In a rapidly changing digital landscape, cracking the code on PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising can be a daunting task. However, Eric Nagel, VP of IT at IMWave, sheds light on this complex subject of PPC affiliate marketing, sharing his wealth of knowledge and unique insights.
IMWave is a company dedicated to helping businesses navigate the intricacies of PPC. They assist businesses that are either new to PPC or are struggling to understand its complexities, working on a commission basis. Their simple mantra is to focus on profitable keywords and reduce non-converting traffic, thereby creating a win-win situation for everyone involved.
As the conversation progresses, Nagel delves deeper into the technical aspects of Google's Algorithm, the differences between PPC and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and the crucial role of automation in modern marketing strategies. He underscores the importance of understanding user intent and utilizing tools like APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and Zapier for campaign tracking and optimization.
What is the future of PPC affiliate marketing?
The future of marketing, as Nagel envisions it, is steeped in artificial intelligence (AI). Chatbots, for instance, hold significant potential in programming and content creation. However, while their efficiency is commendable, Nagel cautions against over-reliance on them due to their occasionally inaccurate nature. He also discusses the possible impact of AI on affiliate marketing trends and industry predictions.
A significant part of the discussion is dedicated to exploring how chatbots can streamline programming tasks and be used for marketing and advertising. They can also be deployed to create SEO-friendly content. However, as with any AI-driven technology, there's a need for caution and careful utilization.
Nagel's insights are particularly beneficial for those keen on affiliate marketing best practices. He shares his experiences and offers tips on how to leverage technical skills, such as programming, to automate tasks and optimize performance. This automation not only increases efficiency but also allows marketers to focus on more strategic aspects of their campaigns.
Overall, this conversation with Eric Nagel offers a goldmine of information for anyone looking to understand PPC advertising and the future of marketing. His expert insights and advice serve as a roadmap for navigating the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape.
With the rapid advancements in AI and automation, the future of marketing looks exciting and full of possibilities. By keeping up with these changes and adapting accordingly, businesses can harness these technologies to their advantage, streamline their operations, and ultimately, drive growth and profitability.
Watch the complete interview here:
Here is the transcript from the episode:
Dustin Howes:
Hey folks, what's going on? Welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your Nerdurator, Dustin Howes, spreading that good word about affiliate marketing, and today and most Tuesdays and Thursdays, you'll find me here on LinkedIn Live where I'm hanging out with old industry friends and new industry buddies. And today my guest in the Nerditorium is Eric Nagel old-time buddy of mine. Welcome to the Nerditorium, Eric.
Eric Nagel:
Wow, thanks for having me.
Dustin Howes:
You got it. Eric is the VP of IT over at IMWave. We'll be talking a little bit about what IMWave does as a company and what Eric's doing over there. If you have any questions about affiliate marketing or just wanna haggle me and Eric for a little while, come on into the chat. The water is nice Without further ado. Eric Nagel, who are you?
Eric Nagel:
Wow, I wasn't prepared for that one. Yeah, I guess you could say we go a ways back in the affiliate world. I'm trying to think. When I built my first affiliate link, it was remember. What was it? Beefery.
Dustin Howes:
Oh, okay, back in the late 90s. No, I don't, oh, it was like the late 90s.
Eric Nagel:
So.
Dustin Howes:
I go way back. I like how you had to build it yourself back in that day.
Eric Nagel:
Yeah, it's not just handed to you.
Dustin Howes:
You got to go out and build it.
Eric Nagel:
You gotta get your own, yeah, and so I've been the affiliate space for a while, doing my own thing and working for various companies and, like you said, now I'm VP of IT over at IM Wave, where we do a heck of a lot with a pay-per-click advertising.
Dustin Howes:
Outstanding, but you have a pretty rich history in the as being technically savvy Not necessarily in the affiliate management realm, but you enable others affiliates and affiliate managers and help other programs out.
