Episode 179 - Peter Figueredo, NetExponent on How To Motivate Affiliates

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Peter Figueredo. Peter is the CEO and self proclaimed brainstorm chaser for Net Exponent. Net Exponent is a performance marketing agency, and they’re based in New York and I’ve know Peter for many, many years. He’s helped me out at AdTech a lot on everything affiliate marketing. And we haven’t had an affiliate marketing conversation for a while. I recently saw Peter at AdTech New York and said “Hey, I would love to have you on DishyMix because the world of affiliate marketing, like everything in digital media, continues to evolve. And of all the people in the world, Peter is the guy that I trust the most to give me advice about affiliate marketing. So I’m happy to have him on the show. Welcome Peter.

Peter Figueredo: Thank you. Good to be here.

Susan Bratton: It’s my pleasure. Hey thanks so much. It was great to see you at AdTech. You were the master, the affiliate marketing master of the who track, right?

Peter Figueredo: I was yeah. It was quite an amazing experience. It was a great show.

Susan Bratton: And you also I think, did you launch your performance benchmark survey at AdTech or did you just bring it to that track? I don’t remember if it was, I don’t remember the timing of it now.

Peter Figueredo: Yeah, we actually are still probably a week away from launching the official report, but I did give a huge sneak peak of the results to the AdTech audience.

Susan Bratton: Got it. All right, well tell my DishyMix listeners about this performance marketing report that you do now each year and what some of the highlights were. Give us a levelset, if you will, about what’s happening in the world of affiliate marketing.

Peter Figueredo: Certainly, certainly. Yeah, so as a quick background the Affiliate Benchmarks Report is a research study that my company started conducting about three years ago. We realized that there really wasn’t a lot of information available on affiliate marketing. Anybody who was doing it was pretty tightlipped and for the most part we had a lot of questions and our clients had a lot of questions and we needed answers. So borrowing from some of my background on my research, we started our own research study and this year was our third year, as I mentioned, and we had about 10,000 or a little over 10,000 respondents complete the survey, so we had a huge respondent base for this research, and it really gave us some great insight into the world of affiliate marketing, what affiliates are thinking, what motivates them, what works well and even advertisers and what’s working well for advertises, and you know, really offered some good insight and I think provided some interesting context to the overall AdTech sessions.

Susan Bratton: So what are some of those key findings that you thought were either most directionally unique or most insightful?

Peter Figueredo: Sure. So one of the things that I really focused on in my presentation and, you know, so your audience will also get a sneak peak at some of this data, is that there’s just a lot of mysteries around affiliate marketing. Because of the lack of data and the lack of transparency, affiliate marketing doesn’t typically get the spotlight like other forms of online media such as paid search and display. So there’s a lot of mysteries, there’s a lot of questions, typically who are these affiliates, are they legit, is it safe to do affiliate marketing, is the quality of the orders worthwhile, you know, how do I get started, and some basic questions like that. And some of the interesting things that our study allows us to do is to take a closer look at who these affiliates are and, you know, what makes them tick. And I think that helps demythify the affiliate marketing industry for a lot of advertisers and industry folk out there who aren’t really interested or aren’t involved in it yet and it makes them a little more aware of the benefits. So for example, when we look at overall the demographics, and as I mentioned 10,000 plus people filling out the survey, we have a pretty good sample size, there’s a pretty good mix of male and female, although the audience, the affiliate respondents do typically scale to the male. It was roughly a 70/30 split male to female. So there are, you know, predominantly a lot of males in the affiliate marketing industry for whatever reason. But every other demographic of this space is pretty diverse. The average age usually falls between 25 to 54, which is a pretty big range, but we do find people in the, you know, 18 year old rage all the way up to the 65, 70 year old range answering the survey. Most of the folks who participate in affiliate marketing and responded to the survey have a college degree or even a graduate degree, so they’re highly educated people. One really interesting stat is about half of the people who answered our survey started at affiliate marketing in 2009, so 50% of the people who answered the survey got into the industry in ’09. I like to draw the correlation that because of the down economy and because of people losing their jobs, a lot of folks are out there looking to supplement their income, they’re out there looking to find other ways to make money, and affiliate marketing offers a great opportunity. There’s a very low barriered entry, anybody can join, anybody can start launching affiliate sites. Not everybody can make it successful and do well and make money, but anybody can get involved, and I think that really blends to the influx of people that have come in over the last couple of years, and we’ve done the study for three years, so we’ve seen this trend as its progressed over the last couple years, and then more and more people are entering the space everyday. Of the people that get involved in affiliate marketing, they’re not hanging their hat on this as their sole income driver. Most of the people or about half the people are part time and hobbyists. They consider affiliate marketing as their part time job and not as their full time responsibility or they even consider it as a hobby where they’re doing it again to supplement their income. Maybe their a parent who, you know, is a work at home parent or stay at home parent and you want just a little bit of the income to help supplement the rest of your family’s income. Maybe you want to help, you know, buy some presents that’s coming close to the holiday season. Whatever it may be, affiliate marketing gives people an interesting opportunity for that, and I think what most people find is that as they get in and they learn and they become successful then they have the option of making it full time or not. But, you know, what we’re seeing is that it’s a very diverse mix of people across the country and, you know, it really helps us better understand who are these affiliate marketing folks, so as an agency and for clients who are advertisers we can better tailor our communications and our approach and, you know, the way that we can help affiliates become successful because now we understand a little bit better who they are. So now that’s one example of some of the data that has come out of our survey and really helped us understand the space better, and I can definitely go into more if you like.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, maybe give me a couple of kind of topline other findings and then I’ll go deeper in some of those.

