Mustafa Saeed - Paul Street Podcast

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What's up, Dtcpod? Today we're joined by Mustafa Saeed, who is the co founder and growth chief of Paul Street. So Mustafa, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what you do in the ecommerce and DTC space.

Yeah. Excited to be on the podcast. I am a growth marketer and entrepreneur in the ecommerce industry. I've been fortunate to work with incredible brands like HelloFresh Noom on it amongst over 400 others. Right now, I'm building Paul Street with Aaron Paul and Patrick Cleary. We're an affiliate and partner marketing agency. We started in January of this year and have since grown to more than two dozen eight to nine figure a year brands. We're a team of almost 20 people now and have established over 1000 affiliate partnerships.

We believe affiliate marketing is broken. There's a complete lack of transparency in this industry. There's so many lower quality traffic sources and side hustlers that are just looking to get rich quick. We're taking a different approach by focusing only on the higher quality opportunities. These are the top 1% of affiliates. We avoid all coupon sites, all cashback sites, all credit card offers. Those are the kind of sources that are likely to cause more harm than good for your business. They're usually not as high quality, they're not as incremental, and don't usually as meaningfully contribute to that final conversion taking place.

So the type of affiliates that we do focus on are the media buyers. So these are affiliates that can spend five to six figures a day on Meta ads, TikTok Ads, Google, Pinterest Programmatic, Native, the list goes on. We also work with content publications, the likes of Forbes, Wikihow, New York Post, social media influencers of all sizes, smaller podcasts, email newsletters, a lot of those kind of traffic sources. Those are the opportunities that historically we've seen as more incremental, scalable opportunities. And that's what we want to focus all of our time on. These affiliates also will take the time to create content, will actually educate prospective customers of your unique value and what problems that you're solving, and work with us in optimizing their campaign, their performance. So that's a little bit about us. It's been a very exciting year.

It's come with its challenges, but we're still growing despite everything that's happened in this industry.

Sweet. And one of the reasons we're excited to have you on is because I think for brands, right, growth is especially if you're a brand that's starting out or you're a brand that's scaling it's. Like, you've got Facebook ads, you've got TikTok, and you've got these kind of ad platforms that you can run ads on, but then, like you were saying, affiliate. It's kind of like once you open up that can of worms, it's so big, right? It's like, which creator do I work with? Which publications do I work with? You've got PR, there's so many different ways, and you've got a limited ad budget to spend on. So why don't you just tell us a little bit more about when a brand is kind of getting set up. What do they come to you guys for? And what's your first order of business in trying to set an affiliate strategy?

Yeah, of course. So, to be honest, the overwhelming majority of the clients that we're working with today, it's not their first walk in the park, it's not their first time in the affiliate space. Usually they've gone through multiple networks, multiple agencies. They've tried it in house, they've tried freelancers. And I feel like we're in the intersection of your marketing, where a lot of brands are flocking to affiliate marketing because they see it as a more cost effective means of acquiring customers, especially after iOS 14 compared to Meta. But at the same time, so many of these brands are distressed from affiliate marketing because they've approached these platforms and are just seeing bottom of the barrel opportunities, the coupon sites, the cashback sites. So, honestly, one of the first things that we do is we scrap all of those traffic sources, we'll do a complete audit of how they're doing things, current state, and we'll just cut the affiliates that we deem are of low quality, not incremental. And we have our own process for educating the affiliates already within our network that we have experience with, that we've worked with before on your product.

Its unique, differentiators and getting them excited to create content, run ads and generate revenue on the program. We're also focused on new affiliate recruitment. Obviously whenever we do bring a new brand they're going to have unique needs in terms of what they are looking for. For example if we're working with a cookware brand perhaps it would be wise to work with YouTube cooking channels or recipe bloggers or things of that nature. So we have multiple mechanisms of being able to identify the type of affiliates that we do think would be a good fit for any given brand and multiple outreach methods in order to bring them in again, educate them on the brand, give them everything that they need in order to get off the ground. But that is really our general mentality as it relates to the type of brands that we're working with, current state and how really we get started.

So I have a question Mustafa, you mentioned you guys have 1000 affiliate partners for example. What does that exactly mean? What is the vertical you guys focus on? So is it big affiliate partners? Who are publishers? Is it just creators? Is it a combination of both and depends per brand? And then why are low quality affiliates like why do they need to be removed?

