The Amazon Associate scheme is one of my favourite affiliate avenues, thanks mostly to its large product set, trustworthy brand and actually pretty decent commission rates. Obvious downside is the recent change to 24 hour cookies, but it remains a great program to be involved with.

One thing that frustrates me slightly is the stats that are available. Firstly, there's the wait. The long, agonising wait to see what sales you've got. And then when you get the stats, they're not spectacularly helpful in letting you know anything other what orders came through. You have no idea as to what clicks specifically generated what sales, which throws a fog of mystery over the whole thing as you try and determine what clicks converted best.

No doubt the seasoned pros have their own strategies for analysing their stats and learning all they can from them, but I recently came up with my own strategy for gleaning more information from Amazon's stats and thought I'd share it.

I wanted to work out what times of the day and days of the week were the best for converting clicks to sales, and wanted a way I could develop some kind of heatmap, showing me the hottest times for particular products. It may be that there was no conclusive patten but trying to understand, learn and ultimately predict purchaser behaviour is part of the fun.

So here's what I came up with. Amazon recently increased the number of tracking IDs you can have to 100. You can create new tracking IDs by creating a new aStore. I picked a random word and created 24 tracking ids, each with a number - starting at 00 - appended to the end, and incrementing by one.

e.g.
trackingID00
trackingID01
trackingID02
trackingID03
and so on

Each of the tracking IDs now represents an hour of the day.

I have created my own Amazon links that go through a local page on my server which runs a little bit of vb.net code to determine the hour of the day and then insert the corresponding tracking ID into the outgoing Amazon link. For example, at 2.30 om, the amazon link will be created using trackingID14. It's pretty simple and this bit of work on my side allows me to then from see the stats the 'hot' times of the day for the products I'm tracking and work out a decent plan for my PPC activities across the week.

Labels: amazon, tracking

My "Community Technical Preview" of Microsoft Expression Web Developer came to an abrupt end the other day when it suddenly expired. I was pretty miffed it hadn't given me any advance notice, but managed to get round it for a couple of days with some messing about with my system date, but in the end I decided to bite the bullet and buy the software. Now, buying software is something I try and avoid as much as possible and in fact I think the last piece of software I bought was many years ago when I got a copy of Eudora Pro following yet another mail crash in Outlook Express.

So what made me actually purchase a copy of Microsoft Expression Web?

Well, having used it for quite a while now, I'd have to say it really is an excellent tool. You can very quickly and easily build standards compliant web pages with no code bloat. I spend a lot of time in the code view, and having Intellisense avilable HTML, CSS, ASP.NET and VBScript is a definite help. Also I like the way that the preview mode renders page components like user controls on asp.net 1 and master pages in .net 2 so you can see the whole page layout, if it is actually split into several files.

It comes with a handy little integrated web server so you don't need to configure IIS or anything like that to test your pages. The application really encourages you to use CSS and the CSS task pane does indeed make it a real doddle. Also, I like the fact that if you insert a picture you are auto prompted to enter a value for the "ALT" property - a simple thing but shows they are taking accessibility and web standards seriously. Another nice touch is that if you want to preview the page, it detects the browsers you have installed and gives you the chance to preview the page in any of the browsers at a range of standard sizes.

Overall, since I mainly use it in code view, I could actually do without MS Expression, but I'm glad I don't have to.

Labels: microsoft expression

The stats for Amazon.co.uk's Associate program are severely delayed today. Usually you can get updated stats from around 00:30 - 01:30 but no sign of any new numbers yet and it's 09:45.

OK, fair enough, this has happened before and it's not the end of the World and I'm sure it will be sorted later on. But then I remembered they had a fairly new blog and that would be a sensible place to put up any information about problems or delays.

So I head on over to http://affiliate-blog.amazon.co.uk/ to get the inside scoop on what's happening and not a dicky bird.

Note to Amazon: If you're going to run a blog worth reading, at least try and make it a half useful resource and put information on there that people really want to know from you.

Labels: amazon

I stopped using Adwords quite a while ago, but recently have been starting to dabble again, partly to make some money and partly because it is actually quite fun.

I picked a merchant where linking direct to the site was allowed and setup some campaigns. I created a tracking URL of my own to receive the click, insert the details into a database and mail me them to me too, before directing the user to intended destination. I like to have stats in real time as far as possible so this seems a nice way to do it, and also it exposes me to the full referral url data which is great for learning about search terms.

