Topics:

Never Miss a Beat - Get Updates Direct to Your Inbox

Home » Podcast » How To Expand Your Brand and Revenue With Affiliate Marketing

FILTER:

How To Expand Your Brand and Revenue With Affiliate Marketing

Lauren Lee is the Senior eCommerce Business Development Manager of ClickBank, an e-commerce platform with a global affiliate marketplace that empowers entrepreneurs to build, market, and scale online. In this role, she utilizes her expertise in affiliate marketing. Before ClickBank, Lauren was the Director of Business Development at Brad’s Deals, Senior Accessories Buyer at Groupon, and eCommerce Sales Manager at vfish Designs.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[02:44] Lauren Lee shares her background in affiliate marketing
[04:01] What is affiliate marketing, and how can you start an affiliate program?
[09:24] The affiliate networks sellers should join — and how they’re different from ClickBank
[11:27] Lauren explains how ClickBank works and its performance affiliates
[16:28] How ClickBank helps brand owners build direct response offer campaigns
[20:23] The difference between warm and cold traffic
[22:59] The price point for ClickBank’s affiliates and what they consider
[26:31] ClickBank’s overall process and customer success stories
[33:28] The biggest mistake people make when undertaking affiliate marketing

In this episode…

Are you struggling to grow your e-commerce brand? Affiliate marketing is a fruitful route to consider, but where do you start?

Promoting your product through affiliates — organizations or influencers with a great deal of traffic on their websites — can help you reach more people. The challenge lies with how brand owners connect with the right affiliate. Lauren Lee, an affiliate marketing expert, recommends joining an affiliate network or platform like ClickBank, ShareASale, and Commission Junction, to name a few. These platforms host the relationship between a seller and an affiliate to help brand owners make the right decision. Today, Lauren shares how they help clients get products in front of more people through affiliate marketing.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Joe Valley sits down with Lauren Lee, Senior eCommerce Business Development Manager of ClickBank, to discuss how e-commerce brands can thrive through affiliate marketing. Lauren explains the ins and outs of affiliate marketing, tips to build your affiliate program, common mistakes, and how expert partnerships can help you boost your affiliate program results.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode

This episode brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. They provide trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations. So, your Quiet Light advisors aren’t your everyday brokers — they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

Not sure what your business is really worth? No worries. Quiet Light offers a free valuation and marketplace-ready assessment on its website. That’s right—this quick, easy, and free valuation has no strings attached. Knowing the true value of your business has never been easier!

What are you waiting for? Quiet Light offers the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:07

Hi folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Joe Valley 0:18

Hey, folks, Joe Valley here, welcome back to another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast. Today’s guest is an expert in the affiliate marketing side. So if you’ve got an e-commerce business and you’re trying to grow your brand, affiliate marketing is probably a good thing to consider. Lauren Lee is a head of business development vice president, got a long title, and it’s abbreviated on LinkedIn. So I’m about to tell you what it is she says it then we abbreviate it at ClickBank and she goes through explaining how it works, how its risk averse, because you only pay the commission if you have a sale, but that there’s actual media buyers out there that spend their own money and their own risk to buy time for your product, expanding your reach. And they only make money if a sale is created, you do have to do some work on your end, we get to it in the second half of the podcast talking about creating a funnel, testing some things on your end. So you’re giving some data to ClickBank and the people on the other end of it that are the list owners, the email list owners or the media buyers so that they know what the conversion rate is and what the margin is going to be like. But it seems to me like it’s a great opportunity to expand your brand and your reach. You could do it profitably or break even and make money on the back end. If you’ve got additional products to sell. If you’re one product wonder this may not be for you. But if you’ve got a product line, where you’re selling something on the front end, a good healthy ticket price, and you can make a little bit of money or breakeven, knowing that you’re going to make lots of money on the back end, this might be right up your alley. So let’s take a listen. Here we go. Lauren, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. How are you?

Lauren Lee 2:18

I’m good. How are you?