Yeah of course. So just to speak on the type of client we work with on the brand side first so only eight to nine figure a year plus direct to consumer brands but they'll always know have investments in Amazon, retail channels and elsewhere. We work primarily with consumer packaged goods brands largely because they can capitalize on repurchasers, we can bundle the products together to drive a higher AOV and generally they can pay a lot more for customer acquisition. So that's what it looks like on the brand side. For affiliates, there's a much wider range in terms of the media buyers. These are largely like media buying agencies that like to run affiliate offers on a performance model kind of as an additional revenue stream, mainly because they don't have to deal with the overhead that comes with managing clients. And they have a much larger number of brands to be able to activate on. And of course, we provide them a lot of support.

Also, in terms of media buyers, we also work with a lot of independent media buyers that are working as full time media buyers at the larger agencies like Mute Six or Unicorn Innovations, wherever else. And they kind of see it as a side hustle. And those are the best affiliates to work with because they have so much knowledge, so much insight, so much experience, and they're generally much scrappier to work with as well. So they're constantly bringing new ideas in terms of what's working for them in terms of their agency life and what they think will perform for the campaign in terms of the content side, content publications. Of course, there are the larger ones, like Forbes and Glamour, but we also work with the mommy bloggers, those smaller creators that may not have in the many tens of millions or hundreds of millions of monthly visitors. They may only have less than 2 million monthly visitors, but they have a very highly concentrated audience or very loyal audience that we can tap into. A lot of these bloggers and content creators generally have multiple mechanisms of bringing customers back onto their site. So whether they have an email list or a large social media following or some kind of community group on Facebook where their audience likes to hang out, having, for example, a mommy blogger create content around, for example, one of our clients is a woman's supplement brand can be very effective.

Same thing goes for sex coaches or OBGYNs or doctors that just happen to have a large following. We can leverage those creators as affiliates in order to create content and drive awareness and acquisition amongst their more concentrated cohort of customers. Similar thing in terms of podcasters, similar things in terms of email newsletters. There's really a range in terms of large, medium, and small. But when we are going smaller, just to make sure we're not wasting our time, what we do look for is that strong brand fit. So when they do send traffic, we're seeing more of the kind of performance staff we're looking for.

Yeah, Mustafa, the question that I had is sometimes even like what you're saying, it's tough to evaluate and pick the right partners. So say a brand is coming to you for the first time and you're kicking off a campaign. You do an audit, you understand, okay, let's get rid of their bad traffic sources. Here's a couple of creators that might be a good fit, but why don't you talk to me about how many creators or publications you're working with? Just kind of paint that picture for me in terms of how to, I guess, launch an MVP of that first successful affiliate sort of strategy.

Of course. So it would be different on the media buyer side versus the content side. On the media buyer side, we're acting much more intentionally. Ultimately, we don't want to work with people that are inexperienced, that don't have credit lines and large budgets to be able to work with. Those are the kind of affiliates that are just going to waste our time. So we want to hand pick the partners on the media buyer side, just so we're working with the type of agencies that they're going to buy the media efficiently and we can work with them more closely from an optimization perspective. So usually we'll select individual media buyers that we've had success with in similar verticals inform of them, of the campaign launch, give them everything they need, and that's really how we get the ball going in terms of the relationships there. On the content side, a huge issue in the world of content is making that channel profitable.

A lot of these influencers and publications are just going to charge exorbitant upfront fees in exchange for creating content for your brand. We don't want to do that, right? The reality of the matter is there's no guarantee that we're going to get a return on investment for paying like, ten grand or a View article and some social posts. We're really taking a gamble by going that direction. What we would much rather do instead is operate on a completely performance based model where we're only paying that affiliate a fixed commission for every sale they generate for one of our clients. So instead of paying that affiliate $1,000 for creating an instagram reels, for example, we can pay them $100 per conversion and just so they can generate ten sales and make that grand. And honestly, if they're not confident in generating those ten sales from their traffic, it's probably not worth our time anyways. Mustafa I just want to kind of.

Dig deeper there because I think what you just brought up is something that a lot of brands run into, where from the brand side, they're like, hey, I've got a high converting product. It's cool. There's a great messaging, but they have limited budget. They go to a creator. A creator is like, yeah, I'm going to charge you five grand just to do one post. And then the brand is like, let.

Me go check with marketing.

Deal never gets done, right?

