Guaranteed Results Public Relations - Paid On Results For The PR Industry

As many of you know, I consult for Pazang. So I'm sure many of you would be interested to know that Guaranteed PR has reached the North West.

There are a couple of other companies that offer "Guaranteed PR" but they would do it as a % of rate card. So if they managed to get you a double spread in the Sun, which to advertise would cost £15k, you may be expected to pay £3k.

The way Pazang are offering Guaranteed PR is to work with you to create a target media list, corporate objectives, key messages and costings. Then if we don't secure those key messages in the specified publications then you don't pay.

So we're all evangelising affiliate marketing as being the case where you only "pay on results" and there are some networks that charge no over-ride, or monthly fee - now there is truly accountable public relations on offer.

More information here.

Crowded House Gig Review - Manchester

And why not? It's amazing how concerts can really make the memories flood back. But last night me and Stevo went to see Crowded House as Laura was ill.

After setting the Sat Nav stupidly to go the "shortest route" from his place, instead of the quickest. We finally got there to see the last ten minutes of the warm-up act. I'm glad we didn't get there any earlier as it was, er "different".

But tracks like "Weather With You", "Don't Dream It's Over", "Not the Girl You Think You Are" and "It's Only Natural" brought me back to those halcyon days of living with Rufus and some Kiwi's and Aussies in London playing cricket in the garden and hitting the Fosters in the evening. During those few months I did absolutely chuff all work! :-)

But back to the music. The M.E.N. wasn't full to capacity and wasn't as bumping as Depeche Mode were last year, but it was a fantastically, intimate atmosphere. And well worth going - they've got dates left in Glasgow, Nottingham, Birmingham, Cardiff, Bournemouth, Brighton, Wembley Arena and the Royal Albert Hall. You can get tickets from Ticketmaster.

SEO: The Art Of The Obvious

Isn't SEO just the art of the obvious these days?

Surely when you know how search engines work, isn't the "optimisation" part of SEO just the implication of those learnings?

I know there are hundreds of factors for working well. But for the majority of e-commerce sites, the long-tail of SEO isn't really relevant and can lead to sever consequences for getting it wrong.

In my 11 years or so doing SEO I've seen thousands of people overcomplicaing internet marketing by trying to game the serps with some ludicrous tactics knowing that they've got pretty significant brands at stake.

For me, just doing the basics right: title tags, keyword research, h tags, internal linking, great content creation and fostering referals can get you fantastic results. With the power being put firmly and squarely in the hands of publishers, there shouldn't be a need to try and swap or buy links. Create good, engaging content and you simply won't need to employ link buying agencies - publishers will link to you because of your content.

I was thinking, most of my SEO consultancy income over those 11 years, hasn't come from people that absolutely knew nothing about SEO, but those that thought they knew it and then employed me to fix their mistakes when they realised they'd tried too hard.

So my advice to anyone starting up an online business is not to over-complicate your site, keep users in mind, focus on what you want to achieve, get the absolute basics right and keep it simple. Don't give SEO consultants cash for fixing mistakes that were caused by being over-zealous.

SEO Magazine Subscription Offer

When I'm on holiday or there's chuff all on the box I'd like to listen to podcasts. But to me there' s nothing better than reading a magazine about the net. But to behonest there aren't any great ones any more. I do subscribe to Podcaster and Blogger Magazine but I feel the need to get a more indepth magazine to read when I'll get a rollocking for being "anti-social" whilst listening to podcasts.

So just being slightly vain and seeing who was mentioning me on Technorati I noticed that Matt Hopkins was mentioning the Search Marketing Standard, and thought I'd give it a go - its only $6.60 for a year - not even a cost of a pint down swanky parts of Laaaandon!

So if any of you folks want to subscibe, Matt has negotiated a 67% reduction in the usual cost (until Dec 10th). So go see what you think!

P.s. There's another reason of supporting it. $1 of every sale will be going to the Cancer Research Fund - my father died of cancer last year so I'm happy to have some of my subscription donated there!

What's Going To Be Big In 2008?

Well obviously not the Euro 2008 tournament - for us anyway. But you should have started to think a few months ago about what you'll be doing in 2008.

I know many affiliates are what I call "process affiliates". These are affiliates that monetise the process of purchasing online, i.e. cashback or price comparison or discount code sites. But there some of us that are "event affiliates". Quite logically we create sites around specific events, such as the launch of new products, sporting events or just (inter)national events.

So if you're the latter, what should you be looking out for? Well here's my list:

• African Cup of Nations
• 2008 Formula 1
• Luna eclipse
• Local Elections
• Eurovision
• Football thingy - don't know what it is :-(
• 2008 Olympics
• Open golf
• Halo Wars - I seriously need to update that site!
  
