How to Use an Affiliate Program to Create a Content Marketing Engine

According to Alex Standiford from Siren Affiliate, affiliate programs should be much more than just discount systems or referral links in the modern era. According to him, companies particularly those that provide courses and software should consider themselves to be media and education enterprises that require ongoing content, collaborations, and audience trust in order to expand.

Alex advises locating niche specialists, bloggers, podcasters, influencers, and producers who already cater to your desired audience and offering them incentives to produce worthwhile material about your product or sector rather than attempting to produce all of the content yourself. He refers to these individuals as “multipliers” since they help you reach audiences that you would not be able to reach on your own. Additionally, he stresses that consumers start their trip long before they are prepared to make a purchase, so companies should provide content for earlier phases of the customer journey rather than just product-focused searches.

He also makes the important point that AI is revolutionizing this process by assisting companies in finding SEO possibilities, identifying possible partners, automating outreach, and eventually developing AI-powered partnership platforms. In general, his argument is that rather than depending solely on direct sales or conventional affiliate marketing, modern growth comes from creating networks of rewarded connections, content collaborations, and community-driven marketing.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Alex Standiford from Siren. You can find Siren at Siren Affiliates. Alex and I have done a lot of work together over the years. We co-created some content on how to build a Udemy clone website, i.e.

a course marketplace using LifterLMS and Siren. He’s been on the podcast multiple times. Siren is not just an affiliate program, it’s really about incentivized partnerships, of which affiliate is just one of those. Before we dive in, welcome back on the show, Alex. 

Alex Standiford: Hey. Hey, Chris. I’m super glad to be here. I always, glad to be on the show.

I could talk to you about this stuff all day.

Chris Badgett: I like that. I laugh because Alex has what I think is one of the best-kept secrets in this kind of incentivized partner program development. There’s… It is so cool, and I feel like more people need to understand and know about it, and it’s so much bigger than just an affiliate program, which, by the way, Siren does better than any other solution in WordPress, and you just released your Siren 3.0.

But to start to get people excited, we’ve done… We’ve talked a lot about affiliate programs, and yes, you can do that with Siren whether using LifterLMS, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, other solutions. But tell us about creating a incentivized partner program or content engine with Siren and why that’s important today.

What’s happening t- that makes this even more valuable in the world we live in today? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, okay. Whenever people think about affiliate programs, what they usually think about are the, I always hear coupon coupon sites or media buyers where people are basically traditional affiliates.

The ones that you can find on ClickBank or sh- you know, things like that, those, the affiliate marketplaces. And while those are a potential option for some markets definitely not all that is just one very small way you can find partners and find people to work with. And I pitched this idea about talking about this with Chris because he was recently talking in a previous episode about, You were talking about how different how AI is impacting course creator discovery and how you can’t necessarily hide all of it behind a paywall anymore, and some questions and things like that kind of have to be out in the public so that your course can be discovered in the first place.

And I think 

Chris Badgett: that’s- And that you’re a, and that you’re a media company. You’re not just in the course business. Exactly. You’re, in the media business too, whether you realize that or not. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, exactly. And that is… That really struck a chord with me because I realized that I am using a strategy in my own media business with Siren that with using Siren, right?

I was lit- I’m literally leveraging Siren to do this. The thing that really struck me about what you were talking about before was sharing sharing all those details and sharing making sure that the content is discoverable by AI and figuring out how to make sure that you’re able to give the information that people want while still be, and to be able to provide value and get them into your top of funnel that leads them to still being able to buy your course.

And the thing that really, I really that struck me was the way that you can… That a lot of– There’s a lot of situations where the content that you’ll find that you’re gonna publish, that you want to publish or you want to rank for, like if you’re doing SEO keyword research or you’re trying to figure out what…

You’re, looking at different watering holes like Reddit or something like that, and you’re finding questions that people are asking. Sometimes, obviously, you can answer those questions yourself, and you can publish that content directly on your site, and those are great cases. But there are also situations where you can’t.

