Arsen Rabinovich (00:00:02):
Oh, we’re live. We’re live. All right. All right. Act normal. Act normal. Compose. Compose. Hi. Hi, everyone. Welcome to a very serious episode of TopHatChats. We still do our regular SEO for bloggers webinar. It’s quarterly now. And then once a month, I come to you with amazing people like Adam here, where we talk about a specific topic. And this time, we’re going to be talking about… Not SEO, we’re going to be talking about alternative ways to monetize your content for content creators, and publishers, and bloggers like you.
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Just like with all of our other webinars that we do through StreamYard, we want you to type Q in front of your question so that Melissa… Who’s here with us and you know her from our other webinars, but she’s in the background pressing all the cool buttons, so that Melissa can tag them for us and we can answer your questions towards the end of this webinar. Today, we are really excited to have my really, really, really, really, really good friend, very handsome friend also, Adam Riemer with us here. He’s an award-winning digital marketer, strategist, and affiliate marketing professional with over 20 years in the game. Adam’s all about helping creators take control of their income, which is exactly what we’re going to be talking about today. Hi, Adam.
Adam Riemer (00:01:28):
Hey, Arsen.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:01:30):
Welcome to TopHatChats. Cool. So as people are coming in, we went a little bit in the opposite direction with this episode because of everything that’s happening in our ecosystem with search, with everybody seeing a decline in organic traffic from Google, and a lot of our listeners monetize through page views and Google is a big source of traffic and revenue for them. So we wanted to cover this topic of how else can content creators monetize. So I’m going to just dive into some questions, and these questions, by the way, were submitted by people who were registered for this webinar and we’ve condensed them into specific topics. So to kick things off, if you were starting a blog from scratch today, what would be the first three monetization priorities and in what order? How would you monetize it?
Adam Riemer (00:02:34):
It would depend on the type of blog that I’m doing and what the needs of the audience are. Instead of just doing something that I’m passionate about, I would also tie in where are the readers going to be in 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years from now. Because if you’re going to build something now, just like it was when I used to be a full-time blogger, it’s not about making money off of the first visit, it’s about the lifetime value, and that’s actually how I was able to drive consistent revenue and what led to me having my agency. For example, if I was going to be a wedding blogger, which I was, I would probably start out with a different type of opt-in system and I would be doing a pregnancy blog or something to go off of that.
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From the pregnancy blog, and this was actually one of the first campaigns I ran with one of my first clients, we said, “Okay, they’re having the baby at one, let’s track them so we know about when the baby’s going to be due, then we can advertise birthday party supplies and cross promote that and cross promote with clothing, and fashion, and toddler types of sites.” Not to go into mommy blogger stuff, but, yeah, it was literally mommy blogging type of stuff. And I would think about how can I keep this person engaged for 5 years and 10 years and how do I build the audience to actually develop a community? Because the community’s something someone cannot take from you. And that’s what people like Jill from Scary Mommy years ago did really well before she sold her website. It’s just building that community and what topic is going to be able to do that for the long run, because then no one can take your money away from you because it’s something you own and people are there for you. Does that make sense?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:04:12):
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the first episodes that we did, and this was back in I think 2019, 2020 for SEO For Bloggers Webinar, and one of the first things we covered was diversification and not having Google being your primary source of traffic and that investing into building an email list is… Because there’s no algorithm. You can do a lot of stuff with your email listing. You’re not dependent on the third-party platform. So you’re saying your approach would be more centered around really understanding the audience and what their, let’s say, life cycle is as far as what content they’re going to consume over the next period of time. Let’s say they’re pregnant and different content can be pushed out to them across-
Adam Riemer (00:04:53):
Correct. Or if it was a college blog or a high school blog, I know they’re probably going to go to college after high school. After that, they’re likely going to go to a city. We all love our cities when we’re younger. And so how do I also build something in our complimentary sites? So once they’re done with the college type of content, how do I bring them into entering the workforce into decorating on a budget and how to start to grow up and start savings and stuff and move them into a finance type of space? And you could separate the sites out and run them simultaneously and keep funneling people through your system. Because there’s what you’re passionate about and that’s very easy to write about and create a content outline and a monetization plan for, but you want to keep these people. You worked hard to get them to your website and into your platform. Let’s support them for at least 5 or 10 years.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:05:43):
Right. So with that, let’s say we’re just starting out and obviously people aim towards reaching a certain level of traffic so they can qualify for ad networks and they can start making money through page views and all of that. But there’s a time to get there. Right? And especially now, that’s becoming a little bit more difficult. So what would you consider to be most valuable avenues for content creators to explore for additional source of income that might not be immediately obvious, especially for someone who’s just starting their journey?
Adam Riemer (00:06:18):
So look for where the audience actually is most important, but then look at the algorithms and how that they work. So you have TikTok, which is a useless algorithm. It can drive a ton of exposure pretty darn quickly, but you’re not going to get traffic coming to your site very well. And if you do, it’s probably not going to stick around forever and your TikTok dies after one day or one week. It might get recycled into an Instagram reel, but then it’s going to die after two weeks. If you do something on YouTube, that has a shelf life of two to three years. Pinterest can keep driving traffic for over a year. So it’s think about where you can actually bring people in and where your efforts are going to matter most for a longer period so you can keep consistent traffic in, and then you can work to try to replicate that traffic coming into your website, and then you can figure out…
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So one thing that I’ve seen a lot of people doing incorrectly is they still focus on email only. Split your audience and split your content up to figure out where the younger generation and the older generations are. Younger people don’t even know how to write an email. Some companies are actually, in the onboarding, they teach how to write a subject line and how to write an email. It’s different. It’s a different age. And so they’re also offering classes on how to take a phone call because people are terrified of the phone and I am in that group. But, basically, you want to look at your content that has the younger audience and flip your opt-in box from email to SMS first or give the options when you can’t split that. And your goal is to extract people from these platforms, not become a platform creator. You want them to be inside your ecosystem.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:07:57):
So everything needs to terminate somewhere. Right?