Eric Nagel:
Tell us a little bit more about that background. Yeah, so I guess talking about my background is I went to school for programming so I fit right in the Nerditorium here as a big time nerd, being able to get my hands dirty with the ones and zeros, and so I worked on. Just my unique take in the affiliate world is from the technical end, I look at things and we're gonna talk about it a little bit where it's like I don't like doing things manually so I can dig into like the APIs and that kind of stuff and get nerdy. So, yeah, I've helped various agencies automate reporting. I've worked with advertisers or merchants to get their programs set up. That was a long time ago. I've worked with publishers or affiliates on the technical ends of things and data feeds and all that good stuff. So, yeah, definitely nerdy, awesome.
Dustin Howes:
Also, you are a professor. I forgot to call you professor Nagel. Excuse my language. And you're also coaching our teaching young minds over in Buffalo right.
Eric Nagel:
I am, yeah, at Buffalo State University. We were Buffalo State College, but now we became a university. I don't know what that means, but, yeah, I teach two courses over there. It's been, I don't know, four and a half years or so, and I teach programming for the internet, one which is HTML, css and JavaScript, and we do all that in one semester. And then, yeah, there's a lot, and I honestly don't know what my other course is titled, but it's something like we use VBnet. I don't know what the full course title is, which many students ask me isn't that a dying language? And it's like yeah, it is. But if you remember, like in early 2020, when pandemic times hit and everyone was filing for unemployment, all those systems were running on cobalt. So even a dying language needs programmers, and I teach this more as a, not as a here's how to program in VBnet, but here's how to be a good programmer.
Dustin Howes:
Hmm, interesting, is Latin still a thing? I know that's that died out, but there's still people that have to.
Eric Nagel:
People still have to know what Latin is or somebody has to translate it from scripts.
Dustin Howes:
I don't know. That's what they're reminding me of. Awesome. So our guest Eric Nagle. There's a link to his profile in the chat If you wanna get ahold of him and nerd out any further. Or you wanna get ahold of him with his company, IMWave. We're gonna talk a little bit more about that. The link is in the profile chat to go grab it and let's dive into what you do or event at. IMWave. First off, what's the company do and who you guys serve in.
Eric Nagel:
So we are a publisher or an affiliate I don't know what you call them these days Sure, but we primarily buy ads on Google and Bing, directing traffic to the advertiser site through affiliate networks, and so what's great about that is that our team is really good at PPC, and if we're working with a merchant who's selling widgets, they're really good at making widgets. Their specialty is not PPC. That's where we can come in. So, like I said, we're really good at PPC, and the great thing about that is you know that you're gonna be paying 10%, so you can build that directly into your margins. You know it's 10%. You don't know that this keyword's gonna cost you $55 and this one's gonna cost you 55 cents. That's not things you need to worry about, so it's kind of you know that's one of our value propositions is that you know, let us handle the PPC for you.
Dustin Howes:
Yeah, awesome, and that's a extremely powerful for companies that might be young or don't even know how to do the PPC game. They can get a lot of value out of you guys, and you guys are working off a commission basis, so you guys are just essentially trying to spend a little less money than your earning in commissions, right?
Eric Nagel:
Yeah, and you know, if you're working with a traditional agency, they might not really care about profitability for you. You know, if they're working, especially if they're working on a percent of the ad spend, whereas us we don't have a budget you know, if we find something that's profitable, we're gonna run it as fast as we can, as hard as we can. And if you're comfortable paying 10, 20%, you know we're a great partner in that way and that we're just gonna just give you as much not as much traffic, but as many sales as possible. Right, because for us I can buy you know, ridiculously broad keywords and send traffic your way and it's not converting. That's gonna cause me to lose money, which I don't want as your partner, right? So we're finding the right keywords to drive conversions back to the merchant.
Dustin Howes:
Right, and there's not a lot of companies out there doing this. I've used you guys previously with some of the brands that I've worked with over the years and you guys have done great work, especially if you know we don't have that internal system to go and utilize our PPC campaigns. You guys are a great fit there, but always have great work. And tell me a little bit more about what you do over at. IMWave. How do you help this team?
