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Making Affiliate Marketing a Real Business - Organizational Structure (7)

11-11-2016 02:29 PM #1 manu_adefy (Veteran Member)
Making Affiliate Marketing a Real Business - Organizational Structure

If you’re anything like the typical affiliate, you learn all the skills required to run campaigns yourself and after some success, you yourself are the bottleneck for scaling to 4 figures or more daily profit.

What we have to learn is how to make a business out of media buying or other ways of promoting affiliate products. The first step of this is building a team. Only a few months ago that was the step where I found myself. Although I’ve worked in startup teams before, this AM venture was one that continued to grow and I had to learn more than before.

The main issue I faced recently was in actually structuring the business to know WHERE I need to hire in order to grow. More people won’t necessarily mean more productivity. You also have to know what to train people for, and there must be a clear structure. I read a few management and business books to find an answer, and one of them is called High Output Management, by Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel. Among many great tips, I found that the one explaining a hybrid company structure to be most useful.

Specifically for affiliate marketing, it’s always hard to decide.. Do you hire for the traffic source, do you hire for the vertical, do you do a mix? What happens to your margins in each case? What can you outsource? Do you need remote teams or local office? All these questions have a different answer depending on your company structure.

I want to show you an example of what I think is a good starting structure for an affiliate marketing company.

Executive is also ownership to begin with and it coordinates activity of everything below, adds and removes unites as well.

Business Development is functional but also something important enough that should be its own unit, next to the functional and business units. This department is the one that develops relationships with advertisers and traffic sources, that networks at events to get new deals going.

Tech, Design and Accounting are probably very obvious. They are needed only once per company.

The Business Units is where it gets interesting. Each media type should probably have its own department and within that, they should be very autonomous in how they do their operations, for example the Facebook unit is also responsible for handling all account challenges. The only thing that matters is that they still report periodically to Executive, that they have a good relationship with Biz Dev to profit from the deals that (should) come in, and then have clear documentation for how they “outsource” some of their tasks to Tech, Design and Accounting. They will have landing pages to be coded, they will need servers, banners, invoices to get paid, etc.

By coordinating as EXECUTIVE it also means to create documentation for how they should interact. It won’t be a one time thing that just works. It will be constant iteration. It will be the executive unit’s job to perfect the processes involved in all the business.

Given this hybrid between functional and business units, you can see how you can also add an ecommerce business unit, or an HR functional unit, etc. This hybrid version is also what is used in big international companies, Intel included. They take advantage of economies of scale and also give enough autonomy to the parts that need it.

One final thing… You will certainly have the same person wearing several hats in this structure, including yourself, but you need to start with the structure and have the list of “hats” that you start giving away later. If you are thinking about hiring a local full time employee, a virtual assistant or partnering with someone, I hope this clears up some of the frequently asked questions about hiring and building a team.

The forum has quite a few more experienced members than me when it comes to this. Would love to hear your thoughts on this, maybe we can turn the thread into a hub for organizational structure in affiliate marketing