Affiliate marketing still works? Plus private podcasting with Ripple

Hey, folks, and welcome to another episode of the Creator Toolbox. This is a show all about the nuts and bolts behind running your creator business, sharing how we run ours. I'm Colin Gray from the podcast host dot com. Join me, Jacob, as always. How you going, Jacob? Hey, Colin. Yeah, good. Good to be back. Not to sidetrack at all, but I was listening to a few episodes that we've recorded recently, and every single time you ask me that, I say the same thing. I say, it's great to be back. And I

knew that today. And I said before I came on, I was gonna. I'm gonna say something better. I'm gonna say something more interesting. And I honestly couldn't come up with anything, so I'm really. Well, I'm really excited to be back. Maybe I can ask you a different question. It's like, so. And now I'm joined by Jacob. Jacob, what's the last fruit that you ate? A mango. It's delicious. Nice. Good. Damn it, I shouldn't have asked you that. Just make me jealous. Jacob is for

the. For the benefit of the listener. Jacob's currently in Thailand, so he's got a ple. Access to mangoes and all sorts of tasty fruit. So today we've got a few topics to cover today, don't we? We've got community chat tools. We've got affiliate marketing. Is affiliate marketing dead? Is it? I don't know. We'll discuss that. We've got community, totally private podcasting, and a tool you found as well during your research for this very episode, haven't we? That's right. Yeah.

Right, let's jump into. I wanted to start with Ripple. Can I jump in first? Okay, go for it. There's a tool that I have discovered quite recently. I'm going to just bring it up here. So here we go. Private podcasting. I mean, it's a great way to monetize a show, and community is another that really complements it well as well. People love getting exclusive content, and if they can then talk about it with know other listeners and connect with you as the host directly, then that's even

better. So this tool that I've found just recently allows both of these really easily and actually has a few other really cool benefits

too. So I want to talk that through. The tool is called Ripple, and we're going to bring it on screen now to show you. So this is Ripple. Now, Ripple is designed by Brian Castle, who is a guy I've got to know quite well over the last couple of years, creates Some great products. And the principle is that it combines private podcasting with community. So you can create a private podcast on Ripple and then develop a community just within

that private podcast. But equally you have public podcasts listed as well, and you can develop a community around that public podcast. So taking Brian's community as an example, he runs the show called Bootstrap Web runs it with Jordan, Jordan Gal, and the two of them have run this show for years now. I followed this show for quite a long time. Really good show. Really worthwhile listening if you don't already. Just the story of two guys running businesses, creating products,

all sorts of stuff. Really interesting. And unsurprisingly given that it's Brian's product, he has the biggest followed show on the platform so far. It's pretty new, so it's still quite, still quite a fledgling thing, but even so, 172 people he's got involved in this. I mean, really. Yeah, he just, he just built it for himself. He self admits this. He kind of just built it for himself and then has made it more public as well. So the way it works is you come on here as a listener, you search

for the podcast you like. If it's, you know, somebody's mentioned, generally as a podcaster you'll mention this platform. So Brian's mentioned a bunch of times. But you come on here, you could type in creator toolbox. So you'll see our show in the list here we have one fan, which is me. So yeah, if you're out there listening, you want to get in this community, that'd be excellent. I'm thinking about trying

to promote this. The only. There's a question I'll have, actually I'll have for you in a minute, but I'll show you the platform first. You go and you find it and you just say, right, I'm a fan. You mark yourself as a fan. It's over here on the left. If you're not, if it's not one of your favorites, add to favorites and from then

on you can follow this discussion. Now the interesting thing is you can make this private as the podcaster, so you can make it so that people have to sign in, they have to become a member, they even have to pay as well. Monetization options as well. Do you know what? Brian has plans to release monetization options in here, but actually I'm not sure that is here yet. But it's certainly on the, on the roadmap to make it so that people have to pay for this community as well, but there's

certainly the private podcasting aspect as well. So this is the public podcasting side, so you can follow the public podcast, but then you can also set up a private podcast feed as well. And I've got a couple of subscriptions in here. I've got one with Brian, so you can definitely make these paid if you want to, and you can subscribe to them.

And there's a couple of cool things in here. Well, there's the fact that you can just build that community. So you can build a community of people that really follow your show, but then you can also create a private one alongside that helps you release, you know, a more exclusive content. Really kind of build that community around the private side of it as well. But there's just the fact that you can kind of help listeners actually connect with each other, which is something that's not

really very common in podcasting. It's something that a lot of people miss out on because it's often just a one to one thing going back and forth where you're speaking to the listener, this listener hears you, and they never know anything about any of the other listeners. But what I've noticed, noticed in here over the last few weeks of looking at Brian's community is the conversations, the questions. There's something around if you listen to the same podcast as someone else.

Podcasts are so self selecting for people who are of certain values, certain types, certain likes, dislikes, certain psychographics. So there's a really good chance if you listen to the same podcast as me, that we're going to get on well and be interested in similar things. So it's been really cool to see that actually. So, yeah, that's Ripple. So what do you think, Jacob? Interesting tool? Yeah. Yeah, I'd actually, yeah, I would love to use it for the creator toolbox.