Peter Figueredo: Okay. So we talked about motivation for affiliates, and one of the key things with affiliate marketing is how I get affiliates to join my program, how do I get them to promote my brand and my products, how do I get them to sell more. You know, these are great, these are very sufficient orders and the advertisers running affiliate programs are getting essentially guaranteed efficiency ‘cause they’re setting what they want to pay for every customer. The question is how can I do more, how can I get more. So we really tried to look at motivation, what’s motivating affiliates. When we asked affiliates the question on how they decide which programs to join, a couple of them, we asked them to actually rank the top reasons that they joined programs and, you know, the number one, number two are not surprising; commission structure is number, like how much money they can earn essentially is number one. Product being sold is number two, which is not too surprising either because affiliates, you know, don’t necessarily want to take on the challenge of selling a luxury yacht when they can sell Staples. So looking at those two things not too surprising. But when we went one level deeper and said, “Okay, what’s the third most important thing”, and we had other choices in there like the brand that’s being marketed and, you know, things like that, the programs reputation came up as number three. Now this is really important because this really stresses the fact that for affiliates involved in affiliate marketing, if a publisher’s involved in affiliate marketing the reputation of the programs they join matters more to them than almost every other factor out there when they decide what program they want to join. So you could be, you know, for lack of a better example, you could be Walmart, you could be Staples, you could be BMW Mercedes and you have a great brand, but if your program has a bad reputation, affiliates are less likely to join your program than someone else’s.

Susan Bratton: Is the reputation primarily based on paying on time?

Peter Figueredo: I think it’s based on a lot of factors. I would say that paying on time is one of them, but it’s not the only one. Paying on time, reliability of tracking, the tools that are offered to affiliates to help them sell is also important, so there’s a number of things that a reputation – even just, you know, from a purely high level standpoint, ethics and, you know, trustworthiness of a program is very important for reputation. A lot of times the affiliate manager or the agency or the team that’s managing a program is what drives the reputation because they’re the people who are either not returning your phone calls or the people who are out at every conference shaking your hand, meeting you in person, saying hi, taking you out to dinner, and you know, a lot of those things really come into play. So, and to build on that we asked affiliates how important do they think, you know, how important do they feel their relationship with the affiliate manager or the affiliate marketing agency, how important is that to their success. And 55% of the people who respond to the survey felt that their relationship is either important or very important. And so again, it really comes back to this reputation relationship. Affiliate marketing is very different from other online marketing channels because it is so relationship focused and, you know, I can’t stress it enough to anybody who talks about, you know, why they should work with an agency or hire a manager, you know, like the relationships are really key and it takes years to cultivate and build those and build a reputation that folks in the affiliate industry can trust and want to work with.

Susan Bratton: So I want to get into how NetExponent works when you hire an agency versus try to do this inhouse. You know, what the business relationship would be like between a brand and yourselves. But before we do that can you just give us the URL so that anyone can go and download the full report and get all this insight.

Peter Figueredo: Sure. The URL is affiliatebenchmark.com.

