Affiliate Marketing Secrets for Independent Retailers with Wade Tonkin

Crystal Vilkaitis: Prepare yourself for a very interesting conversation around affiliate marketing, something that we haven’t really talked about on the show and something that could really help grow your ecommerce business, as well as give you access to additional products to sell without housing ,and buying the inventory.

There is a solid chance that you have not even considered affiliate marketing for your store. Maybe you’ve heard of it before, but you feel like it’s sort of a big box thing. It’s unreachable. It doesn’t make sense for you, or maybe you’ve never even heard of it before. Wherever you are in the affiliate marketing space and knowledge and experience, I want you to listen to this full episode with my guest Wade from Fanatics, because he is breaking down how independent retailers can easily add this aspect to your business to really grow your store. There’s a couple of different ways that you can do this. We dissect it in this show, and I am just really grateful for this conversation because it is a whole new way of thinking, I think, for your independent store.

It’s a new channel for you to make more money and expand your brand, and there’s a lot of opportunities for independents. You’re going to see that in today’s episode.

Before we dive in, here’s a little bit more about my guest. Wade Tonkin is the director of global affiliate marketing at Fanatics Inc. Wade’s a 25 plus year veteran of the affiliate marketing world with most of his time spent managing affiliate programs. He spent the past 13 plus years at Fanatics, either directly running the affiliate program or running the team that runs a family of affiliate programs for some of the top brands in sports.

And in case you’re not familiar with Fanatics, it is a massive brand, but in case you’re not familiar, I’d like to share a little bit more with you as well. Fanatics is building a leading global digital sports platform where sports fans can buy licensed fan gear, jerseys, lifestyle and streetwear products, headwear, and hard goods, collect physical and digital trading cards, sports memorabilia, and other digital assets, and bet as the company builds its business.

Sportsbook and I gaming platform Fanatics has an established database of over a hundred million sports fans, a global partner network with over 900 sports properties, including major national and international professional sports leagues, teams, players, associations, athletes, celebrities, colleges, and college conferences, and over 2000 retail locations, including it’s lids, retail business stores. You can learn more at Fanatics.com. You can follow Wade on X, we’ve linked to everything in the show notes. Let’s dive into this awesome episode.

Welcome to Rooted in Retail. I’m your host, Crystal Vilkaitis. Here, we have engaging and informative conversations with successful indie retailers and industry experts. Together, we learn, connect, and grow. Don’t miss our live after the show every Tuesday night in the Rooted in Retail Facebook group.

Alright, here’s today’s episode.

Wade, welcome to Rooted in Retail. I’m thrilled you’re here.

Wade Tonkin: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to do the chat.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah. This is definitely a new topic on Rooted in Retail, so I’m very excited because we haven’t talked a lot about affiliate marketing and I think that this is going to be a new idea for a lot of our listeners, but I think there’s a lot of opportunities. So what better person to have than you, working at Fanatics, one of the world’s largest affiliate marketing programs that’s available.

So before we dive in and get to it, I’d love for you to take a couple minutes and share more about you, what you do in your retail experience.

Wade’s journey into affiliate marketing 26 years ago

Wade Tonkin: I’m Wade Tonkin, I’m the Director of Affiliate at Fanatics. I’ve been doing affiliate marketing now almost 26 years. Started in May of 1999, so it’s been a while. And I actually cut my teeth with a startup, I was running channel management for a software company on the east side of Seattle for a few years.

And one of my friend’s parents had a gardening company and they were launching an online business, which was called eterra.com. And it was very similar, honestly, to what Fanatics is doing now, where we do a lot of white labeled stores for leagues and teams and things like that, but with Eterra, we are doing that for garden centers.

And so essentially we’re allowing them to extend what their product reach was with their online store. So if they didn’t want to stock it in their retail location, they could just go online, order it up for people and we would take care of it. That lasted a couple of years and we burned through a whole lot of investor money, and this is like back in the first tech boom, and found myself looking for a job because we ran out of money.

And started consulting. I mean, it was one of the obvious things to do because, I kind of had this rare new skill because honestly, I was late first wave getting into affiliate marketing. And so I started to talk with local businesses and try to find ways I could help them take advantage of affiliate.

And one of the first I worked with was one in Mount Vernon, Washington called Charlie’s Greenhouse. And they were a greenhouse supply company. That was a regional business and we were able to do some really cool stuff because gardening is something that people are really passionate about.

So we were able to find some really good content partners that put a lot of content out there that had big audiences and cool thing is I was able to leverage some of the connections that I had from Eterra and then play that into making things work for them. From there, I ended up working for a tech platform called Kowabunga! Technologies.

It was one of the early affiliate tracking platforms and networks. I was doing some sales there and running affiliate programs for them. I actually helped them launch the, one of the first in-house affiliate program management agencies. And that was really cool, worked for them for a while.

And had just a variety of roles across affiliate marketing, whether it be working on kind of the network or platform side. Had started my own agency, did that for a while. And then about 13 and a half years ago, a friend of mine that was working at Fanatics gave me a call and said, “Hey, you gotta check this out. I think it’s a really cool opportunity.”

At the time, Fanatics was a completely different business. Honestly, we were more of a regional play. We had a lot of college relationships. College stores that we were running programs for, we had footballfanatics.com And so I jumped on board then.

And at that point I think we were like a 175 million dollar business. Now we’re a 5 billion dollar business on the retail side. So it’s definitely come a long way. And it’s super, super exciting. My team, I have five people that report to me. We kind of function like an agency inside of the company almost, because we’re handling a bunch of different brands at any given time.

