The Real Reason Industry Giants Win at Affiliate Marketing

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Digital Marketing Stories. I'm absolutely delighted today to have Stas who's coming to us from Andorra. He's actually from Ukraine originally, but he's now living in Andorra. And the company that he's working for is called. Is it Leader Private?

Stas [00:00:17]:
It's correct, it's Leader Private.

Jim Banks [00:00:19]:
It's fantastic to meet you. Tell us a little bit about how you got into the industry.

Stas [00:00:25]:
Yeah, it's, it's been a while so I've started 10 years ago started as a affiliate individual. So I started media buys on different niches. My main core it's lead gen and last five years it's mostly social networks like TikTok and Facebook. We work with the insurance industry. Now it's health insurance, car insurance on us, mortgage insurance and all this, all this stuff. Also we work with a mainstream dating niche so we do Legion for these services. So 10 years ago I started my, my way in this business in affiliate marketing and after four years I decided to, to open my company and to create a team. So I started to hire people and at this moment we have 20 people in house team and I don't know say to say about outsource but we have a lot of also outsource partners now as well.

Stas [00:01:25]:
So 20 people in house at this moment, that's great.

Jim Banks [00:01:29]:
I mean like I always kind of say there, there's a couple of things you can't fake and one of the things you can't fake is you can't fake longevity. So 10 years is a good length of time to be in the industry and it's, it's funny, I've spoken to a lot of previous guests and they have a sort of typ. Typical journey that they've taken. They start off working for themselves like doing primarily affiliate related stuff and then they start to evolve and, and become, I mean I call it, they call it legitimate businesses. Right. But I don'. Being an affiliate was ever to me, it was never an illegitimate business. I mean I did a lot of affiliate marketing back in the day and again for me having an agency was a natural evolution to go from kind of running affiliate business to basically sort of setting up an agency.

Jim Banks [00:02:14]:
And part of the reason that I set up my agency was I wanted to eventually get to the point where I could sell it.

Stas [00:02:19]:
Right.

Jim Banks [00:02:19]:
And I didn't think that anyone would have bought an affiliate business. So I decided to kind of set up an agency and like when you look at it now, I think there are so many people that have actually gone out and, and done incredibly well selling affiliate related businesses.

Stas [00:02:34]:
Yeah, yeah, it's true. So affiliate business, it's nowadays it's, it's a big system that you should support, you should hire people, you should use different. It's about age of. And you just run, you, you perform and you make profit and big deal and to work with the people it's much more complicated this moment and always was. So you should know processes and structure. Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:03:21]:
So one of the, one of the challenges I always found and I do a lot of consulting now where I talk to people who are getting into affiliate marketing for the first time and one of the challenges is always how you decide which offers you going to run. Right. Because there's so many people that maybe are offering the same type of offers and how do you decide which one is the best one for you to run? How did you, how did you kind of go through that process of deciding which advertisers you wanted to specifically work with or if you were doing things through a network, how did you decide which networks you wanted to work with?

Stas [00:03:54]:
Yeah, thank you for a question. Yeah, I have a good response for this question. So as I've been known in the industry and I've been working for 10 years, I visit in most of the affiliate shows and big affiliate summits in US, in Europe, in Asia. So I know big community and we are working only with the trustworthy advertisers, only with the reference. So we don't work with the no name companies before we, we, we don't check if they pay any terms, if they don't have any problems in industry. We have different communities, different chats. So you can ask people do you know these guys, are they trustworthy? And after this we just start signing contracts and we are checking all the points of. And the main, it's a reference of course if we know people who work with these advertisers and they don't have any problems, we start to do it if we know that some people had some issues.

Stas [00:04:58]:
So we are checking more details and we can even skip this advertiser and don't start to work because it's risky. We work with the big volumes and I don't want to risk my company, my team and my money. Of course. Yeah, yeah.

