S1E3 - Affiliate Marketing Simplified With Evan Weber

Stuart Butterfield once said, "Every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. If you go above and beyond on the customer service side, people are much more likely to recommend you. And we couldn't agree more." Welcome to the Growing B2B SaaS. This show is not like any of the other startup podcasts. On this show, you'll get actionable and usable advice. People hear about all aspects of growing a business to a business software company. Customer success, sales, funding, bootstrapping, exits, scaling, everything you need to know about growing a startup with SaaS. And you'll get it from someone who's going through the same journey. Welcome to Growing B2B SaaS. Now you're host, you're on Hoffman. Welcome back to another episode on Growing B2B SaaS Podcast. In this podcast, we'll discuss all topics related to growing your SaaS, no matter in which stage you are in. If you want to grow your SaaS startup in the long term, you need to have a product with people like to recommend and refer to each other. If you don't know how to get that done, listen to our previous podcast about customer success because today we're going to talk about affiliate marketing. Our show guest has been in that marketing industry for over 20 years, launched a digital agency 2007 and started his own B2B SaaS called Publisher Finders in 2022. With his SaaS, he helps startups to grow their affiliate program by showing them the best publishers to work with and help you to reach out to them. I had the pleasure to have a couple of chats with him already and really happy to have him on our show today. Fun fact, his LinkedIn slug, his world's greatest marketer, so he's definitely going to get a lot of value under this show. Without further ado, welcome, Evan. Thank you so much for having me. You're welcome. I always like to ask this question. I know why people should listen to you for the people who are not convinced that after this intro, why should people listen to you today? So many reasons. I've been in the industry for a very long time, basically since the inception of affiliate marketing, but it was on the e-commerce side in the early days. Affiliate marketing has come to the B2B space recently in the grand scheme of things. But some of the same principles apply and strategies and ways to make it happen and ways to reach out to people, ways to collaborate to get the content created and share the content effectively and track it all. So it's absolutely the thing to do for SaaS. Affiliate should be part of the strategy. As far as why you should listen to me, I'm just a highly experienced, effective digital marketer. I've worked with over 350 companies in the last 15 years, either as an agency or as a consultant. And I do a lot of the media buying myself, managing the ad campaigns myself on the major ad platforms on the agency side. So I have a lot of frame of reference, both in B2C and B2B. So I believe to be one of the individuals out there that is an expert in both direct to consumer as well as B2B digital advertising and online marketing. So yeah, I learn every day and always learning new strategies on a daily basis and adding them to my repertoire and trying them out, testing them out. I've done a lot of trial and error over the years, which allows me to know what probably will work. So and then you have to put a lot of effort into that strategy, a lot of proper planning and execution, reaching out, things of that nature to really make it happen. Yeah. Nice. And I think a great thing you mentioned as in you work with so many clients. So as we say in that, you looked in so many kitchens to see how it works at a different company. I think that's really valuable. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. You know, every company is a little different. Every niche is a little different. How do the strategies apply? It all comes back to conversion rate, that word that you'll hear around that isn't mentioned enough, but it should be everyone should be screaming it. How are we increasing our conversion rate? The better your website converts the free, you know, the traffic into free use, you know, trials and then you have a back in conversion rate. But the front end conversion rate, a lot of times is what the affiliates are getting paid on. Sometimes they're getting paid on the second conversion. Regardless, both conversions have to be extremely good. And they have, it has to be improving over time, the rate at which people are registering and then paying, becoming a paid user. So the company has to work on those conversion rate percentages in order to make their digital advertising work effectively and make their affiliates money. I tell companies all the time, don't even launch an affiliate program until you've increased your conversion rate because your affiliates won't make enough. It won't, they won't prosper and like they need to. So it's a, you know, it's a, it's a continuum. You have to start to increase your conversion rate with, you know, content, suggestions, tools, a lot of its tool based, re-targeting ads. We could have a whole conversation about that. But I'm always saying that your affiliate program's success is dependent on your conversion rate, right? So go ahead and work on your conversion rate and all of the sudden you'll have more productive affiliates and they'll be happier too, which is the most important part. So that's my approach is a conversion rate oriented approach. And I think everyone should have that approach. If you don't have that approach, I feel bad for you because you're not making it happen, you know, like it needs to. One of my sayings is you won't be able to scale