Well, the answer to the question in the title is that I don't really know and "thought leadership" isn't really my bag so I won't try to answer it. But I read this interesting blog post recently and I haven't seen this blog on any of the usual blog aggregators, so thought it was worth flagging it up.

It looks at some of the challenges facing networks and wonders how they can stop themselves being sidelined by direct deals between the merchants and the 20% of affiliates who provide 80% of the traffic. As far as I can tell, the blogger isn't directly involved in affiliate marketing, but is a venture capitalist interested in opportunities within the sector so his perspective is worth a read...

The affiliate network is dead: long live performance marketing

Labels: affiliate marketing, blogs

This is the first in an occasional series where I mention merchants that I really like. Not a sponsored post or incentivised in anyway - just me using my blog to praise merchants I'm happy with.

I started a Personalised Gifts website a little while ago. It's early days and still a low volume site but it's been ticking over, getting traffic through organic search. The primary merchant I have been linking to is GettingPersonal.co.uk

Getting Personal has a really cool selection of personalised gifts like christmas baubles, door mats with messages as well as exclusive licenced stuff such as Apprentice Mugs and X Factor Calendars.

The commission levels are very healthy too, starting at 8% as default commission, rising to 17.5% at the upper tier (over £500 of sales) on selected high commission products. Where as some merchants seem to take an age to validate sales, Getting Personal are ultra quick. In fact, more often than not, sales have been validated before I've even logged which is particularly impressive bearing in mind how often I log on. So far this month, I have seen a conversion rate of just under 9% and an epc of 33p.

All in all, very impressed with them which makes me want to put the effort in and try and get more traffic over their way.

Getting Personal are available on Affiliate Window.

Labels: affiliate marketing, merchants i like, personalised gifts

One of the things that has become apparent to me from my portfolio of sites is that the amount of effort put into a site often bears little or no relation to the results it might produce. There isn't any parity between input and output.

For instance, I have sites which I have spent a pain staking amount of time on, developing original content, making graphics, writing copy etc and they might produce a regular trickle of sales but low basket sizes and tight commission means that the money earned can be small change, although welcome.

Contrast that with a niche holiday site I created last month. It literally took no more than two hours to make. In fact I used that little application called EssEeeO which I developed and mentioned before to create a number of SEO friendly pages. I uploaded it, let it get indexed and literally haven't touched it since. £66 worth of sales in the first month. £184 so far this month. That's the kind of income, which will hopefully be regular income, from two hours work which makes me smile.

It's stating the obvious I know, but whilst working hard is good... working smarter always wins.

Labels: affiliate marketing

Do you think an affiliate network's job is strictly as a facilitator, connecting merchants with products to promote, with affiliates that have sites or mechanisms that allow them to promote said products?

Or do you think that affiliate networks should actually be helping affiliates to earn more. Of course it could be said they do already help affiliates. All of their innovations and widgets etc are there to help the affiliate earn more I guess, but I like to think how they could go even further and what maybe I would do if I woke up tomorrow and found myself in charge of an affiliate network.

One of the things that an affiliate network could do is to link to its affiliates sites. Affiliate Network homepages often have a decent Google Pagerank and could be considered authority domains. Affiliates often have new sites which need the helping hand of incoming links. So how about affiliate networks giving their affiliates a little boost with a plain text link.

Now, how would this work. There's loads of affiliates, and many of them, like me, have loads of websites. They surely wouldn't all deserve a link but how about if you could nominate one quality site which you wanted to receive some link love, after being approved by a moderator from the network. Even then, there might be hundreds of links and a page with that many outbound links might not be helpful anyway, so a page on the network site could perhaps just show a randomised selection of 50 sites from their database of affiliate nominated sites. Another option would be to break them down into categories and create a directory.

Most affiliate networks, I think, tell you which merchants they work with. Why not be open and proud about the good quality affiliate content based sites they have on their books.

One consideration from the network's point of view would be, why should it link to your affiliate site when you might be promoting merchants on other networks at the same time or instead of the original links and I think that would be a fair point to make. I'm not even sure if there's an answer to that, except maybe you would qualify for the incoming link (and possibly other perks, such as better commissions) by committing that site to work exclusively with the merchants of that network?

Or is this idea fatally flawed? Let me know if you think this could never work in practice.

Another idea I had, which I can't remember if I mentioned before, would be for affiliate networks to operate private noticeboards within their control panels where affiliates could post up messages finding in context links from other affiliates. Affiliates understand what other affiliates need in terms of links and if you help them in their linking strategies, that could be good for all.

What do you think - is there anything you've thought of that an affiliate network could do, beyond what it already does, to actually help you make a success of your affiliate business?

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate network, ideas

When I logged into my stats this morning I was pleased to see that I had a sub affiliate signup to HypnosisDownloads.com affiliate program through my link. These occurances are few and far between for me so I'm happy to highlight it.

