Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum

---

Question for people who has a team who manage campaigns, finance etc (25)

---

Hi all,

I believe large no of people here have teams who run their campaigns, handle finances, backend etc.

I do email marketing and work alone, I want to have a team who can do all the campaign sending, offer selection, backend etc so I can focus on growing my business and focus on creating other business.

I am good at brainstorming ideas, new ways of generating revenue, creating a strategy, telling what to do etc.
But when it comes to hiring or creating a proper company I get completely clueless, I literally feel like a retarded person.
Recently I registered and created a business bank acc in my company's name and that's it.

I read Jason Akatiffs guide on hiring and my first thought was also the same, to hire an Operations Manager so he can do all the day to day operations of the business and make sure campaigns are getting sent everyday and everything is running smoothly etc.

Should I share the cpa networks details with the team? Will they see the revenue or at least the Ops Manager will see the revenue? what will they think that I am paying them less than the revenue that is being generated.

I am afraid what if the Ops Manager copies what I do and quits and does it for himself?
Or maybe I am just thinking this too much lol.


How did you guys scale?
Would love to hear your stories on how you successfully scaled and made affiliate marketing in to an actual business.

---

Its a great question man...

I used to manage tons of people in a past life and had enough of it to last a lifetime lol... At the time I really liked the idea of being a 'leader', however I came to the conclusion that managing a bunch of unhappy employees at globocorp has nothing to do with 'leadership' in the historical sense lol.

So anyway... I bring that up because I have purposefully wanted to stay 'lean' in IM as a result...

For that reason I have relied on 1) outsourcing to agencies rather than hiring employees, and 2) hiring fulltime Filipino VA's rather than domestic US 'employees'.

For that former... There's a lot of great companies out there that can handle one aspect of your business... whether its bookkeeping, billing, creatives, tech logistics, or any number of things... and farming out work to an agency has many benefits compared to having an employee (though having an employee has advantages too).

With Filipino VA's... there's a million reasons they're great... but one thing I like about hiring them is that there's no expectation they are going to be "rockstar" employees, just competent ones, so you are forced to really create systems for them to use, which is ultimately what you want anyway.

But yeah... I bring up those two things to give that side of the perspective, but I'm sure there's other folks here on STM who have done great work building out actual teams of employees, so I'll let them chime in on that front

If you're interested in Filipino VA's though check out John Jonas and OnlineJobs.ph... he has a ton of great videos on YouTube and on their site that are really relevant whether your hiring Filipinos or actual employees...

Also I don't know if its still available, but James Van Elswyck had a course called P3 Scaling that I bought last year and which was really good... all about scaling up a media-buying outfit...

---

Thank you for your reply. Great information.

I have considered remote hiring and I think it might work since one of the most imp task is creating 10s of campaigns everyday and its inside a platform so its easy to learn I guess.


Best would be to just hire and go from there, see how it works.

---

Like you, I do email marketing (as an agency - separate to aff stuff). I have a team of 5 people in the agency. Also had 12ish staff for aff stuff back in 2017.

A few important things:

1) before you hire for something, you should know how to do it well enough to train people and know when they are producing rubbish.

2) If you want to focus on growing the business and other businesses, I strongly strongly strongly advise you to have the business completely systemised with a team in place FIRST. Otherwise you will be creating chaos. If you work alone now, identify the areas you can hire for, create the SOPs and job specs... then hire.

Repeat enough times and then you will have a full team and more time to think about other things without distraction.

3) "How to make it into an actual business" starts with creating profitable campaigns in my opinion. If you havent figured out how to make profit, then I would go all in on that one thing. Im sure you know but in Aff marketing, you will lose money before you make it. Hiring a team is about scale. Focus on scaling profitable campaigns.

Now, you can make the argument that "having a team will make things quicker". And it will. But if you havent cracked the profit code, then the team will lead you to the affiliate graveyard quicker.

It doesnt take a team to launch profitable campaigns.

4) finally, to agree with @jack_I -- do you really want a full team tho? The reason why I am closing my agency is because it NEEDS people to scale. Lean works for me better. Maybe you too.

---

@vinn_land - that's an extremely good post man... ton of wisdom in that...