I think about, for example in the context of Siren, right? I probably can’t write a review about one of my competitors directly on my site. I can’t do a compar- I can write a, I can create a comparison page, right? And I can make a case for the pros and cons of both and talk about how Siren is different and all those things.

But I can’t necessarily do that, or I can’t write a tutorial on a specific aspect for a very specific market in all cases. Or if I do, it won’t be that impactful. That’s, the basis for what I’m wanting to talk about and what I wanna… How, we’re using Siren. What we’re doing to basically find people who can publish that content for us, right?

We find basically partners or affiliates if you can call them that content partners who you incentivize to publish content on on their site to be able to talk about your product or link to it or discuss it indirectly or otherwise. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us more about the, an affiliate who just does a link versus becoming part of your content engine.

Alex Standiford: Yeah, 

Chris Badgett: so- And by the way, that, that affiliate or partner could publish the content on your s- on, your site- Yeah … or their site. So talk about the difference between that and how Siren solves that. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. There’s a few different ways that you can leverage that. So the first thing that comes to mind is for me, for example, I am literally…

I’ll do keyword research with various SEO tools, whatever, and I’ll find a keyword. For example, the other day I just found a keyword for Siren that was, like, how to start an affiliate program or how to start… Yeah, it was literally how to start an affiliate program for your veterinarian business, literally for vets, and that is so hyper-specific.

I could publish that. I could write that post. But whenever I look at that, I see that as there is somebody out there, there’s a coach, there’s a podcaster, there is a person who does nothing but talk to medical professionals about how to grow their business, right? They’re, they exist. I don’t know who they are, but I know they’re out there, and I know they would rank for that keyword way faster than me, and that we could have a really fantastic conversation, and I could create something and really pitch something fantastic to them.

So this is how I’m identifying what I call a multiplier, right? A person who I can pitch an idea to, and then they multiply that idea to their audience, and it, ends up translating into a sale. You’re actually seeing this happening right now as I’m talking to you, Chris, right? ‘Cause I’m literally talking about Siren and how it coincides with your own business, right?

So that’s one example, right? But then the other one is, of course, like you’re saying where they can publish content directly on your site. If you find… The, a different route here could be that you need a series, you want a series of professionals to write content on your site. Maybe you have a bigger platform, a learning platform or something like that, and you have a series of courses that you wanna publish publicly and/or that you have published publicly and you’re selling online as an upsell, and you need a large body of content on your site to talk about these things from different aspects, and you wanna have professionals, or maybe you need to have licensed professionals or something like that, having a conversation about these things with real authority.

You can use Siren to be able to incentivize those people to write that content, where they get credit if somebody reads the blog post, and then it converts into a sale for the course, right? So there’s, those are two different ways that you can leverage this tool as a piece of your your, media company to be able to form a team of people who are able to support you and multiply you in the process.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. There’s several big ideas here which I wanna zoom out on. Yeah. One is we’ve mentioned every company is a media company, whether they realize it or not. Related to that, every company is a education company, whether they realize that or not. And then the third big idea here is that if a business puts their core customer at the center of their business, not the product, it changes how you look at things, and you actually build a more effective company that grows faster, which creates some content challenges, which I’ll explain.

So if I put LifterLMS at the center of the business, in s- in many ways, this podcast doesn’t make sense. But for over 12 years, we’ve done this podcast to help our customer, ’cause remember, they’re at the center of the business, with issues even not related to LifterLMS. Now, Alex and Siren adds value as another technology you can plug in to create incentive referral programs.

There’s all kinds of interviews we do on this podcast about things like instructional design, community building entrepreneurship topics that are really outside of the scope of what the LifterLMS software does, but our core customer needs to know in order to be successful. So you create this web of subject matter experts and valuable content.

But we were chatting about the other day, sometimes, if I really look at my customer and go really far back in their journey, before they’re actually shopping for learning management system software, just as one entry point, they s- one place people start, and this is way before they’re aware of the LMS world, is they have a thought, which is, “I hate my job.”

