JEBCommerce is growing rapidly and needs more talented people right away. We currently have one position open.

Assistant - Affiliate Marketing

JEBCommerce is growing rapidly and we are looking for someone with great administrative and organizational skills that is looking to join a high energy team. This position will assist the affiliate and account managers in:

* supporting affiliate manager
* affiliate partner application approvals
* appointment and meeting scheduling
* posting to several of the blogs we operate
* assisting team in sending out partner newsletters
* basic affiliate program administration functions
* basic online research

We are looking for someone who can help us continue to grow our clients’ campaigns. The following are desired qualifications:

* strong communications skills
* ability to work independently
* proficiency in excel, word, powerpoint
* minimal html experience
* good written and verbal communications skills

To apply -email your resume and a brief cover letter to careers@jebcommerce.com

This position is located in beautiful Coeur d’Alene Idaho and we are currently not looking for telecommuting candidates.

One of the things I learned from working at and with several large, national, multi channel retailers, was the concept of same store sales.  Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a complex metric that I came up with, it’s only something I have found useful when managing affiliate programs.  Whether retail programs, lead gen programs, business-to-business programs or others, it comes in quite handy.

Same-store performance is a concept used by retailers and investors to evaluate a retail company’s performance.  It compares sales of stores that have been open for at least a year in that organization.  From investopedia:

This statistic allows investors to determine what portion of new sales has come from sales growth and what portion from the opening of new stores. This analysis is important because, although new stores are good, a saturation point–where future sales growth is determined by same store sales growth - eventually occurs.

So why should you care?  As an affiliate manager it is important for you to know where your sales are coming from, how your current partners are performing and what percentage of your sales growth comes from new partnerships.  And like the description above, at some point, your program’s sales growth will be coming from your current affiliates as your program becomes saturated with all the appropriate affiliates.

You need to be able to measure if your program is growing by new partners, or existing partners.  Your plans, promotions, offers and strategy will be dependent on this measurement and will change as you move from new partner growth to current partner performance growth.

JEBCommerce wasn’t able to attend the Affiliate Summit in NYC this year.  We very much wanted to, but we are working on some big things here, launching a few new clients and hiring new people, so a journey across the country was not in the cards.  If you haven’t attended an Affiliate Summit and are still on the fence, do it.  You won’t regret it.  Our entire team will be heading to ASW10 in Vegas next year.  We won’t be missing that and we hope to meet you there as well.

Fortunately for us, more than 50 attendees have posted their recaps of the event online.  Our team went through and found recaps from people such as Ian Fernando, Zach Johnson, Clickbooth, Missyward, the Martells, Murray Newlands and more.  We’ve listed many of these recaps here.  It sure sounds like everyone had an awesome time, and lots of business was done and networking took place.  If I missed your recap, just send an email to jamie@jebcommerce.com and I’ll add it today.

Revenews’ CT Moor’s Recap

Stephanie Lichtenstein’s Recap

Affiliate Summit East Slide Shows

James and Arlene Martell on Webmaster Radio

MissyWard.com

Murray Newsland’s Recap

ClickBank’s Recap

Affiliatetip’s Recap

Buy.at’s Recap

Eric Nagle’s Recap

Vinny Ohare’s Recap

HelpMeDrive’s Recap

TheChrista.com’s Recap

Ian Fernando’s Recap

AdHustler’s Recap

Affiliate Marketing Fanatics’ Recap

Nerdy Affiliate’s Recap

Mike Chiasson.com - Love his welcome to NY moment.

TrishaLynn.com

CashTactics.net

ShockMarketer

Super Affiliate Twins

DailyConversions.com

InternetMarketingWorldCup.com

I put this little video together this morning after driving my favorite vehicle to work.  Yes that is a two-tone, 1973 Scout II.  Unfortunately it runs about as good as it looks at the moment.  Watch the video and then please share with me your story.  Do you feel like you have a good idea of where your program stands?  Are you ready to tackle all your obstacles and opportunities through the end of the year?

From time to time, we have the good fortune to work with companies that really go above and beyond to help us become successful.  These outstanding companies remind us, and drive home the need for our agency to provide the best possible customer service to our clients and affiliates, and Wes Moore at iPlayerHD is just one of these companies.

When we were finishing up the 12 week curriculum for our affiliate manager training program, MyAffiliateCoach, we were using MotionBox to serve all our videos.  Each module has an intro video and many have bonus videos and other video educational elements to it.  We had spent months putting it together and, at the time, were very happy with MB’s service.

Then, just as we were about to announce the launch of this service, MotionBox was acquired by Snapfish and let us know we had ten days to move our videos and that our account “may not be available” after a certain date.  As you can imagine, that sent us scrambling as we were planning on using this service for the duration and now had to find something completely new.

In walks Wes Moore, founder of iPlayerHD.  I believe that Wes contacted me through a twitter post, or possibly a frantic email to his help email.  What transpired after our initial call was nothing short of the best customer service experience we have had in a long time.  Wes spent a significant amount of time in the following two weeks to not only make sure that we understood how to use iPlayerHD in our MyAffiliateCoach program, but also that all the videos (about 28 in all) were encoded, embedded and ready to go for our launch on August 1st.