without conversion rate optimization. You can't scale without conversion rate optimization truly being a proactive thing in the company. An activity that's going on every single month. What are we doing to increase our conversion rate this month? You have to be asking that question always. And then making things happen, bringing in experts, trying different things, headline testing, adding tools, changing up the retargeting ads, launching new videos and retargeting, always coming with new content in the follow up process, sending more automated email follow ups. So many areas that can be addressed and can be worked on. And all of that to say that that will help your affiliates be more successful. Nice. And I think everybody knows conversion rate or should know conversion rate. Not everybody might know what an affiliate program is. So let's just zoom out for one second. As in how would you explain affiliate marketing and then maybe in particular, SaaS affiliate marketing to somebody who's completely unfamiliar with it? Yeah. So affiliate marketing is simply third parties referring clicks that turn into sales or leads. So you have bloggers, you have LinkedIn influencers, you have email listeners, you have any number of entities, other companies that you can turn into an affiliate, convince them to become your affiliate by asking nicely or reciprocating with them, doing a reciprocal affiliate partnership, which is particularly effective with SaaS. And we'll get into that. But essentially it's having a bunch of third parties referring new business. It's a referral program. Now, there are customer referral programs and there are affiliate programs. Affiliates can be customers, but a lot of times they're not even customers of the company, although they can be. And it's important to convert your customers into affiliates. And even your free users, your free users can be converted into affiliates. Right? And then they can refer to their friends and get a free month for the tool or a payout. So many ways to cultivate affiliate relationships with SaaS and all of those things need to be cultivated over time. And you'll have different types of affiliates sending traffic and referrals over time as you invite them to be an affiliate, you know, or they ask you or you do a partnership. So you always have to be sort of pushing the affiliate program on people in a nice way. And a, hey, we want to make you money by allowing you to link to us and we're going to pay you 20% residual. That's exciting in itself. Now, when they start sending traffic, it helps if they're making sales, you know, so that's where conversion rate comes, it comes back into the picture. Yeah, that's pretty much a little rundown on affiliate marketing. B2B, it's a slightly different than B2C, although the principles are the same. As long as the click can be tracked, everything can be tracked through a click to registration, to back end conversion, you need to know how productive your affiliates are sending in revenue. But there are companies that pay just for the leads, the public paper registration and they can pay per sale as well or they can just pay per sale. So there's different ways of structuring it to make it lucrative for the affiliates. But people out there listening need to understand that your job as a brand or a company with affiliates is to make the affiliates money. It's not for them to make you money, although that's the way it seems. But it's by converting their traffic better by doing what you do better, they'll make more money, they'll get happier and put more resources into it and that will make you more revenue. So yes, we're all working together here to make money. And the point is a lot of companies view their affiliates as like, oh, let's just get more affiliates and we'll be good. No, it doesn't work. It does work like that to a degree, but you have to really work to convert their traffic. And that's the way it works best and works quickest. So that's what people out there need to know. Exactly, exactly. If the affiliates do well and they make money in the end of SaaS company will make money as well. So I mean, in short, it's basically other people recommending your company and in exchange for paid clients, they will receive a commission or sometimes if they deliver you leads, they will receive some kind of kickback fee. Right. Or a hybrid, which is something up front and something more on the sale. So that's a way just to make it more lucrative for the affiliates. I mean, companies need to be thinking about now that can needs to be kept in check though because some companies won't pay forever on the referral on a monthly basis. They might pay for a year, the year and a half, two years, that 20% residual. And some companies will pay for the life of the client. When they will pay for the life of the client, it could be very lucrative for the affiliate because if they keep the client on board, they're making money, they just stack up the referrals, they could have 100 referrals all paying monthly. And then that is passed. income. You want to talk about passive income, get a bunch of referrals to SaaS platforms, and that you've created the residual passive income for yourself. So that's another point about SaaS affiliate programs is they're typically more lucrative, I keep using that word. You can do better with them than B2C or D2C, whatever you want to call it, because those are one-time sales of a product on an e-commerce website. It's a one-shot payout 10%. Boom, you're done. The SaaS is it keeps going and going and going for the life of the client in some, you know, most instances, sometimes it doesn't, but sometimes it stops after a year or whatever, but nonetheless, it's