Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Stayin’ Alive in Affiliate Marketing

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I wasn’t one of the “original” affiliate marketers, but I have definitely been around long enough now to be considered one of the “old timers.” I already had a legal career when I came to affiliate marketing, and I didn’t expect to find an entirely NEW career in writing about potty training. But parenting posts led to coupons, which led to datafeeds, which led to privacy concerns, which led me back around to legal issues. And here I still am almost 17 years later.

As I was thinking today about all of the changes in our industry over these 2 decades, the song “Stayin’ Alive” kept running through my head because sometimes I feel like that’s what I have been doing all this time. So many businesses have come and gone. Some have just changed to stay relevant. People have moved between companies, started new companies…given up on us altogether sometimes.

How have I managed to stay basically in the same place? What does it take to make it down the stretch in affiliate marketing? I do have some advice.

Network Like Your Life Depends On It

I wouldn’t still be in this industry if it were not for my network. Period. Full stop. Whether it’s affiliate managers who slipped me sweet deals to keep my sites going, consulting contracts when the sites were NOT going, or even advice when I needed it most, my network has been invaluable. And I know it’s not just me. I’ve seen people lose their jobs and pick up new jobs almost overnight because the community looks out for its own.

I don’t mean just connecting with people on LinkedIn or following them on Twitter. I mean making meaningful relationships and building trust. The kind where you can tell someone you need help and they will do everything they can to find it for you.

Be prepared to reach out to help others even when there is nothing in it for you.

Network with your business partners but ALSO with your competitors because things can change on a dime and you never know who you might find yourself sitting next to next.

Keep An Eye on Trends

We all know that technology changes quickly, and affiliate marketing is essentially a combination of sales and technology. You can’t bury your head and pretend like you don’t have to change thousands of links when Google Affiliate Network goes out of business. If you don’t change the links, you don’t make money anymore. (If I wanted to be really old school, I would have said BeFree) You need to stay out ahead of major technological changes if you want to keep making money.

It’s the same with everything in the industry. You don’t have to do everything your competitors are doing, but you do need to KNOW what they are doing and how it can impact your business. Likewise, you need to be watching for overall industry trends like cookie tracking, attribution models, the rise of influencers, Google results changes, etc. One quick example is that it used to be great to rank 3rd in Google search results for a term. Now if you rank 3rd, you may find yourself so far below the fold due to ads and “People  Also Ask” that you won’t get any traffic at all. If you were only paying attention to your rankings, you would have no idea why your traffic was dropping so much.

Be Good At What You Know, But Keep Learning

I’m guilty of knowing a little bit about a whole lot of things. I can modify my WordPress templates, but I’m not a programmer. I can run some Google Ads, but I’m not a PPC expert.  I can pull links and report across all of the major networks, but I don’t know how to run datafeeds or post back from APIs on my own.

What I DO know is how to run a cash back site. And I DO know an awful lot about FTC Disclosure. That doesn’t mean that I won’t keep learning everything thing I can about those two things or work to learn more about other things. Today I watched a webinar about Toolbars and Browser Extensions. I thought I understood them and when I don’t want to get involved with them. But now I might be thinking differently, which wouldn’t be the case if I hadn’t stayed open to learning. By continuing to learn more about affiliate marketing, you stay open to ways to change your business but also understand what might threaten it. (Mental note….maybe it’s time for a SWOT analysis of Sunshine Rewards….)

If you are still with me, it’s because you either really like me or you have been thinking about some of these things yourself already. Drop me a line. Meet up with me at Affiliate Summit. Ping me in the PMA Member Slack. Maybe we can help each other stay alive in this industry.

And so I’ll leave you with this….

Is It Time for You to Energize Your Affiliate Career?

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Change your career

When I started in affiliate marketing 17 years ago, my kids were 2 and 4. I blogged about nap time and trips to the library and how to save money on diapers. I worked on my websites outside of my “real” job hours… on weekends and after the kids went to bed. I was constantly hustling to try to learn the industry and grow my business with new initiatives so I could be a full-time affiliate marketer and spend lots of time with my kids.

Fast forward to now. Last month my nest became empty when my younger daughter went to college. I haven’t launched a new website or initiative in probably 10 years. I’ve grown complacent in updating and launching sites. I haven’t even updated WordPress on most of them in so long that plugins are starting to break.

