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Clarity

Angel Djambazov

Greater Seattle Area

Owner of award winning affiliate marketing agency. Current and former clients include: Dell, Spanx, Rhapsody, Unity Games, Intelius, Jones Soda, KEEN, SAXX, Chrome Bags, Machine Zone, Point 3 Basketball, Dark Horse Comics, and Bag Borrow or Steal.

Winner of Affiliate Manager of the Year (2006, 2009) and Affiliate Advocate of the Year (2010) from Affiliate Summit. Top 25 Performance Marketing Influencers (2011). Affiliate Agency of the Year award during the Affiliate Marketing Awards (2011).

$4.17/min

20

20 Calls

22

22 Reviews

31 minutes
Avg. call

Social Media Marketing eCommerce Email Marketing Influencer Marketing Affiliate Marketing Display Advertising SEM Ecommerce Strategy Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Affiliate Management

Call me to talk about

Launching a Sustainable High Growth Affiliate Program

It's relatively easy to sign-up as an advertiser with any affiliate network. The tricky part is developing an affiliate program that is more than just coupon sites, and one that provides new sales or leads without cannibalizing your other marketing channels. I can help you avoid pitfalls and missteps in the launch process, while helping you develop a strategy to attract high growth sustainable affiliates.

Conversion Focused E-Commerce Audit/Advice

Have you developed a slick e-commerce site featuring quality products, but found your customers are still not converting? Let me help. I can provide actionable insights that will help improve your conversion rate, optimize your landing pages, and reduce shopping cart abandonment, regardless of what platform your e-commerce site is built on.

Give me a call today to discuss your needs.

Answers 5
Reviews 22

Answers

Angel Djambazov answered

Can anyone recommend an affiliate network that helped you increase mobile app downloads?

Highly suggest taking a look at HasOffers, Performance Horizon Group, or ImpactRadius. Great tracking across all mobile platforms. None of the noise or black hat issues in normal CPA networks. Happy to take a look at what you are working and jump on a call to advise.

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Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Networks

Angel Djambazov answered

A StartUp is looking into setting up an affiliate marketing platform, I believe the setup is different to the industry standard. Any insights please?

So this model has been attempted before in various formats. As a direct comparison, 3-4 years back there was a company called WidgetBox. They were a startup. Successful in getting funding. Raised at least $8 million. Their changed up their model a few times but their most successful one was nearly identical to what you described. They went directly to various advertisers on a CPA basis and then guaranteed publishers a set CPM based on the agreed CPA with the merchants. Got as high as doing 500 million impressions a month. But they didn't appropriately account for fraud, had to back out on payouts, ended up nearly folding. They were able to pivot and be absorbed into Flite.

A less direct comparison of your scenario is very common. Many affiliates these days operate what is considered a sub-network (against the rules of most larger affiliate networks) or a super-affiliate program. Examples are the dozens of loyalty affiliates out there like Upromise who also have their own affiliates (as well as members tracked on sub-ids) underneath them.

Being the advertiser's "sole" affiliate is partially where I don't see the model you describe work. Unless your advertisers are completely unfamiliar with the digital space they are unlikely to only work with one company as their sole affiliates. Advertisers like to scale. It's why they work with networks.

What ever you decide, Post Affiliate Pro does not have a robust enough of a platform for you to launch with. Beyond that the software's ability to help detect fraud is suspect. HasOffers (know called Tune) is a way better choice. Also recommend looking at Performance Horizon Group.

Either way, highly recommend rethinking the "exclusivity" or "sole" component of your model and asking yourself why an advertiser would just go with you?

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Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Management

Affiliate Networks

Angel Djambazov answered

What affiliate software should I use - open source or paid SaaS platform? If either, which specific one?

It depends on the following two questions:

1) How good is your in-house team at compliance and enforcement? Affiliate is very much still the Wild West. This means that there will always be some affiliates either stealing commissions from other affiliates in your program, doing things that may put your company in legal jeopardy with the Feds, or cannibalizing your other channels by stealing credit for sales they didn't drive thus impacting your ROAS.

