“Hey, what exactly do you do at work? Because right now, I don’t get it.”
Someone said that to me the other day, someone I consider to be pretty intelligent. Once I realized this person was asking me this question AFTER I attempted to explain what I do, I decided I should put it “in print”. If this post still leaves you wondering what it is an Affiliate Manager does, don’t tell my boss cause he might start to wonder if I actually know.
So I figure the best place to start is at the beginning.
Before I was ever given this position I was told to read up on something called a “CPA Network”, and of course my initial assumption was that this company dealth with finance (which I know little about, but was willing to learn if I had to). So of course my research library was populated by those great people over at Google, and when I received my information on what a CPA Network was, I was completely taken by surprise. Now, I have a degree from a good school in which I learned about all kinds of different levels of marketing, business, finance, law, and many other subjects. I’d like to know why it is that I wasn’t informed about the vast world there is in Internet Marketing, one of those topics would be CPA Marketing (Networks in particular).
So here’s my 2 month evaluation/ explanation of CPA (Cost Per Action) Networks. There is a huge internet world out there that is encompassed by a large amount of people that either send emails, blog, or any other variation of things that we all do online, but they make money from it. These people are referred to, from here on out, as Affiliates. A CPA Network has two sides to it. There is the Advertiser side, where people who have a product to sell come to “us” and say “Hey, I have this product and would like to advertise it through your Affiliates”. So they give us items which, in the business (I’ve always wanted to say that), are known as Creatives. These creatives take the form of a linking banner (as soon on many websites you’ve been to I’m sure), Emails, text ads, HTML (which I have the pleasure of working with having no background knowledge, and it is a foreign language). So once the advertisers give us their creatives, we put them into our back end system.
Now the other side of the Network idea. The Affiliates come in through a different “door” than the Advertisers. These Affiliates come in and talk to ME. They apply to our network, I contact them making sure they are a real person and they aren’t going to cause any fraud to enter our network. After we have made sure they are a good fit for our network and they are approved, I then make sure I keep in close contact with them to make sure they have everything they need from our Network to make as much money as possible. They get paid every time they sell something for the advertiser, and get paid well I might ad. I can now see how people make a lot of money online, cause I’ve literally seen it happen.
So in a nutshell a CPA network is the bridge between the people who want to sell something, and the people who want to make money selling it for them. It’s an idea that gets overlooked easily, but performs well regardless. In a CPA there are people who put campaigns together for the Advertisers, and there are people who assist the Affiliates with anything they need. Turns out, i’m two people where I work because I do both of those things on a daily basis. That comment isn’t meant to be taken as a complaint, I enjoy being busy and involved with what’s going on.
So hopefully that explained the basics of what Affiliate Management is, VERY short description seeing as it took me 2 months to get where I’m at and still don’t know 1/10th of what I will by next month. So if you have anymore questions as to what I do, or how to make some money online, or just can’t honestly make sense of what’s been rambled on this page, feel free to comment on it.