This right here: "if you havent cracked the profit code, then the team will lead you to the affiliate graveyard quicker" could have saved so many affiliates so much trouble man...


Anyway though @dante7 , hopefully some other folks with actual big teams will chime in, but after reading your post again, I think you'd really, really enjoy utilizing OnlineJobs.ph... you've obviously got a lot of good ideas and excitement and creativity surrounding the team-building aspect, and hiring a Filipino VA will be way less hassle, less risky, and less stressful than hiring a fulltime employee to start...

Not saying you shouldn't hire fulltime employees too - by all means, build up a billion dollar business with thousands of them if you can do so and want to- but OnlineJobs.ph would be a perfect on ramp I think... you can find all sorts of talent on there too... video editing, data entry, accounting, basically anything you can think of...

I've used the site quite a bit so if you end up doing so and have any questions feel free to dm me

---

Wow thanks for writing that all! Great stuff. And my long term goal is to go into b2b email marketing, I have plans laid out for that too haha.


Yes, I am already profitable running campaigns but right now I am the one:

1.Buying server
2.Get it configured for mailing
3.Upload data
4.Look for offers to send
5.Create and send campaigns daily


These are main aspects, and sometimes involves doing small tasks such as creating a creative, backend tech errors, offer selection, data testing, buying new data, warming up etc.

So it eats a lot of my time and I am unable to do 2-3 other things that I have in my mind.


My plan is to get a better email platform, more servers/ips and data(total of this all would be around $3k-$5k/mn I am sure you know how costly email infra can get).
And then create subaccounts for people who will do the campaign sending part for me everyday.


Would you mind talking more about what you used to do in 2017? I mean, how did you manage the email aff team?



Thanks again for your help, loved your 2nd point


Yup yup I've been profitable for quite some time now.
I'll definitely ask you questions if I hire from onlinejobs.ph I browsed it last month and the pricing seems reasonable for VAs.

I think I can try to get one person first and have them send my campaigns and see how that goes.

Maybe I am in my head too much.



Thanks for your replies guys.

---

So in 2017 I was a FB ads affiliate.

But for what you do now I would:

1.Buying server (create the SOP and hire)
2.Get it configured for mailing (create the SOP and hire)
3.Upload data (create the SOP and hire) - do this first. Its admin.
4.Look for offers to send (Keep forever lol)
5.Create and send campaigns daily (Outsource last)

Happy to chat more seems as i did a bit of mailing as an aff too. PM me

---

Just curious to know...currently are you working alone or have a team?

---

Everyday, i sit in front of my computer and waste hours of time(daily) manually optimizing my campaigns. It's the most boring job in the world. Creating blacklist, pausing campaigns...etc. I am willing to pay someone $1000/month if he promises not to steal my campaign and do this campaign optimizing work on my behalf.
I badly want to hire someone, but the fear of him ripping my stuff(copying my campaigns, whitelist) scares me from hiring anyone. And that's why i do everything myself.

---

Building up a team vs being solo is a tough choice. It definitely depends on your goals in business/life, as well as how you approach it. I've worked with/for several successful solo marketers as they grew into running companies, and have started several of my own, so I've seen things play out all kinds of ways both good and bad. There are a few lessons and general advice I've learned:

1. Before making your life easier in the long run, the decision to hire is going to make it much harder short term. Hiring is quite literally an investment. You need to spend time not just selecting the right candidates, but far more importantly, in training and onboarding them. Without strong support in their early days, most employees are going to fail, even the good ones. I've found the most dangerous time for this is when you expand a team beyond the 5-6 person mark. The first few hires you typically work really closely with, and then once you go beyond that point when you get lazy and less involved it can fall apart. @jack_l's advice of starting to learn the process with VAs and highly structured low level roles is good one, as it'll help you get comfortable at first

2. Before you hire for something, understand it. It's so easy to have a problem and think "I'll just hire someone to solve this for me", that can work for very specific one time problems, but for a full time position it's a recipe for disaster. You'll almost certainly hire someone incompetent, or much worse, a con man who will wow you in interviews then deliver nothing. The best solution I've found for this is to hire a consultant to help you recruit/evaluate/onboard for the position.