It’s time for me to remember the hustle that I had 17 years ago and get back to it. At 46, I have plenty of career left ahead of me, and I am never short on new ideas. But I have to really get back in the game. If you are in the same boat as me (or even worried you are heading there), here are some things I have done and will be doing to kick myself back into gear.

Get Back to Education

Even though I’ve been in this business a long time, there is always something new to learn. This week I attended the PMA Virtual Conference and watched about 10 hours of videos and webinars about everything from influencer marketing to how to better use coupons on my site. Some of the videos weren’t even targeted to me and yet I learned a lot from them. Just hearing what is new in the industry gave me ideas on what I should be doing and how I can quickly get my sites back up to speed…and maybe even out ahead again.

I’ll be watching the rest of those conference videos but also doing a better job of attending some of the many webinars that I see agencies and networks putting out. They are often free or lost cost, especially compared to my continuing legal education fees!

Network for Growth

From the start of my business I had been attending Affiliate Summit every single year, twice a year. I was always busy–hitting the booths to find new partnerships and partying the nights away to make new friends. With COVID and the halt in conferences, I stopped growing my network and to some extent even stopped nurturing my current network. 

It’s a little harder now without going to conferences, but I do make the most of the PMA for “meeting” new people. And I keep the Affiliate Slackers group open on my computer at all times to toss out things I find and ask questions of others. I don’t know when I will get back to going to conferences, but I am going to do a better job of networking electronically.

Find and Use Data

It’s easy to keep doing the same things over and over again, even if they aren’t working. But sometimes you don’t even realize they aren’t working until you measure them. There is SO much data in our industry–from Google Analytics reports that measure our site traffic to Facebook engagement data that show us how our social media is doing to network clicks and conversions that show us how much money we are making.

Sometimes we need to step back and see if what we are doing is actually benefiting us. Is anyone clicking through our Twitter links? Is anyone reading the emails we spend so much time writing? Use the data that is available to you and be honest about whether you are doing something because it is easy or because it is profitable. 

Be Okay with Quitting

Revamping your business isn’t just about starting new things. It can also be about ending old things. It’s okay if you have a website that hasn’t performed in years and you decide not to renew the domain name. If you are doing contract work that you don’t like and it is holding you back from spending time doing what you DO like, maybe it’s time to let it go.

Once upon a time, I had to make the leap from a terrific full-time work-at-home job with benefits and pension to focus full-time on my affiliate career. It was scary to quit, but it was what I needed to give me the bandwidth (and motivation) to truly move forward. It might be time to sell a part (or all) of your business. Or just give up on a project that never became what you hoped it would be. Quitting doesn’t mean moving backward.

Create Accountability

Sometimes when you work for yourself, you have to put something out into the world in some way to hold yourself accountable. Whether that’s a Mastermind group or a business partner or….. a blog post announcing things to everyone you know. Let people know where you are on your journey and ask them to check back in with you every once in awhile to see how things are going (hint, hint). 

Are any of you in a life change or a COVID dip or just an overall slump? What are you doing to move forward from it?

Check Out OptinMonster and Enter to Win It for a Year

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OptinMonster Contest

I don’t tend to run a lot of contests on this site, but when a company I use myself approaches me to give away their product, I jump on it!

It’s been almost 3 years since I wrote the post “Why You Need to Get OptinMonster Today.” Since that time, I have continued to use it myself on all of my sites. It’s one of the few paid tools that I use to grow my blogging and affiliate businesses.

Thanks to OptinMonster, THREE lucky winners will be getting a year of it for FREE! Plus, everyone who enters will get a special surprise after the contest ends.

Even though my post above gives more specifics on why I use OptinMonster, I want to break it down very simply:

You need to build your lists.

How many times have you freaked out when your Google ranking dropped for a keyword that you relied on for traffic? How many times has Facebook changed its algorithm so that your fans are not seeing your posts as much and you lost money? Although there is nothing wrong with building your site and your social to get all of that “free” traffic, you can’t ever rely on another site to sustain your own.

Because of that, you need to build your following and build your email lists. According to Statista.com, 85% of people check email at least once a day. That’s higher than visit any social media platform. As of 2017, there were 3.7 billion global email users, and that number is expected to grow to 4.1 billion by 2021. People still read email.

