The breadth and depth of the advice in Geno Prussakov’s book, Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day, is exceptional.

I’ve been involved in affiliate marketing since 1996, and I’ve designed and helped implement new affiliate programs for a number of etailers since 1997. In that time, I’ve seen lots of “advice” shared by “experts” about affiliate marketing (in books, magazine articles, white papers, and web sites). In each of these resources, I’ve found both good and bad advice (sometimes horrible advice) — but always with huge gaps, failing to address critical issues that my clients and I have experienced. As the affiliate marketing industry has matured, new problems have arisen, and any advice that doesn’t address some of these issues is actually dangerous. I was quite impressed with how well this book addressed so many complex issues.

Most resources about affiliate marketing are also biased, favoring the practices of the author, often omitting (and sometimes condemning or mocking) alternative strategies. In my opinion, much of the “advice” found in most of these resources is biased to favor the financial interests of the author or sponsoring company, not the reader.

Although Geno Prussakov is a professional “outsourced affiliate program manager,” I didn’t perceive any significant bias in favor of that particular approach, and despite his professional need to maintain friendly relationships with major affiliate networks, his book directly criticizes some of the bad advice that those folks give.

I only noticed one lapse: I couldn’t find any mention of “advertising nexus” sales-tax enforcement laws that some states have enacted to try to force out-of-state merchants to collect sales tax based on the existence of affiliate relationships. This issue exploded when New York enacted the first such law in mid-2008, and then in mid-2009 other states adopted similar laws. While the issue is likely to be temporary (in the past year, one court declared the law unconstitutional, and California repealed the law a few months after its enactment), I still consider it a critical issue for every merchant to consider when planning a new affiliate program.

Though I view this as a serious omission, I’m not aware of any other books or resources that come close to the comprehensiveness and usefulness of this book.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone considering (or planning) an affiliate program. I’m not aware of any other resource that even comes close: Geno Prussakov’s book is (by far) the most comprehensive and useful resource I’ve found for new affiliate program managers. The book should also be useful to current affiliate program managers and “affiliate technology providers” (affiliate networks, and related software and web developers).

Disclaimer: The book links to Amazon.com are affiliate links (paid advertising).

One Response to “Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day (Geno Prussakov)”

1. Mark Welch says:

   May 9, 2012 at 5:25 am

   Disclaimer: The publisher sent me a free review copy of this book, and the links to Amazon.com are affiliate links (paid advertising).