Adam Riemer (00:08:00):
Yeah.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:08:00):
Your TikTok caters to a specific audience with specific content types, Instagram caters to… Maybe there’s a crossover between. There’s a cross-pollination between those spheres-
Adam Riemer (00:08:09):
But it also is a short shelf… You’re not going to get traffic for the long run. You want to build-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:08:13):
The [inaudible 00:08:14] very short on that content. So you’re saying be present where your audiences congregate for information, education, recreation, whatever it is, but the goal is to entice them and bring them in into where you have more control of that pool. Right? And then segmenting that out into who is in my audience and what’s the best medium and vehicle to communicate with them. Right? So SMS, video or traditional email through email, right?
Adam Riemer (00:08:45):
Correct. And use your time smart. So I would start with a longer-form YouTube video and I would break it up into a bunch of shorts. That’s a lot easier than creating a bunch of shorts, and then trying to film a large YouTube video on the whole subject matter. And you’re going to be able to maximize your output and your exposure at that point.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:09:05):
So this goes with being omnipresent across multiple platforms and making sure that your brand is consistently visible there. And now with Instagram being crawled and inexplicable, the business profile pages, and this all feeds into where the ecosystem right now is heading and that’s where we’re already there into the AI-driven search environment where you’re… So being omnipresent and knowing that information will be consumed and synthesized in the AI overview from sources like TikTok and Instagram is important for that omnipresence. Okay. Let’s talk a little bit affiliate marketing because that’s you, that’s your superpower. And we had a bunch of questions here and I compressed all of them in these four questions here. Are affiliate partnerships working as well as they were 5 to 10 years ago? What significant shifts have you observed and what strategies have proven more resilient or effective in today’s landscape?
Adam Riemer (00:10:08):
So the thing that has changed the most is the ability to track. Tracking has been broken substantially because cookies are getting wiped, things just aren’t working, you have merchants launching on multiple networks, which is never smart or a good idea, and you have companies still putting unqualified people in the roles, and a lot of agencies out there just allow a free-for-all program with coupon sites, and browser extensions, and things. Those are all issues we’ve known about for years. What is working is matching the programs to your audience and creating a sheet of where you see people leaking off and to try to figure out which programs can be the most profitable for you. Then it goes well above an EPC or an RPM.
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Basically, what you want to do is you want to say, “Okay, I’m going into this site… So I’ll pick on Walmart or Macy’s because they’re big brands. And you’ll see they have a marketplace, not everything in that marketplace is commissionable. So if you have a fashion site, I think Macy’s doesn’t pay out on Footlocker sales, for example. So if you have people that do buy shoes regularly, all of a sudden, they’re going to buy the Footlocker shoes, you’ve just reduced your own commissions. Meanwhile, Zappos will pay you on that same type of shoe. So the next thing you want to look at is once they get to the exit of the website, do they offer multi-pay, for example, and that’s where you can sit there, you can checkout, and you can do multiple payments. Well, guess what? Those software companies are joining affiliate programs.
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So your customers, if they are budget-savvy, they may now be logging into any of these multiple payment tiers and your commission could be overridden by them because the merchant is allowing them to intercept by installing their software. You don’t have to have them in your affiliate program, and most merchants that I talk to don’t actually even know that their multiple payment systems are affiliates in double-dipping. I’ve seen affiliate agencies participate in their own affiliate programs. So they know your strategies, they know your traffic, and some of them are running coupon sites, some of them are running deal sites, so they’re overriding it and lying to your face. You need to keep track of where you’re making money and where you’re not, where you can be most profitable. Once you have three or four programs, talk to the affiliate manager and don’t accept generic answers.
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If they give you those, then they don’t know what they’re doing and you’re just going to have to use whatever tools you can and look to see, “Okay, this company, their models are age 35 to 50, they are dressed a certain way.” We’re seeing Rottweilers versus Chihuahuas on the site. Is this something that resonates with my audience versus a site that has 20 and 30-year-olds? And where’s the match going to be? Where do people actually shop? And it could turn out younger people actually trust a site that features vintage models, we’ll say someone my age, and it’s things like that. You want to match the merchant to your audience versus who has the highest commissions, who has the best. With one of my old theater websites, I always, always went for the commissions off of ticket sales because they were big-ticket items unintended. But finally, there was a ticket vendor that was paying 25 cents per lead instead and it was a double-step form.
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I was like, “There’s no way I’m going to… I crushed it with that. So just always be open to testing. Even if it doesn’t sound like it makes sense, just keep an open mind when that manager, if they know what they’re talking about and they give you a good case study, maybe they actually did research your website and your traffic. They could say, “We’re running PPC ads off of this phrase,” or, “We’re running this type of demographic on Facebook or on Pinterest,” to try to do their own ads and you actually keep showing up here so you have a similar traffic. “Our conversion rate is 8%, our average order value is $100. That means you could be making X, Y, Z if you test us over this one.” When they approach you with that stuff, give it a try because they actually put the effort in and you may be making a lot more money. And that’s what happened to me with the ticket lead gen.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:14:20):
So this is a little bit more involved than what… I’m assuming a big chunk of our audiences is used to with these ad networks where it’s just plug-and-play, the ad surfaces up and there’s the ad network handle. So now you’re paying more attention, not just like, “Hey, I have a website that’s generating traffic, and I’m working with Mediavine, and I have ads running on my site,” and whatever the ads are showing, whatever they’re showing, and you have a little bit of control here and there of what stuff you want to show or you don’t want to show.
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But here, you’re actually getting more into the weeds of it, right? You’re looking at it from a perspective of, “Who is my audience?” Having a deeper understanding of psychographics, demographics, really understanding who’s there, and then being able to match offers, products, whatever it is, through the affiliate network to your audience, but you’re approaching it from a standpoint of, “How can I make money? What will fit better?” And there’s a question here also about different affiliate networks, but are there networks that will help you figure that out? So there’s a question here. How does the platform like Sovrn truly differentiate itself from CJ? But are there affiliate networks that will help somebody who maybe is very, very new to affiliate marketing and probably does not have the information or the knowledge to think like you think or approach things that way, right?
Adam Riemer (00:15:43):
Unfortunately, the networks don’t hire strategists. They hire people that’s… They have a lot of data. I have to be cautious because my company does rely on networks and I can’t just say they give tons of bad advice and they genuinely don’t care. They do actually care, but they don’t invest in people that could teach you real strategy. The people at their conferences, they’re not there because they’re experts, they’re there because they do interceptions, they do other things. So there really isn’t a network anymore that provides these types of resources. The last one I think that existed that did was [inaudible 00:16:18] which became [inaudible 00:16:19] got purchased and folded. So there’s another important differentiator here. Sovrn is VigLink, and that’s not an affiliate network, that’s a subnetwork.
