The Affiliate Channel Most Brands Ignore: One Partner Driving $120K a Month

Steve Hutt
Well, hey there, welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I am your host, Steve Hutt. Now today I’m joined for the second time, actually, Josh Kennedy. He’s the founder of a company called Imagine Marketing, and he’s an agency, and what they do is they build affiliate programs for Shopify and other scaling kind of D2C brands, but he really does love focusing, I’m sure, on subscription companies and health brands typically, but there’s a lot of other areas that he kind of does a lot of great work with. He loves working with brands that are typically in that $5 million kind of plus range, but we’ll talk about the GMV and the kind of complexity question in a few minutes, probably. But what I found interesting when I did some research for today’s recording was that most merchants, when they kind of hear the word affiliate, they kind of picture kind of coupon sites, maybe, I don’t know, cashback extensions and all these sort of things that are taking credit for sales that were kind of going to happen anyway. And I think what Josh has done and his team, they’ve kind of are deliberately avoiding a lot of that. And they really like to focus more on the incremental revenue, let’s call it, like from mass media publishers, or I think they do a lot of like paid search and they do a lot of post-purchase offers, things like that.

Steve Hutt
I think they even involve audio from last I heard. So it’s interesting. And like even content brokers and things like that, it’s interesting, they actually can buy placements like kind of in major outlets and literally on a CPC kind of basis. And it’s interesting, like his team is so deep into the affiliate side that they even, I’ve just learned a moment ago, he actually has his own review site and it’s called BuyerIQ. And it’s interesting because he actually invests his own money as an affiliate kind of inside his own clients’ programs. So it’s really interesting. I’m excited to really unpack. I think the timing is perfect right now, kind of being pre-BFCM right now.

Steve Hutt
The affiliate industry is really hot and I think Josh is the guy to talk about it. So Josh, welcome back again to eCommerce Fastlane.

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, thanks Steve. Yeah, I’m looking forward to jumping into it. You covered a lot of ground there, but hopefully I have some more to add, you know?

Steve Hutt
Absolutely. So, you know, for a founder who’s kind of like I said, it’s only seen affiliate maybe as coupons and cashback sites. Like, what is the modern affiliate program actually made of, like, right now in 2026? Because I think, you know, and I, because I know you highly recommend to stay clear of these coupon sites entirely, but I just, I’m curious on what’s the lay of the land right now from a successful kind of affiliate program.

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, that’s a, that’s a really good question. and I think it will help to kind of give you some context and frame it a little bit, right? So Affiliate programs, I would say if you were just gonna, you know, like just join a network like an AWIN or an Impact or something like that, I would go as to say that I would say that maybe 80 to 90% of the applications that you’re going to receive or just, you know, people that want to work out and reach with you are going to be valueless or value detracting, right?

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
So they’re going to like, they’re not going to add value to their program and possibly cannibalize you. So like you’re kind of walking on a tightrope in some ways when you’re like building an affiliate program because you’re really vetting hard for maybe 10% to 20% of like specific affiliates. And on top of that is that the, like most affiliates, right, where the real value is for brands, they’re not going to, most of them are not going to organically apply to programs. So that’s kind of your foundation or your baseline is that like you really need to have an expert not only to kind of vet and sift through, you know, and tell you no, and tell no, a bunch of affiliates no, monitor those campaigns once they’re up and going, up and running. But then also too is like knowing where to source the actual value of valuable affiliates. And that’s where it kind of breaks down into the different partner types, right? So the coupon cashback, all that subnetwork stuff, I don’t wanna focus too much on that. But because that’s not where we focus our time and that’s where, you know, there’s just so much waste there essentially. But really on the value-add side, right, the incremental side, there’s a few different kind of groupings of partnerships.

Josh Kennedy
So one of them would be the mass media content. again, but mass media content, it falls into some different buckets too, right? So you have mass media content that is like, you know, that is like ranking for search, you know, that is highly cited in AI. You have mass media content that’s just kind of more brand awareness content. You’ve got CPC content. So there’s, there’s different flavors of like mass media content out there even. So it’s not like I wouldn’t, even though you can bucket into one kind of thing, it’s like, you know, again, it’s like there’s different flavors of it. And then also too, a lot of mass media publishers will also have like commerce newsletters as well. So like, you know, Airmail News, The Skimm, like things like this.

Josh Kennedy
They also have, you know, sometimes millions of readers that are— these newsletters are very commerce-focused, right? So that’s another kind of mass media, you know, opportunity or kind of content. Then as far as some other categories, some of like search, obviously SEM is huge. So like the paid review sites that are ranking you know, the top 5 or top 10 products of any category. So, you know, the top 10, you know, could be like ceiling fans, top, you know, top 10 air purifiers, whatever it is. and again, that model is basically, typically is how they work is they are usually buying like comparison, or research-oriented like keywords, right? So like if I was looking for, you know, if I was looking for an air purifier, they would bid on things like, what is the best air purifier of 2026, like whatever those like high-intent keywords are.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
And then what happens is those people, once they kind of like look at the review on the top 5 or top 10 page, then they click, they go and purchase, right? So they’ve got that affiliate click there. They’re being, you know, kind of monitored. And then once they check out, then, you know, then that sale is credited essentially. So those are huge affiliates. But I want to— I’ll revisit that a little bit later. But I think SEM specifically, paid search partners are very kind of underutilized a lot. And then, you know, a few other categories. I mentioned the newsletters, but I mean, any type of paid, so like social channel essentially, or paid social platform.

Josh Kennedy
So Newsbreak, Taboola, you know, Meta, things like that. There are affiliates that kind of specialize in that, and they’ll, you know, buy media for you and then sell it back to you on a CPA basis. There’s all kinds of models within that too. It doesn’t have to be pure CPA. It could be hybrid kind of co-investments from brands. It could be Brands are protecting the downside of the affiliates and offering them test budgets. If you wanna get into that a little bit, we can do that, but it’s a little bit of nuance and complexity there too. And then, like you mentioned, some of the community stuff, like whether it’s employee benefits groups from different companies, like apps that have their own— like we use apps that do post-purchase offers.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
There’s post-purchase on other websites. So, point being is like, Most, like, you’re gonna have, you really have to know, not only do you have to have the relationships, but you just have to have the knowledge base of what are all these partner types, what are the, you know, how do they, like, what type of work do they do essentially, like, what are they doing to drive traffic, right? And then how to, like, you know, launch them effectively. So that’s kind of a high level of, like, the different partner types or classifications, and that’s kind of where we focus most of our efforts.

Steve Hutt
It’s amazing how deep in the weeds you are about this.

Josh Kennedy
It really is, yeah.

Steve Hutt
It’s pretty wild. It’s interesting when, you know, what I actually, to LinkedIn, and you kind of talk a little bit about this, and you say that affiliate marketers really should act more like media planners, maybe not relationship managers. Can you kind of unpack that a bit? Because I think it’s a really interesting nuance and a mindset that people maybe don’t realize how important it is.

