Dodgy Affiliates Out There: PPC On Iwoot

There are some fecking dodgy affiliates out there.

One thing that annoys me is that affiliates bid on keywords with merchants but know they're not good enough to write compelling adcopy to beat the merchant or other affiliates so they have to resort to buying a domain name for the display url and then linking straight to the merchant with the affili link - they don't even use a tracker on the domain to source keywords to filter or refine their campaign!

Google implemented this "one advert" per site for a reason - to allow there to be choice for consumers - not to be tricked into clicking on an advert because they thought it was a different site, only to be sent to the wrong one!

Case in point:




The link actually goes to:

http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php%3Fawinmid%3D1202%26
awinaffid%3D75157%26clickref%3Dpleo5%26p%3Dhttp://www
.iwantoneofthose.com/pleo/index.html

So Sam Applegate could you please sort your AdWords out please - and that goes for anyone else.

My Christmas Winners at Affiliate Window

Just giving a running through my epc's and conversion rates for my Affiliate Window merchants. Whilst many sales are to be validated by Findmeagift as most were pre-orders, Dixons still have some of my toy sales at 0% for some reason and I still have many thousands of sales in pendings, I thought it'd be good to give an overview of what worked for me AWin-wise this Christmas. I'll update at the end of January for a more accurate view - especially as I'm waiting for Dixons to sort themselves out and Findmeagift to despatch some product.

BTW - I'd like to say that about 98% of the earnings were from SEO / Social Media.

At the moment my Christmas winners:

Highest EPC: Hamleys
Highest Volume Sales (£) Gadgetshop

Here's the data:

My Affiliate Window Winners

Merchant	EPC (£)	Conv %
Extreme Pie	0.25	6.81
Getting Personal	0.50	6.67
Buyagift	0.41	6.67
Hamleys	0.53	4.55
Party Delights	0.12	3.85
PC World	0.23	3.77
Be Direct	0.14	3.57
John Lewis	0.25	3.57
Dress-for-Less	0.15	3.38
Currys	0.12	3.33
GadgetShop	0.48	3.30
BeautySlueth	0.12	1.67
Dixons*	0.02	1.61
Cadbury Gifts Direct	0.01	1.35
Boys Stuff	0.12	1.28
Toys R Us	0.02	1.28
Advanced MP3 Players	0.06	1.22
Woolworths	0.04	1.14
... Cont'd
* My Dixons Toys sales came out as 0%
** Most of My Findmeagift sales have been moved to manual validation.

So what's worked for you?

What I Want For Christmas ...

I'd like my Dixons Pleo sales (totalling 25) to attract the correct 2.5% commission instead of being set at 0%!

I'd like my visitors to stop phoning up merchants to order as its happened so many times the last couple of months (the visitors told me).

I'd like merchants to have stock when they've put "in stock" on their site when they actually mean "we hope to have stock!"

I'd like large merchants to actually check that tracking is working and not just fob me off.

I'd like independent merchants to think about building long-term relationships rather than try and make the most in a short period of time by removing probably valid sales.

I'd like merchants and agencies to contribute more - just like Paul Wright did by letting my users know how long Hamleys expected to have the Pleo in stock.

I'd like merchants to offer decent commissions - even if this means you've got to categorise them as Dixons do. I've had 0% commissions from Dixons, 2.5% from Tesco (£5.31 - why did they come out as £4-odd?), Hamleys at 5% - £12.50, Iwoot & Findmeagift 10% (£24.99). So who do you think I promoted most vigorously?

I'd like some commissions to be displayed in a standard format. I mean, if commissions are including or excluding VAT, delivery etc.

I'd like more networks, merchants, agencies to blog and provide separate RSS feeds for each type of campaign, offering, news type.

I'd like merchants to stick to their contracts and give a decent amount of notice.

I'd like more explanation about we're we've been asked to do something. Like OMG telling me I have to (on Thursday 20th December @ 21:35):

Hi Lee,

Hope you are well?

Please can you add the following links to your websites?