a lot more revenue per referral than a direct-to-consumer affiliate program would be. Far more lucrative. Yeah, and it's one of the reasons why we'd read this. We've purely focused on B2B SaaS because it's business to business or high-tech prices and it's SaaS. It's recurring, so it will happen over a longer term. Like not always indeed, lifetime, but definitely year and and longer. Those are the benefits for the affiliate, right? If we turn things around, what are the benefits in your opinion for a B2B SaaS company to set up a affiliate program? Well, it's truly performance-based marketing. It's only paying for the business that they're driving to your website, so that would seem all good and it is. It's a very desirable form of revenue and it should be 20 to 30% of your revenue if you're doing it right, right? Some companies do 50% through their affiliate program. Let's say 2020 to 30, once it's up and running and you have a lot of partners, a lot of affiliates, it's risk-free in that you're not risking your advertising dollars in a digital marketing campaign. Now that being said, you might be able to get sales more cost-effectively through LinkedIn ads or SEO or articles, another strategy. If you're paying your affiliates 20%, that's great, but you're still paying them 20% of the revenue. The life of the client. So if you look at that, the lifetime value of that client to the affiliate, that could be thousands of dollars, which is still fine because it's a percentage, it's still profitable revenue for the SaaS platform. The point I'm trying to make is it's still 20% monthly recurring, whereas if you're running Google ads or LinkedIn ads and it costs you $200 to acquire a customer, it's 200 flat. You may end up paying affiliates more in the long run per customer because you're paying them a percentage residual. So it's just a different metric. It's a different, I believe you need to be running in all channels simultaneously that makes sense and making them all work. That's my approach and that's approach I've always had. And affiliates is one slice of the pie, one piece of the puzzle that you need to grow over time. Yeah, and definitely with every channel you can calculate, of course, like your customer acquisition cost as you mentioned, right? Like how much does it cost you to acquire a new customer and then what is the lifetime of that customer? So is a referral coming from the affiliate? Is that staying longer with you than a company who joined you via your paid campaign? So always calculate your LTVCAC ratio or your payback period for the channel you're running. That's that's definitely good one to to keep in eye on. Yeah, and the point I was making there was 20% sounds like a lot to pay residual for the life of the client. Why not pay them 10? See the payout has to be considered the commission rate. Again, you do want it to be lucrative as possible. The more money they make, the better. But that's it's a fine line. Most companies will start the commission at lower than what they are comfortable paying. That way they can increase it over time to try to get more production and that's a good strategy to use. You could start it off at 10% and then you know, hey, we're giving you a raise to 15%. We're going to boost you up to 20 this month. You know, so you can use the commission rate strategically to motivate the affiliates, but you also need to make sure it's not too much and you're not giving away all the money. So that was just the point I wanted to bring up there. Yeah, and completely agree. It's a fine line. I think we both have been on both sides where an affiliate of companies and we're also now of course founded our own SaaS companies and we know the benefits of the affiliate side where you want to get money out of it and has to be something which is going to motivate you, but you do not want to give too much away. Of course, that your customer accuracy costs keep rising. So it's definitely a fine line 100% degree with that. What is in your opinion the best time to set up an affiliate program? When you've increased your conversion rate adequately, when you've run other traffic sources to the website to try to get it to convert and see what the conversion rate is on the registration as well as the back end conversion. So I would give it like three to six months minimum before once this thing launches or the marketing begins. You can always be building really reaching out and connecting with people on LinkedIn and finding people of the niche that would be a good affiliate and saying, hey, we you know, we want a partner with you. We want you to be our affiliate. We'll let you know when it's live so they can start laying the groundwork maybe. But you know, companies have a misrepresentation of what how to really approach affiliate programs. You have to do it with the right strategy. You can't just launch an affiliate program and expect it to be great. You know, you have to do it the right way. You have to do it at like what you're saying when to launch it. When you've increased your conversion rate and gone through a process of doing so that could last probably three to six months. If if you're actually trying to do that and make that happen, if you don't try it, if you don't do that, then your affiliate program may not do anything. It may not be productive. If you don't approach it like that. So that's what I would say there because at that point, you know, the company should be trying to make other things work to generate users. And if they can't make those things work and then they expect an affiliate program to be the savior, it ain't going to happen. So the affiliate program is never the savior. It's the compliment. It's a