And it’s this thing that they’re about to transition into wanting to become an entrepreneur, and then they figure out how can I make money online?” And then, “How can I build a location into business, independent business? What types of businesses are like that? Oh there’s courses, coaching, services.

I think I like the courses thing.” And now they’re ready for us. But for me to make enough content ab- about I hate my job, what should I do next, and then put that in different niches, like I hate my job at the hospital, I hate my job at the school. There’s so much content that I could create to help my customer.

Remember, the customer’s at the center of the business not the, software. But I can’t make all that content. And like you said there’s somebody else out there who’s probably written a book. I remember, for example, this is super random , but a woman named Pamela Slim wrote a book called Escape from Cubicle Nation, which is about helping people who hate their job figure out plan B in life.

If she wrote that content and pitched Lifter as a solution, it would be even more valuable, ’cause she’s the expert on that topic of job dissatisfaction So I don’t know, jam with me on that- Yeah … context. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. I I, was just– Yeah, that’s exactly a, such a great example of what I’m talking about here.

And I love that you brought up the fact of before in the journey, right? Like you– ‘Cause that’s… And I think that’s a big piece that I’ve actually been exploring a lot lately as well and, that’s why all this is so fresh in my mind, right? Because I’ve realized that there’s about– That by the time they get to Siren, right?

By the time most people are at a spot where they’re leveraging Siren affiliates, they’re ready to start using it, they have gone through a lot, right? They’ve already decided they were gonna quit their job, decided they were gonna make a switch. From a, founder standpoint, they decided they were gonna quit their job, they decided they were gonna switch over to something, they decided on WordPress, they decided that they were gonna use e-commerce and sales tools to be able to grow their business.

And there’s, so many things that has to happen before they’re even in a spot to be able to even have a conversation about Siren. And the earlier in the life cycle I can be there, the more likely they are to choose me whenever that moment comes, right? And especially with something this is maybe a little, off-topic, but especially with something as powerful as Siren because it has so many different ways it can be used.

If I can start having conversations with people about that, every time I have a meeting with people and I talk about Siren and I start listing all the different ways they can use it in their business, I see their eyes light up. I see them realize all the different possibilities of things that they can do.

And if I can present that to people earlier in the life cycle more often, then I am more likely to be able to start to find people coming to me and gravitating toward me naturally. And I think that’s a lot of what you were alluding to there, especially around the idea of being customer-centric instead of product-centric, right?

‘Cause honestly I published, I just published an announcement post the other day for the 3.0 version of Siren, right? And I did it because, of course you have to do that, but it is not something that is… But there’s like a whole bunch of other content that I published at the same time around the stuff I published there that is on several different blogs, right?

So on some partner blogs, on my own website on different, platforms like Medium and, off, off-site as well. Not to mention on X, podcasting, all that stuff, right? There’s so many different channels these days, and I am but one person. You know what I mean? I can only do so much to be able to manage and write all of that content, even if you’re using AI to help you or whatever.

But then more importantly, like I said, a lot of that content is going to be better served by somebody else who is helping that customer through the current journey, current phase of whatever journey they’re in. So if I can look back earlier in the journey and I can say, “Here are the steps that they’re going through.

Who are the people-” that are the key piece of that conversation, those are my affiliate, those are my partners. Those are the people I need to be talking to, right? Those are the people that I wanna connect with, I wanna work with, and I wanna have conversations with them, and I wanna think deeply about how I can provide value to my future customers that are in their audience at that point in their life.

And w- it’s really convenient whenever you’re a founder building products for founders because you’re, by the very virtue of existing, a few steps ahead of them, so you’re able to have those conversations, which is very convenient, of course. But so that, that is a lot of what I’m talking about whenever I think about reimagining what it means to have different partnership programs and, programs like that.

It’s not just affiliates with links and coupon codes. It’s genuinely finding people yourself, prospecting, finding them, identifying them, and having real conversations just like what we’re doing right now.

