What do I mean by Affiliate Marketing Live? No, it's not a suggestion for another affiliate marketing conference, it's to do with talking to your users, live and in real time.

Increasing numbers of websites offer the facility to speak live to a customer service representative in a chat window on their website. When I was more active with my computer support business, I had a Live Chat option on my website which meant I could try to convert visitors into clients.

When a user came onto the website, I would see from my control panel that they were on there, and I could see their IP address and browser information. Actually seeing the IP was interesting because often it would auto resolve it and tell me the hostname and it was obviously rival companies.

And I didn't need to wait for them to click on the Live Chat button - I had the option to initiate a popup box inviting them to a chat. In the chat, I could fill them in on details of services available, give them URLs, collect their email address, log the chat and generally establish a relationship which might lead to business being done.

So I got to thinking how this could be exploited for affiliate marketing. How useful would it be for you to talk to your users, advise them on the best products and then give them the URL to a recommended product? I think this could be a great to offer a personal shopping service and increase conversions.

What are the drawbacks? Well, it will require a lot of your time so the things you are selling would have to be worth in terms of commission. You don't need to sit there 24/7 though - most of the chat services offer the function whereby if you're logged in, the button on your site says you're available and if you're not, it says you're not available - simple.

It would really work best if it was in subject area in which you had expertise and could genuinely give advice. I'm thinking high end laptops, bikes and TVs would be a good way to go (probably not on the same site though). If you had a lot of traffic, you might soon become overrun, so would this be a better solution for a very niche, low traffic, high product-value site.

One of the live chat solutions is from a company called, well, Live Chat Software. Check out their website, give it a go and speak to their operators and try the 14 day free trial if you think it's something that could benefit your site. I might give the trial a go one one of my sites soon and I'll let you know how that goes.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools, ideas, live chat

I bought my Sony DCR-SR32 a few weeks ago, and hadn't really used it much as I don't have much to review at the moment. What I had seen in my first few goes wasn't impressive but I tried to put that out of my mind as I didn't want to think I'd made a big error. Then I saw Vlad's post and comments where he revealed he had sent back his Sony camcorder from the same range, and I thought I better check mine more extensively.

After doing some more checking, I can confirm that the quality was awful. Natural light make it freak out, and straight edges appear very digitised and terrible to look at. I was actually shocked. I don't know much about cameras but i like the Sony brand and put my trust in them. It had a still camera onboard as well and that was some pathetic VGA quality which wasn't as good as my first camera phone from 3 years ago. The video camera on my normal still camera from Samsung was better than the Sony DCR-SR32.

I thought I was probably lumbered with the junk, but inspired by Vlad sending his back, I checked out Amazon's return procedure and found an option that allowed you to return it within 30 days for the reason "did not meet expectations". So I'm sending it back today but almost can't believe how easy it is to return (as I think that goes well beyond statutory rights), but will wait til the money's back in the bank before buying another.

Seeing the SR32 has made me evaluate what I want from a camcorder, and I'm now going to try something completely different like the Canon HV20 which has stunning results.

Whilst on the subject of Amazon, got to say a big thanks to the person that bought 40 USB Memory sticks (although he of course won't see it!) from my Amazon link the other day and pushed me up into the next performance tier with just a couple of days to go til month end. I love the randomness of people's purchasing!

Labels: amazon, camcorder, Sony DCR-SR32

I always think site building isn't too difficult. Link building, on the other hand, is a real pain. Here's the things I do to get get incoming links:

Submit To Directories
To be honest, I only really bother with a couple of directories - usually DMOZ and Splut. DMOZ gets a lot of stick - rightly so - but I always considered worth the time of submission just in case I can get a site listed and I had mixed success.

Enter into Wikipedia
I don't enter a site into Wikipedia for any SEO benefit, as I understand their links have the "nofollow" attribute, but if I have a page which genuinely is useful in the context of an existing Wiki page, I'll add it on and it's one way to get traffic. Some of that traffic might be webmasters looking for link partners too so its beneficial if you don't abuse it.