Eric Nagel:
So we have a system that will pull in the revenue from the affiliate networks and all the costs from the ad networks and does a lot of thinking and then says, okay, this keyword we were bidding 30 cents on but it's, you know, definitely more profitable, so let's bump this up to 42 cents and this keyword over here we've been bidding this and it's not working too well. Let's shut this off and go find new keywords. It handles all that stuff. So I can tell you you know that this particular sale came from, you know, philadelphia, wednesday afternoon. And then we can look and go well, how's Philadelphia converting for this program? How's Wednesday afternoon converting for this program? And you know. So we're dealing with a lot of data. And, again, if you're selling widgets, maybe you don't care so much about that data. We do.
Dustin Howes:
Okay, ah, fantastic, and Google seems to be making it more difficult in the PPC space. It seems like it's getting harder every single day. And how do you guys adjust to that? Like, making the profitability and, you know, keeping the tracking attribution where it is. That seems like the easy part, but the profitability seems to be getting harder and harder and like the other day I got an ad taken down because I had the word away in it and it seems like, like words are, it's becoming harder to make your ads and I don't know why. What do you have to say about that?
Eric Nagel:
Well, first try targeting ads to rifle Colorado.
Dustin Howes:
Those are never gonna get approved, all right.
Eric Nagel:
Yeah, there's certain talents where it's like oh, I didn't know that was a town and you know they'll never approve it. So, in terms of Google ads, I'm gonna relate this to affiliate marketing and you know I talk about affiliate marketing. I actually talk about it in one of the courses at Buffalo State. Is I tell people that today is going to be the easiest it's ever going to be for you to get into affiliate marketing and it's also the hardest it's ever been. Right Tomorrow until tomorrow it's gonna be even harder, and you know yesterday was easier than today. So you know it's not for the faint of heart, because it is definitely getting harder and harder. Luckily, I work with some really smart people. The stuff that Google throws at us, we come up with. I don't wanna say workarounds, but we come up with ways to work with Google and you know I say Google, google, google, but I'm talking Google and Bing. Right, whatever Google does, bing typically follows suit within a couple of months. So, unfortunate, to work with smart people. We figure out solutions to the problems and you know we just got a new one thrown at us last week and I'm not gonna get into details about it because we're still working it out, but yeah, it's never. It's as easy as it's ever going to be and it's never been any harder.
Dustin Howes:
Got you and how do you keep up with that stuff in that field? What's your strategies here?
Eric Nagel:
So there's a lot of you know talk. There's like PPC chat on Twitter, there's you know different blogs and everything, but I go to the source so we get all of the information from the Google Ads blog or, personally, the Google Developer blog. I get my information from because, besides that, everyone's speculating and if you act on speculation, you can just be spinning your wheels for no reason whatsoever. So, we go to the source and make our decision based on that.
Dustin Howes:
All right, so at least the source is verified. Right that you know it's coming from the right people. But Google has traditionally held things close to the vest. They don't really tell people what the algorithm is in terms of like how to rank right, but they will give you snippets of what you can do to improve maybe.
Eric Nagel:
Yeah, and that kind of description is more on the SEO side and not the PPC side. Ppc, I mean, there are little things right, your ad quality and such but at the root of it, ppc is who's gonna pay more money? Because that's what Google cares about. They talk about, oh, we care about the customer journey and all this stuff.
Dustin Howes:
No, they don't.
Eric Nagel:
They care about money. So PPC is a lot less mysterious than SEO is, but there's still a lot going on where Google has been taking information away from us. Yeah, stuff that we used to know. I used to know that when someone clicked on this link, we were in the fourth spot right, which used to be one, two, three above the search results, and four was on the right hand side. Now all that jumbled up and everything, so they took that away and it's harder to understand exactly what keywords are converting. I mean, they're even moving away from keywords and going towards intention, where you're not so much bidding on a particular keyword, but you're bidding on what does the user want to do? What is their intention? So if they search for like, can I take my Google Pixel to AT&T? All right, that was a long tail. Sorry, I don't have this much screen space.
Dustin Howes:
That was a long tail keyword right.
Eric Nagel:
Put your hand up, Dustin, so we can make a long tail Other way.
Dustin Howes:
Long tail. Oh my God, look at that tail.
Eric Nagel:
That was a long tail keyword, but the intention is the user wants to know if they can move their phone to AT&T right. So we're heading that direction of what's the user's intention, not what do they type in, because users don't always type in the right thing. Huh, the customers don't know what they want until you put it in front of their face, right, Right? So we're gonna tell them what they want, yeah, awesome.