great channel to build up over time. Yeah, yeah. And I think this is a perfect point you make as a, and it's not a savior. And it's not also the first channel in my opinion, you have to start out bit as in as you mentioned, conversion rate has to be increased. So it means you have to actually have paid client first. So you can optimize your conversion rate. And then you can go to this channel, but it should not be the first to go channel for a company starting out. You can have it like a live. You can have the affiliate program tracking available. You can put a link in the footer, join our affiliate program in the footer. You can you can have it available, but don't expect much. Don't expect anything. But but you can, you can have it available before you're truly ready to push it out there to the world. There's nothing wrong with that. But just don't expect it to do anything until you have a well converting site and you actually do some outreach to go find you some affiliates and partners. Then it will start doing something. Exactly. Exactly. This is one of the reasons why like we, we would are to offer a free plan just because then people can set it up. They don't have to high expectations. They can at least invite their own network towards it. But they're not going to have much out of it at the beginning just because they need to figure things out themselves first. Yeah, you don't want to have to pay for another tool that's not doing anything. You know, then you get into the problem where they might have to cut the tool, you know, because they're cutting their budget. So it's not doing anything. Get rid of it. This is this is maybe one typical mistake companies make, right? With affiliate marketing. What other kinds of mistakes do you see companies making with affiliate marketing? What a great question. One of them is launching it before they're ready and expecting it to do something. So that we've already talked about that. The second thing that comes to mind is how they're actually trying to bond with the affiliates or actually, you know, find other companies to become affiliates with each other. I believe in SaaS companies doing reciprocal affiliate marketing with each other where you you promote it in your dashboard and the other in the partner promotes it in their dashboard and a little partner tab in the in the left column. You can have a partner section and you can promote each other and track it as an affiliate. That way all your users coming through the dashboard. Some of them will go into the partner section. They'll see the other companies there. They'll click on them sign up and it'll track as an affiliate if anything happens. So that's my number one type of affiliate for SaaS. That's my number one recommendation to make to have traffic coming quickly through a partner. All you need is one other dashboard to do this with that has a similar audience but a different product obviously. A different type of tool with a similar audience. Find one of those to do this with do the swap and see what happens and see the user and then you go get go get 20 of them. 30 of them, 100 of them and you will that that's the only affiliate you'll ever need. You're not going to get 100 in a month. If you get you know two or three a month that's considered that excellent right because you don't need a lot. If they have a fairly high traffic dashboard it could actually bring in a good amount of sign ups right new users. So if they're too small then it won't do much. It's all about you know the size of the how many users they have coming through the dashboard of course but you see my point. It's a very good way to affiliate with other SaaS companies. So that's my number one recommendation for SaaS affiliate is to do dashboard swaps and you can also do email swaps where you email my users you email your users. Hey check out this tool. Check out that tool. Email's blast right you got that email is sitting there you know with nothing to send to it except your own stuff. Send some partner offers out there. Great idea you can do blog post swaps you can do video content together like we're doing. Many strategies when two companies partner up like this. If you do that with multiple companies, it adds up. So that's a really good type of partnership. That's called a reciprocal partnership, reciprocal affiliate partnership. Call it whatever you want, but it's brilliant idea. I've done it over and over again and shown that it works. The other type of affiliates are just influencers and content creators. In the niche, those you need to be reaching out to those. On LinkedIn, Twitter, I would focus it on LinkedIn, to be honest. Because there are some B2B influencers over there on Twitter. But I think more progress could be made recruiting affiliates on LinkedIn than Twitter. But I'm not ruling it out. Because I know of companies that have recruited good affiliates on Twitter in the dev space, in the IT space, software development. So if it can be done in software development, it could be done in other software sales or other tool niches. But you need someone reaching out to recruit the affiliates. There's very few affiliate networks on the B2B side. Now you can plug into a bunch of affiliates ready to promote you. It just doesn't. It's I haven't really seen it. I've heard it could exist, but I've never seen it to exist. Or heard that you could do a thing like that. I believe in building it up from scratch, you know, from the ground up. Using tools to find out who the affiliates are. For instance, I'll give you a good example. You're a SaaS platform or SaaS tool. Find a bunch of SaaS bloggers out there that are writing about SaaS oriented topics and recruit them as