Hi, I'm Oliver Root, CEO of Big Link, and welcome to the Future of Publishing.
Marie Nguyen is with us this week.
Our topic this week is Affiliate Networks.
Our show is brought to you by BlogWorld and sponsored by Big Link and our Publishing
Partners Network Live.
With me this week is Brett Grove, president and co-founder of Wing Trust Systems.
Welcome Brett.
Philip Kidwell, director and business development for E-Health, and Gary Warren's Director
of client services for Rotten tongue link share.
Welcome all.
Thank you.
So why don't we just start with introduction to who are you and what do you do?
Well, like I said, I'm Brett with Wing Trust, and starting the company back in 2002,
and Wing Trust is a SaaS product for managing your own affiliate program to the house.
So we service over 170 networks of merchants across the world.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Gary, let's go to you.
So I'm a director of client services here on the West Coast within share, record
handling and share.
We're a affiliate network.
We also have regeneration research programs, and we're really going to facilitate the network
services between the advertising and publishers, and you feel it well.
Great.
Thank you.
Philip.
Phil Kidwell with E-Health Insurance, largest health insurance agency in the country, director
of business dev over there, kind of opportunity, and the different business dev programs,
and affiliate marketing.
Great.
So the topic today is affiliate networking, and we're focused in the shows called Future
Publishing, so our audience is mostly publishers.
So we have an advertiser in E-Health.
We have a affiliate network that does a lot of business with publishers on the link
share side.
Link Trust, we have a backing system that interacts mostly with merchants, as I understand.
So maybe let's start with Gary.
Gary, if I don't publish her, how can I make money from affiliate?
What is affiliate marketing?
How can I make money?
Well, affiliate marketing is basically a space-source CDI basis of a commission of SaaS,
and it's the work in between the advertiser, say, a large client who may be online on
the online offline, and the way the link share works is that we are that middle person to
facilitate our relationship.
So we track the users going through the publisher side who are driving sales for that advertiser.
We track that, make sure that you have enough capabilities with your own on the publisher
side, and the advertiser side to make sure the commission is attract correctly, and you
receive a nice check for those users that you're sending to the guy.
So it's all based on a CPA basis, and it's a CPA being that across the recognition.
So a publisher, who's, let's say, writing about health issues, may link to e-health,
and they get a special link from link shares.
So when the link goes through, the click is counted, and then if I'm going to sell,
how am I going to make that unique ID for both the identifiers, so the advertiser can
identify which unique, what we call an SID, from the publisher who drove that, use it
to that side, so we can make sure the commission goes back to the correct publisher for that sale,
or whatever the cost of action is.
One came in publisher, as we're looking to work with, all of them.
I mean, the beautiful thing about our network is we have everything from very shopping-focused
people to emergency technologies, and we like the sales in the unique, and what they
do, and obviously, one of the things we like is we won't give our advertiser as many
options as possible.
And that's the beauty of our network, we have the publishers who are niched in certain
verticals, we have some that come in the full gamut of the shopping vertical, who really
drive a loyalty or coupon in, and then we have the other side, like yourself who deal
with content, blog areas, that can really generate commissions for those people who are interested
in certain articles, and help those blog companies drive sales for that, what they previously
couldn't do.
So to be quite honest, all publishers are welcome on our network, and now we're getting
more into the mobile community, and a lot of the traditional players are driving, are
coming into our network who may not be before considered a fit of art, so that's a really
great way for us as well.
Cool.
So, as an advertiser, what kinds of publishers are you looking to work with, how do you find
it?
You know, we work with a variety of different publishers, mainly financial services types
of companies that are maybe marketing auto insurance, or a different type of insurance
line, maybe like a lending tree.com or something around that area.
We really don't discriminate.
Anybody that has quality traffic, it's US base, so our audience is US, you know, anybody
in that realm, what we're happy to work with, and talk to them about, you know, starting
to campaign business.
Got it.
And you have a lot of opportunities for, at the end of the day, it's all marketing, right?
You're paying money to get into business.
You know, there's search and display.
Tell me why affiliate marketing, why do you spend a ton of money here?
You know, it's really a way to kind of acknowledge another community.
I mean, now we have a very aggressive search team, and search marketing is very big for
the company, and that's been successful.