Jim Banks [00:05:17]:
Because again I think, I think a lot of advertisers and agencies assume that as an affiliate that you're going to be desperate to kind of like take their offers. And as you say like sometimes the. I always found like for me the experience was bitter, right? I had had a couple of advertisers and agencies not pay me, right. And for me it's like, it's always horrible because ultimately as you say, like, I mean I, I used to buy a lot of traffic on Google back in the day and, and if you, if you're, if you've kind of committed to spend the money, you've spent the money, right? I mean you spent, I, I could have spent 20, 30, $40,000 on advertising and if the advertiser doesn't pay me, then I'm on the hook, right. I can't turn around to Google and say, hey, you know what, don't worry about it, the advertiser didn't pay me so I'm not going to pay you, but I'm going to carry on running all, all sorts of other offers. They, they just wouldn't do that, right. They would always insist on kind of you getting the money. They get their money.

Jim Banks [00:06:10]:
And so for that reason I, I'm a bit like you. I was quite particular about which advertisers I wanted to work with and which agencies and I wouldn't do anything unless I could get some sort of validation that they were a legitimate business and that they paid their bills on time. So.

Stas [00:06:25]:
Yeah, well, one of the most important point is to know personally some people from this company if, if it's people with a good track, if they, it could be, could work before in different companies and you know them so you ask if it's a good company. You, you work. Yeah, of course, 99% of the responses. Yeah, of course it's a good company and we can work. So it's just industry opinion. If you have it, you can start to work. If you, if you don't have a good feedbacks, it's better to go to another advertisers and to build relationships there.

Jim Banks [00:07:02]:
So what do you think as an affiliate, what would you say are the most important things that you want to negotiate with your advertiser or your agency? Right. In order for you to kind of like do well with them moving forward?

Stas [00:07:15]:
Yeah, of course. So when you already onboard it, just start slowly to check how is the track, how is account manager's responses and how they pay. So, and after one, two months you can scale. If you see that it's a good company, it's a big, it's no problem, always in time. So you can scale a lot and just show the quality and big volumes. And when you show a stable traffic, stable quality, everyone is in a Win win position and everyone would like to scale. We had such cases with a search arbitrage before with IFD feeds. I, I guess you know this industry as well.

Stas [00:07:55]:
So we, we, we used to work with Facebook and TikTok traffic to search feeds and we started slowly with these guys. We just checking day to day feedbacks. How is traffic? How is it perform? Are you happy? Yeah, yeah yeah we are happy. You can scale twice. Three times. Okay, let's do it. And we, we did it in a year, three years so and no problem any, Nothing. We we also we, we just had a very good experience with the Google feeds.

Stas [00:08:30]:
So same model, you can work in different verticals. Just start slowly to check the partner if everything is good. So boost and make money.

Jim Banks [00:08:41]:
Yeah that was the thing I was, I always found funny like a lot of people I, I would, I worked with travel companies and so on and they would like you're, you're, you're a travel company. And I mean ultimately I said no we're not, we're not a travel company. We're a click selling company. We were doing arbitrage. We were selling clicks to airlines and online travel agents, right and ultimately all we were doing is just arbitrage. We were buying Traffic for say $0.20 on Google and selling it somewhere else for like a dollar. Right? And, and ultimately we didn't. Weekly Report WC 12 April 20206 meta ads Baron Designs really care what happened as far as the, the journey of the, the kind of the original point of entry for us with the click at 20 cents, right? And the exit to the, to the airline or online travel agent for a dollar, right? We didn't care.

Jim Banks [00:09:26]:
I mean initially we didn't care. Eventually it got to the point where we started to kind of go well maybe we're leaving more money on the table. So we, we started to to kind of do strategic partnerships with, with airlines and travel agents where we actually got paid A result based upon the, the actual outcome of the weekly report wact the 12th transaction, right? So if it was somebody looking for a flight going from say London to Barcelona, that might be one. If it's one person that could be maybe a €81 flight, right? Maybe not so much now but certainly back in the day then it would be that, that sort of money. So for us we, we would make very little money on that particular transaction. But if it was somebody that was, let's say they were going from London to New Zealand, right And they were going in business class and they were taking their family that could be a huge deal. Right. So it could be one.

