Why Affiliate Marketing Is All LIES | Biz To Biz Podcast | Episode 232

You are now watching the Biz to Biz podcast with Allen and Justin. Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Dick Vitale of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's podcast, we'll be talking about how these affiliate marketers are bold-faced liars and full of crap 90% of the time. Anyway, uh, yeah, how you doing?

I'm doing well. It's a, you know, we're in the middle of, uh, March Madness, you know. Soon we have the final—

Go Marquette!

Final Four for men coming up.

Yeah.

And the Final Four for the women.

Did Marquette win?

I'm not sure. I know, I know in the Final Four for the women it's, uh South Carolina, who I think only lost one game.

And no, they're out of it.

Versus NC State. I think NC State is in on the men's—

beat, beat the—

I think they're in on the men's side.

Yeah, they beat Marquette.

So they have— they're on the men's side and the women's side. NC State, that's crazy.

It's a good program.

Yeah. And then Iowa's gonna play, uh, UConn.

Wisconsin lost in the NIT too last night, I guess. That was sad. That was sad. Whatever.

Yeah, basketball, like, it's funny because, you know, used to be like everybody's making their brackets, you know, who are— who's working and who's working on their bracketology, man. All of a sudden that became a word.

Like, for me, I'm not— go Brewers, they're undefeated. I see the Marlins haven't won a game yet.

Yeah, the Marlins just stinking it up, man, big time. And then some guy last night, some guy at his 8th major league game pitched a no-hitter last night.

Nice.

I forget which team. Astros, I think.

The Astros? Yeah, I think they're undefeated too.

Yeah, the guy—

the Yankees are undefeated. Go Yanks! Detroit was undefeated. The Brewers and Pittsburgh are the only 4 teams that haven't lost yet. And today is the first opening day for the Brewers back in Milwaukee. I wish I was home.

Yeah, the Astros, Ronel Blanco in his 8th game pitched a no-hitter.

That's crazy. And Pittsburgh is the first time that they've been undefeated since like 1983.

That's crazy. I mean, you know.

It's gonna be a good year for baseball, I think.

Yeah.

Hopefully.

Yeah, so it's a crazy, you know, crazy times with sports. Baseball season kicking off. March Madness, and they're already talking about football and trades.

And how the hell is there already a playoffs for hockey?

I don't even know how many—

how do they not stop playing hockey?

Hockey like goes on forever, it seems.

Dude, I just literally seen yesterday that the Florida Panthers clinched a playoff.

Uh, birth.

Yeah, I'm like, what? Whatever.

I don't know, it just seems like they figured out how to make sports never stop. Like, one starts, one is finishing up, right? And there's all flowing into— all flowing into each other.

I mean, it's always been that way, but it's, it's weird for me to— because I'm not from a hockey state. Like, Wisconsin, we have a minor I don't know, whatever.

Minor league hockey.

Yeah, the Admirals, which they're really good. They are always going to the championship and stuff. So, but it's not like the Blackhawks or the Panthers or the Bruins or something, you know what I mean? So, or the Red Wings. That's who you would always hear about back then. A lot of Red Wing fans. Anyway, so I, you know, I never really, I never paid attention to hockey.

No, I'm not a big hockey fan. I think that, you know, now you have like all these different sports channels on TV, and with social media, I think, you know, just the attention on sports is amped up a lot more, you know, with the social media presence. And I don't know, what is there? ESP— I mean, ESPN, you know, they got—

I mean, you got 3 different channels for you.

I mean, yeah, plus the pay ones. That's what I'm talking about. And then you got every college, every college, uh, conference has their own channel. The SEC Channel, the Big Ten Channel, the ACC Channel. And then hockey has its own channel, you know. And Florida Sports has its own channel for sports in Florida. And the Miami Heat have a channel.

What?

Yeah, yeah, there's like a special sports channel that puts— shows the Heat and the Marlins and the It's like FS1.

I mean, not Fox Sports.

No, not— no, there's another one. It's like Florida Sports or something. I don't know. Jacob has it. Bally Sports Channel, that's the one the Heat's on all the time.

Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, it's crazy.

I don't, I don't, I don't consume television like that, so.