• Various Mobile Phones
• Launch of HTML5
• Windows Server 2008
• MS Office 2008 for Mac
• Various video games
• Various film launches - Harry Potter etc
• Testosterone Spray
• Laser Tv
  
• iRadio
• The 3g iPhone (Feb?)
• TAG HEUR mobiles
• PSP Phone
• USB Mobiles
• Various new technology launches (I'm not going to name them as I'm "on" some of them!)
• DAB Radios will start to get more integrated with other forms of audio output.
  
• There will be a more appropriate range of domestic robots, such as vacuum cleaners that work autonomously as well as robot lawn mowers. The prices of these will come down gradually over the next few years and apparently there will be a robot in every home my 2010!
• There will be even better MP3 Players such as the Zune Player which will hopefully reach our shores!
• There's the start of the Football World Cup qualifying in Europe!
• It's about time that Mirror TVs started to make their mark in the UK - they've been very slow here to sell any sort of quantity!
• There'll be a whole load of new environmentally friendly gadgets coming out. I just bought my brother a solar-powered mobile phone battery charger for example.
• Homnet - LG's new home networking, product-management sytem m'thingy!
• Xbox Ultimate - what looks to be an abosolutely fantastic games console with iptv and a 320gb hard drive.
• Wowee Robots - there are going to be a massive selection of toy robots out this year. 2007 was a bit light in the selection, but Wowwee have created 6 robots to be launched in 2008. They're launching robot toys like the Rovio and Femisapien that will rock your world!
• I'm going to try and get my cheap Christmas presents online as well. I did ok with a Valentines one, but I'm going to see if I can beat my Easter eggs site for traffic. With such a competitive market its not going to be easy!!
• Holidays in Cuba are going to be huge - you may say that there'll be a decline in foreign holiday. But I think people will be looking for something different!
• 
  

You'll have to hunt around for the niche products that are launching - but the effort is nearly always rewarded with very nice returns if you can spot the hot products early enough!

High Street Retailers Over Take Pure Online Retailers

Hitwise has put together some interesting stats on the presence of the online versions of bricks and mortar brands against the pure-play internet ventures. And their analysis makes interesting reading.

These statistics show that 51.1% of visits during October where to the high-street brands online (i.e. Argos, M&S and Next) whilst 48.9% were to the internet-online operations such as Amazon, Dell and ASOS.

Hitwise's view is that there is a seed-change in how consumers buy online. Last year the relative share of traffic was the other way around during the pre-Christmas period. My view is that there have been significant levels of ad spend by these large brands - you see adverts for M&S, John Lewis etc everywhere. Whilst ad-spend for pure-play has been less significant.

I don't necessarily see that there is a significant change in how consumers naturally perceive the two types of retailers, I just think that the ability to spend millions offline on seasonal advertising has won the day.

They also say that Search engines are the largest source of traffic for pure-play concerns, but not in the January and Christmas sales period. They don't say where this traffic comes from, but I'd suspect email marketing and affiliate "discount code" sites.

But looking at search traffic more closely they show that 37.1% of High-Street brands traffic came from search engines, whilst that was only 30.4% from pure-play. I'd hate to think how much of that 37.1% came from closed group brand bidding :-(. Millions upon millions wasted.

But we shouldn't forget email marketing. It's something I've got more involved with this year. According to Hitwise 5% of visits to shopping sites came from email accounts. Whilst CheetahMail says that an average of £85 per person is spent at Christmas as a result of email marketing.

Here's the chart:

Why I Support The IAB And The Affiliate Marketing Council

Affiliate blogs are great these days, we can fully vent our frustrations about what we see as less than clever actions of networks and merchants. Occasionally we point out less than ethical actions of our fellow affiliates. But sometimes our views, albeit well thought out, often don't change anything.

After meeting a network and having a good two-hour chat about the range of issues including what technological solutions affiliates seek, I realised that this sort of dialogue should be a more frequent occurrence.

At the A4uExpo I was the only affiliate that chose to attend the Affiliate Marketing Council meeting of the IAB. Which was highly disappointing. Affiliates tend to criticise merchants and networks for being flippant about the industry and taking their over-ride for granted. But it appeared, then, that it was us affiliates that were more concerned with "networking" rather than trying to shape the industry and partaking in a real-life forum to vent our concerns.

Perhaps its difficult for affiliates to break out of their unstructured existence to attend meetings? Perhaps many affiliates feel they don't have anything to gain from giving a modicum of time and thought?

The issue for me is that without using the resources of the IAB, we'll never be able to agree, implement and monitor a set of minimum standards from those that we often criticise with apparent ease and passion.

We have seen it so many times in recent weeks that merchants don't act with common decency to their affiliates, let alone within the terms and conditions of their contracts with the networks. Merchants also "come to market" with a less than satisfactory understanding of how the affiliate process works and what are generally considered to be "best practices". The IAB and the council, I believe, would be best suited to communicate these agreed standards as I believe thousands of affiliates in isolation could never achieve what educated affiliates, merchants and networks could achieve collectively.