Jim Banks [00:10:15]:
We could weekly report w 12th april 2026 we could take a commission on the actual value of the transaction rather than on just the kind of click that we were sending out to the airline. Right. So it's almost like a. I think sometimes you need to look at it from the point of view of how can I kind of manage my own risk. Right. I want to try and I think sometimes having a hybrid of some elements that are kind of you get paid for each visitor so pay per click, right. Or whether you get paid on performance. So CPA or rev share I think that that quite often work well also.

Jim Banks [00:10:49]:
Weekly report see 12-4-2026 meta ads Baron

Stas [00:10:52]:
Designs yeah yeah it's a, it's a very good case and on US market always we work on CPA or yieldshare and so the, the main goal is to generate quality traffic and everyone is happy. So yeah it's a, it's a good case.

Jim Banks [00:11:09]:
So so, so the, the, the agency that you have now, did you transition completely away from affiliate or do you still sort of have some affiliate business and kind of agency business?

Stas [00:11:21]:
We have some kind of agency business and affiliate business as well. So it's two direction so affiliate business is still, is still busy and you can work and of course we have a big experience in different niches and know a lot of people so we continue affiliate business as well.

Jim Banks [00:11:43]:
So how important do you think it is to because you mentioned like earlier about going to the kind of conferences and shows how important is it to kind of go in and sort of actually physically be there in person with with other people in the industry. Weekly Report WTC 12 April 2020 I

Stas [00:12:01]:
think it's one of the most important stuff to, to go to the shows because you show to the people that you're in business. You, you don't hide somewhere you are public and of course in a person you can arrange more details, you can, you can see your partner, you can, you can discuss more points and you can, you can, you can make more deals. Even so I. 100% I advise to go to big shows, try to focus where on what niche you work and start building relationships online and continue to work with the people in person. The biggest deals I have I had after after personal meeting. So it always work. It always work.

Jim Banks [00:12:56]:
I've always said to people that most of the best deals I've ever done have happened at 2 or 3 o' clock in the morning when we're in a bar somewhere right. We're blind drunk and that we agree that we're going to do some work together and those have been quite often the best relationships I've built with people but also the best deals in terms of the kind of the money that I've made down the line after kind of cementing the deal over a couple of drinks.

Stas [00:13:20]:
Yeah it's happened from time to time but now I can share as well that different sports activities on the conference for example running padel tournaments it's a good good places for networking so of course different ways you can speak just you you should be not shy communicative people person and to be open to feedbacks to communicate communication with different people so and just build relationships not one time it's a for long term so it's a main case how to to make profit if you will not go to the shows success should be much lower level.

Jim Banks [00:14:07]:
So yeah I also think, I think a lot of people go to the show. So again you mentioned like affiliate events. I mean like Affiliate Summit's been going on for forever and I typically I don't go to both affiliate summits. I just do the west coast one now so the one in Vegas and for me it was always a case. Weekly Report WC 12-4-20 tweaks meta ads Barron Myself I I'm always amazed at how many people I would meet and they would say I'd say what what are you doing tonight? Which parties are you going to? And they say oh no, we're going to, we're going to the like a concert or we're going to like we're going to go and do top golf or whatever it might be but doing something that wasn't industry, right. Weekly Report WWC 12 April 20206 meta ads Baron Designs Right. So they were doing or they'd go gambling, right? And I'm thinking well this you know to me that's a missed opportunity right? Because as you say you have 6,000 people all in the same industry all in one place at the same time. Right.

Jim Banks [00:15:04]:
And it's easy to kind of get around and I don't necessarily think you need to spend a huge amount of time walking the floor. Right. But I think certainly Weekly report with WC 12th April 2026 meta ads Baron Designs if you hang around in the bars and various kind of hotels you'll get a lot of opportunities to kind of meet people who are quite often decision makers within businesses. Right. And they can kind of do things for you that may not be able to ever do if you just try to reach out to them by email or phone. Right. So I think having kind of that physical face to face contact is absolutely essential.

