And Why I'm Back

Wow! I didn't think people would be so supportive about my negative views about the industry. But to Jess, Frostie and Keith a big thanks.

I was due to do my second half of the series tonight, but I've bought it forward to set everyone's minds at rest.

So why I'm back ...

There are some great people - a few responses earlier proved the point. There are some people that in actual fact are competitors but they will help you if you need it and are always there to support and encourage. It's a community thing, we've got a great collection of people that "work" in affiliate marketing. It'd be a sad day when I wouldn't have a reason to talk to them.

I love a challenge - I've always taken the road less traveled and I've always done things the hard way. So that's another reason. It's hard to build up sites again - building links, finding content, selecting merchants etc. Life would be boring without challenges, however.

I love being imaginative - There are few industries where you can be more creative, maybe film production and fashion design. Fortunately I have no interest in either so I'm left to knock out websites with varying degrees of imagination. This is something that I really need.

I love forward thinking - I've bought loads of domains about events in the future. I love spotting these events and product launches and seeing if there are domains available. I suppose it's a bit like hunting, and it's a big thrill finding a peach of a domain.

I love working in fits and starts - I work very intensely. I won't even eat, drink but I will fart for hours on end. I don't like working in the afternoon and much prefer the hours of the day when there's no distractions. I like pushing myself as hard as I can to get a new site up and then standing there and saying "I made that". Sad I know - but it still gives me a buzz even now.

I don't like relying on others - Doing SEO consultancy you have to rely on developers to do what they're supposed to. They can be temperamental buggers and don't like responding to emails or phone calls. Doing my own stuff I don't have to rely on anyone else (other than merchants, networks, hosting companies, Google, agencies, broadband suppliers etc).

You can't argue with the cash - Earning more in a month than most earn in a year is a huge thrill. Then I used to focus on a few sources of income. I then broadened it out and lost focus. Now I'm starting again on a couple of industries and using one main way to earn. I'll still keep my hand in ppc with those merchants where it's still very easy to earn good returns, but I'm going back to basics with SEO.

Overall, I'm back, bigger than before (I can't stop eating Battenburg cake)! And I'm coming to a SERP near you! (chuckle).

Why I Effectively Left Affiliate Marketing

Following on from John Lamberton's great post about why he hates affiliate marketing, I'd thought I post my thoughts.

Basically I agree with him. A couple of years ago the industry really started to piss me off! And here's why:

So Lonely - John's right in saying being an affiliate on your todd is lonely. I felt it at times. Luckily whilst doing all my affiliate sites I'd still have SEO clients, I just reduced the number and how much input they had. This kept my mental juices flowing on other challenging areas and kept me in contact with the good mates I built up there.

It is annoying that the only people you'd see during 8am-6pm would be the postie or the neighbours coming and going. So that's one reason I reduced my involvement with the industry.

No Set Hours - To be honest I liked this. For about 3 years I never set my alarm (except if I had an early flight). I love working early in the morning or late at night. I hate and I mean hate working in the afternoon! Affiliate marketing was the perfect way to maximise my working hours.

No-one understands you - Luckily my brother and father work(ed) in the IT industry. By brother's a kick-arse web designer. And my father was a fantastic IT project manager covering both public and private sectors. They fully understood what I did. My mother was pretty clued up too. Most of my mates work in the industry or in supporting industries. When it came to my girlfriends that wasn't as bad as perhaps it could be. All of them tried to help in one way or the other.

The funny thing is when you go and buy a house or have legal issues with ex-girlfriends, the solicitors just don't have a clue. I'd just say "internet marketing, I help companies sell more online" - and that'd solve it.

People think you’re grubby - That's true we all know the Nick Robinson comments. We're all tarred with the same brush. People say to me that SEO (as a tool for affiliate marketing) is a black art and that we're all geeky people that don't see the day of light. We also, apparently have no morals, which, at times is true! I agree with John when he said "Most of the full-time, professional affiliates are upstanding, hard-working people that bring a lot to the table. Quite often it’s the newbies looking for a quick buck that try things on, but it’s the rest of us who lose out." - Too true.