Yeah.

So you just said that you really focus on gearing these offers, so they are performance only. So how do you make that happen? Is this just because creators have worked with you guys over and over, so you have the relationship set up so you're able to approach them on the performance basis? Or how can a brand, I guess, who's just operating for themselves, whether they're working with you guys or not, with you guys, how can they get a creator's attention without that upfront cost if they don't have it in their budget or their planning?

Of course, you have to play the volume game. To be honest, the overwhelming majority of these influencers and publications are charging flat fees. Nowadays, some will charge flat fees in addition to a performance model. It's an epidemic. So even us with large brands, big celebrity names, it's a challenge finding influencers that have the right brand fit, that do have strong engagement and are willing to operate performance only. Ultimately, those are the type of partnerships that we want the most, mainly because they're more cost efficient, but they're also more long term relationships where it's not one and done right. They can keep creating content and keep generating sales on the program. So we leverage multiple different channels.

The first would be the affiliate networks. So we're on a dozen different affiliate networks impact sharesale Squaredance, Levanta, LTK, the list goes on. We take a multiple network strategy, mainly because each of these networks give us access to a different niche of affiliate. Some will be focused more on the content creators, some will be focused more on media buyers, some will be focused only on Amazon affiliates, for example. So we have to take a multiple network strategy for us to be able to capitalize on the full range of affiliate opportunities that are out there for us. Second to that is Cold outreach. So we're constantly finding opportunities on the open Internet. You can search different keywords in Google.

You can leverage tools like Bussumo or SimilarWeb or zoom info to get large lists of these mommy bloggers or social media influencers that we can then plop into HubSpot, have personalized outreach towards in order to try and get them on a call, educate them on our offers, and try to get them activated. We're also leveraging multiple different online forums, slack communities. One of the popular ones in the affiliate space would be STM, but lots of individual Facebook groups, LinkedIn Groups, like Mommy Blogger.

Yeah, you're always recruiting, you're always looking to grow your network, and that's why people come to you, because you put in the time and the work to establish those relationships. And for eight to nine figure company, they need to assemble an entire team just to do what you're doing. Not even accounting for the ramp up time and the opportunity costs of the mistakes that they will make are going to cost them. So I'm curious, on average, how many affiliate partners are these companies working with just so the audience can get a sense of sort of the scale that these companies are working for?

Yeah, so on the media buyer side, it'd be less than a dozen usually. Of course, at scale, we'll pile on additional traffic sources. We're constantly testing new things. On the content side, since we are playing more of the volume game, it's usually around 100 plus, but of course with scale, we can go well above that.

Got it. And Mustafa, my next question comes to Attribution, right? How do you guys handle that? Are affiliates working with links? Obviously on the publication side, you guys are what, embedding like they have their own tracking links that they can use. But on the creator side, what are you seeing that works best? Is it a promo code? Is it like a social snowball thing? Is it another tool that's being used to track that? Attribution? How are you guys seeing conversion and Attribution done on the social side of things?

Yeah, for sure. Custom discount codes are the easiest for creators, so whatever the name of the influencer is will come up with some clever short version that they can call out as part of their content. You can also have tracking links within your bio as well. Usually the creator will have like a link and bio page and they'll have affiliate offers towards the bottom because they know that's something that a lot of their audience likes to click on. But even beyond that, in terms of attribution, you also have to think about the brand side and what's important to them. We plug into Triple Whale North Beam Rockerbox, one of those tools for pretty much all of our clients. Those are the platforms that nowadays they're relying as their source of truth. They're making budget level decisions based on the data that they are seeing on these platforms.

So we always get access to these platforms. We have people constantly monitoring these platforms to make sure that we are optimizing towards more of the type of traffic that we deem as favorable. So usually our clients will have some kind of CAC figure that we're trying to optimize towards or a certain desired conversion path that they're looking for. So for example, we'll end up using this as a layer of optimization. So if we see an affiliate that's driving a CAC lower than $100 and that's deemed favorable, then that's fantastic. That now gives us a justification to go back to the brand and ask for a higher payout. Especially if the type of affiliate that can add a zero to an advertising budget like a media buyer can, or a content publication that can send out little emails or social posts or create more content to drive more traffic. Same thing if we have an affiliate that's driving insanely high cactus for whatever reason, now we can go to that affiliate, get an understanding to, okay, what exactly are they doing? Do we need to pause out that source or are we able to optimize towards what we are looking for?

