ClickBank's case a lot of other affiliate networks do this.
Dominick (14:56):
They'll they'll split the money automatically, but there's a lot of people that use just tracking software. And so that tracking software, you have to go into PayPal, make the payment and everything that don't, don't task 'em with that task them with relationships, understanding where that traffic's coming from. But then it provides an opportunity to get in front of that affiliate and get more traffic from them. You know, that there's their, your affiliate manager knows there's six months out on their email promotional calendar. If we have a big promotion, you know, for black Friday or whatever it may need to be, we've gotta get in touch in like may and we need to have black Friday targeted copy or images ready to go well in advance of, of that time. So strong advocate of that, I also say you know, like all those offers are competing for affiliates.
Dominick (15:48):
So the easier it is to get in touch with that person, you know, put their face right at the top of the page, here's how you get in touch with 'em, here's their phone number, email, Skype, whatever it may be, make it as easy as possible because we see this where at, at scale, a lot of these guys are, they're just looking for the next thing to, to promote the next thing that will convert for them. If it's really difficult to get that out of, out of a seller, then they're just on to the next seller make it as simple as possible.
Kathleen (16:19):
You mentioned a couple things that I now have questions about. The first is that you drop the word network, and I think there's some folks who are listening, who are gonna know what you're talking about and some who are not. And so can you explain what an affiliate network is?
Dominick (16:36):
Oh sure. Yeah. So at, at a really high level ClickBank specifically, we will track usually on the click or device fingerprint who the affiliate was that directed traffic at which seller. And what we do is we say affiliate number one, sent a sale to seller number one. And prior to that sale occurring, they'd agreed to a commission rate of 50%. So when that sale occurs, we automatically at the time of sale, take 50% of the funds and, and put it in affiliate number ones out. That's, that's how ClickBank works. There's, you know, variations among several networks all the way down to it there's tracking software that will just tell you, Hey, affiliate number one sent the sale, but it doesn't calculate the amount or split the transaction for you. And most often businesses that kind of dipping their toe into affiliate marketing are using a piece of software like that. And their affiliate managers just sitting there, you know, calculating commission and sending out, sending out payments. So affiliate network, like you said, is a broad, broad term, but that that's how our, our business works.
Kathleen (17:54):
And does it in most cases also encompass finding and sourcing your affiliates?
Dominick (17:59):
Yeah, that's correct. So ClickBank has an affiliate marketplace that will rank every seller we have based on how it performs for affiliates. So the long tail of affiliates can go in and just search through that marketplace on the higher level the ones that are working with our account management teams, they have analytics tools where they'll say this affiliate did really well with these three sellers. And these other 10 sellers have very similar offers that convert at a very similar rate. And so their job is to constantly be introducing those affiliates and sell they're basically giant matchmakers is, is really what they're doing.
Kathleen (18:43):
Interesting. Okay. So, so that leads me then to my next question, which is how should brands think about selecting who their affiliates are, in other words, like, are there different dimensions to who you might want in an affiliate versus who you might not?
Dominick (19:06):
Yeah. I would start off with affiliates that are in channels that you're not great at. We've talked earlier, you know, let's take the company, for example, they're great at YouTubing great at Facebook, but they've never really done anything with email or display. Give it a shot there. I, but I would say the, the industry, at least in our section of the industry is fairly small. So I would talk to people whether it's at a trade show or, or online forums there's all, all kinds of groups that you can get in. If you wanna get into the affiliate space. Hey, has anybody ever worked with this email list manager? Are they any good? Believe me, if people have had trouble with them before they they'll be pretty vocal about it. So I would, I would recommend vetting them beyond that. I, you know, show me your prior work, who have you worked with in the past? I have connections that almost every competitive network, because they're, they're pretty friendly out sharing. Hey, have you worked with this person in the past? Have you, have you had any issues? So if, if you're working with a network, they'll, they'll tell you who to, who to work with and who to stay away from. But as far as targeting affiliates by segment, I, I would say dip your toe into, into a channel that you don't already.
Kathleen (20:35):
Okay. And then, is there any rule of thumb around how many affiliates, cause you talked about how some brands might have eight to 10,000 affiliates like, is it, is, is there any benefit to limiting the number or should you always just have as many as possible?