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Chris Badgett: Yeah. Incentives and relationships, and then a s- a tool like Siren to manage all that is really mind-blowing when you think about it.

It’s that whole African proverb of you wanna go fast, go alone. You wanna go far, go together. Or I might have gotten that backwards. But the going together is better, which means you need relationships to be successful in business. There’s a lot of buzz around the solo one-person company, of which I’m a fan.

I love that kind of idea and thinking. But if you really wanna go far getting partners and not just affiliate partners on board is, can really help. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. And- 

Chris Badgett: Let’s do the l- Go ahead … do the bullet points of high-level different types of partnerships. We have affiliates, affiliate sales partners.

We have content creation partners. 

Alex Standiford: And then 

Chris Badgett: there’s- And within that, there’s a specific one the Lifter integration that Siren has is for course creation partners. 

Alex Standiford: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: But what else is in these list of, to get people’s juices flowing? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah the course creation one is particularly interesting ’cause, like you said earlier, you could create a, essentially c- we talked about this a lot, right?

A Udemy clone where you’re able to basically pay course creators for their own course content, and it’s, I call it a royalty program, basically. And what’s interesting is there’s a variation of that I’ve seen that’s been truly awesome, which is I have a customer right now who has Dungeons & Drag- they build this really awesome Dungeons & Dragons table that doubles up as a kitchen table, right?

And they’re, about to launch, and they’re all excited about it, and I’m, excited to be there with them, right? But what, one of the things that we’re, they are, they’ve launched is they have these, mats that cover the, cover their tables, their, the Dungeons & Dragons table, and they can print art on those.

And instead of, and I told, I directed them that instead of just finding and paying, just solely paying artists, use this as an opportunity to create a program. So he created a royalty program where artists are able to provide art that can be printed on these mats. And he also doubled it up as an affiliate program on top of that.

So it’s an incent– an affil– So they get paid every time their mat is purchased, a mat with their art is purchased. But then they also get paid more if they use an affiliate link to actually direct the sale, right? And it flipped the script for artists because now artists always struggle with promoting or selling things online.

This flips that. It gives them a way to be able to incentive or to earn money with their, they, what they can do, right? It gives them a really cool product to talk about that’s relevant to them in some way. And it also gives the company both a way, a couple of channels to get their product promoted, and also helps them improve their product at the same time because people are able to directly contribute to them all at the same time, right?

Royalty programs are so cool and so underutilized, I think, in, in a lot of businesses. There’s a lot of opportunities for that kind of thing. But then of course, like you said there’s, the traditional affiliate program where you have people who are promoting your product, talking about it.

This is more aligned with what you’re talking about with influencers. Today, that’s usually what I think about whenever I think of them today is, an influencer who is on TikTok or YouTube or something like that talking about your product in some way. A lot of them often want to have some kind of cash paid in addition to actually doing the program, and I don’t think that’s a problem, especially the first time around, ’cause they’re just trying to de-risk it, right?

They don’t know you. They don’t know if you’re gonna convert. So they have to, you have to do that. But what I’ve found is a lot of times if you do convert and you do lead to sales and it does work out, they’re a lot more willing to do the follow-ups without necessarily needing a giant pay, like some kind of paycheck up front, right?

Because you, they are now de-risked. But then, like you said, there’s also the content program, which is like a variation on the royalty program, and the beauty of it is you’re solving two problems at once. One, you’re getting content published on your site regularly, and two, you’re able to incentivize people to publish content that converts.

So, those are the big three that I really think about. Whenever you start getting into bigger, sales and higher dollar things, there’s also more traditional sales programs that you can do where you have direct outreach campaigns where people are being directly contacted, emailed, demos being shown, things like that.

A lot more similar to what you would think of in a, in a sales kind of scenario. Those are probably the big four that I think are relevant to this audience. There’s- So many more that are also potentially doable. I had another one where somebody created a program where every time somebody purchases a product on their- at their- through their business, a part of their business is they donate a portion of the proceeds to a different 501 nonprofit.

