The question was posed to me this week, and it really threw me back and made me think. The affiliate industry as we all know is a BIG TIME business otherwise why would we be in it….right? The competition is fierce, and if you want to be at the top of the food chain you must have that one thing that separates you from the pack.  What is that exactly? I have a few ideas:

WORK ETHIC. Are you willing to put in the long hard hours to get the job done? Are you willing to take your business to the next level? Personally,  I have to love my job to get to the next level. Because I do love my job,  I get to new levels every day and I make huge strides to take my affiliates with me.

PERSISTENCE. Your ability to not stop until the job is complete even if it takes 50, 100, 1000 contacts to get that next BIG client. In my mind, affiliates will only know who you are if you tell them. There is no other way around it. If I’m bugging you, its because I want you to make money!

FOCUS. I was watching one of my favorites TV shows this week, The Big Idea , with Donny Deutsch on CNBC.  On the show he had a very successful Navy Seal and when he was asked what makes him successful, he said, “you have to be totally focused on your goal”. Distractions may slow you down and  take you off course, but if you stay laser focused you will win. With all the distractions of AIM, email, phone calls, company meetings, etc. this business can be very difficult to remain focused.

TALENT. God given gifts that you have been given. Do you use all your talent to reach your full potential? Some might say some people are more talented then others. They may have a point, but I believe each of us do have that one special talent that separates us. Some people find this talent, and some people never do. My talent in this business is adapting to everyone’s personality. If you are hyper; I can be hyper back. If you are quiet; I can tone it down. I feel making people comfortable is key when communicating.

Those are a few of my favorites. So what is yours? Talk to me Affiliates.

What separates you from the next guy or gal out there? There is lots of competition!

What is your work ethic? What makes you persistent? How do you stay focused daily? What kind of talent do you have?

What are your thoughts?

Talk to me,

Chris

A lot of business owners and technology directors think it’s best to buy their employees the newest, coolest-looking, most well-advertised gadgets as soon as they hit the market. This is actually a flawed school of thought, and logic.

Almost every new technology that hits the street comes laden with bugs and irreversible, unpatchable issues that you or the manufacturer won’t be able to remedy. Ultimately, the only solution for this is to shell out another mint for the ‘New & Improved” version of your tech toy a month or two down the road.

In reality, tech manufacturers are using the impulsive business owner and personal user as “beta testers” for their new devices. This is the way it’s always been. The manufacturer releases their new toy, gets an unfathomable amount of groans and moans, and applies the fixes to the next version, leaving the livid consumers in the dust (and a little bit of financial discomfort). Take a look at the first iPhone. It was completely ridden with bugs. The new version is supposedly flawless.

In order to have a successful business, especially one that is based around digital media and communication, stability is imperative when it comes to your technology. In this industry, the strength of your business is directly dependent on the stability, functionality, and efficiency of your technology!

Here at AKMG, we don’t risk our integrity to get the newest toy the day it comes out. We wait a month or two, unless you are the CEO who gets the toy the day it comes out, then hands it to me to fix when it breaks….

In today’s chaotic and demanding world, it is easy to complicate things. We often over think situations and in doing so, lose money, lose trust and in most regret, lose relationships. If we only turned back the clocks of time and reminded ourselves that the most basic events can create the best opportunities. As Robert Fulghum stated (paraphrased), take what you learned in the sandbox in Kindergarten and apply it to life and everything will be much more pleasant.

“Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life.”

- Robert Fulghum

All of these simple rules can easily be applied to our daily life and make work more interesting, profitable and most importantly, fun.

Here at AKMG, we strive for success. We strive for success as a collective group and each one us of strives for our own personal growth and success. Tiger wasn’t born successful. He had to work at it every day of his life and he continues to work at it to remain at the top. AKMG shares this same philosophy. We are always looking for ways to improve our company, our people and our relationships and have fun along the way!