Dominick (20:55):
That's a great question. And it would depend on the, it would depend on the business. So I I've seen two examples. We were talking about that that company that had eight to 10,000 for them are less highly branded. I mean, they, they certainly have a brand, but they're more willing to be lenient with their affiliates. And so they'll pretty much let anybody promote, but one of the best strategies I've seen for a highly branded company was they purposefully shut it off. I, I wanna say it was like 50 or 60 affiliates. And in order for anybody else to get in, they had to either kick an affiliate out or have that affiliate stop promoting and just leave. It was really interesting because when I first saw this, I thought, man, they're leaving so much on the table. I, I get it. You know, not all 8,000 of that other, you know, that guy's got 8,000 affiliates promoting.
Dominick (21:51):
'Em Not all of, some of 'em are sending like one sale a day, you know, it's not huge, but you might as well take it. You got 6,000 affiliates that are sending one sale a day. That adds up really quick. And so I had a couple drinks with this highly branded company's affiliate manager, the one that limited, it limited it to 50. And he said, you know what, it's crazy. What happens when you introduce scarcity? Because people see their product out there and they're like, oh, I could promote that. And he's like, I've got a list of all the best affiliates waiting to promote us. And so they go through and review once a month and if somebody's not performing, they, they, and then they've got some phenomenal affiliate right at the top of their waiting list, ready to come in and, and start promoting their brand.
Kathleen (22:37):
That's interesting. And, and if I understand correctly, there's not like a carrying cost to working with an affiliate. It's just if they perform, they get paid.
Dominick (22:47):
Correct. Yeah. So some networks will charge you, you know, a monthly fee in our case and a lot of the networks that are similar to us, it's just on the transaction. So there's no cost unless that affiliate does send you a send you a sale.
Kathleen (23:04):
And, and I wanna talk for a second about the types of affiliates and this kind of comes out of, I, I used to, to work in another company that loosely played in this space. And I'm curious to get your take on this. And so what I've, I haven't done a lot of affiliate marketing myself, but what I've seen is there's, you know, individual people who act as affiliates, like somebody has a great blog or a really big following, then there's like publishers act as affiliates, you know? And so an online newspaper magazine media property might feature products and they have affiliate links, et cetera. And then there's coupon affiliates. Are there other categories that I'm missing?
Dominick (23:46):
There are probably subcategories in there. In general, ClickBank's about half paid media affiliates and half email. On the email side, there are kind of like you mentioned solopreneurs, they acquired a list mostly through content publication and they'll promote, but also there's, there's quite a few list managers in our space. So somebody that has built up a really big list, but they're not a professional emailer. And they don't, they don't really want to hassle with it. And so they just go find the best person in this space to market to that list. That's pretty common on the, on the paid media side, it's all over the place. You've got you know, agencies who are just trying to keep people busy in a slow time, or like you said publishers that are trying to fill up some remnant display space all the way down to one of the most interesting affiliates I met was this guy that showed up to one of our after parties at a, at a conference.
Dominick (24:54):
And I had been emailing him back and forth. I, I was his account rep at the time and this guy, I mean, he is probably six, 7 million in sales that year that he had done on his own turns out he had just turned 22 and was really excited that he, he was gonna be moving out of his grandmother's house. He had just bought a used BMW and he had figured out, and I believe it was Facebook. He had figured out how to get really good at promoting different products on Facebook and, and, and had found a lot of success there. So I, I always find it interesting cuz especially at our events, you could go from one conversation where it's Some large agency in, in New York. Who's just trying to find some extra margin to the guy who's literally living at his grandmother's house.
Kathleen (25:49):
Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. I wanna ask you specifically about coupon affiliates. Honey, CapitalOne Shopping, et cetera. I feel like the industry has a love, hate relationship with them. They wield tremendous power. They, in my, in my previous role, we were actually trying to stop them because we realized that their, in many cases, their overwriting credit, they're claiming credit for sessions that somebody else has driven. It could be the brand's own Facebook, a or email campaign, or it actually could be another affiliate. And then, you know, at the last second, the user clicks, the let's call it the honey box and they drop a perpetual cookie that overwrites original source attribution. So I would just love to get your take on this. And I ask this knowing that perhaps it might be a difficult question to answer because are, are coupon affiliates a part of your network?