“Terms and Conditions”

“Privacy Policy”

“About Us”

The changes need to be carried out by the time we get back from Xmas/ New Year break

Many Thanks

Katie

I had to ask why and was told the next day (most last people's last working day of the year) that it was a requirement from Yahoo! and Kelkoo.

So I'm expected to add these pages to my 60+ sites over Christmas in time for OMG to get back from their Christmas break!! I'm sorry but Yahoo! & Kelkoo can go stuff themselves! I know its not OMG's fault - but chuffing heck! I'm sure us affiliates are seen as people with nothing else to do over Christmas and will jump to the tune of merchants and networks and update our sites with chuff-all notice whilst they return the favour without giving US any notice about commission drops or ceasations!

I'd like more networks to ask for feedback and opinion more often.

I'd like merchants to update their creatives more often. I've seen no creatives for the Pleo which is one of the biggest selling products of Christmas.

Bloody hell! I want a lot! But is it unreasonable?

Here's to a 2008 where we all work better together!

iiRobotics Affiliate Programme

A quick thanks to iiRobotics's MD (I think) for phoning me up and explaining the situation regarding commissions - they did go out of their way for paying early etc. My apologies.

Merry Christmas - Boy Was it Good!

I'm speaking about the affiliate side of Christmas! It's certainly been a bumper one for me and look forward to working on my non-Christmas sites in January. To be honest I've had enough now!

I've had one site that worked far better than I thought so I put more effort into that and thought "sod the rest!".

It was good not relying on PPC to provide most of the profits this Christmas after the shenanigans of HMV last time round! I've now cut my PPC spend to less than 1% of what it used to be and now I rely on my blogs and social media strategies to bring home the bacon (sorry Darren!).

I must admit it's nice not having to log into to Adwords first to see how much I've spent and then the networks to see how much I've earned and not be concerned about the lead time between paying for traffic and receiving the revenue from the commissions!

Here's to a great 2008, and roll on those international advents that will hopefully add some more cash to the "wedding fund" ;-)

BTW! If you've not heard it enough, here you go - Merry Christmas!

p.s. thanks James for the Prestat Chocolates and everyone else - Including Andy at Linkshare for the Christmas card - I'll make more of an effort to work with you - and thanks for the input so far!

Do You Work In the Internet Travel Industry?

Well then you'll be needing to read this fantastic review of internet marketing for travel companies - it's fantastic!

I'm just creating an online marketing strategy for a company that will be launching audio travel guides in the new year and it's giving some great background info as well as some useful pointers specific to that niche.

Great User Feedback! There are nice people out there!

I was just getting pee'd off with a subscriber that had emailed me twice saying he'd bought the product I was promoting direct from the States because of "my inflated prices" - well sunny - I don't set the prices!!

But then I got this one:

Dear Lee

Thank you so much for your email. I have pre ordered my [withheld] from gadget shop on 6th Dec so hopefully it will come!? Your web site has been fantastic and so much help. I was desperate to get one for my severely disabled son so fingers crossed.

It'll be thanks to your info if we do get it.

Sarah

How cool is that? There are some fantastic people out there!

And there have been some other ones from people saying thanks etc, asking information, and filling in the blanks if I've not found a retailer that stocks the product!

Who says social media isn't a viable proposition for affiliates?

Tell Me What The Commission Rate Is Please

I just signed up to an Independent Affiliate Programme for a small toy retailer - because I'm shifting loads of a product. I did so in a hurry as I know that in this circumstance, the more choice the better (as merchants come into and out of stock I'll have more chance of sales). But before putting them on I thought I'd check the commission rate to see where they shoud go.

Low and behold, I couldn't find it anywhere.

So if you do have an independent affiliate programme, please remember to put all the information on the site!

Using Google's Hottest Feed To Spam?

If I wasn't so white hat these days, I'd use Google's Hottest Searches feed to spam the heck out of them!

But if you do want to do things properly, its a good way to find angles on your chosen markets to create nice, content-rich content about!