Wes actually encoded the first 15 videos for us, loaded them in iPlayerHD and sent me the embed code for each one.  What I thought would have taken me two weeks, and pushed back the launch another month, took only four days.  Wes’s help and instruction was vital for us launching when we did.

Not only did he help get this done, he helped get this done while I was out on vacation.  I know this is a bit of a cliche’, but he really went the extra mile and I really appreciated the help.

The product itself is pretty awesome.  We use it in our blog announcement and our presslift announcement as well as each module and bonus modules.  It’s a great way to serve video, pretty much anywhere.  Great product Wes!

I asked Wes to tell us a little more about his product for this post:

“Over the years, I have launched many companies and among those companies,  iPlayerHD is my clear favorite. When asked why, my answer is simple: iPlayerHD has made a complex problem simple and an expensive solution inexpensive. Using iPlayerHD’s video hosting platform, any business or organization can easily and affordably deliver high definition videos to their audience in an ad-free environment ensuring their message is the focal point of the viewing experience.”

When someone makes an impact on us, goes above and beyond and really strives to help us be successful, I like to tell people about it.  Wes, you did an awesome job and we can’t thank you enough.  You turned a stressful situation into one that ended up working better than we had imagined.  Thank you!

If you are looking for a video hosting and serving solution, please check out iPlayerHD and let Wes know that JEBCommerce sent ya.

I honestly can’t believe we are almost in September.  My evenings are starting to fill up with my kids extra curricular school activities, back to school shopping and picking tomatoes and corn out of the garden and hoping my butternut squash turns out ok.

All those things trip a trigger in my mind and make me realize the 4th quarter is here.  It’s now time to get ready for the marathon that is the holiday season and ensure that all our programs are ready to rock and roll.

We use a process we call the Affiliate Assessment and Success Roadmap, you can learn more about this service here, and we teach this in our My Affiliate Coach affiliate manager coaching and training program.  It is such an important aspect of managing an affiliate program.

How can you get to where you want to go, without first knowing where you are now?

Assessing your affiliate program is vital as we head into the last part of the year.  Why?

• knowing where your program stands will provide you with an objective picture of the items you need to work on to reach your goals for 2010
• it’s incredibly hard to create a plan for the 4th qtr if you haven’t looked at all aspects of your affiliate program
• self evaluation is vital in continuing to improve your own performance, advance your career and is important in a process of life long learning

Here are a few things you should assess this month to get ready for the big push, as we call it:

• your creative - do you have current banners and text links, do you have old ones sitting out there, are you scheduling updates for the season?
• affiliate performance - retail organizations call this “same store sales”, but it is a concept you need to look at here.  How are the affiliates you have performing compared to last year?  I’ll be writing more about this next week.
• consumer promotions
• affiliate promotions
• distribution of top sellers and categories

That’s a real short list.  We cover over 20 distinct areas of each affiliate program we manage to determine what needs to be worked, where the opportunities for increase are and exactly what we need to do to reach our goals.

What say you?

Sunny with a slight chance of failure?  Does that sound like a forecast you have been putting together for your affiliate program?  With the fourth quarter running rapidly at us, our team is working on their forecasts for each of our clients.  It’s an extremely important aspect of affiliate management, and one that drives the strategy for the month, quarter and year to come.

We create a forecast each year for our clients, then update it on a quarterly basis.  In our affiliate manager training program, MyAffiliateCoach, we spend an entire module on forecasting and goal setting.  During that module we talk about some of the mistakes made in developing a forecast, and that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

But let’s start off with a small confession.  Each and every one of these mistakes I have personally done…… many, many times.  Hi, my name is Jamie, I have, in the past, been a horrible forecaster for my programs.  Ok, I feel better now.

All kidding aside, forecasting is difficult and important.  If you have yet to put together a forecast for your programs, maybe we can help.

There are many ways you can mess up a forecast, let’s go over three of those most common errors:

• Isolation - Creating a forecast within a vacuum.  I’ve personally created, and seen many affiliate managers create forecasts without any input from other marketing channels or taking into consideration the activities of the entire company.  The foundation of a forecast tends to be historical data, but if you aren’t looking at things such as Catalog drop schedule, consumer promotion schedule, retail store openings, overall online sales forecast, seasonality, nationwide events (elections for example) and other things outside of the affiliate silo, you’ll really be missing out a lot.
• Identifying your key drivers - There are actions, events, and other items that directly effect the sales of your affiliate program.  Things like how many producing affiliates, average order size, number o contacts and outreach you make, catalog drops and orders per affiliate, are drivers of your affiliate program sales.  Now, yours may be different, but you need to identify those things that directly drive sales and effect the amount of sales of your program.  You need to be a bit scientific about your forecast.  How many affiliates product 5 sales a month, how many $5000 in sales, how many active affiliates producing our average sale amount do we need to hit X amount of sales?  Not identifying these things will make your forecast less accurate, and will increase the difficulty of creating a plan to reach the forecast you create.
• No trust in the gut - I have put together countless forecasts where I included all my drivers, all the seasonality and even a daily sales schedule based on catalog drops and store openings, only to be told “you need to be 20% higher.  When asked why, the response was - “it just needs to be, my gut tells me we can do more”.  The first time I heard this, after spending about 40 hours developing a scientific forecast, I was like “ok, what the heck, why did I got through this process in the beginning if the sales goal was going to be pulled out of a…. hat?”  Sometimes you either need to work back from a sales number you just have to hit, or you just have to trust your gut and work back from there.  Don’t be too discouraged, use that number, identify your drivers, and work your way back to identify how many and how much of each of those drivers you need to hit those numbers.  Then you can create your plan.

