I remember, vaguely, my first few years in affiliate management as a series of less then intelligent, or correct, decisions and actions like the one depicted to the left. It truly was a trial by fire and learn by doing type of experience for a number of reasons. Firstly, my first job out of college, well the interview, lasted two whole questions : Jamie, can you do this job? and “How far did you say you drove today?”. Seriously, no lie.
It was the dot-com boom, or at least near the end, and they neither knew what they were doing, nor what they needed. To say that there was no training program from that organization is an understatement. It wasn’t so much their fault, as we were all really trying to figure out what was what back then. Oh, to be back in 1998 and 1999, ahhhh.
This industry was also just being formed as well. Leaders in our field such as Shawn Collins and others were helping newbies as much as they could, but the industry and field was young, and I think we all got a little charred as we learned what affiliate marketing was and how we were to manage it.
But times have changed, you no longer have to go it alone. The emergence of the blogging community has truly helped other affiliate managers figure things out much quicker than we did back then. The success of Affiliate Summit, congrats Shawn and Missy, has really driven the industry ahead and brought it the forefront of the online marketing community. And we, here at JEBCommerce, in August announced the addition of the My Affiliate Coach training program for affiliate managers. If you’ve been reading this blog since then, you’ve probably read a few posts about it.
We’ve been speaking to many affiliate managers over the last few weeks, and a common question they seem to have, is how does our affiliate manager training program help them avoid mistakes?
Our 12 week training program, accompanied with our Action Guide Workbook, walks affiliate managers through every aspect of affiliate management, and identifies the top mistakes made and provides ways to avoid them, find them before they happen and overall manage a program better.
Check out our audio FAQ’s here.
