Take A Hint From Breaking Bad - Get Yourself A Partner In Crime. (31)
Take A Hint From Breaking Bad - Get Yourself A Partner In Crime.
This week I'm back on the Breaking Bad buzz, so I had to relate want I wanted to say to it.
For those of you who haven't watched Breaking Bad, you should. It's about Mr White, a chemistry teacher who is diagnosed lung cancer. He uses his chemistry skills to make pure meth. And partners with a small time dealer (Jessie). They make a killing with this partnership.
During today's torturous cold shower I was reflecting back on my AM career. One thing that sprung to my mind is since the first 6 months of AM I have never run a campaign on my own (apart from a few small exceptions). I've always had a partner in crime.
Over and over again having a partner has made up for the split of profits. Some of the benefits are:
- Learn twice as fast.
- Work twice as much.
- Twice the skill set.
- Eyes on your campaigns over a longer period of time.
- Psychological boosts and motivation.
- Different point of views.
- Twice the accounts.
- Twice everything.
You may come to the conclusion that increasing all those points by two means your revenue only goes up by two. Which means your basically at the same point as you would be working by yourself. Wrong.
ALERT SUPER SIDE TRACK: In AM I see there is an invisible staircase. The more revenue you hit, the more ads you buy, the more stairs you climb. After certain stairs there are elevators. Once you hit certain barriers in revenue, or hit certain spend on ad networks, you get to access these invisible elevators. These elevators take you to places the typical affiliate can't get to. You get access to special payouts, offers, landers, placements, bids, insight, the works. Because of this, your revenue jumps up a few steps that you can't achieve doing the same old optimizations/testing. Watch out though, there is decay. You can fall down stairs if you aren't constantly active.
The point of that side track is I don't see making money with AM as linear, I see it as exponential. Teaming up with someone means you are going to hit the elevators/short cuts to bigger money faster. You also have a lot more momentum which is a key for longterm revenues.
I have created a poll above. I'd be interested if you partner up the majority of the time or not. And whether you consider yourself successful or not. Please answer 
Hope this thread made sense...I admit it was a bit of a brain fart.
Good post! I voted "Work as lone wolf. Am successful" but I've always been interested in partnering up with someone. I guess I just haven't met that 'special someone' yet 
For the people that do partner up, I'm curious if it's usually with someone you already knew or someone who is in the same area that you can meet with face to face vs someone that you only know online.
I'm also curious how people manage splitting/sharing the money and how they structure the partnership.
This is something I've always been interested in but cautious about actually doing. I'm interested in hearing feedback from the people who actually do this.
-Aaron
I do alright by myself, but I've been trying to find a partner / team for a while now. However, I find this aspect to be very difficult because finding a partner on a similar level is not that easy. How did you find / vet your potential partners?
Good questions!
Living most of my life in New Zealand I didn't have such luxury of popping down the road to meet fellow marketers. I met all my partners online first. One of my partners I'm still yet to meet. Another partner I recently met after working together for 4 years.
In terms of finding a the right partner. First thing is trust. Trust is everything when AM is mostly about intellectual property. If you are looking to get a partner you have be the one that puts yourself in a vulnerable position (share something valuable). Depending on how they respond, you know whether you have a keeper or a dud.
The partners that have worked out best for me, are technical. As I am technically retarded. Your partner should make up your weaknesses.
Where to look? This forum is perfect. You can see people work, what their strengths are, what their personalities are, before you even say a word to them. Mastermind groups are another good one. If you start with a group of 6. Typically people will fall off the radar until there are the one or two good guys left.
Partnerships haven't always gone well for me. Actually my first one I got burnt. But I learnt my lesson 
.
I've had a few. My first big internet venture was done under the assistance of a partner. In the end, we had our issues but I can say without a doubt that I wouldn't have succeeded without him. He could take care of the things that I didn't want to do and vice versa.
I have also met one good past partner on this forum, and while we aren't currently involved in any projects, the experience was really successful.
