The terms ‘JV Broker’ and ‘Affiliate Manager’ are often used interchangeably, which of course leads to all kinds of confusion.
So let’s get straight to the heart of the matter. A JV Broker usually brokers a connection between a product owner or vendor and an affiliate who can promote the offer – this would be the joint venture or JV. And for this introduction the broker usually receives a commission on the sales that the affiliate might make. This commission is usually referred to as a ‘2nd Tier’ or ‘Over-ride’ commission. The affiliate who promotes the product gets the first tier commission, and the broker gets a 2nd tier commission on whatever the affiliate sells. The JV Broker usually will not take an ongoing role in maintaining the relationship between the vendor and the affiliate. That becomes the responsibility of the vendor.
An affiliate manager on the other hand does more than make an introduction. An in-house affiliate manager would most often be an employee whose main responsibility would be to recruit affiliates, communicate with them on an ongoing basis and manage the relationship between the vendor and her affiliates.
We are an outsourced affiliate management company, and we like to think we are akin to affiliate managers on steroids. We not only create affiliate programs for vendors and direct response marketers, but we recruit affiliates and manage them on an ongoing basis. We are platform agnostic – we don’t care whether you want to process your transactions on ClickBank, RevenueWire, ClickSure, JVZoo or your own merchant account with affiliate traffic tracked through InfusionSoft, Ontraport (Office Autopilot), HasOffers or Post AffiliatePro. It’s all in a day’s work for us.
An affiliate manager, or an affiliate management company will also work on organizing affiliate contests, product launches, publishing leaderboards of affiliates’ standings in sales contests. In other words everything related to improving the sales performance of the affiliate channel. Affiliate Managers will also work toward achieving your revenue objectives and report against those objectives. We usually report on our achievement against our clients’ revenue objectives on a weekly basis.
So JV Broker or Affiliate Manager? It depends on whether you just need the introduction to affiliates or if you need someone to manage the whole affiliate relationship going forward and drive your sales up!