How My Operation Started

I started ~3 years ago on my own, just a solo affiliate trying to learn the business. I had my own campaigns that did well, but after going to some events and talking with industry friends I realized I was small potatoes. Most of my affiliate friends were solo as well, so I pretty much stuck with that route for a while. I had a few partnerships along the way, but that’s an entire post on it’s own (hmm perhaps the next post then?).

After a while of working on my own and building out my skills, I took a step back and looked at what was happening. I was making pretty good money but I was doing everything myself. That’s when I went golfing with Matt and he jokingly suggested that I hire him. That day I thought about it a lot and it actually seemed to make sense. I’d pay him hourly (more than he was making at his current job) to work on things for me. The more work I gave him, the more free time I had to work on things myself, start new ideas, and network a lot more. And play Call of Duty here and there ;).

So I went through with that idea and it proved to be beneficial. Now a few months later I see that my plan was still very flawed. I thought about things and what I was good at, and what I was training Matt for. I was good at coming up with ideas, setting up a decent landing page, and driving traffic to it. I pretty much spent months teaching Matt the same thing. WRONGGGGGGGGG.

Instead of initially looking for someone to compliment my skills, I should have been looking for someone to supplement them. Meaning instead of training someone to do what I’m already good at, I should have been looking for someone to work in the areas that I’m weaker in; primarily programming and design. Now that I realized that small roadblock I made for myself, how could I take it to the next level? By…

Building a Team

If I could break it down into a step-by-step process, I’d go something like this.

Step 1 : Making sure you’re in the proper mindset.

Building a team is serious stuff, and for it you have to be serious. That means not only will you have to take a risk in paying all these employees that may not make you anything more than you are now, but you also risk them being counterproductive to what you’re already doing. These risks can be minimized by simply hiring the right people. You have to be prepared and ready to accept a potential loss, it’s all a part of the game.

Step 2 : Asses the strengths/weaknesses in your company/yourself.

In my own case, I mentioned that the strengths in my company from myself were traffic generation and ideas. My ideas come to life, but not at their greatest potential. If I were to take things seriously, I would want employees that would specialize in :

• design
• content creation
• programming
• accounting/legal/bookkeeping

Now that you know what you have and what you don’t have, it’s time to actually make it happen.

Step 3 : Set up your game plan.

There’s actually a few ways you can hire and manage the team you’re going to build. I’ll list a couple of them:

1. Hiring an outsourced team. I’d suggest hitting up a place like Odesk.com or even a design/writing forum or some sort of internet forum. Post up a job and take resumes and portfolios. Take all the info, look it over, and then choose your team to hire over the internet. Communicate via email, phone, and IM.

Pros : Can find much cheaper work, it’s faster, you can communicate anywhere, cutting someone is no hassle, you have the opportunity to just hire on a per project basis and not hourly/salary.

Cons : Everything that comes with hiring a remote staff. They may not pick up your calls or take a while to respond, time zone differences, quality of work may be lower because you’re not there, and things are generally easier to explain in person.

2. Hiring an in-house team from scratch. I’d say the younger the better, so if you were to build a team from scratch I’d try and find some students fresh out of college. Post listings at local colleges and design schools, in English buildings and computer buildings.

Pros : We just made the change to in-house, meaning you have a constant watch over everybody, communication is easier, and teamwork is a lot better. Simply put in-house is just much more effective. They’re fresh out of college and are ready to learn and work. They know nothing about the industry and with your proper guidance will never know enough to quit the company and go off on their own. Just make sure that you really specialize what they’re doing and not tell them anymore (i.e. don’t show a designer affiliate network stats, traffic stats, revenue, or anything).

Cons : Training. Depending on your current skills, this can take either a long time or a really really long time. Matt still has a ton to learn and he’s been with me approaching a year now learning everything that I know. Also you run the risk of them just not working out and not learning well. If you’re going this route make sure you have an extensive interview process. Also costs. You’re going to want to get some office space, equipment, and then the employees will most likely be more expensive.

3. Collaborating with and poaching existing industry folk. Say you have a really good friend and he’s bomb at programming or something. You two decide to team up and hire a team. Someone will have to move, but you both get together and build the company together. You can either hire fresh students, or you can hire existing industry affiliates and affiliate managers. I’ve known more than one instance where I’ve seen an affiliate manager be poached by a private affiliate.

Pros : Most members already know the industry. Training is kept to a minimum, ideas flow much better, you have everybody’s connections combined, and it’s all just much faster.

