Welcome to Week #9 of the Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series!

This week I interview super affiliate, conference speaker, and outspoken affiliate marketing advocate Scott Jangro.  Scott Jangro is the co-founder of MechMedia, Inc. (http://www.mechmedia.com), a web publishing and affiliate marketing company that focuses on social media and retail products.  He frequently writes about the stuff that keeps him up at night on his blog, Jangro.com.

Read on to learn more about Scott Jangro.

Here are the rules… 

The Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series will feature an original up-close interview with an affiliate marketer every Friday.  Priority will be given to Pepperjam Network affiliates, but that is not a requirement to share your story.  If you’d be interested in being interviewed please submit your request here - please make sure to tell us why you think your story is especially entertaining or educational and worth sharing with our readers.

As the series progresses we will do our best to ask questions that both entertain and educate!  We encourage you to comment on each of the interviews, as well as ask follow-up questions of the interviewee.

Lastly, if you are a blogger or just someone with a network of likeminded affiliate marketing friends, we encourage you to share our interviews series with anyone who you think may benefit. Also, since you won’t want to miss an interview once it’s published I encourage you to join the Feedburner Pepperjam Network RSS Feed, which is located at the top of this page or by clicking here.

Well…let’s get on to the interview!

Meet the Affiliates: Interview #9 

Scott Jangro
Jangro.com / MechMedia.com

Question #1

KRIS: When did you first get involved in affiliate marketing? Tell us the story of how you got started…

SCOTT: My first exposure to affiliate marketing was in 1998 when I had just registered the jangro.com domain.  I put some Barnesandnoble.com affiliate links on there hoping for some beer money.  I didn’t get any.

A year later, as fate would have it, I joined Be Free as employee #88.  I was at Be Free for about five years as a product manager for the BFAST affiliate platform, one of the first affiliate service provider solutions, though we didn’t consider it a network.  During those years, I went through an IPO, and acquisition, and a merger with a competitor.  It was an interesting run to say the least.  But I always loved doing web development and wished that I could be doing the work that publishers and affiliates do.  So I finally made the jump in 2004 and haven’t looked back.

Question #2

KRIS: Where do you live?  Are you married?  Any children? Animals?

SCOTT: I live in Stow, MA, a very small town about 25 miles west of Boston.  Stow’s got about 6000 people, 4 golf courses, and maybe a dozen apple orchards.  I’ve got an 11 year old daughter, Sarah, from a previous marriage and my lovely wife Kristin and I have a two year old son, Alex, and another boy on the way in August.

Question #3

KRIS: Can you share a few success tips for affiliates who are new to affiliate marketing?

SCOTT: Don’t look for the quick buck or fall for the guys selling their “make money” secrets.  There are lots of different ways to make money in affiliate marketing, paid search and SEO through many different types of sites, or no site at all.  Do a lot of research.  Find people to talk to on forums and conferences.  more on that in a second.

Focus on something you enjoy.  If you’re going to start a blog, pick a topic that you’re interested in.  If you love analytics, statistics, and spreadsheets, try paid search.  Doing something that you like will increases the odds that you’ll stick with it.  I’ve lost count of the great money making website ideas that I’ve started but lost interest in a few weeks.

Make friends.  The absolute best thing you can do for yourself is to find some smart people who you can bounce ideas off of, get feedback, and learn from.  Affiliate Marketing can be as cutthroat as any business, so it can be hard to share ideas with people for fear of someone running with them.  This takes a long time and some effort, but good friends are golden.  That’s my number one tip.

Question #4

KRIS: If you were not a successful, full-time affiliate marketer what would you be doing and why?

SCOTT: Had I not left the corporate world to become an affiliate marketer, it is very possible that I’d still be working for Commission Junction.  At the very least, I’d be working for some software company as I have a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, or pursuing my secret desire to become a teacher.  While I hope to never ever again be making others rich working at some company, I haven’t given up on the idea of teaching.

Question #5

KRIS: What are some of your favorite online resources for learning more about affiliate marketing?

SCOTT: While I like to think that I know everything, you can never stop learning.  The space changes so rapidly that you really need to keep on top of the affiliate networks, the search engines, other issues that are affecting our business, and the trends that shape consumer behavior.  I read a lot of blogs of other affiliate marketers, search experts, and social media folks.  There are several forums out there, but the one I’ve stuck with forever is ABestWeb.com.  I also participate in a lot of private discussions with some industry friends on IM, email, and private forums.  That gets back to finding some friends in the industry that you can share with. The absolute best resource is some smart people you can trust.

