Born in Bulgaria, Angel Djambazov has spent his professional career in the fields of journalism and online marketing. In his journalistic career he worked as an editor on several newspapers and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Wyoming Homes and Living Magazine. Later his career path led to online marketing where while working at OnlineShoes he earned the Affiliate Manager of the Year (2006) award at the Affiliate Summit, and In-house Manager of the Year (2006) award by ABestWeb.com. Currently along with his duties at ReveNews, Angel is the OPM for Jones Soda and leads the marketing efforts of PopShops.com which was awarded Best Affiliate Tool (2007) award by ABestWeb.com.

Angel lives north of Seattle, spending his free time reading up on obscure scientific references made by his wife, Jenn, while keeping up with a horde of cats and a library of books.
We are very excited to have him drive forward the vision and leadership for ReveNews. He will bring a new energy and direction to our community, especially given his very relevant background and experience.

I look very forward to having him on board, and I’ll sure all our readers will also take great pleasure in congratulating him!

Quick background for those readers who don’t know me:

I founded and was CEO of a company called Clicks2Customers in 2003 – a major Paid Search Marketing company which really did well (got up to about $10m in annual affiliate commissions) running paid search through affiliates (not Adsense arbitrage – but more like direct linking cost of sales commissions). It specializes in long tail SEM with multi-million keyword databases.

Quick history of incuBeta

After about a year of operation, in 2004, we decided to create an umbrella structure, called incuBeta, which owned Clicks2Customers, and setup other companies such as Traffic Synergy (which was spun out of the group eventually), invested in businesses such as Quirk (eMarketing agency) and developed some interesting technologies, such as SynthaSite (more about this in a second).

We also raised $3.7m in funding for incuBeta in early 2007, after various smaller rounds of investment. Clicks2Customers won numerous awards from Commission Junction (including Global Vision in 2006) and Linkshare (Best New Affiliate in 2007) and also picked up Top Technology Company in South Africa in 2006…

So, it’s been about a year since incuBeta purchased a majority stake in Revenews. This move was partially opportunistic, and partially strategic. The original reason was that we would support the business of Clicks2Customers by driving thought leadership within the affiliate market – especially with the uninformed.

Unfortunately, quite soon after this deal was done, the company decided to change direction and become a direct agency, and not an affiliate – given the pressures from merchants of not direct linking to their websites. This obviously nullified the original interest in Revenews for incuBeta.

Where did I go?

In addition to that change, I also decided that I needed a change of pace, as after four years slogging at what is ultimately a services business – I wanted something more technology focused (given my technology background), and so I decided to focus my interests on SynthaSite, an emerging technology within the group, as full time CEO, and with that, began a journey that would eventually become a partial exit from the group.

Given the various rounds of investment and the subsequent dilutions I became a smaller part of the incuBeta picture anyway, so the change made sense to me. Shortly after I turned my interests to SynthaSite, we raised $5m in funding for this business, which meant that it needed to stand on it’s own two feet as a separate company from the incuBeta group.

So, in short, incuBeta is finalizing a process of unbundling, where various shareholders are assisting in the unbundling process – where the umbrella company, incuBeta, will eventually become unnecessary – and companies in the group will all become standalone.

I have opted to obviously take the SynthaSite, Quirk & Revenews.com stakes and will remain a minority shareholder in Clicks2Customers for the near term. The other businesses, such as African Dream Holidays are being/and have been spun out directly to other shareholders.

So where to from here for Revenews:

Upfront, I need to thank Sam & Wayne for the great job that they have done, bringing Revenews to this point. In particular Sam, who really turned this into a thriving community. This also heralds an end to Sam & Wayne’s input at a business level, and I’m tasked with taking this community to the next level. Sam & Wayne have negotiated with me to exit their interests in Revenews, and we’re finalizing a plan around it – which should be in place next month.

I have been approached by a number of folk looking to purchase or partner with Revenews, and I’m considering my options at this stage. Luckily, everyone in the community is very supportive and contributive, so given the work that Sam has done, it’s pretty much on auto-pilot – you define what we become. That said, I do realize that Revenews needs some direction and leadership – so I’m thinking about those needs and trying to figure out what needs to happen next.

The bottom line is that things are happening – I’m on it! More details to follow next month – please let me just get through the paperwork!! Some of you already know what’s up – but this is all I can really confirm for now – sorry!

What a great way to start the new year, by finding out that you suck . I must be honest, though – I think that this is the greatest form of flattery. Someone actually took the time to write a special ad copy around my name and tell people not to buy from me (that part I can’t understand, because I don’t sell anything on my blog – I don’t even run adverts!).

So the real question is: When do bloggers earn the right to start Trademarking their names?

Here’s what she had to say:

VL : What advice do you have for affiliate managers?:

CM: Two main things that affiliate managers should do:

1. Look at your partners – their business models, trends, etc. What has their performance been up to now?
2. Engagement – talk to them, be available and reach out at every occasion. Share the news proactively – good news and bad news. Look for feedback and listen to what partners have to say about your program. eBay has a large account management team that allows us to leverage across marketplaces.