I have a question on that actually, because I find this interesting case and scenario where in my experience of working with affiliates, typically, like you say, the best ones are the ones that are value first and they're not afraid to provide value and show conversions without any upfront payment, et cetera. But some will do that and then they'll say, okay, if you want to work with me again, here's what my engagement looks like and everything. But as you mentioned, it's not necessarily to a completely new audience or new channel. And so I'm like, well, you already shared it. Is it really worth it to spend, again, say, to just do another push to the same audience? So I guess the way to sort of drill that down into a question is like, is it worth hitting the same audience over and over if you already saw results? Or is it only worth it if it's like an exposure to something that they sort of gatekeep from you?

Ultimately, if they're operating on a performance model, we really don't care. Hey, you can keep creating content for as long as it aligns with our brand guidelines, but generally you will inevitably see diminishing returns if it isn't the type of publisher know does have a massive audience like subforbes, but yeah, that's what I would say on that.

Got it. And Mustafa, my last question in terms of everything else on the affiliate side is how do you work with brands? Because again, we said we're working on performance only. So what are the types of offers that you're putting together, what's required on the brands, and do you work with them to come up with the offer? Have they already come up with it? And what makes a compelling offer from an affiliate perspective?

Yeah, for sure. So we're holding their hand along the way, we'll do a gap analysis of their program current state and that will largely determine immediate next steps to how we improve things, how we craft a more attractive affiliate program. Ultimately, payouts are extremely important in the affiliate space. That's like the number one thing that affiliates are going to look at. How much are we going to get paid for every sale that we generate? The good thing is when you are working with the higher quality, more incremental sources, you can pay so much more for that acquisition. Right? Rather than paying an affiliate 5% of an order value, I have to pay them 100%, especially if it's CBG brand that's going to capitalize on Weebly purchasers. Outside of that, having a war chest of creatives, the number one reason why an affiliate shuts us down, turns us down, says, oh, I'm not interested. It's mainly when we are missing a certain desired asset, whether it's a type of landing page, a piece of ad creative, the ability to use a certain influencer or celebrity or even metrics on the channel that they are running on.

So making sure we have in the hundreds, if not thousands of creatives as much, we can never have too many creatives for affiliates is very important. We'll also do a brainstorm session with the brand to get an understanding of, okay, what's the hook that we can leverage with affiliates, right? If I go to an affiliate and say, oh, I just have another Nail Kit brand, I'm not going to get the type of day from them. But if I say it's Paris Hilton's Nail Kit brand and can show some kind of virality or perhaps they want some big industry award, we can do a much better job of capturing that affiliate's interest and getting them on the call for further consideration. And last but not least, optimize landing pages. So the affiliates, it's easy to get an affiliate to send traffic. I think the more difficult part is keeping them on once they start sending traffic. If they see low conversion rates, high acquisition costs, low earnings per click compared to what they are seeing from the ridiculous number of other affiliate offers that exist out there, they're not going to continue with you. They're not going to keep investing more resources, they're just going to go do something else.

So those are some of the main things that would be top of mind for us and crafting very attractive affiliate offers.

So why don't you walk me through.

On the creative side first? What type of creative library does a brand need to have? What are you sharing with the affiliates? Are you sharing them examples of content that's performed in the past? Are you sharing them hooks? What type of brief, I guess, do you need to give the creator so they can create their best content or their best work?

Of course. So the content needs would differ from media buyers to content. On the media buyer side, it's more your best performing creatives across as many traffic sources as possible. Obviously, most brands internally will have only a handful of channels. It is the affiliates that generally are much more diverse in their channel mix. But having access to those, ideally the corresponding copy and any metrics to those just gives us a massive head start in making sure we're orienting ourselves in the right direction on the media buying front. At the same time, any and all raw assets that would be helpful in creating additional content. So lots of user generated content, whether it be unboxings or testimonials or just product images, those are always very helpful for affiliates that do like to create their own ads and do want to retrofit that content for their unique channel mix.

On the content side, it's more supplemental, right? It is the content creators that are going to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of writing that blog, creating that social post or whatever. Usually they'll ask for product samples, so we'll send them free products, they'll take their own pictures, do their own review. But it's always a good practice to make sure you have lots of lifestyle photography and a lot of the same assets that would be valuable on the media buyer side just so they can incorporate them as part of their content as well.