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What they do is they join the affiliate networks, which would be Commission Junction, Affiliate Window, Impact Radius, Everflow, some of the others, and then they take all of the programs that they can get approved into and they offer you their affiliate links. I believe that they’re still using a JavaScript, and I could be wrong on that. You install that into your website, and then as you link to a specific merchant or a program, it’ll redirect through the JavaScript, set the affiliate cookie, and you get a portion of the sale. So it’s not a bad idea to use Sovrn or to use Skimlinks or to use any of the others, but what I would do if I was using them is I would track which merchants I’m getting sales from. Some of them allow you to use postback, some of them allow you to really fine-tune where you’re doing it, you’re only getting a portion of each sale.
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So once you know you make consistent money with a specific vendor and you know the pages that’s happening from, go direct with that vendor and show them that you are performing at this level through that subnetwork. And now try to get yourself a better deal. One, you’re going to get the full commission versus a partial commission unless the subnetwork had a custom deal, which they may have. Two, if you’re driving decent volume or that affiliate manager needs to show that they have top-funnel partners or mid-funnel partners, then you have the upper hand and you may be able to get a better commission than Sovrn or Skimlinks or Digidip or ad goal, any of them had and now you’re making more money, you have a direct relationship with the merchants. The added benefit of getting that direct relationship is that you can be first to market with PR releases, with new products.
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You can say, “Hey, I know this deal’s coming out, can I break the deal? Leak it early?” And we do that with some of our partners sometimes. We say, “Hey, there’s a brand new product. It is not going out to the public for two weeks, but, oops, here’s the creative if you accidentally spill the beans.” There’s things you get when you go direct. So test and use their data, and then use it for your own. Just make sure you’re actually paying attention to the data so you know who to join and where to join. You can also rotate your links and say, “Okay, I do have this vendor and they’re doing good for me, but here’s a similar one. I just have a good feeling about it,” or, “Their website experience is good. They have a seamless e-commerce checkout process.” So maybe you split-test it. I don’t know if these two plugins exist anymore, but AdSanity and AdRotate. You select, you flip out links pretty fast and pretty easily on WordPress.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:53):
Let me cut in real fast. Sorry, Adam. So Adam is throwing a lot of information to everyone-
Adam Riemer (00:18:57):
Sorry.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:18:57):
… here. We will… No, no, this is great. We will have a recap. There will be a transcript. So don’t freak out, just be patient with us. There will be a recap. There’s going to be available on YouTube right away, but then we’re going to have a transcript, and links, and everything else in a few days. So just to make sure that… Again, I want to just compress this. Sovrn is more of, let’s say, a broker in between the major affiliate networks and publishers who might not have the traffic or the visibility to work directly with the affiliates or with the bigger brands, but they can qualify with Sovrn, and then obviously they make a little bit less money.
Adam Riemer (00:19:38):
Yeah. But even if you make less money, you’re getting a ton of data and you don’t have to do the work and put it in. You also don’t have to change out every single link on your website so you’re saving time and you could focus on your company. There’s always a balance and Skimlinks and Sovrn can be a really good option, especially if you’re time-constrained.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:19:57):
A lot of our listeners are food bloggers. Beyond Amazon, what niche or higher commission affiliate programs would you recommend content creators explore, like food bloggers, especially these days, the traffic is low?
Adam Riemer (00:20:14):
I would go off of the niche. So if your people are more woodsy and they’re more rural, if you were… The Pioneer Woman, she has everyone from everywhere, especially after Food Network, but think about camping supplies and think about the other things they’re doing. You can also survey your audience. You can ask them, “What do you do in your spare time? What do you do in this? Would you like me to start testing out products if you’ve been confused? And even though it’s off-topic, you don’t want to take your website silos and your content silos off-topic, but if you do have an active readership and they do have the same types of hobbies, there’s no reason you can’t do a couple of shopping guides and no index follow them via meta robots… Is everyone pretty tech-savvy in here or no?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:20:59):
Yeah, yeah.
Adam Riemer (00:20:59):
Okay. Cool.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:21:01):
[inaudible 00:21:00] index. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Adam Riemer (00:21:04):
Yeah. And so these can exist without impacting your site’s SEO and taking you off-topic, and it’s something that provides value. It’s something that can still get shared regularly on social and can still do it without taking away. It’s like you can still tell the story of your great aunt’s favorite fruit bowl that sits on the table for Thanksgiving, just you can put it somewhere so it doesn’t impact the rest of the site.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:21:29):
Right. So you’re saying that, I’m a food blogger, let’s say I write about just general recipes. And I have a pretty active email list… Not even active, but a pretty large email list. Let’s say a 1,000, 2,000 people. I can survey them and I can ask, “Oh, what do you think about camping,” or, “What do you do in your free time?” And then offer guides like, “Oh, here are recipes for camping,” or, “Here’s this,” or are you talking about specific… Or offer recipes for camping, but then also include links to gear, like, “I would use this outdoor fire pit,” or-
Adam Riemer (00:22:09):
Correct. I’m talking about the kayaks or the tent or the actual cooking materials. And you can even go out and have some fun, literally burn the pots and pans over a fire and show them, “This does not live up to its name-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:22:22):
Again, but the traffic source to that content is not Google. The traffic source to that content is your email list, your social, and all the other ways that you drive traffic.
Adam Riemer (00:22:30):
Yeah, totally. Google’s totally irrelevant from that. You’re providing a user experience. But it could be anything. It could turn out that, hey, the majority of your audience is three kids, so you need to sit there and budget for that. Maybe they’re all in the same types of age ranges and everything, so you know that you’re going to be planning for preschool and kindergarten. Now, all of a sudden, you have one in junior high school, they’re going to start hitting the age where they like to fight back with you, and so you have the elementary school with that.
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And you’re creating guides and resources so you can keep your own sanity while they’re going through this. And these are still things that are relevant. Then you can sell school supplies, you can sell a lot of other things. And these are ways to make money. You can also do a lead gen for therapy, and I’m not even joking about that one because we could all use a break, or different groups of like-minded parents in your community. There’s a lot of different ways to monetize through that. There’s also after-school programs. So if you notice that, you can always sell and do lead gen for that.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:23:33):
This answered our next question here. So for a blogger that’s about 20,000 page views per month, what are the most impactful and often overlooked ways to significantly gain affiliate marketing revenue? And this, we covered this with that.