We run about 40 different affiliate campaigns for different stores, including like Fanatics, NFL Shop, NBA Store. We run a lot of team stores, so Kansas City Chiefs are one of the stores that we run. So we had a pretty fun year for the Super Bowl this year. We also run a lot of international soccer stores.

So like Manchester United and PSG, the Olympics is one that we’re pretty excited about, and doing some things with here coming up. Cause we’re just taking over a long term deal with the Olympics. Yeah, lots of crazy cool stuff going on, but I got my start doing small stuff. So that’s kind of where I learned and I’ve always been entrepreneurial in my approach, even working with big companies. So I think there’s a lot of cool stuff we can share.

What affiliate marketing is and how it works for indie retailers

Crystal Vilkaitis: I think so too, and that’s where I’m so excited for this conversation. Now, if anybody is listening to this and they haven’t heard of affiliate marketing before, they’re not really sure what that means. Will you just break down what that means?

Wade Tonkin: Sure. Long and short of it, it’s a RevShare partnership. So it means that if you do a deal with a content creator or publisher, and give them a percentage of sales whenever they drive traffic your way that converts into a sale.

How can independent retailers effectively tap into affiliate marketing to drive traffic and sales?

Crystal Vilkaitis: Awesome. And what I love about this for our retailers, you’re not buying the inventory, you’re not housing the inventory. It’s just that rev share, it makes it easier. I’m seeing a lot more of this because of online and because of social media and TikTok shops and all sorts of things. And I would love to know Wade, how can an independent retailer effectively tap into affiliate marketing to drive traffic and sales? And what are the first steps that they should take to establish this channel?

Wade Tonkin: Sure, the best thing I would say about affiliate marketing is that it is low risk inherently. It is efficient inherently. As long as you structure your program correctly. So you’re not actually spending any money until somebody drives the sale your way. So it’s different from like paid search or something like that where you’re buying traffic and hoping it converts.

So that’s, number one, great for small businesses because it’s pretty cash flow positive. When you’re looking to get started, I will say that there’s never been a better time to do this, because there are so many good platforms for small businesses to get their stores up, and most of those platforms, if not all of them, have connections into the different affiliate platforms.

So whether you’re using Shopify, WooCommerce, The Gentile, any of those. They’ve all got plugins with all of the tech providers that you might want to work with to launch an affiliate program. One of the first things I would say to anybody who’s looking to start an affiliate program for their business is it’s not the first thing that you do.

Because one of the tricks to it is that you really need to have a kind of a well oiled conversion machine built before you start driving traffic. Because the affiliates that you’re going to be looking to work with are making a bet that if they send you traffic, you’re going to convert it as well as, or better than, the other people that they might be working with.

And so if you just launch your store, you don’t have any traffic coming in, and you fire up an affiliate program and go out and try to find skilled affiliates that are experienced, they’re going to ask you, “Hey, what’s the conversion rate? What’s your average order?”

If you don’t have any of those metrics, it’s going to be pretty tough to get them on board because you’re asking them essentially to peel away traffic that they’re sending to somebody that’s working for them and to trust you that it’s going to work out.

What I would definitely be looking to do, number one, you’re going to want to get your site up and running. Test some other traffic driving techniques. Do a little bit of paid search. Maybe do some social media advertising to figure out, or you’re working with customer referrals, things like that to figure out how well your site is converting.

Once you have a feel for that, so conversion rate, average order size, then you can go out, find a tech platform. There’s a bunch of good ones out there. The one that we work with is called Impact.Com. It’s a little bit more of a big, enterprise solution, but there’s definitely some out there.

ShareASale, Refersion. Some really, really solid ones that are good for companies that have a smaller budget that provide good functionality, that provide easy access to reporting, handle the payment services, things like that that are kind of a basis for the relationship.

You do need to have a good tech platform. I recommend that people plug into an affiliate network, like a ShareASale or something like that, because then you’re tapping into a group of existing affiliates that already know the game that you can relatively easily source through the tools that the platform provides. I’ve seen a lot of smaller businesses go out and work with kind of more software based solutions that are not connected with other programs. That are just one-offs that they plug in. Those can be a lot trickier because I mean, they’re not plugged into an aggregated kind of marketplace of affiliates.

So if you’re going out and contacting a part, a potential partner, and they’re interested in, they ask you, “Hey, where’s your program hosted?” And you say, “Oh, it’s Post Affiliate Pro,” or something like that, it’s more work for them. If you’re already in share sale or Commission Junction or Impact or Everflow or one of those other platforms, it’s an easier risk, it’s lower risk for that.

They can jump on and say, “Hey, cool. We’ll give it a test.” I can, I’ll apply for the program here and I’ve already got things going on there. They aggregate reporting, they aggregate payment. So it’s just a lighter lift for the marketer, and it’ll make it a lot easier for you to get people on board.

What I would say though, is that you do have to have some commitment to the channel, whether that means that you bring it, you have an employee that you bring in and dedicate, at least, partial time to going out and finding partners. And that can mean jumping on Google.

That can mean find people that have traffic in your area. It can mean jumping on social media. Getting a feel for who’s influential with your audience and being able to start reaching out to those folks. Because above all, affiliate marketing is a relationship business.

And so you have to have somebody that’s going to be dedicated to searching out the partnerships, reaching out to people, getting them on board, helping make sure they know the tools, providing them with creative, providing them with story ideas. Because one of the biggies when you’re working with content creators is that this is a place where I see a lot of people make mistakes.

