Peter Koning: Hey, everybody. It's Peter Koning from Affiliate-Software-Review.com with a very important call today. I'm interviewing the VP of business development of Webmasterchecks. I have Mark on the line. Mark, are you there?

Mark: Yes, Peter. I am.

Peter: Great. Thanks for coming on the call. I think we should just launch right into it. I'm very curious to learn a bit more about your company and a little bit of background on how you guys came to be. Then we can get into some of the benefits you can offer merchants that are running or starting affiliate programs.

 

I'd also like to hear a bit of your perspective on where you see things going down the road as far as affiliate marketing, and payment systems, and maybe if you have some international aspects too, what you guys are doing too, that would be great.

Why don't we get started, and if you could maybe tell us a little bit first about your company, how you guys came to be, and what kind of offerings do you have today?

Mark: The company started about four years ago. The reason it was started was because we saw that there are a lot of affiliate networks and programs out there, and softwares out there. The software can be very robust and great software, but the one piece that was missing that people that own the software kept asking about was how do you do payouts? How do you send the checks out? How do you do the PayPals, or the wires, or the ACHs?

 

After reading message boards for quite some time and seeing people ask for this, and not having a service out there, with our background - I have a little background in banking - we figured it'd be pretty easy to set that up.

We got that started, and then we put the website up. We got the systems up and the processes. Then we started getting clients, and then we just grew from there.

As far as what are our strong points, it's a stable business, and it's a good business to where you get feedback from your customers, and you change your system processes around in order to make them more customer-friendly. Then you make sure your website's very strong, and you make sure that people talk about you by word of mouth.

That's the first step because you have to have a very strong foundation in my opinion. After that, it comes into marketing, and then getting your links out there, and networking, and so on and so forth.

But as far as how we got started, that's pretty much it.

Peter: OK. Can you maybe outline a little bit about what is it that you offer, and how is your service positioned? Is it a money-saver, or is it a revenue-generator, or a bit of both? Just give us an outline of what's your elevator story or your executive summary of what you guys do.

Mark: OK. Well, we're a company that works with affiliate programs and networks in order to help them get their payments out to their affiliates every single week, or every couple weeks, or every month. Affiliate programs, it's pretty easy to get the software, but the part that's missing is how people do the payments. If you own or run a program, you've got to do the checks yourself, and do the PayPal and the wires, and then keep track of the accounting, and then get the reports to your affiliates, and take care of the customer service.

 

With Webmasterchecks, that's where you get all of that. What you do is you send us a file with the payees and how much to pay them out, and then you send us the money.

Then we will take that and issue checks, or wires, or PayPal. We send them out to your affiliates, and then we'll get you a report, and we'll get your affiliates tracking information on all the payments.

We'll do that every week, every two weeks, and we take care of all of that. Then if there are checks that are uncashed - they expire after I believe six months - we'll cancel them and then go put it right back in your account.

As far as the payments for affiliate programs and networks, you go to us, and we'll take care of everything.

Peter: Can you give us an idea... I personally have affiliates for a couple of my e-books and information products, but the volumes for me are not that high. They're all happy getting PayPal, because it's kind of in an Internet marketing space. So I just pay my PayPal now and then, and it seems to work for me. I'm probably not a good candidate, but I would think there's a certain kind of profile you have of the ideal customer. At what kind of level would you be talking where it would be really worthwhile for them to outsource this to you guys?

Mark: Well, we have customers at all ranges. I think with the Internet, it's very easy to run a website from all around the world and operate them with an affiliate program online. But one of the few things that you have to actually be in the office for and do the work on is the payment side of it. With a service like ours, if you're one of those webmasters that likes to travel around the world and work from the villa here or there, you deal online with us, and we'll get your payments out.

 

In that sense, we have some customers that we'll send 10 checks a month out because it's easy for them to do, and they're willing to use us when they're even that small.

But then it really gets into the bigger networks and programs to where we get 1, 000 checks out in a day, and so on and so forth. That's where our system is more robust, but I think we would rather have a lot more of the smaller clients because it makes our business a little stronger, having a solid and diverse base.

Peter: The checks, are they mailed out from the U.S., or do you have other mailing drops that they are coming out from as well?

Mark: We're currently dropping into the US, and then we hope by the end of this year we'll have a few banks set up in Europe. Check me there. Right now we do have an EU solution, but on top of that we're hoping to get some other banks. Can I talk about checks for a second?

Peter: Sure, absolutely.