2) How extensive is your network of potential affiliate contacts; and if it is not extensive, how compelling is your offer/brand/niche to affiliate partners?

If you have time and expertise for deal with compliance and if you feel you have a big enough pool of potential affiliate partners; then I would go with a paid established software like DirectTrack. If not, I would go with an affiliate network like ShareASale (mentioned by one of the other commenters) or ImpactRadius (which has a lot of flexibility).

Regardless, I would not go with an Open Source software solution unless your dev’s have time on their hands. Whatever you might save in network fees or software fees you will lose 2x in ongoing dev costs and opportunity costs.

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Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Networks

Angel Djambazov answered

Is there a service or group that allows me to connect with business blog writers and pod-casters to set up affiliate marketing partnerships/deals?

There isn't a such a service per se. There are several methods we us to find bloggers but most are more manual. They are:

1) Via conferences like Affiliate Summit (largest affiliate conference in the US), Type-A Mom (one of the most active mom focused blog conferences), NMX (largest blog conference in the US), PubCon, AdTech, etc.
2) Via analytics tools like Salesforce Cloud (formerly Radian6) that allow queries/searches based on content created in social media
3) Identifying bloggers that are open to affiliate deals based on which ad networks, if any, they are already working with.
4) There are also still plenty of active forums: A4U, ABestWeb, and Affiliate Summit's own forum.

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Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Networks

Affiliate Relations

Angel Djambazov answered

Is it a good idea to work with a remote business partner in the e-commerce space?

~ Is it really viable?
Distributed teams are very common. If you are startup is not having to deal with shipping/receiving or if onsite events are not critical; then there are plenty of proven examples where a remote team is viable.
~ Will it be harder to bounce ideas and be innovative?
As long as all stakeholders communicate regularly and a system like Slack or Discord is adopted, it shouldn't be.
~ Will this kill momentum?
Only time this might is around an actual product launch where timing is critical for success. Otherwise it shouldn't impact anything.
~ What are your immediate concerns?
My only concern would be that adoption is key. If you both are unfamiliar with or haven't adopted agile methods for remote work, I think there will be some growing pains. But if you both commit fully to the process and the project, being remote shouldn't slow you down.

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Partnerships

Partner Management

eCommerce

Reviews

Definitely glad I had the call - learned a lot from it and got great feedback on what I'm planning on the affiliate side. We covered a lot for the time spent too. Would highly recommend!

Steve Jones Source: Clarity

Got loads of value from my call with Angel. Just the fire we needed and tons to work with and implement immediately. Will be back!

Andrew Cariboni Source: Clarity

I'm trying to hire a full time Affiliate Manager for my business and Angel had a TON of insights on how to navigate this process. Thanks Angel! A+

Jordan Litvenenko Source: Clarity

Angel was excellent! Very knowledgeable and helpful - highly recommend!

Tarun Malik Source: Clarity

Angel had excellent advise to tremendously propel my business forward. I will be calling him again and again.

Stacy Brown Source: Clarity

Angel was so helpful!

Shane Zilinskas Source: Clarity

Super helpful and right on point. I learnt more from Angel in my 15 minute call than I could have in five days of research. More than excellent!

Alicia Monasso Source: Clarity

Extremely insightful. If you are even remotely considering setting up an affiliate program for your product, call Angel.

Kishan Bhoopalam Source: Clarity

Angel is an affiliate BOSS. Call this man.

Jeff Deutsch Source: Clarity

I think that my call with Angel was really worthwhile. He knows online marketing and particularly the affiliate space, and was able to give me some clear direction which will save me from throwing away dollars before we're ready. Helped me to prepare and progress properly.

Lenny Willis Source: Clarity

Great opportunity to speak with somebody with some serious affiliate knowledge. Provided some great feedback for my project that I wouldn't have otherwise considered.

Matthew Averkamp Source: Clarity

Member since May 2013