Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordspeopleusercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as always, and today I've got something a bit new for you. It's a book review.

Speaker 1: 1:22

I don't think I've ever done a book review on the podcast and yet, even more unusually, it's an actual physical book, which I don't buy a lot of nowadays. I'm more an audible person, so get a lot of books, audio books, so I can listen while I'm walking the dogs or working on the farm or lying in bed or doing household chores or anything like that. I'm more into audible to use for those times. But this book is only available in, yeah, paperback or hardback, and I bought the paperback for a grand total of about 20 quid. I don't know how much it is in the US or anywhere else, but it's probably going to be around the 20, $25 mark, I imagine, and it's called the Payout Mafia and it's subtitled how the Top Affiliates are Still Robbing the Bank in a Post-AI World. The Playbooks, principles and Profit Models Behind Affiliate Success by Neil C and James Dooley, by Neil C and James Dooley. Now, this is not a style of portraying affiliates that I'm a massive fan of. As you all know, if you've listened to any of these, I've been in affiliate marketing since 2004. And hey, yeah, okay, I've made a lot of money out of affiliate marketing and still do. I have bought and sold sites. If you want to hear the back story, go and listen to the episodes about Broadbent at Cuddy UK and others now, because there is the ability to make quite a lot of money with affiliate marketing if you A know what you're doing. B have a bit of luck and persevere long enough.

Speaker 1: 2:52

It does attract some of those kind of characters that are a little bit more on the shady side, and that's not to denigrate them, but they're not approaching the way they portray themselves to the world and their business models. It's about bling. It's about how much money they're making, how well they're doing that kind of thing. Now, that's completely up to them. That's how they want to portray themselves, and that's fine. Not the way I tend to go about, because I'm not a flashy Lamborghini-type person, but some of these are.

Speaker 1: 3:27

And James Dooley is quite well-known in the affiliate world, especially around the rank-and-rent type of affiliate. And then Neil Z is not someone I'd heard of, but it's obviously he's. Having read this book I now know he's quite a very not quite, but a very successful affiliate in the Netherlands with a whole portfolio of sites in the Netherlands targeting that particular market and doing very well out of it by all accounts. And what these guys have done is they've basically got together let me count how many one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, fifteen people who are known for affiliate marketing and have asked them a set of questions and then have compiled this into a book. So it's not like a book that you necessarily have to read from beginning to end. You can dip in and out, just read individual people's stories and tips. But essentially they asked each of these people a set of 21 questions that cover things like foundational strategy how to get started, traffic and growth how to get your first initial traffic and how to grow it. Monetization how they monetize it, the tools and systems they use, scaling and mindset and the kind of things they do for scaling and tools and systems they use, scaling and mindset and the kind of things they do scaling and the mindset that they use for that. What they do for learning and development, their philosophy and lessons, the things they would show people and where they think the future of affiliate marketing is going now.

Speaker 1: 4:49

I bought this book because, although, yeah, I've been in affiliate marketing for well over 20 years, I I know that I don't know absolutely everything. I know that there's always stuff to learn. So I was very interested in reading what these people had to say, the kind of tactics they use, things that were different from what I've done and things that I might or may not agree with, but also interesting to see where they think things are going. So for me, it was quite interesting to see where people agreed with me and some people agreed I agree with who I wouldn't necessarily thought I would agree with them, based on how I sometimes have seen their personas come across and the other sort of surprising takeaways where I have a different perspective. That has made me think maybe that's something to try, maybe that's something different.

Speaker 1: 5:35

Not all of these people are SEO focused, some are more paid acquisition focused. They don't all just do pure websites. Some are more focused on email marketing, some are more focused on webinars, some are more focused on YouTube. So lots of different things and different perspectives to look at. So what did I get out of this book? Going through it, obviously, apart from, I said, where some of the concepts and ideas reinforce my philosophies, which, okay, it's nice to hear other people saying the same things as you, but it does make me wonder am I suffering from group think on that? I like to be challenged to look at different things. Obviously, I like the bits. Still doesn't mean I'm not going to like the bits where I agree with them, but to see other areas where so many of them, and especially the more experienced ones, are so focused on the data within the business and that is something that I know. At times, I think I'm probably quite guilty of not doing that. I've let things just coast a little. One example I can just share is in one of my sites recently. One of my affiliate sites just share is in one of my sites recently one of my affiliate sites.

Speaker 1: 6:42

I hadn't really paid much attention to the individual earnings per click for each merchant. So the earnings per click is how much do we earn on average for every visitor we send to a particular merchant? And I had one merchant that had been doing well last year that I left in the top spot on many comparison tables and going back and examining that data in early August I saw that one of their competitors was now actually performing way better on EPC and they were significantly further down that table. So I just bumped that top performer to the top of the table, just one place above the one that was previously at the top, and the earnings per click shot up even more for that merchant. Now they were being more highly recommended. We're sending more clicks to them. They were converting even better and it bumped up the revenue for that actual individual merchant from around, I think, £2,000 per month, that's about $3,000 per month up to about $8, thousand dollars per month.

Speaker 1: 7:42

So that's a big increase just by making one small change, and that's I'm guilty there for not having spent so much time on top of those epcs. So I'm now and this is another thing that's in this book some of them are really into automated processes. I am now making sure that I'm automating certain processes to bring this information to me on a much more regular basis so that I can make those changes, because although that merchant is doing well now, it doesn't mean they're going to be doing so well forever. It could just be that there's external things, like they could be doing a whole load of external marketing that's bringing it more into people's minds so that they are actually selling better. Because, yeah, as an affiliate, you have to take into account that there's things outside your control that will actually be affecting conversions. And merchants who are doing a lot of above the line advertising can you can see that their performance increase on your website, even though it's nothing you're doing, because their external advertising is helping the, helping them convert, and this is the kind of thing you've got to keep an eye on. So, yeah, so automating more is definitely a key takeaway from that.

Speaker 1: 8:47

Yeah, would I recommend this book? I would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in affiliate marketing, I think for 20 quid $25,. I think it's worth it. I think you've got to read the whole book. Although they say you can dip in and out.

Speaker 1: 9:01

I think the thing that's most interesting to me is to see where there is commonality amongst the 15 or so different people who contributed to it and where there are differences. If enough people are agreeing on something, then that's probably good solid advice. Good solid advice the outliers, where people are coming up with new ideas, new things that no one else talks about. They're the interesting sort of ideas where there might be more things to investigate because they might have some nuggets there that no one else has really picked up on yet. So yeah, although I'm not a big fan of the mafia associations with affiliates the kind of the idea that we're shady and dodgy because we're affiliates I don't think affiliates are dodgy, so that branding not my cup of tea, but I think it's for the money.

Speaker 1: 9:46

It's worth a go, and if you're interested in affiliate marketing at whatever level, even if you've been doing it as long as me or even longer than me, I would still recommend this book. It's worth a read, worth having on your bookshelf and spending some time with. I'll put a link to it in the show notes where you can find it on amazon for those of you are interested in taking it further, and I might actually use some of the questions that are in this book that the all the people who were interviewed actually answered. I might use them as a basis for some future podcasts, you never know. Anyway, until next time, keep optimizing, stay curious and remember seo is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 10:28

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my seo tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that ed is spelled with with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson. On both you can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 10:47

You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online, poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize and continually refine your content Targeted, personalized advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.