Merchant Fraud Endemic In The Industry

I had a conversation last night with a fellow affiliate who has had a similar experience to the one I had with HMV and the Wii Console. The history of the matter is that it appears HMV continued to offer the Wii console on their site despite not having the stock to fullfill them. So many affiliates kept on promoting the product with them with no chance of earning a commission from those sales

This I can cope with - it's just a case of lack of communication and both the merchant and the network not managing their campaigns with what I call "due care and attention". For me this is a case where if we were valued, the network and merchant would say "fair enough, we ballsed up, here's some compensation to acknowledge that you've probably last a few £k because we didn't do our jobs properly".

There is one thing I can not stand and that's the plethora of merchants that are seemingly manipulating orders to avoid commissions.

I've got wind from this affiliate who had an email exchange with one of the buyers that one particular merchant continued to take Wii Orders without stock (fair enough!) but when they did have stock they called up the buyers and told them they had to put their order through on the phone, but not only that, if they didn't take out a 3 year product warranty they wouldn't be getting their Wii. This, in my mind, throws ethics straight out of the window in the affiliate sense, but surely is illegal in the wider sense?

Then the affiliate himself was called up and told that they couldn't put his order through unless the games he had with them.

So there's two issues:
The merchant following up existing web-orders to amend over the phone;
Forcing buyers to buy expensive 3 year warranties.

I'm shocked and appalled by this! There has to be more openness and we need to inform other affiliates of potential problems much earlier! Merchants that act in this manner should be removed from networks with due process. Affiliates should refuse to work with these merchants if they ever pop-up on another network.

I was going to post the emails that he forwarded to me, but we're awaiting official investigation from the network. I'd be very much inclined to report this matter to the Trading Standards and the press as it's absolutely outragous! But am I right to get this annoyed and incensed? What other tactics do we have to rid the industry of this sort of contempt for affiliates?

Affiliate Marketing Conference - A4UExpo

Even though the A4uExpo "Affiliate Marketing Conference" has not long been announced, but I'm sure interest is heating up for networks alike as they increasingly look for cost-effective ways to get their brand and solutions out in front of merchants.

I feel many networks are now finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate their offering from their competitors. Each network has a different strategy, some offer full support, some others just offer a technology solution, some attend every G2G to cajole affiliates to swap over (as well as merchants).

Also you've got the underhand tactics that you get to hear about with networks emailing clients of another slagging them off and demeaning their service. So how does this all fit into the Affiliate Marketing Conference? To me it offers an opportunity for all networks to lay their cards on the table, cut the bull, and show merchants exactly what they have to offer and allow comprehensive debate.

Far too often, in my mind, networks find it easy to shoe-horn merchants into joining their network and then the sales people spend the rest of their time defending their network from onslaught from their competitors.

So, why would a merchant want to attend the Affiliate Marketing Conference?

• Obtain full knowledge about each network from the people that use them every day;
• Meet network employees face to face before you sign any long term contract;
• Listen to affiliate's issues, concerns and advice so you choose the most suitable network and operate your programme in a mutually rewarding manner;
• Get a "bull shit" detector installed - there's a load of crap created by the press about affiliate marketing and most reporters know bugger all.

Why would a network want to attend the Affiliate Marketing Conference?

• The opportunity to talk to a wide range of potential clients
• Differentiate your offering from your competitors
• Learn from a wider range of affiliates

Why would an affiliate want to attend the Affiliate Marketing Conference?

• Increase your knowledge of your niche;
• Socialise with your peers;
• Communicate your fears about the industry.

Why would an agency want to attend the Affiliate Marketing Conference?

• Pick up more business;
• Convince affiliates that you add value to the process.

In general the industry is far too fractious with the main players - the affiliates being marginalised on too regular a basis (remember if there were no affiliates there would be no affiliate marketing industry). The first affiliate marketing conference should be the first step of bringing the industry together for the benefit of us all.

Google - Place your adverts in video games

So Google allows you to place adverts on their site, their partner's sites, radio and now computer games. This all comes with their acquisition of AdScape Media.

You can't really blame them. It appears they want a hand in all advertising media.

Adscape have a number of patents out there. If you look at them you'll see that they have one that allows advertisers to buy and manage adverts in video games. For example, it looks like advertisers will be able to pick say "roadside billboard" and put their advert on that, or even "graffiti on wall" or place their new song they want to plug in the background.

If I was Adscape I'd make it truely realtime. More and more consoles are connected to the net 24-7, so why can't these adverts rotate between advertisers. If you want to take it to its logical step I'm sure advertisers would want to "day part" their adverts and even configure by demographics etc.

It's a beautiful concept, I love the technology but ...

