Mastering Testing Methodologies for Affiliate Marketing

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. And actually, I don't know who to go to next. So you go for it. I think Adam is up next. Mr. Adam Fisher. All right. Thank you. So I've got two questions if we have time. But first one, it's about testing software. So have a client. They're in the affiliate marketing space for like American Express and Chase. And I know the guy that does their paid media. And so they brought me on board because the paid media guy is really hard to work with. but I'm supposed to be the guy that helps implement like a testing methodology for them. This is not my core expertise at all.

1:05But I can work with the guy that does their paid media. So I think my question is like, how do I choose? They have like millions in traffic organically and with paid. I found like VWO looks like a really good testing, like sophisticated testing software platform, but the just a couple of things like the company says, Hey, we want to make sure this can meet all of our needs. And we have complex needs that we want. I don't know why they want server side rendering for the test approach. So that's something I don't understand. And then the other part is like, where will I house all the insights in a systematic way?

1:46So kind of a vague, tough question, but wanted to put it out there. for I don't know about server-side testing a lot of us just use like bwo and uh I think some people use like convert.com and there's a lot of solutions like optimizing I don't know any server-side testing solutions Eric do you nope I just said we use convert.com um and so Adam I know you have another question but in the interest of time I want to give it to David and then carry and back over to you if that's okay. Sorry we couldn't solve it for you, Adam. I honestly don't know the solution. No, that's totally fine. But another part of that one question is just the, like, how do you store insights?

2:28Like, because you're doing a lot of testing yourself. So I used to do it the old fashioned way, like a PowerPoint slide for clients, right? Like this needs to be a lot more easy to store and gather, like, how do you do that? I'll be honest, we use an Excel sheet. to store it raw, right? And then PowerPoint, if you want to make it all reportified and everything. A lot of things I don't think we need to overcomplicate. Good old-fashioned PowerPoint. Or sorry, Excel. Excel. We use Excel a lot because then you can just put in notes and then you can have different tabs for different tests and date ranges.

3:00And then when you have new teams, because you can store Excel in the cloud, you can just give it to them and be like, here are all the tests we ran. Because you can even include screenshots in Excel and just being like, here's all the tests we ran. here are the results. Here's what worked. Here's what didn't. And the stuff that didn't work, we even put notes on why we don't think it worked. Not just the results and the stuff that did win, what change did we make and why we thought it won? Because all this helps influence future tests. So it's not about like how pretty it is. It's more so just stored in a way that's easily accessible, because that's important.

3:36So that way people can continually get access to it. But B is a way that people can easily understand, even if it's not pretty. That's helpful. Thanks. I was going to say, I have one thing to add on that. I would ask the client what their security protocol is, because I work with clients where they have very high security protocol, like massive, and they might, if you ask the question, they'll say, oh, you know what? We're so glad you asked. We actually have a place we want you to put everything, so that way competitors don't get access to it. That's a really important question asking you about the storage.

4:10When you're dealing with providing them with insights, which in the hands of the wrong person, you know, the wrong company, you know, they could, it could do some damage. You know what I'm saying? So they might even offer you a separate laptop to work on. So when I was working with Exelon and Google, it was like that. Like they gave me a laptop. And I, you know, because everything I did for them was on there because they weren't going to take a chance and, you know, let it get out anywhere else. I wasn't able to use my own phone and my computer. So I love that you asked that question. Nice. That's even telling you how it's worked for me in the past.

4:50Thanks. Nice. Cool. Good discussion here, guys. David, let's pass it over to you. Yeah. One quick thing on that too, Adam. I'd recommend reaching out to Ben Labay at Spiro. They're a CRO agency. He's super open about the tools and everything that they build. And I think some of it's overcomplicated what they built, but he automates a lot of stuff from like Airtable directly into slides and like populates all the data and presentation and stuff. So it might be interesting to you. He's going to be hosting EXL, I believe, in a couple of weeks in Austin. So I want to take a look at that conference.