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, so this— that’s a great question. So that ties back directly to the SEM stuff.

Steve Hutt
Okay.

Josh Kennedy
Right, so like I can tell you that like there’s You know, SEM, so we’ve launched some of our clients, you know, we have multiple clients that SEM partners alone are driving 6 figures a month or more of affiliate revenue and like profitable revenue, right? So like, you know, some of these subscription brands that have a, you know, 3, 4, like X LTV, like some of these paid search partners are sending them sales, you know, sending them hundreds of sales every day on a maybe 5%, 10%, 20%, you know, profit margin on the first sale.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
And then those guys are just, you know, getting, you know, collecting 30%, 40%, repeat customers. I think some of the— I think like when we’ve looked at the data, I think it’s anywhere between like 20% and 30% of like the paid search traffic is like turning into like multiple repeat customers with a high lifetime value essentially.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
But what I think what I mean by that, right, is like that SEM from like an affiliate perspective or like a brand perspective is like the most controllable sort of growth environment or acquisition environment, right? It’s like Because you can specifically target the actual keywords, right?

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
And then you can run tests as far as like what is profitable and what is not. And plus you’re incentivizing, on top of that, you’re incentivizing a third-party partner. Their incentive is to make more money by driving you more customers.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
Right? And they’re gonna run it on an automated basis, right? So it’s like you’re not having to go into Meta yourself and set up the campaigns or make the creative on your end or any of this. There’s not like the manual labor, you know, is not certain. It’s very low effort. I don’t want to say low effort, but there’s, you know, low like manual labor investment when you’re— yeah, or asset investment when you’re doing this kind of stuff. It’s more of just like you’re testing different things. So like, you know, and I think what most affiliates— like let’s say a top 5 air purifiers page, right? They’re going to go after the most high-intent keywords if you would give them brand plus, you know, bidding allowances, they would do that. But also too, like they’re going to typically go after like the low-hanging fruit kind of keywords, like the ones that they know are going to be the highest commercial intent. But like, for instance, like let’s say there’s a— like if you go on and even if you’re listening to this podcast right now, go look at top 5 of whatever your category is or just type that into Google.

Josh Kennedy
You’re going to see these paid review sites that are like listed in the sponsored ad, like the sponsored listing section.

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Josh Kennedy
But if you pull one of those links, go into SEMrush and then look at their, you know, look at the keywords that they’re bidding on or Ahrefs. Or whatever, and then just look if they’re bidding on your general head term, right? Look at something like, are they bidding on air purifiers, right? So like, that’s a huge— that’s, that’s a huge market, right?

Steve Hutt
Oh yeah.

Josh Kennedy
They may not even be bidding on, right? But that would be something that would be really valuable is like, okay, maybe you could just get people that are high up the funnel, head term air purifier. You can, you know, show them a piece of third-party comparison content that’s really good, and then maybe that’s enough to convert them. But if you like If you don’t have that, if you don’t know that that’s like what the keywords they’re bidding on, what their keyword strategy is, like any of their bidding strategy, then you’re not gonna be able to like, yeah, you’re gonna miss that, right?

Steve Hutt
Mm-hmm.

Josh Kennedy
And then there’s an addressable market that you’re gonna miss. So my point being is I think that like, is that traditionally affiliate marketers have been sort of more passive about like their partnerships, right? It’s like, hey, can I get into this? Like they might say like, hey, can I, you know, this is my brand, this is the features and benefits of it, and I’d like to get, you know, I’d like to pay you out this much, and I’d like to get in your, you know, in your ranking, right? And maybe you get number 3 or number 4 or number 5 depending on the offer or how competitive it is.

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Josh Kennedy
But again, I think there’s like, if you look at just the market itself, right? If you look at all the addressable keywords that are out there, what you’re trying to do is you’re saying, okay, like there’s obviously gaps that we’re missing, right? There’s people who are searching that we’re not visible for that have some sort of intent for this market. And then if you’re a bigger brand and we’re not really able to implement this in a systematic way right now, but my mind goes to is how do we create like $5,000 for a big brand? Like we’re talking like an Athletic Greens or, you know, whatever, like Caraway or what. $5,000 is not— it’s not a lot.

Steve Hutt
No.

Josh Kennedy
With, with $5,000, you can essentially validate different search funnels. They call them different things. You can call them PPC funnels or search funnels or demand funnels, whatever you want to call them. But basically you can get clusters of SEM group keywords And you can give these part— these SEM partners $5,000 at a time to validate these different things. And what you’re really trying to do is you’re trying to say, okay, like, what are— where are my efficiencies in search, like, search clusters within a particular market? And then can I get affiliates to basically run, keep, like, keep these campaigns running on an evergreen basis? So like, this is like, to be honest with you, I don’t think there’s really anyone kind of doing this or implementing this. I think this is kind of like cutting edge strategy, to be honest with you. And like, it’s hard kind of when you’re in the day-to-day, it’s hard to systematically kind of like roll these things out. But like, that’s just where my mind goes to because like, I just know, like, I see like how valuable these specific partners are, but I know that there’s an ocean of like basically search intent out there that we’re not addressing.

Josh Kennedy
So like, Yeah. how can we as brands and affiliate marketers help enable these affiliates to reach those markets than to drive them into your business essentially?

Steve Hutt
That’s amazing. I know you kind of use a word, I don’t know, you kind of describe different ways of acquiring these, you know, net new customers. And I think, you know, we talk a bit about the media buying and getting the offers and stuff. And I believe you use the word like kind of like traditional kind of affiliate marketing. You also kind of lean a little bit towards the PR-led affiliate. Can you talk about the PR-led? Because for some reason, it seems to be coming up quite popular where people are kind of pushing a lot about digital PR and what does that mean and how does it help my brand and can it drive more revenue? What’s, what’s your thought process around this kind of PR-led as it relates to affiliate marketing?

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, so I have a lot of thoughts on this. and so I think again, it helps to give a little bit of a kind of backstory, background on this. So, right. So like basically PR kind of, it’s not completely a dying industry, but it definitely there was, you know, it was facing some challenges a few years ago, you know, I think, and even now, right, when publishers are, you know, I think basically, right, like, is that PR faced some challenges and what happened, how PR adapted or the PR industry adapted is that they started to embrace more affiliate marketing.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
But really what happened is like they started to brand them. I mean, it’s PR, right? It’s like people are branding themselves, but they aren’t really Like, how do you know they have the goods really? How do you know they have the technical skills? They’re just, they’re just kind of like presenting something, right? It’s like, here’s a great product, but you know, I don’t know if it’s actually going to be functional for me. And so I think that’s kind of how initially PR kind of rolled into affiliate marketing. It was just like this, you know, kind of like cohort or type, like, or PR industry people. And then they kind of came into affiliate, they said like, oh, we’re affiliate experts and yeah, we have relationships with these mass media media publishers, but I don’t really think they had the technical and functional, like, the technical skills and like the technical understanding of affiliate marketing. It’s just really that they kind of come, they kind of came over and they had to brand themselves that way. And like, and really what that means is like, I think the extent of it is pretty much that they’re just still doing the same things, but they’re kind of just making sure that affiliate links are within the content, right? So like that there’s some, there’s some basic reporting on clicks, there’s some basic reporting on you know, conversions and revenue and all that kind of stuff. But if, but like nuts and bolts technical affiliate marketing, I still don’t think that they really like know too much.