Here's an example of the data you get. I've knocked this up very quickly so I haven't formatted it well:

We Don't Want Your Custom Coz We're Out Of Date

I was on CabinCrewDirect.com just (don't ask!). I actually found them via an AdWords link. I use Firefox out of choice and I think a good 10-15% of people now do the same. So I was shocked to be greeted with this page:



So they design for the bleeding-edge technology that IE4 offers! Didn't that get superseded like 4 years a go? How chuffing stupid can you get? Especially when you're ppc'ing to the site!

If any of us affiliates purposely decided to make our sites inaccessible to 10%-odd of possible users wouldn't we be sent to the funny farm by the networks and merchants?

There are some loons around even still!

The funny thing is that it does actually render perfectly fine in FF 2.0.0.11 but then redirects to that splash page - they can't even do redirects properly!

And a note to Google - please can you stop sites advertising on Adwords if their site isn't accessible to a good proportion of your users?

One To Watch: Proximic

Most of the time you'll come accross some widgets that are crap and have no useful what-so-ever. But sometimes you see some widgets that are really useful. And proximic is certainly the later.

I was looking at some news widgets to embed into my affiliate sites as an alternative to FeedDigest and found proximic on the way.

It's a widget that you can either install a toolbar (yawn) or add it to your site to connect users with related information and products. At the moment there's no way to monetise it, but it's on the way.

It's still in beta but there is so much opportunity to turn it into a revenue generation tool and a method to keep people in your site longer as they play with it.

I've used it here to allow people to find related news, books etc. I'm not interested in earning from its installation on this blog, but its a good test to see how it'll work on my others.

You have the opportunity to restrict any of the other resources it finds to your own domain which is useful to move people around your site. The Independent are currently using it too. You can see it in action here.

You can try it out by clicking on the "Find Related Information" link below:

Affiliate Villain: Gadget Shop - Affiliate Window

I've awarded Gadget Shop the Affiliate Vilan for December not for any direct-affiliate reason; they've approved commissions very quickly - but because they've messed me round as a consumer!

I ordered my Pleo with them last Wednesday, late Thursday evening I got an email saying it had been dispatched with next-day delivery. So I waited in all day Friday.

It didn't come then. So I waited in Monday and half-way through the day I gave up. I managed to call City Link and they said they had no deliveries for me. So I called up Gadget Shop and she said that it actually hadn't gone out on the Thursday and she'll call me back to let me know what's going on.

Well I got that call back saying that it was dispatched that day (Monday) - well there's still no sight of it.

I've now been on hold for ten minutes and have just spoke to someone. The young lady has just put me on hold again whilst she finds out whats going on!

Well apparently they're not getting stock until Friday, so they'll be sent out Saturday and with me Tuesday / Wednesday next week - so that's ten days later than they said!

The thing is, they'd already approved those Pleo commissions on the Monday - not good!

The thing is, if I was running an ecommerce business and I saw that a product was being delayed I'd found out who ordered it and email them saying it had been delayed - it'll save time and money in the long run with people having to bother your team with calls. And also I'd make sure I'd look elsewhere next time I went to buy a gadget!

New Adsense Features: V Nice

I've been of the opinion recently that Adsense didn't offer anything to visually stand out from the crowd. Ok so they'd added new corners and a nice logo etc - but they aren't major things.

This morning (coughing and spluttering) I went to check that I'd created the adsense code correctly on my Olympics site. After loading the correct code up I found that there's two new features (on the large ones at least):

1) Show More
When clicked this shows more adverts (naturally) on a Google Adwords Results page:



2) Scroll Up / Down
This feature scrolls the ads up and down within the space. This should help increase CTR's and obviously CPM's as the user would hopefully find more relevant adverts:





Adsense has just become a more attractive option!

I'm not sure when this was announced but I haven't been in AdSense land for a while.

P.s. They're now on this blog in the 468*60 format:

Consumer Reviews Are King

Going back to my social media & last click thoughts ... There's been a study in the US about how "consumer comments boost buying".

The survey by Razorfish isn't the largest in human history (only 475 US internet users) but it goes someway to support my theory that affiliate sites and blogs in particular to play an important part in the buying process amongst consumers.

