Affiliate Marketing Strategy with Amanda Williams and Jeannine Crooks | Mediavine On Air Episode 43

There's hundreds of things you need to do as a content creator: strategizing your outreach, building your audience and scaling efficiently chief among them.



But how do you do that in today's world, where everything moves at the speed of light? We've got the answer.



Enter affiliate marketing, an often underutilized revenue stream.



On Summer of Live 2019, Mediavine On Air host and Senior Director of Marketing Jenny Guy picked the brains of two affiliate marketing experts. Amanda Williams, a Mediavine travel publisher and affiliate ace on her website A Dangerous Business, and Jeannine Crooks, Partner Acquisition and Development Manager at Awin, a global affiliate marketing network.



Listen in and get ready to earn as Amanda and Jeannine tell us all in today's episode of Mediavine On Air!







Helpful Resources



A Dangerous BusinessJeannine's LinkedInAwinMediavine Ads and Affiliate Marketing: Striking the Right BalanceImproving In-Post Affiliate Earnings with Katelyn Fagan: Mediavine On Air Episode 7








https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F3WJ4qhlqI&t=25s




Transcript



[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Hello. Welcome. It is Wednesday, August 7th. It is the final month of the 2019 Summer of Live. And even though it is hot and dry most places around the world right now, we are making it rain here at Mediavine and continuing our focus on monetization.



Welcome and thank you for joining us. I am Jenny Guy. I am the marketing manager for Mediavine. And I have two amazing guests that I'm going to talk more about here in a second. But what we're focusing on today has the potential to be a really highly lucrative revenue stream for content creators. But it also has the potential for being complicated and challenging to get going. We are talking about affiliate marketing.



What did you think of when you heard the term? Did you have excitement, dread, bewilderment? Well, luckily, my two incredible guests, when they hear affiliate marketing, they also hear cha-ching, because they know how to earn. They are experts from different sides of this equation.



So first, I have Mediavine publisher Amanda Williams. She has one of the top travel blogs on the internet, a Dangerous Business, which she started in 2010. In 2018, a Dangerous Business was awarded a silver award for Best Travel Blog in the 2017-2018 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition, which is hosted annually by the Society of American Travel Writers, SATW for the acronym.



So not only is the content on her site phenomenal, a Dangerous Business helps drive more than $35,000 in sales to its affiliate partners every month. Amanda is also killing it with ad revenue and relationships with brands and tourism boards. Hello, Amanda. Welcome to the Summer of Love.



AMANDA WILLIAMS: Hi. Thanks, Jenny.



JENNY GUY: Yay. We're so glad you're here. So she's on the blogger side of the equation, clearly. And I also have Jeannine Crooks. She is the partner acquisition and development manager at Awin, a global affiliate network. She is especially experienced in affiliate marketing and internet marketing and creating successful partnerships and developing effective, profitable websites that generate immediate involvement and results.



She's a frequent conference speaker everywhere from Affiliate Summit to TBEX and the Military Influencers Conference. She's also a travel writer herself. And her work has appeared in most of the major newspapers across the US and Canada. Thank you for joining us, Jeannine.



JEANNINE CROOKS: Well, thank you for inviting me. Glad to be here.



JENNY GUY: I'm so excited to have you both here. So I know that there are a lot of questions out there about affiliate marketing. So please make sure to post in the comments. And I will make sure that we ask the questions to my wonderful guests. But let's start with the more general question, ladies.



So you're both extremely well-traveled, both literally and figuratively,