Joe Valley 2:19

I’m fantastic. I’m excited to have you here because I don’t know a whole lot about affiliate marketing. And I know that I had opportunities way back in the day as I sold folks say. And a lot of the people I talked to on a regular basis can really, I think grow their businesses through it. But I don’t know jack about it. So why don’t we start with you and your background? Who the hell are you Lauren Lee and what do you do?

Lauren Lee 2:44

Well, I’ve spent my whole career in e-commerce and retail I’ve had various roles. So I’ve been a buyer for a retailer. I’ve been in business development, sales, e-comm, kind of you name it. But the last seven years, I spent time as the director of business development for an affiliate publisher, and I learned a lot about affiliate marketing. And currently today I’m here at ClickBank as a senior e-commerce business development manager, which is a mouthful as they embark on bringing on more e-commerce brands into their platform.

Joe Valley 3:16

It’s such a mouthful on LinkedIn. It’s abbreviated, I think.

Lauren Lee 3:20

Yeah, it is. Yes, very true.

Joe Valley 3:23

And you’re up in Boise, Idaho. Have you been there for seven years or you joined recently?

Lauren Lee 3:29

Yeah, so actually, I’ve been working remote in Boise for the last five years and I joined ClickBank six months ago. And so before that I was in Chicago,

Joe Valley 3:39

And they threw you’re right on the podcast circuit.

Lauren Lee 3:41

Wow. Yeah, they were like go you know this stuff. Go do it. I was like, yeah, absolutely.

Joe Valley 3:45

Amazing. All right, so just for me, because I don’t know if I can perfectly define it. And no, I can’t. And anybody listening in the audience, what the hell is affiliate marketing?

Lauren Lee 3:56

I think that’s a really good place to start.

Joe Valley 3:58

And I stopped with a vulgarity though I’ll stop. What is affiliate marketing?

Lauren Lee 4:01

No, I mean, this is your audience, they know you, right. They know you use that type of language. I think it’s a really good place to start. So I think people have a good frame of reference of affiliate marketing. And most companies, most e-commerce brands and maybe interest in general people are thinking about affiliate marketing from like influencers, ambassadors, maybe you even consider, okay, I want to be featured in Forbes or have a relationship with a publisher like that. And so that’s primarily I think, what most people are considering as affiliate marketing. Do you feel like that resonates with you in terms of how you understand affiliate marketing?

Joe Valley 4:37

Look at you turn the question around, good for you. She’s done this or what she’s done this a few times, folks, how about that? Yeah, no, look for me. If I go way back, originally affiliate marketing is selling digital products, it’s courses and things of that nature, doing a lot of affiliate marketing that way. Digital books, courses, pamphlets, brochures, how to use that kind of stuff. But then more of, you’ve got a unique product, and you want to reach more people, and they’ve got traffic on their websites that you don’t have. So you capitalize on their traffic. And they do that by adding a banner or promoting your product on their site, or through their email list and things of that nature. And when it sells, it goes through to your site, and then they earn a commission, and you get sales. And it doesn’t cost you anything until you actually sell the product. How do I do?

Lauren Lee 5:38

So good? Actually, so good, good. Yeah. You said you didn’t know anything. But actually, you really do know how affiliate marketing works.

Joe Valley 5:45

I just played dumb a little bit enough to be dangerous. I’ve never actually done it myself, though. So before we hit record, I had a nutritional, nutritional supplement business, and we had a lot of traffic to our website. And I thought about it at that point. And I might have reached out to someone like ClickBank or something. But I never really took any action with it. So how would somebody get started? I actually told you let’s talk about my plumbing guy, I just had coffee with somebody in the plumbing industry. And he’s done great on Amazon for many years. And he’s trying to expand his product line and for the people that are primarily selling on Amazon, and they jump over to Shopify, they’re like, oh, I need to take control of this. Amazon shut me down for a week for no reason whatsoever. I need to de-risk and grow on Shopify, and they find it incredibly hard to get any traction with traffic on a brand-new website. Is affiliate marketing an option for them to, you know, get a foothold off of Amazon, and how will it work?