So what am I asking? Well, that you don't dismiss out-of-hand the IAB and at least entertain the idea that the Affiliate Marketing Council is there to make the industry less stressful and a more profitable industry for us all.

If you're a member of the A4U Forum, feel free to contribute now. You may like to start asking "what does the IAB do?" or "how can I contribute to the Affiliate Marketing Council?"

Last Click Commissions - Still Relevant in 2007 / 2008?

I was out and about this week talking to a network and some merchants and it got me thinking about whether having the "last click" being the one that determines who gets the affiliate sale.

Is it still relevant today when you consider there are many marketing channels that merchants typically engage.

Consider this scenario:

User reads in press about product XYZ

User searches in Google for "product XYZ"

User finds an affiliate blog entry giving details of the pro's and con's of that product with a nice little video and a list of merchants that offer the "cheapest deals for product XYZ".

User clicks on the affiliate link for Merchant "ABC"

User doesn't buy straight away but signs up for merchant's newsletter

Next day they get an email from Merchant ABC with "Best Christmas Deals for XYZ-type products".

User clicks on link and refines the exact product they want

User doesn't buy straight away as they want to have a think

User decides now is the type to buy

User searches in Google for "Merchant ABC"

Merchant ABC uses Dart tracking to do their inhouse ppc.

User buys 2 Product XYZ

Who should get the "sale"?

Is it the affiliate that first introduced the user to the merchant?

Is it the merchant's email marketing team that gets a conversion for their stats?

Is it the merchant's SEM agency that get's the conversion?

Should the merchant cost that sale to the affiliate/email/SEM channel?

Should the merchant de-dupe the affiliate sale because they actually got the sale themselves?

If the brand bidding was actually conducted by an affiliate should there be a way of compensating both affiliates - the one that educated and introduced the user to the merchant or the last click affiliate that was there at the right time?

Also do you think more and more merchants will start de-duping across the various marketing channels and what impact do you think that will have on the affiliate industry?

The Economics of 0% Commissions, Brand Bidding And The Long Tail

I'm sorry Kieron, but I'm going to do a post on the implications of brand bidding and in particular closed groups (again). Look away now if you don't want to see the results!

It struck me this morning that many merchants are paying 0% commissions on Wii consoles because they don't make sufficient margin and they already have significant levels of demand that they don't feel the need to effectively pay for the sales.

So let's look at the first part (not sufficient margins). The view of economists is that the price of a good or service will rise until supply meets demand. We have seen this with the Wii Console. A the outset the prices were basically £179.99. You would get a few mavericks that would cut the cost. But effectively there was no need for merchants to do this as they'd sell at that rate.

No the supply of the Wii's is even more limited and hence the price has risen. Game now sell it at £204.99 (increase of £25); Sendit £179.89 (no change); Amazon New Used from £325 (increase £146); PC World £1000 (increase of £820.01); GameSeek £179.99 (no increase);

Without an increase in the wholesale cost of the consoles, surely Game will be making at least £30 - £35 per sale when they do get them?

But this isn't the main point of this post. What I wanted to raise was that the issue surrounding the interaction of demand and supply with commission rates in the console sector is analogous with that of impact of merchants allowing brand name bidding, in closed groups or otherwise.

Taking the notion of "we're getting those sales anyway, why should we pay for them", can that not only apply to brand bidding?

For big brands that have got their own SEO right then surely why the hell do you need to pay £xx,xxx's or even £xxx,xxx a month when you don't have to?

Here's a list of some the sites that have been (are) bidding on the Sky brand in the recent past:

Sky.com/SaveSky.com
sky.digital-tv.co.uk
Sky.selectdigitaltv.co.uk
sky.4-digital.co.uk
Sky.TV-offer.co.uk (1163 keywords.txt - not necessarily an accurate list)
sky.4-digital.co.uk

If the logic is that sky is bidding on 2350 keywords (which it looks like they are) and they don't think they're missing out on some so they want to open it up to others to reach the long tail of their brand, why limit it to five other affiliates. Who's to say they have the monopoly on SEM intellect?

These affiliates use Hitwise, other public tools and proprietary software to develop and manage their keyword list and bids. Why can't it be done in house? I know Traffic Broker has spent over 1000 hours developing their software, but what advantages are there for the merchant?

Can you see where I'm going with this? If you take the information that Pete of AF gave that in some cases as much as 75% of content affiliate cookies are being over-written by brand name bidding affiliates then it takes you that bit closer to the thoughts I'd like you to at least entertain.

So far:

Merchants don't want to pay for traffic they'll already otherwise get;
Brand name bidding can be an advantage if the internal intellect isn't there;

What I'm now going to say is ...