There’s no security - Very true. You have to make your own security, however. Save as much as you can to ride you through the rough times when Google kicks your sites out, or merchants don't pay. But it's that good 'ole "risk and reward" thing. We risk a lot (our time - opportunity cost of working for someone else for quite a bit of cash, in the expectation of earning substantially more).

The Goalposts are always moving - now this is the bit that made me pull back big time. Merchants think it's their right to break contracts and dictate the exact fashion in which we work. It's not right and it just breaks relationships.

Too many suits, Not enough substance - I agree totally. I reduced the number of G2G's I went to because they were too stuffy, filled with people that just wanted to harass me about programmes I had no interest in and prevent me from having a good time. This is why I generally only go to Affiliate Future G2G's because you're guaranteed to have a laugh and not be force fed merchant crap.

But here's some of my own:

Too many numpties - there are loads of plonkers in the industry that just try and screw everyone they can. They'll ride roughshod over merchant terms, deliver absolutely crap leads and give the industry a bad name. They know exactly who they are! It just pissed me off that merchants would be so anal and OTT with all affiliates because of the few that really did take the piss.

Lack of support from networks - There were a number of issues that caused me to get very angry. The first was when I was ppc'ing a credit card with OMG. Because the leads were batched I had no way of knowing that it was converting. The only problem was that the campaign stopped the end of the previous month and we were half way through the next month. No one from OMG contacted me to let me know the day before - even though the allegedly called everyone else. That cost me around £3k.

Another time, with Buy.at I would have expected so much more with the HMV Wii "sales" - in my mind they totally miss-managed the whole affair.

There are too many other instances like this, but I won't go into them now.

Merchants that just don't have a clue - There are far too many examples of merchants that don't understand how the internet works but still feel they have the ability to run an affiliate marketing campaign. Things like "you can't use our brand on your website or in ppc, but still promote us". WTF - are you having a laugh? Merchants do this all the time, but hey they'll end up wasting their time and budget.

Affiliate Classroom Magazine

Has anyone subscribed to the Affiliate Classroom Magazine? Is it any good?

E-Consultancy Affiliate Marketing Report / Questionnaire - Last Few Days

If you're a merchant or agency and wish to take part in the Affiliate Marketing survey then you've only got a few days left to add your views.

The survery is sponsored by buy.at, and looks at the effectiveness of affiliate marketing, resourcing, budgets and the challenges the industry faces.

Earlier in the year I commented on their Census which was focused on us affiliates, but this one is focused on merchants and agencies and tries to understand their views and should still be just as provocative and interesting.

The results will be announced at Affiliate Summit (Aff Link) on Sept29th so get yourself along!

Why do some see deeplinking as illegal?

I was reading some stuff on Chillingeffects and noticed this one about Bill O'Reilly's Collumn (no smirks please).

They did a Cease and Desist against a guy that had the whole text of a piece on his site and then did another saying he should remove the link to the original source after the content was taking down.

Why are authors so damn anal? The guy had removed the content then linked to you - get real!

The notes on the bottom of the Chilling Effects page gives evidence that deep-linking isn't "illegal" and how could it ever be so?

Pathetic - and yes I'm waiting for a C&D from you guys too!

When Doing Nothing is Best

Back at about the 6th August this year I had three very niche sites that weren't getting a huge amount of traffic because of their nature fall out of Google.

The sites where about electronics products. Two were about future products due out this year and the last was one that I mainly used for PPC but still used to have decent rankings.

Then a couple of days ago they jumped back into life. The traffic was back. But what did I do? Absolutely nothing. I didn't try and get more links, remove any duplication, change internal linking or stuff more keywords in.

So if you're not trying to push the envelope with your SEO and if your site isn't littered with affiliate links and your site inexplicably falls out of Google - give it a month or so before you do anything.

The only thing I'd do is carry one with what you're doing before. If you're supporting your site with offline activity with such actions as PR then carry on. Keep submitting articles/posts it to Digg.com etc.