Lauren Lee 6:50

Absolutely. So to actually bring up a really good point, somebody who’s wanting to get more traffic to their e-commerce site, whether it’s on Shopify or Big-commerce, or whatever platform you’re using. So that’s an identifier of a problem that I think many people face. So I think that’s a great place to start. And affiliate marketing can come in and be a solution to that absolutely. So where do you begin? How do you start an affiliate program? The best place and so you mentioned something actually really key you mentioned, I thought about it, and like I reached out to a few people, right, but I never followed through. And I think that’s what a lot of times people in a company, you’re wearing many hats, but people are doing lots of things. Affiliate marketing kind of falls through the trap of the cracks. So you want to ensure that you understand the strategy and the benefits that can happen. And you actually put in resources and time and effort, maybe an individual who’s the point person on affiliate marketing. So let’s go back to how you begin. The best thing you could do to start your affiliate marketing program is to join an affiliate network or a platform that is hosting the relationship between a seller or a brand. Like you mentioned that company that is a plumber company said.

Joe Valley 7:16

Plumbing supplies, yeah.

Lauren Lee 8:00

Plumbing supplies, thank you. So it would connect this plumbing supply company with affiliates. And these companies are called networks are basically the middle the connecting point so that people can and mutually opt in to each other’s programs. Those are big terms. And I’ll explain what that means in real terms. So a platform could simply be Shopify has one for influencers, I think it’s called dovetail. And so it’d be joining dovetail. And that’s available to you through Shopify, and it’s going through and it’s only for influencers. So it would go through and you could search, I’m looking for this category, I’m looking for this type of reach that this influencer has, I’m going to reach out to them directly and talk to them about my affiliate program. That means that you’ve determined what you want to pay out to this person for driving traffic and driving conversions. We could talk about that to the financial piece. And it also means that you’ve determined, what do you want them to promote? Do you have a promo code? Do you have an offer and in my world, we are doing something very specific and it’s called direct response marketing. And again, we can go into that so let me just recap because it’s a lot you, where you want to start is you want to start with a network right? You want to pick a network.

Joe Valley 9:16

Is ClickBank an example of a network?

Lauren Lee 9:18

Absolutely. So we are a network.

Joe Valley 9:20

What are in two or three others so let’s go ahead and talk about your competition. ClickBank and who else?

Lauren Lee 9:24

Yeah, so it’s interesting and I know I’m not just saying this because I work for ClickBank but ClickBank doesn’t really have a direct competitor network and I’ll explain why. But let me just give your listeners like lay of the land of where do you go and where do you find a network. So you can work with companies like ShareASale that allow you to track or manage connect with affiliates and pay them so that’s so super key and having a scalable affiliate program or commission junction or link share and there are other companies as well but those are the big players in terms of like networks.

Joe Valley 9:55

I’ve heard of all of them. How are they different from ClickBank?

Lauren Lee 9:58

Oh, you just like set me up for the next thing, so thank you for that question. Okay, so these networks are connecting you with certain types of affiliates. All of those networks I mentioned are connecting you with publishers, ambassadors or select influencers that they work with, or even agencies. So that’s the type of affiliate you’re going to connect with. ClickBank is going to connect you with a different type of affiliate, which I will explain to you and that is the primary difference between ClickBank as a network and the other ones I mentioned. The other really good thing is I have to plug this in, but not to sound too salesy, but ClickBank is totally free, whereas other networks are, sometimes have an upfront costs. And you have to think about that risk for your company and also monthly fees, and ClickBank does not so.

Joe Valley 10:48

So ClickBank I would assume get a percentage of the sale.

Lauren Lee 10:52

Exactly. So we take a percentage of sales.

Joe Valley 10:56

Okay. I’m still a little confused in terms of exactly how it works. So somebody is going to sign up for ClickBank and then they’re going to pick and choose who they may want to work with, or people that are out there on the other side that have websites with traffic, are picking and choosing who they want to be able to advertise because it’s relative? Or is it like AdSense, in a sense, where it’s just Google figures out what will be an appropriate ad to be fed to this particular website? Is that how it works?

Lauren Lee 11:27

No, but that’s very clever. So let me kind of paint the picture for you and for your listeners. So on ClickBank, there’s a marketplace, and on the marketplace, that’s where brands are going to put their offer. And I’m gonna explain what an offer means, because that’s very particular too, but on the marketplace with your offer is there and it’s living 1000s of affiliates are coming every single day to look at the offers that are available on ClickBank.