Josh Kennedy
So I think what you kind of had in the affiliate industry is you’ve had this sort of like misunderstanding or misrepresentation where like you’ve got these PR essentially agencies or PR people that are, have kind of like represented affiliate marketing as just PR when it really is, PR is just a very Like I mentioned earlier, like you’ve got CPC PR, you’ve got search PR, you’ve got partners, mass media partners that are bidding on SEM, you’ve got different types. And so like it’s just kind of, I think what it’s done is it’s kind of fooled brands a little bit or misled brands. And I’m not saying that PR is bad or valueless, like I think it definitely has its place, but I definitely, as a brand, I would be a little bit concerned or wary of going with someone who’s like a PR first. to run affiliate programs because you’re missing so much of the pie, which is kind of, if we, you know, look, you know, go back to initially what I said about, you know, the different channel type or the different channel types and traffic sources that you’re working with your post-purchase, with your, you know, different paid social campaigns, like your, you know, SEM arbitrage stuff, like all of that kind of stuff where a lot of customer acquisition comes from. They’re gonna miss that. The one really good thing about PR, I’m like, some of the really good is that you can acquire customers cheaper than if you’re gonna do any type of arbitrage campaigns, right? So, okay, because there’s no paid media element and PR is mostly organic, or there’s a lot of organic, is that, you know, maybe at 10%, 15%, 20%, 25% commission you can acquire a new customer, which is cheaper than you can do in some of the other, like if you’re gonna involve a paid media buyer, you know, in your program essentially. So that is like some real value, and definitely some of the content there can get cited, right? but again, I would want to, if I was hiring a PR affiliate agency or if I was getting, hire a PR team, I would want to make sure that like I knew that that content was getting cited. So I would want to use a tool like Profound or something just to see the, you know, the content pieces that you’re, they’re, they’re getting you in or the earned media is that that’s actually being cited in AI, just to make sure you’re getting a return on your investment.

Josh Kennedy
So, if you have any other good questions about that, I hope I kind of explained that well, but like—

Steve Hutt
No, you did. It’s interesting because one thing I’m thinking about, like when you talk about like, I’m thinking like traditionally, if you want to completely contrast this, it’s just like standard placement, old school, where the brand would pay for maybe a guaranteed exposure, but there’s no guarantee about actual conversion. We don’t know if the readers are actually buying it because that’s not part of the plan. Where I think on the flip side though, if somebody, I don’t know, let’s say brings a cookware brand, I mean, you kind of brought that up, but let’s say someone does that, they can really pitch the publisher and say, hey, we have this new, I don’t know, nonstick pan or whatever, and then they go and write some kind of editorial thing around it. The publisher puts it up, they put the affiliate link up, and then the reader buys it through that link. I mean, that’s interesting because now the brand is, I guess, is kind of paying a pre-agreed commission or something back to this company through some kind of an affiliate. program or platform. Am I right about how old school it used to be, but now it’s kind of like, no, no, these brands can actually give their product for consideration.

Steve Hutt
and they take them in if they’re like leading great products, right?

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, no, I definitely think, and there’s still definitely value. Like I said, there’s definitely value to the content from a brand awareness perspective, from just claiming that we can be in, you know, we got in Wirecutter, we got in like, yeah, yeah. Like, and you’ll definitely see some conversions from it. Like, absolutely. Like, I definitely think PR definitely has— I just still see it more in terms of like, I think PR agencies are still really good at PR and they’re not so like— I, so I think that the problem has been is just like the conception, maybe like the understanding of what affiliate marketing is it’s kind of become synonymous with PR. And again, PR is just a very small part of what like a real affiliate program is or like what real affiliate marketers do. And the things that real affiliate marketers do, most PR agents, in my opinion, my assumption is that most PR agencies like are not doing very well or are not even aware of. And so that’s the only danger is like, and from more of a strategic growth perspective, right? If I’m listening, like if I’m talking to like people who are directors of growth, heads of growth, you know, on the acquisition side is that like when you’re like doing SEM, for instance, like we have clients that, you know, can, are selling, you know, maybe $10,000 plus, you know, $200K, $300K a month, like where it’s consistent every month, like through affiliates, right?

Steve Hutt
Where— Mm-hmm.

Josh Kennedy
Like, because we’ve set it up and we’ve built the program in such a way with like specific partners that are gonna be very predictable and stable. Like if you’re creating a program based on like PR hits, right? Like it’s going to be extremely inconsistent. And unless you’re kind of like getting cited in AI, right? And Gemini, or you’re like, right? Like number 1, 2, 3 spots is like, you’re not going to have the consistency of the traffic to that page. It’s going to be like, oh, we got featured in, you know, this page or, you know, this cookware, you know, Good Housekeeping for like. A couple days and we got a burst or a pop of sales and then it kind of disappears. So it’s not like a super, I guess, predictable, but it’s not a strong kind of way to acquire, or I’m not communicating that as well as I want to, but it’s not a, yeah, it’s not gonna change your business overnight and really build a platform for growth. I think that’s really where more of the things that I mentioned before with the SEM kind of arbitrage, like really knowing how to, you know, make the most out of that is going to be way more valuable, in my opinion, from an acquisition perspective than just getting one or two, like, you know, some premium press hits or premium media coverage. So yeah, that’s kind of a little bit of my perspective there.

Steve Hutt
Yeah, it’s interesting because it’s funny, I was doing more research around kind of what these review affiliates are actually doing out in the marketplace. And you made a comment about AI and stuff like that. And I find it interesting that a lot of these review affiliates now are buying ads on ChatGPT. and I’m sure it’s going down that journey with Gemini and Perplexity at some point also. ChatGPT seems to kind of own the market a little bit around at least early adopters to get out there and, see if they can get some conversions. So, and literally, like, they’re just sending traffic to their review pages. like, do you know much about— because clearly this is an arbitrage game where they’re paying their early ins, like the old Gary the Gary Vaynerchuk days, you know, buying like Chardonnay and buying wine online in, you know, in Google AdSense. And no wonder his wine store, you know, ended up finally with an exit for $60 million because he got in early.

