Explore every episode of the podcast Affiliate BI - the Advanced Affiliate Marketing Podcast by StatsDrone

I hear often that people think that rather than using StatsDrone, they can just build an in-house affiliate stats tracker. This is a short podcast to explain the nuances of running this type of business. The short answer is this, do you want to be a marketing company, a tech company or both? Let us be the tech company and you do what you do best.

In this thought-provoking conversation, marketing director Martin Calvert dives deep into the realities of SEO and affiliate marketing in 2025. He and host John Wright unpack the hard truths about how affiliate marketing has matured—gone are the days of passive income from generic review sites. Today, success demands caring deeply about every click, maintaining airtight user experiences, and turning one-time visitors into long-term brand followers through data ownership, newsletters, and apps. Martin stresses the importance of affiliate sites treating traffic like a precious resource—nurturing every visitor, eliminating broken links, and doubling down on conversion rather than merely traffic growth. Martin also examines how AI, business intelligence, and changing search behaviors are reshaping how marketers must operate. The conversation touches on sentiment analysis, internal search on branded affiliate sites, and the crucial importance of developing a strong brand identity—whether that's through tone of voice, authoritative content, or offering truly helpful reviews. They caution against outdated strategies and emphasize the need for experimentation, strategic focus, and understanding local markets. Martin’s takeaway is clear: affiliate marketing isn't dead—it's just growing up. And only the data-savvy, brand-conscious, and genuinely customer-focused marketers will thrive.

Can dynamic variables help detecting shaving from operators? Based on a conversation I had last week with Armin Aganovic, CRO of Joelsson Media, I realized that click IDs are more valuable than I realized. That is, operators can't inject fake winning players if you're in control of issuing unique codes within your click IDs.

At the iGB L!ve Pitch in London 2025, I got asked a tough question by Karolina Pelc which is how does StatsDrone avoid getting eaten by AI? I have had time to think about that question and digest a better answer and I think this comes down to affiliates trying to get more value out of their existing traffic whether it is staying the same or decreasing.

In this short solocast, I break down why so few affiliates use stats trackers, what holds them back, and how we can collectively create more product awareness to change that. Spoiler: it requires trust, collaboration — and a lot of purple at conferences.

Is there a need for a new standard when it comes to affiliate data, standards and reporting? I think this needs to be done. At the moment, this was attempted by NetRefer which was a great concept except that I believe that this initiative can't exist as a commercial directive but one that needs to be collaborative. When other companies are involved and it isn't owned by a single company, this is where this has potential to take off. For now, looking to start the discussion with this podcast and a few more LinkedIn posts.

Today is a solocast but want to shoutout to Mark Flores Martin, the founder of XGENIA for the conversation we had at NEXT.io. He shared his opinion that bigger companies will start commanding on-prem services and cancelling data contracts as a result.

Meet Robbie Strazynski who's working on improving his poker affiliate site, cardplayerlifestyle.com. He's navigating the new world of SEO and I'm here to help him with affiliate coaching.

Meet Lukasz Zelezny of SEO.London who's a well known SEO expert whom speaks at numerous SEO conferences globally. I know Lukasz as more of a technical SEO but we touch on a lot of intangibles in SEO of why there is so much disruption for affiliate sites today.

Should you start a podcast? There are enough pros and cons but the short answer is yes! Podcasting is a powerful channel for sales, personal branding and helping put your business on the radar of your potential buyers. Whether you're a SaaS founder or an affiliate company, podcasting is powerful.

Should you consider AI when producing content? Absolutely says Andrew Ansley of ContentSprout.ai

Meet Jon Bruford who's the co-host of The Gambling Files Podcast. He's nearly 20 years into the iGaming space as a content editor. He's got a lot of content insights that would be useful for any affiliate.

Meet Phil Fraser who runs the Business Sounding Board service as a business coach and is also the host of the Leeds Business Podcast. That podcast is amazing and I highly recommend you follow and listen to a few episodes of Phil's business podcast that talks about entrepreneurship and mentoring entrepreneurs. Phil has run many affiliate marketing businesses with successful exits and he shares his take on not just what he does but common mistakes he sees business owners make today.

Meet Olga Zarr who's an SEO consultant who is super into using AI for anything SEO related. Despite that, she does believe that you'll always want and need a human element in your content, in your affiliate sites. Plus see what she had to say about Craig Campbell to start things off.

Meet Steven Khanna who's a content creator and Head of English Markets at WhitePress®. Steven may only have a few years of SEO under his belt but he's got a great grasp of the current state of SEO including the numerous disruptions in Google search and the various Google updates that have rolled out and absolutely steamrolled a ton of affiliate sites. What's the core takeaway of this episode? 1. There will always be evergreen content and link building strategies. 2. Digital PR is leading the way for success 3. There's a massive need for advanced affiliate tools similar to others in the market like Senuto for what they do for SEOs.