It appears we were all sold down the route that Google's mission was to "organise the World's information" - I simply don't trust this! It appears that their mission is to get their advertising service available on all media possible. We'll soon be seeing Google-placed adverts on our box of cereal in the morning, through the door with the local newspaper we never read. I worried where this well end ...

Big Companies Get E-Commerce So Wrong!

I'm pissed off at the moment!! I ordered my mum Mother's Day flowers from Tesco Direct as she likes the company and who am I to risk getting my mum flowers from a company that I don't trust to get it right?

Well, how wrong could I be. Tesco Direct pride themselves on their customer service, but they got it very wrong this time. If it's one group of their customers they can't disappoint it's mothers!

The flowers never got delivered on the day I set, they haven't got back to me with a reason and their telephone support is woefully inadequate!

So what should huge retailers offer in the way of customer service? Well here's my little bit of advice:

1) Don't make your customers wait 15 minutes and still not take their customer service query - I may be wanting to spend more money with you!

2) If you give a customer support email address make sure you get back to your customers within 24 hours! Great company's get back even sooner.

3) Predict Issues - how simple is it for a report to be created showing "Orders by date" | "Dispatched?" - it's not. The product I bought was "Mother's Day Flowers" - that's what you called it - make sure all of your products about Mother's Day are delivered before!

4) Keep your promises - it was a condition of my purchase that they were delivered on the day. At the moment Tesco is in breach of contract!

5) Communicate with your customers - I don't mean the constant drivel of marketing messages - speak to us!

6) Be accountable for your, or your supplier's actions. If you've dropped a bollock, apologise.

7) Value your customers, say sorry with vouchers, better flowers.

So even big companies can learn lessons. The points I set out above are so obvious it makes me cringe that they've not been implemented.

Will I get my money back, will I be able to make it up to my mum? I doubt it. Companies these days are so adept at hiding behind T&C's that consumers are shafted all the time.

Will I used Tesco Direct for my Girlfriends flowers, my mum's, Christmas, Valentine's Day? Will I pop in for petrol or last-minute shopping? No - not until I've had an apology and to feel valued!

AOL Learning From dot com Farces

AOL has ended it's publicly stated interest in buying Tradedoubler after their initial offer of 215 SEK has been rejected by shareholders.

It's fair enough, the shareholders with their knowledge of the business have rightly or wrongly percieved it's current value higher than the offer.

So why would they do that? Well it's all economics - the shareholders would (I would) look at the market as a whole, look at TD's position in that market and would invisage that the value would be going up higher than their own percieved volatility in the share price and risk of the industry.

If the shareholders didn't need the money why should they sell if the price offered is less than their own valuation?

With 8% of the share capital being owned by individuals and 92% being owned by legal intities (businesses, trusts etc) I would (disagreing with the "efficient market hypothesis") state that the larger percentage of the shareowners have more complete information about the market and the company so would place a greater degree of accuracy with the shareholders decision - especially when you see the names of the top ten largest shareholders.

On the same token, AOL will be doing their own valuation. It's unusual for a company to offer it's true valuation price at the outset so I can invisage there's two main reasons:

1) They need to spend the money elsewhere
2) They've modified their aquisition strategy

With the broadband market as it is and their place within it not so secure they could be looking at shifting markets to secure shareholder value. Now if they've seen a better opportunity elsewhere that will bring a greater return they may be moving their cash to take advantage of that opportunity.

I doubt they've seen anything intrinsicly wrong with the TD business as they would have had to do "Due Diligence" before making an offer. Unless there are any complicated liabilities that aren't immediately obvious.

Now what makes it really interesting is that the shareholders value the business at a price higher than the offer price - which in turn is about 7% higher than the current market price (around 200 SEK). Now that is really interesting.

Don't Forget Your Old Sites

So there was I, just wasting a bit of time before I get on with some client work so I decide to look at my Google Analytics profiles.

I'm going down the list of sites and click on my "Cricket World Cup" site. The only problem is that I'd completely forgot about and in fact haven't updated it since September last year.

So there I am, and the first thing that I notice is that there's shed-loads of traffic to it even though I hadn't SEO it and more importantly - I hadn't monitised it.

With all that traffic I've been loosing a cool sum over the past few days by not adding decent affiliate links. Now it's a case of quickly adding some more content to retain the traffic I do have as well as to keep the growth of the site and keywords going. Now I've got to spend a couple of hours looking through the nature of the traffic I'm getting and working out what's best to promote.

That's where many affiliates go wrong. They think that they've got a site about "topic X" and assume all of their traffic would suit "topic X" people. This is not always the case.