One of the thing that's most annoying is of course repeat clickers. I guess the odd repeat click has to be accepted as part of the user behaviour for some indecisive users, but anything over 4 clicks and I get very suspicious.

So what do you when you're getting repeat clicked?

First thing I do is make sure a warning is displayed. This probably doesn't sit will with Google but it's my money going down the drain, so my tracking link counts the clicks from a single IP source in a time span and will display an warning message alerting them to the fact that the repeat clicks have been detected.

Next thing I do is go into Sherlock Holmes mode, and crack open a command box and enter tracert [IP Address]. At the least this will tell you their ISP, but it can also possibly tell you a lot more sometimes revealing the organisation they're from, if they're on a company network.

When enough details have been logged, I pass them onto Adwords Support for them to investigate.

There are some caveats with these methods: Some ISPs, such as AOL, use proxy servers which means that some or all their users may appear to be from the same few IP addresses, so this is a less than perfect method. But when it's your money, doing nothing doesn't seem like an option. So what do you do to deal with competitor click fraud?

Labels: adwords, click fraud, google

First up in the Dragons' Den was Ling Valentine with her contract hire website and an eye-catching poster showing her URL printed onto be nuclear missile. Her website has a crazy design that is on first glance a complete mess but the more I looked at it, decided it actually seems to work. I read through her site and was especially amused by her advice page on building a good website which had this nugget of information:

Use program like Macromedia Dreamweaver and sit with clever druggy student who show you some basic skill.

Duncan and Richard were interested enough to make an offer that the equity stake they demanded was too big and Ling abruptly refused it, telling them ' Chinese eat dragons for breakfast'. Her advert on a missile was a good publicity stunt, and you couldn't help but think her appearance on Dragons' Den was just another one, but good on her for that.

More popular with all the dragons was the husband and wife team who wanted to sell a kiss moulding kit called Send a Kiss by Benje. The idea had come about when the guy had a heart attack and thought of something he would wanted to leave behind to his wife. All of the dragons loved the idea but also agreed this was a' lifestyle business' that could make a great living in a couple but that probably wouldn't make a big return investors. Peter Jones said he found the back story to the business ' heart rendering' when he surely meant heart rending which was quite a funny Jade Goody moment for someone who had just been blasting another pair of entrepreneurs as ' idiots'. The couple didn't receive any funding although Peter did buy one of the kits from them for £50 which was like some kind of patronising act of charity since they already said the RRP was £14 99. Theo said he may be able to put them in touch with someone who could help them and maybe he was true to his word because the Send a Kiss website has a non-affiliate link to Theo's underwear store, La Senza which implies some kind of relationship was born.

Finally in the den was in Imram Hakim who had iTeddy - a teddy bear with a media player embedded in its stomach and day content subscription service on the associated website. It seems like a pretty reasonable idea and surprisingly affordable considering it was apparently a video player as well and Imran had a very polished product to show considering he had only come up with the idea five months earlier. Most agreed it was a good idea if he was able to get the patents, and Theo and Peter ended up investing in the business. I don't mean to fisk Peter Jones's every contribution but he made a point of saying in his negotiations that Imran could ' have the money today'. Followers of Dragons' Den know that despite the impression of cash being handed over, these deals are long drawnout affairs are often never take place one due dilligence has been carried out. The deal was dependent on a patent being granted, which Richard thought was unlikely, and he may have been right because I can see no mention of iTeddy in the patent office database.

Labels: dragons' den, entrepreneurs, review, tv

I blogged a few months ago about a website I had called Problem Exchange that was built with worthy intentions and was doing kind of okay traffic wise, but just seemed impossible to monetise. I tried AdSense, Amazon links and affiliate network links but nothing was working.

The site had been using a three column design, with most of my advertising attempts placed in a 120 pixel width column on the right-hand side.

I recently changed the layout to a two column design with a large right-hand column. I've brought the AdSense unit into the main content area and placed it alongside an entry form. Rather than the 120x600 unit I was using, I've go a 300x250 banner. Since making that change, the website has provided a regular stream of AdSense clicks and has become one of my most reliable and consistent earners.

You can see from the picture below where I've placed the AdSense unit. Please excuse the Valentine's Day decorations-my users a demanding bunch and always liked their seasonal decorations on the site.



