Mastering Testing Methodologies for Affiliate Marketing

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Let's go to Austin. Actually, I don't know who to go to next, so you go for it. I think Adam is up next. Mr. Adam Fisher.

All right. Thank you. So, I've got 2 questions if we have time, but first one, it's about testing software. So, have a client, they're in the affiliate marketing space for like American Express and Chase, and I know the guy that does their paid media. And so, they brought me on board because the paid media guy is really hard to work with, but I'm supposed to be the guy that helps implement like a testing methodology for them. This is not my core expertise at all, but I can work with the guy that does their paid media. So, I think my question is like, how do I choose? They have like millions in traffic organically and with paid. I found like VWO looks like a really good testing, like sophisticated testing software platform. But just a couple things like the company says, hey, we want to make sure this can meet all of our needs and we have complex needs and we want— I don't know why they want server-side rendering for the test approach. So that's something I don't understand. And then the other part is like, where will I house all the insights? In a systematic way? So kind of a vague, tough question, but wanted to put it out there.

I don't know about server-side testing. A lot of us just use like VWO, and I think some people use like convert.com. There's a lot of solutions like Optimizely. I don't know any server-side testing solutions. Eric, do you?

Nope.

I just said we use convert.com. And so, Adam, I know you have another question, but in the interest of time, I want to give it to David and then carry it back over to you if that's okay. Sorry we couldn't solve it for you, Adam. I honestly don't know the solution other than—

No, that's totally fine. But another part of that one question is just the, like, how do you store insights? Like, because you're doing a lot of testing yourself. So, I used to do it the old-fashioned way, like a PowerPoint slide for clients, right? Like, This needs to be a lot more easy to store and gather. Like, how do you do that?

I'll be honest, we use an Excel sheet to store it raw, right?

And then the PowerPoint, if you want to make it all reportified and everything. A lot of things I don't think we need to overcomplicate.

We're just good old-fashioned PowerPoint or sorry, Excel. Excel. We use Excel a lot because, and then you can just put in notes and then you can have different tabs for different tests and date ranges. And then When you have new teams, because you can store Excel in the cloud, you can just give it to them and be like, here are all the tests we ran, because you can even include screenshots in Excel and just being like, here's all the tests we ran, here are the results, here's what worked, here's what didn't. And the stuff that didn't work, we even put notes on why we don't think it worked, not just the results. And the stuff that did win, what change did we make and why we thought it won, because all this helps influence future tests. So it's not about like how pretty it is. It's more so just stored in a way that's easily accessible, because that's important so that way people can continually get access to it. But B is a way that people can easily understand, even if it's not pretty.

That's helpful. Thanks.

I was going to say, I have one thing to add on that. I would ask the client what their security protocol is, because I work with clients where they have very high security protocol, like massive. And they might, if you ask the question, they'll say, oh, you know what? We're so glad you asked. We actually have a place we want you to put everything so that way competitors don't get access to it. That's a really important question asking about storage when you're dealing with providing them with insights, which in the hands of the wrong person, you know, or the wrong company, you know, they could, it could do some damage. You know what I'm saying? So they might even—

That's relevant for this client too.

Yeah.

Yeah, they even offer you a separate laptop to work on. So when I was working with Axelon, it was— and Google, it was like that. Like, they gave me a laptop. And I, you know, because everything I did for them was on there because they weren't going to take a chance and, you know, let it get out anywhere else. I'm like, I wasn't able to use my own phone and my computer. So that's— I love that you asked that question.

Nice.

That's even telling you how it's worked for me in the past.

Thanks. Nice.

Cool. Good discussion here, guys. David, let's pass it over to you.

Yeah. One quick thing on that too, Adam. I'd recommend reaching out to Ben Labbé at Spiro. They're a CRO agency. He's super open about the tools and everything that they've built. And I think some of it's overcomplicated what they built, but he automates a lot of stuff from Airtable directly into slides and populates all the data and presentation and stuff. So Might be interesting to you. He's going to be hosting EXL, I believe, in a couple of weeks in Austin. So you might want to take a look at that conference.

Agency owners, if you want to grow faster, my partner Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills and you're going to learn how to get more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day-to-day. You're going to learn how to recruit the right people and you're going to be hanging out with like-minded people such as yourself. So if you want to learn more, just go to marketing Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you on the other side.