When you've got a site up and running and you've got people coming to it, look at the search terms people use to find your site as those phrases may include keywords that you can use to either earn more with CPA affiliate links or CPC search providers.

So get looking at your logs and look at what traffic you're getting to those old, forgotten sites. I've even just found an old blog about broadband reviews! Chuffing heck!

Best and Worst Performing Online Advertising Tactics

eMarketer send some nice informative emails and the one the other day was pretty interesting too. It was a survey of US online marketers to find out what their most and least successful methods of online marketing were for 2006.

Not suprisingly Paid search, email marketing to a self-formed list and SEO were the top three.

I was suprised to see SEO go from 33% to 45% of respondents's best tactic despite the increased competition between SEO providers and a more restrictive SEO environment.

I've never been a fan of paid email lists, despite buying many thousand pounds worth from sites like Yahoo! and a number of niche providers in the past. For me the niche lists were great, the Yahoo! list less so.

I'm suprised to see "behavourial targetting" up there too, being the fourth. It would be great to full understand what internet marketers in generall classed it as.

The worrying aspect was that affiliate marketing was only the best performing tactic for a quarter of respondents which put it 7th in the list. And even worse, it was only 2% behind "banner ads" for the worst form of online marketing.

The only reason I can see for this is that, despite to many of us, affiliate marketing still isn't a hugely mature method when compared to email and banner ads. But what about when you compare it to paid search? Amazon et al were offering affilaite programmes even before Google and Goto.com concieved the PPC model.

My concern is that people like Nick Robertson do have an impact on the industry. People do listen to negative and inacurate views and then have pre-concieved ideas when they start an affiliate offering.

Despite fora such as A4U and ABestWeb churning out loads of great information, there are plonkers on both sides of the fence that try and ridicule and damage the industry at every turn. So I call on every affiliate, merchant, agency and technology provider to be an ambassedor for the industry.

Fixing Supplementals With Blogger

So previously I had an issue with one of my sites going supplemental and the homepage disappearing. The advice I gave resolved initially looking at your server's uptime, how your CRM or blogging tool created pages, whether it'd be scrapped etc. But now it's back up and ranking very well for the phrase "euro 2008".

Unlike many webmasters I didn't panic (I've been around too long for that - eek thinking about it I've been SEO'ing for 9 years). I simply thought of the elements I was too lazy to solve in the first instance.

I looked at duplicate content:

• Firstly I got rid of the Euro 2008 qualifying league tables that I had on every page and just reduced them to the homepage.
  
• I got rid of the labels feature on new posts and just had them when they were off the first page.
  
• I got rid of the archive as I didn't want posts on the post page, homepage and label page.
  
• I changed the link to the site's feed from being the on site RSS/Atom to the FeedBurner (thanks Vlad)

I also took some other steps:

• I looked more at natural internal linking rather than forced.
  
• I changed the Meta Description from being a copy of the page title to the site's title. When I've got my head round the intricacies of the Blogger templating system I'll try and create more variation.

So if anyone's having any problems with duplication it's probably worth starting with these steps - but obviously all sites are different so the required solutions to remedy you're own problem may be a collection of the usual ones that are resident in the SEOers toolbox, or you may need to do a fair bit of digging around various fora.

Great Keyword Combination Tool

I'm not sure which tools others are using, or if indeed you've created your own. But I've just started using "Search Phase Builder" and must admit it's pretty damn cool.

It's £9.95 when you register it, but it's well worth it.

p.s. I've not used an affiliate link - because he doesn't have one, but maybe he'll drop me a free activation code for plugging his tool. :-o

Google Adwords Suggested Optimisation - Don't Make Me Laugh

I run some PPC for a property aution site up here and it's going pretty well. With a geographic-specific service such as this you've really got to be tight with your keywords. So what I've done is create two campaigns; one with generic, but service-focused keywords where I use their geographic serving only to show to users in the North West and another campaign where I use generic + geographic phrases but show them nationaly. Some may say that's obvious, whilst other's would never have thought of that.

But what no affiliate or PPC manager would do is advertise on un-related phrases. So why should Google's Optimisation team suggest keywords for a propery auction site such as:

antique auctions Broad
antiques auction Broad
art auction Broad
art auctions Broad
auction antique Broad
audio auction Broad
audio auctions Broad
auto car auction Broad
boat auction Broad
burnley co uk Broad
car auction Phrase
car auctions Phrase
cars auction Broad
cars auctions Broad

Is it me or do they generally offer crap keywords? Can anyone trust what they suggest?

Nick Robinson - ASOS Numpty?