But if you are doing uber-SEO then give your site a once over and look for inter-page and cross-page duplication.

Has anyone else seen any improvements in rankings in the last two days and what features/characteristics do they have?

How the Affiliate Marketing Industry Killed Itself - Update

When I posted on David Hawk's comments about the affiliate marketing industry perhaps I should have qualified my comments: "and I agree with him" and "reasoned if not negative view"!

Kieron I think miss-understood this as a total support for his view - its not.

But Kieron does agree with David that "brand bidding is on the way out".

And he agrees that spyware has given the industry a bad rap.

He also agrees with David that arbitrage PPC is bad for the perception of the industry.

And he doesn't understand David's point about pay-per-performance affecting other marketing channels.

I'm not being rude Kieron, but how can you say that David is "wrong, wrong wrong" when you agree with 3 out of 4 of his points and admittedly don't understand the fourth?

I'm a bit disappointed that you were "saddened" with me agreeing with him. If you take a look at my post about Palmer Web Marketing's "3 reasons to avoid affiliate marketing" or the rest of my blog in general you'd understand my viewpoint that there are few hellbent on taking as much out of the industry as possible with blatant disregard for the rules and it is this that is killing the perception of affiliate marketing of those that need convincing the most.

You'd also realise that, I myself have broken the rules, and I know many affiliates with high moral standings have also broken the rules or at the very least bent them. I've knocked up thousands of pages in the past with a total disregard to Google - I could name many others that have done the same (and in some circumstances are still doing it).

I regularly state at how great James's Flightmapping is and I'm always quick to give kudos to affiliates who I believe are pioneers in the industry.

We'd all like to see the industry flourish and everyone to have a positive view of it. But we shouldn't let our "rose-tinted glasses" prevent us from having a deeper perception of the industry's ills and the willingness to communicate the fact.

Addendum:
Instead of writing all that, I should pointed you to Jason's post as I fully support what he said.

SEO is Not Dead - Its Been Evolving For Years

As many of you know, I see the benefits of conducting an effective Social Media Optimisation (SMO) campaign. But I don't go as far as some in saying that it's "almost dead".Jim Hedger published a piece the other day about how SEO is changing. He comments "SEO has evolved so far and so quickly over the past six months that is is hardly recognisable from its humble roots, much like a Neanderthal placed beside any give Homosapien".

I'd disagree. I see the whole SEO evolving much before this. Patricia Seybold foresaw the change in the Internet marketing agenda due to an evolution in how business interacts with consumers way back in 2000 with Loyalty.com and 2001 with "The Customer Revolution". These books mentioned the greater involvement the Internet had with the buying decisions of consumers and how those processes are affected by the reality and perception of the levels of customer service from a given organisation.

The factors that he speaks about (RSS feed-readers, social media, specific vertical search tools and multimedia) have been around for years. All that's changed is the media's focus on them. Forum's have been created around niche topics for years. There's nothing new with consumer power. These forums, blogs and vertical sites have always been crawled by Google et al. They've always been a very useful tool to leverage your own rankings. Just look at why Google changed their algo about 4 years ago to limit the impact of link campaigns using forums!

Not only has the media's attention changed, but also that of SEO/marketing agencies. Each agency is trying to find ways to differentiate themselves from the competition - just like Tradedoubler buying The Search Works. They did this to say "look at us, we can offer you all these seamless services" (as well as buying a shed load of customers directly).

The most interesting of features that I don't think the majority of search engineers have picked up on is that PR and SEO has almost merged into an amorphous entity. Brand reputation management now goes hand-in-hand with SEO. But you need the SEO skills built up over a number of years to truly fulfill your client's needs when it comes to SMO.

Now I believe that Jim has gone too far when he says that "the final nail in the coffin of traditional SEO was the introduction of Google's personalised results". For a start, the user has to be logged in and enjoy the way it works. People like to use the Internet for different reasons at different times. At one stage it'll be information retrieval and the next product review. Jim goes on about utilising social media bookmarks to leverage SEO as well as changing how you use titles, tags, text, structure and links. I'd have to disagree. Just focus on making your site the best it can be for the end-user. Make it easy to buy from if it's an e-commerce site or make it easy to digest if its an information site. It's not rocket science.