And what they did was they set it up to where you can pick at checkout which nonprofit you want your donation to go to, and they’re using Siren to track that, right? So that is so far removed from the idea of an incentive program. It’s not even about incentive at that point. It’s just about keeping track of who do I owe, and things like that.

Chris Badgett: Now you, have, I noticed on your site, now, if you go to sirenaffiliates.com, you have a beacon GPT to help people figure out their programs. Can you tell us what that is, how it works, and the problem it solves? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So one of the biggest problems that I’ve had with Siren historically has been that it doesn’t, It is powerful, and it is capable of building a lot of things, right? You can build almost any kind of program you want. However, the challenge I’ve run into is a person who comes to me and says, “I just want this program.” They’ll say it to me in words, right? And I realize every pers- whenever you buy Siren, you get a– you are able to schedule a one-on-one with me, where I basically help you onboard it.

I look at it, I help you. And almost every one of those calls was basically me helping them set up their first program. And I realized, oh my gosh, this is th- this is how I’m overcoming that onboarding process, and I’d really like to do a better job of making sure that people, if they wanna just describe the program, the vision that they have for a program, that they can just get that back, and that they can get exactly how it would be built in Siren and have it with a one or two-click setup on their Siren install to be able to build it for them.

So what I ended up doing was I ended up creating what I call a beacon, which is my AI system. It’s an MCP server technically, but it’s also, there’s also a GPT on ChatGPT, so you don’t even have to set anything up. You could just talk to it. And what it does is it does exactly that. You can have a conversation with this AI agent, and it will look at all the knowledge that it has about Siren, and it will help you build out exactly what your program would be in Siren.

And then once it’s done, you click a couple buttons, and boom, it adds it to the system for you, and it’s installed. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And tell us about the recipes that just released. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. So that’s the, that’s the underlying magic of it is the word to put it. AI, the AI agent, the beacon agent uses, creates recipes.

It can create its own custom- recipes, but then the site itself has also a series of recipes on it that are published that you can also one-click install as well. And basically, a recipe is a combination of Siren, what I call primitives, basically Siren th- pieces, right? So programs, distributions program groups are really the big three.

And it can, it- they are basically pre-made combinations of those things that build the different programs you want. So instead of me saying you’re gonna create in order to be able to, for example, create a program where some affiliates get 10%, but you have a set of super affiliates that are getting 15% but you don’t want those beams to cross.

You only want one person from those programs to win. How do you set that up in Siren? Technically, it’s with two programs in a program group, right? So all of those things put together allow you to do that. But a customer, the person, doesn’t think about it that way. You don’t think about your affiliate program as two programs in a program group, but Siren does.

So there was a disconnect in that thought, so I ended up creating all these templates where you can go to the site and say, “I want an affiliate program. How do I do that?” And then it shows you, here you go. This is exactly what you need. You click a button to add it to your site. It asks you what percentage rate you would want for your affiliate program.

You give it your s- your website so it knows where to go, and you click go. Goes into the Sir- your Siren website where it’s installed. Of course, if you’re logged in, it only does it if you’re logged in. And then it allows you, it says, “Hey, did you wanna build, did you wanna import these programs into your system?”

And you say yes. It goes through, and bing, bang, boom, it’s added those different programs to your system and set up your program for you. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. So you’ve solved the blank page or the blank screen problem with pre-configured recipes or- Yeah … templates. Yeah. That’s awesome. 

Alex Standiford: So it solves, for me, it solved both onboarding, the onboarding challenges for my customers, while also solving the sales problems, because now people can look at it and say, “Can Siren make an affiliate program?”

And the q- or, “Can Siren create this wild, wacky program that nobody’s ever thought of?” And the answer is always yes, but now I can prove it. I can say, “Here you go. Here’s exactly how you would do it in Siren. Do you wanna buy it?” 

Chris Badgett: I was just trying to count. There’s so many recipes you have on your site.

These are sirenaffiliates.com/recipes. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah.

