Welcome to the “Champions of Performance Marketing” series, where we dive into the journeys and insights of industry leaders who have significantly shaped the landscape of digital marketing.
We are thrilled to present an interview with Evan Weber, a seasoned expert whose extensive experience spans from running a free auction website in the early 2000s to founding his own agency, Experience Advertising.
Evan’s journey is rich with lessons on affiliate marketing, digital strategy, and conversion optimization. Let’s explore how Evan Weber began his marketing career, his perspectives on affiliate programs, and his approach to optimizing digital advertising strategies for platforms like TikTok or Google Ads.
Here is the interview on Spotify so you can easily listen to it:
Interview with Evan Weber
Q: How did you start your journey in marketing and your first contact with affiliate marketing?
Evan Weber: My journey goes back to the early 2000s.
My first endeavor in Internet marketing was running a free auction website, an eBay clone, where I sold antiques and vintage items for a couple of years.
Then, I joined a startup called dentalplans.com, which was a dental insurance website portal. Over five and a half years, we grew it into a large internet operation. That’s where I learned the basics of digital marketing, such as driving traffic to websites and optimizing conversions. We relied heavily on search engines, email blasting, and affiliates in those early days because social networks weren’t around yet.
At dentalplans.com, we started an in-house affiliate program that ran on multiple networks, growing to several thousand affiliates with several hundred active producers.
I learned a lot about working with affiliates, recruiting them, and managing a team of affiliate managers to implement processes for making affiliates active and productive.
In 2007, I left that company and started my agency, Experience Advertising, to focus on growing affiliate programs for companies. Over the years, I’ve added services like Google Ads and Facebook Ads and managed all major ad platforms.
I also developed a Publisher Finders software tool to help affiliate managers find affiliates and web publishers more easily.
Q: What do you think is the big advantage of having an affiliate program for brands today?
Evan Weber: Well, it should be a part of the strategy, and there needs to be people managing it.
In my opinion, it’s not enough to just launch an affiliate program on a network and just let it go. You have to have intensive management.
You know, you have to have people on it, because one thing a lot of people don’t realize, like brands, is that not all affiliates are the same. They’re all different.
They’re all doing something a little different.
Some are more desirable than others.
I have a saying: not all affiliate revenue is good revenue.
You have to look at how they’re actually generating the revenue by what methods.
Different companies will have different needs for different types of affiliates.
Some just want web publishers, some want influencers, some want technology affiliates that help with conversion, some are coupon affiliates, and, of course, search bidders and media buyers.
Ideally, you want a little bit of each, but you have to really know how they’re operating because there are pitfalls, and there are things to worry about or be concerned with.
Sometimes, the affiliates will, for instance, capitalize on your traffic from other sources and claim it for themselves. They’ll bid on your company name in Google search with coupon codes and things like that. So, there are certain types of affiliates that don’t work well for all brands.
Over time, you’ll determine which ones are driving value and which aren’t and what you should pay them.
Not all affiliates should be paid the same commission rate.
You have to motivate the affiliates with the commission rate at times, you know, hey, we’ll pay you a little bit more if you can produce more or, you know, things like that. You should reward your affiliates and just try to, I say, become besties with your affiliates. That’s the affiliate manager’s job to build a relationship with every single affiliate, big, small, or medium. Because you never know who could produce what in the future.
Q: Do you think getting to know affiliates should be done by the brands, the affiliate networks, or both?
Evan Weber: Well, the problem with affiliate networks is that they don’t really bond with the affiliates. They just run a platform to facilitate the clicks and the reporting. They don’t get involved on behalf of the brands to build the relationship.
It’s up to the brand or the affiliate managers that work for the brand, the marketing manager, whomever it may be, or an agency if you bring on an agency to do that for you.
That’s why there are many affiliate agencies: many brands don’t really know, and they don’t have the time or expertise to work with the affiliates.
And dare I say, many agencies probably don’t have the expertise, or at least they don’t do it as proactively or intensively as I think it should be.
So, I think every affiliate manager should set up a video call like this with every single affiliate to find out who they are, what they do, what they’re capable of, and how you can work together. Build the relationship, find out where they live and what’s going on—little stuff that will get them to like you and want to promote the brand.
But at the end of the day, it depends on how well the traffic they’re sending converts.
So, you must do a great job of converting the affiliates’ traffic, which many brands don’t prioritize.
If affiliates are not making money, they will drop the program fairly quickly.