If there are a huge army of affiliates creating content and doing research about your company, the products you offer and the industry you work in; would it be in your best, long-term, interests to allow 75% of their hard work to be stolen because you don't want to manage your SEM campaign to its fullest extent internally?

My view is thus: If you want to conduct a brand-name-bidding strategy then don't use the affiliate channel. Don't overwrite affiliate cookies and reward all the hard work that content affiliates put in eulogising your company and products.

It's unfortunate that content affiliates inform and educate your customers one step before the brand name bidders step in with their own cookies having simply bid on your brand (+ generics) when the consumer was ALREADY GOING TO BUY FROM YOU!

So I'd implore every merchant that currently allows brand name bidding to work out the exact average cost per sale it incurs and how much a month brand name bidding costs you in commissions and network over-ride.

From this you'll be able to establish if you want to prevent people bidding on your brand, if you want to do it internally or if you'd want an agency to do that doesn't overwrite the cookies of the affiliates that informed and encouraged that customer to buy from you!

But what has this got to do with the long tail? Well 1% of your affiliates may be generating 30%-40% of your sales - but what a bout the other 99% of your affiliates that may be collectively driving 60%-70% but in the odd sale here and there. How would you feel if they all started to say "don't buy from Sky (just for argument sake) they're crap, they take your money, give you rubbish service and are expensive" - how would that effect sales?

Meet The Network: Altogether Ads

Everything you wanted to know about Altogether Ads but were afraid to ask:

Website : http://www.altogetherads.com
Telephone : 0207 309 5751

What's the history of Altogether Ads?

Altogether Ads is a product of Altogether Digital – a full service digital agency based in Central London. Altogether was formed about 6 months ago as part of a merger between Meme London, Eyefall & DC Interact and has around 85 members of staff. We're part of a bigger marketing group so there are around 450 people that wander around the office every day.

Altogether Ads came in existence after we hit our heads against the wall almost daily at the charges that some of the networks try and bestow upon merchants – I've said it time and time again but it doesn't cost £5k to setup a campaign on a network. We decided to launch the network primarily as a placeholder for our managed campaigns but have since opened it out as a tracking only solution (with no setup or monthly fees).

Whilst there are now a fair few amount of networks in the UK we still feel there is a place for us to continue to deliver a high level of service and try and help continue develop the industry and launch some great offers.

The network launched at the A4UExpo at the end of October and early signs are good – we've had hundreds of affiliates sign up, sales coming through & some great feedback from the people that we work with.

What sets Alltogether Ads apart from the other networks?

I think it's our transparency. We're quite clear that as an agency we offer two services; a consultancy service and a network and there are big differences between them – some other networks are not so clear in their offering and are still trying to work out if they are a tracking provider or an online marketing agency. Aside from this we're trying to do some good things for affiliates – we're putting £30k of our own funds into giving away a Mazda RX8 and have some great plans for future incentives of a similar nature. All of us here at Altogether have been involved in online marketing / affiliate marketing for some time & have a huge passion about the industry which I think is extremely important – we live and breath this stuff and it's not a 9-5 role.

What are your USP's?

I think I've mentioned them already but from the Merchant point of view it's a bit of a no brainier – we work on a performance only basis just like our affiliates.

For affiliates it's not necessarily a USP but we're trying to be a network that doesn't just put up with merchants changing the rules all the time, lowering their commissions at busy periods or turning programs off after running out of budget! We're building a good team of passionate staff and looking forward to the prospect of growing our network into one that affiliates will enjoy working with.

Meet The Team:

Name: James Little Position In Company: Affiliate Director What is your job role? Pretty much everything from new business through to account management and team development. I like to think I'm the glue that keeps it all in place What's your perfect holiday? Barbados with Affiliate Future, but that's more like work... I'm looking forward to taking some time off next year for a few weeks to spend with the family (one wife and two kids). If you could be a Super Hero, which would you be and why? I always wanted to be a rock star, and am currently growing my hair to try and help in this development, so some form of superhero rockstar would be good! What's your favourite website? CPFC.org (I'm a Palace fan, potentially one of the only ones in affiliate marketing!)
Name: Renee Williams Position In Company: Online Marketing Executive What is your job role? Besides being Chief Tea/Coffee maker? Well, I manage the day to day running of our campaigns, reporting, accounts, maintain merchant and affiliate relationships, research, bringing on campaigns, is there anything I don't do? What's your perfect holiday? Without a doubt - Ibiza. If you could be a Super Hero, which would you be and why? I already am a superhero (Ed: Renee didn't say why, but I supose that's a superhero's perogative!) What's your favourite website? I have only used it once or twice, but I think Facebook takes the cake.
Name: Kenneth Cheung (on the left) Position In Company: Online Marketing Executive - Affiliate team What is your job role? Affiliate Management, campaign optimisation, project work optimising websites. What's your perfect holiday? Skiing in France, or Beach in the Maldives, s long as there's wireless internet, can't stay away from the computer and I love what I do. :) If you could be a Super Hero, which would you be and why? Steve Jobs - Apple is the future. The chance to make computers cool, sexy and spread my love for technology means I can really make a difference, imagine being able to contribute to society and influence so many people. What's your favourite website? Found this one this morning and I thought it was really cool: We Feel Fine

Google Are So Great At Spotting Duplication - Not!