Well, Jacob's really into—

he's into no subscriptions in our household for—

well, he's streaming all that stuff, so I don't know what he's what he's got on there. But affiliate marketing is like a crazy, you know, a crazy thing. And it's, you know, and a lot of people get sucked into it, you know, in different, in different ways. And, you know, and there's been a big crackdown on it from the card schemes. So the card schemes not really happy with affiliate marketing. And like, let's say we send in a merchant and they're selling CBD. The first thing they do is they're out searching the internet to see what kind of affiliate marketing is out there on that company.

Yeah, I, I don't know, but I just, I think the premise of what we're talking about is like how these people are selling dreams to people. I mean, you know, these guys say like, oh yeah, you know, I do digital marketing and, you know, you'll make $500 grand a month, you know? And that's just bullshit. It's not, you know, it's not real.

Well, that's what I'm talking about. Like the ads that they put together or the verbiage that they put together is not, always representative of the product.

No, I'm saying that they're selling you a dream, right?

Yeah, there's—

that's what I'm saying. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. I, you know, but like when you're, you're on these social media, uh, scrolling through the, the feed or whatever, and you know, they say, uh, sign up to sell, uh, a course, right? Right. And you'll sell this, uh, content management system platform like Kartra, and you know, you'll, you'll make all this money.

Yeah, being an agent's Kartra agency or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, okay, you know, like It's just, it just, it to me, it's just like, uh, pyramid schemes, man. That's what it reminds me of, affiliate marketing. It's, uh, you know, get this guy underneath you, and the more people you get underneath you, the more money you'll make.

And it's just, it's just, oh, it's like multi— it's like multi-level marketing, like reborn. They first, you know, multi-level marketing got a bad name, then they changed it to network marketing. You know, but it's still the same thing, multilevel marketing. And now, like you're talking about, like with these affiliate programs, it's— they're turning those things into multilevel marketing now as it's a big—

it always was, right?

But I'm just saying it's more amped up now. Yeah, it's more amped up. I mean, we were at that business show, right? And what we saw, at least what, 5 or 6 different platform companies that were trying to do that. We saw that one called The Business Show. Remember, we saw GoHighLevel and then a couple of other no-name CRM platforms and Zoho and a few other ones. And you're all pushing this whole like agency business model, which is basically MLM affiliate marketing, right? You know, and all that, you know. Yeah, so it's kind of crazy, it's kind of crazy. But also, you know, affiliate— a lot of affiliate marketers, you know, use like these third-party platforms, and then you have to sign— people sign up on the third-party platform, they choose which programs they want to promote, and then create ads that maybe are misleading Mm-hmm. And then that's the kind of stuff that the card schemes and the banks are really policing now big time. And with AI, it's making it a lot easier for them to police these affiliate programs and find these ads that are out there saying like, oh, this CBD gummy will take away all your anxiety. Well, you can't really say that. And, and you know what I mean, it's a misleading— or it'll cure rheumatoid arthritis.

Man, I wish.

And, uh, you know, so, but it's not just those kind of pro— you know, it's not just those kind of type of products, it's any type of product, even the software product. Like, oh, sign up for this, uh, AI email program and it's gonna send 5 million emails out and you're gonna get, you know, all kinds of business and blah blah blah blah blah. And you know, that, that kind of stuff, you know, that's going on with all that. That's where we talked about, you know, that we, you know, Google and Microsoft and Yahoo and whoever else is issuing email addresses out needs to, you know, have some kind of ID program because it's getting out of control. I mean, this morning I opened up my inbox, and there's, you know, probably close to 100 emails in there about digital marketing, affiliate marketing, get a new website, let me do your social media, let me do your SEO. And it's people from all over the world. And none of the— in the Microsoft, it'll tell you like, oh, is this a verified email or not? Mm-hmm. And it'll also show you if the person has a LinkedIn.

Right.

So to me, like, if doesn't show verified and it doesn't show LinkedIn, I just hit ignore. And most of the time, if you go to reply to any of them, like hit stop or something like that, it'll come back that it's a bad email. It's already been closed down. But meanwhile, they sent out like a million emails.

Yeah, they do. Affiliate marketing is—

yeah, and it's crazy. It's just crazy what's going on with, uh, all these marketing schemes.