Joe Valley 11:53

Okay. Let’s pause there. And let’s define an affiliate.

Lauren Lee 11:57

Okay. Yes, yes. Thank you. Thank you for circling back on that. ClickBank has a particular type of affiliate. These affiliates are called performance affiliates. They are media buyers, and or their email list managers. What does that mean? A media buyer as an affiliate means an individual a company an agency, they are creating ads. And the brand does have control over this, we can talk about that too. But they are creating ads and buying media on behalf of the brand and driving traffic to the designated place that the brand has said drive traffic to this URL, this landing page this funnel? Why is that important? And why is that different? So this is important because somebody like you mentioned the plumbing supply company, or even the company that you had prior in the supplement space or health and wellness. You are probably buying media yourself or thinking about it or totally terrified of it of the risk associated. And now you’re leveraging affiliates to do that for you. These are skilled media buyers buying media from Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, Facebook, wherever.

Joe Valley 13:07

They’re spending their own money at their risk, hoping for a sale and will only earn a fee, or be profitable if a sale occurs. It’s no cost to me the product owner.

Lauren Lee 13:17

Exactly. You got it you’re tracking. And so the other affiliate type on ClickBank is an email list manager. And these are companies who are managing hundreds of email lists. And again, they are sending out campaigns on your behalf and promoting it to their audiences. So we’re talking about hundreds of 1000s of people to five to 10 Millions of people that are going to see your brand if that affiliate picks it up. I hope that is making sense. Are you following that?

Joe Valley 13:47

It does it sounds like ClickBank has professionals on the other side of it. Whereas you mentioned ShareASale. Is that where there may be smaller individual may 1000s or 10s of 1000s of site owners that have traffic and are trying to earn money as an affiliate?

Lauren Lee 14:06

Yeah, so insurance sale can be like an influencer or a blogger or, and they do have like relationships with bigger publishers like the one that I worked for, they’re just different, not that one is better than the other. And so when you really understand affiliate marketing and the program, you can build your thinking about the totality, right? So you want to think about your ambassador program, you want to think about selecting a few influencers that you want to work with. You want to think about your publisher relationships, like what publishers are going to publish content for you. And then you want to think about your acquisition efforts and leveraging affiliates to be able to do that for you through media buying. And then lastly, you want to think about driving traffic to your funnels or to your website and using email list managers. So it’s a big program and I think a lot of people get confused about thinking about what am I building And what is affiliate marketing? And how am I going to begin and start leveraging this?

Joe Valley 15:04

Who were these agencies that are spending their own money? Advertising somebody else’s product in the hopes of the sale? Other agencies, then that’s all they do. Because I’ve never heard of them.

Lauren Lee 15:18

Yeah, they’re really skilled media buyers, essentially. So and the other thing that’s really particular about ClickBank…

Joe Valley 15:27

Can I ask a question before? Yeah. So they’re really still media buyers? Where are they placing the media?

Lauren Lee 15:32

Yeah, so that’s another good question. So they’re placing it on channels, like I mentioned, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and they’re driving traffic to these ads that they’ve created or content that they’ve created. And the call to action is to then go to the brand right to go to the brand’s URL that they’ve designated. This is where I want the destination for the traffic to be.

Joe Valley 15:55

And for those that don’t have any experience in this at all, once they’re signed up for ClickBank there’s an affiliate link that will be tracked to the website and tracked in your back end so that people get paid properly. And that media buyer can log in and see how they did as well and see what their ROI is.

Lauren Lee 16:14

Exactly. Yeah.

Joe Valley 16:15

Is there a particular? I’m sorry, I’m just gonna start asking questions because I know that people listening like to ask this ask that, is there a particular type of product category or value that works better than others?