3. Consider your goals. Hiring is great if you want to build an empire. If your goal is freedom, its a terrible idea. Don't outsource your core competency. I've seen successful entrepreneurs bankrupt themselves by hiring with the goal of replacing themself at their own company. This never goes well.

4. Don't give trust and responsibility until it's been earned, especially with remote positions. I wouldn't share critical financial details or campaign data that can be stolen with anyone new unless you have proper controls in place or they're demonstrated sufficient loyalty and tenure.

Despite all the potential problems, I personally really like to have a team and find it's way more enjoyable than working alone. Put the focus on having your early hires help you grow rather than thinking of it as a way to make things 'easy' and you'll probably do much better. Take it slow, try to find and train 1 good team member, then add on from there.

IMO that sounds like a really bad idea. You're giving someone valuable access and data, that someone competent in that role would know exactly how to use if they steal it, while not really paying them a sufficient wage and/or giving them the intellectual and social involvement to deter them from ripping you off.

---

I've never had a large team, just a bunch of people, so I'm not the most qualified person to discuss this, but anyways, let me share a few thoughts

What has worked for me, but I realize it's not a one fits all solution, was this: whenever I needed to hire someone who would get in contact with crucial info such as the revenue, I made a performance based deal with them. So the more we made, the more they would get paid. With this setup, they would be risking a significant revenue stream if they tried to "steal" the campaigns from me. On top of that, I always made sure they do not see everything... so for example, I always handled the communication with the advertisers, I handled the finances myself etc...

But what I found to be the most secure was to find people who are smart and hardworking but do not fancy running their own business from whatever reason... these people are hard to find, but they do exist

---

Me, my wife, and then a VERY small amount of VA's/agency outsourcing

---

I think if you hire some 22 year old gal in the Philippines to do this you won't have to worry about them stealing your campaigns... not everyone even has a desire to be an entrepreneur (as strange as that may seem to people like you and me lol).

I honestly haven't heard that many horror stories about employees within the IM world... usually 90% of the horror stories are partnerships... ("as they say, the only ship that doesn't sail is a partnership") however I'm sure there's exceptions to that too as I know some folks love that model...



Edit: I do agree with @bc_red though that that would definitely not be a task to give one of your bro's or your cousin or some dude you meet in IM forums... but then again the actual work involved is low-level so you wouldn't want to pay US-tier wages for it anyway... if you can make it mindless and step-by-step then the person doing it doesn't even need to know what they are doing really...

---

Literally the story of my life lately.

That sounds good. But I guess the question is practically - how do you SOP for the task.
For example for me it's mostly TheOptimizer and looking at the stats of the affiliate network - the manual boring media buying.

1) Would you trust someone to get access to the affiliate network?
2) How do you get someone into Optimizer and monitor what they are doing?
3) How do you systemize explanations of bidding up widgets (I feel - there's many variables involved in that), increasing budget, pausing campaigns, increasing campaign bids - I've been doing those things for so long that I feel they are on an intuitive level.
4) Besides the more boring systematic work, do you let them duplicate campaigns for you, upload creatives for you (also bit boring IMO although a bit less time consuming)

5) And finally, how do phillipinos handle boring work ?? Don't they get bored?
6) And finally finally, wouldn't Ukranians or Indians be a better "value for money"?

---

My 2 cents on point 5 and point 6:
Point 5- No ! Filipinos don’t get bored running the same tasks everyday. Tried for 6 years myself working with them. They will certainly get bored doing exactly same steps for 3 years straight. Hehe. As long as you have a rule book .. it will be followed well. To remind you .. ( could be quite difficult to imagine ) but people exist who love doing the same job every day… happily

Point 6:
Ukrainians: no clue.
Indians : no significant price difference compared to a Filipino however it could be a hit or miss in remote . It’s a great success if they work from a dedicated office or you tie up with someone who staffs them for you ( well tested)

Again .. that’s my experience


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

---

That´s why I work on automation stuff.

I also had VAs from onlinejobs.ph but only for landing page related tasks and so on.

I also don´t really trust others with my stuff so I better do the most important tasks myself.

TheOptimizer is already a huge help but I want to automate my work as much as possible now so I just earn how to do it myself.