Susan Bratton: Awesome, affiliatebenchmarks.com, perfect. So lets go to the performance marketing agency concept. You don’t want to do it inhouse, you’re not quite ready, you want to build an affiliate marketing program, you want to come to a company like NetExponent. You manage the relationship, you’ve got a lot of relationships with affiliates so you can take a program and essentially market it out to your existing relationships and probably get people started a lot more quickly than if they had to do it from the ground up. Lets talk about it from the perspective of the brand. I’m a brand, I have a product. Lets make it simple and assume it’s an online transaction, something I can buy online. What do I need to bring to you so that you say, “Yes, I want you as a client. You did all the right things or you’re willing to do all the right things. Here’s what all the right things are.”

Peter Figueredo: Sure. It’s a great question. I mean from a very top line perspective, we look at clients in two ways. The first is making sure that we can, you know, deliver results that are going to make everybody happy – the client, us and publishers we work with, and that one I think is at the root of your question, we can dive into that. The second one is, you know, a little more subjective in that we want to be proud of a company that we’re working with that we can talk to our parents, our daughters, our friends, our family and say, “Hey, this is a company that we work with, this is a company that we’re partnered with.” And that one is, again, a little more subjective, but for the most part that’s our tool. Now on the question of what an advertiser can bring to us in order for us to be able to build a successful affiliate program, you mentioned that they’re online, they’re transacting online. We do prefer to work with business to consumer companies as opposed to B2B. That’s not to say we won’t work with B2B; it’s just we recognize that it is a greater challenge and there’s some scenarios where B2B just doesn’t make sense for an affiliate program to be honest, and it’s not, you know, it’s not an easy way to draw a line and say anybody who does this is not going to make sense and anybody who doesn’t will, but B2B is just a tougher nut to crack for affiliate marketing. So B2C is a little bit more low hanging fruit and easier to make successful, typically our clients on the B2C side. Again, along with B2C we also look for national distribution, so if somebody’s local or if somebody’s an advertiser who only focuses in one metro area, it can be a lot harder to make an affiliate program work there. If you ship nationally or even internationally, which is better, then you have a much greater chance of success because affiliates are a cross the world really. The most successful the top affiliates aren’t located in any one area. They’re really across the U.S. and international.

Susan Bratton: Although I did hear that Israel is huge for affiliate marketing. Is that true?

Peter Figueredo: There are a lot of successful affiliates that are based in Israel, yeah.

Susan Bratton: It seems like it. The Israelis are good with math and they’re aggressive business people. I think it’s well suited for them, don’t you think?

Peter Figueredo: Yeah, it is, it is. And anybody interested in that phenomenon would probably love a book that our head of search marketing recommends highly; it’s called Startup Nation, all about the burgeoning startup realm and tech industry within Israel. It’s pretty interesting.

Susan Bratton: I’d like to read that. And actually I’m going to go to a break right now. I’m sorry to mess up your flow. I just want to make sure we hit our break, and then when we come back I want you to give me maybe two or three other like key areas where there are maybe some hotbeds of good affiliates, and then I want to keep going through what do we as a brand need to bring to you as an agency for you to be a big fat “Oh yes” to being our, you know, our agency for out program. So lets go to a break and when we come back we’ll learn the answers to those questions. Stay tuned. We’re with Peter Figueredo. He’s the CEO and brainstorm chaser of NetExponent. Right back.

Susan Bratton: We’re back with Peter Figueredo. So Peter, before we get back into kind of the laundry list of what makes a perfect client for you, how we can be the perfect client – ‘cause I think the basis is not that, you know, you’re so wonderful we have to do everything right, although that’s probably true. It’s that if we do everything right we’ll be successful together, that’s really my point. But any other kind of enclaves internationally of affiliates? Are there any particular countries that have, you know, done really well or types of people or anything like that?

Peter Figueredo: Well, I mean, you know, I have to mention the U.S. I mean I think most of the really successful and large affiliates for the programs we’ve run over the last ten years, a majority of them have been U.S. based. So while there are pockets of other countries that have a significant number or quantity of affiliates, for the most part a lot of their higher quality affiliates tend to reside in the U.S. But there are emerging, I mean there are areas like Britain that’s got, you know, some great really innovative affiliate companies, good folks there. There’s folks in France and a lot of the European countries, Sweden, because those guys are so, they have such deep internet penetration that just naturally they’ve got way more people online and way more affiliate savvy folks. So those are countries that are typically great to look at. They’re also countries that advertisers should be a little more conscious of because…

Susan Bratton: Great.

Peter Figueredo: not to say that they’re all blacklisted or all bad, but we do tend to find a lot of fraudulent affiliates coming from China and India, so we’re usually a little more cautious about companies that originate from those countries and look at them a little closer before we approve them into our clients programs.