One of the exciting things about this kind of affiliate marketing in general is in seeing how minor tweaks to the layout and presentation of information can have a direct effect on human behaviour.

Labels: adsense, google

I like to keep an eye on the nothing-ventured blog written by Tom where he always seems to maintain some integrity and a great work ethic about the projects that he works on.

He put a lot of work into a new site called trust my garage which allows people to post up the reviews of garages and mechanics which is a cool idea because if you don't know about cars, picking a mechanic can be a real leap in the dark.

So he made his new site and started mentioning it in various car forums where it was seen by the editor of Yahoo!' s car pages. They were sufficiently impressed with the idea to feature the site on the front page which is really a fantastic piece of exposure for a new website and just goes to show there may still be something in the idea of working hard on a decent website that people will find genuinely useful.

Well done Tom, I hope the site goes from strength to strength.

By the way, I'm still using Dragon NaturallySpeaking I have to say it's really very good although I was talking to a friend on instant messenger who wanted me to test the swearing and the only offensive comment I could find out-of-the-box was toss pot, but I guess I'll be extending its repertoire of obscenities as time goes by.

My blog has been rather quiet lately, because I've been trying to give my hand a break since my RSI flared up. In fact, this is the first blog posting I have made using the speech recognition software, Dragon naturally speaking.

I've been trying to take a break from the computer so my affiliate activities have been limited the last couple of days. I did, however, manage to get a quick two day AdWords campaign up advertising House Of Cards DVDs following the sad death of Ian Richardson, who was a fantastic actor.

Tasteless profiteering? You may think that: I couldn't possibly comment

Labels: rsi

Dragon's Den made its return to our screens tonight on BBC2 - perhaps a little sooner than one might have expected since I was remember reviewing the last series back in September. For those unaware of the show, this is where budding entrepreneurs can pitch their ideas to a panel of "Dragons" who are looking to invest their own money in viable businesses. I like to think I have a modicum of entrepreneurial spirit, which is why I enjoy this programme and I think probably many online entrepreneurs in the UK watch it, and likewise for the versions shown in other countries.

Possibly the show has lost credibility though because I think it's become quite a lot about the personalities and egos of the Dragons and there's been too many reports of the deals shown simply not happening, but its still entertaining viewing.

First up in the Den tonight was a guy looking to take his contemporary puppet business into schools, community groups and young offenders institutions. Certainly the idea of tackling juvenile delinquency through the art of puppetry wasn't something that had occurred to me, but the panel liked the idea. Their main concern though was the business he wanted investment for was a side venture to his established activities and actually had nothing to it yet: it hadn't started doing anything so there was nothing to invest in other than an idea. He didn't get the investment.

Next up we had two entrepreneurs wanted £160,000 to invest in their "thermo-logistic" business. Unsuprisingly for refrigeration experts, they stayed cool under pressure and managed to negotiate a deal where they took the money in exchange for a 22.5% equity share. Seemed like a solid enough business, but the subject matter was hard to get too enthusiastic about, although the panel were certainly excited because at one point they had offers on the table from all five Dragons.

Dr Gili Kucci from Kucci Kukui wanted money to help expand her City-based relaxation treatment business. The Dragons' had difficulty believing the figures they were being given and she didn't get the investment, although Duncan Bannantyne rode to her rescue and tried to interpret her answers into something more coherent.

Levi Roots was a charismatic entrant into the Dragons' Den, beguiling the Dragons with a catchy ditty about his Reggae Reggae Sauce - "so good I named it twice". Despite making a huge error in his understanding of an apparent order (mistaking 2500 litres for 2,500,000 litres), he managed to score an investment of £50,000 from Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh. I think they clearly took a shine to him and that got him the deal, because I can imagine many other people making that kind of mistake would have had some harsh words coming their way. There was nothing on the Reggae Reggae Sauce to indicate any breakthroughs in the sauce's fortune, and I've not seen it in Sainsburys, so I'd love to know if this deal actually happened.

Labels: dragons' den, review, tv

My wireless internet site, myHotspots.co.uk, had been ticking over nicely for the last couple of years and doing quite well with Adsense and also reselling BT Openzone vouchers (which I'm still to be paid for, but that's another story). I had tried to increase revenue by adding links to various electrical retailers in the side bar, but to be honest, my users didn't show any interest.