Someone actually signed up through it a while back but never became active on the program. So this time I want to try and help and have emailed the guy offering to help them in anyway I can to promote the program, whether it be through linking to them, any technical help I can offer or any SEO advice I can come up with.

And of course I'm happy to extend that offer to anyone that wants to sign up. For anyone unaware, Hypnosis Downloads are speech based MP3s that can be downloaded on all kinds of subjects. Because there's no physical product to wait for, you can create a compelling argument that web visitor can buy and now and be listening to it in minutes. The downloads come with a money back guarantee so there's no risk - if your user doesn't like it, they lose nothing.

What kind of site can I promote Hypnosis Mp3s on!?!

The hypnosis downloads are on all kinds of subjects and can be elbowed into more sites than you might think. Got a dating site? Promote the confidence and dating MP3s. Got a sports site? There's plenty to choose from to give listeners a winning mindset . Got a holiday site? How about adding in a "fear of flying" hypnosis download.

Find out more about the program from when I interviewed the affiliate manager, Roger Elliot.

Visit HypnosisDownloads.com and sign up, and then email me and I'll be happy to help anyway I can.

Labels: affiliate marketing, hypnosis downloads

Toys are of course a big priority at Christmas and I'm spending quite a bit of time on my UK toys site at the moment. It's basically built around the Toys 'R' Us product feed, which is generally quite good although one of my visitors wasn't very impressed to see "For Mum Washable Breast Pads" categorised under 'Gifts, Gadgets & Toys". The downside to using Toys 'R' Us is their very restrictive PPC policy and quite a miserly standard commission of 3% though, so I've tried to build in an Amazon price comparison alongside the Toys 'R' Us, as another merchant option. Amazon of course pays up to 10% if you can generate enough volume.

I noticed earlier on that The Entertainer, formerly on Webgains, has relaunched its online presence under the domain "www.thetoyshop.com" and the affiliate program is available on Affiliate Window, with an excellent introductory commission rate of 10%. This really means that Awin pwn the Toy sector in affiliate marketing when you consider their other merchants such as:

• Toys 'R' Us
• Hamleys
• Early Leaning Centre
• Woolworths
• John Lewis

And then they have plenty of boy's toys/gadget type sites like Firebox, DrinkStuff, IWoot etc. With the Christmas gift season approaching, that's a very impressive portfolio of merchants.

Talking of toys, I happened to come across Toys 'n' Playthings - "The UK toy trade's no.1 magazine". I must admit, the idea of looking at trade publications is something I had completely overlooked but this is really useful for getting insights into what products will be hot for many months to come and right into next year. Do you read trade magazines for the sectors you operate in? Do you find them useful and can you recommend any?

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate window, toys

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

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

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 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

I ordered an SD memory card from Amazon the other day, and the price was a very cheap £5.00. Great, I thought, so I ordered it but was suprised to see that the postage was another £5.00. Seemed excessive I thought, but at least it will come quickly and probably be sent by recorded post.

But no, that's not what happened.

The item took about a week to come and was simply in a plastic envelope with a first class stamp. They must have had made as much, or more, profit through their "postage" costs as they did through the price of the item itself. Of course, this kind of practice isn't new. You commonly see it on eBay where the fixed price of items can be artificially low but with the money recouped through high postage.

But what's the impact of this?

For Amazon, I think it diminishes their reputation. The fact that it's from a 3rd party is a subtlety which will be lost on many users and I expect them to believe they are simply getting it from Amazon, and that Amazon are using this strategy of artificially low prices. That's not good for Amazon.

For Amazon Associates (on the Performance model, which includes 3rd party sales), it's a raw deal because the commission earned is on the price of the item not for the shipping costs. So if the seller has artificially low prices, the affiliate is missing out on the commission from where the profit is really made - on the postage.

Basically, it sucks.

Labels: affiliate marketing, amazon

I find that sometimes when blogging, the easiest thing to come up with for a post is a moan or a rant so I thought I'd come over all Pollyanna and try to be positive for a change and make a list of the things I like most about the affiliate networks I've signed up to.

TradeDoubler (sign up)

Detailed reports
Tradedoubler offers some cool reporting and allows me to quickly see from what site a sale has come, the time of the click and the time of the event/sale, and very often details of the actual purchase made i.e what products have been bought.

Easy to use "pools"
It's very easy with TradeDoubler to create a rotating advert pool. Once the pool has been defined, you can easily add new banners into it and adjust the weighting to determine frequency of impressions.

Affiliate Window (sign up)

Notifier Application
I love the little ker-ching when a sale comes through. I wish I heard it more often though, and it would be nice if it told me the merchant that was involved in the sale rather than just giving the figures.