I see two main downsides. The biggest issue that often arises is that one guy feels he's doing too much of the work. This was the case for me in the first partnership above. Second minor thing is that sometimes in a partnership situation the additional accountability and the reliance on someone else can start to make things feel more like a 'job' with less freedom. This could just be me though. I hate structure.
I currently don't have a partner, but if I were to get into a more businessy project beyond affiliate work I'd definitely want to have one.
^^ Yeah that is one big point I forgot. Work balance.
It is hard to find someone that will work the same amount as you. Really hard. Personally I put it down to value. I don't care if they work 100 hours or 1 hour, if they are evenly helping with the bottom-line then I'm all good with it.
Worst case scenario just change the split. Or work out some way of making each other accountable for what work they do. Recently I ran two different campaigns with my partner. He took care of one, I took care of the other. We made an excel doc and noted down daily profits, including reasons if there were big drops or increases during the day. We agreed that at the end of the month the person who generated the most would get an extra 10% from the split. It's good motivation and you can quickly see who is pulling their weight.
Will agree with Mr. Green here, trust is the #1 important thing you need to have in a partnership. If you have that, everything else can fall into place much more easily. That's the one element that you can't collectively learn and get better in. And since this is a BB thread... take to the words that ended yesterday's episode to heart:
"If you don't know who I am -- maybe your best course is to tread lightly"
Awesome, what about splitting costs/profits? How do you structure it so that one guy doesn't screw the other?
Also, Breaking Bad is the best tv show there is.
I've not worked with a partner in AM, but I've worked with multiple business partners in other ventures - and it's definitely a good idea.
One of the benefits I find is really significant is just having someone to bounce ideas off. It's far easier to make good decisions when there are two of you to actually verbalize your ideas, bounce back and forth, and winnow out the good ones from the terrible ones.
@jaaproos - I try to make it work 50/50 so both parties are equally motivated. In terms of who floats the cost. It depends on the partnership, maybe part of one persons value is their capital. If capital is not an issue, then I've always made it the person who does the spending gets paid. They then send the profit share to the other partner. Since there is trust in the partnership I'm not bothered either way who does it.
very intersting post.
I've pretty much done my own stuff, but like you said... you hit this ceiling.
Was thinking and i'd be down to do a partnership deal with someone (or ppl) for traffic to my offer(s).
if someone is a badass with traffic/tracking etc. i'd be down to fund and split profits accordingly.
just hard to find someone A. you trust, B. dedicated, C. has the skills
its a good idea IMO because you can bounce ideas off each other, and that "buzz" you get working with a team/partners helps you really get more shit done than just working all on your own.
but again, its gotta be the right person.
1. I haven't watched the newest episode of Breaking Bad yet, so NO SPOILERS!!!!
2. Partners are the best if they can fill a void you're missing (which usually is always possible). ONE great aspect of a partner that was only mentioned once so far is MOTIVATION! You wakeup in the morning and already have a txt, a skype msg and 3 emails from them, and vice versa. Gets you pumped to work harder, you feed off eachothers energy and thus more money!
Wow these stats so far are interesting. There is no one out there yet who's partnered up most of the time and hasn't considered themselves unsuccessful. Keep the votes coming!
stackman... ya... dont wanna ruin it for you... but you gotta watch it. :-)
I have a partner horror story.. Although I am not against partnering up but. My current partner who's name I wont mention
We both went on an out of bounds trip with neverblue a couple of years ago where he met a fellow affiliate and they immediately hit it off.
That affiliate visited a short time later for ASE 2011 and thats when my partner decided to partner up and "exchange" some super secret valuable techniques with this person. (all was talk no contracts nothing) The next day we both noticed that our stats dropped from 5 figures down to 3.. We had a plane to catch (vacation to Curacao) my partner would not get up to leave to the airport until he figured out what went wrong out of nowhere we thought... Anyways, he ended up finding a walk-though guide of our secret sauce on a private forum with that affiliate labeling himself as the creator claiming he has been running it for years..