Dominick (26:48):
It's funny you bring this up. I was actually listening to a couple of your other podcast episodes and appreciate your take on coupon affiliates. I'll say this with the disclaimer that ClickBank doesn't provide coupon attribution, but we do have, have quite a few clients that use it on. We have mutual clients on that are on other platforms that use it in general, in the majority of circumstances it's stepping on the original source affiliate or the original source of that traffic. It's kind of like jumping in front of the parade right at the end. And I'm what I really don't like about it in my interactions with our users is they're they say, well, we've get, we get the X percent of sales from people that use a coupon. And it, every time I ask this, well, did you test taking the coupon field off the order form?
Dominick (27:43):
And, and almost always it's a no. Yeah. so you, you know, your conversion rate might go down by a couple percent, but if you're giving up 20% off of all of those sales, you just gotta do the math on it. And I think in general, it's probably a bad idea and maybe you gotta do it for influencers, but the Honeys of the world, CapitalOne Shopping, not, not crazy about it, just because I don't don't think it's super additive. I I'd be curious what your thought, I mean, you obviously lived in this world, I'd be curious what your thoughts are.
Kathleen (28:21):
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. We actually ran the data cuz we, we were blocking this when I was at clean.io. We were blocking coupon injection. And so for the user, it might appear that honey was there and was trying codes, but it would never work. They would never get a valid code. And so the question was, what does that do to conversion rates? And what we found was that when you blocked Honey and CapitalOne shopping, the conversionn rate actually went up and cart abandonment actually went down. Totally counterintuitive. So if, if you believe that then with, and that was, that was based on 50 50 split tests where we would block coupons on half traffic and not on the other half, if you believe that to be the case. And then you think about the fact that you could actually increase conversion rates. You wouldn't be taking the hit on the discount and you wouldn't be paying the coupon, affiliate their percentage of commission.
Kathleen (29:13):
Like it's, it's massive. So I always described the coupon affiliate thing as like in 90% of cases, when a coupon affiliate swoops in it's the equivalent of, if you owned a brick and mortar store, people coming to your store, you know, from all different places, your newspaper ad, your flyers, your email campaigns walking by on the street purchase, picking something up in your store, walking to the cashier, getting ready to pay. And the person in line in front of them says, Hey, I have this extra coupon. Do you want it? Like, that's what it really is. They're not driving business. And it, it would, it would make me nuts if I owned a store. So we don't have to go on and on about it because it's not what we're really here to talk about.
Dominick (29:51):
That's a phenomenal analogy. And if you don't mind, I'm gonna borrow it, but I've got one, one other thing that might be helpful on the coupon side is so, you know, we work with a lot of direct response businesses, so we not exclusively, but we see a lot of, of of sales funnels with very clear call to action. And the we've ran a couple tests where it's not even just Honeys of the world or CapitalOne Shopping, but having that coupon field on the order form prompts people away from the order form. Yes. to go search for it. So even if you're not paying Honey, it's still worth testing to see if it's worth it, to just remove that field altogether.
Kathleen (30:41):
I've heard like if you make it a link where it's like promo code question mark, and then they have to hit the link to get the field to pop up. Even that helps because it's not as obvious, but you're right. It does people think, oh, I'm missing a code. There must be a code. Mention a code. Yeah.
Dominick (30:57):
Yep. Yeah, exactly. And then they open another tab to search Google and all of a sudden they're on Twitter and they're gone.
Kathleen (31:04):
Exactly. Oh my gosh. So, so interesting. So much to mind there, but different topic for a different day. The thing I wanna ask you about is on the B the B2B side, because we, as we were talking about earlier, affiliate marketing historically has been used quite successfully and, and quite frequently by direct to consumer businesses or at least business to consumer businesses less frequently in the business to business world. But I, I feel like there are great applications for it. And so like, for example, I work in B2B SaaS, which is kind of like another e-commerce play really. And so I'd be, I'd love to get your thoughts on like what potential is there for business to business businesses to use affiliate marketing.
Dominick (31:53):
Yeah, I think it's it's certainly very helpful. We, so I'll give you an example of the types of businesses that we see in the B2B space is mostly a around education and training. So we'll see, the types of affiliates in that space are often emailers that are, have people subscribing for content. It may be marketing content or e-commerce tips and tricks type thing. And every once in a while, they'll drop in. So say maybe once a quarter they'll promote another business's course or educational offering, or I've got a really good friend. Who's a client. His product is he teaches people how to build e-commerce stores out on Shopify, phenomenal product. He's made dozens of people multi-millionaires and his, all of his stuff that he sends out is very content heavy. Like here's a, what we learned today about this very specific issue with fulfillment would be an example, right?
