Ok so I’m not sure if I’m the first one to write about this…but the Top Affiliate Challenge TV show officially sucks. It looked like it could be O.K. at best, but after finding out how it works and watching the first episode, I can confirm why I knew it would be a waste of time and money to audition and try to get on the show. Here’s why :

• Their whole “business model” for competition is stupid. The goal is to make “as much money as possible through affiliate marketing”. They look at revenue as making money, and not profit. So a team can spend $5,000 in PPC and only make $1,000 in revenue. That’s a $4,000 net loss but in the eyes of TAC, you just made $1,000.
• How do they expect you to learn and get a profitable campaign running in like 2 hours? The team that wins will simply be the team that takes a little loss and switches their campaigns over to the team’s affiliate link. I was working with Team XY7 a little and was about to move over a campaign that does ~$1,500/day (they would still fund it), but just thinking about doing something like that for this show is completely pointless. That’s totally against the point of having a challenge to find the “top affiliate”.
• The camera work looks like it was done with a $100 Flip video camera and edited by a 15 year old freshman in high-school. There’s cheesy ass hues on the border of the screen, ridiculous looking fonts, the whole thing looks insanely cheap. They’ll be talking and it will just break the frame and cut to a new one, it’s not smooth at all.
• The host looks like she just learned how to read and is reading the script off a piece of paper. Oh wait, you’ll see her looking at the ground all the time, and the awesome camera man has her script showing laying on the floor.
• The gurus pulled together their elite resources and drove a massive $200 revenue for the win on the first day.
• I just skimmed through the second episode which leaked on Google Video. Team XY7 lost, so one of their teammates was going to get voted off. Then they had an individual immunity challenge, somebody from a different team won it. Why the hell would someone that wouldn’t get voted off anyways win an immunity ring? The guy is a saint though and ends up giving it to someone from XY7. The hostess then tells him it doesn’t even matter, because that person is safe anyways. Umm…pointless?

I have nothing against Thor as he was nice to me when I chatted with him about auditioning, but the show is a complete mess. I can’t even sit through a full episode without being completely bored to death, the show teaches absolutely nothing about affiliate marketing, and since it’s not even entertaining it’s completely pointless to watch.

One thing you can relate an affiliate campaign to is having a baby. First let’s look at what having a baby is like…

You’re all excited you’re going to have one. You get the baby’s room all ready and primped up, there’s cute crap all over, you’re telling all your friends about your baby that’s coming. You’ve invested all this money in your baby and pumped for it to come. Now after all this setting up and waiting, the baby has been born. Your first initial thoughts are “awe it’s so beautiful”, but you know that sucker is mangled and bloody when it first pops out. For the first month or 8 weeks or whatever (I haven’t had a baby yet), it cries, poops, keeps you up at night, and makes you a wreckless mess. It suckles from your teet (or your wife’s), and drains you of milk. Finally it starts to learn, optimize itself, and starts pooping in the toilet. We still have accidents, but it matures and eventually gets better. If you raise it right, you have a nice kid on your hands that grows up well, gets a job, and then takes care of you when you get old. If you raise it poorly, your child sucks and continues to wreak havoc on your life.

Now let’s compare it to affiliate campaigns. You get all excited when you first hear some good things about an offer, just like when you hear about having a baby. You invest money designing a page, getting content written, programming the tracking and everything in; all before the campaign goes live. Maybe you get excited and tell your friends you’re pumped about this new campaign you’re launching soon. Now it’s time for the campaign to go live. The first day it goes live, although you love the potential it has, it’s going to probably *look* like a mess. You’ll be testing out a ton of keywords and ad variations, and if you do it right you’ll be losing some money because not everything is going to convert. Now it’s time for you to become a good parent. You’ll go sleepless nights working on the campaign and it will stress you and keep you up. It suckles from your teet of wealth, and drains your cash. You need to spend time optimizing the campaign and making sure it grows and loses less and less money over time. If you optimize correctly, you have a great campaign that makes you money into your elder years. If you don’t optimize properly or the niche is a dud (ok comparing that to babies would just be mean lol so I didn’t), you’re out of luck and it does nothing but lose you money and cause chaos and depression in your life.

So what does any of this have to do with you? Well aside from a slightly comical comparison, the above is true. You’re going to lose money when you first start a campaign, and you need to realize that it’s just like having a kid. If you get through all the pooping and crying your campaign is going to do and optimize it right, you may just end up with a winner.

