Affiliate Marketing in Covid Times

We talked to Sergey Gaydar, CEO & founder at Indoleads.com on it thrives in helping its advertisers and affiliates around the world to grow their revenues.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Sergey Gaydar: We are doing fine. Luckily none of my family members has been infected so far. I guess our natural cautiousness and attitude to hygiene help us to avoid it. Moreover, the number of cases at the places where my different family members, for now, are not huge. Hopefully, that situation is going to be over soon. 

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Indoleads.com.

Sergey Gaydar: I’m CEO, and Founder of Indoleads is a Premium affiliate network with HQ in Malaysia and offices in Brazil, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India & Russia. We started as a small company with 3 employees in a coworking space in Kuala Lumpur, and now after 3 years, we keep growing and launching new products for affiliate marketers. I’ve been doing what I do since I was 17 years old (20 years) and started as an affiliate for US-based pharma companies, then decided to try other businesses to get more experience in management and general marketing. At the age of 25, we launched the very first fashion e-commerce brand in Russia, and after 2 years of operation, we were acquired for 40M USD. After that, I decided to move back to my main profession and starting with a small digital agency, and at the same time, I was building the core product for Indoleads Network, a very flexible and innovative platform for affiliate marketing Oneklix, where I put all my experience and knowledge to make it perfect for any advertiser or affiliate marketer. 

How does Indoleads.com innovate? 

Sergey Gaydar: We built a platform for affiliate marketing very fast, reliable, and easy-to-use for any kind of business. Our platform could be utilized as the main affiliate portal for brands or as an all-in-one hub for an affiliate manager where they can successfully manage any type of traffic and analyze ROI. Plus, for that, we are building a DSP platform, which will be a new way for many affiliates to buy traffic.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Sergey Gaydar: Covid 19 impacted many of our clients from the travel industry. For a moment, we started feeling that in our cash flow, but at the same time, the e-commerce niche increased the number of transactions since people started ordering everything online. And finally, we discovered a hidden gem, which is an online education, and apparently, growth is also related to local lockdowns and measurements, forcing people to stay at home. For now, even travel is getting better and hopefully for next year with new knowledge people will slowly but surely start traveling again. 

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Sergey Gaydar: For us, the main concern was how to work permanently remotely and whether it affects our company’s performance. But for now, I can tell that way of working doesn’t affect our company’s efficiency and basically, most of our employees even after even all measurements are going to be lifted will stay in “work from home mode.” 

How do you deal with stress and anxiety?

Sergey Gaydar: Personally, for me, there are three things that help in reducing the level of stress, i.e., chess, sports, and computer games. These help to change your focus and relax your mind from redundant anxiety. Thanks to new technologies, we can now have a personal trainer on our smartphone, and even during the dark times of lockdown, you can stay fit. 

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Sergey Gaydar: Our competitors are many old networks like Admitad, Tradedoubler, ClickBank, etc. But all of them would agree with me that our main competitor is ourselves. In that industry, you must be very flexible and prompt to see every time signal coming from the feedback of your either advertisers or affiliates. And hope you cope with those signals depend on your company success. There is no “silver bullet” to win the game in a short distance, but with long term and very wise strategy, you can gain a lot of results. 

Your final thoughts?

Sergey Gaydar: For that moment of our life, I hope many people understand that digital businesses of any kind grow stronger than traditional businesses. Impact of Covid shows us how we should change our business models and drag very traditional business to online also. In the nearest time, we will see more marketplaces for small merchants and other small businesses because many entrepreneurs understood the importance of being “online.” That will make us less vulnerable to such situations in the future. 

Your website?

https://indoleads.com