Check out the competition
I google for competitor sites URLs and find out which pages are linking to them. There's a reasonable chance the same site might link to you.

Search for related links pages
I think of the main keywords relating to my site and start searching the engines for keyword +links.htm to find links pages which are relevant. Also try links.php, links.aspx, links.asp etc.

Cross Linking
I have plenty of sites and I nearly always find space to cross link a couple of my other sites from each. Some people say you can get penalised for this. I never have, but I do it in moderation.

Buy Text Links
I have done this a bit. To be honest, I didn't see much benefit - none in terms of traffic and nothing noticeable in terms of SEO, but I may have just picked some bad sites to place my ads as I understand this is a popular route. It's something I should do more of, if I wasn't so tight fisted.

Ask In Writing
Ok, I haven't done this yet but I've seen it mentioned and I plan to give it a go very soon. The idea being that webmasters get tonnes of email, including lots of junk and many automated link swap emails which I can't be bothered with. But if you were to actually print out a hard copy letter and send it to the company address, it might get more attention than just another email.

Part of the problem when link building is that I don't mind admitting (but only to you, dear reader) that some of my sites are just affiliate sites. Even as I the creator understand they don't all actually add much value to the web so it's not easy to ask for inbound links. On the other hand, I recently made a website about Mayfair in London, and I really got stuck in with plenty of research and photos and I was much more confident about approaching webmasters and asking for links. So I guess the point is, the better the site, the easier it is to get links - ergo, make better sites, right?

Talking of asking for links reminds me of an email I received recently asking for a link from one of my sites. The site they wanted me to link to was nice enough but I didn't get round to replying. Then they sent another request a few weeks later asking me if I might think again. Once you've ignored someone once its even easier the second time so I blanked that too. Then the other day I got a third email asking me to select from a range of DVDs as a free gift and it would be sendtthe next day if I put a link up. I think I'll hold out for a fourth email and see what's next on offer!

So those are my link building "strategies" although I don't want to make it sound any cleverer than it is - that's all common sense really. If any readers have any tips, please feel free to post them in the comments. And don't forget I have plenty of websites (see the list at www.uretopia.com) to feel free to check them out and see if any could be suitable link partners for your sites.

Labels: link building

I've written a couple of posts before about large product feeds and how to deal with them, most recently with a quick run through on how to use MS Query to extract only the info you want from a large product feed.

What I didn't realise is that Buy.at already offer in-built functionality to only download part of a product feed by editing the download URL.

So for instance, I wanted to download the HMV feed and only get the videogame information. Previously I had downloaded the whole thing and run an Excel macro to get what I wanted. But what I can do instead is grab the download link from within Buy.at (rather than click on it download, right click and copy URL) and then edit it to include "&LEVEL1=GAMES". Then when I access that link, it only returns the results from the product feed which match my criteria.

I found about this on a thread on Affiliates4u, and having read it, I'm not at all sure it works for all merchants, or if it does work for all merchants but you might to need to open it up first to find out what field you need, but it works fine for my purpose - getting games from the HMV feed. So, thanks Buy.at, that's a cool feature!

Now, I can't publish this unremittingly positive post without adding in a small hint of a moan. I looked in the Buy.at help pages under product feeds and saw no mention of this functionality. As I mentioned, I only found out about it when I saw it on the Affiliates4u forum. From what I can see, some merchant feeds might require you to use a category name and some might need a category ID. If you have a good feature, don't hide your light under a bushel - let every one know and document it nicely in your help pages. Obviously some people did know about it since it was discussed on the forum, but I've been faffing around for ages and could have saved time if I had known earlier.

And in other news...

John Lamerton's excellent post on comparing affiliate marketing to eating an elephant has been well publicised in the affiliate blogosphere. But it kind of got me thinking, what's it actually like to eat an elephant. I found this useful recipe - Elephant Soup from the Congo Cookbook

Labels: affiliate network, product feeds

So I was in the bath contemplating how I should best exploit video content in affiliate marketing. I've done a bit of video content now and recently bought a new camcorder to try and spur me on to increased output and better quality. I haven't actually done any video reviews since I got the camera as I need to do a fresh round of emails to companies to ask for evaluation products. One merchant did contact me direct with some software to review, which is on my to do list.

