Interview with Olya Ashykhmina Head of Swanker.club the first finance platform in Ukraine
Swanker.Club is the first finance/forex platform that allows affiliates, brokers, and partner programs to communicate directly with each other. The platform offers ready-made deals for affiliates, brokers, and networks, providing a bank of promotional materials, cases, and helpful articles in the financial verticals for driving traffic. Today, we conducted an interview with Olya Ashykhmina, Head of Swanker.club, who will tell us how the idea of creating a marketplace for affiliates emerged, who the service can benefit and how, how to become a partner, and share exclusive insights about the upcoming 2024 updates.
Well, let’s start with the first insider question that will help our readers get to know you. What is Swanker.club? What is the mission of your media?
Oh, that’s a tough one. Swanker is like a one-stop shop for all things in the financial vertical. We call it a ‘media’ resource but there’s so much more to it, in fact, than just reading a fancy magazine online.
You’ve got the community hangout, you’ve got the marketplace for finance aces, a resource hub, and of course, the media playground I’ve been talking about.
This is what you get when a bunch of super smart and tech-savvy guys get together and start throwing ideas around. By the way, Swanked is made and run by a Ukrainian team. The idea was to help affiliates find that tender work-life balance while being aware of what’s going on in the finance world.
Speaking about the target audience, to whom your service will be useful?
Our platform has two components: the media, apparently, and a marketplace with Meetmarket. They bring together several audiences.
Media is more about inspiration, analytics, and educational content for newbies in the finance space or for switches. We are actively growing and expanding and at this point, we’re ready to welcome gambling affiliates too.
Meet market is made for people with hands-on experience with these verticals like solo affiliates, teams, networks, and brands looking for new partners.
Awesome! You have a lot of features that are really useful for partners. It seems there are no analogs on the Ukrainian market. Tell us, how did the idea of creating such a unique marketplace for affiliates come about?
Swanker.club was created as the logical result of years of trying, testing, winning and failing. During that time, it was kind of challenging to find any relevant — I’m not talking about quality — content out there. This is where our founders got this idea to team up and create a one-stop shop for affiliates, networks, and brands.
We spend a lot of time gathering statistics and analytics, and also getting people to like Swanker, especially the partners we trust. We do all this job so that our customers won’t have to. It’s very basic, down to its core: all we want is to help people.
Always curious to know who stands behind such global ideas that change the market. Speaking of your team working on Swanker.club, how would you describe them?
Let me break it down for you a bit. There’s an entire team behind Swanker, of developers and designers, content writers and SMM specialists, PR guys, and account managers. That’s a bunch of people to produce content, take over social posting, and of course, help affiliates on the platform. Which makes it hard for me to condense it into just a few words but if I had to that would be: innovation, expertise, and dedication.
That’s who we are.
Since we’ve already got to know you better and learned about your team, I’d like to ask a few technical questions about how it all works. For example, How do you collect statistics, and how do you ensure reliability?
I’d say, better safe than sorry. We take stats from our partners but we don’t work with just any partners—only those who have continuously proven they can be trusted. The verification system we’ve built is very effective: we double-check statistics by looking at the original screenshots and we always double-check the numbers with media buying teams.
On a real example, it’s always easier to understand how effective your work is. So, it would be interesting to know about a successful case. Could you share one?
Honestly, with more than 1,300 marketers being active users on our platform, it’s hard to think of any distinguished personal case. In general, networks are buying ads on the platform and sponsorship for events, and they’re given all the opportunities to explore where their audience is. Sounds like a successful case of cooperation to me.
The community grows bigger, day after day. We have all the data, it’s a metric that is very easy to track. I’d say our partners trust us — and we appreciate their support. Most projects in our domain are placed under very strict NDA regulations, so I’m not going to throw around any names.
Our platform educates marketers, we let them go creative and take on risks, check their theories, find out how good their creatives are, and if something doesn’t work out — find another approach. We’re talking about affiliate marketing here, and it’s changing as we’re having this conversation now. As an affiliate marketer, you must continue testing your hypotheses, that’s the only way you can succeed.
After such impressive facts about you, everyone wonders how to become your partner. What main points do you consider?
On our platform, we give people a verification mark — which is not something you can buy, in fact, you only get it by proving your worthiness. To do that, to start giving out those marks, we first ask the company to give us some contact details of their partners. Then we pick up the phone and make a call, and if you see that checkmark right next to the partner it would mean their partners confirmed the details.
It’s a bit lengthy process but we wouldn’t lie to our users. If we say we check those accounts personally, it means we, in fact, do exactly that.
In what verticals can we find partners on Swanker.club? Any expansion plans?
Only finance/forex for now. The next vertical that we’re actively preparing for testing and launch is gambling. We have already started inviting some of our partners from the gambling industry to join our test group.
And finally, as 2023 is coming to an end, everyone is summing up and making plans for the coming year. Perhaps you could share what we can expect from Swanker.club in 2024?
At the end of this year, we’re launching a new membership system for our private club. The access to some popular features on Swanker.club website will be limited by monthly subscription and available to members only.
The subscription “package” consists of:
We’re going to split the platform into two parts — the media — for all readers — which includes cases, info materials, events — and a private club for those who have already been in this field long enough or are experienced enough to get a verification checkmark from our admins.
Recent Posts
SUBSCRIBE
ENTER YOUR EMAIL TO GET WEEKLY NEWS