affiliates. Well, send 200 emails to those type of sites. Perfect example. That's what my tool kind of uncovers is web publishers that are, you know, in certain niches. So you need to go after the publishers in the niche, in the niches, and then the influencers that are on LinkedIn or wherever that have a following of hopefully a decent. They don't have to have a big following, though, if they just have a good presence in the like it. Let's say you had a sales tool, a SaaS, a sales SaaS. You find someone who has a big presence in the sales world on LinkedIn, the sales community, and you recruit them as an affiliate. Then when they post as an affiliate and share the link, a lot of their followers and connections are other sales people. So they can go sign up for the tool. Hey, sign up for this free tool. This free registration. Check it out. This is a great sales tool and a percentage of those will, hopefully, buy. And then that person will make money by just sharing a post on LinkedIn. But there are other ways of the LinkedIn influencer or someone posting on LinkedIn to they could have a blog post or they could just create a nice LinkedIn post, a LinkedIn article, link to a blog post. That talks about the SaaS that they're promoting with their affiliate link in there. So there's a few ways to do it. But most of it is content oriented and sharing oriented, posting oriented. If they have an email list, amazing. They can blast the email list. Or if they have a medium following. When they do a new medium, they're medium audience. People will get notified. So these are ways of working with B2B influencers to promote the SaaS, just some suggestions, some ideas. Yeah, and I think this is great. I'm making a lot of notes because you mentioned like dashboard swap, email swap, publishes, sales guys as an example. And I think it all comes down to, you have to reach out and you just have to ask whether which one it is. You just have to find them and reach out to them and then expand the concept sometimes still. Because not especially what you mentioned at the beginning, not everybody knows the concept of a affiliate marketing in B2B SaaS. So you might have to explain, but in the end, it is a win-win for everybody. Once you set up your own partnership tab in your own dashboard, and then when they click the partnership tab, there'll be like a little page in the dashboard that have the company logos there of the partners. And then once you show them that, say, look, look what we did with these three companies right here. This is great. This is driving us new users and we're generating new users for them. Let's do this together. All you have to do is have one example, one good example to show them, and they'll be convinced. Most SaaS dashboards, they're not like, they don't have a partner tab in the dashboard. They should. Hopefully this podcast will convince them to do it. Because it's a great way to increase new users with no risk. I've even seen companies do it just and they don't even pay each other as an affiliate. They just swap the logos in the dashboard in the partner section and they don't pay each other as an affiliate. But it's cooler. It's good when you can pay each other and there's money to be made. There's revenue to be generated. But you could do it without the affiliate links presence. That's a really exciting way to partnerships. Everyone's talking about partnerships. Yeah, and I think you really definitely practice what you preach. Because if you want to see an example and you're listening, just go to publisher, finders, sign up. And then you will find that section in the two of them. And so I think that's definitely a good one. That's true. I guess when we go back to setting up an affiliate program, do you recommend certain steps for people to follow to achieve success? Well, basically what we've talked about, doing it at the right time, having a great converting landing page or home page wherever the traffic's going to go, making sure it's honed for improved conversion rate, A/B testing on the headlines, adding testimonials, running tools, retargeting the visitors when they leave the site. If they, you know, all the retargeting placements you can run to bring the visitors back. That gives affiliates more chance of making a sale. So why wouldn't you be retargeting their traffic, right? Your own website traffic that they're generating for you, of course. I don't think every SaaS company is running retargeting ads. Go to my website and then surf around the web. You'll see my ads everywhere. And I do it at a very low budget per day. The key to retargeting is keeping the daily budgets very low. You can even have them at $10 a day. $10 on Facebook Instagram, 10 on LinkedIn, 10 through Google, 10 through AdRoll, or whatever, retargeting platform. Just like budget retargeting and multiple platforms is a winner. Companies need to know that because what happens is they put two high budgets on the daily budget. Let's say they set it at $50 a day on a daily budget. It's going to spend all that boom, boom, boom, boom, and it's going to be all the same people seeing the ads. They're going to be seeing it like 50, 60 times a day. It's ridiculous. The frequency would be through the roof. So that's a little gem from this podcast is keep the retargeting budgets low on multiple platforms. And then you can increase them over time. If it's hitting the budget and it's making sales, you just boost it. 10 here, 10 here, 10 here. And you just raise it accordingly until it's where you want it to be. So yeah, every SaaS should be retargeting their visitors with ads. That's just the conversion strategy. It's another conversion strategy. And that helps the affiliates