Previously, like with my review of the Kodak Wireless Digital Photo Frame, I created the video, stuck it up on Youtube and then embedded it into a couple of relevant blogs. The video was branded with a URL but I kept the content purely as a showcase of the functionality and didn't mention anything about where you could buy it - that came below the embedded video in a text link.

Then I noticed later on that someone else put the video in their blog and it was becoming content that they were monetising in their own way. I was pretty relaxed about that as they linked to my site too and I was I guess flattered that someone liked the video enough to post it on their site.

But I guess this raises the issue which has no doubt been raised before: what's to stop other affiliates using your video content and then promoting their own affiliate links? As far as I can see, if you're hosting your vids with Youtube and choose to allow embedding, anyone can make use of your content to drive their own sales.

But should you even care? If the video is nicely branded, the more eyeballs you get will result in you getting more kudos and credit and people may well remember you and come back to you in future even if on that occasion someone else got the click through.

Is there a solution? Well, there already be solutions that I don't know about but I saw something cool the other day which may show the way forward. Vzaar is a new video hosting service designed to be embedded into eBay auctions. Actually it's slightly gutting because my friend had exactly the same idea and was starting work on it, but you have to say these people have done a great job. And programmatically included into each video is a Bid Now link with pricing info from eBay.

What would be great is if YouTube allowed you to associate a URL with a video and then it became clickable throughout or at then of the video, or if there was an alternative video hosting service designed for affiliates, like Vzaar is for auction sellers, which had a Buy Now button embedded in it.

Ok, the more I think of it, a dedicated affiliate-leaning video hosting service is a great idea and if I had the skills I'd think about it doing it myself. How cool would it be if an affiliate network led the way and created one? That would be real innovation and interest me more than the widgets and content units we've seen lately.

Labels: affiliate marketing, video

I saw some stats in my Amazon sales figures which made me realise something I hadn't noticed before: if you're selling games consoles, Amazon destroys the competition.

Let's begin by looking at what other well known console retailers offer to affiliates:

GAME - 3% on hardware
Gamestation - 2% on consoles
HMV - 2% on consoles

Now I had an XBox 360 sale come through yesterday on Amazon. I'm currently on the Performance tiered scheme, and up to a default commission of 6%. On top of that, for sales that come from a direct link click through, you get an additional 2.5% premium. So my commission for the XBox 360 was a whopping 8.5% (which worked at about £18).

So unless I'm missing something very obvious, 8.5% blows 2% and 3% out of the water. If you're promoting games consoles and not going through Amazon, you're potentially missing out.

In fact, under Amazon's Performance Fee sliding scale, if you were selling 1600+ products a month, your default commission would be 7.5%, which would take you up to 10% for qualifying direct link clicks that generate the 2.5% premium.

With figures like that, is there any reason you would promote games consoles through anyone else?

Labels: affiliate marketing, amazon, games consoles

Let me preface this post by saying that I'm probably not qualified to even write it. I'm not an industry expert, nor a "thought leader", and yet there's been a thought turning it over in my head for a while and I thought I'd write it out and try to make sense of it.

Every year, figures come out showing us that loads more people are online and using the web for their shopping. I imagine there can only be a few years of this frenetic growth before the figures plateau and the numbers of new online purchases decreases, and buying online becomes even more widespread, accepted and normal than it already is now.

So as e-commerce matures, I'd expect shoppers to become increasingly net savvy and demanding. Obviously lots of people already use price comparison sites, especially for financial products, but in the future, will shoppers buy anything without first wanting to undertake a price comparison? Will price comparison become a standard part of buying online? The web has the power to ensure customers always get the best price and I think that will be essential.

Now, running a large scale price comparison operation is surely a difficult job. Books have unique identifiers (ISBN etc) which mean you can easily price check various merchants, but in other retail sectors, I don't think anything like that exists and product titles can sometimes vary slightly which means there's a fair amount of work, maybe with manual data input, involved in properly comparing products. Also, for a large scale price comparison site, that's potentially a huge amount of data which needs to be stored and accessed efficiently. This requires significant resources.