The best way to grow your email list is to get people who are reading your posts to sign up for it. It’s the only way to guarantee that they are really interested in your content. What good does it do to buy or trick people into signing up for your list when you are likely paying for every email you send and those people may not even really be interested?

OptinMonster helps you target the people who are visiting your site in ways that are most likely to get them to sign up for your list. There are so many customizable options including the timing of when people will be asked to sign up and where the sign up boxes show up.

Check out OptinMonster for yourself and enter below to win one of three 12-month subscriptions. Thanks to OptinMonster for sponsoring this terrific opportunity!

 

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Key Takeaways from New FTC Disclosure Settlement

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Just when it seemed like things were getting quiet with the FTC regarding disclosure and I was thinking that the new administration didn’t care so much about it, a new settlement was announced today regarding commercial endorsements. (If you want to see all of my research and updates on FTC disclosure, this post tracks them: Affiliates Take Note: New FTC Disclosure Guidelines)

The basic facts are that PR firm Creaxion Corporation paid two gold medal Olympians (Carly Patterson Caldwell and Jake Dalton) to promote a mosquito repellent on their social media during the 2016 Olympics (back during the Zika virus outbreak). They also partnered with Inside Gymnastics magazine to get endorsers and promote the product. The PR firm “drafted, reviewed and monitored” social media posts and advertorials made by the endorsers, and the magazine often reposted the endorsements on its own social media.

The allegations that apply to us most as influencers or affiliate marketers were that 1) the endorsements were not “independent experiences or opinions of impartial users” because they were part of an ad campaign, and 2) the endorsers “failed to disclose, or disclose adequately” that they were being paid for their endorsements.

Here is an example from the appendices that is particularly interesting to me:

It says “Made it back to the US! Thanks fitorganicusa for protecting me during my trip in Rio!!” The FTC is reiterating that “thanking” the company isn’t enough of a disclosure because it doesn’t indicate clearly that you are being paid. Recall that they did tell us this in a press release back in 2017 “Some of the letters addressed particular disclosures that are not sufficiently clear, pointing out that many consumers will not understand a disclosure like “#sp,” “Thanks [Brand],” or “#partner” in an Instagram post to mean that the post is sponsored.” I bet I see 100 “thank you” type “disclosures” a week on Instagram. Not sufficient!

Click here to see all of the examples used in the complaint. 

Agency Responsibility

The results of the settlement were in line with what we have seen from the FTC thus far. It focused on the agency responsibilities.

  1. The agency has to provide the endorser with a clear statement of their disclosure responsibilities.
  2. The agency needs a system to monitor and review the disclosures.
  3. The agency must “immediately” terminate or cease payment if disclosure is not adequate. However, they can give an endorser time to remedy it they think it was inadvertent.
  4. The agency must keep reports of the monitoring.

We are seeing this same basic results in almost every disclosure/endorsement case.

Key Takeaways for Affiliate Marketers and Influencers

After diving into all of the documents, here are my key takeaways from the settlement:

  • The FTC is still pursuing disclosure cases, but it can take years for them to come to an end (this is from 2016 and is just now at the settlement phase). Does that mean we will be seeing more and more as influencer marketing gets bigger?
  • The influencers were not a party to this settlement but rather the PR Firm and the magazine. Did the influencers get out early or is the FTC still focused primarily on the brands? We did see them target the influencers with letters last year but no settlements yet.
  • Agencies are clearly bearing most of the responsibility (and sometimes the brands) in failure to endorse cases.
  • Instagram is a big target of the FTC.
  • This is the second time that the FTC has told us that “thanking” a brand is not a sufficient disclosure.
  • The FTC is establishing a very systematic approach to the education, monitoring, and tracking of endorsement relationships.

Although I don’t think that anything new came out of this settlement, I think that it gives the FTC more teeth to continue to go after others for actual money and not just cessation of activities in the future. The more that the FTC continues to lay this foundation, the better chance they have in future cases.

Are you still seeing affiliate marketers and influencers who fail to properly disclose? Do you think this type of action by the FTC will create changes?

Affiliates: Be Prepared to Lose Commissions

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Last week I wrote an article for the PMA entitled Affiliate Marketing and ITP 2.0. It was a basic overview of ITP 2.0 and the impact it can have in general on affiliate marketing. I want to take that a step further and show affiliates just what is at stake and how they can help prevent it.

If you make any money in affiliate marketing,
you need to read and understand this post.