They try to force feed their content and in their voice to creators, which is a massive, massive mistake because creators have a following because of their voice, because of how they say what they say. And if people sense that, Hey, this is bought and paid for. It’s not, it doesn’t sound like them. It just seems like an ad.

Then, they’re going to be pretty sketchy about it. So it’s not going to get you what you want. What we try to do when we’re contacting creators is we’ll give them an outline and say, hey, you know, this campaign is coming out. These are the bullet points. This is what we think is cool, but, by all means, you jump in there, you get a feel for what’s going on and you give your voice and you give your recommendation and that tends to work out pretty well.

You don’t have to scale things massively. In fact, I would be really selective about who I partner with when I’m just getting started, because if you’ve got somebody that’s new to the role, they need to learn their chops as well.

And so dumping hundreds of relationships into the funnel right off the bat is going to be really inefficient to handle, but if you take your time or are selective with the types of creators that you work with and the types of partners that you work with. And kind of start stacking up your wins. I think that can be really powerful. One of the other things I would say is if you’re going out and starting to work with creators. Don’t do short term deals and then make snap decisions.

So essentially, if you do something with a creator and say, “Hey, could you post on this?” They go out and make a post and they don’t make any sales right off the bat on the first post. Don’t get freaked out by that. As long as your targeting is right, as long as they do have that right audience.

You need to be a little bit patient with it. And kind of the more consistency that people see with the connection of the brand and the creator, the more likely they are to take action and shop with that creator because they see that creator and that brand have a relationship and that brand is really committed.

It’s not just a one off, hit and run kind of a thing. But the most important thing is just understand that it is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. You need, if you’re going to go out and hire somebody or you’re going to hire an agency, you really need to be willing to give them at least six months to build something up.

So be prepared for a few months of numbers that might not make you super happy or super comfortable, but be looking at trends, be looking at, “Hey, are we acquiring good partners? Are they driving traffic? It’s increasing. Is the conversion rate getting better? Are we starting to see growth towards where we want to be?”

And then make your decision down the road a little bit and don’t freak out after the first month.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah. So much in there, Wade. That’s so helpful. And I almost think, and I want to clarify something too, because I feel like there’s two ways that our retailers could be looking at this. But I just want to say like most of our retailers are on Shopify. So that’s great that they can just sync right in there.

And to your point about the conversions already being there is so smart because a lot of our retailers, some of them are new to ecomm. They don’t have those conversions yet. You really do want to work on getting traffic to your site, making sure it’s converting and tracking that.

What’s the best way for retailers to get others to sell their products through an affiliate program?

Crystal Vilkaitis: And typically having somebody on your team to manage and do that is best case. We don’t want our store owners spending. Their time that way. So I almost see the person who’s managing their Shopify site could take on the affiliate side of it as well. And this is where I want a little clarification because I almost see two things here.

One being the retailer could go to a platform like ShareASale and look at all the different products that they can then offer and sell through. Which then, and obviously you want to have things that your audience are going to buy and what’s connected to what you sell and then pay attention to those trends.

So you’ve got that to where then the retailers, almost that creator, where they’re promoting those products on their social and they’re speaking to them. And then can there also be this option where the retailer might sign up and be an affiliate and actually have other people sell their products for them?

And that’s where you’re finding a creator. Is that.

Wade Tonkin: two sides of it. And where I would be focusing with an audience of retailers is launching the program to get traffic coming in to sell what they’re selling. That should be role number one, because you’re trying to build your business and customer acquisition is a massive part of that. So through having an affiliate program that’s driving that traffic and those conversions into your your Shopify business or WooCommerce business, whatever the case may be, you’re going to expand your customer base.

And then at that point, you have the chance to sell additional products to them from your own product mix, or you can also potentially look at working with other brands on the network or on the networks and saying, hey, this is a complimentary product to mine. It’s not competitive. And what I’m going to do now is take my, email list that I’ve built up through building my business.

I’ve either sold to these people or they’ve told me that they want to hear from me in the future. And then I can say, Hey, here’s some other brands that we really like. And then, so that can be a way that you can build in some additional revenue into your business beyond what you’re selling on your side.

But for brands, their first focus needs to be, how can I do more sales of my products on my platform and build up that audience? That I can then market to more in the future. And then from there, there are definitely brand to brand opportunities. I mean, that’s something from a smaller brand perspective is definitely something you can leverage. It’s something that bigger brands are doing now.

We might go to like an Expedia and say you guys sell 10,000 units. Travel to people that are going to the Superbowl. Well, if you’re selling travel, why not also push jerseys and hats and stuff like that? So there’s definitely, there’s a brand to brand possibilities that are there too.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah, no kidding. I love this. In our world, we talk a lot about influencers and I think a lot of retailers are trying to find the micro influencers or local influencers to help them drive that traffic. They’re not thinking about affiliates. And I think this is just such a great opportunity for them to find those affiliates as well as become an affiliate.

So

Why there is crossover in the influencer and affiliate spaces

Wade Tonkin: There’s a lot of crossover. I mean, the influencer affiliate space, they’re kind of really side by side. And it’s funny because over the course of the years, we’ve looked at this as there’s just these waves that come along and for a while, it was bloggers that everybody wanted to work with.

We would go to conferences where everybody’s saying well, bloggers, you have to get paid sponsorships. You have to do pay to play, essentially, flat rates. And things like that. And we were saying, well, no. That’s cool, if you can get it, if people want to give you $500 for this post or a thousand dollars a month, whatever, by all means take it. But there’s other ways to do it, you should have multiple sources of revenue coming in.