When I consult for Pazang's clients I say you need to look at a holistic marketing plan. Utilise offline PR to augment your online exposure, monitor your brand and your competitors brand online, take every effort to make it easy for your customers to do business with you, allow them to refer you to friends, reward repeat custom but most of all get the basics right!

SEO is a key ingredient and there's one constant factor - you'll always have to modify you SEO strategy, but you'll never have to rewrite it.

Castle Corporate Venue For Hire & Rich Single Man Available

I know many of you guys have corporate events for your sites so I thought I'd introduce one of my clients. Caverswall Castle is a fantastic Norman Castle (13th Century) and available for hire for photo shoots, product launches, team building events, business meetings etc.

So if you've got a fashion website where you need to promote your latest lingerie in a seductive location or if you're looking for a nice venue for a team building event or business meetings in the Midlands then drop them a line. They're located near Stoke, just off the M6.

You can call Robin on 01782 393 239.

And for the girls, if you're looking for a good-looking, rich man that owns a castle ... then don't give me a call as I don't have castle. But I'm sure Robin may be interested!

How the Affiliate Marketing Industry Killed Itself

David Hawk has created a pretty reasoned if not negative review of the state of the affiliate marketing industry.

And do you know what, I agree with him!

Should Women Be Band From Shopping On Thursdays?

Women do my head in when I'm out shopping in town or the supermarket. They have no consideration for other shoppers.

When women shop they can't grasp the concept that other women are in the shop too. If they've got a trolley they'd have no problems leaving it in the middle of the isle whilst they go and compare fat content on yogurt. They don't think that other people need to get buy.

Another thing that annoys me when women shop is that when they get to the till they don't get their purse out and get their bank card out or a few notes to cover the cost of their purchases. They'd much prefer to stand there and count the £48.36 cost of their shopping in 2s and 5p's. Forgetting that the rest of the 20 people have homes or businesses to go to.

So I'm calling for one day a week, I'll even settle for one day a month where women are encouraged to shop online and let us men go out and enjoy shopping without being dragged around more handbag shops or having pitched battles with women and their trolleys.

Here's to "Internet Thursday"!

3 Reasons to Avoid Affiliate Marketing

Surprisingly this is a pretty good article about the problems merchants could have when they start an affiliate marketing campaign.

The first point they mention relates to coupons (discount codes). Before I buy anything I always check to see if there's a discoumt code (ok so I'm tight) and I'm sure others do too. There's a cost associated to all forms of marketing. But I'm still sure it's more profitable and certainly more transparent that tv or radio advertising!

The second point relates to ppc brand bidders. Personally I don't agree with it as I try and see it from a merchant's point of view. But I still do it. If there's money to be made and it's not illegal - I'll do it! If a merchant says not to bid then I don't (ok sometimes I do but shhh). If you're asked to remove bids then do it - I always do as quick as I can - even when I was sitting on the beach in Antigua this summer. As Rufus full-well knows, I was just about to finish that rum & Coke and get my backside in the sea!

The third reason is SPAM. I used to knock up 40,000 pages in a day around set categories and make a pretty penny out of it too. But there's no real benefit to the user. When Google kicked me out I got myself some morals and now try and build content sites which offer value to users.

As a merchant, if you've got a good agency or network they'll be able to help you manage these problems and mitigate any issues that may arise.

If you do have any questions, feel free to drop me a line.

BBC Gets Social

Ahh the BBC has got all "social" as they no encourage people to submit their content to del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit and Facebook.







Most blogs have been doing it for years, but it's taken the Beeb far too long in my mind.

It'll be interesting to see what traffic the BBC will send to the social sites - but I'm sure that Hitwise will be doing a nice blog feature on it sometime soon.