Stas [00:15:36]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also it's good for community. It's a side event on the shows. Always works well and I am such person that I'd like to, to know new people and I like to communicate. So I'm so happy always to have 12 new contacts from the industry from the conference. This moment usually is because of the reference of my partners. Mostly. Mostly it's easier way.

Stas [00:16:09]:
But yeah, I highly recommend people who start an affiliate business go to the different shows and to have communication with the potential partners 100%.

Jim Banks [00:16:20]:
Me too. I can't recommend it enough. I mean at the moment I think I'm sort of slowly getting back into the throes of going to shows because I went through a phase where you know, because of the pandemic I didn't go anywhere for any, any length of time and I got used to not going to conferences and, and for me again it's sort of like I'm in a different stage in, in life in my business now than maybe a lot of the kind of younger people starting out. Right. So I have less hustle like and I don't feel I need to hustle as much as I used to but, but that doesn't mean that I don't still get great enjoyment out of going to the shows and meeting up with like existing old friends that I've had in the industry for a long time but also meeting and helping new people in the industry. Weekly WTC to April 2020 Zions.

Stas [00:17:09]:
Yeah, yeah, sure many either. So I, I visit last, last conferences this year but I have must have conferences it's affiliate Summit in New York for example this year in July, AW in Budapest. So it's. This is really the best show since the conference.

Jim Banks [00:17:30]:
So I think it's really interesting because I remember at one point in time that anyone that was in involved in the industry that was based in North America. Right. More often than not they wouldn't go to any of the shows outside of North America. Right. But you mentioned AW in Budapest, they do have one in Bangkok. Right. And you see so many people from America now go to those shows. Right.

Jim Banks [00:17:53]:
They'll go to Budapest, they'll go to bank weekly report WEC 12-4-2026. Right. There's one in Barcelona I think. I can't remember what that when that is but you know they, they typically have lots of events and people will go to them right from the States because they realize that there is a massive opportunity to kind of collaborate with with publishers and partners who are based in in Europe who may not go to every single show that is in the States. Right. So it's their opportunity to kind of go and pick up new relationships with people that they wouldn't otherwise have had a weekly report WC Sir Trist yeah

Stas [00:18:27]:
yeah and the big companies usually they have booth on the show stands so people could could come to the booth and to get acquainted with the different guys with their account managers. I had maybe hundreds of such meetings when I started and I still, I know, I know these people and we, we keep relationships so we still in communication. These people already changed 3,5 companies but still we, we are in communication and always they ah start. So what are you doing now? Maybe we can. So it's a big community.

Jim Banks [00:19:09]:
Yeah so yeah yeah this is interesting. Like a lot of the people that have been doing it for a long time they've evolved and they're doing different things now. Right. So again I think I've got lots of friends now who have been in industry for for 20 plus years and they're still as excited if not more excited because of the onset of things like AI pay per call. Right? There's so many different things that have kind of come to the table recently right that has really excited them to sort of stick around and evol some of their skill set. But again I think, I think a lot of the skills that they have and I have it involves building relationships with people face to face. Right and those are not. You can't really sort of weekly report wc 12-04-2026 meta ads Baron designs of use AI to kind of build a personal relationship like face to face.

Jim Banks [00:19:57]:
It just doesn't work that way. Right. So for me, yes you can use AI to kind of help eliminate some of the friction that you have in terms of the job that you're doing to enable you to free up more time to be able to do more of that face to face stuff right So I use AI a lot right to help run sort of elements of My weekly report BC 12th April 2020 Meta Ads Baron Designs my business right That I could yes I could employ other some a person to kind of do that but it's. I don't see the point in spending money on that. I'd much rather spend money on on hiring people that can go to shows and talk to people and build relationships right that way knowing that the technology is there, kind of doing the things in the background that, that we need to kind of do in order to get the best performance. So. Weekly Report W20C 2020 designs yeah, even

Stas [00:20:42]:
a good point to share experience in which sphere of your business you are using AI, what kind of technologies for the companies in the top, it's better to have your own infrastructure or use third party services. So it's AI. It's a huge, huge trend now at this, this moment and we can see that it's, it's deeply inside of corporations and, and small companies as well. So even, even people not from industries, they are using day to day. So we are of course we are using as well AI. It's.