And so if you can get those sponsorships, if you can also do affiliate, and the thing to remember about affiliate deals is they can be recurring revenue. That can be passive revenue. And so if you’re somebody that’s gone out and written a post on your top 10 products for X and that’s evergreen.

That’s always there. And so if you end up getting rated your rankings on that for Google, that’s something that can come up again and again. And so it might be at the same time next year, you do an update, bump that up again, and then you’re making more money again. So there’s definitely a bunch of different ways that you can kind of mix and match with that.

And we would argue with influencers for saying, “Hey, I need to get this flat rate post,” it’s like, well, mix and match a little bit maybe. Or from the brand side, maybe you look at that and say, “Hey, I don’t want to give you a thousand dollars for this cause that’s a little bit risky for me, but maybe I can give you $500. I can give you some product and I can give you a percentage down the road for your sales that come in,” and have a little bit more of a win-win for everybody.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah.

Wade Tonkin: So you should be open too, especially when you’re new. Sometimes you have to be, and you don’t have a brand that’s established, you have to be a little bit more aggressive and you have to have, you might have to have a little bit of budget to go ahead and grease the skids a little bit and say, “Hey, I’d really love to work with you. I get that we’re not super established yet, but maybe if we sponsor some posts for a while, let’s do a hybrid deal and you can kind of go after it that way. And that gives you a little bit of upside too.

What are the core principles for a successful affiliate program that independent retailers can implement, even without the resources of larger corporations?

Crystal Vilkaitis: Right. Yeah, okay. So there, there can be a lot to affiliate marketing and it can kind of feel like a web of complexity, I’m sure, especially for somebody who’s brand new to this. What are key principles for a successful affiliate program that independent retailers can apply without the resources of a large corporation?

I feel like you spoke to some of that, but will you kind of break it down for us for these small retailers?

Wade Tonkin: Sure. I think the most important thing is your audience. Once you know your audience, you can kind of figure out where those people are going to be hanging out and that’s who we look to for partners. And for us, we’re a sports company or we’we’re a sportsssion company, essentially.

So where I always start is okay, so people are fans of these teams. Maybe we take a look at the start of the football season at who we think is going to end up in the Super Bowl. We start from there and say, okay, we want to make sure we have coverage with people that are creators and fan sites of these teams.

And so we go reach out, try to bring in as many of them as we can during the season, get them active. So they know the tools, they know the cadence of how things work, we build the relationship with them. And then if their team ends up making a run, we got them all kind of primed and ready to go.

So we start with those communities. So find the communities where your shoppers exist and then participate. Don’t just go in there trying to cash in, go in there trying to help people out. I grew up listening to a lot of sales tapes, traveling with my dad and listening to a lot of Zig Ziglar. And it’s like, you can get everything you want in your life if you help enough people, other people get what they want. So going to participate, be a part of the community. Then at that point you can offer the communities that you’re working in. “Hey, I got this possibility for a relationship that can help you guys make a little bit of money.”

Then you can pitch that affiliate offer., I would find a good piece of technology that you’re comfortable working with. Go to conferences, listen to podcasts, influential bloggers and social media accounts. Impact, the platform that we work has what they call, The Performance Academy, and they have gone and put together some fantastic resources around all aspects of performance marketing, whether that be affiliate, whether that be influencer, from the brand side, from the publisher side, that’s free. And so, jumping in there is also a good way to kind of familiarize yourself. And, I I would recommend cross training. If you’re going in there as a brand to learn. Also learn the publisher side, because if you’re going to be somebody who supports publishers, you need to be somebody who understands the tools that they’re working with and the platforms that they’re working on.

And when I’ve brought on new team members, generally one of the first things I do is say, Hey, I want you to start, either start like a blog, or if you don’t already have one, or if you’ve got social media accounts, I want you to sign up for affiliate programs and not ours, because I don’t think working in your own program is cool, but some complimentary programs.

Get a feel for how it works. Get a feel for the tools. Get a feel for, how do I do this? Because if you’re going to support other people, you need to understand how it works and so get like a really good kind of base of knowledge and then stay current. There’s events out there that I really like. Shoptalk is really good. That’s where it’s all about the retailer and tools for the retailer. And so you can go to some of those events. They also do a lot of virtuals. They have good newsletters. And so you can kind of keep up on what people are talking about and what the trends are that are coming.

Go to network events. So if you’re working with a ShareASale, if they put on a user event, go to that. I will honestly say that in 25 plus years in the industry, pretty much every opportunity that I have taken advantage of employment wise, or starting up a business of my own has come from relationships that I built going to conferences and meeting people.

I’m kind of a social butterfly. So I go to events and meet a lot of people and talk about the business. And there have been times when I’ve been laid off and either had somebody just call me up, or had some friends that reached out and said, “Hey, I’m not happy doing what I’m doing. Let’s start a business. Let’s start an agency.”

But if you’re out making those connections and wrapping up your knowledge while you help other people as well, you’ll be shocked at how much can come your way just by those relationships. And it might be that you meet somebody that doesn’t necessarily fit what you’re looking to do, but they know somebody.

And they’ll come up and say, “Hey, we met at the show. I got this friend that has this podcast. You should be doing this.” And then that connection is made and we see a lot of referrals. So somebody will have a blog about one team, but they have 10 friends that have blogs about other teams.