Lauren Lee 16:28

Yeah, so this is a really important question. So on ClickBank specifically, the type of offer that are on our marketplaces are called direct response offers. Now if that is a term that makes you think about mailing things to people’s homes or something like that, I want to…

Joe Valley 16:31

Radio direct response days, I used to, never mind, my supplement business was a radio direct response product for us. We did a TV infomercial as well. That’s all radio, direct response marketing. In fact, really, PPC is direct response marketing, because you’re spending money and you’re looking for a what, a direct response, and then you get a sale. It’s all direct response.

Lauren Lee 17:09

I love that. So most e-commerce brands coming into our space have to learn what is a direct response offer? What does it look like? And they build it right, you have to build this funnel this campaign for our affiliates to drive this traffic to. And why are affiliates driving this traffic to direct response offers? I can see you have a question.

Joe Valley 17:31

I do. I’ll let you finish it this one time. Go ahead.

Lauren Lee 17:34

Okay, so the reason that ClickBank affiliates are driving traffic to direct response pages is because of the conversion rates versus driving traffic to an e-commerce shopping experience.

Joe Valley 17:47

One to 2% on a normal page and five to six or higher on an e-commerce page or a direct spot space. So he builds, does ClickBank help people understand how to properly build a good converting direct response page.

Lauren Lee 18:02

Yeah, we do. So again, we’re the network, right. So we’re like the facilitator, the relationship host of being able to guide people into how to build their funnels and campaigns. So we have a lot of resources, a lot of education. But you’re not building the funnel itself on ClickBank, you can use your in-house dev team, you can use other companies that we recommend. And of course, we guide you along the way. So we have business development representatives that are helping add like a consultancy, like feel to help you build your campaigns.

Joe Valley 18:30

Do you build that first, before you put it out there on the network for media buyers, I would say your media buyers will want to see it look at it, see if they think it’s a good campaign or not.

Lauren Lee 18:39

Yeah, and also as a brand owner and wanting to leverage his strategy, you want to have a testing period where you’re actually testing the content that you have on this campaign? Is it converting? Are people engaging with it? Are they actually, going through your funnels, like you want to have some data to be able to present that to the affiliates and say like, I know that this is converting at this rate, and you’re feeling really confident, I think that’s the biggest piece.

Joe Valley 19:04

So in your view, then they should be building this direct response page for their paid advertising as well.

Lauren Lee 19:09

Yeah, absolutely. We see that happen a lot. People learn through direct response marketing and our affiliates, what’s working what’s not, and then take that and leverage that in their own strategies and campaigns for sure.

Joe Valley 19:24

So they’ve got to have some sort of direct response page landing page, some history to show what the conversion rate is to convince the media buyers that it’s a good page, and they’ll make a profit.

Lauren Lee 19:35

Yeah, I mean, primarily, that’s how it’s working. And the affiliates are competitive, and they want to drive traffic to high-converting pages. And so the more that you can compel that, the better. And I think the whole point is that as a company, you want to leverage this strategy. You don’t want to come in and it’s just like soft and like you’re guessing is this going to work? You want to feel really confident going in and ultimately companies are using this to leverage their acquisition efforts, right? You’re driving traffic to a page. And the page is solely built for conversion, rather than built for, like the ethos and the passion of your brand. It’s built to convert. And so you’re driving a funnel for customer acquisition.

Joe Valley 20:16

Okay, so you said a good converting page, what percentage are we talking about?

Lauren Lee 20:23

So well, another thing that I think that’s worth clarifying is that this traffic is cold traffic. So another thing to think about, and now we’re kind of getting into the weeds. So I want to make sure that your listeners are tracking. But the difference between warm traffic being driven to your brand, or a funnel, or e-commerce site versus cold traffic being driven to a funnel campaign or your site, cold traffic was never in the market for your brand, doesn’t know anything about it wasn’t even in the market for the solution you’re offering to them. But where that cold traffic is pointed to the direct response offer campaign is so compelling and converting. They’re staying on that page, they’re sticking. And so we usually see between 2% or higher conversion rate on cold traffic. And I think that’s a good distinction to make. warm traffic means, I have food brands. And I’m partnering with an influencer, who’s a cook and a chef. And they put a promo code onto their social media account, to go check out my product. And then traffic is coming to my website, that’s warm traffic, there is an interest, the audience is interested in cooking, I have a chef who’s promoting it. So they have some sort of interest in my product already. And so that’s how you leverage the differences between cold and warm traffic.