So when Amazon recently increased the number of aStores you can create to 100, I thought I'd try a specific aStore dedicated to wireless internet products. I added it to the site menu as "Wifi Store" and since then I've seen a steady stream of wifi kit, such as routers, network adaptors and wifi finders, sold through the site.

So I'm pleased to be able to say, Amazon aStore seems to work very nicely indeed.

Labels: amazon, things that work

Well, my long drawn out goodbye to my office in Greenwich finally ended last week, when the lease was up and I had to get my stuff out.

I had actually been mostly working full time from home since the start of the year and things have been going kind of well. Firstly, I'm saving tonnes of money in rent and fuel bills. Also, it's nice to have consolidated all my various my items of kit and actually have my printer, shredder, scanner etc available 24/7 and not be distributed over two sites.

I also feel like I'm able to be more productive and can tackle tricky coding projects without knowing that I have the imminent interruption of having to either goto the office, or going home. Also the quality of my lunches has improved and I've been enjoying going through some bagel suggestions.

What's the downside? Well, there's been major downside so far which has been that with my increased productivity, the RSI I've had in my wrist for about five years has flared up again and been an incredible nuisance. I'm currently trying out a new bracelet I ordered from Japan which apparently is used by athletes and is good for joing pain.

It's look a bit like those coloured arm bands that are kind of popular, but it has titanium inside which I'm hoping has healing properties. Made me think that maybe Lance Armstrong should put some titanium in his yellow arm bands and you could call them the Lance Arm Strong. Ok, just a thought.

Labels: home working, office, personal

Which? has conducted a survey of 10,000 people to find out what Britain's most liked, and most disliked, shops are.

Customers rated each store on aspects of their product, convenience, customer service, pricing and shopping experience.

Here's the results (and details of affiliate schemes, if they have one):

1) John Lewis (available on Buy.At, TD, Affiliate Window)
2) Waitrose
3) Marks & Spencer (available on CJ, Buy.At)
4) Local Electricals
5) Waterstones (available on Buy.at, TD)
6) Body Shop (available on Linkshare)
7) Aldi (no online store)
8) Lidl (no online store)
9) Jessops (available on TD)
10) Ikea (no online store)

It's perhaps not suprising to see John Lewis and Waitrose top the list. These two sister companies are renowned for good quality and excellent customer service. Aldi and Lidl offer a no frills service but some fantastic bargains. I got a DVD player, with memory card reader and DIVX playback for only £20, which was a great buy. I know a lot of people get the Lidl newsletter with details of offers and then get there when it opens to make sure they get the bargains and then have it listed and sold on eBay for a profit before the end of the day.

Here's the worst shops, according to the survey:

40) WH Smith (available on TD)
=) Comet (available on Affiliate Window)
42) Co-Op
43) PC World (available on (TD)
=) Woolworths (available on Affiliate Window)
=) MFI
46) Currys(available on (TD)
47) Barratts Shoes
= ) Somerfield
49) Currys.Digital (available on (TD)
50) JJB Sports

Yikes, it must made depressing reading for DSG to see PC World, Currys and Currys.Digital all in the bottom 10. And with Comet in the list too, doesn't it suggest that we're crying out for a big electrical retailer in the UK who can deliver a good customer experience? I'm really not surprised at all to see Comet in there. I've been there many times intending to buy something but half the time it's hard enough job finding a staff member to deal with you because they're often huddled in groups having a chin wag.

I find it sad to see a shop like WH Smith in there, but honestly, their stuff is usually over priced and sometimes you'll wait 10 minutes just to buy a newspaper. Got to say though, I still love them for the Gamecube game sale they did last Autumn/Winter where I was mopping up classic titles and selling on eBay for twice as much.

Find out more about the Which? Survey.

Labels: survey, which

I mentioned a few days ago that I wanted to revisit some of my older websites and improve Adsense performance rather than just see the headline figure for all the sites and be satisfied with that and not delve too deeply in. Of course I've always checked how Adsense Channels were performing but as long as the total was OK, I was generally happy.

But to help with my new approach, I have been making a habit of printing out a "Custom Report" from Adsense advance reporting that shows me Yesterday's Adsense status for all channels, grouped by Channel. I'm someone that reads stats best from a printed page, so I save the report as a CSV and print it out. So far so good, and then I noticed that using the Report Manager, you can have the custom report emailed to you on a daily basis. This couldn't get any better I thought, so I set it up and received my first email report today from Google.

