Issue #52: Affiliate PR is the channel that you’re missing out on
Featuring a conversation with the founder of Praize.
Hi everyone. Wow, has it been a weird week? Between the inauguration and it somehow still being the middle of January, I’ve been feeling a little off. I don’t think I’m alone, so please let me know what you’re doing to help offset this strange time of year.
Today, I’m talking to Emma Grace Moon, founder and CEO of Praize, where she specializes in Affiliate PR for DTC brands, using data-driven strategies to transform PR into revenue-generating engines and revolutionizing how DTC brands approach PR. Emma has a Substack called
– go check it out! She also lives in Paris, where I imagine that she has an incredibly chic existence.
Our conversation this week covers Affiliate PR: what it is, how to do it right, and how it can drive impactful revenue for brands. Going into our chat, I had very little knowledge of this world, so I was super excited to learn more from Emma about this historically untapped channel and how she got started in the Affiliate PR space in the first place.
As a quick run-down for anyone who’s as unfamiliar as I was, Affiliate PR merges earned media with trackable results.
Affiliate PR combines traditional press coverage with performance metrics, helping brands secure and optimize valuable media placements to drive revenue.
When publications feature your brand in content like gift guides, product roundups, or product reviews, they typically earn commissions from purchases made through their links.
This creates opportunities to develop strategic growth initiatives that scale both press coverage and revenue.
Alright, now that that’s out of the way, let’s dive into it! The written interview is condensed for clarity and brevity, but you can also listen to the full audio interview below if you’d like.
CA: Hi, Emma. I'm so happy that you're joining us today to talk a little bit about Praize and what you've been working on in the world of Affiliate PR. Let’s start with a little bit about yourself and how you came to start Praize.
EGM: We're an affiliate marketing studio that specializes in Affiliate PR. We help brands track and scale revenue through PR, making the PR channel a top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel channel.
My background is mainly working in-house at direct consumer brands. And I stumbled across affiliate marketing when my boss at the time told me that I had to prove out the revenue I was driving for the business or else I was fired. I had an oh crap moment where I needed to figure out how to track the revenue from what I was doing. I was actually doing influencer marketing at the time. So I started to experiment with how affiliate marketing could help my efforts with influencer marketing and I saw that it actually worked really well – tracking the performance and proving out the return on investment.
And then I got a tip from a friend in the publication world that this same method was going to actually take over and impact the PR space. So I segued to that avenue after I got that tip, and it's been great ever since.
CA: Can you tell me a little bit about some of your favorite projects that you've had the chance to work on since you've started Praize?
EGM: One of my favorite things that we do at Praize is uncover the curtain that has been in front of PR for so many brands.
One client that we work with now is Great Jones, a cookware company. They came to us frustrated and not understanding how much revenue was coming through their press mentions and not understanding how to reinvigorate or reinvent the wheel with their PR channel. They had exhausted their list of editors. I mean, a lot of brands have this pain point where they've had an agency for a year, they've gotten the placements, and there's not really a next step to understand, like, How do we grow this even more? Is there even an opportunity for growth beyond this, or is it just re-pitching the same publications and editors and getting the same coverage and not knowing what's coming from it revenue-wise?
They came to us with those frustrations. And the beauty about Affiliate PR is that you can track the revenue coming from coverage and you can build a growth marketing strategy for PR, which has never really been done before Affiliate PR came to be. So with Great Jones, we came in and we completely audited and redid their entire PR approach and their affiliate program and scaled their Affiliate PR efforts to be a chunk of revenue. And this was through more of a growth marketing, Affiliate PR approach, not a traditional PR approach.
CA: Can you dig into that growth marketing angle a little bit and how exactly you can track revenue through Affiliate PR?
EGM: The first thing is, every brand that wants to have an Affiliate PR program and work with publications in an affiliate capacity has to have an affiliate network like ShareASale or Impact Radius for example. It's sort of like, you can't have a website without Shopify. You can't have an affiliate program without an affiliate network like ShareASale or Impact Radius in place. So, the first important thing to know is, do you have an affiliate program and can you offer commission to publications?
“The whole reason Affiliate PR exists is because publications have reached a point where they need to keep their lights on, and they're no longer getting traditional paid advertisements from businesses, and they're making a chunk of change through the purchases that you and I both make through publications every single day.”