Joe Valley 21:49

The media buyer, that’s sending traffic to my page, my landing page. And let’s say you’re on the other end of it, and you click the link and you land on my page and you make a decision not to buy go away. Are there cookies that are tracking you coming back to the site through another ad or anything that is going to allow that media buyer to still earn a commission? If you do in fact, by the second or third time you see the ad.

Lauren Lee 22:20

So there is a cookie window. And as a brand owner, you can set your window setting like I think for most people, it’s like 30 days, right?

Joe Valley 22:29

Do the media buyers look for something in particular in that regard. Are they not concerned about? Are they mostly making money on the first visit?

Lauren Lee 22:34

Yeah, they want it to convert right away, right? They’re not looking for people to leave and come back and convert like they are building campaigns and strategies for conversion to happen immediately. Right. Like that’s how they want to win.

Joe Valley 22:48

Okay, and I know the answer to the question of, you know, is there a particular price point that’s best for the media buyers? Well, it depends on the margins and all this other stuff. Can you just talk about a little bit?

Lauren Lee 22:59

Yeah, sure. So generally speaking, you also asked something about the types of products and I don’t think I totally clarified that. So what we see is there is a definitely a category of success. And that’s really in health supplements, consumables. Also digital products like courses and business courses and eBooks and things like that. Informational, like content. And so that is primarily I would say, like 90%, if not more of what ClickBank is promoting and the types of offers that these affiliates are looking for. Is that the limits though of this how this model and strategy works, no. And so when you talk about price point, our price points are really driven by the experience and the history we have of the categories we’ve been serving. So just wanted to put that in relationship. And most of the time we see a successful campaign with an AOB of like 200 plus. So that means that the consumer is investing in the product itself and ClickBank has tools and kind of bells and whistles to help increase that AOB throughout the funnel and experience. But what that allows the seller to do with a higher AOB is to be able to be pay out your affiliates at a really competitive rate. So you can pay out a high percentage with you know, a higher basket cart price does that makes sense?

Joe Valley 24:32

Yeah, know what you meant. What is that higher percentage, like, they’ll be comparing their fees to fees on Amazon to something like this. What would it be?

Lauren Lee 24:41

Okay, so I’m about to say a percentage that’s gonna make people go like, I’m never doing that, like, that’s crazy. So, but I’m gonna tell you the truth and I’ll tell you what’s around it. So normally a affiliate on ClickBank, the payouts to them are in the ranges of 60 to 75%. Again, most people compare this to, like you’re saying like to Amazon or to what they pay their influencers, what they pay their ambassadors, what they’re paying publishers to promote about their brands. And those kind of range between seven and maybe 15% 20%, usually at like the highest. These types of affiliates, which we’ve talked about, they are buying media, which means that it’s more competitive, more pricey, and they’re looking for that immediate return. And so most brands using and leveraging affiliates on ClickBank are thinking about it as an acquisition strategy, they’re thinking about how much can I pay out an affiliate to acquire a customer, and what is the lifetime value of the customer?

Joe Valley 25:44

Yeah, even if you break even, and you’ve got additional products, you’ve got them on your list, now you can sell them additional products along the way. And even if we say, somebody’s paying a certain percentage in Amazon fees, they’re also probably paying for media to drive traffic to it. So it’s not like their cost is only 15%, it’s much, much higher, breaking even on a supplement business, sometimes you could go negative if you’ve got a recurring revenue stream. And you know the lifetime value of the customer, which is critically important, tougher when you’ve got a single product that you sell once and never sell anything else to the customer. Again, you can’t no point in breaking even doing that, because you can break even doing nothing.

Lauren Lee 26:31

Right? That’s actually a really good point. And also to kind of make this come to life. Like I want to give like a real example of like a real brands that ClickBank has worked with and that they actually leverage this strategy. So maybe your listeners know this brand, or maybe they don’t, I don’t know. Or maybe you know it yourself. It’s called Organifi. And they began with like a greens drink. They’re often compared to like amazing grass and some other greens, like products in the market. Have you heard of them before?