A further study by Deloitte & Touche USA said that 18% of people had their purchase decision influenced by peer reviews in the health and beauty sector.

Now if you go into the sectors that I'm heavily involved in as an affiliate: Home electronics, personal electronics and toys & games, it varies from 22% to 45% of purchase decisions being effected by online consumer-generated reviews!

So there's two thoughts, I believe, you should take away with you:

1. Affiliates have a large share of voice online with blogs and other media. Don't mess them around with decisions such as giving no notice on commission changes etc as us affiliates will find it a hard decision to make when looking to promote you again when you need some positive online spin;
   
   
2. Consider looking at "social media optimisation" to monitor and ammend online thoughts amongst non-affiliate bloggers. n.b. don't do pay per post-style nonsense thought!

Right - gotta finish those damn accounts now!

Don't Do Paid Posts - I Told Ya So!

I posted about Kieron using Paid Posts and incentivised posts before and I put forward my opinion that I didn't think it was a wise long-term solution to building page rank and relevance.

Just finding a few minutes before the mighty Top Gear I'd thought I'd check out Matt's blog and saw a nice piece on Pay Per Post-type services. He gives loads of reasons why Paid Posting is wrong, immoral or just inaccurate - and I'm pleased that he's shown up the fools involved in this form of lazy marketing.

It also makes me chuckle for another reason. I once had a client that left because they wanted to use the SEO services of their designer - fair enough there's synergies and cost savings there. But I may be more expensive because I'm worth it - I don't recommend Pay Per Post-type services for a reason - unfortunately the other company thinks its a good idea to build links, not by creating a great site, but by paying people a few quid to prostitute their blogs. I hope the new design company spot their mistake very quickly - before Google wipes your client's site out. Thankfully that's never happened to me!

There's very few short-cuts anymore, when they exist they're closed quickly. Of course push the envelope with your own sites - but never your clients!

P.s. If Matt can post pictures of his cat so can I (well its the neighbour's):

Which Are The Most Popular SEM & SEO Blogs?

Well SEOQuake has a good list if you're looking for inspiration.

By the look at the "subscriber dynamics" people aren't in the SEO kinda mood at the moment! I must admit I've only been doing tweeking lately - no research. Roll on January!!

Google - Don't Forget The Bread & Butter Crawling!

I was just adding some content to my Olympics blog and noticed that newly posted content was being added into the serps instantly - but pages on the site that I'd hard-coded in still aren't in a week later.

I know it ranks well (at the moment) for one of the most important phrases of next year, but it still isn't loved enough to deep (cough - one link deep) crawl. But surely they shouldn't be relying so heavily on leveraging our RSS feeds or Feedburner to find new content!

Surely doesn't having an RSS feed for non-blog sites become even more important now? I've even been trying to get one of my clients to create an RSS feed for the past two years with no luck!

Does anyone else have any issues with non blog content on their blog domain?

The Good 'ole Days: My Adsense Earnings - The Lessons

I was thinking of how my strategies have changed and how I've matured as an affiliate and how I put my SEO knowledge to use on my own sites - and I started thinking about Adsense.

In the past I've talked about how I've done things that can't be classed as "white hat" - but the important thing is that I've suffered from my "black hat" activities and in turn has made me a better affiliate / SEO consultant.

I've included a chart below which shows my adsense earnings from the beginning of July 2003 to the present day. What you'll be able to see is that for a period I was making a handy $450 - $800 (around £250 - £450 then) extra a day from these tactics.




But what did I do? Well not being the most technically gifted, I used a programme called WebMerge to crank out thousands upon thousands of pages from spreadsheets and templates with Adsense on there and a few CPA offerings. These were the days before product feeds really became openly available in any way that would allow me to build more visitor-focused pages.

I'd openly admit that then I'd created 2,000 pages around mortgage keywords another 2,000 on loans, another 2,000 on holidays etc etc. And it worked for a while - until Google clamped down on differentiation and duplication. Most of the traffic went over night - and rightly so. I was caught in that greed frame of mind. A place that I still see many people.