Cons : Already being in this industry, employees like affiliate managers will want a decent salary or some sort of revshare. You’ll already be splitting the company with a partner (if you choose), so that means you get even less of a cut.

Step 4 : Take the plan to action.

Now it’s time to put the game plan into action. Go out and find your employees whichever way you choose. Hit up colleges with flyers, talk to professors, talk to your industry friends, etc. This is where 95% of you reading this will just stop. You’ll get psyched about the money you could make with a full team, plan on actually doing it, and then never following through. Maybe the campaign your working on now takes up too much of you’re time, or maybe you’re just a baby and don’t want to take a risk. There’s nothing I can say that will change your mind or reveal anything to you, so I guess that where it’ll end. Either do it or not.

I’m probably going to cut the article off here for now, because that’s pretty much what I can report on. I have multiple friends that employ teams EXACTLY the way I just described to you, and they’re raping it. Right now I’ve started taking some steps to outsource a little work, and partner up with some industry friends for single project revshare deals. Next year I plan on getting out of Buffalo and moving somewhere nicer. Once I do that I’d like to get an office and just start hiring in-house.

So while I can’t give many tips on managing a full team yet, hopefully it’ll make for a decent post next month.

See ya’ll in NYC in a couple days.

EDIT: I think comments are back and working.

Although most of us know that you can receive 5% cash-back through Yahoo Search Marketing up to $500 a year if you use an AMEX Business Credit Card, but did you know that you could also receive 3% cash-back as-well with MSN AdCenter up to $500 a year too if you use a MasterCard Business Credit Card that is enrolled in the MasterCard Easy Savings Program?

You can earn a lot of extra-cash by using credit cards that have rewards, however, I think everyone already knows this for the most part; so what we are going to share with you today is on how to get a-lot more from your rewards cards than you might have imagined possible.

I’m going to skip over the basics; you should already know as a PPC affiliate that you should be using credit cards with rewards! And if you do not use a rewards credit card already you will see in this post why you should!

Forewarning: This post is probably be most helpful for affiliates who are spending between $2,500 to $50,000 a month on PPC through their credit cards, the tips shown below will show anyone with that amount of ad-spend to earn an extra couple thousands of dollars by doing a-little extra work.

MSN AdCenter

So if you are using MSN AdCenter and you are not currently receiving 3% cash-back on your ad-spend; get it started.

To qualify you need to use a MasterCard Business Credit Card, but the card must be enrolled in the MasterCard Easy Savings Program; this is a free program to join. You must enroll each of your individual MasterCard Credit Cards to the program one at a time if you have several. Once you do both of this you will be eligible to receive an extra 3% cash-back for simply using your MasterCard with MSN AdCenter, this is good for up to $500 per year.

Although most affiliates, including myself, would agree that AMEX is generally the best card for PPC, but it may not be true for MSN AdCenter. As you can now get a MasterCard rewards credit card which despite may have less rewards than an AMEX in general; but because you can now combine the MasterCard Rewards card with the 3% MSN AdCenter cash-back you are getting about the best deal you possibly can.

So of course when you do decide to setup the MSN AdCenter 3% cash-back deal, you might consider using a MasterCard Business Rewards Credit Card for obvious reasons. And you may consider getting several cards; and the reason why will be explained as you continue to read the rest of this post.

Yahoo Search Marketing

And of course, Yahoo.

Yahoo has the 5% cash-back deal for anyone who pays their Yahoo SEM bills with an American Express Business Credit Card, they will pay up to $500 per year for each card used.
So just think, while your getting 5% cash-back for using an AMEX Business Card with Yahoo SEM, you could also combine that by using an AMEX Blue-Cash Card and receive an additional 5% cash-back on-top of the other 5%!

To make it even better, what if you used as well a voucher code worth $100 when signing up for the Yahoo account? Talk about getting the most bang for your buck.

Although I should warn you, the Blue-Cash card only gives a 5% cash-back bonus for the first $17,500 spent on the card, after that it will drop to 1.5%. So that’s why after you get to that point you switch it over to the AMEX Plum Card which has an unlimited 2% cash-back forever, as long as you pay off the balance at the end of each month.

But the best route, if you were really smart—you would use both cards, and maybe a few other cards as well!

After one card maxes out the $500 potential cash-back earnings, you switch it out with a second card and get the $500 cash-back again, and then after that’s done you swap it out again to a new card, and so on and so forth!