I mean, some of— like I said, like 90% of it, I think, you know, I think is— it's just a scheme. But, you know, there's some good stuff out there that actually, you know, you can make some money on. Um, I'm, I'm not really familiar with, uh, the successful products. I, I I, I don't— it's just, it's too much. It's a lot of work, you know what I mean? If you don't have time to, to really to focus on selling, right, the product, um, it's probably not for you. Like, it's not, you know, it's never been for me. I've never found something that I remember one time I was I took a meeting for a website, but this guy literally just— he kind of— I was so pissed off because he wasted my time, right? He was— he wanted me to sign up for his affiliate program to sell some sort of fat weight loss bullshit, you know what I mean? Like, powder or whatever. Yeah, uh, meal supplements type thing. And we, you know, I'm sitting there and I'm explaining to him all about it, and he's like, yeah, so you're gonna sign up to, to do this, and then, you know, we can get to work. And I'm like, what? No, I'm not signing up to sell your product, bro. I'm here to build websites, right? What are you talking about?

That's crazy. Yeah, I don't like when people do that and they want to take a meeting and then they have an alternative.

It's really just to sell you.

Yeah, they want to just sell you something. Meanwhile, they're saying they want to buy your service, but then they flip the script on you.

Yeah, man.

But it's also like Amazon, you know, they have affiliate programs.

I mean, that works really well. I know a bunch of people that are, you know, again, that have the time, right? You know, COVID, they had the time to set up their store and to do all the research on which products are selling and which ones fit for them, you know, and it works. You know, they make a decent amount of money to provide for their family. But I, I had my store set up through Amazon and it's just for me, it gets so confusing.—

Yeah, they don't make it easy for you to do it.

It's—

No, it's not easy. It's a lot of steps and then you gotta do research on what the product's selling for.

The hard part is the setup. It's like getting your— making sure that you input the right values for the weight, the shipping, the cost. 'Cause if you don't do that right and all of a sudden you sell a bunch of them, you might be losing a shit ton of money, right? You, because you're not charging enough for shipping, right? You know what I mean? And so I, I quickly, I quickly just shut my store down, you know what I mean? Like, I just didn't want to keep dealing with it.

And it's confusing too with the Amazon because you don't know which product— you have to really research because if it's not in the Amazon warehouse and it's in a third-party warehouse, then there's shipping charges Or even higher. Yeah, and if it's in the Amazon warehouse, then it's a different shipping charge. And it's different for regular members or non-members and Prime members.

I don't think you can even be a non-member and do it anymore.

Oh, you have to join?

Yeah, I don't think you can.

Well, I know, but there's—

I don't know, don't quote me.

Some products when you go in there, you hit Prime, I think those are ones that are stocked in the Amazon warehouse.

I have no idea. No, not a Prime, not an Amazon.

Like what? And the other thing is, is like now you have this, now you have this like TikTok shop. I don't even know where that, I don't even know. Well, all these people are making videos about brownies and oh, drink this. There was this one guy, these guys, oh yeah, I'm drinking this drink and I'm losing 20 pounds in 2 weeks.

Celsius?

No, some other drink, some green powder stuff. And then I looked it up.

Speaking of Celsius, I just read had— well, heard this nutrition guy talking about one of the main chemical, like, ingredients inside of it. Yeah, they, they literally get it from water treatment facilities.

That's disgusting.

And it's the— so gross. He said it's the foam that's on top.

I don't want any of that, of the of the water. That's nasty.

Yeah.

And that's about an— is that supposed to be an energy drink?

It's like a— it's a health drink. It's like a pre-workout drink.

People, whatever. I'm not drinking that.

No, I thought it was green tea. You thought it was green tea? That's what it says on there, like, yeah, well, extract, right, stuff like that. You know what I mean? So I, I had, uh, I don't know, it was a while ago, like a year or two ago. I had went into the— this is probably when they first started, you know, really amping up their, their marketing. Yeah, because Flo Rida, the, the rapper from Florida, right, uh, invested in the company, or didn't have to invest, he, you know, whatever, a promoter. Yeah, he was, he was part— he's part of the company for sure. He just won like an $82 million lawsuit.

Wow. For them.

Yeah, he got paid, so But, you know, so I was taking, you know, I was drinking them. I would drink them in the morning. You know, it was kind of like my morning tea for instance. And, but, you know, I actually, I didn't really like the way it was, you know, after a while I'm like, man, this is making me really jittery. And that's why I don't drink coffee. So I stopped drinking them and then You know, when I would, instead of getting like a Red Bull when I would be driving, I'd get one of those, you know? And then I would see people at the gym with them all the time and I was like, oh, that makes sense, like the pre-workout. And then I started reading it, you know, it's not aimed at that, but whatever.

