Can you Trust Affiliate Managers who Are Also Affiliates?

12 replies
I work with a cpa network, and my affiliate manager is also an affiliate for her company. Can I trust her? She is basically privy to my campaign, traffic sources, landing pages, and so forth.

Robert
#affiliate #affiliates #managers #trust
  • Profile picture of the author dreamedia
    Ask yourself this question:

    If you left a $1,000 of cash on your office desk & she knew she couldn't be caught if she stole the $1000... would the money be still on the desk in the morning?
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    • Profile picture of the author rvrabel2002
      Originally Posted by dreamedia View Post

      Ask yourself this question:

      If you left a $1,000 of cash on your office desk & she knew she couldn't be caught if she stole the $1000... would the money be still on the desk in the morning?
      Good point, but like the other guy said def. depends on the person. I mean what if i wake up one morning and see that there is an ad right next to mine on google. Exact ad, links to a landign page that looks like mine, and goes to the same offer.

      Then I can call her out on it, right? I switched the offer to a new network for now, as a test.
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  • Profile picture of the author damham
    maybe depends on the person
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  • Profile picture of the author Kenster
    The simple answer is that this is a business and you need to protect your assets. This is the very reason that you cloak, split revenue between networks and do other things to keep your campaign private.

    As you start to drive traffic, then you get a lot more control in the affiliate/affiliate manager relationship. You may even want to completely hide my traffic. You can let you AM know that you are hiding the traffic and if they dont like it, then you will drive the traffic to another network. They will understand if you are driving huge amounts of traffic why you dont want to share your whole campaign with them.

    You dont have to worry about this too much until you get into bigger numbers, but its a very real problem because there are AMs out there that would love to secretly compete with your campaigns.

    Further, if the traffic is converting on the advertisers end, then the AM has no real reason to care where your traffic is coming from.

    This is where open communication is critical. Open communication doesnt mean telling AMs everything you are doing, it means telling your AMs what you are doing. If you establish a relationship, then you can call them up and say hey, I've got some traffic that has been converting really well and the only reason I am hiding my traffic is because I see great potential. Ask them to check often on the advertisers end to make sure they are happy and then everybody wins.


    campaigns are assets guys. If you are afraid or dont know how to do tricky stuff with protecting your traffic (I admit I'm not that good at all, thats why I have my cousin!!) then just split your traffic up among many networks to fly under the radar. Hence, if you have something doing 1k per day, split that traffic to numerous networks so each of your 10 cpa networks thinks you just have an ok campaign. This may help
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  • Profile picture of the author RyanEagle
    Well - being a network owner myself (and an affiliate), we always as our publishers to cloak their LPs and not disclose their traffic sources. If they want to extend trust in our AM's to better help them - then they can.

    We've been in business for a bit now and we have a great reputation, literally no complaints of us copying landing pages. We're in it for the long run and reputation is very important to us as a network - ripping an affiliate off would only make money till that campaign dies off and would infuriate an affiliate at the same time.
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  • Profile picture of the author Affiliit
    I am very weary of when companies do this, however I trust a few companies - (for example EWA), they make me more money by doing this.
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  • Profile picture of the author Lou Diamond
    Hello,
    let me tell you a story, I found one campaign that was making sales like clockwork with every 200 clicks for a week, which made me over $3,000.00 in commission per week.
    I called up my affiliate manager to see if their was another CPA offer like this and the very next day I had no more sales with the exact campaign.
    I was floored, this had almost turned me off of CPA completely.
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    Something new soon.

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    • Profile picture of the author Affiliit
      Originally Posted by Lou Diamond View Post

      Hello,
      let me tell you a story, I found one campaign that was making sales like clockwork with every 200 clicks for a week, which made me over $3,000.00 in commission per week.
      I called up my affiliate manager to see if their was another CPA offer like this and the very next day I had no more sales with the exact campaign.
      I was floored, this had almost turned me off of CPA completely.
      Did you switch networks?
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      Learn Affiliate Marketing - Affiliit - Learn How to Make money with Facebook, POF, CPV/PPV, PPC, SEO, etc!
      Try Out Affiliit Now And See How Hundreds are Making Money Online!
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  • Profile picture of the author Affiliatebuddy
    No serious affiliate network allow their AM's to do affiliate marketing. If you are working with a smaller one... Just dont reveal any in/out of your business.

    Thanks
    Buddy
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  • Profile picture of the author ChadH
    lol.... can you trust them? Depends... but I'll tell you, I much rather working with AM's that were or ARE strong affiliates than someone that has no clue and just tells me "YO THIS IS KILLING IT!!!! CAN WE DO A TEST?!?!?!"
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  • Profile picture of the author PPC-Coach
    Ryan does it and it works well for him. I'm not sure any other network could reproduce that though. It all boils down to reputation. Has the network done it in the past? In EWA's case no they haven't. So why would they put themselves at risk in the future. They wouldn't.

    You've got to go with who you trust and don't just give them your trust right away, they have to earn it.
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