Hiring Affiliate Managers - What's their Role and Percentage Share Of Sales?

by askloz
2 replies
Hi everyone

Has anyone here hired an affiliate manager before?

As the job title says, its fairly obvious their role is to recruit more affiliates for you.

But is there anything else they do as part of your agreement.

Also, more importantly, what percentage do you give them and how is it calculated?

What I have in my mind is, IF they are the ones getting the affiliates in, via their own special splash page to collect emails from to give the affiliates more content to use, etc, they could be tracked to see which affiliate made a sale of which your affiliate manager recruited from his trackable affiliates sign up page.

What ever percentage is given to the affiliate. What is left over after processing fees from the merchant that handles your sales and affiliate commission processing, 50% of what is left goes to the affiliate manager.

Is that fair? Reasonable?

Some others I have spoken to said they want 50% of everything, regardless if they recruited the sale or not.

Personally I can't see why anyone would want to give up 50% of their business.

Cheers for your feedback.

Loz
#affiliate #hiring #managers #percentage #role #sales #share
  • Profile picture of the author Andy Fletcher
    I've done a fair amount of affiliate manager recruiting and used a couple of different models for it.

    My base affiliate program pays 60%.
    And for completeness it may help to know that I estimate fulfilment/service cost to be 5%.
    That leaves me with 35% profit if I recruit the affiliates myself but that's not practical or scalable.

    So in model one I pay 15% commission to anyone who recruits an affiliate for me. That is automatically tracked, linked and paid instantly at time of sale. Such affiliate managers don't receive any additional help, funding, or access to giving out discount codes etc. Not that I wouldn't do it if they asked but they're external to the business so it's on a best effort/no guarantee basis.

    The other affiliate managers (of whom I have just recruited 2) receive a base salary of £25,000 a year and 5% commission on everything their affiliates sell. That's completely uncapped so a great recruiter/manager could easily blow past the on target earning (OTE) figure but we estimate that a good competent affiliate manager will make £50,000 OTE including base.

    Those guys work in the office and have full access to company resource. So if they need copywriting help to set up a recruitment campaign they have full access to my full time copywriter etc.

    They break even for the business at the point where they are earning about £38,000 and at the OTE figure of £50,000 we are working on a rough ratio of 1:1:1, that is £1 paid to them (whether base or commission), £1 on expenses eg desk/chairs/computer/management time/copywriting etc and £1 profit for the company.

    I guess I would consider working with a single guy who wanted 50% of the whole thing but they'd have to be bringing a considerable contact list and track record to the table for me to entertain it seriously.

    Hope that helps,

    Andy
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  • Profile picture of the author ajrocks
    I have hired more then a few affiliate mangers in my day. It's very hard to get a good one. If you want someone with contacts and actual sales ability you need to pay for them. You are looking at a 40 to 50K USD base plus com. You can get people for much less but the results will be poor.
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