So, it’s really important that you launch an affiliate program when you’re ready to do so.
When you’ve tried to make your website more effective or the landing page where the traffic is going, you’ve done some conversion rate optimization. You’re offering maybe a dedicated coupon code to them, special incentives for the visitors they send. If they’re happy and making commissions, they will be forever a producer for a certain length of time. Then you just have to go get more affiliates like that and build it up from there.
Q: Did you notice that brands abandon the affiliate program if they don’t get revenue from affiliates early on?
Evan Weber: Well, yeah, that can happen. As I said, the other problem with affiliate programs is they don’t necessarily grow by themselves.
The only ones that do are if it’s a known brand, like a big or hot brand, something people know about. If such a brand launches an affiliate program, it could attract a lot of affiliates because they think it will convert well. The bigger the brand, the better the results, which can be the case many times.
It’s harder for smaller brands to succeed with affiliate marketing because the affiliates may not be that excited about promoting the company if they’ve never heard of it or if it’s a small niche.
If the brand’s website doesn’t convert well, it breaks down. The affiliates won’t make any money, and the company will think it’s not working. You must do it with the right strategy, process, and steps.
You need a lot of outreach recruiting and identifying your competitors’ affiliates or other companies in the same industry.
There are tools out there that tell you who these affiliates are.
You can approach those affiliates and use tools like Publisher Finders to find relevant affiliates by keyword phrase.
For instance, if you’re selling pet products, you can recruit pet-oriented web publishers or affiliates based on relevance. I believe in that approach—getting relevant types of affiliates and publishers, but you need a lot of them. That’s what Publisher Finders does; it helps companies find relevant affiliates.
Q: Can you tell me more about how Publisher Finders works?
Evan Weber: I’ve wanted to build a tool like this for years. I probably tried over ten years ago, but it never came to reality. This time around, I partnered with a developer, and we decided to try and pull all of the web affiliates from all the networks into one database. We used sources from companies that had already figured this out, so we pulled all the best data sources.
We created a giant database of relevant affiliates that you can search and reach out to. We have the contact information in there.
It’s harder and more time-consuming to recruit affiliates like that, but that’s why I built the tool—to make it easier.
It still takes a lot of outreach and the right approach. You must approach affiliates correctly, like saying, “Hey, we want to partner with you. This is going to make you money.”
Even paying them to sign on as affiliates, like a sign-on bonus, can help.
For example, we’re going to pay you $25 just to join the affiliate program and another $50 when you make your first sale on top of the commission, like a first-sale bonus. So you really have to put them through a good onboarding process and something that’s going to be lucrative for them—make them money.
Q: You talk about landing page optimization, website optimization, and conversion optimization. Can you advise on optimizing a landing page for a higher conversion rate? What do you check first when you look at a landing page or a website?
Evan Weber: Oh, what a great question. I do this a lot.
I’ve been doing it for so long, many, so many years, that I sort of know what to look for in a website or a landing page.
It could be anything, even the main image, the headlines, the calls to action, the bullet points.
It’s really important to A/B test the headline on-page optimization, not one landing page versus another, but you have a really good landing page, and then you AB test multiple headlines on the same page. You can determine which headline is the most effective and converts the most sales or leads.
The image, the video, and a lot of social proof—they have to have recommendations, testimonials, and reviews—are a lot of what they call social proof, which are other people benefiting from the product and raving about it. That’s probably one of the most important things.
You need tools, widgets, popups, and the right mechanism to collect names and emails. You can put them in a follow-up email flow, right?
So, you need a good popup strategy.
One great strategy is using quizzes. They come to the website, and you either take them directly into a quiz to ask them questions and match them with the right products.
That could be the entire landing page—just a quiz, getting them into a quiz step by step, page by page. Ultimately, they are asked to give their name and email, and then they are sent a five or six-email flow to get them to convert. This can be really effective if it isn’t a really urgent type of product.
I believe in urgency and tapping into their emotions. It’s very, very important.
What is the product going to do for them? How is it going to be emotionally beneficial, like changing their lives? It’s about having a good design, then A/B testing the page elements, and having the right tools on there.
Another option is using ChatGPT to write the content, revamping it to make it more urgent and exciting. You just tell it to make it more exciting, and you’ll be amazed at what it creates. This is a multi-faceted strategy for improving a website or landing page’s conversion. It’s actually something you should do before ever launching an affiliate program or any paid advertising.