Congrats to Aorson for coming in 3rd place. All these articles are awesome and I’m going to continue to post all the entries because we can all learn from them.

These five mistakes, once remedied, had the most immediate and/or dramatic affect on my bottom line.

1. Being too money conscious.

Whoever said ‘it takes money to make money’ hit the nail on the head. I am over conscious about debt and getting out of it so for a long time I was really averse to spending more than a pittance on testing my adwords.

Big mistake.

The stats I was getting back for testing in the low-end of the bidding spectrum (roughly 1/3 of whatever the high bid currently is on Google) were unreliable and in the process I lost as much as a few thousand before turning any profit. Or, worse, I was completely off the mark about which ad was best suited for what time frame, which demographic, etc.

Investing heavily and slowly decreasing my bids (a tip I picked up Uberaffiliate, actually), tracking tracking tracking everything religiously, and tweaking on a daily basis has produced results, on average, 3 x faster (e.g. if it took me 3 weeks to decide before, it only takes about 1 now) and at half the cost I would have spent using my old risk-averse method.

There are no more surprises about ad performance anymore, to boot.

2. Being over-diversified.

In the ‘more is better’ theory of marketing, we assume that if we know Uberaffiliate has made most of his money in 4 or 5 service or product genres, then, by God, we’ll be able to get at least as far by doing 10. Or 15. 20, even! You get the point.

Having too many irons in the fire is a classic mistake, and one I fell face-forward into.

At first I spent far too much time attempting to monotenize landing pages in product genres I really had no knowledge of but saw a high commission on (which means you can expect it to be oversaturated). As soon as I trimmed the fat from marketing 11 different campaigns down to the 4 producing the greatest ROI, I reinvested the funds allocated for the 7 axed campaigns and saw a boost in profit within 48 hours.

It also upped my quality-of-life factor significantly. Trying to stay abreast of 11 campaigns and tracking them all is time-consumptive and exhausting. I was able to start getting six or more hours of sleep again!

3. Not preselling hard enough and/ or not referring to deep links.

As a ⫸b, I creating landing pages that referred either to the homepage for the entity I was marketing or to a sub page (like the “Rods” section of Orvis.com, for example). I did not do enough to refer to a specific product, or advertise the features of a specific service.

Internet users are also becoming savvier and avoid paid ads or anything that appears to be an affiliate or third party link. I was shooting my legitimacy in the foot with these referrals.

My network manager was the first to point out this error. When I changed things up by preselling the product on my landing page and connecting to deep links, it accomplished three things:

a)With persuasive content you convince someone of the ease and necessity of inputting their information or why they need of the product. Priming boosted my CTR.

b) The user is expecting to arrive at the page you direct them to- either a fill-in form or a product purchase page (this locked in both my page’s and the product/ service’s legitimacy); and

c) If they have gotten this far, they are ready to provide the info or whip out a credit card.

4. Having too many distractions outside of affiliate marketing.

When I first learned about affiliate marketing, I had just read The Four Hour Workweek and was inspired to get something going as soon as possible. It was also the beginning of the semester, and I was going to school 3 nights a week and Saturday mornings on top of working full-time.

Needless to say, I couldn’t juggle a full-time job, school, and a web venture. Guess which one lost?

I lost almost all of the money I invested when I was trying to squeeze affiliate marketing in during my 2-4 hours of free time a week. Though I could make more money (day job) to cover my losses, the resulting discouragement was a different beast entirely.

Fortunately, when you hate your day job as much as I do, you get 40 hours a week of motivational reinforcement.

After my too-many-irons-in-the-fire semester, I took the next one off and started affiliate marketing after work. I set some ground rules: after dinner until around 10:30- I’m at my computer testing a new campaign, creating new pages, tweaking old ones, or catching up on AM-related correspondence. There’s no TV, no radio, I’m not trolling WickedFire/ DigitalPoint/ Google Reader and I don’t take personal calls. This might seem a little much, but it works for me and my bottom line. Your mileage may vary.

5. Not doing something soon enough.

affiliate marketing is a gyroscopic event.

Like learning how to ride a bike, the hardest part is just getting on. But once you get going- progress- like pedaling, gets easier and faster.

