Welcome to Week #11 of the Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series!

This week I interview one of the hardest working, most admired, likeable (and verbose) affiliates in the industry - Carsten Cumbrowski.

Read on to learn more about Carsten… OR click below to watch a video version of the interview!

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 #11

Carsten Cumbrowski
Internet Marketer, Blogger and Entrepreneur
http://www.cumbrowski.com/ 

Question #1

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

CARSTEN: I live in Fresno, California, which is located in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. Fresno is about 3 hours away from San Francisco, 3 – 1/2 hours from L.A. , 2 hours from the Ocean and 1 – 1 ½ hours from Yosemite Valley National Park within the Sierra Nevada.
 
I was born in East Berlin, Germany and grew up behind the Iron Curtain and was 15 years old when the Wall fell on November 9, 1989. 
 
Before I came to the United States in May 2000, I did live for about one year in St.Gallen, Switzerland. I am single, never married, no children that I know of and no pets. I am not against pets at all (except for some allergies, especially some cats). I always wanted a dog, but my parents were against it, due to the fact that we lived in a crowded 11-22 stories high “concrete desert”.  Some of my best friends had dogs, so I got to have some fun with them. I never got around to getting a dog or any other pet here in the States.

Question #2

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

CARSTEN: That was around November or December 2000. I first signed up at Commission Junction and the first merchant was a Dish Network satellite TV reseller. I made $0 commission with that reseller.

I started off badly actually. A friend of mine from Germany was doing email spam back then. He told me that one of his biggest problems was that doorway pages where he linked to from within his emails were taken down by the free-hosts that he used (geocities and that sort of thing). This meant that a chunk of traffic from the spam emails would not get anywhere, not buy anything and thus not make him money. I asked him why not create a real site, not a free-host one page ad page for one service. With that it would be possible to get returning customers, if they like the site would be a shopping directory (there were not that many of those back then).
 
I was thinking about the spam as customer acquisition tool that would become less important over time while we establish a brand that can sustain itself and reach critical mass. So I started working on a directory. We never worked out a deal and parted from each other before it even started. I decided to work on the site anyway, without the spam traffic to support it. I learned a few things from my friend and did try it myself around spring 2001. Boy was I naive, but I was at least an honest spammer and more than just CAN-SPAM compliant, which didn’t even exist in those days. SPAM was also not as big of a problem as it is now. I am sure that my friend from Germany stopped spamming many years ago too, but I cannot say for sure, because we lost touch.

I spent most of my spare time in 2001 on the site and its content. I built some nice features that I should have developed further and by looking back at it today I regret that I did not follow my instinct, which was right. Features like the ability to not only “bookmark” any merchant that I had in our directory (I partnered in 2001 with a friend here in the States), but also let you add regular bookmarks to whatever site you wanted to, share any or only some of those bookmarks with other people, which you were able to segment into groups that you then could use to specify for the permissions to your bookmarks, in addition to giving permission to individual contacts. You could invite friends to create an account and access your bookmarks. Since all the stuff was saved on the web and not your desktop, was it possible for you to access your bookmarks from anywhere you wanted, as long as it is a computer with internet access and a web browser. Does this concept sound familiar to you? I am sure that you did not hear about that stuff in early 2001 though, right?
 
I focused instead on other features that had at least the potential to make some money and not just cost me money and time. The only commissions that we made from the site were for our own purchases. We realized that it does not matter, if you have a crappy or a great website, if nobody knows about it and never visits it to decide for himself. That was as true then as it is now. We learned about SEO in early 2001 and did a test that was like a revelation to us. The impact of our relatively minor chances made such a huge difference and turned the existing site from making $0 to almost $1,000 within 1 month. We got into paid search in 2002 and by 2003 we made more money with less than a dozen advertisers via PPC than we did with the whole website with over 1,000 advertisers from organic traffic.
 