Google Proxy Hacking: How A Third Party Can You Removed From Google

I found this pretty interesting article about the good ol' proxy / Google / Black Hat issue that's been around for a while. Just thought some of you may be interested - it by Dan Thies.

Affiliate Marketing - The Way Forward - Comparison Sites Out

I've been getting calls from a guy who works in a factory earning an OK amount - but he wants more. He says he's been trying affiliate marketing for a couple years now but only makes a few quid a day.

He wanted my advice. I said build a site around topics you're interested in and with affiliate marketing there'll always be opportunities to make money from it if he's passionate about it.

Yesterday I didn't have time to take the call - I was having a crap day with one particular client and was short with him. I emailed him and gave him a few lines on how to make more money from affiliate marketing. But there's a pretty succinct article from Joe Stewart that sums up my views totally.

Today it's not about plain old, multi-industry seo/ppc as a route to affiliate success. There are too many highly organised affiliates that gobble up the opportunities as they arrive - it's all about personal niches.

I remember reading in NMA about how people are using price comparison sites less because they understand that products are normally promoted at the top where it earns the sites' the most money. OK, so that also happens in blog and theme sites - but it's less obvious. People are cottoning on to comparing prices between "authority" sites and not relying on comparison ones.

Over the past 3 years or so, affiliates have been crazy for product feeds. They've been arguing over the quality and usefulness of them. Others having been focusing on niche sites based on quality content. My view is that the former is great for established players, but for anyone new into the market, unless they've got bucket full of cash - they should avoid them.

My New Carlos Tevez Blog

I've had blogs about products and events. I've occasionaly done them about bands before their tours. But I've never done any about sports stars.

I secured the Carlos Tevez domain the other day. I was going to set one up about united as I get pissed off with all the ABU diatribe from people that are more interested in slagging them off than talking sense.

I've gone down the Tevez route as I expect there'll be loads of opportunities to earn a few quid with shirts, t-shirts (all I expect that there won't be many posters sold). But mainly its to let off a bit of steam.

I know there's one particular Citeh fan out there that would have pleasure trying to wind me up - but unlike Ronaldo - I won't fall for it. So if anyone wants to add reasoned comments or constructive cricism then feel free. If you just want to slag off United because you can't get your kicks elsewhere or your girlfriend has a "headache" then go and relieve some stress whilst looking at your club's website.

Why Title Tag is "King" And Keyword Stuffing Won't Get You Banned

I don't like looking at one instance of an issue and then deduce stuff from it. But this one made me chuckle.

I did a search for "ethical recruitment" and noticed the 12th site listed was "AMC Recruitment".

It's got some dodgy redirect on it so I looked further. The only reason I can see is it ranks for that page, despite having no textual content, is that it's got "ethical recruitment" in the title.

It thought furry muff. But how can that happen when they've also blatently stuffed the meta description with 21 "recruitment"'s and a solitary "cv"? Google must have missed it!

Even with completely buggered up frameset code they still rank fairly well for the "ethical recruitment" phrase.

So what can you deduce? Well Title is still mega important and you can still rank well with sites with bugger all content and chuff all links. Well done guys - there's hope for all the wannabe affiliates out there that can't be bothered to create content.

I'm changing my strategy back to spamming ;-)

A half decent domain, trickle of sales - but you decide.

I've got a half decent domain name about franking machines. With no work in well over a year its started to get a trickle of sales and traffic.

Its not particularly the most interesting of markets but should I try and make something out of it and set up a decent site? Or should I just see if someone wants to buy it?

You decide! Just leave a reply to this post.

Why Can't CD Wow Be More Like Play.com?

It really pee'd me off. Some git did a load of fraudulent transactions on one of my company credit cards on CD WOW. It appeared that CD WOW has done nothing about it. I called up the credit card company (BofS) and they reversed the transactions. Then more appeared on CD WOW.

Who goes and spends around £700 in a few days on CD Wow - with all the transactions being between £37 and £43. Would you think it was fishy?