Dominick (33:04):
Great open rates. And very rarely, he will say, here's the type of, or here's the company we use for web hosting. And here's why we use them. If you want to use them, check it out. And oftentimes those types of promotions that we see, they're very upfront about the fact that this is an affiliate link, but I have such a, as a reader of his, as of his stuff. And I, I admire what he's built. I'm more than happy to click on his link. Like I hope that host skater or whoever gives him 20% of whatever I pay them in perpetuity. So when we analyze affiliates, cuz we look at everything from whether it's performance for revenue, but also performance for returns customer complaints, all of that, to make sure for quality those types of affiliates have the most bought in bought in engagement or live. And they oftentimes drive it'll be sporadic revenue, but because they're not gonna email that same, Hey, here's my favorite hosting company every day. Right. but when they do it's really high quality revenue. Yeah.
Kathleen (34:15):
And I would say like, that's a very authentic way to approach it, which is have a loyal audience. I'm gonna be honest with them and tell them I'm gonna make money off of this. But I also am only doing this because I actually use the product and here's how I use it.
Dominick (34:29):
Yeah. In, in the, in the end, at least, you know, in my world working with thousands of internet marketers, they know it's an affiliate link. Like they, they sniff that out pretty quick.
Kathleen (34:40):
And that's a good question to fall on with, which is, are there any kind of legal regulatory things that, that somebody needs to be aware of? Not, I mean, there, I think there are things on the affiliate side, like if you are posting something, I believe you have to don't you have to disclose.
Dominick (34:59):
Yeah. There are disclosure requirements. I, I don't recall the exact requirement off the top of my head. You'll see it. If you go to like a web, a great website for this is like the points guy, I think it's called The Points Guy or the blog. Yeah. Yep. And yeah, you'll see, in ital at the very top of the page, you know, there are affiliate links present but very similar. Like I read that guy's stuff all the time. I don't care. I hope Delta Airlines pays him a bunch of money. So that doesn't tend to be too discouraging on the, if you are paying, if you are a US based company and you are paying affiliates in the United States, I don't remember the threshold, but it's pretty low, couple hundred dollars. You do need to 10 99 them. So in, in our space, we take care of all of the 1099s, but if you're using just a tracking tool and then paying them out manually, you'll wanna send that tax reporting, which is-
Kathleen (35:54):
Probably not, not to make this a plug. It's probably a good reason to use a platform or a network because then that's taken care of. Cause I can see how that could get really overwhelming really fast.
Dominick (36:03):
Yeah. I mean, do you wanna pay your accountant to mail out 1099s cuz they'll charge you for sure.
Kathleen (36:09):
Exactly. cool. Well, I would love to before we sort of wrap up, I'd love to find out, do you have any interesting success stories or case studies that you can share of, of how companies have used affiliate marketing to get really great results?
Dominick (36:26):
Yeah. You know I mentioned earlier about the your affiliate manager building really good relationships with your affiliates, but we're also working with a lot of entrepreneurs who they haven't necessarily gotten to that point, or they're not quite sure they're ready to hire somebody to do that. And I worked with a woman who she came to, one of our VIP events about five years ago. And we had, I do not remember who the speaker was, but it, somebody that everybody wanted to get in, we're talking about a room of like a hundred people. Right. And so somebody tried to walk through with their like YouTube film crew with lights everywhere and everything. So I was then charged with making sure nobody got in the door that wasn't supposed to be in there. And she kind of snuck in behind me and I turned around and I said, I'm really sorry.
Dominick (37:18):
I have to ask you to leave. And she's like, oh, I'll, I'm, I'll be quiet. I'm not, I'm not gonna bother anybody and I'll leave as soon as he is done. Well, she after the event was over, met everybody in that room, she just went around, asked them about their business, what they do. And of course entrepreneurs are curious about each other. And they're very proud of their, their baby, their business that they built up. So the conversation's pretty natural. Over the course of her next year and a half, just the network she built out with those personal connections, with the affiliates that ended up building her business into it's a tens of millions today paid off dividends just by being curious, asking questions, pushing back on me a little bit to stay in the room. Now that's great at a live event. I, I would certainly do that online too. Who else, who else should I meet? It pays, it pays for itself really quickly.
Kathleen (38:24):
That's great. All right. Well last question, and then we're gonna kind of go into the wrap up, which is what are the biggest mistakes that you see companies make when it comes to affiliate marketing?
