I've done a few video blog posts before using the video function of my digital camera, but I took delivery today of my new video camera - the Sony DCR-SR32. I went for a hard disk camcorder because 30gb of storage is plenty and I can't be bothered to mess about with tapes or discs. So I'm looking forward to creating lots more video content with my new camera.

How do you get hold of kit to review?

Someone emailed me recently in response to my post about a video review I had done to ask how I got hold of the stuff to review. It's pretty simple to be honest, but here's how:

Once I've decided what I want to review, I go to the manufacturer's website and look for contact details of their press office or agency - often it will be in a third party PR agency.

Once I've identified who I need to contact, I write an email explaining why my site is a great fit and how it will benefit them to get the exposure. I have created a "media pack" pdf for one site with details of search engine positions and traffic. I put myself in their shoes and think what boxes do they want ticked before they agree to send an expensive piece of kit. I only bother writing for a site that I am proud of and I genuinely think can benefit them or their client.

They will either agree or not respond, or respond but say they don't have anything at the moment - I think they usually have a pool of loan equipment. If they respond positively, they will usually send a loan form which needs to be completed and guarantees you will look after the item and return in a set time.

I did review a low value item once (under £20) and there was no mention of returning it. And there was a gadget correspondent in a neighbouring office, when I didn't work from home, and he had a mountain of freebies he had reviewed and kept. But a freebie is a bonus and I always go into it expecting to return an item and I do so on time. After reviewing and returning an item, I follow up with an email providing a link to the review.

And that's pretty much all there is to it! But if you have any other tips, feel free to use the comments section.

Labels: reviews, video

Well it can happen to any one of us, but I think I made a stupid mistake.

I may have mentioned that I run the UK's #1 Wifi site, called myHotspots. It's a bold claim I know, but in Google's UK results, I'm tops for that term (although I'm sure bragging about it only increases the chances that I'll lose it) so I'll use that as my justification.

Well, last week there was an interesting case of a man being arrested for "stealing" someone else's wifi. On Friday evening, about half five, I got an email from someone at the BBC World Service. They were arranging a discussion on the subject and wondered if I would take part. This was an intriguing offer to me and I was really torn. On the one hand, this was a great publicity opportunity for me and my site. I got some lovely traffic after another site was featured on the BBC's world service output. But on the other hand, I was just about to go out so could make a convincing argument to myself (and them) that this was too short notice. The honest truth is it out of my comfort zone and I was scared to do it, and could have changed my schedule if I was brave enough to go ahead with it.

Rationally, I don't think a brief mention to a global audience about a UK wifi hotspot listings site was going to have too much impact, but on the basis that it's not an offer I get every day of the week, I really regret turning it down and missing out on the experience. So a lesson learned perhaps about reaching outside of my comfort zone and challenging myself. There's a TV advert that says "life get's better when you say yes". Should have listened.

Whilst I'm talking about myhotspots, I noticed that another wifi directory site which should so unnamed and certainly unlinked to, has created a section titled called "my hotspots". Well, they do say immitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so they must really love my site.

Labels: mistakes, publicity

This eye catching affiliate incentive just dropped into my inbox and I thought it was worth sharing.

PC Tools - makers of Spyware Doctor and Registry Mechanic - are offering $20,000 worth of prize money to its top affiliates between September 1st and November 30th. The winning affiliates, determined by total sales, will receive the following prizes:

1st: $10,000
2nd: $6,000
3rd: $4,000

Should make a nice Xmas present for somebody!

You can promote PC Tools through OneNetwork. You can sign up here and promote them, alongside other programs like Symantec, Uniblue, Sega Games, Dragon Naturally Speaking and more. I read somewhere that a head honcho from OneNetwork is speaking at A4uExpo (or was it affiliate summit london?) by the way.

That sign up link was an affiliate link, I might add. I throw it in with the vain hope someone might use it one day but I've come to the realisation that it's fairly unlikely.

Actually when I started this blog, under the domain affilate-schemes.info, I intended to promote lots of multi tier schemes and make a fortune that way. I soon realised that just simply wasn't going to happen and that pot of easy money was going to remain elusive. I did refer one signup to an independent program once but the guy was useless and has never made me a penny. In fact, so sure was I that I had been barking up the wrong tree with that strategy that I later reviewed a network without any aff link and then someone posted a comment saying "shame there was no affiliate link, I'd have signed up through you". I think that can be filed under sod's law.