Susan Bratton: Good to know. All right, so an ethical quality company and brand, business to consumer is preferred. National distribution, a product you can transact online. What’s next?

Peter Figueredo: So really what’s next is kind of their approach to online marketing. And where we are most successful is with companies who have strategies that allow for aggressive consumer offers or consumer offer testing, even if it’s not aggressive, meaning that they’re not stuck on one price point and they never change it, they never discount it, they never coup on it, they never offer any incentives. For companies that are willing to test and say, “Hey, lets try out some buy one get one free offers, some discounted pricing, some bundle pricing, lets try out a lot of different things”, affiliate marketing can not only drive good revenue, but can also give you some great insight as to finding the optimal price point for your products and helping you learn some good information about consumer offer testing.

Susan Bratton: So somebody who has good analytics and tracking down to conversion, if they’ve got that dialed in and they have flexibility around offers.

Peter Figueredo: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Peter Figueredo: Offer flexibility is definitely important…

Susan Bratton: Great.

Peter Figueredo: and I didn’t even mention it but you brought up a great point, the analytics and tracking, being able to look at the purchase path, being able to look at their order process and optimize and say, “Hey, we’ve got a ten step order process, can we make it three”, and “Hey, we’ve got a three step order process, do we need all these fields for somebody to complete a purchase.” You know, all of these things, which are fundamental online marketing best practices, apply to affiliate marketing as they do any other channel, but they really resonate so much with affiliate marketing because affiliates are taking on 100% of the risks. So if they look at what you’re doing and you optimize your website, you optimize the conversion process and that benefits them, again that trust factor goes, the reputation of the program goes up and overall the relationships agree. So affiliates do value the efforts that marketers put into making their sites better and selling better products, and we advertise that for our clients as much as possible; when they invest a ton of time and energy we want affiliates to know that hey these guys are doing a lot to help you make money and they’re doing their part.

Susan Bratton: Okay, that makes sense. What else? Is there anything else or is that it?

Peter Figueredo: Yeah, no there are the basics of landing page testing. You know, all of like the testing optimization process, which again, is out of the control of affiliates. Being able to say like, “Hey, where we’re sending traffic, is it optimal, has it been tested and when was the last time we tested it? Do we customize creative based on products being sold or do we have a generic logo ad unit, which doesn’t really talk about product benefits or even selling proposition, doesn’t, you know, talk about any kind of holiday promotions or doesn’t tie into the relevancy of the affiliate websites.” So there are a lot of areas like that where the marketers, again, are kind of looking at the tools that they’re giving affiliates, and we consider all of these things part of the affiliate toolkits – the coupons affiliates can offer, the creative ad units they’re given, the landing pages they’re able to use, setting up a product feed. I mean you’d be surprised how many advertisers launch affiliate programs have hundreds of thousands of products and don’t set up a product feed, and that’s a huge disadvantage. Affiliates are so savvy that they can take your product feed for advertisers that offer it and build out a product list on their website, build out search boxes on their websites, integrate those products onto their sites to such a degree that it really makes a better kind of shopping experience for the consumer and ultimately increases convergence for the advertiser. So there’s tools in this, you know, toolkit that are very valuable for affiliates, and we really like to work with our clients to build out those tools for the affiliates and make sure that they have, you know, as many areas as possible where they can try and improve the sales of the affiliate channels they work with.

Susan Bratton: If there was more time in the day, it would be nice, what would you do with it when you’re thinking about managing a clients program? Do you start with maybe one affiliate network and if you had more time in the day you’d go to two or three or four, or do you always start out with a whole bunch of different networks and test to see which ones work the best, or where do you put your time in as you increment the success?

Peter Figueredo: The two areas where we really, really ideally, if we had, you know, an extra week or an extra ten hours already, or even an extra hour in the day, we’d probably split our time in two key areas when we work with clients, first being strategic development, strategic planning, where we really as an agency try to focus on building out quality strategies for our clients and then constantly improving those strategies as we gather learning, as we gather analytics. So building and analyzing and improving strategies would be one area. And then the other area is honestly strengthening and building new relationships with top publishers. Reaching out, shaking hands, talking to people on the phone, visiting with folks at conferences. I mean our affiliate team goes to every major affiliate conference that’s offered throughout the year, which means that, you know, we’re out and meeting affiliates, shaking hands and really building relationships for our clients and recruiting for our clients. And those are the two biggest areas that I think we can show the most benefit when we work with an advertiser is how we help build a solid strategy that’s continuously improving and the relationships that we don’t structure and optimize on their behalf, and that really comes with a lot of face to face and personal one to one attention.