Steve Hutt
And I think there’s some early adopters right now with these ChatGPT ads. Are you getting involved in this or have you heard much about this and how people are being successful with it?

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, so we have, we’re like literally as we speak, we’re like Hopefully by the end of next week we’ll have some live campaigns.

Steve Hutt
Oh, beautiful.

Josh Kennedy
In the Amazon space with ChatGPT ads.

Steve Hutt
Nice.

Josh Kennedy
Yeah. So that’s— so we essentially, we have 2 right now. We have 2, really 3 resources, I would say, that are active in like affiliates or affiliate companies or, you know, media companies that are active in that space and that are willing to do it on a commission-based model or a CPA-based model instead of like a flat fee model. So yeah, we definitely— I think Amazon’s probably like, I think it’s probably best for Amazon brands or for subscription brands because it may be expensive to acquire customers, which tend— they can tend to afford like the higher— either the conversion rate’s so strong on Amazon that it makes it a little bit more viable, but also to like, you know, subscription brands tend to be able to pay out a little bit more for their customers or to affiliates because they’re getting that lifetime value out of the customer.

Steve Hutt
True.

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, but yeah, I mean, so if you’re if you’re a a company that’s looking to you know lever you know a D to C brand that’s looking to acquire customers and you’re not using ChatGPT ads as a as a cam like as a campaign source or as a channel right now is like you know we definitely have like I said two or three especially in the Amazon space and then if you are a subscription brand I mean of course like it just I feel like it it just makes it a little harder like I feel like affiliates affiliate marketing is a really really effective channel for subscription brands, just because a lot of times when you’re getting these, you know, you’re getting affiliates to buy media and sell it back to you, it’s like, it can be costly, right? Like, so, you know, they’re playing, again, they’re playing an arbitrage game, but they’re having to pay for that traffic, that person to come send it to you. So, yeah, it can be really effective there, but if you’re not leveraging that right now, it’s definitely something that’s kind of sprouting up in our space right now, and We’re you know launching tests as we speak, and we’re kind of reporting back. Who knows if it turns in or is as effective as like Google Ads is, or you know Google Ads essentially for you know some of our clients right now. But we’re definitely excited about testing it. And then kind of as a yeah as an add-on to that is like a lot of our like the affiliates that you know like kind of a model that we work with a lot of affiliates for, and again some of our brands. You know, fortunately do have some some flat fee budgets and things, but they’re able to run. They’re able to again run tests with affiliates, like where we’re able to like kind of you know lower the affiliates’ risk a little bit and either co-invest with them. Like if you’re a you know let’s go back to the air purifier brand, right? Like so if you’re going to give them you want to run a ChatGPT ads test and you say okay we’ll give you two thousand dollars or twenty five hundred and then you’ll match that with two thousand twenty five hundred and then we’ll see where the.

Josh Kennedy
Acquisition costs after this and see if it’s profitable to run. So, you know, again, that’s, that’s a typical model that we’ll run under. You don’t have to do that. But if brands are, again, are looking to, like, you know, test out some of these channels, like just kind of giving you, exposing you guys to like some of the models that a lot of these affiliates, you can incentivize them to work with you by kind of co-investing with them a little bit.

Steve Hutt
Interesting. You know, I find that, and I want to go down, this is probably a path that you don’t want to talk about, but attribution to me is a topic that comes up quite a bit. And I think a lot of people, especially more tech-savvy people, probably those that are listening right now, you think about these using AI assistant of some sort, like if you’re using ChatGPT or Claude or Plexi Gemini, whatever your flavor is. But I think a lot of people are doing a lot of their product research in AI tools now versus just kind of looking at Google’s top 10 because it just seems more organized. And so if you kind of Zoom out on that a bit. Like, do you think that there is some, maybe some reporting or some attribution challenges right now, knowing that maybe the buyer’s journey is starting inside an AI assistant and then working its way through to a final conversion? Like, what’s your mindset around all of that whole new journey that’s happening?

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, that’s a great, that’s a great question. I feel like I’m beating the drum. I know, right? But the, or beating a dead horse, whatever they say. But, yeah, I think a lot of it goes back to— I think what— so I think it can be— so I can only relate to the data that I’m seeing, right?

Steve Hutt
Okay.

Josh Kennedy
And like, so a lot of the data that I’m seeing is that SEM is still extremely valuable, right? Right. So meaning— so that there could be a couple things there. Like I said, we have our SEM partners are still scaling like as we speak, like So, and they’re probably not reaching again. So we’re talking about all those search, all the keywords available that you can possibly bid on in Google Ads for these review sites. Like, would I— there’s still— there’s not— I don’t think they’re at a ceiling and they’re still scaling for, again, some of our clients well over to like— we have one affiliate, just one review site affiliate, for one of our partners that’s doing like $120K a month. Just one partner, right? So like they’re, they’re sending some, you know, they said they’re a 7-figure affiliate partner essentially just for this one brand, and they’re scaling still. So like, there is not like— and I don’t think they’ve reached a ceiling. I’m sure that we could amplify that and whatever.

Josh Kennedy
So my point being is like, whether we are losing click share, like overall to content, it’s very possible, meaning attribution would be more difficult and more complex. However, so either are, you know, how do you react to that, right? So there’s a couple different ways. I think one is you can kind of default to AI citation attribution, which which is kind of this, you know, which basically trying to say is like, I’ve looked at tools like Profound, like you’re trying to say, okay, like, is there a way that we can, you know, basically relay back to the brand, report back to the brand, like how effective this content, what this value this content is providing to them in some sort of metric, right? And so then citations is like an easy one to look at. So if you like say, okay, well, you know, plug this into Profound, we watch the citations for a couple of weeks of a specific form of content. Maybe it’s that cookware review that you mentioned earlier. You said, oh, that was cited, you know, 50 times or 75 times or 100 times. And we can look at the different AI tools or AI, you know, that cited it. And it was a Gemini cited it.

Josh Kennedy
It was a Perplexity. Although you see, there are tools to do that. You know, I think it depends on the brand, right? It’s like, does the brand actually value that and think that, you know, directly translates to revenue and customers in? Like, I’m not 100% sure. I think that’s That’s more for the brands to say from me, but of course that reporting capability is out there. How I see it still is like, I see it’s like the, you know, it’s kind of like that concept that like boring businesses, right, are sometimes the most effective. Like, you know, and then sexy businesses like don’t, like, it’s like sometimes I think affiliate marketing can just be a boring business where it’s like, okay, well, why don’t we, SEM is so valuable. And why don’t we just milk SEM as much as possible? Whatever chaos is going on in the, you know, open web with like AI content and attribution and all this kind of stuff, like I know that every month I’m still having my SEM partners scale to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for our brands. So like I’m going to maximize those relationships because like that’s what I can verify.