Joe Valley 26:59

No, but you’re very much into meditation. So I understand why you are, I do not know these brands.

Lauren Lee 27:04

Even if I wasn’t into meditation, a healthy green drink is definitely something on my radar. And I’m sure now anybody listening, if you go into the store, like they’re in Whole Foods, or in most retailers.

Joe Valley 27:19

Organifi, so my wife drinks something very green every morning. So maybe that’s what it is.

Lauren Lee 27:25

Okay, so maybe that’s it. There are a lot on the market. But at least there’s some frame of reference of a brand that is used ClickBank. So when they started, they didn’t have any brand recognition, they were just kind of getting started. And they really leveraged the strategy of affiliates. And so they built a funnel, they built the campaign, they built the direct response offer. And I just want to add that they built it within their own brand ethos, they didn’t sell out or say things and make claims that didn’t resonate with their brand. And they built a campaign and bundled their items together. So people are buying three or six, or sometimes nine bottles of bourbon jugs of the product. And so this is how they actually scaled their business. This is how they began to drive traffic for customer acquisition, to show sales growth, to be able to leverage this strategy and start to build their business as an actual standing brand. And get into retail and getting to stores and partnerships that they really wanted to use. So this strategy, although it feels complex, and there’s a lot to think about, it absolutely can work for a brand to be able to really scale quickly without having to put out a lot of cash for risk.

Joe Valley 28:49

Yeah, no, I agree 100%. I’m thinking about all the stuff I’ve done in my life, and I should have paid more attention to this along the way. People will spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars on Pay Per Click, or influencers or other social media stuff now without really knowing what the ROI is for six or 12 months, which is kind of scary. There is a cost associated with this though. There’s no fee paid out to ClickBank or the media buyer, in this case, unless there’s a sale, but there is a cost to develop the landing page. I did this for that book back there. And man I said I spent a lot of money. I was going to create a quick and easy course and whatnot and then life at Quiet Light just got incredibly busy. And of course the paid media didn’t work. So let’s be honest, it didn’t work so I stopped doing it. But I wasn’t really fully vested in it for the long run. Because my life and business is really made through Quiet Light. The cost associated with develop thing a landing page for a supplement business, you guys have experts that are available on your site when somebody becomes a partner that they can access those folks.

Lauren Lee 30:13

Yeah, absolutely, we have an experts page. And actually, I’ll give it to you. So you can put it in the show notes. And we absolutely can allow people to connect with them and work with them. And the cost association, I think that you’re talking about is the investment you’re going to make into the strategy, right? So you are going to build a page. And there are companies like Click Funnels or Focus Funnels, or even Shopify has ways for you to build these funnels and campaigns now with like plugins and widgets that they have on their platforms. And so you can start lightweight, you don’t have to invest hundreds of 1000s of dollars until you feel confident that this is a strategy you want to implement into your business. But I think putting it into perspective for people like what would I invest to build a funnel, again, it can be as low as $1,500, hiring somebody to build a funnel, and it can scale from there. But there’s one piece that I think is important for people to start to think about, when you’re building a funnel. That’s one piece of it. But the big part of building a funnel and a campaign is the content the copy?

Joe Valley 31:20

Thank you, I was gonna ask that who creates it, not the media buyer?

Lauren Lee 31:24

No. So the brand is either creating it in-house, you have somebody who has a phenomenal copywriter, or somebody you depend on to build your copy. Or you’re hiring a copywriter to be able to generate this kind of content. And again, the content is built for conversion. It’s not about brand ethos, it’s not about your passion projects, it’s about conversion. So it might feel a little bit different for our brand to be writing that at first. And you are dictating and guiding the affiliates of what to create. So you’re providing the assets and the subject binds and the content they might put in an email, or the types of pictures and images that are working and taglines. So you’re really allowed and should be the person who’s dictating what the affiliates are promoting for you.

Joe Valley 32:17

And on your site, there’s going to be examples people can learn how to do this people don’t become expert content writers for direct response marketing without seeing other stuff. Is that the partners page?

