ROTE 032: Oliver Roup Wants to Make Every Link Intelligent and Valuable
Imagine how many web sites and blogs there are in the world that link to products and services directly, with no affiliate link in place. While affiliate marketing is a way of life for most of us here, it’s a completely different world to anyone outside of the online marketing space.
Amazon.com is one of the most popular sites in the world and the immediate go to source for buying anything online. When someone writes about their favorite movie or product through a blog post or article, they will usually link directly to the Amazon product page where someone could buy it. More often then not, the site owner or author simply has no idea that they could be using an affiliate link and earning a few dollars on any referred sales or leads sent to the site.
While Amazon is just one example, there are millions of other sites and affiliate programs that operate under these same principles. Imagine how much money is being left on the table my having natural links in place instead of affiliate based leads?
This is exactly what we are going to be talking about in the latest episode of the Rise of the Entrepreneur.
Rise of the Entrepreneur – Episode 32 with Oliver Roup
Oliver Roup is the founder and CEO of VigLink, a company that helps content creators make money through the use of affiliate marketing, while not having to deal with all the complexities of individual tracking, manually creating links and joining multiple programs.
Before getting active in the online marketing space, Oliver had accumulated quite an exciting resume of previous work with Space X, Microsoft, Paul Allen and many others. However, what might be Oliver’s most exciting experience to date was taking his business at Viglink from an idea to the flourishing business it is today.
For Oliver this isn’t something that would happen overnight. Instead it was a long journey of meeting with investors and VCs, trying to convince them that his idea was worth their time and investment. After many failed attempts, Oliver finally found an investor that was interested and things started to move fast!
Years later and over $20 million dollars in funding to date, the company continues to grow and scale in size while also helping sites of all sizes make money with their content while also connecting them with some of the largest brands and advertisers in the world.
Talking Points Discussed in this Episode:
- Oliver’s process for turning his idea into a real business
- $20 million in funding and lessons learned
- Studying link structure across the internet and how people link to sites
- Using affiliate marketing as the foundation for content monetization
- Creating an all in one system for link management and compensation
- How advertisers are paying top dollar for top placement with Viglink
- Providing partners and clients with superior tracking and analytics
- Three great Q&A questions for Oliver in the Pit of Fire
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