Josh Kennedy
That’s clear that we’re experiencing clicks, we’re seeing conversions. And there’s room to grow. So like, and it’s like consistent and predictable. So like my point being is like if the general click share, right, like is shrinking, right? And people are going to more AI and we’re losing some sort of like attribution is like, I still think there’s room like to like to point SEM or narrowly. Like I think there’s still a way to basically like manufacture SEM in a certain way where you can still have all of that click attribution and still have new customer acquisition and still have growth and things like that. So my reaction would not be to personally, would not be to like, we gotta justify our existence by looking at AI citations. It would be more like, I’m just gonna try to figure out how I can optimize and maximize SEM and then let attribution kind of catch up on the other end. That’s how I approach it, but I could be wrong.

Steve Hutt
No, no. Well, like I said, You’re frontline, so you kind of get it, and that’s why I didn’t mean to railroad you there with that question, but I think it’s important to kind of get that context, right?

Josh Kennedy
Did that make sense though, too, with how I explained that?

Steve Hutt
Oh yeah.

Josh Kennedy
Okay.

Steve Hutt
Yeah. 100%. I want to pivot a bit over to— and on the flip side of your business is— well, first of all, you own imagine-marketing.com. That’s kind of the main primary domain. That’ll be in the show notes, but you also own— you’re on the flip side, you’re actually an affiliate partner for a lot of the brands that you actually manage. I’m sure others on top of that. But can you talk a bit about what BuyerIQ actually is and kind of what you’re doing? Because this sounds like another revenue stream for you, but it also has a significant upside to the brands that you partner up with.

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, that’s a thing. Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. So just to clarify, so it’s Imagine-Affiliate. The company’s Imagine Marketing. The website is imagine-affiliate.com. And then The review site is buyeriq.org. And so really what the goal is, it’s kind of double-sided, dual-sided, right? So on the one end is like, we can, as a review site, like all the things that I just mentioned before, like I said, I think SEM is underutilized. These partners are so valuable, like all this kind of stuff.

Josh Kennedy
Like, so if I was— so we know that paid search partners are extremely valuable, right? Like I just mentioned that we have a client that’s doing $120K One affiliate partner for one of our brands doing $120K a month in scaling, right? So we know it’s valuable. So like, but again, it’s like if you’re one of the other competing brands, it’s like you may not have access to that. They may not be fully transparent in all of their keyword bidding, or like you just might want transparency or access that you’re not getting. So that was kind of one of the, you know, the ideas is like, let’s build a review site, let’s be an extension of some of our clients, and then let’s validate some of these like SEM campaigns, right? So like, can we make these campaigns essentially profitable? Like, it’s where a brand is going to pay us a certain amount on a conversion, but it’s going to cost us a certain— it’s going to cost us less to basically refer that client over. And so basically, that’s, you know, we’re running— the goal is to like build SEM campaigns and scale SEM campaigns for our clients as review affiliates in order to do that, right? In order to create profitable for us, create profit for our clients. Again, if they’re subscription brands, it makes it a lot easier because they’re going to get that repeat customer, you know, the lifetime value out of that customer. On the kind of traditional affiliate side, it kind of solves some problems or, you know, remediates some issues because essentially like a lot of, like as a third-party system, let’s call it like where you’re working exclusively with affiliate partners who basically own media or Like they have their own review sites or whatever. Like you don’t have like kind of like turn on, turn off access to like traffic essentially, right? So like if we’re able to provide you some of that more like automatic like access to traffic supply, then we can basically turn on growth quicker than if we’re working exclusively with third parties.

Josh Kennedy
Now it doesn’t mean that third parties are not valuable. We don’t want to work with them, but it just means that we’re going to be able to like, you know, we don’t have to like I can just. I can put you— I can, you know, write some content, or we can write some content. I can take an image, I can set up a campaign, and we can have that done in, you know, in less than a day. Where it’s like, if you’re working with someone else, it might take a week or 2 weeks or 3 weeks. Traditionally speaking, it’s like that’s where brands were, you know, like they’re paying out, you know, X thousand dollars a month in retainer, and like they’re just in these waiting, you know, they’re essentially just waiting, right? They’re in these, you know, for basically third parties in order to like get campaigns up and running so then they can get some value back. They can start to see the customers in the door. So the goal is to expedite that process a little bit.

Josh Kennedy
But again, just like my— some of it’s theory at this point, but I think I have enough kind of proof of concept to say that some of it’s not. Again, it’s like if you’re a little bit more selective about the campaigns that you’re running from an SEM perspective, is that you can find incremental search campaigns, that you’re basically, your other partners are not addressing.

Steve Hutt
Mm-hmm.

Josh Kennedy
So that would be also the goal. So there’s different ways to do it, but it kind of, it basically is like an added value that we bring to our brands. It opens up kind of new customer groupings or customer cohort segments that we couldn’t access before, and it just makes us stickier with our clients, right? Like, if I’m actually spending my money to invest in my clients, it’s like, that’s more valuable to me as a brand owner than just a relationship manager. Right, who, when I, you know, they’re helping me, they’re being an intermediary, but like, they’re not, they don’t have any skin in the game, right? They’re not investing in my business. So like, right, I just wanted to, yeah, just kind of like, I guess, heighten the incentives a little bit, or like tie the incentives together a little bit more and solve some of the issues. So I feel like it’s a little bit better model than kind of the traditional affiliate model.

Steve Hutt
You use the word incremental a few times, and I’ve used the word incrementality, I guess, is another word. But it’s interesting. I think a lot of people are using it. And so I guess if I was to be devil’s advocate a bit and saying, hey, how do you prove maybe a sale? Maybe— I mean, I know the SEM side is interesting because people have actually clicked and, you know, there’s a transaction there and it goes down a funnel and they buy. But like, how do you prove maybe that the sale wouldn’t have happened without the affiliate? Because I think it’s interesting where I think a brand should really understand that if they’re going to hire an agency like yourself, for example, to want to do this sort of work for them, I want to make sure that they have the proper reporting and they feel that the sale wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for this particular channel. I just don’t know how you show the incrementality correctly and give that warm and fuzzy feeling.

Josh Kennedy
Yeah.

Steve Hutt
That in fact everything is legit and the sale wouldn’t have happened without that affiliate partner?

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, I mean, there’s, first of all, there’s a lot of answers there. Because it’s a very, like, it’s because like, because you’re technically possibly working with multiple different traffic sources. So it’s like, there’s like, so basically incrementality would probably be measured a little bit differently, approached differently on each traffic source.

Steve Hutt
Blended of some sort.

Josh Kennedy
Yeah. Yes. So like, if you’re, for instance, like when I’m talking about mass media content, right, it’s like, if If you get in a, again, we’ll go into Good Housekeeping, right? So if you get a net new published article, right, that’s published on a date where it doesn’t exist before, and now you get on it, and now you see clicks and you see sales from it’s like you can pretty much, that’s pretty safely attributed to that specific article, right? So I think one thing is just being able to track, it’s just being able to track your, there’s no perfect incrementality. There’s different, like, I know that people talk about holdout testing and all this kind of stuff and whatever. It’s like, holdout test, like, actually, like, maybe that’s a great, there’s a great question. There’s layers here and there’s nuances. So let me try to get through it and then if you have any more questions.