Well on the other end of the scale, I bought a book from Play.com - just £9.00 and because I'd ordered a Pleo Dinosaur from them in the past they wanted me to call up and confirm I'm who I say I am.

To me this is fantastic. Every merchant should try and guarantee as much as possible that the orders aren't fraudulent.

I wonder who are the best and worst merchants at protecting you from fraud?

What are the 5 Most Common Affiliate Mistakes?

Cher K. Markov has written a useful piece on her "Top 5 Affiliate Marketing Mistakes".

Here's a summary of what she sees as the most common mistakes.

1) Conduct a Basic Research.
She's right in saying that so many new affiliates are drawn to the most sensationally advertised affiliate programmes and don't conduct proper research into how the programme works, what its restrictions are, how much it pays and how "buyable" the product is.

2) Joining Multiple Affiliate Programs.
I disagree to an extent. I would never recommend limiting yourself to just the one. I'd say a good handful of 10 programmes should be enough for any newbie. But at the outset it'll be a case of "trial and error" as you establish which works best for your skills and experiences.

3) Test the Product Before you Promote
This is often not possible for real-life affiliate marketing. But the best sites (in my opinion) are the ones based on products and services an affiliate has indepth knowledge about. So in real-terms this should be done, but for large scale affiliate marketing, slightly impractical.


4) Spending Hundreds of Dollars on eBooks.
This one pee's me off no end! It's my opinion, that virtually everything you need to know can be be gained from sites like Webmasterworld and A4u Forum.If you are going to spend money on any ebooks, I recommend Marketing Sherpa (only only because they've got an affiliate programme) as their content is fantastic and well worth the money!


5) Burning Your Fingers With PPC
Cher is right with this one. Before a new affiliate should delve into ppc they should really learn the ropes building content sites as it's so easy to waste a shed load of cash on promoting the wrong merchants in the wrong way!


Are there any other common mistakes that new (and old) affiliates tend to make?

And The Award For Best Network Blog Goes To ...

To me communication from network to affiliate is absolute key to the performance of both groups. I detest the endless amounts of emails about from merchants via networks that I have no interest in.

I'd dearly love to find a way for networks to rationalise and organise their communications to allow us affiliates to sift through them automatically rather than get millions of emails every single day.

One way I like is for networks to have blogs and categorise their information (label it) against a particular type of announcement, such as vouchers etc. They should also label any news by industry that particular merchant is in. This would allow us to be notified of information that we're actually interested in - and not make me waste a good 1/2 a day deleting a load of (to me) rubbish.

The network blog that I find most fits my needs for categorising and organising news is the Webgains Blog. They could do that extra step and categorise by industry, but it's light years ahead of every other network blog.

Well done Hero and everyone else!

Why PR Is Great - Client Has Major Coverage in The Sun

Don't you just love PR? I obviously manage the online PR for some clients. But one of them: Caverswall Castle (taken up a week ago) has just got some major coverage in the Sun online and today's Big Brother pull out! We've worked out that it's got an AEV of around £165,000 with just the newspaper - we haven't worked out how much the the equivalent value of the website coverage would be.

It's a great job by Danielle - just a shame the hosts have messed up thier server config so the site doesn't work at the mo) and really helps my bit of creating online buzz, links and rankings!

Google PR Update?

I've just come on here and the site's got a PR4. I've refreshed and it's gone back to a 3. Are other people seeing a PR update - not like it's important or anything!

Call To Ban Travel Affiliate Sites

Where's James Avery when you need him? Whilst trying to find a decent flights aggregator merchant to replace the Cheap Flights offering on Buy.at that came off months ago (I'm just getting rid now) - I cam across a blog called "Travel Rants" which had a post calling for "complete holidays websites .. [to be] scrapped".

Obviously it isn't as easy as getting affiliates to scrap their sites. They make bucket loads. But the guy is right to be concerned about punters to be confused by sites that show ABTA logos when perhaps they don't have a right to.

I'm not an expert on the legal position, but I can foresee a repeat of the restrictions that came into the finance affiliate arena with the regulations that the FSA brought in a few years ago.

