Affiliate Nerd Out

I published a video I was proud of, and a friend texted me, "This is old news.” She runs compliance at a major network, so she wasn’t wrong. For her. What it showed me about everyone else surprised me, and it ties into a big opportunity for anyone going solo right now. What’s something that feels obvious to you but most people in your job have never heard of? #AffiliateMarketing #AffiliateNer...

How do you buy a sponsored placement when you don’t even know who to email?   That’s the problem Lacie Thompson , CEO of MediaPact , set out to solve. On Affiliate Nerd Out , I set up a MediaPact account live, from scratch, as a brand looking for partners. A few minutes in, it was recommending placements I’d buy today. In this video: 1. The marketplace with placements from a few hundred dollars to...

One partner sent 200,000 clicks in a month and got credit for one sale.  The orders were real. The customers were real. The payments cleared. The only thing wrong was whose name was on the commission.  James Nardell , founder of Affiliate Manager Experts and in affiliate marketing since 2002, joins me in the Nerdatorium to break down attribution theft. It’s a type of affiliate fraud that passes ev...

Four years ago, Daniel Stanica of Competico started tracking 100 successful blogs. Today, the median blog has lost 85% of its traffic.  On this episode of Affiliate Nerd Out, Daniel breaks down what happened and what affiliates can do about it: What wiped out so much organic traffic What the surviving blogs have in common The content Google and AI can’t summarize  Whether affiliates should chase A...

Alfie: https://dustinhowes.com/alfie and use code DUSTIN30 for 30% off your first month For more tips on how to scale your affiliate program, check out https://performancemarketingmanager.com

Adults with ADHD are 60% more likely to be fired from a job. I’m no stranger to that. In this episode, I sat down with Kyrus Keenan Westcott . He was diagnosed at 35 after spending decades thinking he was just lazy. He blocks time in his calendar for scheduled incompetence. It's one reason he can hold down a demanding job as head of paid media with an ADHD brain.  #ADHD #ADHDatWork #Neurodive...

I signed up for an affiliate tracking tool live on camera. Never touched it before. 15 minutes later, it was tracking every click on my site. If you’re an affiliate, you know the routine: log into Impact, then CJ, then Awin, then the next one. Check stats. Copy numbers. Repeat. It eats your week. So I brought Jorge Barbosa back to Affiliate Nerd Out (third time, he’s officially a regular) to set u...

Have you ever recommended someone to a client, then watched them drop the ball right in front of that client? 😬 That’s what happened to Christen Evans (she/her) It was an enterprise brand with millions on the table, and it should have been an easy yes. Instead, she got three weeks of pushback, with the client watching the whole time. The client’s take: “It’s almost like they don’t even want our b...

I have been burned by the word "unlimited" more times than I can count. Most pricing pages promise the moon, right until a surprise bill hits your inbox. So I put Martin Demiger , the founder of Trackdesk , on the hot seat in the Nerditorium. I asked him straight out: what does "unlimited" actually mean at your shop? I am not going to spoil his answer here. But he shared a wild...

3 million shoppers across Asia want to buy from US brands. Most can't, because those brands don't ship to them. What if you could reach them without changing a single thing about your shipping? I sat down with Jeff Unze , North American GM at Buy&Ship , to talk about how brands are doing exactly that. He also shares which product categories this audience goes after, and why it's...

I sit down with Brian Blancho from TicketSmarter to break down everything that went down at CJU. We are talking about an honest, no-holds-barred review of the event, covering the good, the bad, and our official star rankings. If you are trying to figure out where to invest your budget and how to recruit affiliates in the performance marketing space, you can't sleep on live events. But is CJU...

It's go time for Q4. 🚨 If your Q4 plans aren't locked in yet, consider this your sign to finalize them this week. On this Real Talk Friday edition of Affiliate Nerd Out, Christen Evans (she/her) and I cover: 1/ Why I'm heading back to CJU after 10 years 2/ The question that made a 10-year industry vet walk away from me 3/ Affiliate leaderboards: motivating or discouraging? 4/ How a...

Not leads. Not "maybe" contacts. Full profiles: contact info, why Alfie thinks they're a fit, fit score, traffic type, reach, and even soft signals like age and gender skew. Stuff that used to take me hours of manual prospecting just... populated itself. In this episode of Affiliate Nerd Out I gave a live look at Alfie's new Advanced Campaigns feature, built directly from user...