What I'm wondering is, do you think that how much do you think we'd actually be interacting with people if we start promoting this for Creator Toolbox? You think we'd get more interaction using something like this versus just asking for emails or, you know, traditional stuff? I think this is what I'm thinking about actually is how much more interaction I think we would get if there was one

place that they could come for it. And in that place they can meet other listeners with all of those similar interests so that you can, you know, you can just share stories, you can, you can talk about episodes, you can pick out a tool that was mentioned on the last episode and say, well, what are the alternatives

to this stuff like that with other listeners. But equally, I think there's something really interesting in here that I've seen Brian do as well, which is as soon as you've got even like 10, 15, 20 listeners in here, what a resource that is for improving

the show over time. So you can come in here. What I would do is ahead of an episode, I would say I'm thinking about talking about this topic, anything you particularly want me to cover on this topic, and then you get a whole bunch of questions that you can build into the plan for that episode. Equally, if you don't even have an idea for an episode, you go in there and say, so what's on your mind? Anyone got an idea for a topic? And you get something that's really powered by your listeners.

And two things there. First, you get more relevant content, obviously, because it's actually powered by your listeners, but you also get more engagement with that content because the listeners have some ownership over it. They've actually, you know, they've powered some of it. They've. They've had a say into what you're. You're creating. So I think we would. I feel like I would be in here really often, actually, partly for just discussions, but a lot around improving the show as well.

Yeah. Do you think we do. We do a private podcast? What do you think would. What do you think would do differently? What would we put in a private podcast? Yeah, I think the power of the private podcast is that you have the public version that attracts the wider audience, and then you do the private one for building engagement. So you offer something special for people that sign up,

and in return, they tend to become more engaged. They could pay, maybe, but even if it's a free one, they become more engaged and they become your kind of core fans that help promote your show for you and help you get it out there to more people and. And all that kind of stuff. So I think that's really cool. And one way Brian's using it, actually a really good case study of it is he's got. So that one that I showed you just then, the. In my private podcasts here,

my subscriptions and what's next. So Brian does his main show with Jordan, which talks about everything they're doing just now. It talks about struggles, problems, solutions, all that kind of stuff. They help each other out. It's kind of like a hot seat every single week, which is really cool. But in this one, he talks about what's next. So this is the private version. So if you like the main show. You're probably interested in what Brian's working on next. And he does short

episodes usually just. Well, actually, I say short, but some of the recent ones have been quite long, like 28 minutes, 25 minutes. But he's giving much more in depth content there and interestingly, he's putting a lot less production value into it. It's. Well, he says it there. This is my audio journal. So, yeah, I was just gonna say. That'S how that reads. Yeah, yeah. And it's. He's kind of just like.

He's often just pulling out his phone. One of the recent ones I listened to was he pulled out his phone on the beach and he was taking a walk and he just. There was like the waves crashing in the background and he was talking through something that he was struggling with at the moment. And so it was 10, 15, 20 minutes of him just sort of talking

through this problem and almost trying to solve it as he's doing it. It was much less rehearsed, much less planned, and much more just, here's what's going on in my head right now. And obviously that's much more just for the super fans. It's much more for just people really interested. But it's such an interesting way to really engage with those super fans, give them more of what they really want and build that engagement even higher.

So, yeah, I mean, can you imagine doing something like that? Like, what would you use that for? I already do some audio journaling stuff and I've actually thought that some of it would probably be. Here's the trouble with it, it would be good content for people who are already interested in what I do. I mean, I feel like that's where private podcasting works best. I might be wrong about that, but I've not been part of many private podcasts. One of the ones that I have been part of, it was

paid for, was a Patreon thing. It was a public podcast primarily. But they had this kind of private tier and they made like it was. It's a comedy podcast. So they're just. It's like after, after dark. Do you know what I mean? Like, they're. They're not pulling punches. They're not too worried about getting demonetized because it's all private. It's all, you know, so you get the best kind of content in there, but it's all kind of

special, special effort content, specials. You know, they would actually get a budget and go and do something interesting and just be funny. So. But I think that only works because they had the public podcast. You think I'm. What do you think about that? You think it's. They kind of have to go hand in hand or can you have a. Yeah, I think so, yeah. Yeah. An exclusively private show generally doesn't work very well at all unless you have another channel. Maybe. Maybe it's,

you know, it doesn't need to be a podcast. Maybe it's a YouTube channel and you do a private podcast to kind of just talk behind the scenes. That it would let a YouTuber who takes like, puts a lot of production value into their videos. Maybe they only get something out every two weeks or every month, lets you put something out a few times a week instead to engage with your audience. But yeah, you generally need another channel

to go with it to be known the podcast. If it's a podcast, the podcast is what grows your audience and the private is what monetizes it potentially, or what engages it, I think. But yeah, yeah, it makes a lot. Yeah. I think platforms like this, though, like Ripple, I think not necessarily just the private podcasting part of it, but giving people a place to come and kind of gather. It's got to be. That'll be quite a good growth tool for a podcast. It'll take a bit of.

