Affsum Session: Advanced Approaches To Affiliate Recruiting, Training, and Management
Monday
Jan 19, 2009
Date: Sunday, January 11th, 2009. Session 1b, 12:00pm.
Session Description: 
Dual presentation on advanced techniques, strategies and ideas for affiliate training and management. This enlightening, and entertaining session will help you improve and grow your affiliate program. The panel consisted of:
- Heather Paulson, President, Paulson Management Group
- Geno Prussakov, CEO & President, AM Navigator LLC
Bullet Point Review!
- Affiliate Managers = ones called to manage the unmanageable ones.
- Don’t think of it as Affiliate Management – think of it as Affiliate Leadership + Affiliate Program Management.
- Affiliates are normally intolerant of bogged down management, so you can’t actually manage them, just the program.
- Affiliate managers deal with different affiliates at different maturity levels.
- Use a contingent management style and strategies that are situational.
- More than 350 of the Fortune 500 companies use a contingent approach.
- There are tools to use to find affiliates: Syntryx, DomainTools, manual research, Email Analyst.
- iSpionage is a great tool to monitor keywords and find affiliates that way.
- If your program is on Commission Junction, ask them for a Push Offer – request recruiting function is turned on for your account.
Unfortunately the Q&A was a bit useless since no one bothered to go up to the microphones that were provided, so the questions were unintelligible. And judging by the answers they gave that I could hear, they must have been really specific because I didn’t really get much from the answers.
I admit, this session was a bit of a let down for me. It started late due to some technical difficulties with the presentation and so they were rather rushed. I’ve heard Heather speak before, and while she really knows what she’s talking about, she talked about the same tools she’s been talking about since I first heard her speak. Geno was refreshing since I’ve never heard him speak before but his data was a bit hard to grasp. This session definitely needed the help of the slides, so I’m including them.
All in all I think Heather has good things to share for affiliate managers just starting out, but I’ll be passing on her sessions from now on since it’s clear she’ll be sharing the same things. Definitely recommended though if you’ve never heard her talk about Syntryx (she has to be their biggest cheerleader, hands down) or Affiliate Relationship Management.
Here are the slides from the presentation, courtesy of Affiliate Summit:
Comments
Geno Prussakov
January 19th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Glad you've found me “refreshing”, Trisha. As for the data being “a bit hard to grasp” – that's why we called “advanced approaches”.
The basic idea behind the contingency approach (or situational theory) is that while particular leadership styles and behaviors may be in effective in some settings and situations, they might be absolutely ineffective in others. In my presentation I've split affiliates not by type, but rather by their maturity level.
There are 4 groups: Newbies, lower- and higher- moderate maturity levels (equipped, but either inexperienced in affiliate marketing, or unwilling to work with the merchant), and super affiliates. With newbies you practice a telling style, with the two moderately mature affiliate types – selling and participating styles, and with super affiliates – a delegating style.
Shawn said the videos will be available in 3-4 weeks; and it'll be much easier to follow it on video.
TrishaLyn
January 21st, 2009 at 12:03 am
Hi Geno thanks for clarifying. I think the slides did well to explain. I know this time around the videos won't be accessible for everyone, so I'm not sure I'll be able to post the video.