Yeah, I noticed that too. Like I was at somewhere and it was like being advertised as like a workout drink.

Yeah, I mean, well, it's for weight loss. It's, you know, it's like a, promotes weight loss, whatever that means, right?

Exactly. You might lose weight.

Yeah, because you're not going to want to eat because you're going to feel sick anyway. Yeah, so I was, I don't know where I stumbled, probably on YouTube or something, one of the shorts. And this guy is, you know, he was obviously a, he was a doctor.

Right.

And he was talking about Healthy ways of losing weight. He went into this whole rant about Celsius and how nasty the ingredients are in there. Anyway, if you like Celsius, I highly suggest you take a look and see what you are consuming.

So I was telling you about that green thing. So I started looking it up and it basically said it's like, a double, triple dose of like Metamucil, which will make you go to the go. And I was like, that's disgusting. And they're charging like $50 for this canister of this green stuff. And I'm like, that's ridiculous. 'Cause you know, you gotta, you know, you can't just like, you see some video, it looks exciting and the person's like, oh yeah, I lost 20 pounds. That's the problem with affiliate marketing. That's because the affiliates are doing that kind of, marketing. Yeah. And then the product is not what it seems to be.

It's really not a good product and it's very unhealthy or, yeah. That's why, you know, you gotta be very careful when it comes to—

But they're advertising a lot of this stuff on TikTok shops. And then you can click a button and buy it.

I've never even— TikTok has its own shop now?

Yeah, they have like, if you have enough followers, you can advertise stuff.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about.

And then you can do a, you can shop on there.

I thought you meant like a TikTok shop.

Well, that's what they call it. You know, and then people are selling different stuff on there. And there's another one, like, I don't know, I call it Poopy, but I started seeing videos for it everywhere and it's called Poppi. The soda? Yeah, the soda.

It's just a prebiotic soda. Right. Instead of drink— it's a healthy soda.

Right. It's supposed to help you go to the bathroom. No, it doesn't. It does.

It's a prebiotic. It's a probiotic.

Well, there's video.

It's good for your gut health.

So there's like all these people on TikTok.

If you're full of shit, yeah, you're gonna have to take a dump. You know what I'm saying? But like, that's not what it's for. It's, it's good for your gut health.

I know that, but I'm just saying, now there's all like drinking a kombucha. So there's all these people, man, and that one too on TikTok. There's like all these— I don't know why, but we're in March, we're almost— we're in April now, right?

It's April 2nd, buddy.

Yeah, it's April 2nd, and there's like dieting ads are usually come out like, you know, December, January, right? But I don't know for what reason all of a sudden all this like dieting.

Now you're getting targeted, sir. You must have looked at something and now you're being targeted. Your algorithm changed.

And well, them cookies need to get shut off that we talked about. But, uh, no, but I'm just saying like you just seen like all this like stuff out there about like, you know, all these like—

because I don't see any of that. You know what I see?

What?

I see all workout stuff, workouts for getting bigger.

Okay.

For like protein. And yeah, ladies and gentlemen, I am not buying into any of your workout powders. I got my own. I, I like the Garden of Life brand. It's good, it's organic, it's vegan. Doesn't taste the greatest, but that's because it's not loaded with sugar.

Right. Yeah.

So, you know what I mean? And so, yeah, I'm good on all your vegan, your protein powders.

And I see all of that stuff too, you know? And then, you know, I see that kind of stuff also. And then there's all these like keto, keto things, keto mushrooms or something. I don't even know what that is. Somebody sent in for like to get a merchant account for that. I sent it to the bank. They were like, no way, forget it. I don't know, it was some weird like keto mushroom powder.

Like rice? It's actually, that stuff's really good. My dad had some. I, like I said, some stuff just gives me too much the jitters and those, the cordyceps mushrooms and all that other stuff. Well, I'm not saying it right, I don't think. But, you know, it's not the shroomy shrooms where you get, you know, high. Yeah, no, it's like lion's mane mushroom and all these other things that are really, I take lion's mane mushroom drops in my tea, but.

Well, I don't think they like like the wording on the website about like the promises and the fake testimonials or whatever the heck was on there. You know, the whatever. 'Cause they had like a bunch of, it's a brand new business and they're like, you know, a bunch of testimonials on there. Oh, how great this. You know, making them lose weight. And also like you can't advertise stuff like that and say, oh, it's as good as Ozempic or something like that, you know? And like everybody wants to take, you know, Ozempic, but you have to be super overweight.