Dominick (38:39):
Well, first, first off I would say not buying into it as a channel, as we mentioned. I see a lot of people, they put that affiliate link at the very bottom of their page with kind of like an email opt in and think they're good affiliates, aren't waiting with bated breath for you to put your product available for promotion typically. So that, that would be number one beyond that, and this is a real killer is testing on affiliate traffic or trying to optimize on affiliate traffic that will burn bridges really quickly because those affiliates are optimizing for what they saw today, not your split test for tomorrow. And if you want, if you need affiliate traffic to test, let the affiliate know and you, there's all kinds of arrangements you can make with them, like floor the floor, the CPM on the email or pay per click or whatever it may be.
Dominick (39:35):
But just being transparent with that. I've seen that a couple times where we'll do a lot of legwork to get to get affiliates, to promote promote a, a vendor. And all of a sudden the pages are completely different and they say, well, we're optimizing. And it's just kind of, you know, there's, there's no coming back from that, that, that bridge that bridge is burned. And then lastly, I'd say I wouldn't, you'll, you'll see products and businesses out there that have really successful really successful affiliate programs. And I wouldn't at the beginning start off by comparing yourself to that highly successful program. The, oftentimes those look like they just kind of emerged and all this traffic went to 'em in reality. What is it that I can't remember the the book, but they were talking about the flywheel of success. You're, you're seeing it after the flywheel already spinning really quickly. It took, took in a lot of testing and optimization product development to, to get to that point. So I wouldn't compare, you know, the first six months of your affiliate program to, to the top of the market.
Kathleen (40:49):
Yeah. That's great advice. All right. We're gonna shift gears. I always ask my guests two questions. First one is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing, which I loosely define as like anything that naturally attracts the right customer to you, which certainly encompasses affiliate marketing. So is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park and, and doing a great job with that today?
Dominick (41:16):
That's a great question. I, I don't know. You'd have to tell me if this counts as your definition within your definition, but the brands that Ryan Reynolds owns.
Kathleen (41:30):
MNTN. He, well, his agency was purchased by MNTN, but are you talking about Aviation Gin?
Dominick (41:34):
Yeah, Aviation and that cell phone company. I can't remember it, but Aviation Gin, I, I actually have a bottle of Aviation Gin at home and I asked the, the guy that runs the liquor store. Last time I was in there, I said, do you guys sell quite a bit of this? And he is like, you know, about four years ago, it just started flying off the shelf before that we couldn't give it away. So his his social media content is phenomenal for, for pushing that.
Kathleen (42:03):
That's awesome. All right. The second question, the marketers, I know many of them say one of the biggest pain points is just keeping up with everything, like all the things that are changing in the world of digital marketing. How do you personally like to stay up to date and keep yourself educated?
Dominick (42:20):
So I'm a big reader when it comes to books, not necessarily specific to marketing I'd give a quick plug to the book alchemy by Rory Sutherland, which was the most recent best one I've read. I'd say that's one of the best marketing books I've read ever. But a lot of it is we appeared a lot or we go to a lot of live events and I'm very particular about watching, watching people from stage. And then the podcast space has been pretty good. So adjacent to us, a very similar company to ours is called max web. They're very heavy in the paid media space, so listen to a lot of a lot of their podcasts.
Kathleen (43:07):
Nice. All right. Last question. If somebody has a question about any of this and they wanna connect with you, ask a question or learn more about ClickBank, what's the best way for them to do that
Dominick (43:19):
To reach me directly I'm pretty active on LinkedIn Dominick, Keenan and you know, if they wanna reach out to us here ClickBank. Clickbank.com/podcast. We have a, I think it's three questions on there about whether your business would be a good fit for affiliates. And also you know, if you're not ready to take that step, ClickBank's very active on social media. We have a phenomenal team here that publishes both our own content, but we, like I said, we work with all these phenomenal entrepreneurs. We have a really tremendous resource for, for content that we push out on pretty much every social media platform out there.
Kathleen (43:57):
Great. All right. Well, I will put all those links in the show notes as always, and you can find those at kathleenbooth.com. And if you're listening and you like this episode, I would love it if you would head to Apple Podcasts and leave the podcast a review. And if you know somebody else doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, and I'd like to have them as my next guest. In the meantime, thank you so much, Dominick. This was a ton of fun. I learned a lot.
Dominick (44:25):
Yeah. Thank you.