5:24Agency owners, if you want to grow faster, my partner, Neil Patel, and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills. And you're going to learn how to get more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day to day. you're going to learn how to recruit the right people and you're going to be hanging out with like-minded people such as yourself so if you want to learn more just go to marketing school the io slash agency again it's marketing school the io slash agency and we'll see you on the other side um so my question is around the gen um we're fortunately in a position where like things are going pretty well but because of that we're paranoid and always trying to think ahead and i know eric you and neil do like linkedin and a podcast and everything we also do those things that want a much larger scale, but I'm curious, do you have any systems in place to capture that attention and funnel it down into the sales cycle?

6:10Do you have people monitoring it or do you have something set up where they like your LinkedIn, it messages them and connects with them and all that stuff? What does that funnel look like for y 'all? Eric May probably has a much more advanced system than us. We don't do much on that. We do a lot of that for goodwill. And then we'll promote things like webinars and then get signups from there. And then that funnels into our system. But what we'll also do is see who we're connected with on LinkedIn on a regular basis and start messaging people. And we invite them to in-person events that we're throwing for free.

6:43So like I'm in Malaysia right now. I was in Hong Kong yesterday or the day before. My time's all messed up. And then tomorrow I'll be in Singapore. But I did this in Hong Kong. I did this in Malaysia. And I'm doing this as well in Singapore where we have tons of companies coming. Like today or yesterday, we had 30 something companies at one of our offices here in Kuala Lumpur. And we ended up discussing what's happening with marketing, just very high level. And we have a mixture of current clients or prospects or a mixture of both. Or you can just have pure prospects if you don't have tons of clients.

7:18And you just get to know people and build relationships. And over time, that's where we actually see a lot of our revenue come from. Neil, go ahead and finish your thought. Yeah, we don't really get tons of revenue from things like SEO as most people would think. A lot of our revenue comes from just building relationships over time. And we'll pay for events. People are like, oh, Neil, you get paid to speak. we'll do deals with like marketing associations and pay them 20 30 40 grand we'll pay for our own travel they'll bring a lot of people and we'll speak and it's just our event with them and that ends up uh that ends up getting us a lot of leads but it takes like six months to a year plus to close a lot of that revenue and it works we just do that over time in a lot of regions and we consistently do that over time so a follow-up to that would be um what do you send to people when you're trying to get them onto your, what is it, your worldwide webinars?

8:20Our worldwide webinars, that's a little bit different. We just send out an email blast and we just send out a message like on LinkedIn, like, you know, are you tired of, like, we may end up posting a post on LinkedIn. Have you noticed that when you post content on LinkedIn, it gets very little engagement and you keep posting content thinking one day you're going to get a lot of likes and shares, but it's not really happening. What's the problem? Why aren't you generating results no matter how many followers you have? Well, you're not alone. We're actually going to break down the right way to use LinkedIn and generate leads, customers, traffic, whatever you want to call it.

8:57It's going to happen at this time. It's free to attend. Click here to register. And we get a lot of people to just join the webinar. And it's just a numbers game. And we'll post that a few times before the webinar, send out email blast. I made that copy at a thin air. I just pulled it out of my behind. Right. Uh, but yeah, something that would probably be a little bit better than that, but yeah, that's what we just, you should tell people what you do for the live events too. So for live events, I'm assuming you're saying, Hey, this is a private event for CEOs or CXOs or whatever, just to lead you off a little bit.

9:27The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one One thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms. When it comes to marketing, they've been a great asset for us.

9:56And I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io slash hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io slash hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours.

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12:06Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. uh well to go back to the webinar and then i'll ask the other question but to go back to webinar we usually use restream and we go live on all the platforms at once so then that way we get extra people who may have not registered as for the second thing for the private events we reach out to literally the decision makers within that company and we'll offer a lot of people to come for free most people ignore us and turn us down but if you hit up 10 people you may get one to show up they don't care a lot of people like private events it doesn't matter if you're neil patel or whoever patel exactly it doesn't matter if you're eric seward neil patel they don't really care what they care about is what's the content that you're presenting and who else is going to be in the room so we'll tell them like hey there's a lot of other companies that are your size that are attending uh we may name some of the brands that have agreed to come this is what we're going to talk about here's some of the issues that you may be facing that you know a lot of people are facing that you're just covering and you know you hit up 10 at least one usually shows up all right guys that wraps up our call for today if you're watching this live you can always go to marketing school.io slash a o a and you can apply for the community we'll see you next time