Remember, the MSN Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing deal will only give you up to $500 cash-back per year, which kind of sucks. Although there is a loophole in the system that there is no restrictions on how many cards you can use. So if you used ten different credit cards, you could essential get $500 cash-back for every card that you used.

So lets run through an example: I have three AMEX cards currently, all AMEX Business Cards: an AMEX Business Platinum, an AMEX Blue-Cash For Business, an AMEX Business Plum Card, and finally I’m in the process of getting another AMEX card as well!

So at first I had the business platinum card, I received my travel points, plus after I maxed out the $500 extra-cash from Yahoo, I switched it over to the business plum card and got my 2% cash-back and another extra $500-cash from Yahoo. Now after that is depleted I switch it over to my AMEX Business Blue-Cash card and get 5% cash-back from the regular card rewards program, and the extra $500-cash back again from Yahoo. And we keep just switching the cards left and right, max them out, move on, max them out, move on and keep going to maximize the most value we can possible get out of our points.

And let’s say I used all my business cards up and got my $500 cash-back for them all, I could even lastly switch it over to a personal AMEX blue-cash card, and get another 5% cash-back and max it out to the $17,500 limit, and finally switch off to the PLUM Card which will for the rest of the year give me 2% cash-back.

So you can do this for both Yahoo SEM and MSN AdCenter, you receive up to $500 cash-back per card on your ad-spend, and Ad-Spend, and you could use as many cards as you possibly have. And again, you get the extra-cash back on top of the additional rewards that the credit cards provide as well.

Conclusion

Start ranking in extra money today, by using lots of cards, taking advantage of both Yahoo SEM 5% cash-back,and the MSN AdCenter’s 3% cash-back. You can apply for a new credit card every other month if you wanted to, as long as you make your payments you’ll probably get accepted more often than not.

Always use a rewards credit card, if you want to travel the next year, use a travel card, if you want cash-back use the cash-back cards. If you combine the cash-back from the PPC networks, with regular cash-back from the rewards cards and also use PPC vouchers you will be positioned to make some positive income!

Lastly, we will leave off with a few of the rules, as there are requirements to be eligible for both programs. Basically they both require Business Credit Cards, if you don’t have one, you might consider registering one.

The Rules

Yahoo Search Marketing gives a 5% cash-back rewards to anyone using an American Express Business Credit Card, they will pay up to $500 back per year. [source]

MSN AdCenter gives you 3% cash-back rewards to anyone using a MasterCard Business Credit Card, which is enrolled in the MasterCard Easy Savings program. [source]

Some Good Cards To Use

AMEX Blue-Cash (business & personal) 5% cash-back up to $17,500 spent, after that it switches to 1.5% cash-back.

AMEX Plum (business) 2% cash-back as long as balance is paid off in full every month

Finally:

If anyone has any other great cards to check out, please post them here in the comments so everyone can benefit from you sharing. Thanks!

In my experience at least, communicating over the phone makes the relationship much more personal and real. Talking over e-mail is so stale and you only talk about what you need to. You usually don’t start off your emails with “So how’d you golf this weekend?” When you’re on the phone you can hear and express emotions, break off on tangents, and really build the relationship with whomever you’re speaking with. Sure e-mailing is easier, we can do other things in the background easier and we’re never put on the spot. But speaking on the phone just creates a connection that e-mails can’t do. I didn’t get to where I am or make as many contacts as I have by sticking with e-mailing all the time.

Doing things on the phone makes things so much faster as well. Getting things done faster = more money for you. If there’s a problem, I’ll call my affiliate manager and get the CEO on the line as well so we can work out the problem. Affiliate problems can be solved in 3 ways :

1) E-mail/IM the affiliate manager. Takes 30 minutes to get the full problem across, and usually a day or two to have it fixed (sometimes longer, sometimes shorter).

2) Call your affiliate manager. Takes 2-5 minutes to get the problem across, and then they’ll usually start working on it right away.

3) Call your affiliate manager and get someone higher up on the line as well. Takes 2-5 minutes to get the problem across, the CEO/higher manager usually makes some alternative suggestions that can make everybody more money, and then the problem is worked on right away.

You get things done by taking action, simple enough. I’m not the only crazy person who believes this either. About a week ago a direct merchant sent me an email about potentially linking up with their offers. So I replied and said “alright what do you have to to offer?” Instead of continuing the conversation through e-mail, he gave me his phone number and I called him up. We were able to get a weeks worth of e-mailing covered in about 30 minutes.