It'll take a bit to get going. But is there anything else that Ripple does, like, kind of growth wise? Yeah, interestingly that it does actually help with attracting new listeners because as soon as you go to a podcast, like I mentioned, if you listen to a podcast, somebody else listens to a podcast, it's likely that you're into the same kind of stuff. You probably get on. Well, maybe you wouldn't, I don't know. But I think it's more likely, certainly. So you can go

to the podcasts. Let's say I click on. Let's go from my first million here, come down here and there's a button here, fans also like. So click that. And then I can see that everyone who has signed up for this service that has clicked on My first million has also clicked on bootstrapped web starts. The rest of us acquired mostly

technical rogue startups, open threads. So you see a list of shows that are not necessarily like my first million but are liked by the same kind of people, which I think is actually a really interesting difference, isn't it? Like, you can go and say, like, here's a bunch of shows that are on the same topic, but it doesn't mean you're going to like the hosts the same way. It doesn't mean it takes the same angle, has the same philosophy. Does it? So,

yeah, what's the show you're into, Jacob? Let's have a quick look. If we scroll down there, actually. Bootstrap under. Yeah, with Arvid. He's. Oh, yeah, with Arvid. Good show. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so if I look down, fans also like. And yeah, there's a bunch of stuff in here. Built to last. It's very similar. I mean, this is going to be. I think this is going to be really valuable when it's built out more so at the moment,

it's obviously, it's quite new. I think Brian's only got a few hundred users on it necessarily, so it's not giving a massive variety of shows. It's mostly fans of Bootstrap Web, to be fair. So it always shows off. And so all the also likes lists are very similar. But I think this is going to be really valuable once it builds out, once there's a bigger audience on here. There's already some shows in there I've never heard of, which is really cool, even with

loads and loads of users. So, yeah, that's cool. I think discoverability is always the challenge of podcasting in it. Yeah. So, yeah, that's ripple. So I'm going to be keeping an eye on this. I think the one debate I have is whether we use it. So I love the tool and I think we should use this or at least the principle.

But my one caveat or my one concern is just adding another platform to what we do already. So the alternative, I think is actually just building a space like this in our existing community. So we've already got a community called Indie Pod and we could just build a little space in there that we can link people directly towards. That's a part of the community, but it's still a private little space just for listeners of the creator toolbox or our other shows like

podcraft and the rest. So I don't know. What do you think? There's. There's definitely more utility here specifically for this, but then there's benefit in getting people into our wider community as well via our podcasts. I'm not sure. Any thoughts? Yeah, I have opinions. I. Yeah, I tend to err towards fewer platforms, fewer places the better. Yeah. Although there is crossover between our podcast and audience and critical toolbox audience. Lots of crossover.

I don't know, someone that finds the creative toolbox without knowing anything else that we do. Maybe you think that might be, I don't know, just weird. We're asking them to join a community about something that maybe they're not interested. Maybe they're not interested in podcasting at all. They're just. They're just creators of other types. So, yeah, that's one thing. Yeah,

yeah, it's true. It's true. I would suggest that probably if someone follows our brand of the creator philosophy, they have to end up being at least interested in podcasting. And our indie pod community definitely talks about stuff wider than just podcasting. And our paid community in there, our podcraft academy is definitely widening out and covering all elements of the creator economy, partially powered by this show as well, actually. So, yeah, don't know.

No final decision on that, but yeah, definitely a few things to think about. All right, well, that's ripple. All right, what you got first then, Jacob, you got another topic? Yeah. I have been going very, very deep on affiliate programs because our current program at Alitu hasn't been working. So I had one big question when I started this, and it was, is affiliate marketing dying? And if it is dying, what's the alternative? And I kind of thought in my head before it started, yep, it's probably.

It kind of is dying because it kind of just feels like it is. And it's probably all shifting towards influencer marketing. And I wasn't completely wrong. It's just. It's not a world that I've spent a lot of time in, so I had to actually research. I had to actually go and find out I wasn't completely wrong. But it's kind of a bit more nuanced than that. It was. Yeah, it was a. It was an interesting thing to. It was an interesting thing to look into because it kind of. It goes well, here's the

thing. When do you think the first affiliate marketing website started? Like the first online affiliate program? Oh, good question. I mean, if I'm gonna. If I'm gonna play the game, I'm gonna say like 1980 or something,

because it's probably gonna be ridiculously early. But realistically, I mean, blogs were really taken off in the early 2000. I mean, I think realistically it could have been like 2,000, 2, 3, 4. You were close to the first thing. Oh, really? Never close to the first time. 1989. 1989. And it was a website called PC Gifts and Flowers. And it was exactly what it sounds like. It was just mail order gifts and flowers and people

signed up. And exactly the same way that an affiliate program worked today, they got a commission for every sale that was attributed to them. I'm not sure how they did the attribution. Maybe it was just discount codes probably. But yeah, that really surprised me and that's kind of what put me into gear about thinking of the difference between affiliate marketing and influencer marketing in a slightly different way. Because I'd assume that one

was the evolution of another. Because it's about individuals promoting things for some profit. You know, they work with a brand, the brand sells things and it's, it's. They're really similar, but it's not the same. And yeah, this probably completely obvious to other people, but yeah, I don't know, it's just not a world of being part of. And I'd never

really differentiated the two. But if you break it down, affiliate marketing has happened since the start of commerce, really because it's just a trusted partner referring business to you and then you give them a, you know, a backhander, here's a fiber for the trouble kind of thing that's been happening forever, happening since the start of the Internet and it's kind of continued on. But it feels like it's. Well, here's a question. Do you

feel like it's. Do you feel like it's tailed off because you've been working in affiliate marketing for a long time? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the first money that the podcast host ever made, our company ever made, was affiliate money. It was with Amazon. Amazon was the big guy in the affiliate space back in. Well, that was about 2010, right then. But yeah, absolutely, it was going for way before that. And affiliate marketing was like rife through. Yeah, really strong through the 2000s as well.