Dustin Howes:
So when you are working with merchants, I'm sure you guys have dozens, not hundreds, of like programs that you're joined to and running campaigns on a regular basis. Like the profitability with these campaigns has to have a certain threshold for you guys to keep doing it right and like in this space, I would assume. Like SaaS products are a little easier these days to go after and partner up with, but do you lean more towards the E-Com partners to work with or is it in the SaaS Like so?
Eric Nagel:
we're all over the place thinking about our top merchants. They're all over the place. But I will say that if we're picking up a new program, we tend to lean towards those that are represented by an agency that we're already working with. So it's not that we're going into CJ and saying, okay, who just joined the network, or go to share a sale and sort by who allows PPC and then are filtered by who allows PPC and then sort by who just joined. We're working these relationships with different agencies.
Dustin Howes:
Okay, gotcha, so that's easy enough. Working with the agencies out there to see what new clients they have. They'll probably give you an update once or twice a month or something. That's great, and you're big into APIs and like setting up automation. How are you guys utilizing that and that skill set for setting up these campaigns or working with clients? So?
Eric Nagel:
I mean, this whole process used to be, from day one was manual, right? You would say I'm going to run a PPC campaign, I'm going to send it to this merchant and then the next day you log into CJ or whoever. You say I made this much money and I spent this much money. It was profitable, great, and you left it at that. And the problem with that is you could have certain keywords that are not profitable and your highly profitable keywords are masking the losers. So if you get down to the keyword level and you can somehow track that, then we know that this particular keyword is a loser or this one's a winner, and when you're talking about, you know you can fit. I don't know. We typically try to cap our well. I don't want to get too geeky or spoke too many trade secrets, but if you're dealing with 20,000 keywords, then doing that manually is not possible. So that's where APIs come in and that's where someone like myself comes in, where you know you hire a programmer to say, pull the data from the two different sources and you have basically big data right and you align everything. Now you can see what keywords are winners, which ones are losers, and you can throw the losers out, you know, pause them and then give the winners a little bit more ad spend and see if you can keep pushing them. So in terms of automation, I mean there's a ton that we can get into with automation, but APIs are I don't know. I should probably know what they stand for application programming interface or something like that. But it's a way that a programmer like me can make. I can get into Share or Sell or I can get into CJ and I can pull that data out, put it in my own database and then run calculations and such.
Dustin Howes:
Okay, gotcha and Zapier come into this at all. You guys like?
Eric Nagel:
using it with his company Okay. Yes and no. So Zapier is a SaaS product where you don't have to be a programmer and you can say this is my input, this is what I wanna do with the input and this is the output. So the simplest example is I just set up a Zap yesterday and a Zap is a flow in Zapier. So my input was an RSS feed. I took the impact status dashboard. They have an RSS feed. So I wanted to know every time impact was having a tracking issue or reporting was delayed or something like that. So that was my input into Zapier. And then my output was every time there's a new entry in the RSS feed, I would have it be sent to our Slack channel. So I was then getting notifications that hey, reporting this delayed, or something like that. So Zapier is a great way to just get started with automation. I use it a ton just in my life Because I've got a lot going on, so I try to automate everything that I can. If I do something and I do something very similar the next day, I say no, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to, instead of taking 30 seconds to do that thing, I'll spend a half hour so I never have to do that thing again.
Dustin Howes:
Yeah, okay, that's fair. I find myself doing that as an affiliate manager, a lot Like, hey, I'm doing this repetitive message in this outreach, what can I do to make this a faster process? And then I end up spending more time on that process.
Eric Nagel:
Yeah, but you make up that time If you do the math if you say okay, this was taking me. I know it's ridiculous that when you spend 30 seconds on something, are you going to invest a half hour in it. But if you think about it in two months, you've made up that time. So if you automated that 30-second thing today by Labor Day, you've made up that time, and now you have September, october, november, december that you're profitable in that time. That's time that's back in your life to do other things.
Dustin Howes:
And what's the quick math that you utilize for an equation like this?
Eric Nagel:
Well, so I just figured 30 seconds to 30 minutes is 10x Okay.