Apart from Google kicking those pages out, you may ask what stopped me doing it again? Well I got some calls from the One Account via OMG asking me to stop promoting them on pages about Halal mortgages because they don't offer them. That's right, I took absolutely no regard for the CPA deals being acutely relevant to the search term - they were effectively foder! I decided that there has to be far better ways of making cash. I still had a load of successful CPA sites that were bringing home the bacon, but I wanted to fill my time doing something more interesting.

I then put more effort into markets where the EPC from Adsense wasn't as attractive as getting the right CPA deals. I started to create sites around niche products and products launching in the future. I found more joy in learning about products I had little knowledge of before and writing about them. Social Media also really started to kick off and I moved in that direction - leaving the Good 'ole days behind me.

But do I still feel that there is a place for Adsense? Bloody hell yeh! But you've got to go down one of two routes:

1) Short Term - Spam the hell out of Google with database sites and have no regard to the internet net user and run the risk of waking up one day and having that revenue stream blown out the water;

2) Medium Term - Create useful content sites and use Adsense wisely - where it makes economic and estethic sense keeping users coming back and refering your site to others.

From what I've learned, I'd recommend you go for #2. Build a wide variety of income streams in a wide range of niches and focus entently on choosing the right CPA deals for your users and add Adsense where appropriate.

I've stopped being an Adsense jerk. I hope you never will.

Online Marketing Tip Of The Week: My Google Maps

You've got to be clever these days to get incremental traffic. And some days I have some clever moments. I'm going to share this one with you.

For my (little less useful) Euro 2008 site I went through the task of creating "My Maps" for the Euro 2008 venues and added where the stadia, train stations and airports were. Obviously, never wanting to give anything away free I added a link to my site.

So I was going through my logs and even though its certainly not the peak period for people searching on the venues, I'm getting some pretty useful, targeted, incremental traffic from people search on those locations/cities and then clicking on my links in the information bubbles:



So my advice is, if you have any sites that include geographic location information, then get them on Google Maps and create "My Maps". This is a perfect tool, in fact, for my friends at Holiday Watchdog, or any hotel site!

So get creating!

Meet The Agency: Brilliant Affiliates

Website: www.brilliantaffiliates.co.uk

Telephone: 0113 394 0000

History: Brilliant Media was formed in 1999, following the acquisition of Dixon Moutrie Silkstone (DMS) by Media Lane. Since then we have enjoyed consistent and rapid growth to the point where the our client book is worth over £150m. We launched our Affiliate arm in 2007, and already have 10 affiliate programs onboard, with many more in the pipeline. We expect a lot from the affiliate channel, and recently launched our own Affiliate portal and blog at www.brilliantaffiliates.co.uk . We’re very much looking forward to creating a meaningful dialogue with affiliates.

Differenatiation: We value & reward the unique contribution each affiliate adds to our programs. We’re not just interested in who can generate the most leads or best sales value – we’re interested in affiliates who are actively branding our clients and using things like social media to add value to the sales process. We’re interesting in rewarding affiliates who can do this for us, and working with them to get their businesses in this position.

As an agency we’re also a lot closer to our clients than affiliate networks are since we manage the offline media campaigns for many of our clients. For many clients we manage their Television , radio, national press, outdoor, and online advertising campaigns – we’re in a great position to make sure that there’s real synergy between these channels. An understanding of what a client needs, and how we can take advantage of their other online & activity often leads to better managed affiliate programs. That’s great news for both our clients and affiliates.

What are your USP’s?:

For our clients I think it’s very much as above, we can effectively integrate your affiliate channel with all your other campaign’s , and we can use our strong affiliate relationships to make sure you get good results and good quality.

For affiliates I think it’s very much about our approach rather than a specific USP. It may sound cliché, but we really do care about our affiliates and their businesses. We monitor what affiliates are saying, and we try and tailor our program terms to suit what they actually want.

We like to think we find the ideal balance between client interests and affiliate interests.