Doing a search for "pimpmybin" (don't ask) I got slightly confused with the top two results - surely they're the same content ???

Wheelie Bin Art - Stylish Wheelie Bin Stickers, NEW fun designs ...
They are colourful, FUN and celebrate your individuality. Wheelie bins will never be thought of as dull and boring again!. Design and supply of ART graphics ...www.wheelie-bin-art.co.uk/ - 13k -

Our site has recently been redesigned, the page you've requested ...
error page. Our site has recently been redesigned, the page you've requested is either under construction, or no longer exists. ...www.pimpmybin.co.uk/bargain_bin.asp - 5k

Whilst I stress over duplicate content and keeping visitors in the site as long as possible, others can have duplicate sites and get away with it. Perhaps I better move away from highly competitive industries and move on to "wheelie bin art" ;-)

I do feel compelled to buy some now I've criticised them though!

Got A Page In Google In TWO MINUTES

I'm having a "love Google" day! I just posted on one of my sites using Firefox and using IE to collate and research content. That browser was stalling but I didn't save the page as a bookmark. So I'd thought I'd search for if using some information that I'd placed on my site.

There was only one result for that queery and that was the page I'd only just published! A full TWO MINUTES earlier! Like how can Google crawl and index a page in two minutes - bloody hell!



For any Iron Maiden fans out there - I should have titled the post "Two Minutes To Index .. woohoo".

Map Of UK Affiliate Networks & Agencies

Who says that Affiliate Networks aren't based in London? The vast majority of them are based with a couple of square miles of the great city:


View Larger Map

I've started to add agencies on there too which should hopefully broaden it out with Existem (in my beloved Plymouth) and R.O. Eye.

If I've missed out your agency or network could you email me your contact details and a 62*62px logo. Also if you would like your logo updated then just send one over that's that size.

I hope you find the map useful.

I do love this Google Map tool (I know its not new). I used it to create a map of Euro 2008 stadia on my Euro 2008 site which I hope will be useful if we qualify. And there's so many uses even if you don't have the ability to use the API tool. If you haven't tried it then just go ahead to Google Maps and click on My Maps.

Update: 26/11/07
Just added three new networks & Agencies - Affiliator (London), Brilliant Media (Leeds, Manchester and soon Birminham) and R.O. Eye (Manchester).

Wii Wars - It's Only A Game To Some, But Livelihoods To Others

I blogged months ago about my experiences with HMV and pre-orders of the Wii Console. I was resonsible for at least 1,500 sales of the consoles for various different merchants before I stopped last December. I was annoyed then, and I'm annoyed now!

Demand is high and traffic to Wii retailers is also high. But for Game (who I've respected for a while)to come out with this email is just takes the biscuit!

As I'm sure you are aware, the Nintendo Wii is in huge demand this Christmas. The volume of traffic being driven to our site via our Wii affiliates has been staggering and has put the site under incredible pressure. It is imperative that we maintain the stability of our site and as a result we have decided to pause affiliate activity on all Wii hardware sales. This is not a long term solution and will look to reactivate the commission payments as soon as we can.

To confirm how this will work, as of today Game will no longer batch back confirmed commissions of the Nintendo Wii to either TradeDoubler or Buy.at. With respect to this we ask that you discontinue your promotions of the Wii until we are able to reinstate the commissions.

Just tell the truth! You don't need affiliates to drive Wii sales as you're getting enquiries already! No-one else has much stock so you're not loosing customers so why should you be paying affiliates to drive traffic promoting Wii's when the user will buy games anyway? To blame it on your servers is utter rubbish!

If your servers can't cope sack your IT department, don't slap the people that drive your sales in the face. As we won't come back!

If you look at Alexa (ok so it's not totally accurate) you're getting as much traffic this year as last. You had stock then so were happy for the customers, but now you don't need us any more!

PPC Tip Of The Week: Analyse Your Keywords Before Removing Them

This tip is more for e-commerce site owners rather than affiliates, but it's one that I'm sure many would find interesting.

If you've got a whole load of keywords in AdWords and you've also use Analytics there's some nifty keyword refinement you can do by exporting your list of keywords.

