The Contributing Partner Contract for Digital Marketing Empire

When working in the Digital Marketing Empire team, you will not be an employee, and you will work on your own business in a way.

However, you will have a business relationship with the Digital Marketing Empire, and the terms of that relationship need to be clearly defined, so that both parties are clear about their rights and responsibilities.

That’s why team members need to sign a contract when joining the Digital Marketing Empire.

The contract is called the Contributing Partner Contract, and the bloggers and digital marketers that sign it are officially known as Contributing Partners in the document.

The contract has two main goals:

• to ensure that your rights are respected and that you are guaranteed payment and rights to your content
• to ensure that new students don’t just abuse the free training they receive without a true willingness to cooperate and work in the team

If you are interested in the contents of the contract, I suggest you download it and read it, as that way you will receive the information straight from the horse’s mouth as they say, without any filters and intermediaries.

However, if you want a brief summary of the contract without all the legal talk, then go through this guide. This guide has no legal power and can’t be used for further interpreting the contract, so anything written here has no effect on the contract itself, but the general idea is the same, and I believe this guide can help understand the contract in a quicker way and explained in a simpler language.

Download Contract

The following link will download the latest PDF version of the Contributing Partner Contract for the Digital Marketing Empire. (Note: do not sign this contract, as it is not signed by me. You will receive the contract that you need to sign in your email inbox after you pass the interview.)

Definitions

The contract defines several phrases, and the most important ones are:

• Business Owner – that’s me
• Contributing Partner – that’s you
• Business – that’s the Digital Marketing Empire
• Content Piece – blog post, video, or any other piece of content you create

Recruitment, Training, and Onboarding

The section “Recruitment, Training, and Onboarding” explains how the training process will look like, and what is required of both parties during that process.

The responsibilities of the person mentoring you during the onboarding process (which will mostly be me in the beginning) are to ensure you are getting quality education on the topic of blogging, that in some cases your blog posts have their headers prepared and the competition researched and the requirements specified, and also, that you will receive help and guidance in the editing process before the article is published.

Your responsibilities will be to create your first 10 articles, pay attention while we go through the edits and the training, and do your best in general.

The training period will last for a minimum of 10 days, which means you will receive at least 10 live training sessions with me or your designated mentor. The training period may be extended if needed, but it may also be cut short if you are not accepted into the program.

Services and Responsibilities

The section “Services and Responsibilities” defines the responsibilities of both parties, and the services they agree to provide, once the training period is done.

The responsibilities of Digital Marketing Empire towards you include:

• timely payments if your content generates profit
• guidance and help and editing of your content if you need it
• strategy, team management and coordination
• providing resources to help you create better content if possible
• insights into reports about traffic and revenue for your content
• covering expenses for running the Digital Marketing Empire

Your responsibilities include:

• creating high-quality content to the best of your ability
• coordination and cooperation with us and other team members

This section also explains that the content you create is a property of Digital Marketing Empire for the duration of the agreement, but that it may become your property if you are terminated under some circumstances.

Revenue

The section about the revenue specifies how we will generate revenue, which is through affiliate commissions and display advertising.

Contributing Partner Performance and Progress

This section explains the levels you can reach in the Digital Marketing Empire, which determine what portion of the profits generated by your content you are entitled to. Your level depends solely on the number of content pieces you’ve published.

These are the levels in the Digital Marketing Empire:

• Level 1, between 0 and 10 Content Pieces: Contributing Partner earns 20% of profits from all their currently published Content Pieces
• Level 2, between 11 and 30 Content Pieces: Contributing Partner earns 30% of profits from all their currently published Content Pieces
• Level 3, between 31 and 50 Content Pieces: Contributing Partner earns 40% of profits from all their currently published Content Pieces
• Level 4, between 51 and 100 Content Pieces: Contributing Partner earns 50% of profits from all their currently published Content Pieces
• Level 5, more than 100 Content Pieces: Contributing Partner earns 65% of profits from all their currently published Content Pieces

Further, this section explains how the percentage of the revenue that your content has generated from display advertising will also be used to calculate your portions from the affiliate commissions and info product sales.

Recommendations of Other Team Members by Contributing Partner

As you may know, you can earn passive income with the Digital Marketing Empire not just by creating content, but also by recommending other team members that join and create content that brings in revenue. You will get paid a percentage of the profits generated by the content of the team members you recommend.

The percentages you earn depend on your level as well. You must be at least level 2 to be able to earn from your referrals.