This week's episode got a little spicy. We're talking about the newest MegaLag video calling out people in our own industry, the ShopMy drama nobody's fully unpacked yet, and why I ditched TikTok for an app that teaches me Claude instead. Plus, I recorded something with one of the smartest AI guys I know, the same guy who helped build out my Claude agents, and it turned into a two-p...

Ever set a commission rate for your affiliate program, only to watch a partner send you customers who buy the cheapest plan, cancel after one payment, and pocket the payout? You're not alone. I've been there myself, and it's one of the fastest ways to torch your margins without ever knowing it happened.  My FirstPromoter review started when I recently sat down with Tautvydas Vasilia...

"Here's $4 million a month. Go figure out what you wanna do with it."   That's the only brief Colleen Butterfield got. No roadmap. No strategy doc. Just a number and a deadline. She went from affiliate coordinator to CMO with no MBA and no traditional path. Built a solar company that sold to ADT for half a billion dollars along the way. In this episode, we got into: 1. What it...

"Letting go of a role that gave me anxiety every day took longer than it should have."   But when it finally happens, you feel the pressure drop in real time.   In today's episode, Christen Evans (she/her) and I talked about: - Stepping away from sales and into the work that actually fits - Pinterest acquired TVSci and there's a beta opening for brands doing less than 100K in a...

Waited until her mid-40s to start her own business. Now she's telling every affiliate manager to stop waiting. Lee-Ann Johnstone built KonverJ from 22 years in affiliate, starting back when it wasn't even called affiliate marketing. 1. Commercial negotiation is half the battle. Learn it early and everything else gets easier. 2. When you stop learning every day, you start falling behind....

The networks know who the bad actors are. They make money off of them. Christen Evans (she/her) is back for Real Talk Friday. She's a rule follower, and she wants to know why the industry keeps gatekeeping in 2026. Here's what we got into:   1. The networks kinda wanna sweep it under the rug and stay quiet. 2. At my first job, publishers had hundreds of fraud tickets against them. Still...

ChatGPT is scraping sources to build its answers. The question is whether your brand is one of them. Sat down with Farzad Rashidi , CEO of Respona , to break down how brands are getting cited by LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Systematically. Here's what we covered: 1. How Respona builds high-authority citations through targeted listicles, comparison guides, and product re...

Want to know what is actually working in the affiliate industry right now? I hosted a live panel with Fred Jean-Barrel from Performance Partners, Mark Goco from All Inclusive Marketing, and Josh Kennedy from Imagine Marketing to break down how to scale programs without relying on tired tactics. We talked about smarter outreach, AI research, and what it takes to win in performance marketing today....

My all-time favorite boss told me something once that changed my entire career. "Dustin, you're the best network marketer I've ever met." That's David Vogelpohl . He started by cold-calling computer shops in the late '90s to set up referral agreements. That was his first accidental entry into affiliate marketing. His take on where most affiliate managers go wrong: 1....

Someone sees your ad on Meta. They Google your brand. They find a Reddit post from Joey323 saying your brand sucks. That's your entire paid spend strategy gone. Ewen Finser , CEO of ScaleVisible , calls this the villain archetype. And it's more common than most brands want to admit. On this episode of Affiliate Nerd Out , Ewen joins me in to break down how brands can win in the age of AI...

Dustin Howes hosts a panel with Nancy Harnett (Instantly.ai, ex-HubSpot), Victor Moen (Affilial.com), and Ed Ceballos (EverFlow) on scaling B2B SaaS affiliate programs. Nancy emphasizes auditing existing partners and analyzing funnel data before expanding recruitment. Victor shares strategies for removing low-quality affiliates, reactivating dormant partners, and scaling targeted outreach. Ed high...

In this Real Talk Friday episode of Affiliate Nerd Out, Dustin Howes and Cristen Evans break down the latest affiliate marketing trends, including industry drama over fraud accusations, the impact of cutting affiliate commissions, and why protecting partner relationships matters. They also share updates on Alfie, AI automation, affiliate program migrations, and an upcoming webinar on modern affili...