Yesterday I found this great article that summarizes Tiger Woods rules for success and it matches quite closely with ours. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Constant and Never Ending Improvement

“No matter how good you get you can always get better and that’s the exciting part.” ~Tiger Woods

2. A Bigger Plan

“I think it’s an honor to be a role model to one person or maybe more than that. If you are given a chance to be a role model, I think you should always take it because you can influence a person’s life in a positive light, and that’s what I want to do. That’s what it’s all about.” ~Tiger Woods

3. Embrace Defeat

“I’m trying as hard as I can, and sometimes things don’t go your way, and that’s the way things go.” ~Tiger Woods

4. Take Life Lightly

“If you can’t laugh at yourself, then who can you laugh at?” ~Tiger Woods

5. Don’t Stop

“Tiger may have used his golf club as a cane, but he refused to use his injury as a crutch.” ~Brian Clark

6. Live Your Own Expectations

“One of the things that my parents have taught me is never listen to other people’s expectations. You should live your own life and live up to your own expectations, and those are the only things I really care about it.” ~Tiger Woods

7. Do What You Love

“I get to play golf for a living. What more can you ask for - getting paid for doing what you love.” ~Tiger Woods

8. Focus

“My main focus is on my game.”~Tiger Woods

9. Pay it Forward

“My dad has always taught me these words: care and share. That’s why we put on clinics. The only thing I can do is try to give back. If it works, it works.” ~Tiger Woods

10. Learn from All Mistakes

“The only thing you can do is take a learning experience from it, positives and negatives, and apply them to the future. What did you do right, what did you do wrong, and I did a lot of things right this week” ~Tiger Woods

11. Celebrate Your Victories

“It’s been a lot of fun to see some fruits of my hard labor.”~Tiger Woods

12. Pay No Attention to Naysayers (my personal favorite)

“You know, all the nay-sayers said that I was doing the wrong things. They can understand why now I made those changes.” ~Tiger Woods

It seems like time moves so much slower during the summer months and everything & everyone are just at their own relaxed pace. Weekends seem longer…lunches turn into all day affairs and floating in the pool is your day’s physical activity. It’s a great time of the year all around. Who doesn’t love sunshine and summer vacations?! Life, though, doesn’t seem slower over here in the affiliate marketing world. It feels as busy and hectic as ever which is a good thing. Weekend summer days wouldn’t be as enjoyable without the hustle and bustle of the work week.

We’ve all been working hard around here at AKMG and are continually adding new exclusive offers, new publishers and further solidifying relationships. We are continuing to see great success with our brand name lead gen campaigns and continuity programs so people out there really are still spending online (in between pool time, of course)! So publishers, be sure to log in frequently to AKMG to see the latest and greatest campaigns we’re running (contact your affiliate manager with any questions). Advertisers, don’t miss out on high quality traffic from the AKMG pubs. Contact me today to get things set up.

Enjoy the upcoming weekend!

Here at AKMG, go to great lengths make sure that campaigns our affiliates deploy are 100% Can-Spam compliant. Anything less than full compliance is simply unacceptable.

We use Lashback, a state-of-the-art compliance management system in which we are alerted every single time an email address on a suppression list is emailed. We have many different flags and triggers within this system, but this unsubscribe violation is one of the more frequent violations of Can-Spam. We also recommend Unsub Central to our advertisers as the premier unsubscribe suolution for their particular offer. It is widely used in the industry, accepted by affiliates and unriveled as an outsourced unsubscribe email solution.

We take Can-Spam violations very seriously and have implemented detailed measures to ensure that our advertisers message is delivered in a professional, legal format and the consumer receives marketing that they are truly interested in. eMail marketing has proven itself for many years to be the most effective avenue for marketing online and we takes steps daily to ensure its longevity and viability in the marketplace.

Scuzzbucket emailers can ruin this industry, but we don’t have to let them. We have a responsibility to conduct ourselves in a professional manner and abide by the laws that have been set forth….please do your part.