make sales. So just best practices. Click the sign up ratio type of making the site or the landing page convert as well as possible. Then go find you some affiliates. Start reaching out. Start reaching out with a great approach. One of my sayings is it's all about the approach. The subject line, the message. What does it say? Are you making an exciting? Use chat GPT to write your outreach messages. Say, hey, write an exciting email outreach for me for a prospective affiliate. And you'll be blown away with what it cranks out. Like you said, outreach. It's all about outreach. Once you have a mess an affiliate, then you have to sort of make friends with them. You have to sort of bond with them and get on a call with them. See what you can do together. What a great expenditure of time bonding on a phone call or a video chat with a partner who are an affiliate. You should be spending an hour, minimum. People will laugh because cracking down on meetings or whatever. But I love meetings. But no, my point is when you get an affiliate, you need to basically make friends with them. Become best besties. That will ensure that they don't leave. And they're always going to be happy. And you're going to have a relationship with them. And you're going to check in with them every month. How's it going? What can we do more together? How's your family doing? How's the weather out there? Don't treat your affiliates like a means to an end. Treat them like a friend, a valuable partner. That helps tremendously. Treat your affiliates like gold. Not like a means to an end. A lot of companies are cheap with their affiliate program. That's another one of my concepts. They always say they want a great affiliate program, but they don't want to invest in growing it. But it's hard to find the right resources also. There's a lot of crap out there. People say they can do this in that. You know, agencies, agencies that claim to be able to do this in that. And they don't do anything. And you pay them thousands of dollars. They do nothing. And then you're like, what happened? We just blew $3,000 on our $6,000 on our affiliate program. And then they think, you know, then that's it. Then they don't want to spend any money growing their affiliate program. So you have to do it right. You have to use the right resources and use the right strategies. Yeah. And then it's very possible. And I think one of the key things you said is in the goal is to help the affiliates make money instead of you making money, which of course happens after. But if you truly want to help them to make money, so jump on these goals, ask how they're doing, how you can help them. What do they need? In the end, it is going to benefit yourself. Well, now with Chatchee PT, you know, I use that tool a lot. You can write content for them. You can give them blog posts. Here's an amazing blog post about the niche and how our tool solves the problem. You can give them an amazing article, totally unique, that they can publish. And then they can leave. And you can even give them the LinkedIn post content. So here, here's a post. Here's the post content. And here's your link. You know what that's called? That's called spoon feeding. And I believe in spoon feeding your affiliates. Handholding and holding in spoon feeding. That's what you should be doing in their affiliates in order to give them what they need to be successful. doing the work for them. Then all they have to do is go post it, go publish the article, go post the blog, you know, go post the LinkedIn post. Then if they have an email list, you can write an e-mail for them. Chat GPT, write an email, write an email for this person's audience about, you know, such and such. An amazing email of your, and you can give them that. And you can say, "Here's everything you need." That's called facilitating your affiliates. A lot of affiliate managers don't do that, but that is the way to do it. I do that. I've always done that. I know what works, you know, because I've been doing it a long time, but that being said, it's all about facilitating the affiliates. Yeah. Exactly. The more easy you make it for them, the more easy it is for them to promote you. It's in the end. Yeah, well, yeah, it's take away the work. If they have to put work in, it's not going to get done. They have to schedule it. They have to wait. They have to wait to all this other stuff is done, then maybe they'll do it two months from now. No. We need you to post it this Friday, right? Here's the blog post. Here's the LinkedIn post. Here's an email blurb for your subscribers. There's everything you need. Here's your referral link embedded in the content, embedded in here, embedded in there. That's it. I make it sound so easy. Really, that is a great way to manage the affiliates. They should call them affiliate facilitators instead of affiliate managers. They should change the name to affiliate facilitator because affiliate managers don't do anything. Nice. Now it's, but it is true. They need the facility. It's the make sure that's successful. Let's move on. When we look at partnership binders, when should people consider using your tool? My tool was primarily built for brands that are in the direct to consumer space because a lot of the web publishers that are in my tool are more on the e-commerce side or the consumer side. There are a bunch of business sites in there. There's SaaS-related sites and blogs in there. There's definitely a couple thousand SaaS-related sites in there that could be brought on as affiliate. Most of the people using our tool are brands. They're consumer brands, so to speak, because there's a lot more of them in there. There's like a never-ending supply. I think they should