Mark: OK. All right. The important thing is if you're a company that sends out checks, then a big part of it is your actual check. The thing people actually get in the mail. I've gotten a lot of checks. You look at them, and they are flimsy. They just look kind of cheap. What we have is we have a custom check designed by Frank Abagnale, who was the character in "Catch Me if You Can."

Peter: That's right. I saw that movie. We watched it, actually, a couple of months ago on TV. I think he was like an expert. Unfortunately, he was being chased by the FBI because he was such an expert in checks, right?

Mark: Yeah. It was a great movie. I loved it. I saw it when it first came out in the theater. So, he is an authority on checks and an expert on check security and check fraud. He actually customized our checks for us. It's a special check that comes right from him. And it's got a lot of security features.

 

The thing with us is it is very easy to do check fraud. If you send checks out for $20 or $30 to all around the world, it is easy for somebody to just wash a check and change the amount and try to add a couple of zeros on and get it by you. As far as our company goes, it is very important that our systems are all very secure. They use positive pay. We have a strong check rule. We will only use these checks. No other checks.

Peter: OK. That sounds like a really good differentiator you guys have over, I guess, traditional companies. Just because, as you know in the affiliate marketing business, people could be anywhere. Like you said earlier, they could be sitting on a beach in Thailand. Their company is based out of Russia, but they want to send some secure checks out. Their affiliates could be anywhere, just like they are, right? The chances for fraud just go up exponentially when you have all these different countries and scenarios involved. That sounds like you've got that covered off.

Mark: Well, you try to get as covered as much as you can. The problem is, once you run a business on certain margins, all it takes is one guy washing a check for $40, 000. The bank cashes it, and you're fighting with the bank for a year. You're in a really tough spot. That's a position you really don't want to be in.

Peter: OK. So, it sounds like the security has definitely been addressed there.

Mark: Right.

Peter: OK. Now, tell me a little bit more about your European solution. You mentioned that you have an EU solution. How did that come about, and how does that work?

Mark: Well, when we started our business we wanted to scale it up. It was obviously very important to get checks out of US banks. That was the first step. We have people asking about it on the European solution. We always send checks out in Euros out of Europe. I think the next phase of our growth is we are going to get banks in...To me the reason is that it will make it very, very quick for affiliates to cash checks. I don't think it's that much of a problem right now, but as far as the next level in growth I think that would be the next step to make it more convenient for some affiliates to get paid quicker.

Peter: OK. And do you have any sort of tips or advice that you give to your clients that are running affiliate programs as far as paying their affiliates and what kind of things they should be doing or not be doing?

Mark: Well, it is very competitive out there, even more so now. So if you're running an affiliate program, you've got to really bend over backwards for affiliates and all. They know that if I just offer PayPal and checks, I'll get this many affiliates. But if I add these money options like RevUpCard and Moneybookers, I'll get another 10% here, 12% here, 5% here. That does kind of add up. It's almost necessary because right now this industry is looking at the pennies. As far as having a diverse range of options, that's important. But then also, if your operations can only get payments out let's say once a month and your affiliates want it weekly or even quicker than that, then firms like ours make the process very automatic and simple for you.

 

We work with people that own programs and networks. We know their business. We know what they want. They want affiliates to send more traffic, better conversion, and more money. Everyone is fighting pretty hard about that. They're all trying to compete for that. It is very difficult to do so.

So, clients of ours, we want to really ensure that we make it really simple for their affiliates to get their money, and the customer service. In fact later on this year, we hope to unveil a system that makes the customer service very easy for affiliates to get. They can just go to our site and put their check number in, and then you can see when it was sent, when you should expect it, and then have a way to contact us for any questions. Just make it really simple for our clients' affiliates after getting paid and all the supporting after that.

Peter: Wow, that's great. I'm an affiliate for over a hundred different merchants. Some of them won't send me a check. I'm not getting a hundred checks a day, but I'll get a check from someone, and it might be every six months just because I'm not even hitting the threshold until then. I have no clue even sometimes what it's for. So you're saying that that feature might actually help in those situations.

Mark: Yeah. I used to work in accounting, myself, and it would be a pain in the butt to get a check or a wire, and you're not sure who it is from. So if it has our name on it, you can go to our website, put the check number in, and see exactly who it is from. You can get all of your accounting from there.

Peter: That sounds awesome.

Mark: Yeah.