I love that. And then I guess following that up. One other thing you said is on the landing page side, right? So you've got all this great creative, they've got examples, they know what they're going to create, but then ultimately they're driving traffic to a page. Are these unique landing pages that you're spinning up per offer, per creator. Like, how are you housing these? Just walk us through the whole landing page strategy. Now that you've got an affiliate, they've got their own traffic source, they've got their reader or their follower on the hook, and now you're sending them somewhere. Where do you send them and how do we build this out?

Yeah, so ultimately, the landing pages that you're sending to from Metahads and Google, just because those are performing doesn't mean it's going to perform on our affiliates, native ad or a programmatic ad, or any one of those other traffic sources. Especially for native ads, you're really not giving the customer much in terms of the front facing ad, right? You'll see a headline, you'll see an image. So for those kind of traffic sources, we are spinning up new pages. We're building two dozen pages a month in total across our portfolio of clients. But just to give an example, for native ads, we'll build presale advertorial pages. So these are long form blog style articles that will go in depth as to what the product is, how it works, the science behind it, social proof, and why exactly you should buy it. I'll also have a hook, some kind of angle to drive engagement and consideration. So, for example, let's say you're selling a cognitive enhancer.

You can have an angle focused on people that work in finance and the unique challenges that people that work in finance face, or students, and the struggles of focusing in class and passing your exams. And we can paint that picture before we educate that customer on the product itself. So that's what presales would look like. Highly recommend checking out miracle sheets, blissy on it. Those are brands that have iconic presale pages. You can check them out on their ads, libraries, but that kind of a page our affiliates would much rather send to because it provides that additional information and education in order to convert that traffic from a customer that really isn't that getting that much top of the funnel. We'll also build exclusive offer pages where we're giving an affiliate a better deal than they can get anywhere else on the Internet. So a big pain point amongst affiliates is attribution leakage.

So there'll be instances where a customer clicks on one of our affiliate links and then instead of buying on the store, immediately, they'll buy on Amazon or they'll buy it in store, or they'll go out to a different device or browser where our cookies aren't placed. And in those instances, the affiliate doesn't get credited that sale. So by having an exclusive offer only for affiliates, only for that instance, we're able. To do a much better job of reducing that attribution leakage and it makes the funnel so much more direct response which affiliates like whole bunch of other types of landing pages quiz funnels listicles influencer pages VSL. Pages it really depends on the source in terms of what we're building, in terms of how we build it. We're using repflow for all of our landing page builds on shopify. So whenever we are building a page that we want to be hosted on the brand's domain, we'll leverage repflow for all of those builds. We also own our own blogs which are more third party domains unrelated to the brands.

We host those on webflow and that's where most of our pre sells will be. Rather than having a presale themed around the brand, we can focus it more on a third party page like The Kitchen Modern or My Daily aesthetic. You can come up with any number of these different domains yourself just to make it look like more of organic blog as opposed to messaging that's coming from the brand itself.

Yeah, there's a lot of information there to unpack. So do you guys write this content? Because just coming up with each affiliate partner is different, right? And like you mentioned, you don't know what's going to necessarily you can't have them all go to the home page because you don't know what's going to convert best for each one. And ideating all of these things one by one with each one of these partners is a lot of work and then having your creative team do all this for each one. So I'm curious, do you guys ever explore with a concept of sort of having bounties for all of your affiliates? So, like, hey, we're going to pay out X or we're going to do this special reward for anyone that wants to make content with this type of format or anything, just to see who grabs it rather than, like, ideating one on one because it's not as scalable.

So it depends media buyer side, content side for the media buyers it is so much more intentional, right? So we are actually speaking with these affiliates, getting their perspective in terms of what angles, what page types, what offers they would be most interested in running. And it is the affiliates, they're the channel experts, right? We're the campaign experts, they're the channel experts. So we do rely on them for providing us insights for us to help in ideating and build more of the type of landing pages that they do want to test. On the content side, it's not as important for as long as they have a well optimized landing page that they can send traffic to. Usually they'll send to a product page or a home page or if we have an exclusive offer page, we'll build that. The content affiliates aren't as large of a part of landing page development but in terms of incentives and exciting things that we can get affiliates on board with. Yeah, like, we'll fly affiliates down to conferences. We'll meet them in person, fancy dinners.