In Analytics go to Traffic Sources > Search Engines > Google > Paid (just above the list). The export the data to csv then you'll get a whole host of information about how long people stayed on your site, how many pages they visited, what the bounce rate was, and your goal conversion rates.

With many keywords the first thing you'd want to do is remove your most irrelevant keywords straight away. With most sites there's a funnel that visitors have to go down to transact or conduct a lead. So ...

Sort the "Bounce Rate column" in descending order. Any keywords that have a value of 1 review to see if you have enough data to allow you to draw a reasonable conclusion, if you have mark them for a negative match. Others will just stand out with only just one visit - so do the same to them.

A tip to the tip: Use Excel's Auto filtering so you can show only keywords that have had more than 20 visitors that period, for example, and has a bounce rate of 80% or greater - but choose your own numbers.

You can also organise by the average time the user spends on your site (in seconds). Again select a minimum here and negative match or remove keywords that don't have the required associated length of time on the site.

From this you can also see if there are some keywords that make people stay on the site for a long time, but don't actually convert. This may indicate that they feel the site is relevant, but just can't find the relevant information or product. From this you could assume that your keyword isn't relevant, you're using the wrong landing page, there's some extra information that the user requires before making a purchase (i.e. postage info) but can't find and then abandons because of it.

This can also be assumed by looking at the Pages/Visit information. Your site may have a lot of information per page so the number of pages viewed may be more relevant than the time spent - it's your call. But make sure you do analyse this data.

It's also important to compare the length of time and average page visit numbers between paid and non-paid search sources. This may allow you to compare your SEO and SEM campaign effectiveness.

The reason that I go into this much detail is that some keywords may have such a low volume of traffic that its dangerous to look at a week's data and assume you can make an accurate conclusion about removing keywords.

If there is little data, being able to see how close those users got to transacting should give you an indication if that keyword is likely to convert in the future.

So my PPC tip of the week is: Analyse keywords thoroughly before removing them or reducing bids.

What Place For Recruitment / Job Site Affiliate Programmes

I've been chatting to a cross-industry job site who may be inclined to run an affiliate programme next year. I know that many affiliates haven't had much success with job site affiliate programmes in the past. But with blogging and more niche affiliate sites do you think there is a place for it in this day and age?

I remember TotalJobs messed their programme around going from CPC then CPA with possible tracking issues (on BeFree). There is also Workthing and Jobsite paying for advertiser leads.

For job seekers I'd imagine that a programme that offers a CPA rate would be more attractive to the job site (obviously lower risk) but a CPC deal would be preferential to affiliates (lower risk to them too).

Without knowing conversion rates just yet, would affiliates be inclined to promote a job site targeting job seekers?

Affiliate Tip Of The Week: Don't Try and Do Too Much At Once

Panic Stations! Just over a year ago I went through a mad phase of buying loads of domains and starting a few blogs around product niches! Well I thought it was only a few - but now I realise that it's nearly 70!

My plan was to leave a few hanging around, getting old and then when the time is right I'l monetise them and start to work hard on them. The only problem is that around 15 of them have started to get some fairly decent and now it's time to add some good content and some nice affili links.

The only problem is that I just don't have time to work on them now that Google has started to like some of them. So I'm going through my list of domains that having been in Google a while and thinking about leasing them out or in certain circumstances "giving". I'd rather someone made some decent cash out of them rather than sitting there stagnating!

So if anyone wants to drop me a line with what market you're interested in then I'll see what I've got.

p.s. I've just "given away" activity-gift.co.uk - I can only just manage to associate myself with it! Damn what a crap site!

Feature: How To Set Up An Ecommerce Business #1

I'm helping a friend/client set up an ecommerce site. So every week I'm going to profile the "ins and outs", the pitfalls and learning's that I've come across during those seven days.

The story so far:
The person used to do the PR for Crystal Clear Boxes, which lead to some very high-profile people buying from the site. From this a strong relationship was built up with the site owner, who in time, decided that he'd wish to focus on the fulfillment rather than the marketing side of the business.

This is where I come in. It was agreed that myself and a Tanya Arturi would create a site (ok manage the creation of the site) and market it using my SEO, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Project Management skills, whilst Tanya would effectively fund it and manage the PR and traditional marketing.

We've come up with a domain name (Luxury Shoe Boxes) and I have knocked up a quick (very quick, crappy holding page) just to let it age in Google whilst we spend our time working on the business plan and spec'ing the site's features.

When taking over a site or e-commerce business it is important to have a thorough discussion about technology platforms, sales rates, profitability, fulfillment - basically every single feature of the business.

The major outcome of this meeting was that the current site uses Mamut to manage the fulfillment, stock levels etc etc. The issue we have now is developing a site that just works as a front end and integrates into their systems on a Windows box. My preference is Linux gear so we're going with that. The developers I've chosen are my trusty friends at Hallnet. So that's the stage we're at.