I was happy with that except for one thing - they sent the report as a .zip file. This means that to access the info how I like it, I need to save the attachment, open the Zip file, file the CSV file within, and then print it. It's OK, but it's click intensive. There must be a better way, I thought...

Step forward EZDetach...

I googled around and found EZDetach from a company called TechHit. This dreamy little add in for Microsoft Outlook automatically detaches attachments from email messages. It works as a toolbar button, or more importantly, as a custom action, meaning you can set it up to work as a rule applied to incoming messages. But it doesn't stop there - after it detaches the file, it gives you the option to unzip the file and then another option to execute a script of your own - from where you can then print the file automatically too.

The end result is that I receive the email from Google, the attachment is automatically saved, unzipped and printed. The report comes shooting out of my printer with no interaction or work from me at all. I just pick it up and start analysing.

This solution is so sweet, I thought others might be interested, so here's exactly how I've set it up:

1) Install EZDetach (http://www.techhit.com/ezdetach/) - Free trial is available, and the actual price is only $29.97

2) Open Outlook - I'm using Outlook 2003

3) Find an existing Adsense Report received, and right click on it, then select "Create Rule"

4) Select "Subject Contains - Adsense Report Request..."

5) Click Advanced Options, and then click Next to proceed to the "What do you want to do with the message?" screen. Scroll down and tick "perform a custom action"

6) Click the underlined words "a custom action" to choose the action, and then select EZDetach in the drop down list. Click Change to configure it...

7) Set an Output path, tick Execute and enter "c:\printfile.vbs" and also click Unzip File. So you have told it where to save the file, that it needs unzip to the file and that it needs to run a script called printfile.vbs which is on the c:\ - now we need to make that script! Just click Ok, and Finish first.



8) Open Notepad.exe and enter this text, than click File->Save as-> enter "c:\printfile.vbs" for the file name and be sure to select "All Files" for Save as Type.

Option Explicit
Dim objShellApp
Dim strFilename
strFilename = "c:\my documents\mailattachments\Adsense-Report.csv"
Set objShellApp = WScript.CreateObject("Shell.Application")
objShellApp.ShellExecute strFilename, "", "", "print", 0
Wscript.Sleep(5000)
Set objShellApp = Nothing

I should add - the company behind EZDetach is so cool that they made a print file script available on their website which I hacked about to make this. this script relies on there being the same output path as I had, but you can easily change accordingly.

9. That's it! Next time you get a report from Adsense, it will just print straight out ready to be collected from the paper tray.

Of course, not everyone will want to receive and consume their stats like this, but for the way I like to do it, this method works so well.

Labels: adsense, affiliate tools, review

Epitiro Technologies performs a quarterly survey the leading ADSL providers in the UK. They use a number of metrics to come to their conclusions, based on performance tests that take place from destinations around the UK.

Just thought I would post up their most recent top 5 along with details of the network through which that provider can be promoted.

1. BT (on DMG)
2. Pipex (on DMG)
3. Orange (independent? they have an email address to join)
4. Demon (were on DGM, but ceased program in Q4 2006)
5. Virgin (on Buy.at and DGM)

You can find out more about the Epitiro and their quarterly performance benchmarking from their news release.

Labels: broadband

I'll just concentrate on Adsense for this earnings update, as that remains my biggest earner by quite some way.

In this type of update post, I debate with myself whether to just state the actual numbers but I think you reach a certain point when you're doing kind of well when it seems a bit inappropriate to say how much exactly you've made. Although there's another stage where your earnings are so phenomenal you just have to tell the world - but I'm not quite there yet!

Anyways, so here's a percentage break down of how I did in January compared to the previous month, and the same month a year ago.

	Compared to Last Month	Compared to 12 Months Ago
Adsense for Content	+47.87%	-10.98%
Adsense for Search	+98.12%	+268.50%
Adsense for Referrals	+1.37%	+89.66%
Totals	+20.38%	+21.72%

I find doing this update really useful because it reminds me that actually I was doing better with Adsense for Content a year ago, but because Referral units took up the slack and pushed my earnings forward, I lost sight of other sites which have had an earnings decrease.

When you make quite a few sites, its easy to lose interest in older sites which once earned OK money. So my task for February is to spend sometime everyday revisiting some of the sites that are earning less than they were to see if they can be dusted down and made useful again.

Labels: adsense, earnings, google