I mean, lots of different things. We're thinking about giving away a car. I don't know, it's still not confirmed, but Q Four is technically to compete in that program.

Yeah, let me know. A new cyber truck. Okay, so for the blog pieces, do you guys write that? Do you guys put that together? Do you collaborate with the media partner that is going to publish it? I'm just trying to sort of wrap my head around Paul Street value add here for the brands.

Yeah, for sure. So when we're building landing pages, we actually have a copywriting agency. We work with zero to one. Brandon Hamm's, Agency. They write all of our pre sale editorial copy as well as offer pages. So we do that ourselves. We have our designers as well. They're external designers that have expertise in specifically repflow and webflow.

Can you actually repeat that question? We could do that part again. Sorry.

Yeah, no, no worries at all. I was thinking if the content blog like the copy so you mentioned you have a copywriting agency, but the brand understands themselves best. Like, what are the value propositions? So do you write the articles or does the brand have to provide you the article, or is it a collaboration between both of you?

Sorry, let's just show the listicle. Yeah, let's cut that last part out and just officially restart. Three, two, one, go.

Okay, so I know you guys do these listicles that are high converting landing pages for the brands, right? The brands know best their customer, they know best their value propositions, but you know best what converts and what gets people's attention. So do you write these articles or is this a collaboration between you and the brand, or do they do it for you?

Yeah, of course. So it would be different on the media buyer side and the content side. On the media buyer side, since we are focused more on landing pages, we are the ones that are developing the copy there. We leverage Zero to One branded Hams agency for all of our landing page copy there. In terms of the blog content, the more commerce content listicles, those are things that the affiliate is largely responsible for. Like we'll give them assets in terms of brand guidelines and especially in the health and wellness space, we'll have do's and don'ts documents in terms of the claims that you can say, the claims that you can't say. What are the things that generally resonate with customers? What are the unique value propositions that we really want to press our finger on? So there's a lot of guidance that we provide these creators, and whenever we do get something that's completely out there, obviously we'll hop on a call with that affiliate, give them context to what has performed in the past. And that's really how we approach those kind of situations.

Got it. And so, on that same vein, when it comes to guys, just given that this word creator, affiliate, it's all sort of getting blended together. So for creating the UGC, do you guys also help and run with that strategy or is that something completely separate? The brand just feeds you UGC for.

Pipeline content, whatever we started just because.

There'S this aspect of negotiating with the Scene creator who could also be an affiliate, et cetera.

Yeah, so whenever we're launching with a new brand, they'll always have a ton of UGC that we can gain access to. Obviously, when you're working with affiliates, you're more focused on generating revenue as opposed to generating just content that you can use for your internal advertising initiatives. But those are always things that can be negotiated, those usage rights to that content, even whitelisting, that influencer social media page. There's a lot of things that aren't typically part of affiliate marketing but can still be negotiated. So a lot of the larger content publications as well will give out like awards and badges to brands that have made it on one of their top listicles. Those are things that you would pay more money for, but we're more focused on generating sales. But those are always things that can be negotiated, added. Yeah.

And it makes sense. This is why you work with companies that generate eight to nine figures. They're already known brands. Most people have already consumed their product. They have the UGC. So let's take a step back and go. Let's think if we're a brand that is just launching, starting out, my dream is to get to work with Paul Street, but I got to get this program started myself and I got to figure out how to hack this together. What are sort of my checklist items that I need to do as my top three things to create a successful sort of program in house before I can get to something like Paul Street.

So number one, you'd need an affiliate network that will allow you a mechanism of being able to track these partnerships, but also find and build relationships with these partnerships as well. So that would be number one. You'll go through a whole process of setting up, tracking and putting all your brand information. There's so many networks out there, but pick the one that is most concentrated towards the type of affiliates that you do want to work with. The second would be identifying what type of affiliates that you want to work with and which are the type of affiliates that you do want to reach out to. There are more opportunities out there than you will have time for. So you really want to be intentional in terms of what are the opportunities that make sense for your unique business vertical industry. And last but not least, it would be outreach and optimization, reaching out to these affiliates, they'll have questions, they'll have a million reasons to why they don't want to run your offer.

When they do run your offer. They'll have a million problems tracking issues, performance issues. So having someone there holding their hand along the way is going to be extremely important to make sure that when you're expending the effort and bringing these relationships on, they're actually sticking around.

