The commandments of Being a good AM

I just read a post here that gives a great explination of what i think to be the unwritten rules of affiliate management.

My favorite is #3 and i can’t stress this enough to any other affiliate manager in the business.

“3) Thou shall know what the hell you are talking about

I don’t care if you’ve been in the affiliate game for 1 month or 6 years.  KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOUR TALKING ABOUT.  I’ve had affiliate managers who don’t know what a scrub is (they had to check with their manager).  I’ve had affiliate managers who don’t know the difference between traffic sources.  I’ve had affiliate managers who can’t tie their own shoelaces.  Figure out what you are doing and learn about your industry before you make a fool of yourself. “

you can read the full post here

Dealing with competition

Mostly everyone in any business has competition. Whether it’s another business, individual or personal, competition will always surround you. The thing you have to keep in mind is how to best handle competition.

Business competition- In any industry there’s always business competition. Microsoft/Apple, Dell/HP, Sony/Samsung etc. One thing I like to do with my ‘business competition’ is research. Whose got what and how much are they giving it out for. Now as an affiliate manager, it’s my job to know who’s giving the best campaign for the top payout. There might be other networks out there that don’t have a clue on what payout they need to give an affiliate to make the offer back-out. There are also networks out there that give the highest payout possible in order to draw in affiliates. The key is finding the medium that keeps everyone afloat. If everyone’s happy, then there’s progression. If not, you’ll find that relationship doesn’t last long.

Individual competition- This relates more to our industry and our affiliates. Affiliates are always competing with one another. Whether it’s a keyword, a keyword list, a specific niche or if the competition is just simply trying to earn more money than the other. What you have to think in this case is that there’s more money out there than anything. There’s ways to get better keyword structure. And there’s always a niche that’s hardly touched that no one knows about. Keep these things in mind when, if at all, worried about your individual competition. You know you’re the best at what you do, that’s why you do it. Don’t second guess yourself, it will only help your competition get ahead.

Personal competition- This is going to be your worst nightmare if not handled properly. Some things that might be personal competition would be time investment. What should you put time into versus what do you put your time into. Everyone has things they want to do, but they also have things the need to do. In order to stay off tangent in completing things try a little to-do list. Check things off as you complete them and rest assure, when time comes to launch that campaign, so long as your check boxes are marked, you’ll be ready to go, and you’ll have the confidence in knowing that you’ve won over your own personal competition.

Although some may see this as business competition as well the best way I can describe having individual competition is to think of selling your car. How the mileage, interior, exterior, does it drive well, are there any dings in the body, etc? Basically, is the next person who looks at your car going to want to buy it? Relating to our industry; Does your landing page look proper, how’s your keyword list (is it cleaned up/related), Is your ad copy sharp, how’s the ‘mileage’ for your site, etc? Is the next person that comes to your site going to buy whatever it is you’re putting in the window?

In the internet industry, it’s a little different in the sense that most of the competition is fairly negotiable. Sure there might be four affiliate networks that have the same offer, but ask yourself; what makes this network different than the others. How’s their response time, payout terms, communication. These are all things I pride myself on and they’re what make me different and better than most others.

Losing Touch

Sometimes there are things that keep us distracted from what we’re intentionally trying to either finish or progress on. What I find myself doing sometimes is getting tangible with my tasks. Doing one thing on my sites sometimes I run into a problem where I stumble upon three or five other things that I find I want to do to my site. Although getting tangible on your mission is fine, keep in mind the original motivation should never be overshadowed.

When setting up multiple campaigns, make sure, even when distracted, that your site or landing page doesn’t lose its integrity. I’ve seen many people get so distracted from their original tasks that they lose focus and end up running a shotty campaign.

Just make sure you stay focused on your main objective. Take notes of any sites you stumbled on and go back to them later. Finish the one project/campaign and then move on to the next. You’ll not only be more productive, but your days will go by so much quicker having ‘more’ to do.

Too long to count

White Hat SEO
In recent years the concept of SEO has gained a lot of importance. The terms White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO have emerged universally as a marketing strategy to increase a website’s relevancy and ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The SEO industry uses various techniques which can be ethical or unethical depending on the approach SEO professionals wish to adopt for optimizing pages.

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site. It would be best to use this tactic as a means of achieving top ranking in the search results and also boosting real time traffic to your website. These tactics will not lead to penalties which are generally imposed when Black Hat SEO is used and even though it may take some amount of time to reap the rewards of the White Hat SEO process, it will surely bring in promising results in terms of high rakings and also rank stability.

The whole idea behind White Hat SEO is to ensure that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. The content that you would find on the webpage would not be solely for the search engine but also keeping the visitor in mind.

White Hat SEO Tactics:
Internal Linking
A simple way to hinder a good website ranking on the search engine is by making it tough for the search engines to spider and index pages. Several websites may use scripts to provide fancy drop down navigation and so on but unfortunately these scripts will not be crawled and indexed by the search engine bots. They will go unnoticed by the search engine spiders since they are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, scripts, frames, directories, etc.

Creating a site with scripts and fancy navigations may enhance the look of your website; however, it will prevent the spidering of your site. Therefore, it is essential to add text links at the bottom of your landing page linking to your most important internal pages including the sitemap.

Reciprocal Linking
Building reciprocal links is another White Hat SEO technique where you exchange links with other sites to get additional incoming links to your website. However, you must remember the following points when linking to other sites:

Link to sites that are relevant to yours
Consider linking to sites which have content that will appeal to and interest your visitors
Link to sites that have keywords you wish to target

Since this process is tedious and time consuming, avoid randomly linking to any site that you come across. This will not only lead to wastage of time and effort but also not bring in any results in terms of achieving a high search engine ranking.

Creating Content
This is an important part of the SEO process where compelling text has to be created that will attract more visitors to your site and add more value to your web pages. Creating a content rich website will not only boost visitor traffic to your site but will also lead to better recognition and indexing of your pages. Also, there would be many webmasters out there who would want to link to your site if they find it to be a good resource on their subject. Though content creation may take a lot of time, it will be worth the time and effort in the future.

Optimizing Your Website
This is another White Hat SEO technique which has gained a lot of popularity in recent times. Optimizing your site to improve its layout, structure, presentation, and content can help you gain better visibility and exposure.

The two way road of business

When people actually do business together it shows cooperation, teamwork, collaboration, and good ethics. There are some relationships in business that are this way, and there are some out there that think creating good business is a one way lane. I’m here to tell you that if you run yourself down this one way lane, you will burn, and you will crash. On the other hand, people who understand that creating good relationships are centered on the “give and take” conduct.

There have been many instances where I’ve worked with people in the past and eventually generated a good revenue stream. The relationship was good, the communication was there, but when it came down to reciprocating business together they didn’t think twice to bail. This is not only frustrating, but puts you on an untrusting level for any other person you view as potential partners.

There have also been instances where my relationship was very generous from both parties. If I ever needed any suggestions or help with something I knew I could go to them and have no problem getting what I need. And I would like to think that I was able to provide my partner with any experience or knowledge to better themselves. This relationship has lasted years and our partnership has been prosperous.

What it boils down to is, building a partnership in order to conduct long term big business, is never a one way road. If you’re thinking of using a person for what they have, and not being reciprocal, chances are then, you’ll burn through partners faster than sage grass on fire, and your reputation only diminishes each time until eventually you’re not in business.

Take a minute to think about what it is you have to contribute to your current partnerships and ask yourself who you haven’t been able to share this with.

Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need.

Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931)

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