We spend a lot of time developing solid, accurate and achievable forecasts.  When we begin our quarterly planning process, this is where we begin.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be a daunting task, but avoiding the mistakes above is important to be successful.

We’d love to help you develop a forecast and reach it.  If you are interested in our outsourced affiliate management services, contact us at jamie@jebcommerce.com.  Want to learn more about our MyAffiliateCoach program, contact coach@myaffiliatecoach.net.

Last month our Director of Affiliate Relations, Stephen Robinson, was featured on the MediaTrust blog, Relevantly Speaking.  Stephen discusses some of the major concerns big brands have in the performance marketing space and how companies and individuals help with these.  Great interview Stephen!

I remember a time, farther back than I care to mention, when I managed programs, well, from the hip.  Runnin’-n-Gunnin’ is what we call it now.  As a new affiliate manager, I just didn’t know any better.  When I was asked what my program goals were, or where I wanted to be, I would just say “more”;  more sales, more affiliates, more performance, more revenue.  Does that sound like you?

I’ve had the good fortune and blessing of having great mentors and advisers over my life and professional career.  One has always been my father.  Ed Birch has a long track record of managing some of the largest manufacturers in the country.  That experience has enabled him to do some pretty amazing things, and has allowed me to learn some tried and true business principles that, once I really took to them, enabled my business and the affiliate programs we manage to really grow quickly, methodically and hit some serious goals.  He shared those concepts around the dinner table, in our pickup truck (looked just like Uncle Jessie’s on the Dukes of Hazard), on mountain biking trips and more.  And I’ll be honest, as most sons, I fought some of those learning moments for some time (25 years) before I started to realize that, yeah, the old man is right.

Over time I’m sure you’ll hear more about that, and stories from my family, but today I was thinking about SMART goals and how things changed after starting to use them.

So what’s a SMART goal?  a SMART Goal is a goal that is:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

Pretty simple right?  Goals in general have a better chance of being accomplished when they are specific and not general in nature.  For example - “Grow affiliate sales by 20%” is much more specific than “Grow sales through affiliate channel”.

How can you know if you reach a goal if you don’t have a measurement for it?  “Be a better affiliate manager”, that is a goal that is almost impossible to quantifiably measure.  “Answer affiliate emails within 24 hours”, Send monthly newsletter on the 1st of each month”, “increase active affiliates by 5 affiliates each week” - those are all measurable goals that you can track over time.  Goals need to be able to be measured and tracked so you can see how you are doing in terms of attaining them.  “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it“.

Goals need to be attainable.  From TopAcheivement.com - “When you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitudes, abilities, skills, and financial capacity to reach them. You begin seeing previously overlooked opportunities to bring yourself closer to the achievement of your goals.

You can attain most any goal you set when you plan your steps wisely and establish a time frame that allows you to carry out those steps. Goals that may have seemed far away and out of reach eventually move closer and become attainable, not because your goals shrink, but because you grow and expand to match them. When you list your goals you build your self-image. You see yourself as worthy of these goals, and develop the traits and personality that allow you to possess them.”

Goals should also be realistic and timely.  Your goals must be representative of objectives that you are willing and able to work towards.  If you aren’t willing to put in the work, you won’t reach your goals.  If you don’t put a time frame to them, you end up procrastinating until the goal becomes some abstract hope, not an actual item that you are working towards.

Once I set some specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely goals with my programs I noticed a few things:

• I began to work with a higher degree of confidence and purpose
• My day to day tasks became less mundane and more specific to a given hoped for outcome
• In general I worked with more passion
• Tasks were completed ahead of time and in general my affiliate program began to see a lift in sales and my affiliates noticed a distinct change in my behavior

All this lead to higher performance for my program, more recognition inside my organization, more career advancement opportunities and I really started to enjoy my job on a level I hadn’t before.

Are you using SMART Goals?   Are you finding yourself doing more busy work than actually reaching higher and higher?  I’d love to hear from you.

SMART Goals, and a corresponding item called KPI’s, are things we go over in module 2 of the MyAffiliateCoach Affiliate Manager Coaching and Mentoring program.  If you are interested in learning more about these items and more, please contact us at coach@myaffiliatecoach.net.

Last week we launched our affiliate management coaching and mentoring program, MyAffiliateCoach. A few days later we received our first printed workbook, over 140 pages of worksheets, tips and best practices.

Here is a brief walk through.

You can actually get to see the first 15 pages at blurb (the price is for our on-demand only version that comes with the book).

If you’d like to see more, just let us know!