Labels: affiliate network, incentives, onenetwork

There's been a bit of discussion recently in the affiliate blogosphere and on the affiliates4u forum about voucher codes and coupons. There seems to be a bit of dissastisfaction about Tesco's decison to ban the use of voucher codes in the affiliate channel. I thought I would put a post up about the best voucher system I have seen in affiliate marketing and that's from Regnow.com.

I already made a post about this last year but it's worth repeating. As an affiliate, I can log into my control panel, select a merchant and create my own discount vouchers which come directly out of my commission. Say the normal commission is 40%, I might go in and decide to create my own unique voucher - including bespoke text strings to maintain site branding - for a 20% discount, thus splitting my commission with my users.

There's loads of additional options too. I can create my code for a specific product or for a whole vendor product set. I can have my discount only appear on recommended items when another item is purchased, enabling me to promote a great cross sell. I can create a discount on a bundle so that several items need to be purchased. I can set an expiry date on my offer or a maximum number of uses, to make it a limited offer.

Once I have created my coupon code, I can embed it into the affiliate link with a special coupon parameter in the URL too so the users don't need to enter the code themselves.

These are fantastic functions I haven't seen elsewhere.

It would be a fair point to make that it is easier for Regnow to implement this type of system - they are the payment gateway as well, and the commissions are generally decent percentages which gives you more to play with in coupon creation, but this is still a great voucher system that deserves credit.

If you're not familiar with Regnow.com, they are an affiliate network for software and digital downloads from companies like PC Tools, Uniblue, Parallels Desktop for Mac, Acronis, Kaspersky Lab and Panda Anti Virus. Since the products are available to download immediately with no physical product and delivery, this is a great way to monetise international traffic

If you didn't know about Regnow, find out more about them here ...

Labels: coupons, regnow, voucher codes

Affiliates4u has announced its inaugural affiliate awards, with the winners to be announced at the A4uExpo.

The categories for the awards are:

* Innovation in Affiliate Marketing (Merchant Award)
* Innovation in Affiliate Marketing (Network Award)
* Innovation in Affiliate Marketing (Publisher Award)
* Publisher's Choice Award for a Network
* Publisher's Choice Award for a Merchant
* Publisher's Choice Award for an Agency
* Affiliate Manager of 2007
* Merchants Publisher of 2007
* Best New Merchant of 2007
* Best New Publisher of 2007
* Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2007
* Best Agency Account Manager
* Best International Publisher
* Industry Champion Award

This will be a very interesting version of the Oscars for the affiliate marketing industry. On the eve of the real Oscars, there is an alternative version called the Golden Raspberries (or Razzies).
If there was an alternative version of the A4u Awards - maybe called the Grubbies - what would the categories be?

* Worst Website / Control Panel from a Network
* Worst Network In A Supporting Role
* Worst Campaign Creative
* Most Ridiculous Program Terms and Conditions
* Least Innovative Network
* Most Provocative Comment By A CEO
* Shortest Notice For A Program Closure

Any suggestions for others?

Joking aside, I do think it's a great thing to celebrate the best in the industry and look forward to taking part in the voting and finding out who wins.

Labels: a4u, awards

From what I can see, mobile phone merchants frequently update their deals and tariffs, perhaps more so than most other sectors. This means as an affiliate you often need to download a product feed and then put it up on your site or update your database. Ok, you could look at automating that process with some scripts but isn't there a better way? Web services, or live XML feeds are a great way to put merchant data on your website without having to go through the rigmarole of downloading/uploading product feeds.

Live XML feeds seem to be quite common in the travel vertical, but I'm not aware of any merchants in the Mobile Phone vertical offering this - I think they should. If there are any who are already doing it, please use the comments and let me know who's doing it.

Speaking of XML feeds, the one I use the most is for hotel information from Laterooms who I promote through their independent program. It would be really nice to see my stats but their control panel has displayed an error for well over a week and they haven't replied to email about it. I guess they have a problem and don't have the resource to fix it? Maybe sometimes it pays to go through a network after all...

Labels: laterooms, moan, mobile phone, xml

It certainly won't be any great news to anyone interested in making money online that the use of video is increasingly prevalent, and powerful.

I first dabbled in using video to promote a product when I reviewed the Kensington Wifi Finder Plus on my website about wifi. That thing has sold plenty for me since that review - actually probably the single most popular physical product I've promoted. Now the video itself is nothing special, so I don't know how much effect the video had or whether it just sold well because it's a good fit with the site. But certainly seeing an item in video form must be a persuasive factor when deciding to buy.

So I've done a new video review. This time I've reviewed the Kodak EasyShare EX1011 Digital Picture Frame. I've seen on YouTube that "unboxing" videos of equipment are fairly popular, and also I wanted to include a demonstration of what might be the most useful function for my users - the ability to wirelessly get photos onto the frame.