I believe when I first started learning about it, there was already all the forums. Like there was the Warrior forum and stuff like that. There was all these places that were really famous for people talking about how to make that work. I think there was definitely. There was growth right through the 2010s, right into 2020, I think. And it was really through 21 that things started to go a bit haywire. And there was a bit of the sort of COVID traffic

spikes and drops again after that that maybe caused some of that. But there was also massive changes in Google as well around that time too, I think. I don't think necessarily the world of affiliate marketing has changed. It's more how people can promote that because it moved much more away from blogging. So it was much harder to start an affiliate blog, I believe by like 2020 20. But actually a lot of people were still doing that kind of work,

but just in different places. So it just became known as brand deals instead. Really there's different variations of that. Sometimes in a brand deal you just get paid one thing up front and that's it. But equally, a lot of people use affiliate marketing on YouTube, working with brands, maybe you get a little bit of regular income plus commissions from stuff that you sell as well. So there's all sorts of variations of it and I think it just evolved in how people were doing affiliate

marketing. And I think part of this came into that I mentioned to you during the week around the whole kind of conglomeration of websites as well, the takeover by the massive brands. Did you, did you find out about that? What do you mean? Give me an example of a massive brand.

Yeah, well, I mean, the trouble is it's stuff that you've never really heard of, like, so outlets like Vox or outlets like, I don't know, even simple stuff like TV Guide or PC World or like Entrepreneur and Forbes and places like that, Cosmopolitan, you know, big magazines like that there. So many of these different brands are owned by just. I think it is. Let me have a look back. I've got the data here. 16. Yes.

So 16 companies actually own like the vast majority of Google search results in the world. I mentioned Cosmopolitan there. So Cosmopolitan is owned by a company called Hurst and they also own things like Men's Health, Digital Spy, Esquire, Redbook, Popular Mechanics, Bicycling, Good Housekeeping, Runner's World. So that's a big magazine brand, but equally they're just like a massive digital brand, aren't they? Like so much of that stuff is digital

digital now. And then you've got other ones like gamespot, Metacritic are much more digital first rather than magazine first, but they're both owned by Fandom and a bunch of other brands they own as well. So there's all these big brands appear to be big brands to us, like the Verge owned by Vox and Thrillist owned by Vox and all that kind of stuff. They all go back up to these 16 bigger brands, many of whom you've never heard of. Who's heard of Hearst or Bustle. Ziff Davis owns IGN and

PC World and all that. You've never heard of these places, but they're the ones that are dominating it. So I think a huge change in the affiliate marketing world was when all of these companies suddenly started gaining so much power in the Google search, partly through conglomeration, because as soon as you own 10 different websites, you can do some

interlinking, you can do inter referrals, all that kind of stuff. Which gives you so much more power than any individual website. And so they all just float to the top and take it over entirely. And therefore, anytime you search for best, best vacuum cleaner and then like PC World shows up. Sorry, like PC. Exactly, whatever. The PC magazine is like something completely unrelated essentially shows up because they know that it works because they have all these other brands

that are ranking for that and making money off it. So yeah, I think that was a huge change that made it really hard for new ones to start up. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Because I mean, going back to the sort of timeline of it, right, so it started in 89. That's when it started 90s by signs of it, which is before either of our time in marketing. Sounds like it was a golden age, an absolute golden age for affiliate marketers.

And that's probably where the sort of like meta forums of discussing what works best and strategies and tactics probably started. Because back then paid advertising was new, very, very cheap, and no one really knew how to use it. So it was all these affiliate marketers that started using it first because it was a really easy way to just get traffic from search from banner ads. Banner ads were big. And so that's one thing. The behavior of

the, of the, like the affiliate marketer changed there. But what was really, really easy then was that the Internet was still a novelty. Trust wasn't really a thing for anyone that was actually using the Internet at that point. You know, as the older fogies started coming online in the early 2000s, then that started creeping in, but everyone was just excited about the Internet and anything was worth clicking on because you never knew where it was going to lead to.

And I think this probably made it really easy at the time to make affiliate marketing work because you had really cheap paid advertising. You had people willing to click on anything. Like, what could be better? Yeah, my question is like, how did they actually make the sales? Because surely, like checkouts and stuff work were a nightmare back then. You imagine people ab testing like check out button colors and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Experiences. Yeah. But it was,

it was still so much better. Like it was so much less competition that people did it anyway, didn't they? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then, and then that started tailing off because big brands started coming into paid advertising. So advertising got expensive and that became the not meta of the time. And then it was niche sites and that was like early 2000s to 2000s. And that's where the podcast

all started. This is your era. And what killed that is the big brands for sure, niche sites were the way. But the interesting thing is it's. So that's. From the. From the. From the sort of advertiser, from the. From the affiliate marketer's perspective. But looking at it from the actual customer's perspective, the person that's clicking on these and buying things, what's changed? There is. And what leads on to influencer marketing is trust. Trust started becoming a much bigger thing on the

Internet. I don't know. I don't exactly know why it was. I don't know if it was the Internet. Historians will look back on this and answer it one day, but I don't know if it was just the sheer amount of people coming online and then the sheer amount of content. And this was like peak late 2000s, early 2000s was like peak clickbait in articles for me. I don't know if that's around when I installed AdBlock, and that's why it feels that

way. But trust started becoming a bigger issue, and that's a problem that niche sites solved, I think. Yeah. Because a niche site was an expert that was focused on one thing. Like you were the podcast host when that started. You know, it was often one person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And rather than getting sort of bombarded with 10, 20 banner ads for like a microphone, you know, people were clicking on these things less

and less and less. But niche sites came about and actually suddenly there was a person, a site, a place to go to and get a trusted review on Samsung qtu, and then you would have an affiliate link in there that would take them to Amazon and they would trust you. But that kind of stopped working for two reasons.