Emails with affiliate links in
Others have already pointed out the usefulness of it - emails on behalf of AW merchants that contain details of current promotions and best sellers, with the affiliate link already built in so you can quickly copy and paste them.

Paid On Results (sign up)

Deep Link Generator
I love this. You add a javascript button to your favourites, then browse the merchant site - when you find a page you want to link to, just select the Deep Link Generator from your favourites and it will come up with a link for the page you were on. Magic.

Content Units
I've not really used these yet but I've seen the demos and POR's next generation content units look great.

Buy.at (sign up)
Hmm... I like Buy.at but am struggling to think of one outstanding feature but I'm sure there is one! I like the graphs in the new interface and the way you can quickly see how you're doing this month compared to last month. I guess I like the way if you contact support, you do get a confirmation email which contains a unique reference identifier in the message subject. I guess they're using some ticket system to manage them, which at least lets you know they've received the email.

Regnow (sign up)

Custom Coupons
I mentioned before how cool it is that I can create vouchers for specific products or for a merchant as a whole and determine how much they are worth by adjusting the value, which is taken out of my commission. With software sales, commissions are usually decent percentages which gives you quite a bit to play around with.

Emails when I get a sale
Like the Affiliate Window notifier, I want to know when a sale comes through. With Regnow, I get an email. It helps me keep track of how it's performing without me needing to log in frequently.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate network

I've mentioned this before - last year sometime - but thought it was worth revisiting.

BT Openzone operate internet hotspots at public places and venues around the country. They run an inhouse affiliate program that lets you link to their air time e-vouchers and earn 10% from each sale.

The terms and conditions make plain that payment will be direct into your bank account, once the minimum of £50 has been reached.

I've been linking to BT Openzone from my Wifi Hotspot Directory for sometime, and seen a steady stream of sales over that time. So far so good, right? The problem is, I've never been paid. I called the support number on the website and the staff had never heard of it, and I had to spell a long URL over the phone to direct them to a page on their own website to show them what it was. Emails to the support address either bounce back or are ignored. A question on the A4u forum last year got no replies. It seems I'm in some parallel dimension where I'm the only person that's promoting this thing and the only person that's heard of it.

I keep the links up because they seem to convert well, and are about the best fitting merchant for my site. And also I, perhaps naively, place some faith in the BT brand and believe that ultimately this will get sorted.

So, this is an appeal for information. Does anyone know anything about the BT Openzone program? Have you seen other webmasters promoting them? Have you seen any BT Openzone staff acting suspiciously? Keep 'em peeled.

The other point to be made is that this is basically a good performing program but this division of BT does not seem to have the skills or resources to properly run it, so affiliate networks should be pitching for the business.

Labels: affiliate marketing, bt openzone

So, I had a rant on Friday after I downloaded an updated product feed and its column headers had been changed, which broke my site - just as I was about to go out.

I got my site all fixed up now and it didn't take long. I'm not an affiliate that begrudges doing work to keep things ticking over. I see this as a job, and in any job, "stuff" happens and you have to do work in order to maintain a steady ship. I have no complaints about that.

But I do have a complaint about people acting in a stupid way which needlessly causes issues when a little bit of thought and planning could have avoided any problems. I can only think that the merchant involved doesn't actually understand how a product feed is typically used, and therefore doesn't understand the impact of making changes willy nilly to column headers.

If you use a product feed as a datasource, then the column headers are your fieldnames. And if they change, your code doesn't work. Understanding the impact of system changes and communicating them effectively in advance to interested parties should be essential to anyone running an affiliate program.

I don't want to labour a point, but it puts me in mind of that famous quote from Geoffrey Howe: "It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain"

Labels: affiliate marketing

Last month I wrote about the success I was having with a PPC campaign. The return on investment was healthy and everything seemed great - I was at last tasting PPC success.

And then something changed.

All of a sudden, I was just was not seeing the conversions anymore. I noticed that the merchant had made substantial changes to their site. I contacted the affiliate manager and the account manager at the network to see if other affiliates were experiencing any drop in conversions. The account manager at the network didn't reply (don't you love that?). The affiliate manager at the merchant was more responsive and said he was about to engage in some split testing to see which pages worked best.

His results are in and it turns out the new pages perform "well" and in fact, marginally better than the old style.

Which leaves me at a loss to work out why things have taken a nosedive for me. Consider this:

May 1 - May 10
216 click throughs (to the merchant site from mine), 1 sale

April 21 - April 30
177 click throughs, 4 sales

April 11 - April 20
198 click throughs, 4 sales

Now maybe these samples aren't big enough to draw any firm conclusions from. Maybe I need to hold my nerve and hope things come good. But I've gone from a healthy profit last month to only recouping 50% of my ad spend so far this month. Ordinarily I'd say, ok wait and see, a few more sales would change it all back round, but looking at the past 10 days in the context of the previous 20 to that, makes me nervous about how this is going.