So I'll now be looking forward to finding out if seeing the product on video gives any extra lift to sales.

I found making the video to be significantly easier with a cheap tripod I bought in Argos, and once I done my filming, I did the editing in a piece of software called Magix Movie Edit Pro. There's also some free movie making software in XP which I want to try out. Unfortunately my microphone died half way through production, so I finished off with some awful one I had laying about, hence bad sound quality from half way through.

When making the video, I kind of struggled with the question of whether to overcome the inevitable embarrassment and make it a personal thing and become part of the review, or to just keep it in strictly product shots. I decided to appear in it, which seemed like a good idea at the time but I don't think I can bring myself to ever watch it again :-)

Sometimes in affiliate marketing its easy to push out sites that don't really add anything - they just parrot the merchant site and info, and you hope yours gets found by some means before the merchant. By getting in on video creation, you are actually going above beyond what most merchants are currently offering and really adding value.

Labels: affiliate marketing, video

I was talking to a friend, encouraging him to get on to Facebook because, well, everyone else seems to be. But this friend can not sign up to Facebook because he is what we might call in tabloid parlance, a love rat. He's a cad. He has at least three active relationships on the go, and regularly revisits ex-partners.

So the idea of being registered in a place where all these partners could congregate and expect to add him as a friend is too terrifying for him to contemplate so he has to stay off Facebook.

His dilemma got me to thinking about how on the face of it, this connected living is great at one level - being able to share your pictures, moods and news with friends sounds perfect on the surface. But aren't our inter-personal relationships frequently more complicated than "add as friend". We have friends, and special friends, with varying degrees of closeness and just being an additional friend on a page warrants, perhaps, an undue equality between then. It levels out and makes transparent something which in normal life is anything but that.

Surely many of us have different versions of our own reality for the different people that we interact with. I have friends that wouldn't recognise the version of me that spends time with his family. And I'm sure my family would recognise the version of me that some of my friends know.

In real life, yes we have friends who are always there and remain true throughout. But we also have friends that pick up and make the best of during particular times or situations in our life. These are more transitory relationships that probably fulfill a requirement for a time, but is there any longevity in the friendship and do you really need the people you worked with 5 years ago to see who you went clubbing with 5 days ago?

Being on Facebook is all well and good if you have nothing to hide, but is this phenomenon going to leave behind those for whom relationships are much more complicated, and create some kind of moral apartheid where those who have secrets have to get the other bus. Just a little thinking out loud as I sit out in the garden on this sunny friday afternoon.

Labels: facebook

I saw an interesting thread on Affiliates4U about freebies. It seems some affiliates are absolutely inundated with gifts and incentives. And some hardly get diddly squat. I'm afraid I fall into the latter category.

I think that's probably because for a long time I spread myself rather thin and like a kid in a sweetshop, wanted to try everything, my earnings probably haven't shown up on the radar of any one network or merchant, although that's changed a bit of lately my I'm really pleased with how my PPC campaigns are going, with 2 decent performing sites dedicated to one merchant.

So what have I received? Well, as I said, not much, but coincidentally the day after reading the thread, I did get a free pen from Buy.at (which has some funny sticky err label things (sorry no idea what they're called) concealed inside it). They also sent me a party popper. I'm going to put it away for special and who knows what grand occasional will merit me bringing out the party popper. I think they just sent that to remind me I'm still in with a shout on their bringing buy.at to you promotion.

Like a few other people, I got the Ann Summers condom a few weeks ago. My website that the freebie related to is called Naughty Underwear and I was a little suprised to see a letter come through the door addresses to "Rob Powell, Naughty Underwear, blah blah". Come on guys, at least put my company name on it too and make me look less like a perve to the postman.

My most valuable freebie was a £75 M&S gift voucher direct from a merchant a few years ago. So that's it - the complete low down on my miserable haul of freebies!

Labels: affiliate marketing, freebies

If you have some programming knowledge, you can do some cool stuff with affiliate datafeeds. But I got to thinking a while back about coming up with a tool that allowed affiliates with no programming knowledge of server side languages to create large websites using a datafeed. I had a particularly requirement for it myself because I'm from a MS-centric background and don't know how to do a .net equivalent of mod_rewrite which is available in PHP (well, I don't know how to do it on a shared hosting platform where making changes to IIS is limited), so I wanted to create a large volume of web pages with great looking directory structures.

