Bloggers Have Never Had It So Good - Hitwise

According to Hitwise UK visits to bloggs reached an all time high in the weeke endign 7/6/2008 with their tracked list of blogs and personal websites accounting for 1.19% of all Internet traffic - or 1 in every 84 visits.

That may not sound like a great deal to some, but just look at the growth:



The interesting fact is that blogs are being seen as a reliable, or at the very least an entertaining form of news and reviews with their growth being 171% over the past three years with the News category increasing 70%.

Another interesting fact is that blogs are visted half as much more (as a percentage of all visits) in the UK than the US with 1.09% visits during May in the UK compared to 0.73% in the US. UK bloggers are leading the way then ;-)

It'll be interesting to see how this trend carries on into Christmas, but it's good to see this informal product / news information format gaining more eyeballs.

Is Now A Good Time To Start Being An Affiliate?

Many of us "old-timers" remember the good ole' days when there were considerably fewer affiliates around and the rules from merchants and networks were significantly more lax - back then it was easy to make immense amounts of money.

Now, it's less easy, you've actually got to work for it. But After reading the news that UK consumers are spent 38% more online in the first six months of this year over the first half of 2007 and that they believe that half of all consumer spending will be done online by 2014 made me think that now is a great time to start being an affiliate if people had the skills but not the inclination.

The first half of this year saw £26.5 billion online by UK shoppers. Not bad hey? Now if that's not an incentive to start being an incentive or to to work harder then I don't know what is!

Many of may be concerned with the economy or how Google is getting stronger an networks and merchants are often putting barriers in our way (yes they are!). But I feel there's never been a better time become an affiliate.

There's Wordpress and Blogger if you're not a web designer, merchants and networks have made big inroads into helping you add relevant products to your sites with widgets and content units. They've also created deep-link generators and Awin have a useful Shop Window service which makes it a piece of pish to find products to promote (but they do need to sort out the errors when you search using non alphanumeric characters).

Also there's at least a handful of merchants for each niche so you if you want to stay out of the mainstream areas you can still make a few quid.

Google may have got a bit more expensive to do PPC on, but they've got some great analytics tools to make sure that you're getting a good ROI and you've got the graphs and data to allow you to effectively optimise your campaigns.

Statistically consumer spending has been quite low in the summer so now's the right time to be thinking of your winter sales generation tactics.

I've seen other data from IMRG which suggests the middle market is being squeezed. IMRG summarised the information:

UK Internet visits to mid-market online retailers have fallen by 6% in the past 12 months, while visits to discount and catalogue retailers have increased by 12% and visits to high-end retailers have increased by 14%, according to Hitwise.

So either start dusting off your cheap, cheapest, discount, offers keywords, or start thinking off "best, quality and recommended" merchants.

Clothing continues to enjoy large sales volumes as £1.76 billion was spent on clothes online in the fist half of 2008 according to the IMRG Capgemini report, whilst beers, wines and spirits are being purchased online more. Electrical item sales online have been loosing their lustre - 1st 1/2 2007 over 2006 they grew 63% but 1st 1/2 2008 over 2008 they grew 20%. Health & beauty and lingerie have also been static in net terms.

As more and more consumers are spending greater amounts online and a merchants see the true value of the transparent and accountable sales generation that affiliate marketing offers, its a perfect time to become an affiliate - but choose your approach and niche wisely.

Amazon Cap Video Game Commissions - But You've Never Had It So Good!

Don't you just love the rubbish that some merchants come out with?

I've always seen that that merchants will try and limit our success if they see us make "too much money", but I've also always wondered how they think that reducing commissions will help them increase sales volume?

Amazon effectively have a session cookie anyway so their move to limit commissions on video games to £10 won't be encouraging me to promote them this Christmas. Perhaps that they're thinking that none of us would be stupid to promote Play.com with their crappy 2% or HMV who start off at 2% and if you're a top performer you'll get 4%. You may have to look as far as CDWow (buy.at)for a basic 4%. You may want to consider Gameseek (AF) which pays 4-5%.