Adam Riemer (00:23:46):
Well-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:23:47):
Unless we have something else.
Adam Riemer (00:23:50):
Sorry. Yeah, that’s a totally different answer.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:23:51):
Okay.
Adam Riemer (00:23:51):
So put the affiliate link where the person’s going to use it. So you said recipe blog. And I had a recipe blog. Funny story, they thought I was a woman on the blog. Same with my wedding one because someone called me a Mary on it. So I went with it and I did a webinar as Mary, but I hired someone to go out and pretend to be Mary, and I was literally typing the messages of what to say and how to respond.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:24:17):
I love it. Is this on YouTube? Can we link to it?
Adam Riemer (00:24:20):
No, this was years and years ago. And I sold a ton of aprons and some other stuff off of the recipe blog.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:24:28):
Which is actually a pretty cool idea, aprons. Right?
Adam Riemer (00:24:33):
Oh, I have a zebra apron still and a cupcake apron sitting there. They’re frilly, and lacy, and they’re super fun.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:24:39):
Send it over. Do you have more?
Adam Riemer (00:24:41):
Do you want me to show you one of the aprons? I can grab it out of the closet. But, no. So when I was listing the supplies and the bullet list, and when I would put it on the actual downloadable and printable recipe, that’s not where I was actually making the affiliate sales. And so what I would do is I would start and I would tell the person, “Hey, I’m going to link to these at the bottom of the recipe. That’s where you can find these again. So absorb it, learn how to make this dish,” and then I’d give it a nice little roundup. Because they would click on the top part when I was linking there and like, “You will need,” and they would create the list, but they weren’t ready to shop.
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When I said after, “Now, here’s where you make the purchase,” and I gave a very specific call to action and I linked to the stuff, I also looked at, if you don’t have this ingredient when it was some weird things… So I’m allergic to fish, but I actually did a lemon cupcake with salmon and caper frosting on top, cream cheese… And we just grinded up the locks and everything and made a… Everyone said it was good. I couldn’t eat it. But I was like, “Now if you don’t have capers, if you live here or something,” and I would link out to a couple of different stores that normally had it, and I was actually making money off of grocery delivery versus the actual capers themselves. So think about how the person can get deliver or how you can make their lives easier. This story would actually be inappropriate to say on this webinar, but-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:26:04):
How inappropriate?
Adam Riemer (00:26:04):
I had another interesting one where I used to make a bunch of money doing Grubhub and Seamless type of delivery. I would do push notifications through an app. And it was late at night at 1:00 and 2:00 in the morning on a specific type of app and I was just like, “You know what? You can have food waiting for you when you get home.” That’s what I’m going to say. That’s the appropriate version.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:26:29):
Got you.
Adam Riemer (00:26:30):
Yeah. So it’s like just think about the user, think about their needs at the current time, and think about when they’re going to be ready to shop, when they’re ready to take an action. Don’t try to force it on them, make it naturally occurring and you’re going to increase your affiliate commissions. And don’t just link off of one word. You can link off of a full sentence. That tended to work really, really well for me. Especially when I was outlining weddings and how to do a wedding, it just… Yeah.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:26:55):
Let’s put some SEO guardrails up first. So if you’re going to link like this, you have to apply a rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” to it. Right? Okay. So, again, it boils down to really taking off your content creator hat and putting on your marketer hat and really, again, digging in and understanding the behavior of your audience as they engage with your website. You can use tools like Microsoft Clarity to really, really get a feel for where people’s eyes are and where they’re spending the majority of their time. And then these tactics, you apply these tactics to maximize the clicks and really optimize… Instead of for the search engine, at this point, you’re optimizing for the user and your goal is to drive that click to your affiliate. Let’s switch towards a few other topics here. Next to display ads, in your experience, what are the most lucrative and sustainable ways for content creators to monetize their content in the current environment? We covered a chunk of that. What do you think?
Adam Riemer (00:28:05):
I’d just say cater to your audience’s needs. There’s some skin bloggers and health and eco-friendly where it’s all about just wellbeing, and the best way for them to do it was to create a private community that’s a pay to subscribe and an annual in-person event with estheticians and other stuff. A lot of them were estheticians. And that’s how they made all their money. They turned it into a giant event. I work with a large accounting blogger and YouTuber and he’s created an in-person event once a year for all of the business owners and people that he caters to. He sells 1,000 tickets every year for it now. For other people, it could just be a community where they can interact with each other, the members, and there’s a paid and a free version, and then you do an exclusive once-a-week one-on-one or small group interface where people can ask questions and you engage.
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It’s going to depend on most subscription boxes are starting to get a little bit popular again, you could try doing one. They are a nightmare to try to maintain and source, and people always get angry when the post office can’t deliver it on time. But if you’re organized and you’re able to deal with that, that works. You can also start creating your own products. One person that I worked with who was a creator, she launched her own line of Christian gift paper, and ornaments, and things. Now she’s starting to get into a crafting kit and subscription because it just took off. It’s really think about your audience and what will be interesting to them and you can create a product around that, and if it’s a subscription or something that’s repeatable, even better. Does that answer the question?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:29:40):
Yeah. So perfectly leads us to the next question. Let’s talk about digital products. For food and travel bloggers, and again, that’s a big chunk of our audience, beyond standard eBooks, what innovative and less common digital product ideas have you seen succeed and why do you think they resonated?
Adam Riemer (00:30:00):
Well, first, I think that eBooks are not overdone. I think people lack creativity with them, especially travel guides. So I don’t see anything unique in any of them. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. And I have this in an upcoming article because it’s a pet peeve of mine. Go niche with it and give things that actually help. Don’t just show a photo of yourself at the location. That doesn’t help anyone. That just shows you were there. So what you can do instead is say, “If you want a photo that looks like this, you’re going to want to stand here.” Literally take a picture of where they should stand and say, “This is the angle to do it.” If you’re working with people who have trouble walking and need a cane or in a wheelchair, talk about the different rooms and the levels on specific cruise ships. Talk about which ones have most access.