The tasks we've got are:

1) Finalising the pricing
2) Establishing the brand features
3) Listing the site features
4) What marketing we'll need to do
5) How much it's all going to cost
6) How long it'll take
7) What resources we'll need
8) Is it still worth it?

So basically, we've just moved past the concept stage and just getting the very basics done.

I'll be aiming to use social media as much as I can and I'll be noting all the successes and failures we have - so I hope you guys will find it interesting (and give some ideas if we're missing a trick)!

Who Needs An iPhone When You Can Have Google Android?

Google's new mobile software solution, called Android, looks so cool! I know it came out when I was on my jollies, but Google has created a video to explain it:

Back From My Jollies And Raring To Go

I'm now back from my week of sun and Chicken Piri Piri and was itching to get on with some work for the past 2/3 days. I make the mistake of taking audio books on my iPod and listen to them on the beach as well as check over stats between the sun going down and the restaurants opening. So in that time I've crystallised some new strategies using social media and thinking about the long tail, and tails within tails (you'll have to get the book!).

I also got part-way through a book called Wikinomics. Its all about how mass-collaboration changes everything (offline and on).

It's a pain in the backside sometimes when you go away purposely trying to keep away from the PC as much as you can but see sites that take off and you know you have to add new content to keep Google happy but you can hear the waves crashing on to the beach in the near distance. But thankfully, the break has done me a power of good and will be slogging my guts out the next 6 weeks for the Christmas sales whilst getting my income tax done and working on my Easter and Valentines sites - it never chuffing ends :D

So what have I missed?

P.S. If anyone is intersted, I stayed at the Prestana Alvor Praia.

Apple iPhone Links on o2

Is it me or are the links for o2 buggered? I´m on holiday, soaking up the sun in this very nice hotel in Portugal and I´d thought I´d quickly log in and look at some traffic stats. It was nice to see that my iPhone deals site that I got bored with very quickly is getting some very good traffic for people in the buying phase of iPhone searches but the bloody links to shop.o2.co.uk aren´t working - grrr!!!

Anyone want to drop me a line when they´re working again and I´ll get my sorry backside off the beach and on to the pc to get the site sorted.

P.s. my tan´s looking good ;-)

Spoken to Wawick and its working fine over there. They must be blocking foreign traffic then. Good to know.

Are there any other merchants blocking foreign ip´s?

No I Won't Sell Links, Sponsored Reviews Or Pay Per Post

I did get a polite email off someone wanting to buy some text links on this site - so I can't complain about the method of approach. But I'd thought I'd let everyone know that I don't offer advertising on this site (other than the occassional bit of Adsense or affiliate offering).

The reason I do this is not me being big-headed. I think people read this blog for my unfettered opinion and to see if my views can help their affiliate business.

I see others plastering their blogs with advertising, pay per posts and dropping paid links all over the place and I feel that the blog owner is taking their readers for granted - you even say treating their readers like mugs.

If you take Fraser's blog, however, I feel he get's it right. I know he's concerned about annoying his readers so keeps the advertising to a minimum. My view is Fraser offers some fantastsic information and puts in a lot of hard work with his podcasts that he should really be renumerated for his time and effort.

There's another reason too. We all know that if people try and buy links to game the Google system, and not purely as tradtional media buys, then we'll both suffer the consequences. This blog may be no more than a sounding board or vent for my frustrations, but why should I get risk getting excluded for a few extra quid?

So no buying or selling links for me, no pay per posts and paid reviews.

p.s. how much cash am I missing out on ;-)

Some posts about buying / selling / building links:

Google: Don't Worry About Links Sales - Just Get The Basics Right
DMOZ Found To Be "Selling" Links?
Selling Links? You've Gotta Label Them as Such
Reporting Paid Links To Google
Why Kieron Has Got His Blog Marketing Strategy So Wrong
Google to Hit "Hidden Links" Sites Harder
SEO Tip Of The Week: Advanced Link Building

A Look Back at October

Well October 2007 is surely going down as one of my most manic ever! Social media, SEO, affiliate marketing and consultancy took over my life. I've still got loads of emails and Facebook messages to respond to - for that I'm sorry!!

I started the month by creating my "Guide to affiliate marketing" which was just a summary of my views of the industry and to act as a hub for my posts on the topic.

I then blogged about the new search marketing tool from Compete (I Interviewed one of their guys here). I still like it but have added other tools to my affiliate marketing armoury and then asked what affiliate marketing would be like in 5 years? I'm still of the view that the gold rush is over and we're now going through a phase of consolidation with a greater emphasis being placed on investing in technology and content.

I also called into question the lack of PR on some of DMOZ's pages and wondered if they had some pages triggering a Google spam-switch.