So... what do you think, dear reader? Hang tight and see what happens? Call it a day? Switch to another merchant and see how they fare (although this one has a great CPA at the moment which I'd hate missing out on...).

Labels: adwords, affiliate marketing, ppc

Sometimes emails come through or announcements are made from merchants or networks that really make me raise an eyebrow and wonder if this is really how professionals should be acting.

A few weeks ago, mobile phone network 3 seemingly extracted email addresses of their affiliates through Buy.at, and advised them directly that they will shortly be leaving Buy.at and give info on how to sign up to them directly.

I don't have any issue with them starting an independent program or leaving Buy.at if that's what their contract allows, but to hear this directly from 3 and not via Buy.at seemed questionable to say the least. Should 3 really be emailing Buy.at affiliates and asking them to join their in-house scheme? As it happens, Buy.at still haven't confirmed 3 are leaving and are actively promoting new 3 deals, so I'd assume they may be trying to persuade them to stay but they may already have lost affiliates to the in-house scheme.

More recently, it's been announced on Affiliate Window that Heal's - one of my favourite shops, by the way - has "exclusively" launched on their platform.

That puzzled me because I'm already an affiliate of Heal's on TradeDoubler, and I've had no communication to say that this program is ending. Awin even ask TD affiliates to email them directly for info on changing TD links to Awin ones. Until I hear otherwise from TradeDoubler (unless I've missed an email announcing it?), I consider the Heal's to be a live program and find it odd that another network is calling it an Exclusive and offering to help me change links.

Not massive issues really but small things that make me question the level of professionalism - especially in communications with affiliates - in affiliate marketing.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate network

A very nice start to April thanks to some unexpected good luck.

I was promoting some products on an independent affiliate program a while ago, but things didn't really take off so I took the site down and forgot all about it. I was also promoting it from one other site and so as far as I know that one active text link remained to the merchant site with my referral id in it and I thought no more of it.

I've not had a sale on this program for a long time, and when I was getting sales on it, they were were and far between. And then, as if by magic, I get notified by email of 6 sales in the last couple of days.

I logged into the control panel for the program and checked out the referral stats - somehow my affiliate URL has ranked in 2nd place on Yahoo!, just below the merchant itself, for the main key phrase relevant to the products being sold.

It was a complete shock to me, so I can't take any credit for it and who knows how long it will last for, but it's a very nice way to start the month.

I'll probably throw up some more links to it and try to prop it up where it is.

Labels: affiliate marketing, independent, web promotion

Adsense in March can be summed up in three words. Best. Month. Ever. Not by a huge amount, but definitely a new high.

So that's great and I am happy, except well over half was from one site and I really want to see my Adsense earnings diversify further because I hate to be reliant on one site.

Affiliate sales were healthy across all networks, and probably also close to being best I've had.

Amazon Associate performance was sluggish in March, with a slight fillip towards the end when someone bought 11 copies of the same book - I can only imagine it was a teacher or professor.

Another welcome boost this month was that some direct advertisers I have on a site decided to renew and in fact lengthen their advertising with my site, which is a little vote of confidence in the site concerned.

So, really an excellent month on all fronts and with the recent decision to work from home which saw my outgoings plummet, things are really motoring.

Will April bring me down to earth with a bump? Or see even greater success?
I'm looking forward to finding out!

Labels: adsense, affiliate marketing, earnings

Experienced affiliate marketers can probably skip this one. This is my basic guide to using product feeds which aimed at entry level affiliates who want to know about the tools available to them.

What Are Product Feeds?

Product feeds, or data feeds, are a great tool for affiliate marketers building websites and wanting to incorporate product information into them.

Many merchants will export their product information into a text based format such as CSV or XML. These are called product feeds or data feeds and are usually available through your affiliate network.

What's In A Product Feed?

These files will usually contain at least the following pieces of information:

• Product Code/ID
• Product Name
• Product Description
• Price
• Image URL
• Affiliate URL

With this information, you can quickly build large sites full of great product data.
Excel is commonly used to open and view CSV files. Excel could traditionally only handle files with 64,000 rows, but the latest version can handle about a million rows, which means you can even work with large product feeds like the one from Play.com which is about 250,000 rows in size.

What Can I Do with A Product Feed?

You can use the data feed file as a data source itself and have your web pages read directly from it, or import it into a database server like MS SQL or mySQL. I have recently started to just use CSVs as data-sources if they are not too big, and only bother importing them into a database server if they are large or will be getting a lot of hits.

I define "large" for this purpose as being about 1000 rows. Anything more than that and you may possibly be putting a performance hit on the server as it reads the text file every-time your web page is requested. If it's for a site I don't expect to get high traffic, I may be more relaxed about using slightly larger CSV files.