(00:30:49):
I live in Washington DC so we have the national museum, and you can actually see the hours that have more people and less people. Instead of just saying, “Enter through the back,” show a picture of the back doors that are more wheelchair-friendly, and then also map out in your travel guide where the elevators are and the slower times so that people can actually get to experience the whole museum. No one ever goes into that detail, which is why these eBooks and travel guides are not very helpful. They’re all the same thing. “Visit these sites, do this.” Give people stuff that actually helps them and show them where to stand in the visual cues. I was working with a travel blogger and they were very proud about their Edinburgh content and I was like, “But how do I actually replicate this?”
(00:31:33):
And we talked about one of the castles, because I had been at that castle twice, and I said, “So I do know for a fact that this staircase is less traveled because it’s a lot steeper,” so you can actually get to the photo or spots a lot faster and make it here so you can get down to the bottom of the hill in the second castle in the same day. You don’t actually outline how to find that. You just say, “Go up here and use the staircase.” Give them the directions to find that, and that’s how you can stand out and have a travel guide that gets backlinks and sells more often because it’s more helpful. Outside of doing that stuff, what you can do, I mean, the airlines and stuff do not pay good commissions. You could try sponsorships, but that’s a one-and-done deal where you get paid, and then it’s gone. So I don’t know. I always come up with ideas for the individual. It’s hard for me to give a generic one because what’s going to work for Arsen’s not going to work for me.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:32:26):
Right.
Adam Riemer (00:32:27):
I wish I had a better answer. Sorry.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:32:30):
That’s a good answer. So for eBooks, what would you recommend as the preferred platform for selling based on conversion rates and ease of use?
Adam Riemer (00:32:42):
Gosh, the one that allows the least amount of chargebacks and the least amount of pushback for you.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:32:51):
Good answer.
Adam Riemer (00:32:52):
Yeah. They’re all getting really competitive on their credit card rates again right now. So if people are paying by card, you can actually get a pretty good rate. But look for ones that allow the flexibility and don’t make you jump through hoops and are flexible on the payment terms so you can actually get paid in a reasonable time versus having to fight like, “Hey, you haven’t released payment. What the heck?”
Arsen Rabinovich (00:33:13):
Right.
Adam Riemer (00:33:13):
Just go for what works within your stress levels and you can afford financially.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:33:20):
So this is not a question that was submitted, but just hearing you talk about all of this, what… Again, I’m putting myself in the position of me being a general food blogger and my only focus was traffic acquisition. I built an email list. It wasn’t my primary focus, but I have a little bit there. Mainly, my two main channels are Google and Pinterest. And I really am not very techy and I don’t really understand my audiences, have a hard time really digging into this data. Are there tools, are there platforms that will help me or educate me on who my audiences are, give me maybe some information around them, help me better understand whose attention am I grabbing?
Adam Riemer (00:34:10):
There’s a ton of them and they all just slip my mind. I just forgot the name. I’ve mentioned them in so many… Oh, my gosh.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:34:17):
We can come back to this or, also, we can-
Adam Riemer (00:34:20):
Well, there is an easy way to do it though that’s also inexpensive. So if you have an email list and they’re on your website, you can upload that email list to Facebook, for example, and you can run ads to them. The benefit here is Facebook breaks down… If the Facebook has that email address associated with a Facebook account, it’s going to show you the demographics of that specific audience and who are on your list. You can also actually figure out who’s clicking on which types of ads and which messaging.
(00:34:44):
So if one of your recipes is for pizza, and another one’s for seafood tower, and another one’s for bacon, then you can say, “Okay, the people in their 30s, they’re loving the pizza. The people in the 40s want their bacon. The people in the 20s want their champagne and seafood towers.” And so you can actually get a lot of data there, but it’s going to give you the majority of who your audience actually is. And you can spend $50 and you’re going to get so much data over the long run and who engages with what and what types of imagery too. You can run five photos of the same exact dish that you prepared, but from different angles. One’s a flat lay, one’s direct with a background in it. Now you know which ones your audience reacts to more. So as you’re doing your emails and as you’re doing your social media shares for your OG tags and everything, you now know which ones to include where because it’s going to resonate more with your audience visually.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:35:34):
Holly just chimed in, said SparkToro is also a good tool to help you understand your audiences. Okay, I like this. This is really good. Let’s talk about membership sites. And a lot of our readers… And again, travel and recipe, and I’ve had these conversations, we’ll be like, “I’m just going to go membership site. Screw Google, I’m just going to go membership site.” When does it truly make sense to consider closing a website and turning it into subscription-only? And if you have experience in this, what price points for ad-free memberships or premium content tend to convert best?
Adam Riemer (00:36:18):
Don’t ever close your website. Your website is your first public-facing viewpoint. It’s where people come in, it’s how people can still find you. It’s how people can share why people should engage with you and find you. So you don’t want to close it. What you want to do is you want to create some form of value proposition that people would want to pay for. If they read five or six articles from you and they’re hooked on it, they might opt in with their email. Now give them that value proposition that makes them want to pay for it. You can have quotes from similar people. And then the price point’s just going to depend, I know some people that charge 1,000 a year, some people that charge $10 a month for their memberships. There’s a business community that… I work with a large business YouTuber and I think he charges over… What’s he at? 200 a month or something? But his community is entrepreneurs and people that are willing to spend more versus someone who’s just doing this part-time or it’s a knitting thing for hobby where they might spend $5.
(00:37:14):
So just think about the right time and think about when you actually have the time and energy to dedicate to make it worth their money. As long as you’re making it worth them spending their money, that’s the right time. You can also test different price points. You could say, “Okay, I want to make $10 a month, so maybe I’m going to charge $12, but if they bundle a three-month package, I’ll lower it to 11, and $10 if they do six months or more and pay in advance with no cancellations.” These are different things you can start to test. Then you can also say, “Look, you all are grandfathered in here, but what would you feel if I told you the price was now $25 a month?” And there’s no reason why you can’t test. We do this all the time in SaaS where we have our pricing grade and we highlight the most popular, we put different banners over it and we say, “Hey, this is the one that has the most benefits,” or we call out more features.