For more info on Can-Spam specifics, check the WIKI.

I spend most of my day evaluating various offers and landing pages. So I’ve developed a bit of a keen eye in terms of what to look for on web pages and what works. The whole purpose of a landing page is to quickly “sell” someone on your product or service. People online, more than other mediums, only give a landing page an instant to check it out and make a decision either to fill out the form/purchase something or click over to another web page. So you’ve got to make the page that consumers see the best it can possibly be in order to catch their attention in that first instant.

Here are some general helpful tips…these might seem obvious but so many of the pages that I come across do the exact opposite:

1) Keep the design simple and uncluttered
2) Have a clear call-to-action
3) Keep as much pertinent info above the fold
4) Put the data form field on the right hand side of the page - people’s eyes naturally start reading from the left and gradually move to the right side
5) Have a kick butt offer that people want!

If you want to learn more about effective landing page optimization, I recommend the “Landing Page Optimization” book by Tim Ash. We consider Tim a friend of AKMG and the foremost leader in the field. Don’t be a cheapo….go get the book

The busier I get, the more important it is for me to set goals for myself. Whether it be training for a triathlon, getting better at beach volleyball or setting work goals, they are all necessary so I can get to the next level. When I don’t set goals I often see the days pass by like lightning and wonder where the time went.

I also find this is necessary when working with our affiliates. Not only do I try to set monetary goals with them, but also personal goals. For instance, one of my affiliates has a goal to stop smoking. Every once in a while I ask if he is getting closer to quitting. In the same way, I want to help affiliates reach their monetary goals with AKMG each month so they can earn a lot more money than they ever expected. Just as the saying goes, “if you aim at nothing, you will hit nothing.” So lets all challenge ourselves and aim high – at least we will get farther than we ever did and have fun in the process!

As I start my 5th week here at AKMG I’m starting to get more comfortable each day with my internet lingo, my co-workers and especially my Affiliates. We had our Monday morning conference call this week and the topic came up about “what separates one Affiliate Manager from the next?” Obviously hard work, keeping your promises, being available, etc….but what can really separate you from the rest of the pack? Having Fun! Let’s be honest everyone, a good Affiliate gets inundated with tons of emails and phone calls daily. What do you think they would respond to? Would it be a normal email that says what every other email says (we are the best network, we are wonderful, run offers with us!), or an upbeat energetic Affiliate manager that always has something interesting to say?

Let’s take it one step further, I pose the question to the Affiliates affiliates of the world:

What’s the most interesting gift or idea that an Affiliate Manager has done for you?

Whether its prospecting you, trying to get you to run that hot new offer etc…

Is it flowers, candy, a singing telegram or a skateboard (haha)?

What is it? Let me know… I’m interested to hear your response.

Have a great week!

Chris

Having multiple email partners is a topic that has been coming up a lot in the past few weeks with my advertisers and potential new advertisers. While I understand the logic that having a ton of email partners equals the maximum number of leads, there is the other side to that school of thought. As an example, just because you have 20 emails partners, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll hit your capacity or goal each month in terms of volume. Some of our most successful campaigns were when we were the only email partner and were able to greatly exceed their monthly sales goals.

It makes sense if you think of it from a publisher’s perspective. There are many networks out there and they are all hounding the publishers on a daily basis to run their “fantastic” offers. But if a mailer logs into a bunch of networks and sees the same campaign over and over again, the offer loses its appeal. Mailers are looking for offers that are unique and different from the status quo so that they can give their audience something special…leading to higher conversions and more money! If an offer is everywhere, it means it is already saturated in the marketplace and people have most likely come across at it some point so fewer people will convert. If this was another kind of marketing, that might not be a bad thing but we’re PERFORMANCE BASED MARKETING. So conversions are all we really care about!

Let’s keep the unique offers with limited distribution rolling onto AKMG and we’ll all be much happier! We’ll even forget this debate about which is better: multiple or limited email partners.