Jim Banks [00:21:24]:
So what sort of things are you using it for in your business?

Stas [00:21:27]:
Yeah, yeah, so we use content generation AI, we use for analytical and statistical stuff for sometimes for optimizing campaigns but at this moment it's just R and D. So we try to check how it works and compare with manual work. But we involve more and more AI stuff in our day to day business. So it's a, it's a, it's progress the last couple years and even with the coding you can, you can do just simple tasks with AI automatization.

Jim Banks [00:22:08]:
Yeah, I mean I, I'm, I'm always blown away that some of the use cases people are using in, in terms of actually creating, creating skills that can enable them to kind of do tasks. I would say like if you have a task that you do within your agency that you do more than like once, right. So the minute you start to do something for the second time, right. You should be turning that into a skill specifically for your agency to enable it to be done in a more efficient and effective way. Right? Again, I've always kind of said that the, I think as long as you, you understand what the, the task that you're sort of turning into a skill is. Right. And. Weekly Report WCC 12-04-2026 Meta Ads Baron Designs how it should look, Right, Because I think sometimes people go into the, they kind of go into it blind and they just kind of take a skill, apply it and go yeah, that's it, it's done, it's great.

Jim Banks [00:22:57]:
Right? But if you don't actually know what the end result should look like, right. It's very difficult for you to kind of quality control the output to know whether you've got hallucinations in there or whether it's, it's actually going to get you into trouble. Weekly Report April 2026 meta ads Baron Designs all right. I mean so many people I've seen have lost Facebook accounts because they've run AI. They kind of end up with ads a completely new like false and Facebook ding them quickly and they end up losing their business manager and they go what do I what I didn't do anything wrong. It's like well you did right. You trusted AI kind of blindly when you shouldn't have done so.

Stas [00:23:32]:
Weekly Report HWE12C20 Even Facebook, TikTok and Google now have AI moderation. A lot they implement these days a lot of this stuff. And let's see nearest future how is industry growing? So,

Jim Banks [00:23:48]:
so what, what would you say if, if you were going to go right, I'm going to try and do something different that no, nobody else is doing at the moment. Where would you kind of sort of recommend publishers and, and affiliates look in terms of traffic types, right or traffic sources? Are there any kind of like things that you're trying now that you haven't tried before that you're amazed with the, the results that you're getting? Weekly Report East 05-04-2020 Designs I know

Stas [00:24:12]:
it's a good, good for affiliates now to pay attention to native ads open web so it's like such like Outbrain, Taboola mgid so it's a good traffic source. It's difficult to optimize, it's high budget test. But still it's a very good audience there because people there they are on the real websites they are reading articles or different news and they are clicking. They are more focused when they click because TikTok, Facebook, Instagram for example they are just swiping and they are, they're trying to find some wow effect and on this open web traffic sources people are more concentrated and leads in my opinion sometimes on some verticals leads are more quality. Than from social networks. So I highly recommend still if you even tried before, still try Rev Content or Outbrain that's a very good traffic sources for all the white hat niches.

Jim Banks [00:25:30]:
Yeah, I mean I've run ads on sort of Taboola, Outbrain. I think I've also ran a little bit on one called Ad Blade right back in the day, way back like a long time ago. And as you say like I think sometimes it's called native advertising for a reason because the ad copy, like it's almost the case of you don't have to kind of create the ad yourself. The ad gets built right based upon the publisher's site to make it look like it belongs on there, right? And I think sometimes that's where I think people kind of fall down. The Weekly Report WC 12 April 20206 meta ads Baron Designs they try and enforce they've, they say I've got this banner, I want it to go on this page, right? And it just looks ugly. Whereas if it's a native ad, you'll have the same font, the same color scheme as the actual publisher's website. So it'll look, look as though it belongs there. Like it'll look native, hence the name, right? So and I think sometimes if you get the, the kind of the placement, right, so if you have a specific offer that you're promoting and there's a publisher with a specific placement that you can kind of really dive into and get granular, right, then you can get huge, incredible results with it, right? But as you weekly report WC 12-4-26 meta ads Baron Design say like there's, there's a lot of traffic.