This is the payment structure for the earnings through referrals, depending on your level:

• Level 2: 5% of the profits generated by the recommended Team Member once they pass Onboarding
• Level 3: 7.5% of the profits generated by the recommended Team Member once they pass Onboarding
• Level 4: 10% of the profits generated by the recommended Team Member once they pass Onboarding
• Level 5: 15% of the profits generated by the recommended Team Member once they pass Onboarding

Contributing Partner Payments

This section specifies how you will get paid.

Basically, payments are done once a month, but maybe even more frequently in certain cases.

For the time being, payments will be done through Payoneer, and possibly through PayPal in certain scenarios (although the latter is not a guaranteed payment method at the moment). If you don’t have a Payoneer account, create one by clicking the link (we will both earn $25 if you register an account through the link). Later, we will try to enable payments through wire transactions, too.

This section also explains that payments for a certain month happen the next month or maybe even later, because that’s how advertising networks and our affiliate partners work.

Duration and Termination

This section specifies that we are in a business relationship for an indefinite time, and what are the terms for terminating the agreement.

Basically, if Digital Marketing Empire decides to terminate the agreement, it will have to be because of a justified cause. So far, there are only two justified causes defined, which are:

• team member fails to produce at least one content piece for more than 2 weeks in a row (team members of level 5 don’t need to comply with this, they are free to stop producing content and don’t have to be concerned with termination)
• team member is uncooperative, unresponsive, or deliberately acting in ways that are harmful to the Digital Marketing Empire

This is a small list, because we will try really hard to work and cooperate with everyone, and terminating someone is really the last thing we want to do. However, we must be able to protect the business and make sure it stays efficient, and these two causes should be enough for now, although the list might grow as needed in the future.

If a team member is terminated because of one of the causes above, their content remains the property of Digital Marketing Empire, and the team member is no longer eligible for earning profits from the content.

This section also specifies two other ways in which a team member might be terminated, and that’s if the team member is not a good fit for the team, or without a cause. If this were to happen, the content generated by the team member becomes their property, and they will still be eligible for earning profits from their content.

The agreement can also be terminated by the team member:

• if the team member terminates the agreement during the first 2 days of the onboarding process, they have no further obligations towards the Digital Marketing Empire
• if the team member terminates the agreement before completing the onboarding process but after the third day of it, they are required to not work in any area related to digital marketing outside of Digital Marketing Empire for a period of 6 months since the date of termination
• if the team member terminates the agreement after completing the onboarding process, they are required to not work in any area related to digital marketing outside of Digital Marketing Empire for a period of 1 year since the date of termination

If a team member decides to terminate the agreement, their content remains the property of Digital Marketing Empire, and the team member is no longer eligible for earning profits from the content. Also, during the duration of the agreement, the team member is not allowed to work in areas related to digital marketing, otherwise the content and the work they generate will become the property of Digital Marketing Empire.

There is one special case where the team member can terminate the agreement without losing the rights to earn profit from their content, and that’s after the team member has produced 150 content pieces that are published on the blogs. The content will still be the property of the Digital Marketing Empire, but the team member will still be eligible for earning passive income from it as usual, and they will be free to terminate the agreement without any further obligations to Digital Marketing Empire.

So, after you publish your 150th content piece, you are effectively graduating from the Digital Marketing Empire. At this point, you will have received one of the best pieces of training on blogging and digital marketing in the world. Your service in the blogging military will be completed with the highest honors, and you will be something like a blogging commando (we jokingly call it a Navy Seal of blogging), and you will have the option to terminate the agreement and start your own digital marketing business but still keep earning passive income from all of the content pieces you’ve created during your time at the Digital Marketing Empire. Hopefully, you will have had so much fun and made so much money with us that you will never think of quitting, but as an entrepreneur myself, I want you to know that if you decide on starting your own thing at this point, you will be free to do so without any hard feelings from our side. Still, stick with us, it will be more fun and we will make more money that way :).

Contributing Partner Status

This section basically says that the team member is not an employee in the Digital Marketing Empire. This is probably the most uneventful part, because it has to cover all the typical legal mumbo-jumbo and is full of legal cookie-cutter jargon. It doesn’t really have any relevant parts in my opinion, but I still recommend going through it if you are thinking of signing the contract.

Summary

This guide was meant to give you a brief overview of the Contributing Partner Contract that team members sign when they join the Digital Marketing Empire. Again, it is not meant to be a substation or an addition to the contract, and it holds no legal power, it is just an attempt to explain the contract in a simpler language.

I strongly recommend reading through the contract itself, this guide is not a replacement for that.

Matt

I’m Matt, the man behind the Learn Digital Marketing brand. Find me on Instagram and TikTok if you want more.

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