Steve Hutt
Okay.

Josh Kennedy
So like, that would be one is I think that being able to just track back some form, some click or some conversion to a piece of content is, or like, you know, that’s important, right? So if you need to, like, if you just see clicks and whatever, like if you see clicks and sales that are coming from somewhere but you’re not able to kind of like identify where they’re coming from, that’s not a good sign to me, right? That’s where like, okay, well there’s some attribution, or is there incremental? Is there cannibalization happening here?

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Josh Kennedy
So that’s definitely one thing. I mean, there’s definitely like parameters that you can put in specific links, like so you’re looking at different parameters of like, okay, did it come from this specific ad? Did it come from this specific page? So it’s kind of like, you know, nuanced sort of like measurement that can happen with content as well that you can like, if you’re in a newsletter, like you can say like, put the parameters in, okay, this came from The Skimm, this came from this particular publisher, this came from that. So like that’s a way to measure it. Again, tracing back to the existing content. But also too, like sometimes you have to look at like just the way that they’re like they’re operating. So like post-purchase offers is a good way. Is another, like, so you have these companies, just like Rockd is one of them. There’s like, I don’t know, 7 to 10 of them.

Josh Kennedy
Some of them work on affiliate CPA deals, some of them don’t. But that’s basically where you’re showing up post-transaction either within an app, like someone on their phone, like in an app, or they’re showing up post-transaction on another person’s ecommerce site. So like, we have a client that they have a partnership with a, They basically like have a partnership with a lot of different, well, a post-purchase company, but they basically have their ads show up post-purchase, right, as like a thank you or some sort of incentive.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
On different third-party sites, right? So that’s pretty incremental, right? You’re showing up in a third-party environment, like how else are you gonna reach this customer, like other than, you know, that your ad was shown here? And then also too, they pass site IDs. So again, that goes into like the actual, like the parameters I was talking about is that we’re actually able to like, we have a publisher list and we would say, okay, 4162 publisher like sent us a click. Now we can cross-reference that back with our list. And then all the publishers are, so we say, oh, this beauty brand is the one that referred them over. So like, again, I think parameter kind of stuff. there is even like in audio, there’s, there’s audio like companies that will purchase, basically like there’s, there’s affiliates that will purchase like basically media on like audio platforms. So like Spotify, yeah, you know, Apple Music, whatever, different audio platforms. And they have their own kind of proprietary like attribution stuff as well.

Josh Kennedy
So like they’re looking at, you know, and connected TV is another one. So like obviously, so we have, there’s affiliates that buy connected TV and sell it back to brands. So like some of it is like, it’s something that’s mostly proprietary on their end, but they’re looking at, you know, the click streams, they’re looking at, okay, where did this person come from and how many impressions of this, what was like the impression, how long was like the impression, the most recent impression before they purchased. So like that’s a completely different world of its own, like audio and connected TV versus like SEM or mass media or attribution or incrementality. So that’s, you know, basically my point being is like watch it closely, track it back to some sort, try to, you know, apply the parameters to know exactly where the traffic or the clicks is coming from, try to be able to track it back to a specific piece of content, even a date, right, that something was published. Like, okay, this actual piece was published, that’s why this pop came from this specific publisher. So there’s no one universal answer to it. But yeah, I mean, just having kind of an attitude of like trying to make this as easy on myself from a measurement and incrementality perspective, I think is a good approach.

Steve Hutt
You know what’s interesting too, I’ve had a few other kind of app partners on that do something really interesting. And I think this is going down the affiliate road and this may be more specific in the Shopify world, but you think of apps like ReConvert or AfterSell, and, you know, and they offer these kind of third-party offers. Sometimes it’s not just upselling their own products or recommending, hey, you just bought these shoes, you should buy these socks. Sometimes it’s not just that. It’s sometimes they have a partnership arrangement, through ReConvert or AfterSell. And all of a sudden there’s no, You know, talking about the trust that’s baked into a successful transaction, and then showing the thank you page with additional offers from our partners. I know that works. I’m curious if that’s something that you’ve thought of, or you know partners that are doing that sort of thing.

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, so that was kind of what I was referring to a little bit ago. So yeah, they’re called like retail media or post-purchase partners companies.

Steve Hutt
Oh, okay.

Josh Kennedy
So like, they basically— so Rockd is the biggest one. And they— so funny enough that, you know, a lot of A lot of companies use like ROCT, even though it’s like kind of a CPC, it’s typically bought on a CPC. And it’s like usually like a flat fee spend, like they don’t really do CPA unless like you’re a huge brand. So maybe if you’re, I don’t know, whatever the biggest brands are, maybe you can get away with it and negotiate with them a little bit.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
But yeah, I mean, so there’s essentially, there’s companies that do it. Some of them will do it on commission or CPA only. And so you’re only paying for the sale. Other ones do And the interesting thing to note about them is they all have different or exclusive inventory. So like if you work with ROCT, you’re not going to, you know, you’re not gonna basically be buying the same inventory if you’re running 2 campaigns like through a ThanksCo company or a Falcon Labs or something. They all have basically exclusive inventory relationships with, you know, the different websites, the different apps, like whatever they’re, whoever they’re partnered with.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
In order to show those third-party offers. So like you can feel fairly comfortable as a brand working with multiple ones and trying to, you know, see does this work for my brand. We’ve seen typically it does work, but, you know, like you have to have the right offer, you have to have the relevancy of like this specific, you know, like partnering brand or partnering ecommerce store. So like sometimes it’s like The algorithm is not perfect, right? Sometimes you’re getting ads shown in irrelevant places. So that’s just something to be mindful of. And so it’s just trying to, as much as possible, pair whatever your offer is on someone else’s post-purchase with some relevancy and some context. And the last thing I’ll say is apps are really interesting as well, because they do have that post-purchase kind of model as well.

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Josh Kennedy
Or within the apps, they’ve got sort of that’s sort of, yeah, they’re showing like some sort of like offers, like after, you know, someone does something, whether, I don’t know, they reach a certain milestone in the app or, you know, they purchase something or whatever it is. But like we had one recently where we set up some sort of like offer with an app that they had like 4 million users and they were, I can’t remember the name of it. It’s like a vending. So it’s like, it was an app where people would go like either to the laundromat or like to the vending machines. Right? And like they were using this app, right, as like for whatever to pay. It was like, I don’t know, it’s like some sort of transactions, right, or whatever. So payment app, and then they would be shown our offer afterwards. So like my point being is like that’s another thing that’s kind of like exclusive or gated to like a lot of brands, like that if you don’t know about that, if you’re not looking for those types of partnerships, they’re not gonna be, you know, you’re probably not gonna have access to those partnerships.