Meet Fintan Costello whom runs The Gambling Files podcast and has had a successful career in iGaming leading up to an exit to the Gambling.com group. I took a page out of his podcast playbook and setup this episode without any agenda or planned questions and just talked. We covered a wide range of topics from affiliate marketing, data in the iGaming industry, investing, exits, M&A strategies and even how to create a good company culture.

Meet Mark Wright who won The Apprentice show in 2014 and used the £250,000 investment from Lord Alan Sugar to create an SEO agency called Climb Online. 10 years later, Mark has sold his SEO agency for many millions of pounds. There are many amazing insights from Mark in this interview. He talks about the value of the mentorship from Lord Sugar and shares his wisdom of being really good at one thing before moving onto other projects. The key takeaway from this episode is how he had success growing an SEO agency and what helped me make more sales. That is something that many SEO experts struggle with.

Meet Dustin Howes whom is the first person I think of when I think about affiliate marketing. Dustin has made a name for himself by hosting the Affiliate Nerd Out podcast, he runs Performance Marketing Manager which helps educate and train affiliate managers and he is also the co-founder of Affistash which is a tool for affiliate managers to help them prospect affiliates.

After I read all of Eli Schwartz's book called Product-Led SEO, I was hooked and had to ask him some questions about applying his strategies towards affiliate marketing and affiliate sites. Eli will change your world view on SEO and make you think more in terms of product and reshape how you look at search engine optimization practices.

Craig Campbell inspired me to get into producing videos and doing podcasting. I remember Craig telling me that video was a powerful tool for SEO but I didn't realize that it was a significant part of his sales and affiliate funnels. In this episode we also talk about masterminds and why he runs a mastermind group along with the benefits of being in one.

Tom Hunt is the host of my favourite podcast, Confessions of a B2B Marketer. He is also the founder of bCast which is a podcast host and he runs Fame.so which is an agency that helps B2B companies become famous in their niche with podcasting. I wanted to ask Tom questions about his B2B experience in how it can apply to B2C affiliate marketing. If you are thinking about launching a podcast, follow Tom, consume his social content and learn more about what he does at Fame.so

Why should you consider being in a Mastermind group? Meet James Dooley who's an SEO, affiliate, entrepreneur and investor. He credits masterminds as being the key ingredient to his success in business. He explains that you'll gain more knowledge in a mastermind group than you would attending any conference.

Meet Mads Singers. He is the founder of the SEO Mastery Summit, Aristo Sourcing and Mads Singers Management Consulting. I saw a recent clip of him on Instagram about making better business decisions with time management. That is when I realized that Mads isn't just another SEO but something more. What I got out of this podcast as the person asking the questions, I hope you get just as much value as I did.

What does SEO in affiliate marketing look like in 2024? I've had the luxury to interview these amazing SEO experts to ask a lot of questions. Questions like what SEO tools do you use, how would you build an affiliate site on a minimal budget, is it too late to do affiliate marketing and what strategies would you advise for affiliates for 2024 and beyond. These SEO experts include Matt Diggity, Kyle Roof, Victor Karpenko, Gabriela Covey, Sean Chaudhary, Fery Kaszoni, Michal Suski and Koray Tugburk Gubur.

Koray is building an SEO empire as he isn't just another SEO consultant but has an SEO course that is being recommended by some of the biggest names in SEO. In this episode we learn more about topical authority and how it applies to affiliate sites especially for 2024 SEO trends.

Bring on 2024 with this best of compilation of Affiliate BI podcast guests to date covering last year. This episode represents the future of affiliate marketing and your guide to affiliate marketing for 2024.

This episode with Sean Chaudhary from AlchemyLeads could easily be broken into 2 episodes. One topic we get into is the idea of how to integrate an offer into your company whether you are a SaaS, agency or an affiliate. It seems offers and guarantees lead to sales. The 2nd part talks about plans for 2024 and one theme we touched on is delegating tasks.

Meet Gabriela Covay who is the founder of Bright Valley Marketing. What I thought was going to be a link building episode, was really a masterclass on brand building. Gabriela shares her insights on why and how affiliates can use digital PR for link building and more importantly, building a trusted brand that drives sales.

Do you need a Digital PR Link Building Agency? Unless you can replicate the magic of what Fery Kaszoni can do, you should see what they can do for your business. Fery shares his story of how he got started as an SEO consultant and the breakthroughs he has had that has transformed his business as a struggling solo SEO consultant to the 70+ team agency it is today. If you are in need of unique quality links, Fery has offered to our listeners this offer: We give a £1,000 discount to anyone using the JOHN1000 code on our contact form if they buy a campaign at the £7,000 price.