I worked for a custom development and web integration company back then and one client where I was the main architect and head developer happened to be a brick and mortar retailer who was going online with a custom ecommerce solution using some innovative methods to get their business on the Internet. The VP responsible for the website was able to do what he wanted, because it was at first not taken very serious by the top management of the company. It was more like a “pet project” on the side. Everything goes, if it increases business and profits for the ecommerce site, which meant that we tried a lot of things. Because of my experience in affiliate marketing I did suggest to them to give it a shot and they did. They went with CJ and first managed the program themselves, but realized that it did not work out well this way and we offered to take over that part for them. That was when I became an Affiliate Manager myself.
 
I did do a bunch of other things as well, but was always limited in what I could do, because of my legal status in the United States. I was bound to my company via a work visa. My green card process that I started in 2003 after I renewed the L1 work Visa took until late fall 2007 to be completed. That is a story all by itself, but I will save it for another time. When I became permanent resident in fall 2007, I quit the job at my sponsor company and founded a company of my own.
 
Boy, I wanted to keep it as short as possible and still ended up writing so much (one of my “flaws” as badmouth say about me behind my back. I am just kidding and sure that you know what I mean).

Question #3

KRIS: If you were to “trade shoes” with someone for one day who would it be and why?

CARSTEN: I had to think about that question first. My initial reflex was “no one”, because I never thought about it before. Then I was thinking and two things popped into my head simultaneously, so I decided to mention both.

1. Any astronaut who was able to see this planet Earth with his own eyes from outer space. I want to be the astronaut on the day he looked down on Earth.
 
2. Eratosthenes, the director of the ancient library of Alexandria and first person to calculate the circumference of the Earth with 98.25 percent accuracy (around 240 BC!). This is before the destruction of the library. The loss for mankind that came with the destruction of that that ancient library is unimaginable and hurts deeply, every time when I think about it.

Question #4

KRIS: You are a big fan of video.  Can you tell us a little bit about why you enjoy using and editing video?  Also, do you believe there are opportunities for affiliate marketers to monetize videos they make?

CARSTEN: That happened by accident. I started to do some preservation work for old MS DOS programs that do not run on modern PC’s anymore (intros and demos, pieces of software that show of graphics, music and programming skills) .
 
I was not able to get some of the old stuff to run properly, even with a MS DOS emulator so I tried to get what I could get and correct the captured video afterwards. Mostly the sound quality was bad, the frame rate varied (video was not fluid) or the program ran way slower than it was supposed to.
 
I then started looking into other things with video as a result of it. Why do I love it? I don’t know, I also loved to play with (the East German equivalent of) Lego, which follows a similar concept I think hehe. I think that there are plenty of opportunities for affiliates to tap into the whole idea of online video and what we see today is only the tip of the iceberg. Online video is IMO today where affiliate marketing was in 1995. CDNow.com brought the idea to the table and the public, but the Amazon.com program did not exist yet to really cause a break-through for the concept.
 
There is so much going on right now, but that would go beyond the scope of this interview way too much.

Question #5

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?

CARSTEN: I am an active supporter of the initiative and volunteered for the direct participation in the Formation Advisory Board. I was not elected though, but continue to support the efforts wherever I can.
 
I have been for some time an outspoken advocate for an affiliate marketing organization.
 
I think that I made myself clear when I proposed the idea of an association (like others did before me) in fall 2006. To learn more about that, see the following two posts of mine at ReveNews.com.
 
http://www.revenews.com/carstencumbrowski/affiliate-marketing-organization-initiative/
 
http://www.revenews.com/carstencumbrowski/affiliate-marketing-organization-initiative-vol2-we-are-back-to-step-0/

Question #6

KRIS: What do you do when you’re not making money online? Do you have any pets, hobbies, a significant other?

CARSTEN: I do and follow stuff that interests me (and there are a lot of things that interest me). Many of it now happens online. Some makes me money and some others not or just cost me money, but that is not so relevant for me. Work and hobby is for me almost the same thing. I only do as much of “work” as I have to in order to sustain my life style (and I do not need that much, which makes it easier) and then I do stuff that I am interested in without thinking about making money as primary motivation. I am a marketer and always was (without knowing it for a long time) and cannot help it to see opportunities in things to make money of them in order to sustain themselves. I also do not leave money on the table for the next jerk to pick up.
 