I decided to create an application which would generate a static HTML document for every row in a datafeed, not dissimilar to how mail merge works in a word processor. I also wanted it to make it particularly simple to create nice directory structures which would be particularly SEO friendly.

I called it EssEeeO - SEO Made Simple. The point of it is to allow affiliates with little or no knowledge of server side technologies to build large websites, with SEO friendly URLs that will work on any hosting package and don't need a database back end.

I made it. It works and I use it. So what to do with it now? There are other off the shelf solutions for affiliates without programming skills, and I understand an application called Webmerge does what my app does and more, but I think that costs $99 and my app would be a fraction of that, or maybe even free.

I have done about 98% of the project. Now I'm trying to get an idea if there's a demand or interest in me making that final push to get it completed for resale or to give away. So if you think you might be interested, trundle over to EssEeeO.com and check out the demo and register your interest.

Apologies that the video has come out hopelessly blurred - I tried to make it clearer but that was the best I could do.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools

Users, visitors, whatever you like to call them - they can be a funny bunch.

My site myHotspots lists most of the UK's wifi hotspots. Many of them are located inside branches of McDonalds. Yesterday I got an email from someone, who I assume had Googled their local branch of McDonalds and contacted me, thinking she was contacting them.

From: XXXXXX
Sent: 01 August 2007 17:58
Subject: not happy

i went to mcdonalds on saturday the 28th july with my family for a take out..we took them home which takes 7mins and the food was cold ..i am very unhappy about this as my children were looking forward to there meal

looking forward to a speedy reply

Labels: mcdonalds, users

Data feeds are a popular way of building a website around a merchant's product set. These are typically available as a CSV or XML format download. There's also an abundance of website scripts out there which are ready go with a CSV that you have downloaded from a network or merchant.

Two related issues have arisen for me before. Sometimes these product feeds can be huge files. This causes a problem because you run the risk of quite a performance hit on your web-server if you're expecting to frequently open up and read from a very large text file. The logical step is to open it up and trim it down to just the products related to your site (if appropriate to do that), except this raises another issue because most people's default application for working with CSVs is Microsoft Excel and that has historically had a row limit of about 65,000 rows which means you can't fully open a data feed file with more products than that.

As I mentioned a while back, this has actually been resolved in the latest version of Excel which has some huge new row limit, but if you're like me and still on a previous version, then you might have wondered before how you can best work with these files. The way I do it is to use MS Query.

MS Query is a nice little add on available within Microsoft Office which lets you connect to a CSV, other database file formats, and extract data but crucially you can apply criteria so you only pull out the info you need.

A practical example is that I use HMV's videogame product information on my Toys and Videogames site. There's a whole load of other stuff in that product feed that I don't want - books, DVDs, CDs etc - so I use this method to pull out just the videogame data. Here's how to do it:

1. Open up Excel (I'm using Excel 2003)

2. Click Data -> Import External Data -> New Database Query

3. "New Data Source" should be selected already, so just click OK

4. A box tiled "Create New Data Source" appears. In field 1, Give your Data source some kind of friendly name e.g. Merchant X Product Feed. Then in the drop down box, look for "Microsoft Text Driver (*.txt, *.csv)". Click the Connect button below.

5. A new box should appear titled ODBC Text Setup - untick the check box for Use Current Directory and use the Select Directory button to browse to the directory where your CSV is, and click OK.

6. You will be returned to the "Create New Data Source" window and now the 4th field - a drop down box - is enabled and you select your CSV from a list of available datasources in that directory. Do that and click OK.

7. You have now created your Datasource and you will be back at the first screen. So rather than choose to create a new Datasource (which you did first time round), now select the one you created and click ok.

8. The Query Wizard appears now allows you to select the columns that you want to include in your ouput. Since the aim of the game is to make a nice compact database, try and only include the columns that your website requires - sometimes there's duplication or columns you don't need.

9. Click Next. Now you get to filter out the data that you don't want. Here it comes down to knowing what fields contain what data. But as an example, if you were making a site about Sony products using a feed from a electrical merchant, you might do something like "only include rows where "productname" contains "sony". Click Next, Next, Finish and MS Query will plonk your data right in the workbook for you. Of course, if even after your filtering, you still have more than 65,000 rows, you're back to square one :-)

You can save your query so that this process only takes a few clicks next time, or you assign it to a macro.

So just to recap, the point of doing this is to make it easier to work with product feeds which are too big and help you to reduce the size so that you can increase website performance and make them possible to open in Excel. All that said, I would look at using a dedicated database server rather than a CSV if the product set was anything approaching large.

Labels: csv, excel, ms query