bigdog

Do you care if a company hires a rep who is also a good affiliate? Seems like a messed up thing to do. Now some guy who who was doing 10 sales a day now has access to all the stats of the guys who are doing much more then him.
Imagine some big ppc guy working at TCG now having access to wiredguy's stats.

martinsc

interesting question...

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xclusive

Very good point, It would be easy to steal all his ideas. Hope that there are some safeguards built into thier system.

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joshll

Hmmmmmm, im blown.

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martinsc

the more i'm thinking about it... that sounds scary....

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DEA - banned for life

definitly some valid points

CuriousToyBoy

Certainly is.

But on the flipside, what about the 10 per day rep who helps the 2 per day guy get to 10 themselves?

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bigdog

The reason i bring it up is that i think it happens more then people think

Chris

its called trust

i know our industry lacks it

i know i'd never fuck with my affilates

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SweetJeanette

You're probably right.

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Kimo

yeah that would suck

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rick-e

How do the stats tell you which keyword the sale came from, sure you might get the referring url and see the page, but still that doesn't tell you what keyword the surfer searched for to get to the webpage

bigdog

Well if you are using different campaigns for all your keywords, I can see which ones are productive. Even if you don't name you campaigns by keywords with a little reasearch i can still find out which campaigns are for what keywords.

tranza

Best thread of the day!

Seriously, it opened my eyes.

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Tom_PM

Exactly. I specifically AVOID running some ads because some of our affiiates run their own. I also bought a domain similar to my own tour so that any affiliate could still link direct to the real tour if they wanted to.

Same as I avoid competing with some of my friends keywords, and it's mutual.

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polish_aristocrat

you start the most business threads on this board

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Furious_Male

Its a double edge sword. A lot of affiliates complain that reps do not know enough (a thread with that theme was active here yesterday) and others that reps know to much.

I do my best not to compete with any of our affiliates. At the same time I will not stop promoting and testing traffic sources as I use the knowledge I acquire to share with them. I am more of a value to them as an affiliate in the trenches then I am as a generic rep.

As mentioned it is a matter of trust and I am comfortable that the Adult Alchemy affiliates I deal with trust me.

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s9ann0

don't let them see referers

detoxed

Well its not as easy or worth jeopardizing a reputation.

Trixxxia

bigdog - a rep would also need to have the time to do that research - trying to follow your traffic sources is hard enough - trying to track what keywords you use would probably be possible but they'd need the time & interest to do it.

Now - given all the info a SE gives out on the most searches and whatnot, do you think the information you may have is of more value? All they'll see from the first look is that you promote on google/yahoo/msn... They'll then have to think up all the keywords you are using and then they'd have to test them - it could be a costly project in terms of time & money.

Directly competing on the same keyword using the same site being listed one on top of the other is pointless - even if the pitch is different, they may end up paying for your better conversions if they are on top of you.

polish_aristocrat

haha Trixxxia I love you - again the longest post in the thread so far is yours

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jayeff

If you are a rep, have that kind of access and time to spare, sure, you can infer things about peoples' businesses more easily than if you surf the 'Net. Then what?

No business model exists - in any industry - which isn't transparent or becomes so with a little digging. Yet even when the model is a very simple one which could be described in a few lines, more who attempt it will fail than succeed. The reason is that any reasonable business model has the potential to succeed, however its success is not determined by the visible, broad stroaks, but by the nuances which the operators (sometimes unwittingly) apply behind the scenes.

When demand dramatically exceeds supply, as was the case in this industry for several years, even a third-rate copy can make money. But you don't need to be a rep to go that route and if you plan to be successful in a more balanced market, observing what others do is barely a starting point.

Trixxxia

I'll explain why - sometimes, if you say something and don't explain where you got the idea or reply, people think it's either an uneducated guess, your idea is misunderstood, or they think it's an attempt at getting in your sig. I promise it's not to bore anyone

rants

This is so true. Also very well written. I should have payed you to write essays for me back in college, I wish I was that eloquent. But the idea behind is really true I think.

DaddyHalbucks

Companies should have an established policy for this.

