We’re back with another episode of the Affiliate Marketing Podcast with Affiverse founder Lee-Ann Johnstone. This week, Lee-Ann is joined by the Editorial Director of Global Savings Group, Anna Hecht to talk about publisher relationships in the retail space and the advancements that are causing it to evolve.
Listen in here for all the insights…
The value of information
Anna points out that any piece of written content on the internet should, at least theoretically, hold value to the reader. The internet is vast so that’s rarely the case, but if you want to stand out, you should remember that written content is about quality over quantity.
“I think if our main goal is to add more value for the reader than a retailer site alone could, and if we can’t get more information than what we can just see on a retailer site or read in reviews, we’re essentially not doing a huge service to the reader. So, even though we can’t test every product we write about, the goal is that we get to the point where we are actually testing and touching and feeling every product that we’re talking about, because that will just add so much more value.”
(When) Will AI infiltrate content spaces?
The question hovering over any content creator’s office is the idea of AI and its impact. There’s no doubt that it’s here to stay, but in what capacity?
“I have had kind of a slow burn with it. When we first started talking about using AI a few months ago, I of course kind of had a bit of a heels-in-the-sand kind of reaction to it because I really value the human content that we are creating. And I know that for such a long time, Google has been telling us that if it feels like it’s written by bots or if it looks like it’s over-optimised, you will be penalised for this.”
“So, it is kind of a weird shift just because I know Google is going in more of an AI overall direction anyway, with how they’re going to set up their SERPs. I think that if they’re doing that, they can’t really tell us not to do it. So now we have to figure out, what is the balance between the type of content that we create using AI?”
The importance of mobile optimisation
Anna points out that a majority of customers, particularly Gen Z customers, are accessing retail spaces via their mobile, which might be an oversight for retailers.
“I’m a millennial, but I think one thing that I’ve been realising and thinking about is we’ve been seeing for a long time that our audiences have often been middle-age because that tends to be when people have money and have expendable income and all of these things.
“But Gen Z are coming into adulthood now and they shop very differently and they behave online very differently than maybe I do or that even my parents do. So I think we’re going to have to consider: How are they shopping? What kind of devices are they on?”
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Listen to find out more about:
- Opening the first ever shopping website
- How to make your content unique
Key segments of this podcast and where you can tune into go direct
[17:00] – Finding the value of content
[26:00] – Using AI in content creation
[33:00] – The importance of diversifying your brand options
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