What we learn from this poll is that VASTLY more people have failed/not yet reached success by Lone Wolfing it compared to people who have partnered up.
Interesting.
I am always looking for AM partners. I can't cook meth as good as Mr. White, but I am good with media buys (sitescout) and somewhat decent wit PPV. Hit me up if interested
I started AM in 2003 and never worked with partner.
I think of myself as fking completely unsuccessful and lazy person
that gets lucky from time to time.
I spend $5k last 10 days on background checks, bedroom bugs
and mobile and i don't even have stats to start optimizing on.
Probably would have some data if I worked with partner and split
traffic sources to test.
Breaking Bad rules
^^Serious?
How the hell are you making money?
You must have some insane luck.
@godspeed, haha nothing wrong with that as long as you're making money who cares. But yes having a partner I think would help you a lot.
Originally Posted by Mr Green
Originally Posted by kai1
Jokes on side, i'v been in cc debt since 2008 cos of bed money management.
Something I'm contemplating (and have been for a while) is a partner vs hiring a young guy out of college and teaching him aspects of the business and paying him well.
I would be interested to work with a partner, but at this stage of my career it would need to be a teacher/student level as I only started my first campaign.
Do most partnerships have the same skill/experience level with different skill sets?
In my mind it all comes down to trust both in persons integrity not to rip you off and in their execution of their work.
I have worked with someone in the past and it proved to be my most successful period of money making. Having someone else keep you on track can be very helpful (everybody in this business has the attention span of a goldfish on speed right?!)
Once I've got so new money making skills down pat I will almost certainly team up again just to be able to diversify the creativity and testing.
Most partnerships will at some stage suffer badly. One person will ALWAYS do more work than the other. Splitting profits fairly is necessary. There will be waves of profitable work done by Person A and Person B, so keep track of what's working and who's doing what. In the music industry the recording artists, producers etc. sign a sheet that has their split of work done so royalties get attributed accordingly by the music performance networks. You should be signing off on everything, agreeing to the split. If it's one person's job to do technical work while the other focuses on decisions, then the split should never change. But if both are doing similar tasks, there will be friction and you need to track things.
Saw this thread at an interesting point in time.
In all my time doing affiliate marketing I've been a lone wolf mostly, had some partnerships here and there, most went ok, one was DISASTROUS, but most of my affiliate marketing success was achieved on my own.
Recently, I partnered with a local friend i.e. we are now going to the same office daily and working together everyday, on a new business that's got nothing to do with affiliate marketing.
Interesting thing about this joint project is that both of us actually have our own businesses running nicely and this new business is meant to capitalize on a trend both of us agree are going to take us places for the next one year or so, and then we will re-assess the next step.
So far, the partnership has been GREAT.
I love that we are now plucking our hair out together on hiring issues and when softwares don't work as we hope etc etc instead of me suffering things alone when I was a lone wolf.
And having someone to eat and attend seminars with makes me feel very happy.
I'm more of a ideas and big-picture guy while he's more of a do-er so we're a good team.
We're still at the very beginning so not sure how things will end up but I'm seriously considering building a team for the affiliate marketing business in a similar fashion because of this good experience I have with partnering someone on an intimate level.
By looking at the poll now, i's pretty clear that the likelihood of success is far greater with a partner than on your own.
Would still like to know what the person went through who voted that they had failed after partnering up most of the time.
Originally Posted by Mr Green
^^ Or enjoy Breaking Bad
One other thing I have really taken advantage of by partnering up is the "good cop, bad cop" play.
There has been many times we have been in situations when we have been making money and either an advertiser or ad network has dicked us around. If I were working on my own, I would be hesitant about yelling in their ears and telling them what I thought, in the case of burning my bridges. With a partner I've been able to say exactly what I wanted to say, knowing I'm going to have a good cop follow it up and be a mediator. It's worked well!
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