Yeah, I can't stand the affiliate marketers about like that are just saying, do this and you'll get rich.

Right.

You know what I mean? It's like, Bro, what? No, it's like, you're not even rich. Well, they're getting cars leased, that jewelry's fake.

Well, they're getting it from selling their programs for 5, 10 grand.

Yeah, right.

Some of these people. Yeah, listen, whatever. We know— we have a person that we know through business that did that, and they got hooked on that thing, and they paid like I don't know, $5,000, $10,000 to get the website and all that. And then it turned out to be— we thought it was a scam and it turned out that it was scammy. And he, you know, lost a bunch of money on that.

Oh, he ended up losing his money.

Yeah, he lost not all of it, but there was a boatload of chargebacks.

Did he get his shop back open?

No, he closed it down because those guys didn't answer the phone. They weren't responding to him. The products were getting shipped like 6 to 8 weeks. People were just doing boatloads of chargebacks, right? You're not going to make money if you got, you know, if you got a bunch of chargebacks. Like dropshipping, all these guys are talking about dropshipping on LinkedIn, and I'm like, yeah, it's great if you're going to do dropshipping and, and, and the product's in the United States and you can get it delivered within 5 to 7 business days ground, right, or maybe 10 at the most. But if you're dropshipping stuff and you're using Temu and it takes 6 to 8 weeks to get here, you know, you're gonna have—

speaking of dropshipping, you see that UPS is going to be the main carrier for the United States Postal Service in the, like, in the air.

In the air?

Wow, that's terrible.

Well, I guess they got a piggyback, you know, they're not filling up planes probably.

I mean, who's sending mail? That's the other thing, like You know, like, well, the reason I'm not sending a letter, right, to my kids, right? You know what I'm saying?

Okay.

I'm not mailing them anything.

Okay.

Even birthday cards, right?

You still get a lot. I mean, I get a lot of ads and magazines in the mail.

Bills.

Yeah, it's bills, but I'm saying like not magazines, but like magazine from the city or, you know, or promo, promo magazines and ads for—

yeah, you know, that's sad, man, for I I feel bad. My aunt's the mail carrier lady, you know what I mean? She literally walks and drops letters off. Well, when you want to send—

No, but for elections, people mail out bulk mail for that. I'll tell you—

Do they, or they just— I mean, usually there's people out there on the ground.

Yeah, but they also do bulk mail. You get a lot of mail during election time. But the other thing is, packages they have, like, okay, no one's shipping a package to the United States Postal Service. Some people ship some packages because if you ship one out of the country, if— no, no, but if you're shipping like in the— if you're shipping like, like in the US, and yet they have these small— the, the post office has pretty small businesses. Yeah, they have these small boxes, right, that you can buy bags. Or a bag, and it's like a set price, like $7. So it's cheaper than UPS or FedEx.

Yeah, for sure.

So a lot of people do that, or they have like media mail where it's this small little box and you're shipping something small. I'll tell you another thing, like if let's say you got to ship something to Puerto Rico, don't try to do that with UPS or FedEx. They consider it an international shipment. But if you send it through the post office, it's just a regular shipment. Yeah.

So, you know, So when you're doing your affiliate marketing, be mindful of where your products are coming from. Again, that's just another—

yeah, where they're coming from, how long does the shipping take, what does the advertising look like, things like that. All of that, you know, to be successful.

Yeah, I don't know if we really touched on how they're so full of shit, but well, those are the—

those are the things that, that they sell you on. Oh yeah, you're gonna sell all this stuff, and then later you find out it's being shipped from China and taking 6 to 8 weeks to get to your customer, and then you end up with a bunch of chargebacks and you made a big investment into a website or something, that you got to really do your homework and make sure exactly where— what's going on, so you know the— all the ins and the outs.

Yeah, do your homework for sure, and don't sign up for your affiliate marketing program unless you believe in the product or something, you know what I mean, and you know you get it on time. But yeah, man, that's the pod for today. Let us know if you have any success stories from, from your affiliate marketing, uh, adventure.

Yeah, if you need an e-commerce merchant account, we can help you out with that.

Yeah, you know, so smash that subscribe button, share this with your peoples. Tune in this week for another episode of B2B Vault. Peace.

Farfadiem. Peace out.