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Chris Badgett: And just to name a few, obviously there’s the basic affiliate program. There’s the fixed rate affiliate program, the refer a friend program, blog content program, sales team commission program content creator profit share, and I’m just naming a few of them.

Yeah. And these are like, yes, you could read the documentation and build all these from scratch, or you can just pull a recipe in and then just make some minor tweaks however you want, and you’re good. 

Alex Standiford: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: My, my hat’s off to you for that. 

Alex Standiford: Thank you. 

Chris Badgett: I’m also a big fan of the freemium model, and you have a Siren Lite version.

Yep. Can you tell us what that is and how people should think about that? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. I I, genuinely was afraid that I was giving away too much. And I- Which means 

Chris Badgett: you’re making a very good free product. Yes. It is always uncomfortable to give away- Yes … like your best stuff for free- Yeah … but literally that’s the point with freemium- Yeah

right? 

Alex Standiford: For sure. For sure. So the free version has the ability to create multiple programs. And it’s, Siren. It is everything that makes Siren great, makes Siren powerful and capable. The things, there’s some things that you don’t get that require an upgrade, such as distributors, which are insanely powerful.

I I’m still learning about the different ways you can use distributors. That’s a whole nother conversation, but like I had a customer come to me who wanted to build a multi- not a multi-level marketing kind of company, but a company that had sales teams that had trickle-down commission from, like a sales manager earns commission from their team, and their team earns commissions from…

It’s a whole architecture, and I was able to build that whole architecture with one single well-built distributor, and it just- Wow … It, just cra- it’s insane. So a lot of power there, but that’s, a paid feature. But the fe- the free version gives you a more than enough, more than pretty much any WordPress paid plugin, free or paid plugin gives you out of the box.

I, honestly think that the o- I wanted to make sure that it was enough that if you were considering Siren and you just needed a relatively simple program just to get started, or you, and you needed to know that you had a little bit of, you had wiggle room to grow if you decided you wanna do other programs as well I wanted to make sure that you would be able to do all of those things without needing to upgrade right away.

So it does all of that. And I honestly, I think that if you’re looking at any other tool in the WordPress space right now, it probably covers, I’d say, 80% of the use cases that a lot of people are paying for right now if and several cases that still can’t be done by competitors even at the free level.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m a big fan of that model. And I’ve, seen this movie before, like with LifterLMS as an example, the free version being more powerful than a lot of paid versions or most of paid versions and so on. So go check that out. That’s sirenaffiliates.com. On the pricing, you can see the free- I wanna just explode people’s minds in the last part of this episode.

You’re somebody who I really respect as a creator and an innovator. I know you’re leveraging AI ’cause you, you’ve mentioned building a GPT, a custom GPT in your MCP and all this. But AI, there’s a little bit of overwhelm, but also excitement. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So when people think about… I’ll just rattle off some things, and you can build on it.

Like, when I think about incentivized programs, how could people use AI? Now I’m a fan of human in the loop and the co-pilot concept and not just trying to let AI do everything. But- 

Alex Standiford: Yep … 

Chris Badgett: For affiliates, AI can write swipe file. So if you’re an affiliate, you know what that means. It’s starter content that you give your affiliates to remove friction, to give them some email messages to send as is or tweak, social media posts and so on graphics.

If you’re doing, 

Alex Standiford: You’re gonna love this, just 

Chris Badgett: a sidebar … if you’re doing outbound sales and stuff like that there are AI agents that can… Let’s say there’s an expert who’s gonna promote you and get sales commissions kinda different from an affiliate. That person may– could leverage AI prospecting tools for the– even voice agents and all kinds of stuff.

That– it could get wild. You mentioned graphic design competition for artists. AI is pretty good at generating images and things for design contests, and that’s just- Oh, yeah … a really niche thing. 

Alex Standiford: Yep. 

Chris Badgett: But I’m sure you have a billion ideas. I just wanted to wet the whistle and pass it over to you.