It occurs to me that running a price comparison operation of the type required by shoppers in the future will be beyond small time affiliates.

Presently, there are merchants, and affiliates, and the affiliate networks are the glue in the middle which help make it all happen. They meet the requirement as it now between publishers and vendors. But in the future, when shoppers demand price comparison and affiliates need to be able to offer it, it seems to me that a different service will be required from the "glue in the middle" in order to justify their role.

If affiliates all need to be able to offer price comparison, then they might as well all sign up as affiliates of price comparison sites, and they could effectively take on the role of the affiliate network. So basically I think there will be a time when affiliate networks need to offer what is now being offers by large price comparison outfits, or large price comparison outfits will become the new affiliate networks.

A similar argument can be made for cash back sites. They are another "killer app" for consumers which eventually might become an essential part of the online shopping experience. Small time affiliates would find it hard to compete with the logistics of a large cash back operations so it might be a case of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

In the future, becoming an affiliate of a large cashback site with full price comparison tools would probably satisfy the requirements of many small affiliates. This would allow small time affiliates to concentrate on what they can do best - creating useful new web content - and let the middle man - connecting publisher with merchant - to take care of creating and maintaining the tools which affiliates (and their users) demand.

Labels: affiliate marketing

When an affiliate sale goes through, there's one thing that I'd always like to know: what was the referring page that caused that sale.

With that simple piece of knowledge about the referring URL, I would be able to see what pages work, what ones don't, and make more of the pages that do. I could give more prominence to well converting pages and make sure more traffic goes there.

But why is it that most affiliate networks, as far as I can tell, don't tell you this? Why don't Amazon share this info with their Associates?

It's possible to see the referring URLs of your clicks in Buy.at's interface, but I can't then also see which of those clicks is linked to a sale.

Most networks do offer some form of link tracking which lets you add in an identifier so you can track the source of your sales. And if you want to get quite clever about it, you can dynamically generate those Link IDs on your site which enables you to fully track your users and see what they're up to. But I'd consider than quite an advanced method, and simply knowing the referring URL of a sale would be useful for newbies and experienced marketers alike.

So what possible reason could there be for networks not sharing this information with affiliates, or for not collecting it if they don't already.

But maybe I've been missing something obvious and some networks do tell you that. If you use a network which tells you the referring URL which led to your sales, please let me know in the comments section.

Labels: affiliate network

BT Openzone have an attractive sounding affiliate scheme whereby you can earn 10% commission from the sale of air time vouchers for their wifi hotspots.

I've mentioned before how this has appeared to be a ghost programme, which few other affiliates promote and there's little or no information coming from BT about it.

In a previous post, I described how I called their support desk and the staff hadn't even heard of it and wanted to know from me the URL on their website that had information on it.

More emails to them with account queries have gone ignored or bounced back.

And most annoying and also most importantly, payment is still outstanding. A few months ago, I took down their links and decided to just send them a paper invoice but that didn't receive a reply also. The amount outstanding is only about £150 which I would have liked to receive but ultimately it's not worth the time to stress too much over so I'll end up having to write if off I guess.

But to sum up the BT Openzone E-Voucher reseller programme:

• Emails ignored or bounced back
• Staff on the only phone number listed haven't heard of it
• No payments

If ever there was an affiliate scheme to avoid, this is it.

The fact of the matter is, commercial hotspot access is too expensive anyway in the UK and with mobile internet over 3g being better priced and more convenient, the commercial hotspot business model doesn't look like it has much longevity anyway.

Labels: bt openzone, mobile internet

I often think of my approach to site building as being like kite flying. I throw up plenty up in the air and if any start flying, then they get my attention and I then dedicate more time to them. Others fall by the way side and never progress further than the time it took to create them in the first place.

One site which has recently started flying is a site called Toys and Video Games, which I mentioned back in April when I developed it and made use of Amazon's Web Services. It was designed to hook up with the toy inventory of Amazon in the US.