Josh Kennedy
And I would think that that would be pretty incremental because it’s a fairly closed community, like being like partnered with a specific app and showing an offer with offer there.

Steve Hutt
Hmm, interesting. So we do have a lot of, I would say, different types of people listening to this recording today. You know, there’s some early stage people that are, you know, just getting product market fit, or some wantrepreneurs for sure, they’re just thinking about wanting to get involved in entrepreneurship and wanting to maybe get their first product going, or even if it’s a dropshipper, print on demand or whatever they’re doing. But there’s a lot of people like firmly entrenched, I think, in the mid-market that are listening right now. Like, who do you think— and then maybe a lot of them don’t have, or they’ve kind of don’t really have an affiliate manager yet, or they’re dabbling in a few different things. Like you mentioned, like, I don’t know if I read somewhere online, but you talk a little bit about maybe people shouldn’t really have an affiliate program yet if they’re running really like low margin, or if they’re in an early stage, if they’re like said, in a startup mode still, or maybe they have a massive catalog and that’s really hard to manage. I’m curious from your perspective, like, where’s a good sweet spot of Imagine Affiliate? Like, where you guys, you know, are— I guess it must be a data-backed kind of decision about why you’re working with certain brands because they have product-market fit. But I’m just curious about, like, you know, if margins aren’t great or if you’re in your early stages, what should those people do? But then if you are like I guess in this $5 million or more range, why does it work well to partner up with you?

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, that’s good. That’s a good question. So a lot of different, like a lot of different things. But one of the things is that you just like, you know, it depends on what environment you’re into, like Amazon, for instance, like your most valuable affiliates at Amazon pretty much are only working with the, you know, the top 10, top 20 bestsellers, or maybe top 50 bestsellers of any category. And like some will say, like there’s one called Buyer— what’s it called? So Wickfire is the parent company. I’m trying to remember what the— I can’t remember, but there’s basically, there’s a million of those review sites in the Amazon space and buyersguide.org, right? And they simply like, they’ll have it like if you’re not in the top 100 or 200 or whatever their threshold is, they just simply won’t work with you. And so really, depending on what type of affiliate you’re working with, really it backs down to like how well does your website convert? And it’s like startups just don’t typically convert as well as like more household names. And so basically the affiliate is getting less from their traffic from sending it to you than they would be if they were sending it to like a household name in your industry.

Josh Kennedy
So like, you know, if you have an example would be like, you know, an athletic greens, right? Or maybe like an air purifier, whatever that is, like Honeywell maybe is one of the big ones or something in that space. It’s like if they’re sending it to like a brand new air fryer startup versus like sending it to Honeywell, it’s like that’s kind of like a global brand, you know, people recognize, they see it in Home Depot or wherever they go. And so it’s really like the conversion and the trust of like the partner, the brand, like it makes it so much easier on the affiliate. So that’s one. There’s partially because a lot of these affiliates, either they want to run, depending on what they do, like some of the content costs, you know, whether on a CPC or a flat fee or, you know, or like I said, a test budget of some sort. So like brands that are super restricted with budgets, like it just can make it more difficult to, you know, get partners on board because—

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Josh Kennedy
You’ll have other brands that are bigger than you, right, that are willing to do that. And so basically your offer in the marketplace is not competitive for the affiliates and the other people that they’re working with. So that’s That’s another thing. And then also just, I think, kind of the recognition or the resonance that you have with something like the mass media publishers and the newsletters and stuff, it’s like, I think they can be interested in talking about a brand new brand or startup if it is very interesting.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
But a lot of times it’s like they want to go with the safe bet too, I think. So that’s really what it is. It’s nothing against the smaller brands. It’s just that For affiliates, it just is not quite as appealing as some of their bigger brands for some of the reasons I mentioned.

Steve Hutt
Yeah, I know, 100%. So what do you believe some of the next steps are for those who are listening? So the early stage, I’ll put some links in the show notes of what I believe, and I’ve written about it, and I’ve had other kind of early— these apps and different connectors and things like that that can help you with your thank you pages and things like that. That’s a really decent starting point for the early stage people, but those that are kind of firmly entrenched, you’ve got product-market fit. fit. You’re on Amazon likely, and this is just part of your journey and you want to continue with the growth. I think right now, we kind of talked before recording, but we’re in this pre-BFCM time right now. This is the Super Bowl of commerce is coming up. It’s incredibly important, and I believe there’s time still as of right now to get a decent affiliate program going and partnering up with the right people.

Steve Hutt
Walk us through what happens. If someone’s in that $5 million range or more, and they’ve got product market fit, then like, how can people work with you? And what do you believe some of the next steps might be?

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think anytime is a good time to really do affiliate marketing if you like. Yeah, to add an affiliate program, honestly. But of course, like, it’s, you know, maybe amplified during this time. So during Q4, when gift guide, people are looking People are looking for gift guides, just generally speaking, people are spending more money, all that kind of stuff, obviously. But as far as working with us, you know, so I will kind of offer, you know, typically we work with like 3 to 6 month kind of range of retainers, typically. And we do, we have a model where it’s like a kind of a base plus a, you know, base fee plus like a percentage.

Steve Hutt
Okay.

Josh Kennedy
Of revenue, of incremental revenue that we like refer to you, but I will in order to work together, I would work for 50% off, like basically our first month’s retainer. So I would either offer that or I’ll offer, like my other offer would be 50% off our first month’s retainer, and then I’ll invest that in ad spend towards your brand, right? So we’ll set up some of those campaigns through BuyerIQ as an affiliate yourself, so you can choose kind of which direction you wanna go. And I want, you can only make it like, the minimum kind of commitment would be 30 days. So like if you don’t wanna work past 30 days, I won’t hold you to it. But if it works, obviously, then we could continue to work together however long. Generally speaking, we do work with, if we move forward with a brand, we usually at least have a 1, 2-year-plus kind of partnership retention with them, so usually pretty strong. And as far as what we’ll do, so we will basically, we’re gonna do, audit sounds very commonplace, but basically—

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Josh Kennedy
What I’m, when we’re doing an audit, What I’m looking at really is I’m looking at like the a lot of the publishers that have content in your space. I’m looking at a lot of the SEM partners that are you know like active in your space. I’m looking at like how competitive the the like the payouts are and things like that. We’re looking for you know just like interesting signals essentially from and we’re also looking like how big is the the particular market that you’re in. Like air purifiers very competitive but also very big. Market. Something that’s super niche, is not— maybe not as, not as easy to work with. So like, basically what my— you know, when I say audit, I mean we’re going to do our homework and we’re going to make sure that it’s a worthwhile investment of our time on both sides, whether it’s us investing in you, whether we think there’s like kind of lift opportunity for you as well.