Dustin Howes:
That's 20x, 20x.
Eric Nagel:
Right. So I guess my math is wrong, because then, even if it was 20x, that's only 20 days away, Okay, Right. No, it'd be 60 days away because it takes. Anyway, basic math that I can't do in my head right now and what I try to do is you can look at these things and say what's your biggest bang for the buck. If I automated this, I get my time back in seven days, or this might take a little bit longer. It's going to take me nine months to get my time back. That one you might want to think about a little bit more. Is that worth the time to automate? But you start knocking out those little things and some of the things are so simple. So I use Trello for my to-do list and whatever to-do list you're using, you can do this trick, and most of them have a service where you can email something into your to-do list, Right? So I have Gmail filter set up and I've got some that are ridiculously simple, Like when I request a book from the library and the library says your book is available, that email automatically forwards to my to-do list. Something that simple just keeps me on track. I know it has nothing to do with affiliate marketing, but just life in general, if you can keep on track and eliminate decision-making.
Dustin Howes:
That would be helpful. I haven't utilized Zapier nearly enough. I've done it for some funneling systems to match up my calendar, syncing it up with my funnel system, and it seems like funnel systems go high level, which I use, are getting even better nowadays to make that life easier, and sometimes Zapier isn't even needed at this point, but it seems like there's always applications that are needing it. So those are some great use case examples. Thanks, sir. Let's switch gears here and talk about our sponsor the day. Oh, who should it be? Oh, a lot of surprise. It's my own course. Like when I started out as an affiliate manager, I was tossed in the deep end to either sink or swim and everything I learned was through trial and error, or occasionally my company would send me to a conference to go learn. But even at a conference, I'm still trying to figure out what systems to go to and the right people to connect with, and I just decided there's gotta be a better way to learn this, and that's why I created performance marketing manager as a course to help affiliates expedite their education in affiliate marketing as an affiliate manager. Come check it out, performancemarketingmanagercom, and come hang out with my community. Now, eric, switching back into it all. Let's talk about you and your feed on LinkedIn. I want you to defend your post here today. Your first business back in middle school was people were chewing gum in class and then they stopped allowing it or they started allowing it. How did this already go? Okay?
Eric Nagel:
Yeah, so you never could chew gum in school and in middle school they've lifted that. Sixth grade They've lifted that rule and everyone could chew gum. So, as you can see here, I went to the drugstore, okay, and bought these five packs of hubba bubba bubblegum 40 cents and broke it open and sold every piece for a quarter, okay. So it turned 40 cents into a dollar 25, which, back in sixth grade, 91, 1990, that's a lot of money for a 12 year old. You can buy some baseball cars with that. So, yeah, that was my first business. And I was just talking to someone yesterday who doesn't have the internet knowledge that we have and he was asking me I need a side hustle and I thought about when there was a piece of my vacuum cleaner that broke, and so I go to eBay because I don't like throwing stuff away.
Dustin Howes:
That you know most of the vacuum works up as one piece yeah.
Eric Nagel:
So I go to eBay to buy this piece, and this piece was $40. But a refurbished vacuum was $120. If I bought the refurbished vacuum which I did took the piece out and put it in my vacuum. Now I have a vacuum that works and then another vacuum is just missing one piece. If I broke that down, I could sell the other one for $140. So I could have gotten my part for free and made a couple bucks. And I told him this I'm like look, buy these refurbished Vacuums, break it down and sell the parts and you get like a 50% ROI on that. So same thing. You know, you're buying the whole and selling the parts. I was buying the whole pack of gum and selling the parts and how did?
Dustin Howes:
how is how? Have you used that same strategy today in the business that you've done? It's, it's just a trait that you've kept on going.
Eric Nagel:
I mean I'd say the hustle, but as I've gotten older the hustles kind of Not quite diminished. I mean, okay, you know, I, I have multiple jobs, so I keep busy, I like working. I don't know, how does that, how does that relate to today? I guess I would just say that, yeah, I'm always looking for Opportunities, let's put it that way Fantastic.
Dustin Howes:
All right, we'll get back into the AI subject. Hey, AI is obviously taking over and it's going to kill the affiliate industry. Everybody knows it.