I think that started probably started tailing off. You'll maybe tell me I'm wrong, but I think that probably started tailing off before the rise of influencer marketing happened and before these kind of big brands started taking over all of search. Because trust in like the. Again, in like the 2010s,

that became a big thing. There was like all sorts of headlines around elections and around the place, the politicization of the Internet, and it became a much messier place, and it's only gotten worse since then.

I need to bring this back a little bit. Yeah, no, no, I get you. I get, you know, yeah. Trust eroded as more and more content was created, more and more crap was created, more and more people jump on the bandwagon. It always happens. You get the. The people that. Doing it for the right reasons in the early days, and then it suddenly works and they make Money from it. So everyone else jumps on and does it for the wrong reasons.

So, yeah, it totally dies away. Yeah, but then that's why influencer marketing grew up, wasn't it? Like you're saying? Because then suddenly there's a real honest person on Instagram posting like 12 times a day or on YouTube, like just vlogging, like the Casey Neistats of the world, like literally just carrying a camera everywhere and they're just themselves. And you're like, oh, I like this person. They feel like a friend. Leads into

podcasting. Like podcasts. Podcasts are great for affiliate marketing because there's so much trust built because people spend so much time with you and think of you as a friend. So as soon as you mention a product and you. As long as you don't break that pact of trust by mentioning someone crap, it genuinely is something decent, good for that audience. They're going to keep buying it and lots and lots of your audience are going to do it. So that's why. That's why it

works. I think there's still lots of opportunity in that space. I feel like it's gone more niche. I feel like you need to be able to add something to the recommendation. So, like, the best vacuum cleaner doesn't work anymore. The big brands have taken that stuff over. The commodities, completely gone. They just list 10 best and you look at them all and it's all the same 10best because those brands have paid the highest affiliate marketing fees and basically got themselves in whether they

are the best or not. But if you can add some education like we do. So hosting platforms, like everyone who runs a podcast has to use a hosting platform. So they come along and they're like, what the heck is a hosting platform first? And so we teach them what it is, why you

use it, what you might want to find in a good hosting platform. And actually, they're not all the same. It's not like a Hoover. You don't just want it to suck. Some people want a hosting platform for private podcasting, some people want it for growth tools, some want it for SEO. So we can teach them all of that stuff.

And I think that's a big part of where the opportunity still lies when you go very niche and you add that education and expertise and you can add that to the mix so that the affiliate purchase is actually just on the other side of you helping this person 100%. And that is the reason to answer the initial question that affiliate marketing isn't dead. It's just good

to know. Long Story short, it isn't. It's not like, I know it's a total clickbaity title, but I kind of, I kind of thought it was because it's just, it just, it just feels like that's the way it's going. But it is. I think it comes down to trust. We are able to build that trust because we go into that super niche level of detail. Like you say we're able to earn because. Because we're able to. Yeah, pretty much that. Like, we're, you know, know, we're experts in what we do on the podcast.

Host.com we go into the detail. It's not just a listicle. We'll actually, you know, we'll not just teach you that, we'll teach you everything else around it. We'll help you make the right choice. We'll not just say, this one's the best. This is the top of the list. This is the person that paid more.

And I think that's why sites like ours are still going, but the currency is still trust, you know, and there's, I think that's probably why a lot of people who were working in affiliate marketing before that were on all these forums. Like there was a time where affiliate marketing was just the hotness, you know. Yeah. And it's. And it's just kind of not anymore. And I think that is, that's the thing that's changed. But yeah, yeah, there is a bit of a paradox which I don't understand,

which I want to ask you about. Okay, let me, let me ask say one thing before you jump into that one. I think, I think to be fair to your clickbaity title, I think there is affiliate marketing dead. It depends in some areas. I think it pretty much is like, it's not half it. Well, it's near impossible to go and start a new blog called Best Lawnmowers and actually get that to rank. And even though you could put some education on that, you could make that quite

specific. But the way to do. The only way you could do that is I think actually if you do build some influencerness around it. So you become the lawn. You are the lawn care guy with all of that stuff in the background. So the affiliate marketing that is dead is one person in their bedroom with no knowledge around 20 different topics starting a best lawnmowers.com, best hoovers, best toasters.com, which is what used to happen and used to actually work.

If you put some work into that, that would work. So it doesn't Work from the fact that you don't have the differentiation, the education. But it also doesn't work because now that is so easy for anyone to do with just a chat GPT account or a Claude account or whatever, you can spin up like 500 lira. So in the next two or three years that is just going to be, it's just going to be swamped with sites like that. So it does need that influencerness, that authority,

that trust. Ye for sure. So yeah, sorry, what's the paradox? Well, the paradox is the place, the only place that I've found that affiliate marketing is flourishing and it's that probably the one place on the Internet where I would have thought that we're talking about trust and how kind of what's dying is maybe affiliate marketers that don't. That don't build that trust first. Yeah, web three crypto crypto casinos, initial coin offerings,