But I wouldn't be ready to jump ship. Do the math. if you're doing a bit of volume your commission rate could be 6.5% so to achieve £10 commission you would have to sell £153.85 of games to be affected - which is about 4/5 regular priced games. Go back and see if sales are generally less (which may be difficult with their system).

The issue remains, that there must be sales with huge basket sizes to warrent bringing in this change, so if you do volume with Amazon, its time for a bit of number crunching whilst looking at that psuedo session cookie.

It's this bit that made me slightly miffed. Just look at the bit I've highlighted.

Dear Amazon Associates,

We hope you are enjoying the rewards of referring traffic to one of the UK’s largest Affiliate programmes?

Due to continuing high sales of Video Game products, Amazon.co.uk has taken the decision to change the fee structure paid to Associates. With effect from 00:01 Friday 1st August 2008, the referral fee payable on any Video Games Product under the Performance Fee Structure will be limited to a maximum of £10.00 per Video Game Product, regardless of the Qualifying Revenues derived from the sale of any such item.

There’s never been a better time to consider new and innovative ways of generating traffic, from setting up of a new paid search campaign or monetising of your new content site using some of our great web 2.0 tools available at http://widgets.amazon.co.uk

Please feel free to contact us with comments and feedback on this or any other issues:

http://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/contact

Regards,

Your UK Associates Team

Never been a better time? You're restricting commissions, so there was a better time - before you limited our success! Numpties!! Where's the AB's when you need them?

Why I'm A Busier Boy in The Summer

I'm manic most times of the year. But in the summer I've started to become manicer (is that a word?). The reason is I've been rebuilding my affiliate business for the last couple of years by spending 80% of my affiliate time on a given site at any given period.

And currently I'm working my backside off on my Christmas gifts site. This means that I've had to turn down get2gethers, football tournaments and the such like as I'm totally determined to make this my best Christmas ever - even though last Christmas was very rewarding.

So if I don't come out and play, or even respond to your email within a couple of days - then I'm sorry! I've got the serious horn for this site!

I used the Easter eggs site a test for my strategy and it worked exceptionally well, so I'm following it through on to Christmas and with the scale of returns possible I don't mind missing out.

Building a site that targets many thousands of keywords with unique content doesn't happen over night unfortunately :-(

I've already had 3 holidays this year and one organised for October so it's time to really work my ickle backside off for the greater good.

I'm planning to go to the AWin event on Sept 11th and the Affiliate Future (Affu - cough) on Sept 16th and may have to go down for a client event on Sept 8th so I'll be "unproductive" for the middle part of Sept so I have to make hay whilst the sun shines.

Boring I know, but whilst you lot are out having fun I've got to keep the Google spam quality content page numbers going up!

So feel free to badger me as much as you want but July and August are going to me having my nose to the grindstone and I'll come out to play in September.

p.s. I hope Hannah continues to provide a suitable distraction with her FaceBook pics and go THE AFFILIATE NINJAS!

Be A Better Dressed Affiliate With House Of Fraser [With Added Style Advice]

I bet affiliates spend hours choosing what to wear to affiliate Get2Gethers. Personally, I wear what's been ironed. But others could do with the £500 worth of designer clothes clothes at House of Fraser if they enter the competition to mark the launch of their campaign on CJ.

So here's some people that should perhaps enter the competition:

Actually, Max is suitably attired for an informal g2gether. But perhaps next time he should go for the Bench Cotton short-sleeved applique polo shirt?

Steve, although no longer an affiliate, goes for the safe option of a checked shirt. Perhaps he should try: the Short-sleeved pique rugby shirt?

Purps isn't wearing a t-shirt that says Pussy. Perhaps he should avoid confusion in future and try the Oxford long-sleeved dress shirt? (p.s. pic supplied by Swifty7)

Mark Pearson should have really gone for something a bit more colourful (and not got it straight out of the packet) and gone for the tight-fitting yellow Short-sleeved crew-neck T-shirt.