Peter: That sounds like a really good feature for affiliates. I know some super affiliates that are into five figures a month, and sometimes they'll get the regular, big checks, but then there's these little ones that they just have no clue. And like you said, for accounting purposes, you need to know where it came from so you can record it properly in your systems, otherwise it's just kind of like a random income and you can't really account for it.

Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Peter: So tell me a bit about what sort of trends you've been seeing. We talked a little earlier about how affiliate marketing definitely seems to be growing. Here we are in 2009, and the economy is maybe not doing the greatest in North America, but at least from the affiliate-marketing point of view, from what I see, it's been pretty strong. What kind of trends are you seeing in the affiliate-marketing industry and where it's going?

Mark: Well, I might see a continued consolidation. I see kind of a separation. You have the affiliates, they're getting more specialized in their own principles. And then you have kind of the newcomers, they're the ones that are working this part-time. To the ones that are getting stronger, you see them kind of pulling away. I'd say the majority of our payments are for very small amounts. But the ones that are for very high amounts, those are getting much higher, only growing. So I'd say the past year and a half, year or so, I think affiliates, the ones that are serious about it are getting much better at what they do and learning a lot more. I'm not sure whether they're going into all the various principles, like online marketing of search engines and so on and so forth, but I see the really good ones pulling out, making more money than before.

Peter: OK. Well, that's promising, if you're an affiliate or you're a merchant looking for some of those big affiliates.

Mark: Absolutely. Hey, Peter, can I say something?

Peter: Sure.

Mark: We were looking for an affiliate system, actually about a year and a half ago, and the first resource we went to was Affiliate Software Review. We went through that whole list, and then we ended up deciding on one of two systems. It was either iDevDirect or JROX. And that came from looking at your comparison sheet and doing this. I just want to say that your site, I think, is a really great site and a great resource for people, they're trying to figure out what program is good, 50, 80, whatever is out there.

Peter: Thanks for the testimonial. [laughs]

Mark: I'm sorry, what did you say?

Peter: Thanks for the testimonial.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a great service, and I don't see anyone out there even close to what you've got.

Peter: Yeah. I mean, I've tried to keep it, in some ways, kind of one-dimensional in the sense that I don't have a lot of subjective information on there. If you go in there, you can see that it's basically, "Does this platform have this feature? Yes, no, or it's limited, or it costs extra." But I don't really give my opinion. The ones you mentioned, and there's a few others, those are all solid products. But I try to stay out of pricing and sort of the subjective reviews that are out there, because most of those subjective reviews are written by affiliates, and they're pushing one option versus another, and pricing can change.

 

So I still leave it up to my subscribers to make the decision and to see how the pricing might be different, because there's promotions going on all the time, and I don't have time to update all that. At least some of the bad ones that are out there, I definitely flag them on my site.

There are some platforms that I'm not ashamed to say that I just won't recommend them, because I've done the homework and I've investigated some products that, clearly, there's a controversy around them because the original software developer was ripped off by them, or all the references that they give are down. That's a fact. So I'm confident in giving out sort of the red-flag ones. But all the others I try and keep a little bit more objective, as far as features go, and then stay out of the controversies.

Mark: Well, good. Yeah, those parts of your site just shine through.

Peter: Excellent. Thanks. One more thing I wanted to ask you as far as your product. If somebody wants to make an inquiry into your service, can you give my listeners here and readers on the blog a special offer? And how would they go about getting that offer and so on?

Mark: Well, I must say that anybody that comes from your or blog or mentions you or your company, we will completely waive our setup fee for that. We'll find a way to waive our setup fee. So if they from you or they mention your company, that is completely waived.

Peter: That's great. What are the steps they have to take to get in touch with you guys and mention this offer?

Mark: OK. They come to our website and call the phone number down, or contact us through the online forms. But just mention that, "Hey, I saw you on Peter Koning, " or "He mentioned this," and we'll give you that to waive the setup fee.

Peter: OK, that's great. And I'll make sure I put the link in this interview as well so that they can just easily click it and it takes them through to your site.

Mark: Very cool.

Peter: OK, Mark. Is there anything else you wanted to add as far as Webmaster Checks, or anything else as far as payment systems?

Mark: Well, I don't think so. I just want to ask you to keep your site and keep it going and keep sending those newsletters.

Peter: [laughs] OK. I promise I'll do that.

Mark: [laughs] Good.

Peter: OK, Mark. Thanks so much for the time, and I'll get this up on the blog shortly. So I'm just going to hit the "stop recording" here.

Mark: OK, Pete. Thanks a lot.