And so they have a good run with us. They make some money and they say, “Hey, I know this guy who has this site. You should work with them.: And it can build virally if you pay attention to it and grow it that way.

Crystal Vilkaitis: It’s so true. Okay, that helps so much. A lot of great tips in there to make it not so complex. I know that some of my listeners are feeling overwhelmed because this is a new way for them to think, but you’re absolutely right. You’ve got to know your audience. The more you learn, the more you earn. This is an opportunity to really learn a new aspect of retail that can really help keep you more competitive and have that revenue stream and how you just broke it down way to think is really helpful for our retailers.

How does Fanatics establish and nurture relationships with affiliates, and how can independent retailers replicate this strategy at a suitable scale for their business?

Crystal Vilkaitis: So thank you. And speaking of relationships, how does Fanatics identify and cultivate relationships with affiliates and how can independent retailers replicate this strategy on a scale that’s appropriate for their business?

Wade Tonkin: Sure. I would say there’s a few ways we do that. One way that we do that is using internal tools within our tracking platform. Impact has done a pretty good job over the last couple of years of building discovery tools that let us essentially do a lot of keyword based or hashtag based searching across different social media platforms.

So let’s say the Super Bowl is coming up, we know the teams that are playing, so we can put in keywords related to those teams or related to the Super Bowl, give it a couple days, it’ll come back to us and say, hey, these are prospects you should talk to. We can then vet those, see if we’re working with them already, see if it looks like a good fit, and then we can reach out to them directly through that. So that’s a really good way of going about it. Most of the platforms out there, whether it’s Sharesale, or any of the other platforms they’ve got. Some tools like that. If you’re also targeting competitors, there’s a really good tool out there called Publisher Discovery out of the UK and they do some really cool stuff and it’s affordable too. I think the basic subscription is a couple hundred bucks a month, so it’s not life changing money. But they are really good at targeting competitors. So you can essentially go in, identify the niche that you work in, identify some of your key competitors. And then they’ll go out and bring you back a list of the people that are working with competitive brands, which is very cool.

And they’ve even got like a gap analysis matrix where once you have your program up and running and you’ve got some people on board, it’ll show you across four or five different programs. Are these people working with me? Or you’re working with others but not with me? And so then you can try to build up what you’re doing.

There’s some other pretty good tools like that. We also do a lot of just old school jumping on Google. Doing searches for keywords, jumping on YouTube, see what’s out there for different, different keywords. We started working with YouTube, recently. YouTube actually released a affiliate program ties into YouTube creators, which is very cool because it lets them tag their products within your posts.

And it’s something that is not super hard to leverage. Essentially, if you’ve got a product feed that’s live with Google, if we’re doing paid search, you can access that for YouTube. So I can give you, send you a link to that and you can share with people because that could be awesome as well because YouTube, a lot of people forget that YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world.

People search for videos on different topics all the time. And so that makes it really easy for people to bring in products into their posts. They can, you can set little triggers so it’ll show like the product in the video and try to kind of beat people more in the experience that they’re into. I’m super interested to explore tech talk because I think.

TikTok, there’s so much traffic on there as well, and people are, a lot of really passionate people that are creating content. We’re kind of exploring how we can plug into that, because TikTok also has an affiliate program that plugs in if you have TikTok Shop set up. Those could all be great ways just wherever, whatever platform people are gathering on to get their content, there’s an opportunity there to find partners and it’s really just about identifying people that have your audience and then being able to reach out to them and say, “Hey, we see this as a great idea for a potential partnership. Here’s what we do. Here’s how our site functions. Here’s what we have to offer.” One thing I would say is if you’re reaching out to content creators, definitely be prepared to offer up some product. Because you’re always going to have better luck with people that have experience with your product.

They have it in hand. They could do unboxings. They can speak to quality and things like that. Especially if your product, the more experiential your product is, the more you need to have it in the hands of the creators that you’re working with. And you’ll notice I’ve been talking a lot about creators and bloggers and social media people.

And I think that’s important for the smaller businesses, because I think one thing people do need to be careful about is if you start working with coupon sites and cashback sites and other sites that might not be quite as incremental, they might not necessarily be getting you anything that you wouldn’t have got by yourself anyway.

And so we tend to be a little bit kind of skeptical of those types of partnerships. The bigger your brand, the better your luck is going to be because, if you’re on a coupon site, people are going to search for the big brands first, most likely. So when I’m building a smaller business, I’m probably going to focus more on the creators that, you know, the micro influencers which I would define as people within between like 5,000 and 50,000 followers. Because for my money, it’s about the engagement way more than it is about the big follow up.

I have a lot of friends that do a lot of influencer work and once somebody gets to Kardashian level, I mean, they can make a lot of money doing a post, but the returns on those posts tend to be pretty diminishing, whereas when the publisher is smaller, but they’re really passionate, their audience is really into what they have to say.

They tend to get a little bit more activity when they say, Hey, you should you know, check this brand out. I tried their stuff. I love it. It’s very cool. One last thing I’ll throw in is make sure that you did the platform that you’re working with provide some compliance tools. Because one thing about working with creators is that creators need to let people know that they have a business relationship with the brand.

So whether they’re getting free product, whether they’re getting a commission, whether they’re getting a sponsored post, they need to disclose clearly that there’s a business relationship there. It’s an FTC requirement.

You need to take care of that from your business’s side and make sure that people know that, hey, if I’m going to do a tweet about this, I need to at least add a hashtag ad. Or if I’m going to do a longer form post, I need to give a good plain language disclosure.