I spent far too much time trying to “learn” affiliate marketing by any other means than doing it. The hardest sale I ever made was my first, but by the process of getting to it, it’s also the one I learned the most from. Blogs, forums and even eBooks were all important to my familiarity in the beginning with the terms, process and basics about PPC and affiliate Marketing, but I can’t credit any with ensuring my success.

If you want to learn this business, do yourself a favor and start now.

Really.

Now.

Go out and buy Adobe Creative Suite CS3 or download a “how to” .pdf on Wordpress/ Joomla et al. Research the products, services, and networks you want to work with- but understand that the majority of the things that will make you money are not things you will read about in a forum. Spending $29.95 on an eBook is not going to miracle any money into your Paypal account. You have to do it and learn it for yourself.

Every day I work I learn about another plug-in, another code, another corner to cut, another keyword or negative or space to add, another thing to tweak above the fold… the list goes on. All of it enhances my bottom line.

Anyone can do this, but no one will hand you the keys to the castle. You buy them with time and effort.

Congrats to our 2nd place winner, Richard.

The 6 Biggest affiliate Marketing Mistakes I’ve Made – And What You Can Learn From Them

I have been affiliate marketing in one way or another for several years now, mainly using minisites in combination with search engine optimization (SEO) in order to drive traffic.

Because of that time I’ve probably made just about every affiliate marketing mistake possible but looking back there are 6 “biggies” that I’ve made that i think could have made a sizeable difference to how quickly I started to see results and the speed at which those results grew.

Since I started to fix these problems i have seen my results increase substantially so I’d encourage you to read on, honestly compare the mistakes I’ve made over the years with how *you* market affiliate programs online right now and as a result hopefully make a few changes to your strategies that will lead to a significant boost in results for you.

1) putting all my eggs into one basket

one site, one main affiliate offer, one search engine and one primary keyword worked for a while but when google changed it’s algorithm i sure felt like a chump as my income virtually dried up overnight. and that’s not an exaduration. putting all your eggs into one basket can lead to a very unstable business.

whether it’s getting hit with a google slap, dropped out of the search engines or having a merchant partner refuse to pay you for whatever reason if you haven’t got a backup plan then your affiliate marketing career cut be cut very short indeed.

even if you decide to specialise in one niche such as dating or credit cards, consider how you can diversify such as by using a few different affiliate offers, programs, websites and traffic strategies so that if one stops working you’re not going to lose your business overnight.

2) not testing different affiliate promotions

when the good times roll it’s too easy to see the commissions rolling in without trying any other offers. if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?

well, not quite in my experience.

i have had a couple of occasions where the checks kept coming and i put my feet up and took life easy for a while. then the sales started to dry up, or the promotion ended or they changed their terms and suddenly i was *forced* to find a new offer. next thing you know you find the new offer that you chucked online in next to no time is outpulling your old one by quite some margin and you have to wonder – how much more money *could* you have made if you weren’t quite so complacent?

the lesson here is clear – even if you have an offer that works, check with your affiliate manager on what else is converting well and split test them. sometimes you will pick the top converting offer in one niche and then weeks or months later a competing offer will come in that converts even better. or the same offer is runnig on another network, but with a better payout. except either your affiliate manager forgets to tell you, or you simply can’t be bothered to make changes to a campaign that’s already profitable.

be willing to put that extra effort in to tweak your marketing campaigns and achieve the very best results possible. it doesn’t just mean more potential profit for you – it also means if necessary you can afford to pay more for traffic and still stay in the black – which allows you to outcompete other, less careful affiliates.

3) getting the balance of analysis wrong

too many people, myself included when i first got started, suffer from “paralysis through analysis”. there is so much to think about, so much to learn and get right when you’re starting out that it can be hard to know where to start. so sometimes you don’t do anything at all. which obviously isn’t going to be earning you many commissions!

what seems to work better is just to jump in at the deep end. throw together a site. gather some links. buy some ads. and then analyse the results, and use these to improve.

most people do the analysis at the beginning and then next to none once they’ve launched a website or campaign. i’m suggesting far more the opposite. get started, then do your analysis to see which keywords are working, which offers are converting, what helped your search engine positioning, what was a waste of time and so on so over time you can develop your own “sixth sense” about what will work and what won’t.

you’ll also pick up business intelligence on things that work specifically for your niche that somebody new trying to enter it wouldn’t know. that’s valuable information and will help you keep ahead of the game.

another example of missing out due to lack of analysis *after* launching a site would be the one i built that was running smoothly on autopilot for months sucking in traffic from the search engines when i suddenly noticed i hadn’t made a sale in weeks when normally 2 days would have been unusual. it turned out that the merchant i was sending traffic to had changed their affiliate tracking software, and with it the url i was using to send them traffic so none of my conversions were being recorded.

luckily i had a good enough relationship with the merchant that they paid me a mutually-agreed sum to make up for it but it just goes to show how taking your eye off the ball can lead to frustration or even failure.

