Interview with Alex Shkarupa from Marketcall

Alex Shkarupa is a Senior Affiliate Manager at Marketcall. He started his career as a junior affiliate manager 2016 in Marketcall. He worked his way hard to grow in the company and became responsible for developing affiliate relationships in Marketcall.com and managing a team of 4 affiliate managers.

1. Hello Alex, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself? Where are you from?

Hey, nice to chat with you. I am from Moscow, Russia and working in the main office of Marketcall. I like to travel a lot so you may meet me in different locations all over the world on affiliate events: New York, Las Vegas, Boston, Barcelona, Bangkok, New-Delhi.

2. How did you get into the affiliate marketing industry?

I was an affiliate marketer and webmaster in my early years, I had some success building and monetizing SEO websites in those years. After getting my marketing degree I was searching for a job and started in Marketcall as a junior affiliate manager.

3. Please tell us a little bit about Marketcall and what you do over there?

So Marketcall is an international affiliate network with 2 main geos: USA and Russia. Our main focus has always been Pay Per Call vertical, but last year we added CPL offers as well.

4. There are already so many affiliate networks out there. What makes Marketcall unique from its competitors?

We have some exclusive Pay Per Call offers, but I would like also to mention our expertise in this market. We do a lot of media buying by ourselves and get the latest updates on what's working and how to run offers. We share some public and private case studies.

5. What verticals does your network specialize in? What kind of offers are performing well on your network?

Our top offers are health insurance, auto insurance, pest control and flight booking. We work with insurance, real estate, finance, home services, travel and other whitehat industries.

6. Do you have any advice for people who are just starting out with affiliate marketing?

I always advise our affiliates to pick one traffic source, become expert in it and then test several proven offers. Don’t waste the budget for paid courses and tools, invest everything in marketing budget and learn with real practice.

7. What's the difference between a Super Affiliate and an Average Affiliate?

Super affiliates are able to scale quickly once they see good ROI. They have high budgets and team to help with that.

8. Which traffic sources prove to be the most effective for your top earning affiliates - Push, Native, Search, Social, Email or any others?

Google ads (search), Facebook ads, SEO and native ads

9. In your experience, what are the three most critical elements of running a successful campaign?

Choosing the right duo of the offer and traffic source, having enough budget to test different approaches and having good expertise with that traffic source.

10. How will the COVID-19 impact the affiliate marketing industry in the long run?

One of our top offers “Flight booking” was affected a lot, because people stopped to travel. Now this campaign recovered at 70%. If you ask me about the long run impact, I would say that we will see substantial increase in industries that were negatively affected by Covid and it will be mainly travel. Also covid increased volume of online transactions, which helped industries like ecom, delivery, online entertainment and dating.

11. What trends do you think we can expect to see in the affiliate marketing industry in the next 1-2 years? Where Marketcall may be going? What advice would you give to affiliates to keep up the pace?

Ad networks become more strict in advertising policies. So Marketcall continues to develop our whitehat offers. But we see other trends when Google/Facebook restrict advertising in certain niches for not direct advertisers. So we will be looking for industries where it is still possible to do

12. For those who are interested in working with you and your affiliate network - What's the best way/time to reach you?

Write me on email alex@marketcall.com or skype aa.shkarupa

13. What's your favorite movie and why?

I have several, so I’d better recommend the one I recently watched. It's a tv series called Better Call Saul, everyone who watched Breaking Bad should like it. The plot may seem slow for action, but I like how it shows the transformation of the main character.

14. Give us a little glimpse into what a typical day in your life looks like.

I get up at 10 am, visit the gym, and have breakfast. Go to the office at 1 pm, work all day until 11 pm. During my work time I mainly communicate with top affiliates and work on strategic projects for our company.