Meet Simon Dunne, founder of Your10k. Simon has been in affiliate marketing for a decade and his knowledge in performance marketing is what affiliate managers and operators should be reaching out to him for.

What can affiliate programs do to earn more revenue and improve their business? The old method was to get affiliate managers to find more affiliates, problem solved, right? Not quite. While most programs are trying to solve the problem with volume, there are 3 things affiliate programs should be doing instead. 1. Use data to make data driven decisions 2. Use CRO to build better landing pages that convert better 3. Train your affiliate managers with the right tools so they can do their job better.

Sami Kurvinen is a long time friend in the affiliate marketing and iGaming industry. He was my favourite affiliate manager because he knew everything and he was hard working. Sami has evolved his career on all 3 pillars of the iGaming industry: first as a professional poker player, then an affiliate manager and now building his own affiliate sites. In this episode, Sami shares a lot of valuable insights that I think affiliate managers should pay attention to. Most affiliate managers focus on sales and are just doing their job, not really trying to evolve their career or to really understand the product they are promoting. I think this episode is valuable for anyone in iGaming or the affiliate marketing industry as a publisher or affiliate manager.

Meet Clemence Dujardin who is the group CEO of MyAffiliates. She is a thought leader when it comes to affiliate marketing as her company, MyAffiliates, is a fast growing and well established affiliate marketing software. Clemence shares her insights as to what she sees currently happening in affiliate marketing and in iGaming and we discuss the state of affiliate management today as more affiliate managers enter into this new career. Her accolades include winning CEO Woman of the year 2021 by Sigma Awards and B2B excellence award - Women in iGaming Diversity.

Peter Loving is the CEO and founder of UserActive, a SaaS design agency focused exclusively on SaaS app redesigns. So why did we have him on the podcast? I believe product designers are not making their way into affiliate sites and I wanted to get Peter's thoughts on this trend happening with the larger affiliate companies.

Lashay Lewis helps SaaS companies create B2B content strategies. She also has experience building affiliate sites and flipping them. In this interview, we take her expertise as a content marketer and learn how all of her tips can be applied directly to affiliate marketing. The truth is, if you follow her advice and content strategies, you might not need to focus on SEO as much. Lashay Lewis is the founder of Authority Plug as a B2B content marketing strategist. She creates powerful content frameworks that any B2B SaaS company can use to drive meaningful traffic that converts.

In this episode, Oliver Kenyon discusses CRO and how it relates to affiliate marketing and how he believes most of the world is missing out on a great opportunity to double their business. At the heart of CRO is data analysis and AB testing with the occasional heat map too. Time stamp 0:00 - Intro 1:05 - How Oliver stumbles into CRO 6:45 - First steps in CRO 11:24 - What do you need to do a good A/B Split Test 16:19 - How many affiliates actually do CRO 17:36 - SEO vs CRO 21:14 - Oliver's take on affiliate marketing 21:57 - Does CRO and its relation with SEO? 24:00 - What the future looks like?: AI, communities and the importance of connection 26:08 - Heatmaps, CRO and automatization 28:56 - Could Oliver do without tools? The importance of knowledge, experience and context 32:00 - Prettier is not always better 33:42 - Last question: what do you see as the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence 35:17 - Final words and contact info

What does deepfakes, KYC and identity fraud have to do with affiliate marketing? More than you realize. In fact, blockchain technology is likely to infiltrate affiliate marketing and to some extent it already has. Blockchains are a ledger of truth where data can't be edited and commissions can't be stolen. This extends down to protecting the identities of affiliate marketers. Jean-Michel Azzopardi is a cybersecurity expert with experience and passion for all things blockchain related. In this episode he shares his take on how blockchain will have a positive impact on the entire affiliate marketing ecosystem. He also believes that AI is going to empower blockchain tech and that the 2 will feed each other.

Meet Michał Suski who's one of the co-founders of Surfer SEO which is one of the fastest growing SEO tools and content tools on the market. Michał is also the Head of Innovation at Surfer as the company takes a data first approach when it comes to optimizing your websites for content. One of the key takeaways is that 25% to 30% of Surfer's userbase are using the AI content tools. Why? Simply put, he shares that AI content often beats your average content writer that you hire in terms of quality and research. AI content is here to stay and we need to embrace it just like their AI content author. Wait, what about detecting AI content? Try Surfer's AI content detector here https://surferseo.com/ai-content-detector/