And one thing we coach our partners on here is having fun with their plain language disclosures, because you can say something super dry, like my posts contain affiliate links, if you click on these, I might earn a commission, but you can have a lot more fun than that.

It’s like Joe, who’s my number two here at Fanatics runs North American operations for me, has a meat site. Loves barbecuing, grilling, all that stuff. And his disclosure is like, “Hey, bottom line, you buy through my link, I’m going to turn that back into more meat that I can eat.” You know, I can write about, blog about, do videos about, make it fun, but make it, make sure it’s super understandable that, hey, I’ve got this business relationship.

And the audience honestly appreciates that. They want to know that there’s a relationship there. If there’s a relationship there, that you’re not just out there chilling. So if you do a really good disclosure and a good call to action at the same time, it can be really powerful and it gives people the why.

And we talk about that a lot with our partners is give them the why. Because we see a lot of people come on board, they’ll do a post, say, “Hey, I’m an affiliate with Fanatics.” And then, but they don’t connect the dots to tell people what that means. Cause people don’t necessarily understand that that means if you like what I do and you want to support me, click through my link, buy products, I will get something.

I’ll get cash, I’ll get more product, whatever, make that connection. But that’s an important thing from a regulatory perspective, because it is an FTC requirement. And so if you’re going to jump into it, make sure you have the tools to monitor it as well and make sure people aren’t abusing it.

Crystal Vilkaitis: exactly. Yeah. Especially if you’re new to this world, you probably didn’t know that it is a requirement. You’ve got to make sure that people are disclosing that. And I love your points about YouTube. And I think that there is a lot of opportunity with TikTok and for our listeners, you don’t have to be that creator.

Find the people that love creating. They love being on YouTube. They love being on TikTok and their audiences connect with you. And leverage those relationships. I mean, so much of this conversation today has been about that relationship and partnership and connection.

Wade Tonkin: I saw a really fun one yesterday. We had a new partner that we just brought on that is a TikTok creator and they have an absolutely gorgeous golden retriever. And their whole thing is that they let the dog pick.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Oh, I love

Wade Tonkin: video yesterday where they had a Braves jersey and a Braves hat on the dog and they were hyping up baseball season getting ready to start.

And I’m like, it doesn’t get any better than a dog wearing a jersey. I love that. And they had a really good call to action at the end of it. They did everything right. They had a really engaging, fun video. I was like, fantastic. That’s like one of the best first posts I’ve ever seen. And we encourage people, it’s like when you do your first post for us, go ahead and share it back because that way we can give you feedback. We can give you coaching. If it’s great, we’ll tell you what’s great. If it’s missing a couple of things we’ll give you tips on how you might be able to improve it.

But that one just hit it out of the park because it was so engaging and so fun. And everybody loves a dog, unless you’re a cat person, but it was really cute. And there’s so many different ways people can go about it, but it’s like don’t be reliant on your own creativity.

Let people that are out there that are way more creative work your brand for you.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Exactly. Pets sell, that’s for sure. If you can add pets or cute babies, that also helps. But that’s really fun. And anybody who’s listening to, I think one of the, if you’re brand new to affiliate marketing, one of the best things you could do is go and search. Search for hashtag ad, try to find some of those creators that are doing it.

So you could just see what they’re doing. How are they saying it? How are they selling this? You click over, you can learn more to just get a feel for what’s happening. And I bet you’ve seen this before on social media, but maybe you just didn’t realize that it is affiliate marketing. And maybe you didn’t even think, Oh, I could be doing this for my business too.

How has affiliate marketing changed as online retail has evolved, and what trends should independent retailers get ready for?

Crystal Vilkaitis: Now the online world is changing really fast. Very fast and very quickly. So how has the landscape of affiliate marketing changed with the evolution of online retail and what future trends should independent retailers be preparing for?

Wade Tonkin: sure. Um, the,

I think there has been kind of a crazy rush the last couple of years by the content platforms to try to find ways to have their own native affiliate. Which has been cool. Instagram tried it, kind of flamed out. Didn’t really pick up. So they have changed over to making the tools a little bit better for people that are promoting.

YouTube coming on with an affiliate offering is very exciting. TikTok coming on with an affiliate offering is extremely exciting. I would say another thing that’s really encouraging to me is that you’ve seen some really effective e-comm platforms coming out that are very reasonable. WooCommerce, Shopify, really affordable..

I mean mean, really lowier to entry, which is fantastic. So if you have an idea, you can take it to market really quickly, really affordably and the ones that have gained traction have pretty easy hooks into, the affiliate platform. So it’s made it a lot easier because you really don’t need to have much in the way of tech staff for that anymore.

And back in the day when there weren’t a whole lot of established carts and people were kind of building their own thing, there was always like integration stuff that had to be done that was kind of a pain. And it could be really intimidating if you were a small shop, but now you can go in and if you’re on Shopify, go in whatever platform you’re on, they’ll have a Shopify plug in.

Plug it in, drop in your token, you’re off and running. In a lot of cases they’ll have things like your product feed is automated, so the tools have evolved so much that it’s really easier to get in and play the game. There’s a lot of cool tools coming out. This is kind of on the fringe of affiliate where you can do customer referrals, which I think customer referrals are really exciting, where if you can incentivize your customers who are obviously they’ve bought into what you’re selling and you can say, “Hey, if you like what you bought, share it with your friends.”

And so they can share it out to social or they can push it off. There’s a bunch of good tools out there for that, that can be really effective. For me, what keeps this exciting and what keeps it from getting boring after as many years I’ve been doing it, is that the technology, the traffic driving mechanisms are always changing.