And would you say the person that's there holding their hand should be? I guess where I'm trying to go is how hackable with a VA is it versus like, no, you should have the person that's holding their hand be like their trusted sort of partner in your community member. Sure, a VA can do outreach, et cetera, but they shouldn't really be the full point of contact.

I mean, you can have a little bit more of a cookie cutter approach and have a VA with a large number of affiliates, but of course there are inherent risks to that from a compliance perspective. Affiliate compliance is generally a larger pain point for brands entering the space. You're working with human beings, right? People are going to make mistakes. You're going to have people, especially if you haven't worked with a certain affiliate before, there are people that are malicious out there and will intentionally put you on low quality traffic sources or will have grammatical errors in their ads or use a certain celebrity as part of their content that we are not allowed to use. So having someone that can actually meet with these affiliates individually and kind of suss out the bullshit is going to be important. But there are people out there that have more of a small team of VAS kind of approach. It's not the approach that we like to take. We like to focus more on, like, if we're working with media buyers, we want to have someone with media buying expertise that can have logical conversations with these affiliates.

And if we're working with the content affiliates, we want to have someone with that kind of a background or has experience working with hundreds of these kind of or thousands of these kind of publishers to be more meaningful from that optimization lens.

That makes sense. And I know we've been rapid firing here, but I'm very curious about what you mentioned. There's people that can be malicious out there. I've seen fraud and affiliate be like a big topic and I'm curious, why should I be concerned of, say, my coupon code being spread on a coupon website? Isn't it good that people out there are getting it and how can fraud happen and how can I protect myself from it?

Yeah, for sure. This is a very long conversation, so get ready for that. In terms of the kind of traffic sources that you should avoid that are generally lower quality, some of the notorious ones, like you said, coupon websites. So there are ways of making coupon websites work especially when you're working with enterprise level brands. They do leverage coupon sites as more of an awareness channel. At the same time there are certain more gated marketplaces for discounts and offers. Klarna and Afterpay have kind of that version on their side that makes it more like a brand discovery tool as opposed to someone that's just looking for a discount. Unfortunately, what we do see with a large portion of coupon traffic is the customer is ready to buy the product, credit card in hand and they're just going on to Google or using some kind of toolbar to search for a discount that could be detrimental to a brand.

Because not only now are you reducing that order value, but at the same time you're having to pay an affiliate a percentage of that revenue. So you're losing margins in both areas. Another similar source of that kind would be cashback websites. So you'll see a lot of toolbars, a lot of search optimized websites like Robertson where you can get like 5% 10% cash back for whatever you're ordering. Some of these are even automatic, like for as long as you have the toolbar, you'll get the cash back and the affiliate will get paid anyways. So whether the customer would have purchased that product or not, you're still having to pay for it and you're making less money in terms of that order value. But same thing with cashback websites. There are opportunities to make it incremental.

There are more audience focused marketplaces for receiving cash back. Some are focused exclusively on students, some are focused on executive perks, some are focused on medical workers. So that makes it again more of a product discovery platform and makes the traffic a little bit more incremental than what we generally see. US personally, we don't like to work with coupon most cash back anyways just because we want to focus on the type of opportunities that we've had more success with in driving high quality incremental traffic. One more that I'll quickly mention before I get into monitoring and how we protect our brands from malicious instances is incentivized traffic. So there are certain traffic sources out there where you can give the customer a reward in exchange for an executing on a desired action. So for example, giving them a $50 Amazon gift card in exchange for purchasing a product for the affiliate, that's fantastic because they're getting paid for that acquisition or giving the customer some kind of in game currency or points is also a very popular route. Obviously these kind of customers are going to be differently motivated.

They may not be as interested in your product or brand, but just be more interested in the incentive that they are receiving. So you'll see higher order cancellations from that kind of traffic. And if you are selling more of a durable good, that's detrimental because now you're having to deal with product returns and you're paying for that right. But when you are incentivizing another action, for example, following a social media page or liking a certain Instagram post, and then you're taking the time to educate that customer on your product, on your brand, on your unique value. That's how you can turn that channel to be more incremental. So what I'm trying to say here is affiliate marketing is on the spectrum. There's a lot of incredible opportunities out there. There's a lot of garbage opportunities out there as well.

There's a white hat and a black hat side to almost every part of the marketing world. But those are just some examples of some of the sources that we choose to avoid internally. In terms of monitoring, or do you want to interrupt me? Go ahead.