As well as creating dynamic pages, you could also use an off-line application to generate static web pages based on the information in a product feed. I started work on an application like that, but have yet got round to finishing it as there are probably better solutions out there.

How Often Do Product Feeds Get Updated?

This varies between merchants and you're best of checking with them. Popular mobile phone merchants may refresh their data feeds many times a day. Other types of merchant may not need to update a file for months. If you are having to update a product feed frequently, you can look at automating the process in a batch file by getting a direct download link from the affiliate network and using a tool like wget

Why use Product Feeds?

Product feeds enable you to quickly build large sites full of product information. This is great for white label style sites or price comparison, or generally just adding affiliate content to your site.

Anything to be careful of when using product feeds?

If all affiliates are using the same product feeds, then there's a risk of too many people duplicating the same content and being penalised by search engines. Be creative in choosing what information to use and balance it with text of your own or even consider functions to replace certain words with alternatives to create web content that is unique - for instance, replacing "great" with "excellent".

Conclusion: Product feeds represent a convenient and accessible way for affiliates to incorporate useful merchant information into their own websites.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools, beginners, product feeds

Some people have predicted the death of Linkshare, CJ and others thanks to Google's recent announcement.

Well, I have a plan for their survival.

Promote new affiliate and merchant sign-ups using Google's CPA platform.

It was obvious really.

Labels: affiliate marketing, ideas

The affiliate blogosphere is still buzzing with the news that Google is going to open its beta cost-per-action platform to content publishers and Adwords advertisers.

It seems to me that that Adsense has an awfully big reach and there's a lot of small time website owners out there who will be happy to add these CPA ads to their websites and will effectively be entering the affiliate marketing tent - albeit at the blunt end of how we understand affiliate marketing at the moment, and lacking the nuanced, relationship based approach that many are used to.

Publishers will be able to select relevant products and services from a base of Adwords advertisers and put related adverts on their site. We don't know yet which form the adverts will take, but looking at Adsense Referrals, they started with banners and moved onto text ads (albeit still Javascript generated) to meet publisher demands.

Assuming it's a success - and I'll assume for now it will be - and more people will be taking notice of the pay per performance model, what will follow?

Sure, I don't see this in anyway killing off (all of) the current affiliate networks - although maybe it will cause some consolidation. It will lack the human networking factor that allows new partnerships to develop and flourish. It will be lacking, to begin with I'm sure, the more advanced tools like data feeds (unless they go the whole hog and bring out web services and an API). Super affiliates, and those aiming to be so, and technically advanced affiliates will surely demand more than Google is likely to be offering and I imagine that's where the affiliate networks should position themselves.

But if enough publishers and advertisers take up with Google's offering, maybe the centre of gravity in the CPA space will shift in that direction and the alternative networks should be looking at sharpening their technical lead to make sure they have a sufficiently advanced offering to keep the interest of publishers. This might be the kick up the backside they need to offer better tools to publishers and the clever ones may even benefit from gaining new publishers who have had their appetite whetted by what Google has offered, and now want to take it to the next level.

Whatever happens, it's sure to be an interesting. As I alluded to yesterday, my best success online has been with Adsense Referrals and I'll certainly be excited to see the platform expand to include more products and services.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate network, google

Marks and Spencer - one of the UK's top retailers - has today sent emails to its affiliates through CJ and Buy.at informing them that they are closing their affiliate programs as of 23rd March. Well, to be more precise, they won't be working with CJ anymore after "taking on board your [affiliates] feedback", and Buy.at are billing it as a "temporary suspension", to be resumed later. Whether that's wishful thinking on Buy.at's part or not, I dont know.

The reason behind the move is that M&S are launching a new website which they've been working on with Amazon.

Leaving aside the obvious disrespect for affiliates by announcing with 2 days notice a change that has obviously been planned for quite a while, it will be interesting to see the new site and what form the new affiliate program will take. Will it be a conventional affiliate scheme, available again through Buy.at as their email suggests, or will it be more like the Amazon Associate scheme?

Labels: affiliate marketing, Marks and Spencer

I saw a link the other day on the A4U forum to a list of affiliate marketing blogs. I'd not heard of the site before so checked it out, and was pleasantly surprised to find a gorgeous looking new site called "Dfinitive" which is a human edited site aiming to draw together in a single page the very best sites in certain categories.

From the about page:

Here at Dfinitive.com we aim to offer you a unique experience, taking in the best elements of a directory site, a search engine and a book-marking site, but with a twist. It’s the first site to use a mix of editors, a expert from each category, and social editing to produce a list of the very best, definitive sites for each category.

I was also very pleased and touched to see my own, humble little blog get a positive review in the affiliate marketing section. Awww, thanks.

So if you haven't already seen it, check out Dfinitive's list of the best affiliate marketing websites.

