Adding “Affiliate Manager” to my job experience

I have been in the affiliate industry and online marketing industry for about 14 years now. I have been able to make a good living for many years with a variety of different sites, merchants, promotional strategies, marketing ideas, and so on. As an affiliate I think I have a pretty good handle on what it takes to succeed as an affiliate.

But after doing something for 14 years a change of pace can be a good thing. Of course there has been many different changes over the past 14 years but they have pretty much all been related to being an affiliate. I don’t know if it is burnout or complacency or what but it has been a while since I have woken up excited to work on one of my affiliate sites so over the past few months I have been looking to make a change.

I had some interviews with a few local companies about doing various tasks including running their affiliate programs, managing their PPC, setting up their ecommerce operations, and various other online marketing functions. Some of those things I think I would have been great at, others would have taken some learning on my part which I was excited to do. But for one reason or another none of these companies seemed like a good fit for me.

So I started looking through some different affiliate managers and OPMs I respected and started to put out some feelers as to what it would take for me to work with them. After being an affiliate for so many years I thought I could bring some value to an OPM and would be a good fit since I knew what affiliate wanted in a program. After a couple weeks of discussion I came to an agreement to come on board with Roger Snow and Snow Consulting.

Why would I want to make the change? Why change gears like this? Glad you asked. Here are a few different reasons:

1. Stability – There were many things I loved about being an affiliate but the big swings month to month were taking their toll. I have had months where I have made $80,000+. I have had months were I have made under $200. With a wife and a new baby I kind of wanted something a bit more stable and a bit more secure. Yeah, the highs probably won’t be as high but the lows won’t be as low either and that is important to me right now.

2. A Need for Quality Affiliate Managers – Over the years I have written many times about the shortcomings of affiliate managers on this blog and complained about numerous topics. The more I wrote about the more I realized that one of the main problems is the lack of quality, experienced affiliate managers. Yeah, some of them purposely make bad choices, some of them don’t care about ethical issues and only want to see their sales increase, and some of them really do think they are making good decisions when in reality they are bad. But more and more I am realizing they just don’t know any better.

Since I have been around this industry for so long and know what works for affiliates I think I would really be a good voice in the merchants ears. Of course I will need to learn more about what goes on from a merchant perspective and why they make some of the decisions they do that seem destructive from an affiliate perspective but I want to help them see things from an affiliates point of view and see that many of their decisions negatively impact their bottom line.

There needs to be more quality affiliate managers out there and I think I can be a good 0ne. I have a lot of learning to do and will probably make a lot of mistakes but I will always be doing my best to make any affiliate program I work with affiliate friendly but also beneficial for the merchant.

3. Merchants Need Education – I touched on this a bit in the previous point but there are so many merchants out there who really need more education on how powerful the affiliate channel can be in generating sales. Two of the companies I talked to seem to place a low value on affiliates but that is because their only exposure to affiliate marketing is the negative stories about spammers and lawbreakers that are always coming out. They don’t see how a good, well managed affiliate program can add sales and not just cannibalize them from other sales channels.

It is hard to re-educate a merchant who is set in their ways but hopefully I will get the chance to change a few of their minds. When a solid merchant has a poorly run affiliate program or no affiliate program at all it makes me die a little inside.

4. Gone as Far as I Could as an Affiliate – Maybe this is just coming from the stagnation I have been feeling lately but maybe I have gone as far as I could as an affiliate. I can crank out niche sites, I can build datafeed sites, and I can still drive some sales but when I look at the bigger affiliate sites and some of the other marketers in this industry I feel like I am still a few years behind. I don’t have the programming knowledge to build anything amazing, I can’t just sit and crank out hundreds of pages of content, I hate building links, and I have trouble giving up control and outsourcing those things I am not good at which are becoming a more and more important part of building quality affiliate sites.

I will still keep a few of my sites running but many of them will now fall by the wayside. I won’t be able to put in the time they need and I just don’t have the energy to put into that many sites anymore.

This might just be a bit self-deprecating though. I know if I really wanted to put in the effort and time I could build some really good affiliate sites but I need a break from it for a while. No idea how long though.

5. Learning Another Facet of this Industry – One of the things I am really looking forward to is learning yet another aspect of the affiliate industry. I have seen it from an affiliate’s point of view for so many years maybe it will be good for me to see things from the other side. I have been interested in the affiliate management side of things for quite a while and I am really excited to be in a place where I can work directly with affiliates and help them improve their sales. Affiliate managers who really know their stuff are always appreciated by their affiliates and I am hoping I can learn enough to put myself in a position where I can be in that group.

Overall I am very excited to be part of the Snow Consulting team. I am very grateful for this opportunity and hope to excel as an affiliate manager. There will be stumbles along the way but I am looking forward to the challenge.