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I recently joined the Clickbooth Advertising Network. Clickbooth is an affiliate/advertising network that features some pretty big name brands with advertising programs available for publishers Now just let me start this off by saying that my initial impressions of the Clickbooth website involved the word “help”, repeated often. This has less to do with Clickbooth’s site, and more to do with my utter newbie-ness with affiliate marketing. My prior experience with affiliate networks is of the self serve type, and even that was minimal. Suffice to say that I am no super affiliate by any stretch of the imagnation. So, in typical Marc style, I had once again jumped into the deep end of the pool. After a quick look around, I rapidly determined that this was not your standard affiliate marketing network.

Next stop: the help pages.

Unfortunately, the help pages didn’t have the kind of help that I was looking for, ie: “How to be an affiliate” and “How to evaluate an affiliate program”. Missing were the usual CPC type stats, or reports on a campaign’s network performance. I wasn’t going to learn how to be an effective affiliate marketer from these pages.

Now let me backtrack a bit here to the beginning of my story before I continue on. I signed up, filled in a bunch of information, and had to wait to become approved for the network. This is where it gets interesting to me. Within a couple of hours of getting approved, I received a friendly email from Dean, a ClickBooth employee.

Everybody, say “Hi, Dean!” Dean is my account manager. Huh? I have an account manager? That’s cool! What’s an account manager?

Fortunately, Dean gave a brief explanation of his role and duties in his email, so I wasn’t completely clueless. He also provided me with contact information so that I could ask him anything that I needed to. Now, it’s only been a day, but I like this guy. I fired off an email with a couple of comments and a question explaining my particular concerns, and he once again answered promptly. At no time did he make feel like a newbie, or stupid, or not important because I’m essentially clueless, or my little site isn’t going to pull in tens of thousands of dollars a month for his company.

Actually, I’m downplaying the numbers here a bit: CB’s biggest campaigns do millions per month, and the company as a whole does 25 million a month. Just so’s you know…

It turns out that Dean and his fellow account managers are the help system. They handle everything from raw newbies like me to 30 year veterans of the affiliate business. They are as hands on or hands off as you need them to be. Their job is to help me choose the right campaigns for my demographics for maximum return, essentially acting as matchmakers between advertisers and publishers. They are experts in the ClickBooth catalogue, and their expertise is available to assist affiliates wanting to match up offerings to their audience.

On the other hand, if you’re the type who prefers to go it alone the CB website is well equipped to help you do that (my previous comments notwithstanding). Once you log into your account, there are links immediately apparent on the left of your screen that will lead you to various useful areas such as “New Campaigns this Week”, “Category Listing”, and various account and stats related links.

To select a campaign, all you do is click on the “Programs & Links” tab, and there you are. You can search by category, keyword, or campaign type. The information presented is clear and easy to understand, and had me up and running in no time at all. I found the rest of the site just as clear and easy to navigate and understand.

Comparing my experience with ClickBooth and some of the other affiliate networks, I have to say that I am a fan of CB. I don’t feel like I’m going it alone in a highly competitive industry, and besides, it’s kinda cool to be able to tell my friends, “Hang on, I’m talking to my Account Manager.” Thanks to Dean’s help, I am now much more comfortable proceeding with affiliate marketing as a revenue source. Maybe I’ll even try an email campaign… of course, I’ll need an email list first… but that’s another article.

Cheers, Marc