But in order to reach everybody out there that's driving traffic to websites, you really
have to go after the affiliate community and work with those folks and talk to them
kind of on their game.
Got it.
So, yeah, it's worked well for us.
So, okay.
And just to follow what I'm looking at is that you do find with the one thing that people
all know is in mind for a lot of the advertising, is how loyal are the users are from those
publisher sites.
It's a little bit of a give and take.
You've got to respect those publishers as well, because they have a very loyal user
based through the driving traffic to you, and that definitely, we, the great thing about
affiliate marketing is it's sort of like a secret work that may not mind marketing, they're
looking for their apparel that ignores some time, because the return and the conversion
is much better than using a traditional other online marketing so we've got it.
Brett, tell us how do you fit into this picture?
I kind of fit in the middle between most affiliates and merchants or publishers, simply because
we power the merchant's ability to track these online transactions.
Got it.
These clicks, these impressions, these conversions of online, and then report that to the
affiliates.
Most of them really don't know or don't interact directly with us, however, are in our
interfaces, widely able to be the brand of our clients.
Okay.
So LinkShare signs up advertisers and also signs up publishers.
You sign up advertisers, and then the advertiser signs up the publishers directly and they
sort of have that relationship.
That's right.
Got it.
Okay.
Do you, how does he help him, or do you work through someone who gets to the publishers
or the young and house program?
We do.
So we do a combination of both.
So we have an in-house program where we can work with our brand advertisers like a progressive
or an insurance.
Okay.
And where we can provide a co-brand experience there.
It may be some other advanced linking options for them at a different level of support.
We work with Commission Junction, we work with LinkShare, with those folks and we're
kind of tapping into a different community of affiliate marketers that aren't necessarily
a brand advertiser.
Yeah.
That works well for us to kind of go on both sides of the fence.
So if a publisher was really interested in being an e-health promoter, as you said,
you know, why should I link to your in-house program or your LinkShare program?
How do you differentiate which one they should go through?
Well, we'll have a conversation where we then have a phone meeting about an in-person
meeting depending on what level they're at in terms of affiliate marketing or whatnot.
If they're not a brand advertiser, we'd like to get them on one of our affiliate networks.
It's very turnkey.
You can manage thousands and thousands of affiliates.
I see.
It's an online agreement.
It's net 30.
We pay.
So when we go in-house, usually for somebody that's going to drive substantial traffic and wants
to have a direct relationship with us.
Why do they want you to be a licensed agency in which case they could work with us, meaning
the insurance world that you can pay on a revshare versus a flat?
Yeah.
Okay.
So the larger higher-touch customers you can work with directly and the more sort of numerous,
less volume you work with in an interview.
Right.
What did you keep in mind?
I'm not saying that we don't have high volume affiliates in these networks.
It's just, it's a different fit for different people.
If somebody's not happy with the network and maybe they'll bring in the house and work like that.
That's not usually the case, but it could happen.
Cool.
Okay.
Why don't we ask Gary, tell me, what's the workflow for a publisher to work with you?
Like they want to do this in the department thing, what next?
So we have our own development team that works directly with the publishers.
So similar to what my team does, I work on the client side of the advertiser side.
That's what my team deals with.
We have two sides of that.
One is, you know, complete what we call, which is what my team does.
It works directly with advertisers, clients that say that to make sure we're supporting them
in the program for our reach activation optimization.
And the net development team does similar to that.
And the net development team breaks down into the business development section that brings in new publishers.
And we work with them closely to understand what their business model is.
What are their goals?
Who would they like to work with when we assess them to make sure they're a great fit?
And once we start seeing some traction with them as a publisher,
they can move through the system in the network and we introduce them to opportunities using our dashboards.
We have a publisher dashboard that they can work with to really gain some traction.
And once they've been through the program, they'll start working probably when you get to a plan
or the level to work with or even below.
They start working with a direct account person to help them develop their program and reach advertisers.
And that's a separate side to what I do with the company.
That's the published side of the advertising side.
Guys, it'll take these relationships.
So we work very closely with that net development team to make sure
if new emerging publishers come in, we're aware of them.
We have a lot of internal meetings to talk about version technologies,
emerging publishers in the network.
So we're always taking into account only the planned publishers,
but also the lower to mid to long-tailed,
and into the new emerging of the program.
So everybody gets exposure in a network and we're always trying to drive those publishers.