The distinction the author draws is that sites rich in content should be allowed and those that aren't should be banned. I hate these prescriptive normative statements. It's up to the advertising standards authorities to clamp down on miss-selling. But it's down to the affiliate to operate morally and not try and trick punters by passing off as other brands, but whilst there's still massive profits to be made and whilst its so easy to get away with - it'll probably continue for many years to come.

But it brings me to the fact that I was looking for a merchant to send people to from my Euro 2008 site when I talk about traveling to away matches for the home nations. Would this guy say that is right? OR should I scrap my site because he doesn't think it's right?

Anyway - can anyone recommend an alternative to "Cheap Flights"?

Yahoo! Search Marketing Rip Off!

I stopped my own personal ppc advertising on Yahoo! Search Marketing as I didn't find it effective as Adwords as I had limited time to optimise it.

Now apparently I had ONE click that cost 5p last month so they're charging me and additional £19.95 in "minimum click charges". If I didn't have any clicks they wouldn't charge me a thing!

What a fecking rip-off! I've now made sure all my accounts are turned off and will probably never use them again. And all my client stuff will be reduced to the absolute minumum!

Where's James when you need him? Mate can you set up a Unfair PPC Charges site?

Censorship 2.0 - The Facebook / BNP Controversy

I hate censorship. I believe that adult and youths generally have the ability to differentiate between what is wrong and what is right.

What also pee's me off is companies getting on their moral high-horse and try and dictate what we think is socially acceptable!

That brings me to Facebook and companies like Vodafone, Pipex, Pru Health who have fallen out because Facebook is a microcosm of society. And part of that Society is the BNP.

In this fairly democratic nation we all have differing view points. I have friends of all colours and creeds, of different political opinion and religion. I never feel that people should be castigated for having a view point and forming a party to put that message across.

It gets to a stage now where people are frowned upon for displaying any degree of patriotism as they are seen to be racists. I don't agree with the BNP's stance one iota, but that does not give any company the excuse to try and come across as morally superior and stop advertising a website that has a page that is about a democratically, constitutionally and legally controlled Political Party.

If these companies are right to stop advertising, then shouldn't eBay stop the affiliate bidding on "British National Party" and appearing on Squidoo? Quick, eBay, get on the band wagon! It's getting away from you!

With all this Web 2.0 stuff companies will have to set up whole departments checking to see if their brand is present on sites with objectionable content. Users are generating content at a rate that companies will not be able to keep up with. But that's what you get with "run of site" ads.

The legal interaction between of Web 2.0 sites, their trademarks, and brand reputation will create headaches for all concerned for many years to come!

It just takes a bit of commonsense to realise that consumers understand that just because an advert is on a page, that company doesn't necessarily endorse the message on it.

Read More:

Vodafone pulls Facebook ads
Register

Ads pulled from BNP on Facebook
BBC News

BNP turns firms off Facebook adverts
Telegraph.co.uk

Firms pull Facebook ads after link with BNP material
Guardian Unlimited

Facebook advertisers pull out over BNP link
Telegraph.co.uk

BNP causes Facebook ad headache
Tech

Vodafone, First Direct pull Facebook adverts
Pocket-lint.co.uk

Monetising Facebook Easily

For those that wondered how affiliates could monetise your Facebook profile then you can now with the HTML Box application created by Chris Ridenour and Chris Lamping - it allows you to “display text, video, music, pictures and more with minimal HTML knowledge.”

I'm going to have a play with it and will give my thoughts later - anyone got any thoughts?

Buzz / Viral Marketing Guide

Affiliates have started to think outside of the box. Successful affiliates are thinking so far out of the box they're on another planet!

Buzz / Viral marketing may still be on the edge or on the cardboard of that box, many affiliates think viral but there are still some that stick to the Shopping portal with the odd newsletter when they can be bothered.

Dean Hunt has a very useful guide to Buzz / Viral Marketjavascript:void(0)
Publish Posting that any affiliate should read.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three