There’s something new all the time. And so if you’re an early adopter, it’s great because it gives you the chance to jump in and a few years ago, nobody was thinking about tech, nobody was thinking about Instagram, nobody was thinking about streaming on Twitch or anything like that.

But now, I mean, those are really valid. Marketing platforms where Twitch used to just be about gamers. But now it’s like anybody who has something to say can fire up on Twitch and do their thing. And so that it’s a community building tool. All these community building tools are out there.

Most of them are free or cheap to get into. One thing I will say is that anytime a platform is free. Make sure that you’re building multiple ways of doing what you do, because we’ve seen this starting with MySpace, going to Facebook, where people were able to get a lot of free or cheap traffic, and then they changed the rules, because in the end, the platform, at some point, it’s going to be like, we’d really like to make money, too.

We used to have a lot of people that would come on, spend a bunch of money acquiring audiences on Facebook. And then promote us on Facebook. Facebook at some point decided that Zuck’s got to get paid. So they started charging people that traffic throttling your traffic, if you had affiliate links in your posts.

And so there’s a lot of people that were just devastated. Because all of a sudden nobody was seeing their posts. Google used to give a lot of free traffic to people that had really basic type in domain names. And thin sites that just had a bunch of like, data feed generated content.

I have people that work for me that wouldn’t be working for me if they’d paid attention to Google guidelines and Google recommendations. But Google came through, took away the free traffic. And so, the old saying about, if the product is free, you are the product.

There’s something to it. Fortunately, your audience is already building a brand. If they’re building a brand, they’ve got a store, they’re gathering email addresses, what you should be looking to do is connect up all of your different social channels that you’re playing on to connect back into that main hub. They’re different, they’re different, each a different method of connecting with your audience. Each of them has quirks to it. How to leverage them correctly, but don’t be overly dependent on that free traffic from those platforms. Make sure you’ve got a bunch of different ways that you’re connecting with people so that you’re not putting yourself at risk.

And watch for that with your partners too. If you go out and get affiliates, I try to coach people and say, “Hey, I see you’ve got this, but, you’ve got Twitter, you have all these other things too, because, at some point it might, that traffic might go away.”

So what are you building? Do you have a blog that you put all this stuff into that you own? Do you have an email newsletter? Everybody should be building a newsletter. I’m still baffled when I see people that are doing anything relating to selling online, whether it’s being an affiliate, whether it’s being a brand that, aren’t incentivizing people to give them opt in privileges.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yes, thank you for saying that because I agree we need to build the email list. We need to own our audience. And some of our retailers feel bad for asking for the email or they don’t have that opt in set up. And this is like, you’ve got to build the list and your customers want to stay in touch. So such great feedback.

And I love your point too. Yeah, exactly. I love too, that your point about how easy technology is now. So for my not very tech savvy retailers, you can get into the game pretty simply way easier than you used to, which helps make you more competitive, which kind of transitions into my final question here before we go into the resilience round.

How a diverse affiliate marketing strategy can empower independent retailers to thrive in a market dominated by giants like Amazon

Crystal Vilkaitis: Could you explain how a diverse affiliate marketing approach can help independent retailers not only survive, but thrive in a market dominated by big players like Amazon?

Wade Tonkin: It’s funny that you mention Amazon because relatively recently there is a tool that made it possible to do affiliate marketing with Amazon product. So that was definitely a game changer. I don’t know how long lived that’s going to be, but it was cool that they had that out there. The funny thing is, I think that a lot of people get sucked into working with Amazon because it is the big store out there, but it’s expensive to sell on Amazon, and so the margins are rough, there are some people that just prefer that convenience, but the more you can have a well structured performance marketing program in place that leverages both affiliate relationships, influencer relationships.

It’s so much cheaper. I mean, even if you’re paying an aggressive commission rate, even if you’re paying 10 to 15 percent or whatever, it’s still less than you’re paying for what you’re putting out there on Amazon. And so there’s going to be more margin in it. There’s more at the end for you, you’re building the customer relationships. So you’ve got the ability to monetize that. The biggest thing is you’ve got control over it because one thing people should have noticed is that Amazon uses their data for deciding what they want to start making and selling themselves.

And so if you have a great product, that’s new to Amazon. And it does well at some point, Amazon is going to happen. It’s going to knock that product off and start selling it themselves. And so if you want to have a business that lasts, you want to do it, your thing your way, you want to have control over it.

You want to sell it on your site. That should be your primary business. Driving people straight into your site, building your contact list and building your custom relationships that you can sell more to people in the future. Whether it’s iterations of your product, whether it’s coming up with new complimentary products, and affiliate and influencer is a pretty affordable way to do that because you’re not paying until you got what you wanted.

And so that for me is why it works. It’s efficient. And it’s cashflow positive. And so, you know, why not do that? Um,

Wade’s resilience round

Crystal Vilkaitis: I love it, I so agree. This has been so good. Wade, are you ready for the resilience round?

Wade Tonkin: let’s go for it. I

Best business book

Crystal Vilkaitis: Let’s do it. Okay. Okay, best business book.

Wade Tonkin: have a couple. And they’re pretty unconventional, I think. One is called No is a Four Letter Word, How I Failed Spelling but Succeeded in Life by Chris Jericho. Pro wrestler and rock band front man. Just a really fun, like 20 chapter book breaks down lessons he’s learned coming up and, in business, wrestling or, whether it’s music or whether it’s podcasting, he’s kind of a Renaissance man. Done a lot of really, really kind of crazy cool stuff and super practical, super fun. The other one is extreme leadership by Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL.