NFTs. That is I think where all of the people who were once upon a time just building bestlongmore.com, that's where they've went. There is so much activity in Web3 affiliate marketing. And if you think about it, I like. Well, I've got, I've got questions. I've not done extensive research into this. It just really surprised me. But like the amount

of like just spam messages and stuff all about crypto, I mean, is that, is that where it's all going or is there actual like real work being done on getting people into proper projects? I don't know, it just, it really, really surprised me. But it's quite a big area and there's some serious people working on it. I was listening to when I was, while I was started working on this program. Like I said, I'd never really done much work in affiliates or just really

understood how it works and what the norms are. So I just took a morning and listened to some podcasts, all of the episodes that were released recently on various different podcasts. It's all about crypto. Is that right? Really? That's what they're focusing on. Surprises me

too. Although it surprises me in one way and in the other way it doesn't because I think if you go back to the early, early days of affiliate marketing, so I kind of said a contradiction there in that I felt like a lot of the early affiliates were just writing about stuff they were passionate about that they liked and they just happened to put affiliate on the other end. That's kind of how it happened with us. I was just writing about podcasting and I Just put an Amazon link on it,

thinking, oh, if I get a couple of quid, that'd be lovely. So there were those kind of people, but also there was all the people that just figured out that they could use paid ads to arbitrage their way into earnings and stuff like that. So there's that whole group of people that are just make money online. They're not really. That's what they're interested in. They're not interested in lawnmowers or crypto or whatever. It's just making money online.

And so it feels pretty natural that that bunch graduate towards crypto because it's such a. Well, it's a gamble in so many ways. But like it is a way that people have proven that you can make money online if you're in the right place at the right time, at exactly the right time time. So I don't know. Yeah, one, One way it's surprising. One way it's not. Yeah, I think that's what it is. I think a lot of those people were just making money online. They were just

making Beth Lawnmower. Lawnmower.com and yeah, so, yeah, you're right. It does kind of make sense. But I, but then this, this, this, this issue with the trust, this issue with niche sites getting dominated on search, this, you know, these two things add up to the influencer market and where it is today. The fact that like, I think companies are need to kind of buy trust in a way and influencer influencers are kind of just.

It's. It's a word that I don't actually really like. It's. It's a word that some influencers call themselves and some of them don't like the term either. But like what they are is professional trust builders and not always on purpose. And usually it's best when it's not on purpose. It's just, it's what niche sites used to be. They're really interested in one thing. It might be like

a particular type of content. It might be like get Ready with me videos, it might be podcasting, it might be classic cars, whatever it is, but it's, it's the same thing that niche sites were and what made niche sites quite beautiful at the time and really good for affiliate marketing. But there's a face on it. It's an actual person. It's why the podcast was. Worked well because it was your face on it, was Matthew's face on it and there was that trust. So it totally.

Yeah, you just. The, the dots just connect and it Totally makes sense. But yeah, and I think just to, yeah. Maybe try and cap this off a bit. I, I think though that there's a, there's a, there's a place for something in the middle. And you mentioned this already a few, a few minutes ago, but the, the kind of classic way that brands are working with influencers and working with creators

is they will buy a sponsored post. And in that sense I, I don't know if that's actually that good for the creators or for the brands. And I think that there's something that modern or current influencer marketing can kind of take from affiliate marketing and it's bringing in some element of compensation for performance. So rather than giving someone $300 for a social post, maybe you give them $150 and a commission for everyone sold. And I think that does two things.

Instead of just paying for one post, one, it automatically becomes a longer term relationship because for every sale that comes from that, that link that they have like affiliate schemes of old, they're going to keep getting revenue from them. So there's, there's an incentive there for them to try the product. Maybe they're gifted it, maybe they,

you know, maybe they're given access to it. If it's software or courses or whatever it is, they have to like there's a lot in it for them to understand the product and to figure out whether they like it it and explain that in a way, you know. And I think that's very,

very different to just buying a post and saying, here's a cool thing, have a look at it. They sent me it and boom. Yeah. What do you think on that? I think the only time, yeah, I think the only time that does work is when you're, when it's your area anyway. So like a lot of the time when I've tried to find people to work with like this, whether you call it influencers or whatever, it's people that are already talking about what it is you want them to talk

about. It's. You're absolutely right. Like it's, it's not going to work. If somebody came to us and said, can you put an, Will you talk about our favorite Hoover? Talk about. So we'll put a channel on. Sorry, a video on our YouTube channel about a Hoover. It's just not going to work because it's not the right content as we've not built trust around that. And it's going to be

pretty obviously a paid slot. But if it's something that we talk about already anyway, or at least very closely related to our topic, then it works. For example, in the past, we've worked with tools which are not for podcasters necessarily, but they offer utility for podcasters, like a community platform. So we worked with one membership platform to do sponsored content, and we created that content to teach podcasters how to use this platform to monetize their audience. And so it

was genuinely useful to podcasters. If I'd had that idea without being paid for it, I probably would have still made it. But they gave us the idea. They said, I think Earthing can work for your team, for your audience. We said, all right, let's have a look. I did. I was like, yeah, it does. And so we took the sponsorship post money, we made the content and everyone was happy and our audience was even happy because it was still good content for them. So,

yeah, I think that's the difference. Sponsored content does work, but it has to be very audience forward. It has to be audience first and then it's fine. Yeah, nice. Yeah. So it's not that. It's also not turned into influencer marketing, which is what I thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They are two separate things, you know, and they've both been happening forever. Like you. Like I said, affiliate marketing's been happening forever in the way of referral marketing.

You know, that's happened since the first guy started selling stones outside the cave. But the same things happen with influencer marketing. It's just that. That it's the more natural way, I think, for brands to reach people now, just because of the state of the Internet, really. But, like, Companies in the UK, for example, from the 1500s, have been buying Royal warrants. I don't think they were always bought. I don't know if they're bought now.