I’m not sure how much more emphatic I can be than that. There’s a good chance you are going to start losing commissions as early as this afternoon, depending upon when the Safari update takes place (now we are hearing perhaps September 24?).

Because Safari is the default browser for Apple products such as iPhone and iPad, this change is going to affect your traffic significantly.

Here are the steps you need to be taking.

Step One: Assess the Possible Impact to Your Site

The first thing you need to do is check your analytics to see how much of your traffic is Safari traffic. The easiest place is through Google Analytics. I’m not an analytics whiz, but you only need a basic understanding to figure this out.

Go into “Audience” “Technology” “Browser & OS” and look at the list for the last 30 days. You don’t even have to do the math–Google does it for you. You’ll see Browsers broken down. Add together anything Safari as a MINIMUM, but also know that Firefox is rolling out something similar soon.

As you can see, for one of my sites, my Safari plus Safari (in-app) are a total of 16%–not a huge amount of my traffic.

But the news is much worse for another one of my sites where Safari traffic alone is 44%. Safari plus Safari (in-app) plus Firefox account for 51% of my traffic on that site.

That means between 44% and 51% of my third-party tracking cookies may be dropped in the next few weeks.

If you are up for a little math, some networks will show you the browsers used for your transactions. For example, in CJ you can run a transaction report and add the columns “Concluding Browser” and “Initiating Browser.” Run the report, export it, and total up your commissions for each browser type. Then you will know the percentage of actual commissions you are receiving through Safari transactions.

Step Two: Check With Your Merchants

The next step is to start checking to see if the merchants you are working with have updated their sites to be compliant with the new standards. A lot of merchants are making changes by the hour. The easiest way to know if they are compliant is if they tell you. However, I’ve only had 2 merchants (out of about 1000) tell me that they are. The next best thing is when a network helps you find that information easily.

In ShareASale, merchants are now being marked when they become compliant so you can easily look for yourself.

Jane was one of the first merchants to reach out to me that they are compliant and sure enough, you can see their account flagged in ShareASale with a green flag and the words “ITP COMPLIANT”:

If the merchant isn’t on ShareASale and other networks don’t start adding these flags, your only choice is to reach out to the merchant or the OPM and ask them if the changes have been made. So far I have been having luck with that, even if the merchant’s response was a date by which they hope to be done.

Step Three: Mitigate Your Damages

Depending upon how many merchants of yours are compliant by the time the update is rolled out, you have a couple of choices on what to do.

First, drop the merchants that are not compliant if you can easily replace them with merchants who are. How much it is worth to you will depend upon how much of your traffic you figured out is Safari and what percentage of your sales come from the non-compliant merchants. If it isn’t a lot or if they have responded that their changes will be made very soon, it may not be worth changing out the merchants.

Second, alert your customers to the change. This obviously won’t work for every site but will work in specific circumstances. For example, as a loyalty site, I can tell Sunshine Rewards members that they will not get their cash back if they continue to use Safari. This will prompt them to use something else when they do their cash back shopping. It is only a temporary fix until other browsers implement similar cookie dropping policies. But it may buy me time until my merchants do become compliant.

Third, negotiate with your merchants who are NOT compliant for some type of make good (some tips on how to negotiate a better affiliate deal in general). You can show them what percentage of your traffic is Safari. Use that data to come up with a fair number that the merchant will use to compensate you for based on your overall sales. For example, you will receive a 20% bonus at the end of each month to account for the untracked sales.

Is This Really a Big Deal?

Assume for the sake of argument that the ShareASale Top 100 list is representative of all merchants. In actuality, they are probably better managed than most merchants and more likely to be following issues like this. But let’s just use them as the best case scenario.

As of today, 22 of those 100 merchants are ITP 2.0 compliant. That is 22% of their best merchants. Now use my 44% Safari traffic from above. Doing a little bit of math, this means that I will lose 78% of 44% of my commissions–or a total of 34%

If the Safari rollout happens today, I will see an immediate drop of 34% in my affiliate revenue.

Let that sink in. That’s basically my company losing 10% of its revenue when Apple flips a switch. Are you prepared to lose 34% of your revenue?

Obviously, these numbers are going to get better over time as more merchants become compliant. However, they will also worsen when the other browsers make their changes. Can you afford to go into Q4 not taking measures to protect your affiliate revenue?