After that initial development phase, which did take a couple of days whilst I got my head round Amazons Web Services and how I was going to make use of it, I've done hardly any work on the site at all except for add in a Transformers toy page and put a link to back packs on the front page for the Back To School period.

But despite it being left to its own devices (which thanks to the live product info through Amazon's Web Services is quite a reasonable thing to do), it has started to generate some very decent sales. Individual toys - and quite popular ones at that - have somehow ranked well within Google and Yahoo! and I've occasionally been knocked sideways after logging into Amazon Associates and seeing how many items a particular toy has sold in the previous day.

Whilst doing online marketing, the prospect of having a .com site, hosted in the US, promoting US products to US customers has always appealed to me (because of the size of the market) and I'm pleased that that's what I've got. So the site has shown me its potential so I hope to develop more actual content for the site before Christmas.

Labels: amazon, progress, update

I'm a total stats junkie and I like to be able to keep an eye on my stats wherever I am. If I'm out and about, I want to know how much commission I'm earning because it might well influence my spending decisions. If I'm buying lunch in Tesco, a good day's figures might mean me heading for the Finest range. No sales means I'm looking at the Value options. By the way, have you noticed that you can get nearly everything as Finest now, including broadband! And the other stores have their own equivalents. I knew things were getting out of hand when even the bleach in Sainsburys was "Taste The Difference".

Anyway, back to the post... I've been logging into Buy.at from my mobile phone for a while. It works OK but the whole logging in thing is always a hassle using the small buttons on a phone.

I was aware for sometime that Buy.at offer Web Services to access your statistics but hadn't got around to looking at them. A few days ago I decided I wanted a simple text only page I could quickly access from my phone handset to find out where my commission was at any given point. So I set aside an afternoon, got a tea on the go and readied myself for a few hours development.

Except I didn't need to. I clicked on the Web Services tab and all the work was already done for me - a selection of pre-formed links with my username and password embedded that return the stats in a variety of formats to suit whatever you want them for e.g. XML, CSV or plain text. So I grabbed the link for plain text results, added it to my phone's bookmarks and now have one touch access to my stats wherever I am. My planned afternoon of development was done in 5 minutes. Thanks Buy.at - very nice feature.

Labels: buy.at, web services

I gave the blog a rest this week. I had a little bit of a light bulb moment the other day when it suddenly dawned on me that I was spending far too much time reading affiliate blogs and forums. Don't get me wrong, there's tonnes of useful info out there and it pays to keep abreast of it, but then you have to stop being so introspective and crack on and do the actual work. So I think I need to ration how much time I spend reading, and increase the time I spend doing. Its pretty to get lost in the blogosphere for hours at a time.

And despite my point about being too introspective, I'm now going to completely ignore that and do a very introspective post - a nice easy one for a Sunday morning where I take a quick look over August traffic for this website and see what brought people here.

Top referrer by a country mile was Stumbleupon after someone reviewed a post I did about Facebook. Second best referrer was Affiliates4u. The blog feeds feature has become a great source of traffic and quickly overtook Bumpzee as best referring affiliate blog aggregator.

Some of the keywords used in search engines include:

• facebook hide friends
• using datafeed to build a website
• anthony borelli sucks (everyone's a critic, eh)
• what is ms query
• pound blog (wow, I hope that wasn't Google giving me a valuation!)
• reputation of dabs4work (I'm saying nothing)
• how much did peter jones get paid by itv to produce business tv ("too much" springs to mind)

And just time for a quick mention of Google Alerts,

I think I may have been the last person in the world to find out about Google Alerts. John mentioned it on his blog, and how Rachel Elnaugh of Dragons' Den fame had responded to him after he mentioned her name and she saw it in a Google Alert. Oops, does that mean she'll see this too (Hi Rachel, if you do). Since I read about it, I've signed up and found it so of useful for pulling in stories and links, which help me create content on niche blogs. So just in case I wasn't the last person in the world to find out about them, check them out.

Labels: traffic