(00:38:07):
You can also try under the price point, say, “Which one matters for you? Do you want… And you can offer different tiers where you can say, “Look, I join a call once a month for people on the top tier, but not everyone needs that or wants that or wants it all the time. So you can do a middle tier subscription where you don’t get access to me, but you do get access to all the content, or for an extra $5 on your subscription, you can ask questions during the webinar,” like people are asking questions here, “But if you don’t pay that five, guess what? You still get access. And chances are someone asks the same question you were thinking, but you get the live recording.” And so there’s different ways you can test your price points. And if it turns out almost everyone’s opting into that $5 upsell, guess what? $5 is not going to be a deal-breaker. So maybe charge that as the base fee and everyone now gets that, and now you have the higher price point. You add another five on for the next round. So just always test your prices.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:39:01):
Again, you got to start thinking like a marketer when you’re doing this.
Adam Riemer (00:39:05):
Well, a business person. This is a business.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:39:10):
Right. Okay, so some questions around Substack. Majority of the questions were, do you think Substack is a good place to be to build an email list and to just start monetizing and gain more exposure?
Adam Riemer (00:39:28):
Substack is the same way that I feel about any third-party platform. They can kick you off at any time. You can be removed and lose everything. It’s the same exact thing as medium.com. Both of them have the opportunity to bring in traffic, both of them have a readership and a subscriber base. If you’re not already a big name and popular, they’re not going to be sending you things, but it could optimize in Google Search and Bing Search and bring traffic in that way. Problem is you could be shut off at any point in time. If you have the ability to optimize your own content and do the list yourself, put the content in your own website and put the effort into your own website and your own platform. If it’s absolutely not working no matter what, give it a try. And then once it is, see how you can get people to want to join your newsletter and see if you can actually funnel that type of brand demand into your own website. The goal is to not rely on a third party or a platform you don’t own.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:40:27):
So don’t use Substack as a secondary publishing platform. Your website should still be where everything terminates. Use Substack as a channel to gain exposure, build some authority and drive traffic to your site. So use it as if it was just another channel. What are the most effective and sustainable strategies for monetizing Instagram and other social media platform in today’s algorithm-driven landscape? Pinterest, a lot of our publishers have strong Pinterest followers, big numbers, any unique approaches there?
Adam Riemer (00:41:11):
I just really don’t like Instagram. But with Pinterest, there is something. So I used to get one million repins on average with my Pinterest account. What I did was I would measure what works, what doesn’t, but also drives in revenue. So an example of something that I did do to get those million pins with one specific website I was running was I would purposely make a mistake and I used cultural things to do this. So I spelled Chupacabra wrong, but then I corrected it. The original pin wasn’t replaceable so it was missing that. So that caused a giant uproar. But when they would get to my website, they would see the word Chupacabra spelled correctly. And when that one took off, I said, “Well, huh, maybe there’s something behind this.”
(00:41:55):
So what I did was I pulled the stats for every single country, how many people have mobile devices, how many countries are online, what portion of the country is active on social media, does the country have a government that regulates it or do they have free speech and free will in their country. And so what I did was I replicated similar… It was an international type of website where we were… I don’t want to give away the niche specifically, but basically what I did was I needed to bring in an international audience that had money and had people living overseas similar to travel with expats, which was a big part of the community. And what I did was I monetized through sending gifts back home or for parents being able to send gifts to their kids studying abroad overseas. That was the niche. And so by doing this, what I was able to do was I was able to get a million repins from people and that brought the visibility up.
(00:42:49):
Pinterest did… I believe it was a Type-A Parent, Kelby’s old conference, that became Plaid St. They had one of the first hires ever at Pinterest. She came up on stage and actually said, “Yes, we do use domain authority, and there is a domain trust signal inside our algorithm.” By creating all of this engagement with comments, with likes, with saves, with repins, we were able to build up that trust authority for the site and it started to go crazy. And then I was able to replicate this across multiple countries. Then we did gifts by type of country, then we did urban legends like the monsters and all of the other… There was one of my favorite monsters that I got to research outside of Nessie and the Chupacabra was the aswang, which is the Filipino vampire. So it’s like I got to learn all this cool geeky stuff too. And it became a passion for me and it all started by helping parents send gifts to their kids.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:43:44):
Okay. So from what I hear-
Adam Riemer (00:43:44):
And so, basically, what your actual answer… Sorry. The actual answer was look for where you can get traffic that can be monetized. So I brought people in off of cultural awareness and how to do it without being offensive, get them onto the email list, knowing their expats by sharing guides, separating out who was there for the viral content and who was there to shop, and then figure out what they needed. It turned out it was parents and expats. And so I would monetize the gifts, the care packages, and things like that, and that’s how I was making money off of it. Google didn’t matter.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:44:17):
So, again, I’m a food blogger and I have a strong presence on Instagram. I’m not monetizing well right now, or we’re not making a lot of money from Google traffic. Whatever traffic I’m getting from Instagram to my site based on my recipe content is doing its thing and now I will have some offer or I want to monetize the traffic that my audience is there. So from what you’re saying is, again, understand your audiences, understand trigger points, emotional triggers, whatever it is. Right? For some people, it could be misspelling. For some people, it could be saying something in the wrong way, watermelon instead of watermelon. Right? But get some-
Adam Riemer (00:45:05):
[inaudible 00:45:06].
Arsen Rabinovich (00:45:11):
I don’t know if you remember, we used to market expensive women’s shoes back in the day. And we used to do all kinds of experiments where we would have a photo of an open-toe shoe and the model didn’t get her pedicure done. Right? And that would be a trigger point, and that post would go nuts. People would comment on it. It wasn’t positive, but it would improve our affinity score, it would improve People Talking About This, PTAT score back in the day with Facebook. And then what it created was an environment where other objects that we would post, other things that we would post after that… Potato, potato.
(00:45:55):
Other objects we would post would get attention obviously not as much because there’s a certain amount, again, of time decay on your viewer authority, right? But it’s an algorithm. Right? So you have to have some event where you’re getting that virality. Okay. So, again, it goes back to really understanding your audiences, really understanding what offer you can present to them, and then how you’re going to interact with the platform where you have not full control or partial control of your audience and what you’re going to inject into that audience based on what content you present. Is there a best way to integrate and monetize vertical video content like reels and TikToks within a traditional blog ecosystem? It’s a weird question, but I’ll let you try.
Adam Riemer (00:46:49):
I don’t know.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:46:50):
Good answer. Moving on. Okay, everyone’s getting less Google traffic. How can content creators creatively, innovatively prove their worth to brands for sponsorships, especially when traditional KPIs might be lower? So everybody’s traffic is low, but I also think brands understand that everybody’s traffic is low, and I think brands also understand that some traffic is much more engaged now than it was before, regardless of what everybody’s talking about. Right? How important… Well, the first part of this question is how can content creators prove their worth or become important for sponsors? What do you think about that?