Jim Banks [00:26:41]:
I think a lot of, a lot of the publishers on some of these native networks are poor, right? I say they're poor then they're not necessarily poor for everyone, right? If you're doing arbitrage, right, and you're paying very little money for the, the click, right, you could be making more on the back end, right? Because you could again you could be paying say 5 or 6 cents on the front end, right? And getting 50, 60 cents on the back end, right? You don't really care kind of what happens on the front end because they, they're ultimately clicking through to your site and off your site off to, to the people that you're partnering with, right? So, so that, that can weekly report 12 April 2026 adds Baron Designs I found native can quite often be good for, for search arbitrage, right? But equally it's good for some like for people that are doing long form video sales letters, that type of thing, right? So we again we've seen some success with things like hearing aids. So the, the ad copy looks really strange, right? So it kind of drags people into, hooks them into the, the kind of the, the, the packaging of the title in the description, right? And then when they come to the site there could be a video sales letter and, and they could get great results from that. So weekly report WDOTEC Health twice April

Stas [00:27:49]:
20 yeah it's a, it's a, it's a good traffic source for example for home improvement as well. So a lot of people are looking for good services in US and UK and how to rebuild the house or how to repair some stuff. So it's a, it's a very good audience but you should remember that it's about big budgets really. So if you're a new guy in affiliate marketing, I highly recommend you maybe to start with more simple teasers and with the lower budgets because here is, it's a, it's a big companies and native and they have big publishers and it's a really tons of the traffic and you should optimize and you should set up and start 20, 30k for first months at least. Check how it works.

Jim Banks [00:28:48]:
Yeah, I've always found that the as you say that there are some premium publishers that the native networks have, right. Where the cost typically is much, much higher than it would be for the run of the mill kind of publishers that they have on their network. Right. But ultimately that's where you get the quality, that's where you get the good results from. Right. So you need to be competitive with your budgets, right. Both in terms of what you're prepared to spend for each visitor but also how much you're prepared to spend on a monthly basis. Right.

Jim Banks [00:29:15]:
So as you say, if you, if you've got a thousand dollars a day, right and you're prepared to pay for placements on MSN or something like that, then you can get good results. Right. But, but I think a lot of people think that they can kind of get traffic for $20 and $20 a day and play $0.20 a click or something like that. And the opportunities there, the publishers that they have at that lower level are much, much less quality. And, and I think that that's going to ultimately lead to, to people having a difficulty in hitting the performance that they want to get in terms of the. The ROAS Weekly Report WTC 12 April

Stas [00:29:52]:
2026 yeah, even, even now if you start like individual affiliate, you should prepare a budget because before 10 years ago we could start with a 10 20k. It was enough just to warm up and to check how is traffic perform at this moment it's you, you need more money to check analytics and to optimize your campaigns. So. If you don't have enough budget just go to work in the agency or affiliate team and you also could make a really good number there. So I, I know that because I pay to people. So it's a big opportunities and you don't need to to make your own business.

Jim Banks [00:30:38]:
Yeah, I've seen a lot of people

Stas [00:30:41]:
good team to join to them and to improve them and that's it.