Lauren Lee 32:31

Yes. It should be our experts page. But yeah, you can see the brands are the companies that we’ve worked with that have built other offers for ClickBank and on offers outside of ClickBank to and I think it’s just a matter of connecting with them and seeing like, does this resonate with me? And do you build content that I like? And do you have a partnership that you think will be valuable for you long term, but the content, the copy is so important, and it should be for any marketing campaign, not just direct response marketing, but that’s what people are engaging with. That’s what’s going to keep somebody’s attention and continue them down the funnel and the path of converting.

Joe Valley 33:09

You got a lot of very valuable useful free material on your site, clickbank.com. And then I just want to read resources. Good stuff. All right, just tell me right now the absolute biggest mistake somebody is going to make if they decide to go and do affiliate marketing.

Lauren Lee 33:28

Okay, so there’s two things that come to mind. Number one, you give up too soon. Yeah, and I think you have to remember your relationship to your business, right? So you are wearing so many hats, you’re doing so many things, you’re pulled in many directions. You’re trying to make these executive decisions, oftentimes very quickly, and affiliate marketing is one of those things that’s easily to just say forget it, right like let’s come back to that when our ducks in a row and let’s be honest, our ducks are never in a row like we always are working on something or something is in flux. So people give up too fast and don’t stay with the strategy don’t stay with it. And so I think that’s number one and number two, you don’t leverage the network’s you are kind of piecemealing together scotch taping together your affiliate program. And so now you’re managing these affiliates on the spreadsheet and you’re trying to figure out how to pay them and then you get to taxes and it sounds awful, right? So a network like ClickBank will take care of that for you we pay everybody we pay all your affiliates handle all the taxes we handle everything for you. And so do most networks but those are the two big things.

Joe Valley 34:40

I don’t need to be tech-savvy in order to do it. That’s what ClickBank does. Yeah, exactly. I do have to figure out how to do Click Funnels or do I need Click Funnels if I’m going to do this through ClickBank?

Lauren Lee 34:53

So ClickFunnels is a way to build a funnel to build a direct response but you still have to put in all the content and all the copy and figure out what it’s going to look like. Right? So if you don’t have an in house dev team or the ability to make your own funnel, then yeah, you would leverage a third party company like that.

Joe Valley 35:14

Yeah, fair enough. And then there’s the email marketing campaign that’s attached to that and then all sorts of other stuff. But that’s what you folks do I don’t do it anymore. Actually, Chris on our team does it off so we do it as a company, I just don’t do it anymore myself.

Lauren Lee 35:28

And we understand how complex it is. And we understand also the value of it. So you do have somebody who’s helping you along the way and explaining it in like real terms and like with real language and being like, you have to do this now when this next.

Joe Valley 35:44

You mean, are you saying there’s a human at ClickBank that I’m going to be able to talk to?

Lauren Lee 35:47

There’s a human. Yes, really go through like our content as well on the like, we have education content and courses and of course, that is very beneficial. And you should go through that when you’re deciding if you want to work with ClickBank but yeah, absolutely. We have a huge sales team and support staff and we’re here to help you.

Joe Valley 36:05

Where do they go? Let’s send them to the site. Now, what’s the best URL to go to? Is it simply clickbank.com?

Lauren Lee 36:11

Yeah, you can go to clickbank.com. Also in the show notes. I’ll share it with you. But there’s an e-commerce success page. And there, you can schedule a meeting with me directly if you wanted to. And I can then share it with other team members. But you could also follow us on LinkedIn and connect with us there. But clickbank.com is the easiest. Yeah.

Joe Valley 36:31

Excellent. Excellent. Any last-minute thoughts for folks before we wrap this up?

Lauren Lee 36:35

Have fun. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the complexities of everything I just said, don’t forget that you’re building a business and providing a product and a service for people that you are really passionate about. And this is a strategy you can leverage to get that out there.

Joe Valley 36:50

That’s brilliant. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed. Appreciate that. Yeah. Thanks, Lauren. Appreciate you coming on the Quiet Light Podcast.

Lauren Lee 36:56

Thank you so much for having me.

Outro 36:59

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcasts, subject or guest, email us at [email protected]. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.