Do You Trust Your Service Provider and Affiliate Network With Your Campaign Data? January 13, 2010
Posted by Andrew Wee in : Internet Marketing , trackbackMy recent post “The Truth Behind Amish Shah’s Magic Bullet System” has had some affiliates riled up about the security of your campaign data being stored on someone else’s system. I think it’s a lot more than that though, it boils down to this: Do you trust the people you’re working with.
If you don’t trust your service provider, affiliate manager, affiliate network, then fine, don’t work with them.
At the same time, anyone with mediocre skill in using any of the search engines, or who’s subscribed to keywordspy, spyfu, keycompete, or have adware installed on one of their computers can see what you’re promoting.
Granted, they may not have your analytics and conversion data, but anyone with 1-2 years marketing/affiliate experience will have some ways to figure it out.
When I was a regular visitor to internet marketing/affiliate marketing forums, there was always the fear that showing your campaign data to a network, affiliate manager or service provider would give them the means to steal your campaign.
Having been in the role of consulting for networks, service providers and affiliates, as well as being an affiliate manager/backend ops for a couple of merchants, I’ve had access to campaign data. I’ve also critiqued an affiliate’s campaign, given them advice on constructing a sales conversion funnel as well as advised them on building email lists, which would have been used to promote competing offers too.
Although I could’ve gone to replicate their campaigns, there isn’t any point to. First, stealing/cloning/copying is a short term strategy. If you haven’t planned out the system, then stealing one or two steps out of the system is pretty stupid and short term in thinking. Given the choice, I’d rather work on long-term business relationships, rather than a couple of short-term ones (even if they’re very profitable…for a short period of time).
Secondly, if you don’t already have a full plate from other projects you’re working on, then you’re probably in trouble already. And stealing is a short term solution at best.
Third, if you’re found out, you’re done.
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While stealing/cloning/copying does take place not just from your network, affiliate manager or even your traffic provider, analytics provider, heck, even your web designer might make a knock off on your campaign, there’re a couple of ways to protect yourself:
- Monitor the competition: You don’t have to religiously watch the ad placements religiously, but making a point to check out your competition every couple of days or once a week (depending on your niche) is one way to see who’s promoting and what they’re doing, so you don’t get hit with a 50% drop in conversions and have a “Now what?” moment.
- Systematize your campaign: If your campaign is little more than just buying traffic and sending it to a landing page, it’ll be easy to rip you off. If instead, you have a series of offers or ways to monetize your traffic, you’d still outperform the other guy when he makes money only 1 way, while you’ve got 3-5 offers sequenced into your campaign.
- Do your homework: Get to know your network, your affiliate manager, if you don’t like them, find someone else to work with. Rotate the offers you promote and network with fellow affiliates.
While fear can often protect you (a fear of fire, a fear of heights), an excessive amount of it and paranoia can paralyze you from getting more out of your business.
Find networks and manager you’re comfortable with, and roll with them. Check out my favorites too.
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Personally, I do not trust my service provider, but I guess I can’t really do anything about it
Excellent post. So many affiliates in the industry are completely paranoid about this stuff. Instead of worrying about that, they should definitely spend more time getting to know the people they work with to determine if they are trustworthy in the first place.
Glad to land on this blog site via Twitter when I added Amish’s Twitter site to read the comments to give me an initial direction with internet marketing as an interest and future investment.
Gotta throw this one in as a comment when I peered to the right to join the member community, lo and behold, a member ‘Silver’ shows up with exposed breasts… lol… Darn good for these hookers trying to make a living offering ’sex’ along with her brains or not – she is sure a fearless warrior among male species, no matter where the men land on internet forums concerning business – to have someone like ‘Silver’ to enlighten your spirits along the way.
Let’s give a hand to ‘Silver’ for sharing her interests with internet marketing…
Good Karma to spread…
WTF are you talking about? She is wearing a halter top. Do you not get out much?
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