Jim Banks [00:30:44]:
Yeah yeah. I've got, I've got a lot of friends that started life as affiliate manager and then realized how much money some of their publishers were making and then they decided to kind of become a publisher right. So they, they understood how the worked, they understand where the real money was being made and weekly report AP 12th April 2026 Meta Aaron Designs and they realized that it wasn't as an affiliate manager, as a an affiliate or publisher and they could, they could make good money that way. And and I'm curious to know like obviously you've got your agency now that's grown to 20 people. How do you retain people in your agency to prevent them kind of doing that going and kind of setting up on their own? I weekly report WC 12th Baron's Baron

Stas [00:31:24]:
Designs I have a very democratic how to say I have democratic management in my company and also it's a great role it's hr. So I have HR department that supporting people communication and always I see in what way people want to grow and I give them this opportunity because I understood before what resources you should have to develop and I understand. These people a lot of people high motivated and they want to grow up. You always should discuss with your team exact goals and what is the motivation for them and how much they want to earn this year or next year and so you can expect the behavior of your guys and you can pay more attention here and that's why yeah in average I work with the people six, six, eight years. That's good.

Jim Banks [00:32:33]:
That's impressive. I've always found that the, the biggest challenge of having people working in an agency is that people I've seen a lot of agency owners make the mistake of assuming that everyone that Weekly Report WC 12 April 2020 Brad's Baron Designs works There is only interest in interested in money, right. And money is not the only thing that motivates people and want wants them to kind of turn up at work. Right. They want to be paid well for what they do. Right. But sometimes it is the the opportunities to kind of manage other people to have a proper career path. Weekly Report Dubsey 12 April 2026 Meta Ads Baron Designs in terms of where they where they're going, right.

Jim Banks [00:33:12]:
They're involved in some of the decision making about what sort of offers they run and that type of thing. Right Rather than they're there just to kind of there's your job, you just do your job and shut up right? And and I think again I think a lot of agency owners have made the mistake of assuming that weekly report WC 12th April 2026 meta ads Baron Designs Everyone is just there for money so if they offer them a little bit more money they'll be happy and they will stay, right? And some people have got fire, fire in their bellies. They want to kind of evolve and grow and, and do things kind of differently, right? And sometimes if you're an agency owner you can help support that, right? I've had lots of people that I've worked with in The Weekly Report WC 12 April 2026 Met Ads designs in the past where they have come to me with ideas, right? And I've gone that's a great idea. Let's you know, how do you want to do it right? And sometimes they would be well I want to do it all on my own. I'm like great, well that's fine, I have no issue with that, right? They've been upfront and told me about it, right? But equally sometimes they're worried about sort of weekly report WCC 12-4-2026 meta ads Baron Designs Doing it because they don't necessarily have the ability to kind of take some of the risks that maybe people like you and I would be able to do because of our longevity of doing what we do, right? Need support and help to, to kind of do that, right? So it could be I can give them some of my time or I can give them some of My weekly report WPCC 12 April 20 Money to help support them grow the initiative, right? And I could take sort of a bit like a Dragon's Den type scenario. I could take an equity stake in their business, right in return for some of my expertise, right? And I think the more people will share about it, I think it would be you're very naive if you're an 8 weekly report you see to April 2020 meta ads Baron Designs Agency Owner and you assume that people aren't going to be wanting some stuff of their own, right? So it's a case of have a, have an environment where they can talk about it openly and freely but you don't want it to be that they're doing all of their own work and none of your work, right? Because that's going to be detrimental to your business.

Stas [00:35:08]:
It's also good stuff. Yeah, I completely agree with you and you also full of energy, always so and charismatic leader because only, only such people work with the people for a long time And I agree with you that you could support new ideas of your team and give them opportunity just to check maybe to test. This hypothesis and you will close the stadt and that's it. And you work together and you are on the same way. So it's important, it's important because we work of course for good money, for salaries, for bonuses, this but also we should do something big together. And they. Always, they my people. I, I guess that my people always feel that I am, I'm with them near day to day so I work with them and I understand this business as well.

Stas [00:36:13]:
Like I'm a practical affiliate. So I, I don't just, just CEO of the corporations that comes to, to the team to manage. Them and I don't understand. No, I understand the specific of this activity. I know how technology work. I know how to analyze, how to optimize and they are feeling that yeah, our, our boss with the expertise. So let's, let's keep working together and let's do good numbers.