Question #6

KRIS: Personally, I’m a pretty big NFL fan (Go E.A.G.L.E.S!!!).  What about you?  Do you follow college or professional sports?  If so, who are your favorite teams?

SCOTT: C’mon Kris, I’m born and raised in Boston and have been here my whole life. You say “Go Eagles!” and I’m thinking B.C.

I’m a huge Boston sports fan, and of course it’s a great time to be one. I really don’t like to gloat about it. Well, ok, I do but it’s getting tiring.  My favorite sport is hockey, which I grew up playing, but unfortunately the Bruins aren’t participating in the championship glut.

Question #7

KRIS: Affiliate Classroom recently launched an initiative to launch an affiliate marketing trade association called the Performance Marketing Alliance (PMA). What are your thoughts on PMA and the need for an affiliate marketing trade association in general.  Feel free to share with us what you think a trade association for affiliate marketers looks like?

SCOTT: I’ve made no secret about my skepticism surrounding any industry organization effort.  Our industry is quite divided due to differing business models of performance marketers.  Add in the entrepreneurial and even lone-wolf nature of many people who work in online marketing and that’s a tough group to get to agree on anything.

That said, I think that our industry does have some serious image issues with the rest of the online and offline worlds.  An industry organization that’s well funded can help with that and other big issues that we face.

The PMA is not the first to attempt this, and I do hope they succeed.  I have been voted onto their Foundation Advisory Board, so I’ll have a part in shaping how this organization takes its initial form.

Question #8

KRIS: If you were to be one of the following characters, which one would you be and why: A. Dirk Diggler, B. Homer Simpson, or C. Tony Robbins?

SCOTT: Seriously, these three are who you come up with?  A porn star.  A middle-aged loser cartoon character.  A squeaky clean self-help guru.  I’m starting to feel like I’m getting Punk’d here.

If I have to pick one, I’ll say Tony Robbins.  He’s an optimistic family guy with a great outlook on life.  He’s self-made and a self-starter.  Plus he’s got great hair and teeth.  I could do worse than be Tony Robbins.

Question #9

KRIS: In 200 words or less, what is the future of affiliate marketing?

SCOTT: Just in the past few months, we’ve entered some really interesting times for our industry, from events like New York State putting their sights on affiliate marketing as a taxable source of income to the biggest Internet company there is rebranding Performics to the Google Affiliate Network.  The latter, I think, lends more credibility to our industry than any single event in our past. We’re going to get much more visible, both for good and bad.  Affiliate Marketers are an adaptive bunch, to say the least, and we’ll keep rolling with the punches and as an industry continue to succeed.

Question #10

KRIS: If the “Big Three” Affiliate Networks (CJ, Linkshare, Google Affiliate Network) were to all do one thing that would make a positive impact on the affiliate marketing industry, what would that one thing be?

SCOTT: I think the most effective or influential thing that the “big three” could do is take a good hard look at the channel conflict in our industry.  There are many models that affiliate marketers use for generating traffic, PPC, loyalty programs, content sites and blogs to name a few and they can all very easily step on each other in the process of a consumer going through a commissionable action.  I’m not even talking about the “bad guys” who intercede maliciously, which is a whole subject of it’s own.

The degree to which this happens is simply not measured.  A huge step would be for the networks to measure and share the information required for their merchants to understand how much or how little these different types of affiliates bring value to their program.  They don’t even have to take a stance on the issues.  Just provide the information to the merchants who are paying the commissions.

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Next on deck for Meet the Affiliates: Pro Blogger Darren Rowse

Find out how Darren went from just an ordinary guy just a few years ago to one of the most successful and influential bloggers and online money makers in the world.  We will talk about Darren’s recently published book - ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income (which I read and highly recommend), as well as what makes Darren Darren. This exclusive interview will be published here on the Pepperjam Network Blog next Friday, July 18, 2008.

Make sure you don’t miss it!  Click Here to subscribe to the PJN Blog and have each interview delivered to your e-mail box.

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Read Previous “Meet the Affiliates” Interviews:

Week #1 - Sam Harrelson
Week #2 - Scott Hazard
Week #3 - Rosalind Gardner
Week #4 - Colin McDougal
Week #5 - Zac Johnson
Week #6 - Harrison Gevirtz
Week #7 - “Uber Affiliate” Paul Bourque
Week #8 - John Chow

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