VL: What are the best channels for recruiting affiliates?

CM: Commission Junction (our affiliate partner), Organically (word of mouth, search engines), presence at industry conferences, reaching out to partners who don’t see themselves as traditional affiliates, but who are top sources of traffic. It’s about reaching out – organic recruitment is a huge part of our recruitment process.

VL: How do you convince new affiliates to join the eBay program?

CM: You would ask some questions such as “Does eBay add value to the content of the website?” & “Is there a fit?” Is there a shopping element and will that be a nice fit? Potentially we work with select categories that work with that particular partner – there really has to be a fit. Then we would look at the payout structure, Rev Share in the US and Leads in other market. We also try to introduce the API which is a very powerful tool to building a strong campaign – and build the value proposition from the beginning.

VL: How does eBay leverage it’s partners in one country, across to another?

CM: We always try to share information with our affiliates, especially the opportunities in other countries. We work with Commission Junction and try to show the value of being in multiple countries. There is a strong case to run campaigns in multiple countries and multiple languages. We have a strong team that is always willing to assist and encourage partners to market in other territories.

VL: What are your top 5 best practices for affiliate managers.

CM:

1. You must know what your affiliates are doing and what their business models are.
2. Be available!
3. Understand the numbers and what the trends are for your program and your affiliates
4. Share news proactively (mentioned above)
5. Welcome Feedback – it’s the most difficult part because it’s not always positive, but often has the most value.

In essence CJ is saying to the publishers community that they care about their publishers, and they don’t want another repeat of the Link Management Intiative incident.

I applaud CJ on this move, and I look forward to participating in this initiative and adding value back to the affiliate marketing community!

For any large business selling more than a few hundred products, it’s virtually impossible for anyone to cover all variations and misspellings of keywords that you could be bidding on in the search engines. Most (not all!) Search Marketing Agencies focus on spending a lot of money on branded keywords and 1,2 & 3 keyword combinations, as their systems cannot cope with volumes lower down in the tail (4,5,6 keyword combination). Companies like eBay, Expedia & Amazon have some of the most advanced search platforms, and even they realize that they cannot cover everything and utilize paid search affiliates to assist them in growing their business – one of the reasons why they are so ubiquitous in search.

I’m often asked whether or not utilizing paid search affiliates (Performance Marketers) will conflict with existing campaigns run by search agencies and the resounding answer from the data we have is NO!

The key differences between PPC Performance Marketers & typical (not all!) Search Agencies are:

You have to ask yourself at some point – what are you paying for?

Many argue that it’s more cost effective to use an Agency, as you cut out the middle man (the affiliate), but this is simply not true. The reason that performance marketers can make money is that they are able to scale their systems, sift out and analyze keywords better, and get the same clicks cheaper through the search engines, like Google, by obtaining high yields and better conversion rates. There is no additional charge to use performance marketers.

Gone are the days of 1-man affiliates sitting at home trying to manage campaigns using spreadsheets, Clicks2Customers, as an example, consists of about 40 full time employees – half engineers, half campaign managers. These are professionals in the marketing space who can manage brands, build traffic volumes and deploy world class search marketing campaigns. Clicks2Customers manages their multi-million keyword campaigns through over a dozen high end servers and generates over $100m/annum for their clients in sales and over $10m in annual revenues – all on a performance marketing basis, in the belief that this model is more linked to success, and not % of spend!

If you’re paying an effective $20 CPA to Google, and you offer an affiliate the same $20 CPA to acquire customers through Google, how is this a conflict, even if they use the same display URL – Google ranks the BEST ad, not the worse! If the affiliate is able to acquire customers cheaper than what your or your agency can, then realistically, they are entitled to the difference in margin for having a better campaign. I would obviously advise not to approach any old affiliate off the street, but as long as you work with reputable companies, you cannot lose.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some very forward thinking agencies, (NetExponent comes to mind), that understand that Search is the channel and if the client benefits by having more traffic and sales overall at the right target CPA, then it doesn’t matter whether you pay the search engine directly, use an intermediary or a combination of both (which is what I advise).

Affiliate and Agencies can work side by side, share data and grow their campaigns independently – the issue really comes in when Agencies, who right now tend to have a lot more leverage, given that many of the companies that outsource to agencies do not understand this space, place their trust in the agency who, as a defensive reaction – prevent affiliates from competing with them, due to fears that they will “look bad” in front of the clients. In that case, Agencies should not take business that cannot deliver on.

In my mind it’s just a question of ethics – Agencies need to advise their clients on what’s best for the client in terms of sales and exposure, not trying to protect their profits from search – a very well known agency in the UK actually admitted that their reason for advising their clients not to use affiliates, was fear of looking bad and losing revenue! On the other side of the coin, Affiliates need to focus on building real value, not just brand bidding, in order to demonstrate that they can provide large amounts of supplemental and quality traffic from the very long tail of search.

I’m not hyperlinking, because I really don’t want to link to these guys. It looks like it could be a scam (I’m almost certain it is), but it could be real – does anyone know if this is real or a hoax?

I still need to read it, before passing commentary.