If I have a pet peeve with affiliate managers it’s those who fail to acknowledge that a competing program might be better in some circumstance. I know that the AM’s job is to convince me to use their program, but when they lose credibility on one of their offers it tends to make me lose trust in their other ones.

This week I had an AM call me asking why I wasn’t using their offer in one of my niches. I started by telling him that my current program was paying me twice what the AM’s program pays. His response was to tell me that he’s positive that his converts better than any others in the market and that I would make up the lower payout per lead on a higher volume with their better converting offer. I then told him that I was using the exact same end merchant as their program but that I was direct with the merchant while they were apparently one or two layers further away. He then decided to try to convince me that his program has better creatives and would still result in higher payouts.

Attention affiliate managers… at this point in the above conversation, you have just lost all credibility with your affiliate for your entire network of offers. Now I’m going to be really skeptical about any other offers you may have that look promising. Stop while you are ahead - admit defeat - and live to fight another day.