Susan Bratton: It’s funny that you say that. I know that in January it’s your ten year anniversary for NetExponent, right?

Peter Figueredo: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, congratulations. Man, I can’t believe it’s been ten years. I think I’ve known you pretty much the whole time, I think I have. It’s really nice to see that your company has, you know, just continued to flourish and grow, and I also like your new tagline. It says “NetExponent, performance marketing agency pioneers, efficient, evolving, ethical.” I think that was really good. I like that. I saw that on your email footer. If you were going to give us a priority, lets just say that we’re starting to go out, we’ve hired you and you’re going to the conferences but we want to go to a few of them too and support you in meeting affiliates for our business, what are the conferences that you would say, in rank order from best to worst, are good for clients to go to to meet new potential affiliates? Where is the best meet and greet happening?

Peter Figueredo: So assuming that the client is running their affiliate program on one of the major networks - whether it be Commission Junction, Link Share, Google Affiliate, Pepper Jam, you know, Share a Sell, one of those networks – assuming that the client is running their program on one of those major networks, going to the annual conference offered by those networks is usually the best place for them to go and meet publishers face to face, shake hands, build relationships. So Commission Junction has a conference once a year, Google Affiliate has a conference once a year, Link Share actually has two conferences – one on the east coast, one on the west coast – and, you know, any of those conferences are a great opportunity to go and meet affiliates and meet publishers. Aside from those or if you happen to be, if you have the ability to go to more than one conference, if you’re not working with one of those networks, then attending Affiliate Summit is probably the next best opportunity to go and meet publishers and also get a lot of valuable learning from listening to quality speakers, and Affiliate Summit occurs, the next one on the east coast just happened in August, and coming up in January they have their biggest show of the year in Las Vegas, which is definitely a great opportunity to go out and meet with folks, and for any conference an advertiser attends I would definitely say have a gameplan before you get there because it can be a lot of networking, a lot of people and you want to make sure you set up meetings beforehand and prioritize everything.

Susan Bratton: How do you set up meetings beforehand if you’re going to Affiliate Summit in Vegas? How do you set up meetings beforehand with potential affiliates?

Peter Figueredo: So if you are setting up meetings with potential affiliates, setting up meetings with existing affiliates is easy because you can just easily reach out, email, phone and try and set something up. With potential affiliates it’s usually going to be done through if you have their contact information that makes it a little easier; for the most part you probably don’t. So it’s probably, I would recommend doing something around maybe setting up a booth, paying to have a booth at the conference and then doing some press around the fact that you have a booth and advertising that affiliates who meet you at the booth can get a bonus commission for the first month of working with you or something along those lines, something to drive people to you. Maybe require that they contact you beforehand to get their information. It could also be, Affiliate Summit usually offers a networking component of their conference, so within one day of the conference they have what they call the ‘Meet Market’. Meet Market is an opportunity for advertisers to set up tables, as well as affiliates and publishers to set up tables. And so as an advertiser maybe bring two people out, one that manages your table and another person that goes around and meets the affiliates that have tables out there. So, you know, it is a pretty good opportunity to go and talk with the right folks, get in touch with the right people. For us the best method is really reaching out to folks on a one to one basis, whether it be trying to find their email on the website or their phone number and really just shoot them a note and say, “Hey listen, we’re going to be at Affiliate Summit, I think you will be too. Can we set up a time to meet?”

Susan Bratton: Hey, that was a clever idea. I like it, and I love the name ‘Meet Market.’ It’s so good, isn’t it? I’ve been in that room at Affiliate Summit, in that Meet Market, and it is a melee. At one point I literally just scooted back up against a wall and stood there and watched the whole thing happening. And this guy came and stood next to me and we’re like “Wow!” I just had to take a break from the mosh pit, you know. He was like, “I know. It’s exhausting.” It was so funny.

Peter Figueredo: No, it gets to be pretty crazy. It gets to be a madhouse in there. So trying to get a hold of the list of exhibitors before you walk into the Meet Market and plan out where you’re going to go will definitely help navigate the craziness.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. All right, well listen, we’re almost out of time and there’s one last question I’d really like to talk to you about. And that is commissions, rev shares; lets just say I have $100 product, lets call it $97 ‘cause you know that’s what it’s going to be, right. So I have a $97 product. How much commission do I need to give to NetExponent and how much do I need to give to my affiliate and what does that structure look like?