One of the things that I'm hot on at the moment is the addition of interactive content to webpages to not only convert traffic, but also keep visitors in their site longer to aid their Google rankings.

I also spent a Sunday morning on my PC fleshing out my social media presentation - I hope you found it useful.

There was a big debate about the impact of brand bidding and how you get into a closed brand bidding group - many ignored me at the A4U Expo because I brought the topic up - others were grateful!

I also used another tool to look at the range of keywords from a selection of mobile phone merchants and affiliates - I thought it was interesting!

Back on the social scene, I posted about the possible impact of social shopping - it didn't apparently excite others as much as it excited me!

I also made a post that was picked up by Search Engine Land and was acted upon by the Google Analytics team when I suggested some improvements to Google Analytics. Everyday I delve in there, I find more useful stuff - thanks!

There was also the interesting move by Google to monetise YouTube videos with embedded Adsense - good move!

I also created by guide to seo - which I hope some felt was useful and goes well with my view that social media should be / is influencing the Google SERPS.

The was also a post about trying to game the Google SERPS by running competitions just to get more PR - I still find it annoying that people would rather come up with a competition to get more page rank by saying that people that link to you could win a prize instead of actually writing good content and people willfully link to you! And I wasn't the only one with these views!

Why Don't Companies Think Things Through Properly?

I got an email from ThompsonFly for my trip to Portugal saying the flight was now a fair bit earlier. I phone up the Parking at Coventry Airport people and fine, fantastic they changed my parking details there and then (6pm) and I get an email instantly with my new details.

But, Hertz, oh no. Nothing could be that simple. I had to ammend the booking details. To pick the motor up earlier of course. But because I've got a new credit card (I lost the old one - but would be the same if it expired) I couldn't amend the times. I was met with the message "CANNOT CHANGE METHOD OF PAYMENT - MUST CHANGE REQUEST OR CANCEL [DE682]". Don't they realise that if they've booked a month ago that they may not have the same credit card?

Bollocks to them. I'll turn up two hours earlier and if they don't like it they can munch on my fist! Grrr!

Why don't big companies really think through the way they do business online?

Even now with my rescheduled flights, there's a small print on the email saying I have to click a link on the bottom of it to confirm the new details. If I didn't spot it I'm sure I wouldn't be allowed on! Any usability companies out there want to give them a call??

Reporting Paid Links To Google

If you ever wanted to report a paid link to Google, but didn't know how - you can easily as they've added a nice form to inform them of a guideline flounderer! oooh where do I start?

Luckily enough I've never bought or sold links, but of course I have treaded that very thin line, and occassionaly camped on the other side, but hey we all make "mistakes"!

But it would be interesting to know how big a problem they feel it is to actually create a form for it!!

Beauty Icon

This is a little test. I've noticed this blog appears in the serps for a term that only appears once as a link on a page that is deep within the site - and to further confuse things, the homepage appears, not the page with the link on.

Even worse, the link is to a site I own that isn't even in Google, although it has only been live a week or so.

So I'm going to test the phrase "beauty icon" - totally unrelated to the theme of this blog and one with 12,800,000 other pages in Google that contain the phrase. Let's see what happens!

All I'm going to do is link to this page from the homepage and see how Google's theming works.

Other beauty icon sites include:

Beauty Icon Archive on Style.com
beauty icon reese witherspoon
Style icons, fashion icons, beauty icons

The thing is, its important to know how your site will be ranked if you comment about something you don't necessarily want to appear for.

Top Ten No More - You've Now Got To Be Top Seven

Google is getting more interesting by the day and are now encouraging people to buy links to get listed top of the first page - but for a different reason.

Just doing some client ranking analysis on their very new site, I noticed that you now have to be top 7 to be on the front page and not top ten.

The cause of this assertion is that it appears that more and more space is being taken up with local search results.

Just take a look for the search "mortgages the wirral". You get even more space for the local results and only 7 listings for natural results. I'm sure this has changed recently. Wasn't the local box smaller above 10 natural listings???



But then you choose another location, say "mortgages ellesmere port" you get the full 10 listings. I'd be interested to see what the defining factor of inserting the local listings are.

I wonder what other pressures will the professional SEO'ers find themselves under next year? Would we have to buy links to get our clients featured in the local listings?

For my client to be featured in the local listings for mortgage searches they'll have to register with Unbiased.co.uk for:

Annual £249 + VAT (to cover 12 months from payment)
Monthly £24 + VAT (payable each month for 12 months)

If you look at other sites that have their information crawled, I'm sure you have to pay to be included in those(?) Is Google now encouraging people to buy links?

Also, with link building in the mortgage industry being so damn competitive I've had to try and find other ways. I've created a Squidoo lense about "Mortgages in Ellesmere Port" and also a Flickr set. I've now started a wet paint page on them too!