4) not knowing when to quit

we all know that quitting too soon can lead to failure but my problem has often been the opposite. i have been guilty of carrying on with a project working 12 hours a day to try and get something working long after i should have admitted defeat and tried something else.

some niches are just harder to make a go of than others. some buyers are particularly difficult to convert. some markets require pockets deeper than you may have to get a foothold. equally, you can fall into others where it seems so easy you can’t believe it. so make sure to give each marketing technique, each website, each affiliate offer a fair chance, but don’t be afraid to move on to greener pastures.

5) not scaling up a successful affiliate promotion

when i have found a niche that suddenly works well for me, i have been guilty of seeing the checks coming in and wanting to move onto the next thing rather than trying to scale up my results and become a major player in that field.

however, if you’re willing to take the time to do so, you can often negotiate higher commissions, recieve preferential treatment from your affiliate manager and find out about new promotions or conversion techniques that are working well before other smaller affiliates (if they find out at all!).

with the effort that you’ve put into finding the right keywords, ads, offers and so on aim to capitalize on that knowledge and try to wring every last cent out of a niche before moving on to your next victim!

6) neglecting the networking

there is a surprising amount of help available to you in the form of affiliate managers, informative blogs, forums, private mentoring and so on yet i have found it too easy in the past to focus 100% of my time on building pages, gathering links, testing offers and so on (the “mechanics”) that i’ve ignored the networking element.

paul has mentioned on several ocassions how much importance he puts on networking and how instrumental his blog has been in helping him succeed. it’s not just a matter of learning the ropes from others – though this can often help to cut short the learning curve by quite some time. it’s as much about learning what your target market is like. what keywords do they really use? what colors do they like? what “trust” factors can you add to your site to increase conversions? what sites do they hang out at that you could buy advertising on?

getting a deep understanding of your chosen niche from both ends – the leads you’re trying to attract – and the affiliate manager who is trying to help you convert them – you can attack the problem from both ends and really maximise the results you generate.

all the best,
richard

Ok, you guys made it WAY too hard to pick a winner. I just spent the last 2-3 hours reading every article, and trying to narrow it down. I started with the 45 or so articles and narrowed it down to 10. That was hard enough in itself, so imagine how hard picking 3 out of the top 10 was.

Anywho, I’m going to announce the winners in individual posts. I’ll announce the First Place winner today and post their article, then Second and Third the following 2 days. After that, I’ll still post all the other great entries, because we can all learn a lot from them. Even if some of the points are repeated, that just means we’ve found a common point and should really learn from that mistake. Now onto the winner…

Drumroll please…

The first place winner is…William C. I loved the message behind this article and it’s so true, really a great read. Congrats William! Here’s the entry :

Mistakes Made And Lessons Learned

affiliate marketing, Few know what it is, Yet so many wish to become one. Lured by promises of the get rich quick dream, Many Will try and few will succeed. It is A True test of determination and Will. affiliate Marketing Is not for the weak and fearful. Mistakes will be made and lessons to be learned from it all.

Wither or not you succeed with affiliate marketing, the mistakes you make and fix along the way give you more experience in marketing and business than most people could ever dream of. There are only so many things books can teach you, but one thing you will never get out of a book is experience, and to me that’s all that matters in the business world.

Growing up my parents would pound the phrase “you’re going to college” in the back of my mind any chance they got. I didn’t grow up in the best of conditions but I always made best of what I had. Through high school I got side tracked with a few bad influences in my life and ended up dropping out and getting my GED and heading straight for community college. Not long after that I dropped out of College. From the day I dropped out of High school I vowed to never work a 9-5 job. All my life I Had heard how the only way to succeed was through college. I disagreed. I felt school was never really my cup of tea. Although I did enjoy learning and the school life style, I just never really got in the rhythm of it.