check it out whether they'll find what they're looking for. Maybe may or may not be the case, but I don't claim that it is. There is B2B stuff in there, though. For sure. A lot of the concepts that we've talked about are SaaS. They apply to any kind of website. B2C, direct to consumer. Before you have affiliates, you need a well-converting website and you need to run some your own campaigns and hone in and make it work. Then you can reach out and get some great affiliates. So it's the same concept. It really is. With the SaaS dashboards, they have a unique opportunity where they can do the swaps, the reciprocal swap, you know, placements. That's a very effective strategy. I can't emphasize it enough. I feel like every SaaS should be looking for those. Like, as soon as they listen to this, they should be like, what other SaaSes do I know where I can do a swap like this? Like, let me look through my connections. Let me see who--oh, this one right here. Let me reach out to Dan. Let me reach out to Sally and propose this idea. I'm telling you, if you have a similar audience, it makes total sense. Is this the question of how much traffic they have coming through the dashboard? Whether it's going to do anything or not. If you can find another company to partner with like that, you can really try to promote each other and leverage it. Yeah, that's a really good feedback. And to come back to the question like, you guys do offer porting day free trials. So for every SaaS company listening, just go ahead, go to publish your finders and see if there are going to be interesting publishers for you in there. When we start wrapping things up, ask this question at the end. When we talk about a freely marketing, like, what kind of advice would you give in certain stages? The first one being somebody just starting out and to grow their SaaS to 10k monthly recurring revenue. Like we said, I would immediately go and find some other dashboards to partner with and get on the phone with them and try to figure it out, make it happen. Say, listen, we have 10,000 users using our tool, a free trial basis and we're going to let them all know about your tool. And can you do the same for us? We'll pay each other as an affiliate. That's the first type they should go after. Then they should start looking for influencers in the niche, influencers in the industry or people that are just like, look like good connections in the industry. Anyone can really be an affiliate if they have a decent amount of connections. As long as their connections are in the industry you want to expose it to. And then the third type I would go after are websites and blogs that have content, articles about your type of tool, your type of software, your type of solution, run Google searches, best tools for sales, best tools for retargeting, best whatever the niche is, whatever the software type is. Go look at all the sites ranking organically in Google and see who comes up in the paid, paid traffic because you can advertise in the paid, but that's, that's a paperclip campaign. The organic results, those are usually articles about the best tools. Reach out to all those public, those are they call publishers. Reach out to all those web publishers and see if you can get them to be an affiliate. Ask them to be your affiliate and say you have a perfect article. We can insert our link right here. We'll even give you a hundred dollars just for doing it. We'll just give you a hundred dollars if you do it. And then we'll pay you 10% residual. Throw money at them. Throw, that's what I mean by having, you have to have a budget to grow your affiliate program and you have to throw around money to basically bribe these publishers and these affiliates to do something for you. It's not, it's nothing wrong with it. You're just, you're just paying them to act. Say listen, if you make a, you find a good LinkedIn person. Hey, listen, if you do a post, I'll pay you a hundred dollars and I'll pay you 10% on all the affiliate referrals. They'll be like, okay, no, no, it depends who it is. They might want a thousand, right? Or they might want 200, you know, so, or they may be like, no, I don't do that. But if you, if you, you're offering money, they're probably going to say yes because and you're giving them all the content, you don't, they don't even have to do any work. And we're going to pay you. Do you think they're going to say yes? Absolutely. But the, no one approaches it like that though, but that's a really great way to approach it with the right people. You don't just throw a hundred dollars at everybody. You, you, you offer it to the, to the right people that look like they actually have the right connections that, that need to know about your software. Go find five of those a month, five of those a month to do that with the ones that work. You keep doing it. Say post again, we'll pay you another hundred, you know, you can actually see if it results in, in sales because you're tracking it as an affiliate. It's almost like media buying, but that's like having a budget for your affiliates and influencers. That's like melding affiliate with influencer, right? So you're paying them a little bit of money and you're giving a commission. That's called a hybrid deal. So that's how you can work with people so they won't tell you to go take a hike. You're offering the money. They're not going to say no and they're going to make a commission on the back end, which hopefully they make money on that as well. And then by that time, if they're actually making money, they might actually say, shit, I can make some money with this. I'm going to post once a week. I'm going to create more blog posts. I'm going to do this that. If it