Does the knowledge that Chris Walker teaches in B2B marketing, personal branding and demand generation and capture transfer over to affiliate marketing? I thought it would and there was only one way to find out. I asked Chris Walker, CEO & founder of Refine Labs, some tough questions about his take on affiliate marketing and if the same principles in B2B marketing can apply to B2C affiliate marketing. Time stamps 0:00 - Introduction 01:31 -Chris Walker 02:41 - Self Attribution in B2C space 04:06 - A huge miss in the use of data 05:20 - Companies should know about demand capture but also about demand creation 07:19 - AI tools and automation 08:15 - Advertisement vs word to mouth 09:54 - Opinion leaders vs Affiliates 11:24 - How to find your purpose 12:59 - How your mindset influence your opportunities 17:40 - Owning an audience 20:18 - Linkedin, YouTube, TikTok, Podcasts and Affiliate Marketing 22:34 - How to look and use data 24:45 - The future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence 27:05 - How to contact Chris Let me just say I was blown away at how much Chris seems to know about marketing in general. He might not work in the affiliate marketing industry, but if he were to ever cross over, either we are doomed or it would be something to celebrate. This podcast is beyond insightful and you gotta listen to this one. Chris is also the host of the Revenue Vitals podcast which is probably the number 1 B2B podcast out there.

Matt Diggity gives an SEO masterclass that includes affiliate marketing. Year after year, people keep asking if SEO is dead and Matt thinks there has never been a better time to be in SEO and to get started in SEO and affiliate marketing. There is a lot of timeless, evergreen, SEO tips in this episode and it is one that you'll want to listen carefully and take notes.

Victor Karpenko is an affiliate and an SEO expert who owns SeoProfy. He shares a few SEO case studies and another look at how he uses data to make better and fastest decisions for running his sites and working with SEO clients. I'll share a story within this episode that should inspire people to think differently about SEO. Take a vacuum cleaner that is high quality but costs $12,000. Nobody is looking for a vacuum cleaner that expensive but maybe you'll find people looking for 'how to start a car detailing business' in which you tell them this vacuum cleaner is the best and needed and you'll be able to make money in no time including getting financing for your business. Victor advocates that everything is about intent and that is reflected down to your content as well as your design.

Joran Hofman is one of the founders of Reditus which is a B2B SaaS affiliate program software helping SaaS companies launch their affiliate program. Joran is also the host of Grow your B2B SaaS podcast and he's also built his own affiliate site promoting various SaaS products. In this episode, Joran shares all the tips he's learned in customer success and how to apply it to B2B affiliate marketing and how this can translate to B2C success.

Ian Sims is the founder of Rightlander which is a compliance tool built for the affiliate marketing industry. In this episode, Ian touches on why compliance is important to everyone in the affiliate marketing ecosystem and why being compliant can help you improve your conversion rate. We also talk about the role AI plays in affiliate compliance and some of the compliance issues facing the affiliate marketing industry today.

Meet David Harris and Vladyslav Bondarenko from ReferOn. ReferOn is a new iGaming affiliate platform powering the next generation of affiliate programs. These guys don't want to just build another affiliate program platform, they want to innovate and build the best one out there. In this podcast they discuss how by automating as many tasks, operators and affiliate managers can make data driven decisions to run their business more efficiently.

This episode had me writing lots of notes on looking at SEO data and building the right SEO dashboard for you. Kyle specifically has SEO courses dedicated to building dashboards and explains why every SEO should do it even though only 0.01% actually do it.

Julian Juenemann is the founder of MeasureSchool which he teaches the data-driven way of digital marketing. In this episode he shares that Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a no-code solution that can be easier to adopt than most realize. It can also be a very powerful tool where your site and situation differs from another.

Sam McKay is the CEO and founder of Enterprise DNA which helps professionals master data skills and upskill in ai. If you want to know what the future of data and affiliate marketing looks like, Sam highlights why data professionals will never be out of a job. In this episode, Sam highlights how data can be used for improved personalization with customer experience and how the affiliate marketing industry can easily do a 10x all by leveraging data.

Allan Stone, CEO of Intelitics, knows there is a gap in the market when it comes to operator tracking tools for any affiliate program. Allan has a take on the iGaming space that operators need better tracking tools and tech. He knows performance marketing well and what these types of affiliates need to be successful and to work with any operator. The next wave of change in iGaming will be happening with data. Listen in to hear Allan's view on the industry and what the future of affiliate marketing will look like for us all.

The future of affiliate marketing, according to Kevin Hartman, is using data visualization tools to tell better data stories as well as using data for better personalization in communicating with customers. From our discussions on the podcast and outside of it, Kevin believes the affiliate marketing industry as a whole can benefit immensely with more companies and people bringing in data science and analytics to the industry. Data viz and Business Intelligence tools are going to move the industry forward and accelerate the revenue growth.