Um, so my question is around lead gen. Um, we're fortunately in a position where like things are going pretty well, but because of that, we're paranoid and always trying to think ahead. And I know Eric, you and Neil do like LinkedIn and a podcast and everything. We also do those things though on a much larger scale, but I'm curious, do you have any systems in place to capture that attention and like funnel it down into the sales cycle? Like, do you have people monitoring it, or do you have something set up where they like your LinkedIn, it messages them and connects with them and all that stuff? What does that funnel look like for y'all?

Eric may— it probably has a much more advanced system than us. We don't do much on that. We do a lot of that for goodwill, and then we'll promote things like webinars and then get signups from there, and then that funnels into our system. But what we'll also do is see who we're connected with on LinkedIn on a regular basis and start messaging people. And we invite them to in-person events that we're throwing for free. So like I'm in Malaysia right now. I was in Hong Kong yesterday or the day before, my time zones are all messed up. And then tomorrow I'll be in Singapore. But I did this in Hong Kong. I did this in Malaysia. And I'm doing this as well in Singapore where we have tons of companies coming. Like today or yesterday, we had 30-something companies at one of our offices here in Kuala Lumpur. And we ended up discussing what's happening with marketing, just very high level. And we have a mixture of current clients or prospects or mixture of both, or you can just have pure prospects if you don't have tons of clients. And you just get to know people and build relationships. And over time, that's where we actually see a lot of our revenue come from.

Neil, what's up? Go ahead, finish your thought.

Yeah, we don't really get tons of revenue from things like SEO as much people, as most people would think. A lot of our revenue comes from just building relationships over time. And we'll pay for events. Like people are like, oh, Neil, you get paid to speak. We'll do deals with like marketing associations and pay them $20,000, $30,000, $40,000. We'll pay for our own travel. They'll bring a lot of people and we'll speak. And it's just our event with them. And that ends up getting us a lot of leads, but it takes like 6 months to a year plus to close a lot of that revenue. And it works. We just do that over time in a lot of regions and we consistently do that over time.

So a follow-up to that would be, what do you send to people when you're trying to get them onto your, what is it, your worldwide webinars?

Our worldwide webinars, that's a little bit different. We just send out an email blast and we just send out a message like on LinkedIn, like, you know, are you tired of, like, we may end up posting a post on LinkedIn. Have you noticed that when you post content on LinkedIn, it gets very little engagement and you keep posting content thinking one day you're going to get a lot of likes and shares, but it's not really happening? What's the problem? Why aren't you generating results no matter how many followers you have? Well, you're not alone. We're actually going to break down the right way to use LinkedIn and generate leads, customers, traffic, whatever you want to call it. It's going to happen at this time. It's free to attend. Click here to register. And we get a lot of people to just join the webinar. And it's just a numbers game. And we'll post that a few times before the webinar, send out email blasts. I made that copy out of thin air. I just pulled it out of my behind, right? Right. But yeah, something that would probably be a little bit better than that. But yeah, that's what we just posted. Emil, you should tell people what you do for the live events too.

So for live events, I'm assuming you're saying, hey, this is a private event for CEOs or CXOs or whatever, just to lead you off a little bit. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, We have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would've in the last couple years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire. To learn more, you can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find.

Well, to go back to the webinar and then I'll ask the other question, but to go back to webinar, we usually use Restream and we go live on all the platforms at once. So then that way we get extra people who may have not registered. As for the second thing, for the private events, we reach out to literally the decision makers within that company and we'll offer a lot of people to come for free. Most people ignore us and turn us down. But if you hit up 10 people, you may get one to show up. They don't care if you're Neil Patel.

A lot of people like private events. It doesn't matter if you're Neil Patel or whoever Patel.

Exactly. It doesn't matter if you're Eric Siu or Neil Patel, they don't really care. What they care about is what's the content that you're presenting and who else is going to be in the room. So we'll tell them, we're like, hey, there's a lot of other companies that are your size that are attending. We may name some of the brands that have agreed to come. This is what we're going to talk about. Here's some of the issues that you may be facing that, you know, a lot of people are facing that you're just going And covering, and, you know, you hit up 10, at least one usually shows up. All right, guys, that wraps up our call for today. If you're watching this live, you can always go to marketingschool.io/aOA and you can apply for the community.

We'll see you next time.