Labels: affiliate marketing, websites

A few weeks ago, I received this email from an account manager at a major network:

I hope you are well – I’ve been looking into your account and due to the success you’ve previously experienced with the XXX programme I thought you may be interested in an excellent new programme which has recently launched on XXX.

Now, this struck me as flannel immediately because my "success" on the X'd out programme was limited to one sale. But putting that aside, I thought I'd sign up with this new programme anyway and give them a go across of a few related websites. I even got to work on a content page based around their product feed. I soon realised two problems with the feed: none of the deep links worked and there was a duplicate header row which was a nuisance.

I promptly emailed these findings back to the account manager, expecting the same breathless enthusiasm as I found in his first email as he promptly dealt with the problem and we could then get on and maybe make some sales. But no, what did I get back? Nothing. Not a sausage. If it was a programme I was more attached to, I'd have followed it with up him but I decided to leave it and move on.

I'm sure they're all mostly great people doing their best, but from an affiliate point of view, I've never been left short of disappointments with all the major UK affiliate networks for really the most basic kind of things. Is it really that hard to get right?

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate network

DGM are running an interesting promotion on behalf of their client, Easyspace. The four affiliates who drive the most validated sales to the client in March will win the right to be in a closed group of PPC brand name bidders from April 1st onwards. Winners will also be allowed to use the Easyspace domain names in their PPC ads.

Personally it's of no direct interest to me, but sounds like an intriguing promotion for those interested in taking part.

I know that closed groups aren't popular in some quarters and Fraser did that interesting post questioning the opacity of these things and whether corruption might exist in determining who gets exclusivity, so throwing the rights open to all in a competition sounds kind of cool.

I suppose this does assume that the affiliates who get the most sales will be PPCers anyway, because if you topped the table of validated sales through your web content/seo channels, I guess you might not be interested in PPC brand bidding exclusivity.

Labels: affiliate marketing, dgm, ppc

I blogged a little while ago about some Flash PC World banners I had on my site which I wasn't able to click on.

I've just noticed that I have exactly the same problem with some Expedia Flash banners - also from TradeDoubler - which I put on a travel site of mine. They look nice on the page, but they're not simple not clickable.

I'm running Flash 9,0,28,0 on a Windows XP machine and have tried from FF and IE. I've also tried from a Win2k machine with Flash 8,0,22,0 and still no joy.

So what's going on? Do the banners simply not work at all. Is it some Flash version problem. I'll email TD to see if they have any suggestions but at the moment, following the same problem from two merchants, I'm left wondering - is it safe to use Flash banners? Or is it ad space down the drain?

[edit]

TD have got back to me and said this was a "bad link" and they have given me a replacement link code that works fine. As this is second time I've had this problem from a merchant on TD, I think I will be double checking any more flash banners from them in future, but preferably using a simple linked image where possible.

Labels: affiliate marketing, flash

Looking for information on Windows Vista from PC World? Click here

With the imminent release fo Microsoft Vista, I thought I better get my skates on and get some banners up for it on some of my websites.

PC World on TradeDoubler seemed a reasonable merchant to use and I checked the creative, and they had a cool Vista banner with a countdown clock to the release which I thought looked good, so I put it up a computer related site, as seen in the screenshow below.



Then I hovered my mouse over the banner and noticed that the pointer didn't change, like it does for a link. I tried clicking it and nothing happened at all. Odd, i thought. So I went back into TradeDoubler and got the iframe method of the same link, but still, the same problem. This PCW banner (160x300) can't be clicked on. Maybe it's me, I thought - but I've tried from multiple PCs and various browsers.

OK, innocent mistake on their part, I guess. But.... why have they got a nice easy, type-in friendly url listed on the banner - "www.pcworld.co.uk/vista". When have you seen an affiliate banner put a url on it like that? And is it just a coincidence that they have it on a banner you can't click on? Call me cynical, but something about that stinks. Obviously I'm now swiftly looking for a replacement merchant.

Labels: affiliate marketing, pc world

OK, well my headline says shock increase but I think everyone expects these press releases announcing huge increases in the numbers of people doing their Christmas shopping online.

That aside, and onto the story itself: The IMRG (Interactive Media in Retail Group) has released figures showing that there was a huge 54% increase in the 10 weeks leading up to Christmas compared to the same period 2005.

British consumers spent £7.66 billion online in the ten-week run-up to Christmas 2006 - between 16 October and 24 December - 54% (53.8%) more than the £5 (£4.98) billion spent online during the same period in 2005, and more than double the £3.33 billion recorded in the approach to Christmas 2004, the IMRG Index reveals. (source)

I don't think this kind of growth is unexpected and for obvious reasons - more people using the internet, more people who use the internet being prepared to buy online etc - but I guess this can only be great news for affiliate marketers and I guess many of them had a brilliant festive season.