Meet The Team:

Name: Martin Corr Position In Company: Head of Affiliates What is your job role? Oversee the strategy, planning and management of the affiliate channel at Brilliant Media. If you weren't in online media, what would you like to be doing for a living? Stunt Man What's your bosses best characteristic? My Energy What's the best song of all time? Rappers Delight – Sugar Hill Sans What's your favourite website? www.ebay.co.uk
Name: Matthew Oxley Position In Company: Affiliate Executive What is your job role? Managing Affiliate programs for Brilliant Media clients, and running the Brilliant Affiliates network & website. If you weren't in online media, what would you like to be doing for a living? An Economist What's your bosses best characteristic? He can take what he dishes out What's the best song of all time? This is so hard to decide, but the ‘social music' site Pandora seems to play Mr Jones (Counting crows) most often, so it must figure I like it… What's your favourite website? Most lately, www.blogstorm.co.uk – this guy is a genius.
Name: Michael Leppan Position In Company: Technologies Executive What is your job role? Heading up the technical department at Brilliant's online department If you weren't in online media, what would you like to be doing for a living? Sportsman – either a footballer, rugby player or a surfer. What's your bosses best characteristic? Down to earth and understanding What's the best song of all time? Eagles – Hotel California What's your favourite website? www.skysports.co.uk
Name: Mike Jacques Position In Company: Technical Solutions Executive What is your job role? To support the various online channels by managing technical aspects of campaign setup, and development of bespoke solutions to improve communication flow. If you weren't in online media, what would you like to be doing for a living? I'd own a coffee shop. What's your bosses best characteristic? His skinny jeans What's the best song of all time? Too hard to decide, but according to my ipod, my most frequently played song is ‘The Futureheads – Hounds of love' (kate bush cover) What's your favourite website? Facebook or BBC News

Google Webmaster Tools & Site's Geographic Target

If you're signed up with Google Webmaster Tools and have .com domains hosted with 1&1 you'll probably have the eternal problem of Google's assesment of which results your site should appear when users search.

I always have this problem. I've got a natural inclination to buy domains with 1&1 which forces me to nearly always buy .uk domains. But now I don't have to because of the ability to set a geographic target within the Google Webmasters Tools.

Has anyone had any success with it yet - its been "out" a month apparently?

I always thought I'd have a problem with my route planners site (don't really work on it) because it was a .com but never got round to checking the distribution of the location of visitors. After looking I found that 85% of my traffic was from the UK anyway even with a large proportion of the keywords used including "USA". V. strange. I'll have to try it on my usb turntables site (another one that I've left to pasture).

I'll let you know the impact of setting a UK geographic association.

A Look Back At November 2007

Well November was one of the most manic, stressful months of my life. But it was the start just the storm before my sites started to really take off again.

Pazang launched "Guaranteed PR" which, if you know what you want to achieve - is great for getting your name out there with national press coverage etc.

I complained about the state of SEO knowledge in business these days. The old adage "a little knowledge can be dangerous" is so apt in this industry.

2007 was a year of testing strategies and 2008 will see me extending them to a wider range of markets! I think the one's I'll be focusing on are the 2008 Olympics, the start of the World Cup. I'm trying to find some gadgets that'll be great for Christmas 2008 ....

The "let's do things bloody properly for once" message seemed to have missed the mark as many were more interested in their Christmas sites than pushing the industry forward.

I also approached the topic of the sequence in which consumers touch the marketing channels and who should get the commission/reward. And I'm glad that MediaVest and Studio 24 are taking progressive action.

I wasted a bit of time on the map of UK affiliate networks - but at least I got my head round it and used it on other sites.

I've been doing a lot of client PPC work lately and thought I'd pass on my views that it was so damn easy to remove keywords before they had a chance to be productive!

I actually forgot that I actually had a holiday in Alvor (bet that bad boy won't rank!) And I'm glad I did get away as I was getting snowed under with work and people asking me to sell links - grr!

And if you did find any paid links - well you could now report them to Google even easily!

I also had a look at the impact of Google adding more "immediacy" elements to draw people to the content Google thinks people are actually searching on more quickly.