In my late years in high school I had started working small operations online through websites like digital point. Building small sites selling them back, running proxy sites you name it I’ve probably done it. For my last two years in high school I was working from my room making more money than my friends working 30 hours a week at star bucks. I loved it. The whole idea of working from home making more money than the average Joe was a lifetime goal of mine and I was doing it. Telling myself I would be happy with 3,000$ a month I continued to work toward my goal awaiting that day I would reach my goal.

Then one day a good friend of mine who I had not talked to in a good while told me about affiliate marketing and how he was making hundreds a day. Obviously this intrigued me and soon enough I followed suit. My first market was Ringtones. The dreaded saturated market in which every Noob should stay far far away from! Either from sheer dumb luck or past experience my first run with ringtones was an automatic profit. From day one I profited, Now really intrigued by the potential I continued deeper and deeper into the ringtone market. I had my share of bumps in the road but all learning experiences.

Next thing I know I am making 3,000$ a month profiting 100$ a day every day. Not even realizing that I had reached my goal. All I had time to worry about was improving and pushing harder. 4,000$, 5,000$, 6,000$ I had doubled my goal amount by 2x and I was making more money than both my parents combined. Falling off the horse a few times but always getting back on I ventured farther and farther into the ringtones market. I had something to prove to everyone who ever doubted me. That was all the motivation I ever needed. I pushed forward until one day I sat down looking at my monitor at 4pm in the afternoon and seeing for the first time, my first 1,000$ day. Not only had I accomplished my initial goal, I had bested it 10x over. A High school and college kid drop out. Three years of Online experience has brought me 30,000$ a month in revenue. I had proven all of my doubters wrong. And now I achieved a income even most college graduates would dream of. I had succeeded in my lifetime goal at the age of 18. I never stepped foot in a real world job, I never plan too. Entrepreneur Is the only title I want.

Now recently hitting my 2,000$ a day mark I look back and reflect on the mistakes and lessons on the road to where I am now. The biggest mistake I’ve been making is not taking the time to look back on all my failures. Nobody wants to acknowledge failure let alone reflect on it, But the lesson to be learned from it is that mistakes are success in a nutshell. You can learn to look at mistakes as failures and shrug them off and never think about it again or you can look at mistakes as experience gained and a lesson to be learned with each mistake.

The best piece of advice anyone can ever give you in business is to take the time to stop. Reflect on your mistakes, Write them down, in a journal if you want and figure out the reason why you failed. Don’t brush it off without knowing why you failed in the first place, The same reason why some people never succeed is because they never learned from their mistakes and its an endless cycle of failure. Don’t be afraid of failure, You can’t avoid it so when you do fail approach it as a learning experience and knowledge gained from it. The more you fail the more experienced you become. I would seek advice from people who have multiple failures than people who have none. They know what not to do, and that experience will always be with them and they can only get better from it.

So take the time to analyze your failures when and if they do happen. Write them down in a notebook to record it for future preference if need be. Tossing aside your mistakes will be the biggest mistake you will ever make. So learn your lesson now before it becomes a huge flaw in your business model.

I hope you enjoyed the read.
Thank you,
William C.

So yesterday I mention that there’s only a day left in my contest, and with only like 4 entries it’d be really easy to win. I’m figuring I’ll get a couple more, everyone will have great odds, and I’ll only have to look over about 6 articles.

I wake up this morning and there’s like 40 new articles submitted! That’s awesome though, hopefully there’s some great content that we can all learn from in there. I’m going to start looking through them today and then announce the winners 1 by 1 and post their article. Updates should be coming later in the week.

Thanks for all the articles, you guys rock.

Tomorrow is the last day to enter your submissions for my MarketLeverage Contest.

I think there’s only like 4 or 5 entries, so right now you have a VERY good chance of winning cash, iPods, video cameras, etc.

Remember the contest is to write an article on the mistakes you’ve made in affiliate marketing, and what you learned from them. I’ll pick my favorite 3 to be the winners and post all of the entries.

I’ve known Kris Jones from Pepperjam and Pepperjam Network for about a year now, and in the few times we’ve spoken you can tell he’s a great guy. I wrote a while ago about him launching his affiliate network, and it seems like things are going great.

I did a pretty lengthy interview with him that was published today, so go and check it out.