Jim Banks [00:36:46]:
Yeah, that you're absolutely right. I think you lead by example, right? So you need to be able to. I'm not saying that that has to be the only thing you do, but at the same time you need to be able to kind of step up and show that you still have the skills and capabilities. Right? I mean if you again, if you look at anyone that's run ads on Facebook in the last. Well, I mean I started Facebook ads in 2009 I think it was. Right, so that's like what, 17 years, right? And, and in that time, I mean the only thing that I've been guaranteed is one that it would be be like broken all the time. It would be changing all the time, right? But. Weekly Report WCC 12-4-2026 Meta Ads Baron Designs but.

Jim Banks [00:37:23]:
But there's been an evolution of how things have worked, right? And for me I've always been testing different theories, different sort of strategies. Right. Different ideas. Right. I want to try and push the boundaries as far as I can. Right. So that then as the team when, when I kind of go to them and say hey, I want us to try this. I'm not.

Jim Banks [00:37:40]:
Weekly Report w 12th April 2026 Med as Baron Designs I'm doing it just based is gut feel is something that quite often I've implemented across the board for some of the clients that I work with. Right. So, so I know that when they're going to do it with the clients that they work with, it's, it's a kind of tried and tested model rather than just kind of like a guess of what might work.

Stas [00:38:01]:
Yeah yeah that's true and I enjoy it.

Jim Banks [00:38:04]:
I mean that's for me that's one of the most exciting parts of the job that I do is that I get to kind of manage campaigns and ads on a day to day basis. Right. I I'm still very kind of active and proactive in in doing it right and, and I manage people less. Right. And manage campaigns more which I enjoy so. Weekly Report WC 12th April 2026 Metis

Stas [00:38:24]:
Baron Designs yeah for me as well it's like a lifestyle it's not a challenge for me. I also used to work with some campaigns. I'm marketer of course I'm owner of the company and but still for me it's very interesting industry and I believe in this industry it's dynamic and you should keep keep strength every day every month. And only, only all this stuff that gives me an energy to continue this business and it makes my business profitable. So and my guys are following me and we work and I also, I appreciate to work with my team team and I want to say them hi.

Jim Banks [00:39:09]:
So Stas, it's been, it's been a phenomenal conversation. I've loved having you on as a guest. If there's anything that you would like to kind of share with my audience. What, what sort of one tip would you maybe give them as a kind of parting gesture in terms of what they might want to do either working with you. It's like if you're looking for publishers to kind of work with or advertisers to work with maybe this would be a good opportunity if you kind of put something out there now to to talk to them about that that Weekly Report Buc 12 Apr 2026 Baron Design

Stas [00:39:35]:
no just guys I can recommend you don't afraid and keep going and you, you can understand that it's a risky but personal message personal meetings it's one of the most important stuff and if you want to work and organize your own business it's about structure, it's about system it's about the right people on your board. So if, if you are affiliate individual just check detail your partners, advertisers, publishers do not lose your money and scale gradually and this is maybe the main recommendation be careful, be careful with with the budgets because you can burn in one moment so yeah and, and there

Jim Banks [00:40:22]:
are plenty of communities that kind of exist on Telegram and Slack and various kind of other places and I'll include some of those in the show notes in terms of where you can kind of go to kind of collaborate with other people who are in the affiliate space. Weekly Report WC 12 April 20206 meta ads Baron Designs because for me again, I think you're only as good as the strength of your network, right? And I think the stronger your network, the stronger your presence in the industry is going to be. So stas, thank you. Thanks again so much for being a great guest on the show and I look forward to talking to you, you, everyone else on the next episode of the Digital Digital Marketing stories. Weekly Report WC 12 April 20206 meta ads Baron Designs thank you Jim.

Stas [00:41:02]:
Thank you Jim. I was appreciate to take part in your podcast. Hope I see you again in a while so and we can discuss more and more points and more changes in the industry. So absolutely.

Jim Banks [00:41:15]:
I think for me it's, it's, it's such a dynamic industry. I've enjoyed being part of it and I hope to continue to be part of it moving forward. So thanks again.

Stas [00:41:23]:
Thanks. Thank you very much.