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jayeff

Damn. I thought I was the most long-winded writer and stopped more threads. You may remember we joked about it on ICQ a year or so back

Your reasoning (the sig thing apart because I don't use one) is exactly the same as mine, so here is a warning. The more years of your life you spend trying to explain things, the longer your posts will become. Every time you sit down to write, you will remember all the other times you failed to get the message across and you think, if I just add a little more detail here, a touch more explanation there, maybe this time they will get it. Let me tell you, it doesn't work

Trixxxia

Most do & they also limit the information the rep has access to.

On that same note though - a rep is supposed to understand everything traffic source, tell you how to apply it to your situation, help you make more money with less effort - but you don't want them to fully understand hands-on what you do and you want the right to tell us that we know nothing when it doesn't work for you.
Vicious circle - can't please everyone all the time. It's a matter of trust & your relationship with who you deal with.

Reps shouldn't be working against the hand that ultimately is helping the hand that feeds you.

**Not geared towards you Daddy ;)

Trixxxia

Oh MY yes, this is why I will normally ask that if they are interested, they should contact me - but then, that looks like I'm hiding something Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I also know that the more you explain, the more chances you'll get others that understood it less or in a different way - hence why face to face is sometimes easier. *but then the downside to that is you can't erase or take back something you've said*

Mr. Blue

It truly is a double edge sword, depending on who you talk to they either want an affiliate manager that knows everything or one that won't be deemed as competition.

I look at it this way, I promote the program I work for, it would be disengenous of me to tell other people how great the program is if I haven't been using it myself. It gives me the opportunity to learn and then to help others based on what I have learned.

Basically what Trixxxia said is dead on..."Reps shouldn't be working against the hand that ultimately is helping the hand that feeds you."

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jayeff

This is a general observation: you just happened to provide the reason for making it. But in just the same way as many of us betray our lack of business experience by worrying about protecting secrets which aren't secrets at all, we also concern ourselves too much about so-called "competition".

Two hardware stores in the same street are competition. A hardware superstore is competition for all the smaller hardware stores within, say, a 50-mile radius. But regular hardware stores in cities 200 miles apart are not competition.

So it is for the vast majority of affiliates, most of the time. We work on the Internet and only in a few very specific instances (or if we exchange traffic), are we likely to confront the same surfers. SEO, providing we are talking about fighting over top spots and not about whether our site is listed at #400 or #500 is an exception. PPC is another.

I think it is extremely foolish to employ a rep who is active on his own behalf in the areas that he promotes. But that is because his usefulness may be limited because of how he will be perceived than because of any potential for actual abuse. In the wider context we generally lose far more than we gain, by limiting the exchange of useful information between ourselves.

WiredGuy

Well, there are certain safeguards I have in place to prevent data leaks. First and foremost, the tracking codes used are not so evident such as using subaccounts called google, yahoo, etc... They're inhouse tracking codes that I assign. You could backtrack it to the source, but even then, what good would it do. Keywords are stripped on my end before it ever hits the join page. It does mean I lose the ability to track which sales come from which keyword, but I'd rather safeguard my keyword lists than expose them to my sponsors (and yes, TCG does have their own inhouse PPC rep which is why I opted to strip the keywords). Now that's my specific situation, but I do know what you mean, it certainly is possible to know too much about affiliates....

WG

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Sarah_Jayne

The flip side is those that obviously have never done any work in the industry and barely know what TGP stands for.

MaddCaz

hmmm....???

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SmokeyTheBear

thats why you have more than one employee. if you let your employees handle too much , there no incentive for them to not use that information and cut out the big dog..

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bigdog

I always try to do biz related threads but no one seems to bother and post in them. The last thread i remember i started that went more then one page was some lia19 pics i posted.

ryph

It's one thing having a rep cutting into this sort of thing, but they're always usually small fries. what's stopping the program owners from even doing this? they would be the ones who are obviously talented and have enough funding to actually replicate someone's hard work in a few days. don't think for a second that when an affiliate slams a couple hundred sales out of nowhere, the owners themselves will not try and do what is needed to find out how to duplicate it and just cut the affil out. this goes beyond 'trust' in my honest opinion. it's just the bottom line and there's not much you can do besides hide your actual traffic source. this is what i have noticed in my day, take my thoughts in stride.

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