Additionally it´s not like you don´t have any work anymore when you hire people, you still need to instruct and explain, control the work etc.

---

Well, I actually don't pharm out campaign optimization... I was just saying... if someone is determined to farm that out, I think that type of hire isn't one who would "steal" anything... but I agree with you... campaign optimization is very tough to create SOP's for...

With that said, we did previously have one of our Filipino VA's helping with that kind of thing...

Here's what we had her do:

-Research search arb verticals and fill out spreadsheet with what she found
-Assemble headlines from pre-based templates for each vertical we selected to run
-Found images for that vertical within Taboola image repository, screenshot them, then post into Search Arb dashboard for approval
-Upload campaign with those images and headlines
-Do daily P&L on Excel for all search arb campaigns

She did great at all that, but we just couldn't get search arb to work very well anyway so discontinued it...

Currently having her writing super formulaic articles for two content sites... she has helped with tons of stuff though... I just take screen capture videos if its something complicated, and so far (knock on wood) its worked okay...

But yeah, honestly I think the biggest worry with freelancers is them not actually doing the work (i.e. taking on 3-4 fulltime jobs at once), however if its data entry or writing type stuff then you don't have to worry as much, since you actually see their work each day.



Edit: re: #6 , I find Filipino's uniquely well-suited to Virtual Work... there are some great individuals in Eastern Europe and India for specific high-skill roles, but for just general attitude+work ethic+English skills, I think the Philippines is by far the best. I'm actually extremely bullish on the Philippines I think it is on an amazing trajectory as a country too.

---

Thanks for taking time to write all that


The good part about email marketing is I don't have to worry about campaign stealing as much about getting my data stolen.
I can disable export function and I'd be on a safe side for the most part.

To update you all, I got a guy to send campaigns for me and we agreed on a deal. I am paying him flat % of revenue earned through the campaigns he will be sending. I will bear all the costs(server/data etc). So he has incentive to work more hard and smart. I know from past few projects so he seems trustworthy.

Now I have a small issue, one of the network I am with doesn't have an option to have subaccount for him. My AM said I can share the account but I don't want him to see the revenue from other campaigns,I hardly use this network but still if I see a campaign I want to run then I'll have to think twice lol.



I'll keep you guys updated on how it's working

---

5) Agree with @reachsam. They are happy to do the same thing over and over, if it is well explained. Lots of high-end hotels in Asia use phillipinos maids, because they are very consistent at cleaning the rooms. I hired my first VA there around 10 years ago, for very repetitive stuff, and she did very well.

6)
- Ukrainians: They tend to be more expensive, because lots of them have good programming skills that pay more. My first choice when I need to delegate programming, but not for VA.
- Indians: Lots of back and forth, even when you have clearly defined SOP. They don't carefully read the instructions. Then they come back with questions, and you waste time saying "as I explained on page 5 ...". At VA level, I usually avoid, unless I need to mess up the SEO of a competitor. In that specific case, they are perfect.

---

Just wondering, you had the same pre-made headline templates for All verticals? How did you come up with them?
And by the "Taboola image repository" you mean the stock images they provide? Were you actually using those images in campaigns and they were working?

---

Yeah.. if you look at all the search arb verticals you'll notice its the same headlines over and over again...

____ in {location} may surprise you!
Interested in _____ in {location}?
See ___ prices in {location}.
____ in {location} could leave you in surprise!
Etc.

And then yes, Taboola's internal image repository is amazing... absolutely incredible man... I use the living heck out of it


Again though I failed to ever make search arb work long-term consistently so don't presume my strategies were best practices by any means lol

---

Just trusted fiverr VA with my Optimizer login, here go nothing (everything)

---

Do you have a long-term agreement for continued work with them or is it just temporary help?

---

No agreement with her, I needed her to do a task for me of reversing some faulty executed rules that day, so she was changing CPCs on widgets for me back to their previous values.

What would an agreement help, btw?

---

No I was just curious...

Was gonna say, if you're gonna try to hire a permanent VA to work for you long-term I would try OnlineJobs.ph, but for short term VA help Fiverr or Upwork is probably great.

---

Home > General > Affiliate Marketing Forum