Adam Riemer (00:47:45):
Look at where your value is. So I’m seeing a lot of creators showing up as sources in LLMs, like ChatGPT and Perplexity. And what you can do is you can say, “Look, my content, this is a… Probably, they’ll eventually figure out to start blocking this stuff. But for right now, if a brand wants to be visible when someone says, “What’s the best type of bakeware to buy,” or, “What’s a good alternative to… And I’m going to butcher the name. Le Creuset? Did I say that right or no?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:48:13):
Sure. Le Creuset. Yeah, yeah.
Adam Riemer (00:48:15):
Sure. But your shopping lists and your information could be the source, and if a brand wants to be featured in there, they have to work with you. So you can negotiate a higher commission. You can say, “Nope, you got to pay to be on the sponsored list.” Now when you do that, you do have to have the disclosure for compliance for the FTC, and for Google for SEO, you’re going to want to put the rel attributes onto your links.
(00:48:42):
But there’s a lot of value that you might not be thinking about when you’re approaching these brands. So when you’re talking to the search or when you’re talking to the AI or when you’re talking to the C-suite team, say, “If you want to be featured here, you’re going to want to be on this page on my site and this page on my site, this is how you get here. One, I want you to buy an ad package for the next two months from me at this cost. And two, you’re going to have to be a sponsor in this post, which costs this much money.” Now you’ve secured some revenue for a few months. And, yeah, I mean, it’s just look at your value.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:49:19):
One of the questions here, “Adam, if you’re comfortable sharing… They literally wrote this, “What’s the best income producing affiliate brand you personally use or recommend and why does it stand out?
Adam Riemer (00:49:35):
What works for me, it won’t work for you.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:49:37):
But we’re asking-
Adam Riemer (00:49:40):
What’s your website? What’s your niche? And I might be able to-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:49:43):
Again, let’s say food and travel. Let’s say food and travel.
Adam Riemer (00:49:48):
I have no idea. I’m an open book. I’ve published the brands I work with.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:49:54):
Right.
Adam Riemer (00:49:59):
My audience comes to me because they like SaaS, they like the fact that I’m arrogant and I always say I and me. But if your brand’s differently, they’re not going to engage with you that way. There was a panel at Affiliate Summit for years with Syed Balkhi, Jonathan, Zac, and… Who else was on that? There was one other person. And they were all six and seven-figure bloggers, but the products and the places they would promote, even though they had the same audience, converted differently because they were there for different reasons with them and that’s why they never had to see themselves as competitors. So don’t worry about what’s working for the people that are similar to you. Worry about what’s working for you and you can test theirs.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:44):
Right.
Adam Riemer (00:50:48):
I’m sorry.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:50:49):
No, no, no. Don’t apologize. I’m trying to reframe this in a way where… And I understand where they’re coming from. Most likely, and I’m assuming, they’re like, “If Adam knows a brand that pays out really, really well or has good promos, or a place to go to find these brands,” right? Because what I used to do is I used to go to ShareASale and I used to just go through offers. I didn’t care what the payout was. I was looking what is a good offer that it’s easier for me to promote. And I get it. Everybody approaches it differently. I had different audiences across different platforms and I could run different offers and… I get it. But we talked about this earlier too. Can you go outside of your niche? So a food blogger selling… You look good, you look good. A food blogger selling camping equipment or promoting camping equipment. Right? Can you recommend a brand that possibly somebody can cross-promote?
Adam Riemer (00:51:55):
So one of my clients is busy and I manage their affiliate program, and we do LLC formations and some of the legal work, and I believe we do 501(c)(3), we pay out an incredibly competitive commission on that. I can also tell you firsthand, we don’t work with the coupon sites and the browser extensions and stuff because I have control over who’s in.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:52:13):
Right, right.
Adam Riemer (00:52:14):
Now it’s not going to convert for you on a food site, but if you teach how to host a bake sale and you have a guide to doing a 501(c)(3) or you have how to launch a food truck or you have a guide about setting up your own cafe or you have that… That’s where you can make the money from it and you’re going to get a good payout from there. And you’re going to find an affiliate manager like me there who’s going to work with you one-on-one to monetize. I have set times on my calendar every single week where I just talk to partners regardless if they’re big or small and we see how we can make things work.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:52:48):
Right. And I think that’s very, very helpful because, again, some of these bloggers are restaurant owners, chefs, and they can put out guides on, “Here’s what I would do if I was starting a food truck,” or provide some guidance. Okay. So that’s actually really, really awesome. Okay, let’s keep going. We have about seven minutes left. We have four questions. Let me see which ones would be good. And we have some questions from the audience as well. Okay. So with all the changes happening with AI, what are the most robust strategies creators can employ to protect their income streams if organic traffic starts to decline even more?
Adam Riemer (00:53:30):
Go to YouTube, go other places, bring your content to where you can still get traffic. AI Overviews is flat-out stealing from you all and it’s total BS. I’m trying not to swear.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:53:46):
We’ll edit it out on post-
Adam Riemer (00:53:47):
It’s not cool what Google’s doing to any of you right now. It’s not fair. And I hope some of the industry associations, especially the major media ones, go to bat for themselves, which also benefits you all. Go to where you can still get traffic. AI Overviews is featuring a ton of videos now. Left and right, they’re featuring images-
Arsen Rabinovich (00:54:08):
Sometimes two videos per overview.
Adam Riemer (00:54:11):
Yeah. And they’re featuring infographics again. So they’ve made a resurgence. There’s a lot of things you can do to actually try to get some of the clicks. Something I am seeing a little bit, but I don’t have data on it yet, is when we give most of the answer, but it’s too big for it to actually do. So sometimes the AI Overview will have a big link inside and we are seeing clicks only when that appears. And when that happens, the people want the extra information so they come through. Try to find a way to get your branding. Don’t put just an image of the food there, put the label over what the image is, it’s a lemon and blueberry shortbread recipe or something like that. That way, it’s not just the image that looks pretty, but you’ve given the person a reason to take action in the AI Overview to come visit your website. Do what it takes. It’s absolute sucks what Google’s doing, and I’m sorry that everyone’s going through that.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:55:14):
A lot of questions around automation and I’m going to just do one here. What are the most crucial systems creators should prioritize setting up to truly automate or significantly ease the burden of monetizing strategies? We talked about email collection. Right?