Personally my Christmas was good, but not great and the fact my top ranking sites for "bikes" and "toys" disappeared from the MSN index really put the kibosh on things. But I won't keep mentioning it, because I'm really not bitter. Really.

Labels: affiliate marketing, christmas, online shopping, press release

Buy.at launched its redesigned management area back in December and has been running it alongside the older interface. The previous management pages were obviously primitive and frankly didn't look very good, but to be honest, I've carried on using it rather than the new one because I'm a creature of habit. But I was reading that when we do things differently from our routine, we create new neural pathways in our brain, and I'm all for that, so today I checked out Buy.at Management Area Version 3.



First of, you have to say it looks great. It has a nice clean design with plenty of use of white space and it just looks modern and a vast improvement.

Upon logging in, the first thing you see is your monthly overview which you can change to other time periods using the drop down. Personally I'd prefer it to default to an overview of the day's activity rather than the month - or at least give me the option as to which I want as my default.

Drilling down into the reports, I clicked on my sales total. It listed the transactions made but didn't tell me the URL referrer, which I think is pretty useful to know. When I click into the clicks total, it does tell me the URL referrer so the info is there but doesn't seem to be displayed in the sales reports. Drill down further into the clicks and it shows you at a glance which banners and adverts people clicked on which is handy.

Getting hold of banners and creatives is easily done. I wanted to download some product feeds and this was easily achieved too, with the product feed page telling me how many items there are in the feed and the age of the feed. The feed could be downloaded, as before I think, in CSV, XML, Pipe Delimited and Simple CSV.

I grabbed some banners and subjected to them the accessibility test, which I did on most of the UK networks recently. Unfortunately the banner code created still doesn't use the alt attribute on the image, failing one of the most basic accessibility tests.

I took a look at Buy.at's introduction to the interface and these are the new features then say the new management area benefits from:

Faster reporting and data extraction
Increased access to more relevant data and statistics
Customisable and saveable reports
Improved account analysis functions
Printable and downloadable reports
Sub accounts
Web services
Intuitive navigation
Easy to use help function

So, what can I say in summary: It definitely looks better and I believe it is better. It hasn't blown me away in terms of function but I want to find out more about he web services and I want some better information about the referring url which led to the click which led to the sale - but that may well be there and I might have just overlooked it. Having had a play, I'll be sticking with it and ignoring version 2 from now on.

P.S. I hope once they have fully migrated to v 3.0, the login page won't do that annoying thing in Firefox of saying "you have been logged out" when I login into the site, making me log in twice unless I specifically remember to log out when I leave the site.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate network, buy.at

When I moved into my new house recently, the previous occupant left some furniture behind which was of a pretty good standard but not what I wanted, so I replaced it and moved the old stuff to the garage. I put an ad up on Gumtree.com and received a pretty prompt email offering to buy the items from me. Furniture sold, job done.

But since then, I have received lots more emails from people asking if it's still available, and I've courteously replied telling them unfortunately not. Before hitting the send button on the last one, it occured to me I might as well bung an affiliate link in the footer of the email I sent back.

And then it struck me that this could be a great way of promoting websites to new people. You could post up fake for sale messages all day across all the main classified sites, and just send polite "sorry" notices to the respondents but with your URL of choice in the bottom. To take it to the logical conclusion, since you know what item the person is wanting to buy, you could be ready and waiting with affiliate links in context and send back a targetted advert.

Now I'm sure this isn't an original thought and probably it already goes on but it's something I've only just thought about. The more I think about it, the better it gets, but there's only one problem: it is at its heart, fundamentally dishonest and not very ethical. It's a bit like spam, but only in reply to an email. So I guess you could call it On Demand Spam. Or Spam On Request?

So on a scale of 1-10, how unethical do you think this is? Interested to know what others think.

Labels: affiliate marketing, email, ethics, gumtree

Just noticed on Amazon there there's a new book coming soon called "Affiliate Millions: Make a Fortune Using Search Marketing on Google and Beyond".

Here's the sypnosis: Google, Amazon.com, and eBay are among the best-known e-commerce Web sites. Millions of people around the world visit and use them every day. But the fact that individuals can generate income by placing affiliate ads for these and other sites is not well known. This book talks about this area.

I took a look at the publisher's site to see if it would be possible to a get a review copy, but it said not to bother unless you're a member of the bona fide press. Whatever that is.

The book's out in April so I guess I'll order it myself and see what it's like when it's out. Here's some affiliate links of my own in case you want to preorder it too!

Amazon.co.uk: Affiliate Millions
Amazon.com: Affiliate Millions

Labels: affiliate marketing, amazon, new book

MSN's search engine has always been a friend of mine. Whilst Google was a tough nut to crack, MSN was easier to optimise for I found. The traffic was lower than an equivalent position in Google, but it was enough to make it a worthwhile strategy.