Instead of being the usual post with tips for affiliate marketers, I want to write a post directly for affiliate managers. Why? Because indirectly this can make a huge difference for us, the affiliate marketers.

affiliate managers can play a big role in getting you the right offer, payout, deal, etc. Some affiliate managers are better than others, simple as that. So to all you affiliate managers out there, keep these points in mind and try to apply them to your every day business.

Tip #1 : DO NOT be pushy when trying to recruit an affiliate.

There’s nothing that draws me away from a network more than when they are pushy and annoying about trying to get me to run offers. With some networks I’ve kindly explained that I have a full platter in front of me and have 0 time for any new projects, and that I’ll take a look once some time opens up. I still got e-mails and IMs every week asking me to look at all these new campaigns. Don’t be pushy! I know you’re out there, if I’m going to come to you, constantly bugging me about it will not help.

Tip #2 : Only show the best.

This goes for recruiting new affiliates or with affiliates you already have. I don’t want to see 50 offers that you “think I can do great on”, I’d rather you show me 2 offers that are doing great for affiliates and you really think with my background I can do some volume on. If I’ve told you that I excel in financial offers, showing me 10 ringtone and funcard offers probably isn’t going to entice me too much. This leads me to the next tip…

Tip #3 : Know your affiliates.

Knowing your affiliates is huge. Using the example above, if I’m a huge financial guy, I don’t want to even look at a funcard offer. I want to see the best debt offer you have and what extra creatives you have for me to look at on that offer. Now a lot of affiliates won’t tell you exactly what offers they’re promoting, but most will at least give you a category as to what types of offers they promote (financial, dating, ringtones, weight loss, etc).

Tip #4 : Be reliable.

I have the cell phone # of all my really important affiliate managers and I know that if I have a problem, I can get help as soon as I want. There’s horror stories online if guys who have been trying to get in touch with their affiliate manager for weeks and haven’t gotten a response. Granted some of these guys are probably a little..er..retarded…I’m sure there’s guys out there who have been “looked past”. Try your best not to overlook anybody, you never know what affiliate can be trying to get in touch with you. He could be huge. Respond to your affiliates on AIM, reply to their emails, and if they’re important enough give them your cell.

Tip #5 : Don’t bullshit affiliates.

I hate taking crap from a manager trying to negotiate. If you’re Network A and getting $20.00 on an offer direct, I may talk to Network B who gets the same offer and payout, and they offer me $18.00 without a problem. Don’t tell me the “absolute best” you can do is $16.75. You’ll take a little sacrifice in margin like any other good network until I send a little volume and you get more from the advertiser and get your margins back to normal.

Tip #6 : Be as transparent as possible.

Transparency is KEY in any good affiliate network/affiliate relationship. You tell me exactly what’s going on with you guys, and we’ll make the best accommodations so both parties profit out of it. We’re all here to make money. As long as you’re not taking a 1% margin or something crazy, we’re both going to make money. Transparency is a testament of good faith and builds a good relationship. I’m much more likely to stay with you in the long-term if you’re transparent.

Tip #7 : Keep my information private.

Pretty simple tip, right? Its a shame it doesn’t happen out there. Don’t be freakin greedy and go and give out information about my campaign, or rip it yourself. I’ve had this experience not only with myself, but with other affiliates out there who have talked to me. They’ve seen networks themselves copy the affiliates landing page and method or promotion…that’s pretty damn low.

Tip #8 : Learn your trade and help me.

One of the best things you can do as an affiliate manager is learn affiliate marketing well. You know how everything functions and how to work things on your end, but you should get out there and try to see the affiliates side of everything. You’ll be able to then make suggestions to your affiliates and directly help them make more money. I’ve had some pretty good ideas come from smart affiliate managers, so it definitely helps.

Tip #9 : No affiliate is too small.

I pretty much sucked when I started with affiliate marketing. My manager was Fraser at Azoogle and I was a complete newb. I bugged him day and night asking him questions about affiliate marketing and would IM him and annoy him every time I got a lead…which was about twice a day. I was doing like $30/day for my first month or 2. He stuck with me, helped me, never ignored me, and I went on to now do over 7 figures for him at CX Digital. Think it was worth it for him to put up with my crap for a couple months?

Hopefully a couple of those tips can help you become a better affiliate manager, or just get a different perspective on things.