Adam Riemer (00:55:35):
So with email I just always used OptinMonster, and then what I did was I would use a system like Drip or Klaviyo. Klaviyo is more for e-commerce. And I would say, “Okay, if people opened up this email, I want you to send this one next week. And if they clicked on this link and this section in this email, send them this one. If they didn’t send them this one… And I would just create the funnels. It’s four or five hours of work one time that saves you tens of hours over every month moving forward. So that was one way.
(00:56:03):
I mentioned AdSanity and AdRotate. I used to use both of those and I would be able to line up and schedule different ads and when advertisers run that out, and whenever I knew a contract was about to run out, I would have an automated email series that would go to the advertisers, “Do you want to renew? If not, these are the brands that are taking your space,” by saying, “Hey… Because it wasn’t about if they got clicks and money from me. It was about blocking their competitors from taking their place on my website. And so just putting those competitors in front of them, it would make them want to renew with me.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:56:38):
We talked about video. For a small team or even somebody who’s just on their own, what is the single most impactful piece of real-world advice you can offer for navigating the complexities of online monetization today?
Adam Riemer (00:56:53):
Do what works for you. Don’t listen to the hype and all, but ignore it. Take their ideas, match it into your strategy and what works within your tech stack and your knowledge base. See if it works. Don’t try to make it work if it’s clearly not going to. Move on. Don’t get obsessive.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:57:12):
There was a question from earlier when we were talking about going outside of your niche in creating content to support that. And the question was are you saying start multiple blogs, websites? And I don’t think that’s what you meant, you meant… We dug into that. So you can create a subdomain on your website and park that content there. As long as you’re blocking it from Google, you’re not going to create any dilution from a topical focus perspective for the entire domain. But maybe there is if you are able to create content that can convert properly from an affiliate standpoint, maybe there is a benefit in starting a secondary web property. What do you think, Adam?
Adam Riemer (00:57:56):
Yeah, there is… My friend, Sarah, she owns a company called Honeyfund. They were a Shark Tank winner. And she actually did something that I had also done years ago where she has… So Honeyfund’s for the honeymoon registry, she has… I think it’s called Plumfund or Baby Plum or something like that. And so now she has a baby registry, similar type of company. And it’s complimentary. You can keep your content separate and the people go from the wedding space into the raising a family space. And Sarah’s brilliant. She’s so smart, and she’s so talented, and she’s been able to grow to bring on a team that’s just like her. And that’s why they’re able to succeed, because they found the complimentary niches. I’m going to turn my phone off. Sorry.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:58:45):
Unacceptable.
Adam Riemer (00:58:47):
That was rude of me. But it was my mother.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:58:52):
How dare you not pick up?
Adam Riemer (00:58:55):
You are more important, Arsen.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:58:58):
Will she listen to this webinar? I hope not.
Adam Riemer (00:59:01):
She will not. She doesn’t use the internet anymore.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:05):
Not allowed?
Adam Riemer (00:59:06):
No. She’s scared of the internet because they hacked her Facebooks, and then they got all of her… Yeah. She’s interesting.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:18):
Stan Store. There’s a question about Stan Store. Do you know what that is? It’s meet your all-in-one creator store. You can create stuff for people.
Adam Riemer (00:59:28):
For me, that’s just gimmicky stuff. It is what it is.
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:32):
So they’re asking, “Is Stan Store an affordable, easy-to-work-with company to sell digital products through?”
Adam Riemer (00:59:39):
I’ve never used it. I just always went direct and built my own stuff, but that’s because I have relationships with people like Arsen that I met at conferences, so I never had to test. Oh, a platform. Has everyone checked out Skool?
Arsen Rabinovich (00:59:52):
Skool?
Adam Riemer (00:59:53):
I’ve been absolutely loving Skool. S-K-O-O-L. So you can teach courses and coursework similar to Coursera or some of these others, but they let you use affiliate links, they let you monetize. It makes it really easy to do to get members to pay and subscribe, and you can have a community aspect, you have a message board and a bulletin board. I’m seeing people start to crush it on there.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:17):
So what? Cooking classes?
Adam Riemer (01:00:19):
You could do that. You could also do recipe. It’s like, “New York City is famous for the how to boil water class.” So you could start with that and end with how to do a suckling pig or something like… You can go through the whole thing on how to actually build yourself into a full-fledged baker at home or a chef or to do Chateaubriand or something. What? I’m getting hungry. Someone send Hasselback potatoes immediately.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:00:53):
Awesome. I think we covered everything, Adam. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you? Do you want to be found?
Adam Riemer (01:01:01):
No. I have a blog that is a mess at adamriemer.me. It’s purposely unoptimized because I use it to interview people when we’re hiring at clients or for my own company, so just take it with a grain of salt. But there’s about 12 or 13 years of ideas, strategies I’ve implemented myself and learnings from my own websites that I publish there.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:01:27):
[inaudible 01:01:27] link to that right now. Adam, what would you say would be a good resource for people to read or learn from if they want to start really taking affiliate marketing seriously?
Adam Riemer (01:01:45):
Someone that’s impressed me substantially… Hate giving compliments, is Lee Ann Johnstone. She owns a company, it’s a competitor of mine, and they’re fantastic. It’s called Affiverse. She also has an affiliate conference. Lee Ann takes the approach from the publisher side versus, “How do I just churn and burn as much money as possible?” And I love the community, the magazine, and everything she’s building. She’s very unbiased where some of the people that I disagree with and where I would disagree with the content they’re doing does make it in, but that’s because it’s not a one-size-fits-all industry. But I think if you’re going to try to learn from a conference or something, she’s the one who’s putting forward the next platform that’s appropriate, that’s going to be unbiased and give you real resources where you can actually learn and learn how to make money. She has the ability to be the next big conference and just place the resource that exists for everyone.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:02:52):
And I got those links for everyone into our chat. It will also be present on the recap. Adam, thank you so much for joining us. We are two minutes over, three minutes over our one hour. You are amazing. Always a pleasure to chat with you. Thanks again.
Adam Riemer (01:03:06):
Thanks for having me.
Arsen Rabinovich (01:03:07):
Bye.