NMA has reportedly quoted the CEO of ASOS (the celebrity fashion retail site) as saying:

"Next year we'll reintroduce affiliate marketing but as it should be, as opposed to affiliates as they were" said Nick Robertson, ASOS CEO. "(There'll be) no silly commissions being paid to grubby little people in grubby studios growing income at our expense, getting in the way of genuine sales"

Now with affiliates being really sensitive to people bounding around the perception that we're spotty geeks sat in our bedrooms knocking out sites, it really suprising that someone that's been voted as in the top 50 of UK Entrepreneurs making a comment that is so stupid and detrimental to his business as this!

I'm sure there'll be many full time, very financially successful, industry players that will be hell-bent to bring ASOS to it's affiliate knees.

I'm also sure that many networks will be very wary of working with a merchant that appears so clueless as to what affiliate marketing is. Any network that does choose to work with them will spend the majority of their time trying to educate ASOS rather than growing their business - well so I think!

Any affiliate manager that chooses to work for ASOS must be a glutton for punishment. Why would anyone want to work for someone that is so anti their industry that they'd make a comment like that?!

Track Me Around the UK

Everyone that knows me knows that I'm not uber technical but I do like my gadgets and bits of useless internet technology.

A mate has introduced me to BuddyPing. This is a service that you can inform where you are by mobile or tinterweb and it'll show you which of your mate's are nearby or other people that are close.

I've got a mate in mind that could use it for dating purposes but for me it's just something to waste my time looking at.

But I do like taking the odd mobile photo. What you can do with BuddyPing is send a MMS to it and it'll add it to your profile with the exact geo-coordinates. How cool is that? Ok maybe not!

Well if anyone wants to add me my user name is imaginatively "Lee McCoy"

What I'm listening to: Angus & Julia Stone - All of Me

A little bit of knowledge is dangerous - SEO Mind Crimes

A fellow Warringtonian, Anthony Fallon caused a bit of a stir by saying that "Search Engine Optimisation Is A Waste Of Time and Money" in his "SEO Mind Crime" blog post.

Many people missed the trick when they criticised his comments. Basically he was espousing the view tha SEO is only one aspect of Internet marketing and that there are many other ways of gaining traffic - not least the method he used to get his views noticed in the first place.

But the way he proved his case is as flawed as George Bush's case for going to war with Iraq. To prove that SEO wasn't necessary in the Web 2.0 era he asked people to search for "SEO Mind Crime" in Google. He claimed that his 3,4 & 6 positions within a couple of days after sending out a press release to PRWEB proves that you don't need SEO to get ranked. Anthony made the assertion:

“The new distribution technologies like RSS will get your message out there without any magic or manipulation of search results. The quality of Google’s Search technology is really coming on in leaps and bounds. If businesses can get in front of their customers without stuffing their content with keywords, it has to be a good thing. As for the SEO Industry, good riddance I say.”

To be totally honest, this is complete bollocks!

First off it's not exactly difficult to seo for that phrase as it's no "golden ticket"as SEO is all about the proper display of information, about correctly interlinking your important content, about hierarchy of content and, wait for it, encouraging your content to become an authority, or at the very least, a useful resource for your given topic.

His miss-understanding of SEO is astonishing, dare I say "ignorance" about SEO. Or is he? Is he simply link-baiting, is the "fool" really the clever little %$%^ that just says what is generally being regarded as false-hoods just to get every industry commentator linking to his site?

I do agree with many of his comments about the importance of PR, link-baiting, RSS distribution. But saying SEO has no place to play in internet marketing based on his view that SEO is just keyword stuffing is pure ignorance. If it were that simple then that's all of us would be doing. But because increasing the occurrence of the right keywords on a page is what virtually all SEO'ers do, then they need other factors to increase their page's "score" against those search terms.

For those that can't grasp the concept, I'll put it more simply:

Because SEO is fundamentaly about Keyword occurrence and that is where virtually where every SEO'er starts, we have to do more to increase that site's/page's attractiveness.

Furthermore, if SEO has no part to play in ranking then why does he have his title in a H1? it's not always the most popular way for non-seo'ers. Using the generally is. Also it's obvious that having "SEO mind Crime" linked from every internal page would add SEO "weight".

What Anthony is focusing on is the other fundamental aspect of SEO, namely linking. Purely because his press release has been syndicated on many sites that publish PRWEB press releases he gained many links very quickly which increased the crawl rate of the site.

So my challenge to Anthony is this?

Change SEO mind crime is this:

• Get rid of the H1 and change it to font styling
• Change the internal links to some other text, such as "SEO Doesn't Work", no scrub that - change your internal links to images
• Get rid of the nofollow's to the social links
• Add some hidden links to some porn sites on there
• Also add some links to some betting and casino sites
• get rid of your meta data

It won't have an effect will it? Seeing as "SEO is a Waste of Time and Money"