What kind of AI innovations could people who are in these incentivized programs and relationships what’s possible, and where are we going? 

Alex Standiford: So one thing that comes to mind immediately is, again, Beacon with the MCP and being able to do that kind of thing. It’s become my swipe file.

Chris Badgett: Okay. 

Alex Standiford: You know what I mean? Because it’s, there. It exists. People can read it, ke- they can, they can– my affiliates can actually use it to be able to riff on ideas and understand Siren and be able to do those things deeply. But also whenever I think about incentivizing there’s, this entire concept that isn’t quite here yet, but where you can literally leverage, you could potentially leverage AI, where the AI itself represents an affiliate 

Chris Badgett: Like the agent is an, a partner.

The AI agent is a partner. Not a human partner, but a, AI partner. 

Alex Standiford: Right. 

Chris Badgett: Where the- Like it’s agentic. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, literally it’s agentic. Yeah, there’s, there is a world where that could exist. There’s probably some places where that is a thing. I don’t, I can’t speak to that a lot because it’s still a new concept, but the tech’s there right now.

We have everything we need. You have the ability to create affiliate links. If you create the right program you could absolutely do 

Chris Badgett: those things. That’s the thing too, just with that, is agents cost money via token usage and stuff. Yep. So therefore, but if you remove that, this is where incentives matter.

If somebody who’s the mastermind behind these agents if now they’re getting paid via Siren for being effective at whatever they do is profitable above their token expenses, then it makes sense. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, totally. I, have this vision in my head of there’s probably gonna be some personal brands out there that are going to end up creating their own MCPs that are literally just AI servers that are literally their AI agent, right?

That literally just takes care of, manages their content, understands the wealth of information from that person, and provides responses, advice, and input in that way. It’s almost like a branded version of that person, right? That can then sell products, recommend products genuinely, right?

Based on what its pool of affiliate links are and stuff like that. This is a little bit, out there but those are some of the things that come to mind for me. But in terms of how a person can use AI, what I’m really excited about today, right now, is how people can use AI right now to find those partners.

That’s been a lot of my a lot of the stuff that I’ve been doing a lot of. I have a, machine that runs a background task that does… uses data for SEO, which is a an MCP that allows you to basically connect to it and very inexpensively do SEO research and search for keywords and stuff like that.

I’m using that with a really well-curated feed of different RSS feeds of podcasts and stuff like that to basically bring in stuff and have AI automatically find an opport- find and identify potential affiliates for me, right? So it’s helping me do a lot of that stuff, and it’s allowing me to, Riff with it on how this could potentially work, what kind of a how that affiliate would work, how the positioning works, how all of that aligns with whatever whatever agenda I may have, whether it be promoting Siren or whatever.

And assisting that audience, right? Just like what we were talking about. So that’s been a pretty big thing that I’ve been pretty excited about from a str- strategy standpoint. It’s basically what I’ve always historically done when I’m looking for affiliates, which is, like I said, primarily keyword research, finding the words or finding the terms, and then identifying where my customers are in that journey and who was talking to them at that point, and then trying to make– working to make them my partner.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And just for those of you that are kinda newer to the AI conversation you probably know about the AI chat interfaces like ChatGPT or Claude.ai, but when something goes, an agent is– can do a lot more and can be outcome-focused. They loop back and can keep improving on a task or even spin up sub-agents.

So what Alex is talking about with partner recruitment, I did something similar where I wanted to source information that adds value to our core customer outside of Lifter that’s just going on in the industry around things like instructional design, technology, community building, entrepreneurship, and so on.

And I have an AI agent that just weekly searches the entire internet, not really the whole thing, but it’s looking through YouTube, Reddit threads, social media, Twitter, all kinds of places, finding interesting content that would be of use to my core customer. But this idea of there is a, role when you are more of a professional affiliate program operator where you hire a affiliate partner manager, but it, that only makes sense when you’re at a certain scale or size business.