Josh Kennedy
So basically we’ll try to make it seamless, or we’ll remove the friction for it, where we’re going to invest in you 50% of the retainer, or, you know, make it a a little bit more affordable or a little cheaper to work with us for the first month, and then we can always back out. And of course, like, before we even get into any type of engagement, even the first day working together, we’re gonna have a really good idea of like, is this a worthwhile thing to pursue for both parties?

Steve Hutt
Yeah, that’s amazing. Thank you for that offer though, by the way. I really, I think people should take that up. So if this is in your sweet spot and you’re thinking about it, like, that $50 off is good kicking some tires, especially if you can put some of that money potentially back into ad spend. I think that’s quite interesting. I did write about— the reason why I asked about this kind of pre-BFCM thing and the affiliate side, I think it’s interesting. There is time, that I can guarantee you for sure. And I know we don’t want to throw around the word about like, you know, doing an audit and stuff like that, but I think that’s really important.

Steve Hutt
I think, you know, there’s some things, there’s some logic that needs to go into understanding the business, like validating tracking and margins and all these sort of things, and the attribution inventory. There’s a lot of stuff to think about. But I also think that’s where you guys fit in quite nicely. We think about like publisher recruitment. I mean, I think that’s a really key thing. Like, you have a list of publishers where you can get the word out for the brands that you work with. So I think building a very large kind of trusted publisher network, they don’t have to do it from zero. They just go to you guys because you guys do it already.

Steve Hutt
Yeah, for sure. I think that’s great. And I think, you know, and then you go down, I mean, SEM, obviously, I mean, that’s— it’s a non-negotiable, like just paid affiliate traffic makes complete sense. And then obviously content production, and, you know, we talked about attribution and measurement and all that. But at the end of the day, I think there’s good commercial outcome that can happen for a brand on the affiliate side because you have all of the slices that are required and you have a baked-in system. You know, there’s an SOP. That’s why you’re successful with so many brands because you have a process that works.

Josh Kennedy
Right, yeah, and I think as I’ve kind of matured in and our work and everything. I think really what I’ve— I’ve come a little bit more practical in terms of, like, what we’re doing with brands is, like, we’re helping you basically— we’re almost as much as anything, it’s like, yes, we have the publisher relationships. Like, for instance, one of our clients is a big health tech brand, or not big, but maybe mid-sized health tech brand growing to 9 figures, like, very—

Steve Hutt
That’s big.

Josh Kennedy
A good, like, a great client of ours, and, like, the last 2 publishers that we sourced for them or recruited for them and got activated campaigns, or got the campaigns over the line, were Healthline and Forbes Vetted. So like, yes, we have the relationships and we have access to some of the biggest publishers in the world. But I don’t think that that’s our total value. I think really what we’re doing is we’re helping to, A, is to avoid the pitfalls, to avoid the icebergs.

Steve Hutt
Yeah.

Josh Kennedy
But also too, it’s really to navigate demand and purchase demand in an efficient way. So really what publishers and, you know, different affiliates and all this kind of stuff doing is they’re selling demand back to the brand. And so we’re helping to basically look at all of that demand across all those different traffic sources and partner types and campaigns and everything. And we’re saying, okay, like, how do we pair you with the right demand? And then how do we make sure that it’s the most efficient for whatever budget, whether you’re paying on a commission CPA or also just like any flat fee perspectives.

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
In line with what your growth goals are. So if you’re looking for massive growth, I mean, that’s gonna be more expensive, right? ‘Cause you’re gonna work with these partners, but if you’re looking at more steady growth, so basically like, I kinda think of it as a little bit of like, we’re like a financial manager or something like that, is that we’re showing you, okay, these are the different, this is the portfolio of partners that you have access to, and the portfolio of demand that you have access to, and then how can can we again help you to access demand to possibly grow your business and diversify off of Meta and Google Ads or whatever your acquisition sources are? So yeah, my point being is like, I kind of all group it into like, we’re helping you, kind of like I said, we’re kind of managing that demand for you and helping you for new customers and hopefully bringing some value, but obviously having your best interest at heart.

Steve Hutt
Yeah, it’s amazing. And it seems like the— before we kind of wrap up, obviously the LTV that comes out of subscription brands really helps fuel campaigns better because we understand the lifetime value of an active subscriber. And because of that, the margin is there and the average order size is— it just grows over time of the lifetime of it. And then it’s easy to say, well, I’m going to take a net loss on the first sale because I know the lifetime value of a subscriber. of a subscriber. And I think that’s good metrics to have when you’re doing the affiliate side, right?

Josh Kennedy
Well, absolutely. And we, you know, we definitely, there’s ways to basically, there’s custom functionality within affiliate programs, whether it’s like an Impact or an Everflow, that you’re able to like watch the lifetime values. Like we know we’re tracking not only first sale, but we’re also tracking second, third, fourth, fifth purchase. And so then you can evaluate as a brand, okay, is this like, was this meaningful? Actually, we could raise the payout here. We can incentivize them more for more traffic, more sales. So, yeah, I mean, depending on which network you’re using, that’s available to you. But, yeah, that’s definitely something that we’re implementing day to day with our programs.

Steve Hutt
That’s amazing. All right, Josh, so it’s imagine-affiliate.com. That’s the website. It’ll be on the show notes. And what else do we have here? I’m on page 3 of notes.

Josh Kennedy
Today, even if you just want to talk to me, because sometimes I feel like affiliate is just like so complex and there’s so much to it, so much nuance, is that it’s hard to, it’s hard to just all get it in one. It’s like drinking from a fire hose kind of thing. So if someone just even wants, if someone even is out there, even if you’re a smaller, midsize, I don’t even say you’re not even doing $5 million, even if we can’t work together. So sometimes it’s interesting for me to just to talk to brands and just like say, like, what do you think affiliate is?

Steve Hutt
Right.

Josh Kennedy
What, like, do you have a program right now? And then, okay, what, how, you know, then we can kind of start from there. Like, so yeah, even just to talk about affiliate marketing, sometimes it helps me to have that brand perspective because like, again, I know it’s to a certain degree or a certain level, but I know that not everyone is in it like I am. So I have to kind of like, you know, meet in the middle somewhere.

Steve Hutt
All right, I’ll throw your LinkedIn and email and I think even a contact form on the website and stuff like that. So there are ways of getting ahold of you and DMing you for a conversation. So yeah, this has been very impactful, longer than normal for recording, but I think the thing was is that the timing is right. I think the opportunity is there, the incrementality is there. It’s just like, where are you in your journey? And then are there plans and opportunities? They’re there and there’s processes in place. Josh, you’ve clearly organized it into a great workflow for people. So thank you for transparent sharing today and have yourself an awesome day.

Josh Kennedy
Yeah, you too. Thank you, Steve.

Steve Hutt
All right, take care.