Profile
Akram Hamam, also known as Akie, 31 year entrepreneur and affiliate marketing expert from Amsterdam. Akie has started his Affiliate Marketing journey in 2011, run traffic, built websites and promoted e-commerce products.
He is a founder of Affiliate Business Club. An international community with events organised world-wide anywhere from New-York to Moskow. Recently the company has launched its platform with a goal to bring together all Affiliate Marketers in the world and become the first Affiliate Marketing Social Network.
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First question as always, what do you do now? What is your current focus?
My current focus now since COVID-19 is Virtual Summits. Before that I was organizing events worldwide within the affiliate marketing and ecommerce industry. At the moment I’m also in the process of launching affiliatebusinessclub.com which will be a social network for affiliate marketers.
Productivity, work, daily habits and tools
We are all quarantined now. What are the main advantages for you to work from home?
Less face-to-face meetings, more quick calls.
Less distractions, more focus.
I can say I’m a lot more rested than normal, my sleep, food & work-out routine is way better than it is outside quarantine. Also a lot less traveling, hotels, partying and drinking 😉
You never start working before you…?
I have brushed my teeth, shower, drink a good glass of water, take my daily dose of vitamins and have kissed my fiance goodbye to start the day.
Provide value and connect people without asking anything back in return.If you don’t give, you don’t get. Click To TweetYour number three DON’TS during a working week?
- Meeting with friends during the day.
- Long meetings without an agenda. I don’t meet anymore just to see if we can do business or to see if something can come out of it. And if I ever meet during the week I’d like to keep most of my meeting to maximum an hour.
- Day-drinking 😉
How do you focus on a task?
I use the pomodoro-technique with a timer. It’s a timer you put in front of you and per task you need to finish you only focus on that particular task until the timer is reached. In the meantime you don’t have any other distractions or apps open, you don’t do any phone calls or have a look on whatsapp.
Your most often used tools?
- Asana for daily planning and setting tasks for the team
- Franz (it’s a complete app to add Slack, Skype, Whatsapp, Telegram and other messenger apps) This way I don’t have to switch between all these apps and I have one app open with all notifications.
What helps you to recharge the batteries?
During the week after a day of work I try to do a work out or go for a run (at least 3 times a week).
I read daily before sleep, even if it’s just a few pages. It kind of became a habit, sometimes I’d just read 4-5 pages and others 20+. What helps me a lot is not watching tv shows right before going to bed.
Besides, I try to sit down at the end of the day and think, I don’t do it daily but as much as I can.
In weekend’s it helps for me to spend time with my friends and family.
Learning, reading, becoming better
You read daily, then what are some of your favorite books?
We’ll it’s hard for sure but as I have my book collection sorted on colour lol. I’ll choose the best one per colour:
- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (orange)
- Effective Executive by Peter. F Ducker (Red)
- Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss (Yellow)
- The One Thing by Gary Keller & Principles by Ray Dalio (Black)
- The Obstacle is the way by Ryan Holiday (White)
- The Lean Start-up by Eric Reis (Blue)
- Plato Dialogen (Green, dutch book)
- Money Master The Game by Tony Robbins (Gold)
Are there any worth taking affiliate courses out there?
I know James van Elswyck has a killer course on GeekOutEdu
Also Nick Peroni’s one, it’s free and super useful for ecom. Ecomempires
Do you listen to any podcasts?
I do, my favourite ones are:
- Lewis Howes – The school of greatness
- Jay Shetty – On Purpose
- Hidden brain
- TedDailyTalks
- Foundr
- Hustle Is Sold Separately
Any FB groups you read?
I follow quite a bit but only really read two when I get the notification on FB because I know they have fire content:
The most important things you learned in business?
Provide value and connect people without asking anything back in return.
If you don’t give, you don’t get.
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What are your mistakes we can learn from?
If you don’t do it yourself no-one else will do it for you.
You shouldn’t make too many ‘bro-deals’ and trust it will work out just because you’re bro’s now.
Affiliate Marketing and on-line business
You are in event business and the planet is on pause, what is your way to adapt?
I will be launching an Affiliate Marketing Virtual Summit and an Virtual Ecom Summit we’ve been planning this for a while now and this seemed like the perfect timing to launching a virtual summit full of great speakers.
Do you believe that virtual summits are the way to go for the nearest future?
We’ll I believe it’s an extra addition to the normal conferences. I mean the best contacts are always made during conferences and you build great relationships during these times. Also the best business deals are made offline and not by meeting people online. But who knows it will change in the future.
What is the point of attending virtual events?
You can learn for free from the best people in the industry, they will share with you all the great things they’ve learned and all the mistakes they’ve made for you to prevent them. Besides attending a virtual summit gives you the opportunity to also meet people at http://affiliatebusinessclub.com which is also free to sign-up for.
More people are going on-line, does that mean that more money to be made for affiliates?
I surely think that there’s a lot of opportunities right now, during times of crisis there’s always people that suffer and always people that make a lot of money. The conscious people and those who make the best out of these times will accelerate and others will stay the same when coming out of quarantine.
How do we all benefit from the current situation?
It’s hard to say that we all will. Personally I hope people won’t go back to the ‘normal’ as that seemed like it didn’t work for our nature and mother earth.
Also the industry we’re in has a big advantage over others as we’re used to working remotely, we live and sell online. We’re used to adapting quickly as this industry is always changing rapidly
Thank you for reading
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