Same thing with Adwords or YSM. Have a problem? Most people just e-mail them and wait a week for a response. Just pick up the phone and call them! You’ll get the problem solved in 15 minutes and your campaigns will be up and running for an extra week. If I’m having a problem with something, I rarely resort to e-mailing to fix it. Companies put phone calls on higher priority, because you work to fix the issue as you’re discussing it.

The moral of this story is simple enough I guess, pick up the phone if you have a problem. It builds your business relationship and can work more wonders than you know.

That being said, you know how much I’m an Amex junkie. I recently started using the Plum card a lot more to get the benefits of the 2% cash back on ALL business expenses (this means PPC baby). I used the Starwood for a while and raked up a nice amount of points, but I don’t live in a hotel so I figured some cash back would be more beneficial. Here’s a screenshot I took a couple of days ago :

How pimp is the Plum card? Since January 21st (I took this screen shot on Feb 7th or something like that), I’ve spent $265,829.90 on it. Right now, they’ll give me back $5,316.59. Estimating that my costs are around what they’ve been, in one month they will give me over $9,000 in cash back. That’s $9k a month in pure profit added to whatever I make already.

What will you do with all your cash back? Like I’ve said many times already, even if you break even on a campaign you can make a nice income strictly from Amex rewards. Pay your mortgage with the Plum card, then switch to the Starwood when you want to go away on a vacation, and then switch to the Platinum for reward points when you want that Xbox 360.

Apply for the Plum.

Amex = ballin.

American Express Platinum Card

The Platinum is a solid card with a mid-range annual fee. I think I pay around $450 to have it. I get reward points with it and get to buy cool things. It’s got travel perks, road side assistance anywhere, shopping perks, and a few other nice things. There’s no pre-set limit which is nice, and goes up as you spend more.

Actually I’m lying to you, I’m salty that they won’t give me a Black card (have to be a member for a year) so I got this to make me feel a little better.

American Express Starwood

This card is a beast if you travel. I have like 400,000 spg points from the past two months, which should last me any event I go to next year. To put it into perspective, that’s almost 40 stays at a 5-star hotel, depending on location. The New York Sheraton was 12,000 a night, and one I’m staying at soon is 7,000, so it varies. You can exchange points for flights anywhere in the world as well which is sweet. If you plan on attending any events, grab this card and rake up some points for a couple months, you won’t regret it.

American Express Plum Card

This is a brand spanking new card from Amex, and they were initially issuing 10,000 of them so basically I just wanted to feel special, and that’s why I have it. 2% of on all business expenses is nice though, and it’s a solid cash-back card. No pre-set spending limit is another perk for someone who doesn’t want a limit but doesn’t want to pay $450 for a Platinum. I’ve started spending a little on it to get some of that PPC money back…Adwords 2% off! The card looks pretty cool, I don’t really like the name “Plum Card”, but it gets the job done for a PPC’er.

American Express Blue Cash

Ah the good ‘ol Blue Cash. This was my first serious credit card (I’ve had $500 student MasterCards) and I basically just wanted to get approved by Amex. I had no credit history and I’m 19, so I’m not really sure how they approved me. You can get up to 5% cash back on things like gas and groceries, and then it’s 1.5% cash back on other things (like PPC). So if you’re going to go for a cash back card, just get the extra 0.5% and go with the Plum. The limit on the Blue Cash starts out pretty crappy initially too. Looks pretty neat though.

Other Cards to Consider

So as you can see I’m an Amex junkie, and I’ll probably be getting a Black card in May once I’ve been a card member for a year. I don’t know what it is about me, I just have a strange obsession for acquiring good credit cards. The Black card probably isn’t going to be worth the annual fee to me, but I can’t control my urge to get a credit card that comes in it’s own briefcase. Kids these days…

Citi CashReturns MasterCard

I’m actually going to seriously look into (and probably get) one of these cards for 3 months. 5% cash back on EVERYTHING…yes that includes PPC…for the first 3 months. So if you’re spending 300k/month in advertising costs, that’s $15,000 profit for 3 months! Yes mommy, I’d like an extra $45,000 for just using this credit card. Props to my man Grayh.at for letting me know about this little gem.

 
So I’m sure there’s a zillion other good credit cards to have, and the whole point of this article was the make sure that you guys are in fact using credit cards and not your bank card. You can get a bunch of cool things, each card has different benefits. Most people say that Amex is the card for a business person, and I’ve hopped on that train. Just explore around and you may find something nice. Feel free to share any other cards that you use and why.

I’ll be picking the $100 Adwords voucher winner soon as well.