Yes. But if an AI agent can f- help you find partners, create swipe files re-engage partners basically look at your Siren program analytics and whatever so that you can get weekly reports and there’s just so much you can do. That can be an AI team member, basically- 

On the partner program. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it is, It’s pretty wild, to be honest the automations that can come out of that stuff. And in particular, finding and identifying those questions. Another thing that I’m doing- My idea of prospecting or trying to find potential affiliates in this context isn’t even necessarily directly looking for their content.

It is trying to find and identify questions that people are asking at earlier phases in what I call watering holes, so like Reddit and, stuff like that. And if it finds questions there, I take that question, I do a little bit of research, and I find out who’s answering it, right? If it if, it’s, if it can’t be me or it shouldn’t be me one step in my process is always: Is there somebody who’s better equipped to answer this question than me?

And if the answer is yes, then the next question is: Can I get that person to become an affiliate to talk about Siren? Or can I get that person… Can I– Or if not, can I get on that show or on that blog and be a guest writer to provide that value to those customers from my perspective and kind of blend in my, my perspective on things, and then work my way from there?

And I think that’s really relevant to knowledge, to, to knowledge workers to… Not knowledge workers, but to course creators and things like that, just simply because that is a great way for you to be able to bring people into your, net, and it’s a great way to prospect. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. And we’re, definitely gonna have to do another episode in a year, whatever- Yeah

and see where we’re at, ’cause all this stuff is moving so fast and is super interesting. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, for sure. 

There’s probably gonna be a service that exists that just descri- does exactly what I just described. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Alex Standiford: You never know. 

Chris Badgett: So for those who are out there watching and listening, what’s the best way to get started?

You have Siren Lite, the free version. I see a try the demo on the site. Tell us about that. You also have… People can just buy it and then get on a call with you. They got the GPT. H- how else… Those are– You have a lot of cool ways for people to get started, but let’s hear the what you’d recommend.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. I think the first thing that comes to mind is if some of this stuff is like resonating with whoever’s listening to this and you think that there’s potential value in this kind of thing for you the first thing I would do is start with you, of course, you could download Siren and try Siren.

I- by all means, please do. I’ll be here. There’s a little chat bubble in the corner. I’m always answering questions there when I’m, awake. And then of course, there’s the AI agent where you can have those questions answered figure those things out and think about it. I, love talking about different ways to use Siren and will always be happy to have conversations.

The free version is always going to be a great place to start, just simply because it allows you to try things out, see where things work, and then understand why or if you even do need the paid version. So that’s where I would recommend starting is what you just described.

So if you’re, if you like to use AI agents and you like to, and you’re comfortable with ChatGPT and you wanna just kinda riff on an idea, start with the GPT. If you wanna kinda shop around and see what different things are that Siren can do use the, look, take a look at the recipes or take a look at the demo, which is at demo.sirenaffiliates.com.

That demo is actually it’s literally the entire front end of Siren, and the only difference is instead of it being stored into a long-term place, it just stores it in your session storage on your browse- in your web browser. So you can just, you can use it to try out creating programs and kinda get a feel for what the interface is like.

But it doesn’t actually install or anything like that. It’s just a, it’s a down and dirty way to get in there and take a quick look at how Siren functions and things like that. The interface also will look pretty different in terms of color scheme to what you’ll see in WordPress because I have some plans with with Siren in the future that doesn’t necessarily involve relying on the WordPress dashboard specifically.

But the interface is identical. The only difference is the colors are different. So that’s another option. And then obviously if there’s something that you need to know or you’re not sure about, there’s always just that chat bubble. You can just ask me a question directly, too.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. I’m so excited about Siren Affiliates. Go check it out. That’s [email protected]. And again, if you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together. That’s the African proverb. And using relationships and incentivized partner programs, there’s nothing like Siren that makes this possible in a way that where you can create the program, manage the program, automate the program.

It’s– And create different types of programs. It’s so cool. It’s so flexible. Thank you, Alex, for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. 

Alex Standiford: Thanks for having me, Chris. Always a pleasure.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.