I live by the motto “What goes around, comes around”, including when it comes to some of my business ventures. It does not make you as much money as quickly as the brute force approach would do, but it feels much better and is IMO much more stable and lasting. I even would go as far as to argue that the rewards overall and over time will be much greater than the quick rewards that you get out it, if you only think about your own benefit and nothing else.
 
I am interested in people, society and history. I am also interested in science and everything that explains how the world ticks. I think that I am looking for the same stuff in any of those things. Science may look at things on a small and fundamental level, but people and society have their own laws and dynamics and are just as important as the laws of physics that create boundaries and limits for us.
 
I have tons of books, videos, DVDs, CDs, pictures, documents etc. I like to read and to write (and to talk hehe). I used to do a lot of sport in the past, but this part of me took some steps back in the recent years. Something I need to work on again on time.

Question #7

KRIS: Why are you an affiliate marketer instead of say a lawyer or a accountant?  Don’t you think it would be easier to just work for someone else?

CARSTEN: If you would know me well, you’d know that it was never easy to just work for somebody else. There are multiple reasons for that. 1) I rarely just do things, because somebody told me so.
 
I always want to know the why and if the stuff that I am supposed to do is boring or repetitive, I start thinking about ways to get rid of them, automate them or make them at least less time intensive as they are when I started with them. I have a problem with authority that only comes out of itself for no logical reason.
 
I respect the authority of people who know what they are doing very well, but I do not respect authorities who just happened to get it from somewhere else by somebody for unknown reasons. I had to do the mandatory military service in Germany and I was a bad soldier. I have that in writing hehe.
 
When it comes to the pure business part of things, I learned that I can be a good “commando” and for a limited time a good “policeman”, but suck completely at being an “infantryman”.
 
I refer to a two part blog post series by Beth Kirsch titled: “Paradigm Shifting as Companies Grow: Commandos, Infantrymen and Policemen”. It is an interesting read. Here are the links to the two posts.

Part 1: http://www.revenews.com/bethkirsch/part-1-paradigm-shifting-as-companies-grow-commandos-infantrymen-and-policemen/
 
Part 2: http://www.revenews.com/bethkirsch/part-2-paradigm-shifting-as-companies-grow-commandos-infantrymen-and-policemen/

Last but not least. I am not a morning person and never was as long as I can remember.

I was always a night person, as if my internal clock is off by about 8 hours, compared to the people around me and the time of day at my current location. I thought that I may be fix the problem by moving 9 hours back from German time, when I moved to California, but it did not work out that way.
 
Being always “on-time” in the morning did eventually become an issue with ALL my employers, even the ones who hired me and knew before they hired me about this “flaw”.
 
It became only once the reason for separation of the relationship from the employer side, but even if it was not causing to be fired, so did it always remain a stain on my “record” and made me feel bad about it. I asked myself “Why should it?”
 
Anybody who looked closely could see perfectly clear that this had nothing to do with laziness or with having late parties too often.
 
People who judged without looking did never interest me and I spend as little as time as I had to with them, because those kind of people are usually very shallow, obedient and to a large extend selfish, caring primarily for themselves only, giving not very much about the environment that surrounds them.
 
I am now my own boss and I never heard a complaint from my boss so far, because I was not up and working on 9:00 am in the morning and I like it that way hehe.

Question #8

Kris: What are your top five favorite musical groups of all time?  What about your favorite two movies?

CARSTEN: Bands
 
It used to be Depeche Mode, from 1986 to 2008, but I changed my attitude towards them a few months ago and a subject that would again go beyond the scope of the interview. Unfortunately is it hard to say that they are not in the list, considering the past.
 
After Depeche Mode does clearly comes another British band, called VNV Nation.  After that I would say The Skeptiker, a band from Berlin, Germany, then the Greek musician Vangelis Papathanassiou, best known as simply “Vangelis”.
 
