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AffiliateCrew is proud to share with you the most recent interview with our very own Affiliate Manager, Mr. Chuck Hamrick as featured in the first issue of Publisher PULP

Q: What is the best thing about working in Affiliate Marketing?

The relationships you build and the day-to-day interaction with affiliates. Before I started in affiliate marketing I worked in an agency doing paid search and SEO. And other than occasional interaction with clients and email, I didn’t have much interaction.

Before I started in online marketing I was in manufacturing and worked with sales reps in the field. That experience has close parallels to affiliate marketing. You are working with commissioned sales people and you have to have a great relationship. But you can’t force them to comply or mandate things. I think my experience in sales management is very applicable to the success we have had with affiliate marketing.

Q: What are some of the biggest changes you have seen in our industry in the past few years?

From my perspective, one of the biggest changes I have seen is the increased understanding of the role that agencies and OPMs play in working with emerging retailers and smaller brands. There is a very defined niche for that role in the affiliate marketing channel and I see increased understanding from Advertisers, affiliates and the networks. Certainly when DoubleClick Performics launched the AffiliateDirect platform, that marked a significant change. But we have seen increased interest and support throughout the industry.

Q: What’s the secret to successful affiliate program management?

The most successful affiliate managers are those who form strong relationships. It was a common theme at the DoubleClick Performics Client Summit last year and at other industry events I attended, affiliates want more communication.

Affiliates need to have a relationship with affiliate managers and they are not as demanding as some people perceive. The important thing to understand is that different classes of affiliates need different things. For example, I have formed alliances with many top coupon and deal sites and for all of the programs I manage, affiliates in the coupon and deal category represent at least 40% of the top 10 affiliates. Even when the Advertiser doesn’t have obvious coupons available, we can work together to develop a common ground. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but any merchant who doesn’t make an effort to leverage coupon and deal affiliates is missing out.

We make an effort to be available and responsive to affiliates. We provide direct telephone numbers and contact details in all of our email communications. We also have live help on our affiliate Web pages. I am actually surprised at how few affiliates take advantage of alternate contact opportunities. I think we are all inundated with email but I don’t know if there is a way around that.

Q: What will affiliate marketing look like in 2010?

We’ll continue to see the rise in social sites and blogs being successful. Affiliates will continue to grow larger and more professional.

In talking with my peers I get a sense that traditional marketing managers may or may not truly understand the online play yet. So that’s something we’ll continue to see evolve in the next couple of years. I believe affiliate marketing should deliver incremental sales. I think it’s a mistake to promote a brand new site that doesn’t have conversion data yet. If you take on a client like that you are doing a disservice to the potential merchant and to the channel as a whole.

I see affiliate marketing as one of the latter steps you need in online marketing. We’ll continue to see affiliate marketing takes its place at the table and become a more routine part of the overall online marketing mix; right alongside search, display and email marketing.

Q: What advice do you have for how Advertisers can better leverage the affiliate channel?

There is a temptation to use it as a testing ground because it’s ROI-driven and affiliates must show a return. And it can certainly used for testing but you shouldn’t look at the affiliate channel as R&D because once you burn an affiliate they won’t come back.

We need to advocate the channel. We need the market at large to know that it isn’t about spamming and cookie stuffing, but affiliate marketing is about bringing one thousand points of light together to develop a program that drives value for a company.

Some affiliates have been around for five or ten years and they have amazing insight into what works. Advertisers can better leverage affiliates as part of their marketing effort. For example, affiliates are experts at writing high-performing ad copy, there is nobody better at it. So a merchant can hire some kid who is a good writer, right out of college to write ad copy or they can have affiliates, who write the best performing copy, help them attract customers.

I am looking forward to this channel really coming of age, it is still perceived as the wild, wild, west. We need to get the word out to the great marketing arena about what’s happening in affiliate marketing. Consider search affiliates, there is some tension between what a search affiliate can do and a company’s SEM effort but there must be a way we can work better together. I have a personal goal to work more closely with search affiliates. They can drive traffic for the merchant and might be able to do it at lower cost per sale.

We have seen a real rise in professional affiliates. I see some of the more successful affiliates as evolving into small corporations, more professional than the stereotype of an affiliate. You see maybe 40 affiliates coming to all of the industry conferences and if you can spend $20,000 per year on industry conferences, you are doing quite well! There are a lot of “stay-at-home-moms” who are doing quite well for themselves and are building companies. But affiliate marketing is hard, hard work. Successful affiliates are not the stereotype sitting around in their underwear, working a couple of hours day. Successful affiliates are working long, hard hours doing good work.

Q: When you are not busy growing affiliate channel sales for your clients and influencing our industry – what do like to do?

I live Park City, Utah so we spend a lot time outdoors. I came to Park City a couple of years ago to work for Backcountry and my oldest daughter and family stayed behind in Colorado to finish out her last year of high school. So with two households to manage, I didn’t get much skiing in that first year. But once my whole family joined me in Park City, we started taking advantage of everything the area has to offer. My wife and I volunteer at the Sundance Film Festival and with the resorts for free ski passes, one of my sons works for a ski resort and all of our kids are in ski programs. I ski as much as I can and each season I get better and more courageous. This year I have been skiing the trees a lot and my kids are getting comfortable with the Black Diamond bumps. There is always a higher mountain, a tougher run and a new challenge. And the summers here are great too, we love hiking. Colorado is beautiful but there we lived beside the mountains, in Park City you live IN the mountains and it’s wonderful.

Q: Any final words?

I have been really thrilled with the service and support we have through DoubleClick Performics. The team is incredibly responsive and that means a lot to us. We are very pleased with the product overall – the value, the support, tools and the network. It makes our jobs easier and we appreciate that.

Chuck Hamrick is the Affiliate Manager at Affiliate Crew, an affiliate marketing agency. Chuck has been active in online marketing since 1999 with SEO, PPC, lead gen., and a full-time Affiliate Manager since 2005. He previously managed the affiliate programs for ToolKing.com, Backcountry.com and Ancestry.com. Chuck also spent 13 years in manufacturing project management and marketing. Chuck lives in Park City, UT with his wife and four children.

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