Peter Figueredo: That’s honestly a tough question.

Susan Bratton: I don’t ask easy questions.

Peter Figueredo: I know, I know.

Susan Bratton: Come on Peter. Give me the answer.

Peter Figueredo: It’s more of a tough question because the scenarios for advertisers vary so widely and it really relates to my short and easy answer is give what you can afford that’s going to still keep that customer profitable. You know, when we’re dealing with a $97 product on say a digital e-book where the profit margin is huge, you as an advertiser might be able to give up 50%, where I would say, “Hey, you know, give 15% or 20% to NetExponent and give 30% to 40% to a publisher.” But if you’re dealing with a retail product, you’re doing it with a retail good, you can’t afford to give up, you know, 50% of your product. So then you’re only talking about margins of maybe 15%, 20% and then the percentages need to change. Normally the way it breaks out is probably a good rule of thumb is that 70% of your allowable should go to affiliates and 30% should go to say the agency or the network. And then that can fluctuate a little bit depending on how aggressive you want to be, depending on how much work you require and how many, you know, how much brand sensitivity you have because that all requires extra work from the agency. But…

Susan Bratton: And what about the actual, the affiliate network, the Commission Junction or what have you? Does that come out of one of the 70% or 30% or is that on top of it all?

Peter Figueredo: I was kind of assuming that would come out of the 30%. But for the most part the networks are charging fees that are around say 30% of affiliate commissions. So if you pay an affiliate 10% of the sale, you would pay them 3%.

Susan Bratton: Okay, that makes sense. Great. All right, this is my last thing. Is there anything I should’ve asked you that I didn’t ask you that’s a real key insight for someone thinking about doing an affiliate program or doing one who wants to optimize it? Any big change in the market place or something really interesting that we might not be really focused on that you are ‘cause you do it everyday?

Peter Figueredo: Yeah, there’s two big concerns that anybody getting into affiliate marketing should think through, and it’s hard to end on these ‘cause they could each be their own segment, and maybe that’s good for follow up segments so maybe you’re giving me a segway. But the two big things, one is really how is affiliate marketing going to coordinate and cooperate with your internal paid search marketing efforts, because there is such a big component of affiliate marketing that affiliates can help with paid search, who’ve got a solid strategy in place. Sometimes they can hurt your internal paid search, so figuring out how you want affiliates to act in the Google, Bing, paid search arena will save you a lot of headaches down the road and will ultimately help you capture more customers than your competition. The other big issue is the affiliate tax issue with Nexxus and which states are, you know, do folks need to be concerned about if they have affiliates working in certain states, does it constitute Nexxus and do they have to worry about collecting sales tax in those states? And for that issue that’s a huge, huge concern for retailers. Some people call it the ‘Amazon tax’ because Amazon’s a big target. But it is something to stay on top of. If you’re pure digital you don’t have to worry about it quite as much, but if you’re a retailer and you’re running an affiliate program you should be aware of at least what’s going on in different states. And the best source of information I can offer on the affiliate tax issue, because it’s a very complex one and it changes all the time, is going to the website for the Performance Marketing Association. Performance Marketing Association is a group that helped form over the last two years that’s really grown to become the industry organization, the trade organization for affiliate marketing, and they’ve made huge strides in educating people on the major issues like affiliate tax, as well as even taking it to the political level and lobbying to make sure that affiliates are protected and advertisers are protected and, you know, they’ve done a wonderful thing with their involvement and they’re supported by a lot of major companies. I would encourage people to go to performancemarketingassociation.com.

Susan Bratton: Perfect. All right, well Peter, thank you, and I also want to let my listeners know that you have a blog. It’s netexponentblog.com. And you can also follow Peter @figueredo. You can also follow NetExponent, and you can also follow Affiliate Benchmarks @affbenchmarks on Twitter. So if you love to get those Tweets, there’s three more to add to your follower list. All right, Peter thank you so much for coming on the show. I think this was a wealth of information, both at a high level perspective about the opportunity that affiliate marketing affords, as well as the nitty gritty details that we need to think about if we’re going to get involved in it.

Peter Figueredo: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Susan Bratton: My pleasure. All right, I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Thanks for tuning in to today’s DishyMix. I hope it was a pleasure for you. It certainly was for me. I appreciate you listening and I’ll look forward to connecting with you next week. Have a great day. Bye-bye.