As traffic comes in, you must optimize as you go, and it’s never done. It’s never good enough. The conversion rate could always be better. You must have that mindset in the company: What are we doing to increase our conversion rate this month or this week? That should be the first question you ask in the market meeting.
What are we doing to increase conversion rates? Working with an expert like myself or someone who can achieve increased conversion rates is crucial. A lot of times companies just don’t know where to begin. They don’t know what it should sound like, what it should look like, what tools to use. It’s very valuable to bring on someone with expertise in that area.
Q: And do you think, as you said, you are using ChatGPT for the content on the landing page? Is that useful, or is it boring or something for the user, the content?
Evan Weber: It’s better for the user. It’s more exciting, actually. All you have to do is take the content and tell ChatGPT to make it more exciting, and it’ll be way more exciting than what you started with or make it more urgent.
It’s really good with tones, which are called tones, like the tone of the content. Is it exciting? Is it urgent? Is it compelling? Is it eliciting an emotional response?
So you can play around with how you instruct it.
It’s never good enough the first time you ask it to do something for you. You have to keep iterating on that. Keep trying different ways of cranking out the content until you get it, you’re happy with it, and it’s exciting enough or compelling enough.
And then, like I said, you have to A/B test the headlines.
Let’s say there’s a headline on the landing page or the homepage, and you could have five headlines. You can ask ChatGPT: “Give me five headlines to test on this landing page.”
And then you put them into the AB testing tool, and eventually, you’ll see, okay, number three is the best. You know, 30% of the people purchased after reading that headline, and the other ones, it’s way less. So then you go permanent with that headline or test different versions of that headline.
As I said, conversion optimization should never end. It’s a never-ending exercise. But you have to have the right tools and the right people running it, or you won’t have a strategy like that. In my opinion, everyone needs one.
Q: When you start working with a brand, and they ask you to do conversion rate optimization of their website, do you just go and check all those things you told me about, like a checklist, until you find the right one?
Evan Weber: I make a list. I look at what the landing page or website currently has and list all the recommendations: change this, change that, add this, move this over here, make this bigger, add this tool, change the popup.
There are many factors, and I give them the whole approach. Some of it is cosmetic, like the look and feel, which is maybe 30% of the fight.
Then there’s on-page optimization, tools, content, retargeting ads, and following people around after they leave.
If they don’t convert, you can retarget on multiple platforms with a low daily budget on each one, so they’re followed around on every platform they go to.
Capturing data like names and emails so you can put them in an email follow-up funnel is very important. All of these things together need to be utilized to raise conversions.
Q: When you build a TikTok strategy, let’s say for a new brand. Where do you start first? What do you do first?
Evan Weber: To implement a TikTok advertising strategy, you must first have the videos. Let’s create some videos.
You can create them yourself and pay the actors. You can get them on platforms like Billow or Fiverr or pay content creators on TikTok or Instagram.
You say: “Hey, I want you to create five videos for me. We’re going to pay you $1,000. This is what we want in it. Here are the products.”
You need a lot of videos, 50 to 100, to be truly effective and see which videos are performing best. You can do it with less, maybe three to five, but you need lots of videos to avoid burnout and see what performs best. You can get more made every month, starting with five, and eventually, you’ll have 50.
You also need variety in your videos.
You can target the video to the demographic, like older people, and then target that age range or location-based targeting. Interest-based targeting is very important on TikTok and other platforms.
It’s crucial to get the targeting and ad creative right and have a really good landing page to which you’re sending the traffic. If you do all of those things effectively, it’ll work.
Conclusion
Thank you for joining us in this insightful discussion with Evan Weber.
His journey from early internet ventures to founding a successful agency highlights the importance of intensive management in affiliate programs and the continuous effort required in conversion optimization.
Every media buyer out there should learn about landing page optimization (or conversion optimization) as it is one of the most important aspect of running an ad campaign.
Evan’s practical advice on utilizing tools like ChatGPT and Publisher Finders and his strategic approach to video content for platforms like TikTok provide valuable guidance for both new and established brands.
Stay tuned for the second part of the interview with Evan Weber in our “Champions of Performance Marketing” series, where we continue to bring you wisdom from the experts driving the digital marketing industry forward.
You can contact Evan Weber here:
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/worldsgreatestmarketer/
- Website: experienceadvertising.com
Here is the full interview with Evan Weber (you should hit subscribe to make sure you don’t miss any other interviews!):