Once brands have an affiliate program and are offering publications commission, when they are mentioned in the Best Makeup Foundation roundups in InStyle or Byrdie or Vogue for example, they are tracking orders coming through that coverage and offering a cut of that order to the publication. Brands who offer a commission to publications will get a higher opportunity for coverage. The benefit of this, unlike other growth marketing channels like Facebook ads, is that you're not paying until you get an order. You're not just throwing money at a fire and just hoping something sticks – you're only paying them if they convert to a customer. Then, you can use the data you're gathering and build growth strategies to scale that revenue.
CA: So what's an example of a client’s learnings from Affiliate PR that they've implemented in their strategy?
EGM: So, one client that we work with is Kinfield, an outdoor skincare brand. They were featured in The Strategist, and it did really, really well. The performance was just outstanding and it caught the eyes of the Affiliate Managers at The Strategist.
Every year, The Strategist holds a two-day sale where it's their editor's favorite products that are a percentage off for a limited time. And The Strategist hand-picks brands to be part of this. It sounds like just a sale, but this drives a ton of revenue. I'm talking thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. Because we did so well in one of their roundups, they handpicked Kinfield to be part of this two-day Strategist sale. And we were able to grow the relationship and further grow revenue for the remainder of the year through that opportunity.
CA: What are some of the major pain points that Affiliate PR can help with?
EGM: I think the pain points that Affiliate PR solves that most brands don't think of is, it helps prove out the return on investment. So if you have a PR agency and your CFO is like, Why are you paying this PR agency to get coverage? But you don't know what revenue is coming from PR, Affiliate PR is going to help you answer your CFO. And it's not just creating revenue, it's creating an understanding of a top-of-funnel channel, when it's just so hard for some channels' ROI to be proved out.
Then a second thing is, if you've exhausted your editor list. Some brands get to a point where they know every single editor at every single publication. They’ve pitched them before and reach the point of just getting the same kind of coverage, but want to figure out a different avenue that they can go down to reignite their PR channel.
Affiliate PR offers you that opportunity, so you can get picked for The Strategist two-day sale if you haven't in the past. And it helps the longevity of the PR channel too. We've been working with clients for three years plus, and that's rare for PR agencies.
CA: I'd love to hear a little bit about the Affiliate PR masterclass that you've launched, what people can learn from the course, and how you came to launch it in the first place.
EGM: I launched this masterclass because Affiliate PR has only been around since 2018 or 2019, right? So it's still fairly new when you think about it. And during the beginning years, me and maybe three other people were really the only people that were doing Affiliate PR. Now there are a lot of people saying they do Affiliate PR.
In 2020, when publications had to publish everything online, and everyone was shopping online, a lot of businesses boomed. Brands needed to figure out how they could make revenue online more than ever, and Affiliate PR boomed as a result. That said, there's a lot of misinformation about Affiliate PR because [...] the PR industry was a little fearful over it. A lot of agencies started putting Affiliate on their website to save clients. It was no longer just relationship-building with publications. You actually had to have a numbers brain and a growth marketing brain in order to scale. And I think there was a lot of fear around that, which I totally understand. But as a result, a lot of misinformation started to spread. I figured it would be worth it to have one hub for people to go to understand how to do this so brands can feel confident when they are questioning, Should we do Affiliate PR? They feel confident in their answer and they feel confident of how they want to go about it.
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Affiliate PR is great, but how great is it? Some examples of some stats that we've seen from our clients through this is, on average, annually, our clients generate upwards of $1M dollars a year in Affiliate PR revenue. This is, as I mentioned, unlocking an entirely new channel that is substantial. It's not a small marketing channel. Another thing to think about is securing coverage. On average, our clients get 50+ pieces of coverage in digital publications every single month, which is huge. These are some examples to paint the picture that Affiliate PR can help turn up the notch for brands.
“The masterclass is definitely an educational resource, but it also is a strategic partner for brands as well. So it will teach you from A to Z what Affiliate PR is, why it's important, and how to do it. But it also has a lot of resources for brands to get started after they're done with the masterclass. It has an email list of the right people at publications to pitch to, it has pitching templates, it's really one resource that people can just go to and trust to feed out all the misinformation.”
Thank you so much, Emma! Praize is offering a free 3-week email course so you can get a sneak peek into their Affiliate PR Masterclass and learn more about Affiliate PR. It includes what actually makes a brand successful at Affiliate PR, which industry "best practices" are actually holding you back, and how successful brands forecast their Affiliate PR revenue. You can sign up HERE.
Today’s post was sponsored by Praize.
So insightful!!
so interesting! loved this one