Eric Nagel:
Everybody's talking about it, right.
Dustin Howes:
I'm out of a job next year. Seo is dead. How are you using AI right now, and are you using it for good or use it for bad? Do you think it's a good thing? Do you think it's a bad thing? That's a lot of questions you could go.
Eric Nagel:
It is. So as a programmer I'm a very black and white person. Okay, so I have students that come to me and say professor Mabel, can you let write me a letter of recommendation for this grad school? That's something that's hard for me to do. Oh, but I can chat GPT and say I need a letter of recommendation for this person. Give chat GPT a couple of qualities of that person and I've got these beautiful letters of recommendation. So I use it for situations like that. I run an event here, it outside of Buffalo, new York, and I use that for sponsor letters. We use it for some some of the marketing. And Probably the thing that might surprise people the most as a programmer is I have it built into my code editor. So as I'm coding, I can put a comment and say you know, this function does this. I hit enter. In less than a second later that function is written for me. Oh, so, again, as a teacher, students, like you know, professor Naples, is chat GPT gonna take our jobs? It's like, well, if you're a crappy programmer or crappy coder, then yes, it's gonna take your job, because that's what GTS? It's a crappy coder, but a programmer takes all the different parts and puts it together. A coder can just, you know, write out that that, those 12 lines of code that you just said. This is what it needs to do. But somebody still has to think about how is all this going to flow together? So I have chat GPT, or a version of it, right built into my code editor and it is kind of funny that I was working it with the, with the Bing ads API. I don't know what they call it the Bing ads API or Microsoft advertising API. They flip the name back and forth and I needed a report. So I'm describing the report I needed, my code and chat GPT writes the code and I look it over. I go, yeah, that looks right. And I go and run it and there's an error. I go, okay, let's go figure out what the error is. Right, chat GPT is not fixing this error for me and Chat GPT knows about all the reports that's available from Bing, and the report that I wanted didn't exist, but it logically made sense that it would have been there and it wasn't. So chat GPT, or code GPT or code AI or whatever it is called, was hallucinating. It thought, look, if all these things are here, this other one must be here. It only logically makes sense. So it's it's a good coder. It probably makes me 30% more efficient as Coding, but it gets things wrong. There's times where it writes code and I'm like, well, that's not right, that's not what I want at all, you know. And then it's also only as good as the, the question you ask it right. There's times where I asked chat, gpt, I need some JavaScript that does this, and it writes it and go, okay, hang on, I meant I need, you know, either vanilla JavaScript or JavaScript using jQuery. And it writes it again and go okay, that's kind of what I want, but change it this way. So it's a lot of communication back and forth. I Think of it like I have a coder sitting next to me and I'm doing the, the programming, I'm putting things together, I'm describing what needs to be done, and it's doing the, the busy work I see. So as a programmer, I love it. As a professor, I love it. I teach my students how to use it because it makes them, you know, more efficient employees when they head out to the workforce. I Don't think it's gonna kill affiliate marketing. You know, something else is already gonna kill affiliate marketing. It's not gonna be chat GPT. We're gonna see a lot of crappy content out there for a while Until, really, google and Bing know how to you know, slap that content and penalize it. Yeah, but in the meantime, you know, use it as an assistant.
Dustin Howes:
Well, what do you know on them slapping content that is artificially made?
Eric Nagel:
at this point I Know that they said the content should be you, a human, should create the content. Okay, that's as far as I know. So you know. But you could also, if you had a system that knows that this is AI generated content, you could say rewrite this content until this system doesn't think it's AI generated anymore. And it was just going to a loop and keep rewriting it and all of a sudden goes Dean Okay, this is not AI generated. And then you plug that into your, your block.
Dustin Howes:
You know this is nothing new.
Eric Nagel:
15 I got. Look at the year. Yeah, 15 years ago. We're spinning content. Okay, you know where you would write an article and the third word you would put in curly brackets three different synonyms, and Then your content would get spun again and again and again. So your one article turns into 400 unique pieces and then you spam the internet with that.