No, go for it.

Awesome. In terms of affiliate monitoring, there are multiple checks and balances that we have on a regular basis just to make sure our affiliates are all doing what they're supposed to be doing. The first is try to focus as best as you can on historical partnerships, so the affiliates that you've already worked with, that you have data on, it just makes your life so much easier because there's a sense of familiarity, you know what to expect. They understand your compliance. You also want to make sure you're meeting with these affiliates, have a one on one conversation with them, get a deep understanding to their background, their experience, the nature of their traffic source, and if they're not being transparent with you, see these affiliates as strategic partners to your business. If they're not providing you with a certain piece of information that you need to make a decision, perhaps that's not the best opportunity for you to work with. Right. Always ask for referrals recommendations like you'll see which other competing brands are on these in affiliate networks.

You can ask them, have you worked with this affiliate? How's their quality? Establishing those kind of open relationships are really what's going to improve this industry in the long term. In terms of checks, brand Verity is a tool that we use for brand like search monitoring. So trademark bidding is a huge no no in the affiliate space. You don't want affiliates bidding on your trademark terms. They'll drive your cost up. So Brand Verity has robots that will scan a lot of these search engines and provide us daily reports to instances where people are bidding on our brand's keywords. We'll also leverage different ad spy tools. The Meta ad spy ads library.

TikTok ads library. Google has their own ads transparency network. We have people checking these to see our ads in the wild just to make sure everything is approved. We're not using any influencers or celebrities that we're not supposed to, things of that nature. You also want to check attribution and traffic quality. What's the AOV, the average order value on the traffic that we are seeing? Whenever we see instances of an affiliate having an extremely high conversion rate say they're converting at 15% plus what's the affiliate doing? Right. That's generally a red flag that we will then delve into deeper just to get better understanding to what is causing such an extremely high conversion rate. And also on the attribution front, I said it before, if we do have an affiliate that's driving traffic that isn't very incremental, perhaps it's at a very high CAC, perhaps it isn't like the type of conversion path that we're looking for where they're interacting with multiple other of the brand's internal channels as well.

Those are all examples of regular checks that we do to make sure the traffic is favorable. We do also have a one strike policy with affiliates, so if we do catch an affiliate doing something malicious, we ban them not only on that campaign, but all of our campaigns. And we work with a lot of really pretty brands, with celebrities. Affiliates generally want to maintain a strong relationship with us. So that is just one final trigger that we have to make sure compliance awesome.

Wasava I feel like we covered so much on the affiliate side of things. I feel like this was like a really proper crash course as we're kind of wrapping up. Are you seeing an overlap between affiliate and performance? Right. A lot of the stuff that you were telling me immediately was coming to mind was some of the whitelisting stuff that I've been starting to see where you've got the brand who's basically putting behind ad spend, behind one of these landers or listicles like you were talking about and running. Is that something that you guys see involve yourself in, stay away from? How do you see whitelisting in this space?

Yeah, whitelisting is not only important for the brands that we work with because obviously they want to leverage that as a tool internally in improving their conversion rates. Being able to have an ad that looks like is coming from an organic influencer as opposed to the brand itself is a tactic that has in the past improved performance. We will also have our media buying affiliates that like to leverage that as well. We have a partnership with 10:00 P.m. Curfew. They own different domains like at girls or at makeup or at beauty. And they have many tens of millions of followers with tons of content and high engagement. So running ads from that kind of a property can be so much more effective performance wise.

So we'll actually have affiliates that want to buy into that kind of a service in order to be able to do that. So it really goes two ways. The brand themselves are leveraging that as an internal tool to improve performance, but same thing on the media buyer front in terms of our affiliates as well.

Sweet. Well, that's awesome. I feel like we covered so much for our listeners who are tuning in. Where can we find you? Where can we connect with you? Are you on LinkedIn? Twitter? Why don't you give a shout out to your socials and where we can connect of course, so you can visit.

Paulstry at palstory co that's our website. I'm also on LinkedIn. Mustafa Saeed you can find me on Twitter, Mustafa G said. But yeah, that's where you can find me.

Sweet. Well, thanks for coming on the Pod. We learned a lot and excited know we'll have to have you back and we can do some more breakdowns and anytime we're chatting affiliate, we know who to call.

Awesome. Thanks for having me on the Pod.