So I loved MSN and accepted that Google wasn't being kind to me. But so far in 2007, things have changed around in dramatic fashion.

I noticed a few months ago that I had lost some good positions on MSN for sites I had about bikes and toys, which was particularly disappointing with Xmas approaching. I've looked into a bit further and found that at least 3 of my sites have now vanished from the MSN index altogether. I'll follow their advice for getting sites reincluded, but it seems my luck with MSN came to an abrupt halt.

But as one door closes, another one opens. I noticed the other day that one of my sites was now #1 for a generic technology search term I had been chasing for quite a while. I just noticed today that another site of mine has managed exactly the same thing and is now also enjoying top status in the UK results for an excellent search term. It actually feels great to have seen these sites gradually move up the rankings to where they are rather than have some overnight success which might have felt more precarious.

I always knew me and Google were destined for a beautiful friendship - it just took the big G a bit longer to realise than I had hoped!

I actually have a theory that once you get to the top spot, it's easier to stay there too, for this reason: Have you ever had to quickly compile a list of links related to a subject? It might be a subject you don't know much about so you may not have any knowledge of specific sites to recommend. And being in a hurry and maybe a tad lazy, you just search for that subject and figure that the top sites must be there for a reason and just use them for your links. So I'm thinking that you can expect new incoming links just by virtue of already being #1, and those new incoming links could help cement your position there.

Labels: affiliate marketing, google, msn, search engines, seo, serps

What thing that has often occurred to me is just how boring most of the banner ads are that are supplied to affiliates by merchants. Very often, you will just a selection of banners in some standard formats and the most imaginative they get is to have some animation.

But if you're a broadband merchant, why wouldn't you just supply a banner form that provides a postcode lookup function which takes the user to an availability page?

If you're a web registrar, why wouldn't you provide a domain search box for affiliates to put on their sites?

If you're the National Lottery, why don't you have banners that display results or are an entry form? Or maybe a number generator?

And if you sell books, how about a RSS feeds of your best sellers in various categories that could be integrated into affiliate sites?

It just seems to me that most merchants just come up with some boring ads for you to plonk on your page when they would be better off by using their imagination to come up with ways in which they can be seamlessly integrated to become part of the content.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools, ideas

There was a report a few weeks ago which said that most websites are still failing disabled web users by not conforming to the most basic accessibility standards.

I try, as much as I can, to follow some of the basic rules. I don't always manage it but it's usually there in the back of my mind when I'm making a site. But as an affiliate, not all of the code on my site has come from me - I have to rely on the code provided to me by the affiliate network.

I thought it would be useful to conduct a quick survey of the code provided by affiliate networks for image banner links to see which followed probably the single most basic, and easy to implement, accessibility recommendation - the alt attribute on an image.

Often you will get the choice of a Javascript or HTML link - for this survey I will look at the HTML code produced for banners, since Javascript has issues of its own which mean its often not suitable at all for disabled users.

Affiliate Future
No Alt Attribute

Affiliate Window
No Alt Attribute

TradeDoubler
No Alt Attribute

Buy.At
No Alt Attribute

Paid On Results
Alt Attribute Provided!!!

Commission Junction
No Alt Attribute

Webgains
Alt Attribute Provided!!!

LinkShare
Alt Attribute Provided!!!

So in the survey, it's well done to Linkshare, Webgains and Paid On Results. And a disappointing result from the other networks.

Seems to me that it would be very easy to create functionality to automatically add in the alt attribute to banner codes ("advertising banner for merchant name") when they generate the link code if the networks were interested in providing accessible code to their affiliates.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate network, web accessibility

There was a discussion on LBC 97.3 today about the best shops and websites to get last minute bargains from. I carried on about my business (assembling a new bed) and thought no more of it.

And then right at the end of the programme, the presenter read an email from a listener who wrote in saying "I got all my Xmas bargains at xxxx-xxxxxxx.com". As soon as I heard it, I realised the opportunity that I had missed. Not sure if the email was from a genuine contributor or someone was promoting their own site but all credit to them if they were, although I reckon they've had enough free publicity for one day so I've x'd out the url.

I checked out the site and it''s just a basic price comparison affiliate website. Nothing spectacular but I imagine they got a nice spike in hits thanks to that mention.

I was initially annoyed I hadn't thought of it, and then I wondered what quality site I would have wanted to plug anyway and I'm not really sure I would have had one which kind of ties into to my earlier post on my plans to build some better online brands next year.

I can knock up sites and pages pretty quickly so have considered before making a page which matches a topic being discussed and then emailing it in to see if I can get it mentioned. Certainly seems a nice way of getting a quick, free plug.

Labels: affiliate marketing, web promotion