And now it gets hard to decide. On spot #5 would be Jean Michel Jarre, Die Aerzte (with the Ä letter instead of the Ae to be exact, Berlin, Germany), Die Toten Hosen (Dortmund, Germany), Shakira (Barranquilla, Columbia), Project Pitchfork (Hamburg, Germany) and Rammstein (Berlin, Germany)… ooops I think those musician never performed altogether.. well… Hehe.
 
Movies
 
Only top two? And I am such a movie buff, okay, I have many favorites, but if you asked me at gun point to pick two as the top favorites, I’d say now Tron and “Good Will Hunting”.
 
No question about authors and books? Nobody is reading anymore. Okay, I throw stuff in as bonus: Douglas Adams, Rainer Fuhrmann, Gert Prokop, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Stanislaw Lem.

Question #9

KRIS: Please share with us your favorite affiliate marketing and make money online resources….

CARSTEN: Some folks might think that it is inappropriate and self promotional, but that does not change that the reason why my one page resources list at Cumbrowski.com grew to a over 100 pages resources “portal” is the fact that good information, resources and tools can be found in many places, scattered all over the internet. I started to collect them.
 
Cumbrowski.com is as much for me as it is for anybody else who happens to come across it and visits it to find some information or simply a list of options.
 
If you force me again at gun point to pick one of the many good resources sites that exist, I have to go with MarketingSherpa.com, which is a great resource not just for affiliate marketing, but all aspects of online (and also offline) marketing. It is not so much for newbies though, especially not individuals who want to give affiliate marketing a shot. There would be sites like Shawn’s AffiliateTip.com or Forums like ABestWeb or the forum at 5StarAffiliatePrograms.com be much more helpful.

Question #10

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

CARSTEN: You may be call it different things, but the idea of getting compensation or rewards for your part in the conversion process of another entity that leads to a sale or other commercially important action will live on for many years to come.
 
The potential risk of selling out is real, but has not so much to do with the idea of affiliate marketing, but with other human weaknesses that have to be overcome in order to become a better person and valuable member of the community where you are living in.
 
Helping one person to find a solution for a need  and a provider of solutions to find people who have that particular need is a good thing and if you are very good at it, then there is nothing wrong with doing it as a full time job. Since money is still needed to be able to sustain the fundamentals of life itself, making money while bringing the two together is not just a way of saying thank you, but essential to enable you to continue what you do in the future.
 
Details will change and a lot of mess needs to be cleaned up, but when was this not the case? I never lived in a perfect society where everything was always peachy and nice, did you? Anybody? I thought so.  - 224 words; shoot hehe
 
I wrote a lot… again… I really try Kris, you have to believe me that, but things are most of the time not as easy. People can wish as long as they want to that the world around them can simply be classified into black or white, good or evil, important or irrelevant.  It will not change the world to fit into those classifications and how it actually is in reality. The color of the world is a light gray, with a lot more White than Black in it. It is hard to get out the black stuff. Anybody who ever washed some dark clothes with the white linen can attest to that.

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Next on deck for Meet the Affiliates: Thor Schrock

Thor was a finalist on the hit online reality show Next Internet Millionaire and went on to product and direct his own online reality show Top Affiliate Challenge. In addition, Thor is an affiliate marketer and has produced his own informational products with varying levels of success.  Find out what Thor thinks about the “success” of Top Affiliate Challenge, whether or not he learned anything as a contestant on Next Internet Millionaire, and whether or not we could expect a Top Affiliate Challenge 2.  BTW - of course, I will also pick Thor’s brain about other entertaining and educational issues!

This exclusive interview will be published here on the Pepperjam Network Blog next Friday, August 1, 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
Week #9 - Scott Jangro
Week #10 - Darren Rowse

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Pepperjam Network, pepperjamADS, Transparency, Pepperjam Chat, affiliate marketing, Next Generation Affiliate Marketing, pepperjam, Meet the Affiliates, Carsten Cumbrowski, Thor Schrock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.