A lot of cool business lessons learned through the kind of filter of operating a SEAL team.

Best retail technology

Wade Tonkin: So pretty,

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah. Great suggestions. I can’t wait to check those out. Best retail technology, like an app or software.

Wade Tonkin: Um, For me, I like Impact. That’s the platform that we work on. They’ve been really smart at building out great power tools for marketers, and whether it’s building on themselves, acquiring companies. You know, offering brands like mine, a really cool suite of power tools to do what we

How do you keep up with the ever changing retail landscape?

Wade Tonkin: do.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Awesome. How do you keep up with the ever changing landscape of retail?

Wade Tonkin: Um, A couple ways. I go to a lot of conferences. Um, I, I speak at quite a few, but I also, I go to a lot just to, to network and, and have conversations. And so, I always like to kind of keep up on, on uh, On what people are talking about, the emerging technologies um, you know, what’s the new, what’s the latest, greatest platform that people are driving traffic with.

Um, I’ve even gone to some that are kind of on the gray hat, black hat side, because I like to see what the bad guys are up to. Um, You know, For me, a lot of the creativity in the industry and, you know, always comes out of gaming, adult, stuff like that, because they’re got super smart people, there’s a lot of money there, and so people test, you know, they really dial in their ideas.

And so we kind of like To see what’s going on there also helps me do a lot of kind of fraud prevention within my program so I can know what that looks like. Um, And then also uh, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Read a lot of newsletters. Um, you know, I’ve, I’ve made a lot of contacts over the years, a lot of smart people, and, you know, I, I, I find that hanging out with people that are smarter than me is the best way to, to approach anything in life.

I mean, you, you learn so much every day and if you’ve got a group of people that kind of pushes each other, um, you know, you can, you could always be getting better,

I so agree. Love it. To help retailers be stronger, more rooted in success. What’s an affiliate marketing foundational best practice?

Really understand your make sure that you’ve got good visibility into. Where your traffic is actually coming from, and making sure that people are doing what they say that they’re doing. Um, Because there, there can be, you know, there can be some, the thing about how, you know, how aggressive your, your offer is, there can be incentive for people to do things in a less than above board Make sure you understand what your traffic sources are, and what your partners are really doing.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Smart.

Wade Tonkin: And keep your eye on the bottom line.

If you had to start your career all over again, what’s one thing you do differently?

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yes, exactly. Totally. Now I know you didn’t start Fanatics, but if you had to start your career all over again versus business, what’s one thing you do differently?

Wade Tonkin: Oh, I would say I would be way early on. I would be way more open to testing before I made decisions because I definitely, at one point in my career, I built a pretty hefty list of assumptions on the way that things worked and probably missed out on some opportunities because of it. Um, I would say if. If something fits in with the way that you like to do business, be willing to test it.

Um, See if it is what, you know, what people say it is, see if it works out. Um, you know, We don’t look at every site that does similar things the same way. Because, you know, we, we saw this with like coupon sites. Most of those coupon sites have different audiences. Everybody’s trying to reach a different niche.

And so if you look at those all the same, you might miss out on some opportunities. Um, you know, And be open minded, be open to chang

What do you think the future of independent retail looks like?

Wade Tonkin: e.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Love it. Finally, what do you think the future of independent retail looks like?

Wade Tonkin: Given the fact that the tools are getting really good and really inexpensive, I think that the, the, you know, the potential for the future is massive. I think there’s never been a better time to be launching a business online. Um, because it’s Just, it’s, it’s so approachable. Um, you know, it, it used to be that you had to have some kind of tech savvy or, you know, had to be willing to throw down a bunch of money for, you know, uh, an established site or, or an established commerce tool or for people to build one for you.

But now, I mean, you can, with a couple hundred bucks, you can be. You know, Pick up your domain, pick up your, your, um, e com account and all that. You can, You can be out there doing your thing. And I think that’s amazing. I think, you know, it, it makes me sad to hear people in like my kids generation say American dream is dead.

I don’t think it is. I think it’s, there’s so much opportunity. Where if, if you’ve got that idea in your world to kind of hustle for and go and put it out there, I’ve seen so many cool projects that come out from a person just having a cool idea and being able to throw it up on a Shopify or something like that, or throw it up on TikTok shops, you know, it’s wherever your audience is, you don’t have to be everywhere.

Um, you know, Just find, Hey, how do I best connect with my audience? Let’s get it out there and see what happens. And, you know, try it until you get it right.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Yeah, so true. Wade, where can people learn more about you and fanatics?

Wade Tonkin: Sure thing. Um,

My, my Twitter or my ex is affiliate warrior, which is I-F-F-I-L-E eight W-A-R-R-I-O-R. Um, So you can follow me on there, post a little bit. Um, fanatics uh, if you want to work with us, just drop me an email uh, w to

Crystal Vilkaitis: Awesome. Wade, thank you so much for your time and wisdom today. This was such an insightful conversation.

Wade Tonkin: thanks for having me. Great questions.

Crystal Vilkaitis: Awesome. Everyone remember that I’m rooting for your success. Have a great week ahead. Bye!

Thank you so much for being here. It means the world to me. Don’t forget to join the rise and shine newsletter, which is social media news. You need to know sent via email every Monday morning, go to crystal media, co. com slash rise to join and don’t miss the newest episode of Rooted in Retail, which drops every Sunday morning.