I think they're just given. But they could buy a Royal Warrant, which would basically be like the. The monarchy's seal of approval for this business. If you think Caprice, if you've. If you've seen a bar of Caprice, you've probably seen the Royal Seal on there, like that. This is still happening. Boots, the big chemist in the uk, all sorts of brands with these things. And like, yeah, it's just. It's just buying trust and in that sense, yeah, it's not new. It's not, you know,

it's not come from anything else. I don't know, it's all probably dead obvious to everyone else. But, yeah, I had to strain it out in my head if I was gonna do more work. No, I think. I think there's a lot of. It all surprises me when new podcasters come to us and say, right, I've launched my show, next step is monetization. And often the first thing I go to is, well, let's talk about some affiliate marketing for your show. Because you're probably too small still to get sponsorship.

You're probably still too early to think about services products unless you have them already. A lot of the standard monetization methods need maybe a larger audience or a bit more of a back catalogue behind you. But one thing you can start with straight away is affiliate marketing. Because you can just say, I'll sign up for this affiliate program and for a product I already use and I'll just talk about it and link people

towards it, get some commission. And people are constantly, I don't really understand how this, like, what, they'll just pay me a commission for selling some of their product? What's affiliate? What do you mean by affiliate? What does that mean? It surprises me every single time how few people are aware of the whole concept. But I mean, it does make sense. It's quite a, you know, a background thing. You have to make it obvious when you do have affiliate links, it's legal requirements

to pop in saying it is an affiliate link. But people probably skim over that and never even think about it. So, yeah, yeah, not too surprising. Do you know, I'll say one last thing as well, like one last area I think, which is still really alive and kicking in. Affiliate marketing or partnership marketing, whatever you want to call it, is big ticket items, actually, particularly if they need a lot of trust. So an example in our area would be

podcast production. So a podcast production company, let's say, charges like, let's say they charge two grand a month for like really high quality output. Like they work with clients to create a great quality show. They charge two grand a month. We teach people how to produce stuff themselves. And therefore sometimes people will say, oh, I don't really want to do this, it's too difficult. Can I get somebody to help? And we're like, all right, okay, fine. Well look, here's a good podcast

production company. A tiny amount of people will ever want to actually do that because it's such a high priced service. So it's not that attractive as an affiliate program for most of the big brands because they rely on volume. Whereas for us, we'll get like one in a hundred people, one in a thousand people that sign up for this $2,000 a month service and we'll get like 500 quid a month from that. And it's, I mean, that's an amazing thing. Equally, people with a

very small audience can actually make money out of this. So if you're a consultant and you train people how to grow your business and podcasting is one part of that, then you might direct them towards. You only have 20 clients, but you might direct five of them towards a really high quality production Service and get $500 a month out of that as well. So it's a way for a really small audience to actually grow an affiliate income too.

But you have to have that really high trust again because it's such an expensive purchase. So, yeah, it's just another area, I think, because those big ticket items are a really interesting part of affiliate marketing. Yeah. And I think in a way that doesn't quite work with buying posts and buying mentions that's really small. Like micro influencer is the

term. Yeah, can do that stuff. You know, if you've got a consistent, like if you've got a podcast and you've got consistent audience of 500 people, a thousand people, 2,000 people that listen every, every month and it's really, really niche, you know, especially if it's like B2B or something or you know, some, yeah, some juicy area, some juicy niche, then you can, you can make really good money off of that. Yeah. So I think it's kind of, it's more asymmetric.

It's. I think, yeah, influencer marketing is cool because it means that people can fill big audiences and they can earn really, really good money. But I think, yeah, affiliate stuff, more traditional stuff that's just commission based. Anyone can start at any level. It's not really, you know, you're not being courted for the size of your audience. Yeah. Yeah, Cool. I think that was really interesting. It's good to dig into that. I think there's

lots of different aspects to it. I think one of the big takeaways is, yeah, for sure. If you're out there, you're creating content around particular specific niches. It's. Yeah, definitely worth looking into more, seeing if there's any big ticket items in there that you can direct people towards or just the smaller programs that people are, you know, just really looking for your audience is using already. Often people say, like go and look at your credit card statement,

see what kind of things you buy. And often you'll find that a lot of those things that you already buy have an affiliate program. And so you can talk to, you can talk about them with authority because you use them because you're already a fan of that product, so your audience will almost certainly be a fan too. Cool. Right, let's bring this to a close. Jacob. Already gone, nearly 50 minutes. What was the tool though? I want to know what's this tool that you used

during the research for this? You said there was something really interesting you found. Yeah, it's a, it's a tool called Site. I'll just bring it up on screen. It's a tool called Site. Have you heard of Perplexity? I have indeed, yes. You have, yeah. Can you see my screen? I can, yeah. Let me just bring it up on screen. There you go. Got it, yeah. So I think Perplexity is definitely the biggest, the bigger tool of the kind of AI research tools.

That's exactly what this is. It's an AI research tool. But there's one thing I don't really like about Perplexity and it's that it pulls together an answer for you. But the selling point is that it pulls together an answer for you not from its training, which can always be wrong, can hallucinate. We know that it pulls it, it researches it, it goes to Google and it looks at sites kind of

mimicking the way that you would if you were doing the research. So in that way it's, it's, it's quite useful to cut down on some of that time, to cut down on Google, essentially, because it'll give you citations and it'll send you to the right places. But the only trouble with that is that Google is filled with inaccuracies.

There's nothing really stopping a blog post that it uses as a citation in this answer from just having being completely wrong, AI generated rubbish in it, or just it being incorrect for any other reason. So it's kind of flawed in that way.