Instead of being the usual post with tips for affiliate marketers, I want to write a post directly for affiliate managers. Why? Because indirectly this can make a huge difference for us, the affiliate marketers.

affiliate managers can play a big role in getting you the right offer, payout, deal, etc. Some affiliate managers are better than others, simple as that. So to all you affiliate managers out there, keep these points in mind and try to apply them to your every day business.

Tip #1 : DO NOT be pushy when trying to recruit an affiliate.

There’s nothing that draws me away from a network more than when they are pushy and annoying about trying to get me to run offers. With some networks I’ve kindly explained that I have a full platter in front of me and have 0 time for any new projects, and that I’ll take a look once some time opens up. I still got e-mails and IMs every week asking me to look at all these new campaigns. Don’t be pushy! I know you’re out there, if I’m going to come to you, constantly bugging me about it will not help.
 
Tip #2 : Only show the best.

This goes for recruiting new affiliates or with affiliates you already have. I don’t want to see 50 offers that you “think I can do great on”, I’d rather you show me 2 offers that are doing great for affiliates and you really think with my background I can do some volume on. If I’ve told you that I excel in financial offers, showing me 10 ringtone and funcard offers probably isn’t going to entice me too much. This leads me to the next tip…
 
Tip #3 : Know your affiliates.

Knowing your affiliates is huge. Using the example above, if I’m a huge financial guy, I don’t want to even look at a funcard offer. I want to see the best debt offer you have and what extra creatives you have for me to look at on that offer. Now a lot of affiliates won’t tell you exactly what offers they’re promoting, but most will at least give you a category as to what types of offers they promote (financial, dating, ringtones, weight loss, etc).
 
Tip #4 : Be reliable.

I have the cell phone # of all my really important affiliate managers and I know that if I have a problem, I can get help as soon as I want. There’s horror stories online if guys who have been trying to get in touch with their affiliate manager for weeks and haven’t gotten a response. Granted some of these guys are probably a little..er..retarded…I’m sure there’s guys out there who have been “looked past”. Try your best not to overlook anybody, you never know what affiliate can be trying to get in touch with you. He could be huge. Respond to your affiliates on AIM, reply to their emails, and if they’re important enough give them your cell.
 
Tip #5 : Don’t bullshit affiliates.

I hate taking crap from a manager trying to negotiate. If you’re Network A and getting $20.00 on an offer direct, I may talk to Network B who gets the same offer and payout, and they offer me $18.00 without a problem. Don’t tell me the “absolute best” you can do is $16.75. You’ll take a little sacrifice in margin like any other good network until I send a little volume and you get more from the advertiser and get your margins back to normal.
 
Tip #6 : Be as transparent as possible.

Transparency is KEY in any good affiliate network/affiliate relationship. You tell me exactly what’s going on with you guys, and we’ll make the best accommodations so both parties profit out of it. We’re all here to make money. As long as you’re not taking a 1% margin or something crazy, we’re both going to make money. Transparency is a testament of good faith and builds a good relationship. I’m much more likely to stay with you in the long-term if you’re transparent.
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Tip #7 : Keep my information private.

Pretty simple tip, right? Its a shame it doesn’t happen out there. Don’t be freakin greedy and go and give out information about my campaign, or rip it yourself. I’ve had this experience not only with myself, but with other affiliates out there who have talked to me. They’ve seen networks themselves copy the affiliates landing page and method or promotion…that’s pretty damn low.
 
Tip #8 : Learn your trade and help me.

One of the best things you can do as an affiliate manager is learn affiliate marketing well. You know how everything functions and how to work things on your end, but you should get out there and try to see the affiliates side of everything. You’ll be able to then make suggestions to your affiliates and directly help them make more money. I’ve had some pretty good ideas come from smart affiliate managers, so it definitely helps.
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Tip #9 : No affiliate is too small.

I pretty much sucked when I started with affiliate marketing. My manager was Fraser at Azoogle and I was a complete newb. I bugged him day and night asking him questions about affiliate marketing and would IM him and annoy him every time I got a lead…which was about twice a day. I was doing like $30/day for my first month or 2. He stuck with me, helped me, never ignored me, and I went on to now do over 7 figures for him at CX Digital. Think it was worth it for him to put up with my crap for a couple months?

Hopefully a couple of those tips can help you become a better affiliate manager, or just get a different perspective on things.