becomes something they're actually making money with, they're going to repetitively do it. And that's how I work too in the referral space. The company is that I refer business to that I actually make money with. I refer them more business because I'm seeing money, right? Your mind just automatically goes to the. So if you have an affiliate program, you could just say, okay, this month we're going to take a thousand dollars and we're going to offer a hundred dollars to 10 influencers and see what happens. What a great way to kick off your affiliate program. Now it has to convert, right? Otherwise, you're spending the money for nothing. All you have to have is a decent, click to registration rate, and then the back end conversion hopefully is five to 10%. And if those numbers hold true, it's a slam-dung winner. If they even come close to those percentages, it's a winner. It's a massive winner. So yeah, that's how you do it. That's how you do it. And with affiliates and influencers with SaaS. Yeah. And I think the last part is of course, which you covered a lot during this podcast is to have the conversion rate in order. So especially for the company starting out, have that in order before you even launch or just have it live but not push it that much. Like start with, as you mentioned, maybe offer people money upfront and the commission. So you will get yourself out there, but emphasis has to be first on making sure that things convert before you really start scaling. And that comes down to the next question. This is for the company starting out. Let's say a company's grown to one million AR. So they have a bit more budget. They maybe have a team already who can handle things like what kind of advice would you give them on a feed of marketing? Well, it always helps if you have someone dedicated to outreach because they could be spending their days and their weeks just reaching out. Hey, I found your own LinkedIn. We really want to work with you. This is how we do it. And they could be ready. They could be sending invites with a message attached, invites with a message attached on LinkedIn. And then following up with those people, they could be finding their emails and sending them emails. They could be finding other companies and they could be offering the partnership proposal to them. Let's talk about it. Listen, a dedicated person should always be 90% on outreach and business development. If you can put a full-time person on it, that's the best possible scenario, if not multiple people. But if you can only do 20 hours a week, that person should be reaching out for 20 hours a week. If you have revenue, then you can can devote that person to it. So that's what I would say. When you have the money to hire a full-time affiliate manager or slash facilitator, that's what you should do. You should hire someone at 90% of what they do should be outreach and business development and seeing how many partnerships they can get and affiliates they can get through the strategies we just talked about. So that's what I would do. I hire one full-time person and then once that person pays for themselves, hire another person. You could literally have five to ten people as affiliate managers just reaching out, pulling in affiliate relationships and partnerships. I like how the word come back at a affiliate facilitator. I think that's definitely your key word here as well. Today my final question is if people want to get in contact with you, what would be the best way how can they reach you? I'm very easy to get a hold of. I'm always on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn all day long. I'm on Skype. I got people texting me. I'm not hard to get a hold of. I'm very approachable. You want to talk to me about your project. I'm happy to give you my feedback on it and what I would do to grow it. Not me particular, but what they should do to grow it. And then if they want to know what I can help them, how I can help them grow it, I'm happy to tell them that as well. But usually when people call me, they could be affiliates, they could be companies. People just call me. I put my phone number in my LinkedIn description. And then when they see what I'm about, they call me and no, that's I have the conversation and see how I can direct them or enlighten them. And that's how it gets done. I'm always analyzing sites, giving feedback, answering questions, and never charging a penny to most people. If the company wants to hire me, then I then I of course, I charge them. I'm happy to analyze, give advice to affiliates, give advice to brands, companies, how they should be doing different things. I'm always ready to jump on the phone and have a conversation. Let them know what's up. Good. So the inclusion is go point, heaven on LinkedIn. Basically, straight for worlds, greatest marketer, or even whoever. And one or another will probably will give his head first at the top of the search results. So definitely recommend doing it. As I can relate, he is able to help you out with any questions you have. He wouldn't charge you a penny. So definitely do so. Thank you very much for being on the show, sharing your knowledge. And hope to see you again soon. Yeah, let's do it again. Cheers, thanks Evan. You've been listening to Growing a B2B SaaS. Youron has been ahead of customer success before founding his own startup. He's experiencing the same journey you are. We hope you've gotten some actionable advice from the show. And we hope you had fun along the way. We know we did. Make sure to like, rate, and review the podcast in the meantime to find out more and to hook up with us on our social media sites. Go to www.getredidus.com. See you next time on Growing a B2B SaaS.