Dustin Howes:
I Mean everything does. Adam remer came on a couple weeks ago and he he said something that that Chuck Mays said write the content yourself and then put it in a chat Jpt to rewrite it, and you can use the rewrites for everything else, like make your own blog post and then your LinkedIn posts. That that's talking about your blog posts. Have it, rewrite it, so it's original content and I thought that was a really smart concept. But Also the other way around is is the most popular version by far and that loop you just talked about as a really interesting concept as well.
Eric Nagel:
Yeah, when it comes to SEO, I would listen to Adam remer over myself. He's an expert in that.
Dustin Howes:
Smart, all right, and Google Bard, what do you think is coming down the pipeline? It's just gonna kill affiliate marketing industry altogether, like it feels like they're trying to absorb the real estate on Google. That is talking about giving suggestions to people to make purchases, and are they going to just absorb all of the SERPs in the future?
Eric Nagel:
So, as I understand it and I haven't touched Bard in a while, but Bard was, you know, when Chatchi PT came out in November, December last year and everyone was talking about it, Google rushed Bard out the door and it wasn't as polished and I played with it back, you know, earlier this year and it was kind of garbage. So I stuck with Chatchi PT. I'm a Chatchi PT fanboy. But obviously Google has a lot of resources and they have a lot of data, so is it going to push out, you know, the real estate that affiliates are taking right now. I do believe that you'll start seeing that we're already seeing it with structured snippets. Right, where if you type in a question, Google directly answers you by scraping content off another website, and then the user doesn't have to go anywhere right, they don't have to go to the affiliate site and even see ads or anything. Right, they're just getting the answer from Google and leaving. So Google is always a threat, but at the same time, affiliates. Google is so powerful that you have to play by Google's rules, because that's where you're getting your traffic from. So again, I'll just go back to. It's never been or it's not going to be any easier to get into affiliate marketing than it is today.
Dustin Howes:
That is funny. That's a good tie in. What do you think that like being might eventually have an advantage? Do you think people are going to get tired of Google absorbing all of the real estate on those SERPs with their own content that there's going to be a need for like that firsthand experience, like DustinHousecom writes reviews about that? I believe in like having that human experience. I think it's always going to be a necessity and other platforms like being search engines having real results may might become popularized again and Google might start falling off the table. Like, is that a possibility?
Eric Nagel:
It's definitely a possibility, like if you think about the internet back in the late 90s, the AOL and the internet were synonymous with each other, right, and it was like how is AOL ever going to be dethroned as the king of the internet? And they were. Google is a verb. It's going to be really hard to dethrone Google, right, and Bing has chat GPT built into it, into the search results or maybe a version of it or whatnot. But it's going to be really hard to dethrone Google. I think it's going to take a lot more than users saying I want search results. I think we're seeing it in the EU a little bit that they're realizing Google is too powerful. So I think that's what it's really going to take is that a bigger entity gets ticked off enough and I'm not going to get into political discussion, but it's going to take a lot to dethrone Google.
Dustin Howes:
All right, that's fair. It looks like we got a chat in here. Since Trisha Maya wants to come in and chime in, I'm going to put a little slide on the pbaorg. Go check them out and become part of our community. She wishes she had something to contribute, but she's not going to bug in here with tech questions today. I think that's her job on the regular.
Eric Nagel:
She doesn't ask me any tech questions today.
Dustin Howes:
No, nothing. That's unfortunate Trisha. Get on your game. Thanks for joining us, trish. So if you would like, eric, thank you for joining me here today. Let's wrap this thing up here. If you would like to be in Eric's seat in the Nerditorium, please go to dustinhousecom Slash nerd and throw out a proposition of what you'd like to nerd out with and about, and my guest next week on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, wade Tonkin and Mandy Pinner are going to join me. For those of you that are interested in getting a free 15-minute call with me to talk about affiliate marketing or how I can help you, I'm going to help point you in the right direction. Go to dustinhousecom Slash explore, grab 15 minutes with me and I'll be happy to help. Eric. Appreciate your time. Buddy, thanks for coming in and learning out with me.
Eric Nagel:
Thanks for having me.
Dustin Howes:
You got it. Thank you so much For those affiliate managers out there. Keep on recruiting. We'll see you out there. Take care folks.