I still use it because it still has its place. Like I say, just if it's something that you're going to Google and you're going to spend 10, 15 minutes Googling, I would use Perplexity instead because I can get all the links and I can go read them myself and I can get a nice concise answer, especially if I just want, you know, an easy answer. But yeah, I found Site, which is a bit different because rather than searching Google, it searches published academic papers.

And that's, that's pretty much the only difference. I really like that because just by definition it's much more kind of fact driven. You know, you're much less likely to get crap in there. There still will be it's not to say that all academic papers are, you know, top, top drawer, fully accurate, but as a whole more accurate than the first page of Google. I would say. Yeah. Would you agree? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean it's especially useful. So I've used a similar

one. I think I even mentioned it on a very early episode of the creative toolbox called Consensus Consensus app. I think it's a very similar one. I use it for this kind of stuff all the time. Site looks really interesting though as well. Just to be clear out there. It's spelled S C I T E so we pun on the citing your research. But yeah, any question that like you can imagine there is some studies around or any kind of science behind it. Like on the front page here it shows like, does exercise

improve cognition? Can cash transfers reduce poverty? Can mindfulness help with sleep? You know, things like that that actually have a bit of. It's a real question as opposed to just trying to find some general information. I guess it's really useful for. Yeah. So what were you using it for? Particularly for this?

I was trying to find actual studies on affiliate marketing and understand, kind of understand the timeline because I wanted to kind of understand where it came from, where it was like when we started doing it and where we ended up. And I probably did not a very good job of actually explaining that but it did really help me get to grips with it. And it's, it's, there's, I don't know, I couldn't actually get a good answer online because so much of Google is now just geared towards how to do a

thing or an opinion on a thing. It's not really, I don't know, it's not always, it's not always great for finding those kind of answers, for just exploring a topic, exploring the facts. It's just, I mean it's, it's Google, it's people's articles and that rank for whatever reason. And it's not always, you know, exactly what you're looking for. But this, you know, this is, this is really cool. I find this really, really, really, really useful. Yeah. So just

I went through a whole chain. The first thing I asked it was, I think it was just a really simple question. It was when and how did affiliate marketing start? And that's when I found out that it, it was starting that company in 1989, which was completely news to me but wasn't actually that helpful. But what was helpful was being able to ask these follow up questions. So I've asked this question

here. What was the first AI ever. And it's given me a, you know, it's given me a response, it's got citations in there, so I can go and actually read the papers that it's coming from, but then I can kind of keep that going within that context and ask more questions, which is really, really nice. So, like, if I'm, if I'm researching an article, this is probably the first place that I'll come to, you know. Yeah. As a way to, as a way to get facts rather than,

you know, opinions and totally common knowledges. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really interesting as well around the fact that, you know, the health and fitness, the health and fitness space online, it's just, it's long been, it's long been the realm of snake oil salesmen and people just like complete anecdotal research, as in, my friend did this and it worked for him. And it's often complete nonsense, but in the last few years, like some of the biggest health and fitness influencers these days are

so science backed. Like they're, they're completely like, they discuss the literature, they talk about studies that have just come out and these guys are like classic. Often it's guys, obviously. Well, at least that's the ones I'm finding who are bodybuilders, that kind of thing. And they're discussing the research and they're sitting on a couch and they're both like the size of houses and they don't look like scientists whatsoever. But it turns out you look into their background and some

of the smartest guys around, they really look into this stuff. So if you're a content creator and you can show your credentials, you can show the depth you've gone to make sure this is all backed by current research, by current science. It counts like the. I think that the rise of those people online has shown that people care, like the viewers care about that. They don't just want the stories, they don't just want the anecdotes. They are interested in the science behind it.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Really good for that stuff. It's just. Yeah, anything that can be opinion, really. Yeah. I'm going to type in into this one. Does podcasting grow trust with listeners? Let's see. Does it have research around podcasting? I wonder. Here we go. Searching all the best scientific papers. Summary. These studies suggest that podcasting can grow trust with listeners too. Do you know what that was? Setting myself up to fail there.

Imagine if it came back and said research shows that podcasting is actually a crap way to grow trust with listeners. We're like, all right, let's stop this now. It turns out you do. That's good. I'm very glad. Yeah, that's cool. It's really interesting. Yeah, there's loads of studies of sites as well, similar to your one too site. So. Yeah, worth having a look at both, definitely. Yeah. I'm going to have a look at consensus. It's got a nicer UI and that goes a long way. Oh,

really good stuff. Okay, perfect. Tie us up, Jacob. Yeah, that was good. Perfect. All right, thank you for listening out there. If you do want to support some of the content we put out, if you've enjoyed this, if it's been useful, do go and check out Alitu. Alitu is one of the products that we run. It has an affiliate program as Jacob has alluded to. So if you talk to podcasters, if you talk to content creators in general, you could help us sell Alitu

to them. And we do think it's worth it. We do think it's super helpful. It makes it much easier to make your podcast from call recording to audio cleanup that's automated, to editing. That's far easier than just about any other platform out there and hosting built in as well. So it's the all in one podcast creation platform. So please do go and check it out. You'll find it over at alcom. That's a l dot com.

It has a free seven day free trial. So if you want to just try it for one episode, one week, see if it works for you, you can do that at no cost. All right, Jacob, thank you very much. That was good. Fun as always. Thank you. Yeah. And thank you, listener, for tuning in. Yep. We'll see you next time. Talk to you then.