Tom should have thought about what statement he was making with his black briefs that night. He should have gone for these Hom Micro swim shorts.

Mr Frost should have thought about how rum and coke would have stained his t-shirt at harbour lights and gone for something that would have masked the beverage he couldn't handle. May be he should have gone for the Superdry Cotton crew-neck printed T-shirt?

And my final bit of advice for all you single affiliates out there! Get wasted and rip your t-shirt - the girls love it (but make sure you keep your barnet looking good):

It also works with account managers:

So if you need sprucing up to get the ladies, (or men if you're a female affiliate) then get yourself £500 of designer wear from House of Fraser!

Here's the details:

The closing date is 31st July, so you've got to get in quick. What you've got to do is answer some quick questions and email affiliates@hof.co.uk (keeping the subject line) with your answers, name, address and contact details plus a link to a fully-working website.

The questions are:

1. When was House of Fraser’s transactional website launched?
2. Based on House of Fraser’s launch 5% net commission, how much would the sale of a Hugo Boss, formal single-breasted stretch wool suit earn an affiliate?
3. Which famous female singer currently has her luxury bed linen and bedroom collection stocked on the House of Fraser site?
4. How much would an affiliate pay for the Prada 80ml eau de parfum deluxe?

And if you wanted to know more about the HofF here's some details Chris has sent over (they may include the answers!):

• 5% of the net sales value*
• 28 day cookie
• Free Product Feed (available upon request)
• High average order value - currently £90
• Strong offers, incentives and promotions
• A dedicated account management team to maximise your revenue and provide updates on strong offers, incentives and promotions advertised with a strong creative suite.
* Excludes gift vouchers, P&P and non commissionable items (non-basket brand links - these are Arthur Price, Coast, Dorma, Karen Millen, Montgomery, Principles, Shoe Studio Group, Kurt Geiger, Carvela, Oasis and Wedgwood).

House of Fraser’s first affiliate promotion with Commission Junction begun on 26 June, to coincide with its SALE Event. Product feeds and other tools are available for the SALE and in preparation for the key Autumn and Christmas period.

One key difference with the House of Fraser programme is that it works with cashback, reward and loyalty sites – making it one of the few department store affiliate programmes who do. They are also looking to work with paid search, content and social media sites.

How To Build Links Easily & Without Spending A Penny

You know I'm always harping on about writing good content and the links will follow, well sometimes you need to give yourself a quick leg-up.

You have to start somewhere; so when you've got a site that really offers value, has something different or you're just desperate for links and eyeballs, here's what to do.

You probably won't have Google's Adplanner (which is awesome) or Hitwise, but you'll have access to Alexa, Dmoz Google and Yahoo!

If you had Google Adplanner you could just put in a few sites in your industry that come to mind and Google will list similar sites - here' you'll just export them to a xls and save them for the next step.

If you didn't have access to it you simply find a relevant directory listing in DMOZ and then think about relevant keywords for your topic. Put them into the Google Keyword Suggestion tool, and get yourself a good range of related keywords (say 50).

From this, just search Google and get some domains that rank well for those terms - add them to a spreadsheet and the continue to expand on them until you've got 20-30 domains (as a starting point, you could always do more if you wanted).

Then go over to Yahoo Site Explorer, and drop in the domains, click search and then select "Inlinks". Simply export them and then aggregate them into one spreadsheet and filter for unique links. It sounds complicated but it doesn't take long.

You'll now have a nice long list of sites for you to work through and see if you can establish a way for them to link to you. For one client I've got over 6000 links - some of their competitors are spamming with doorway sites etc - so I can ignore those.

Some of these pages will actually be blog posts and you can leave a comment. They'll probably have a nofollow on the links so there wouldn't be significant SEO benefit, but you'll still be getting eyeballs and visits from relevant people.

Other times they'll be directories, which is fine, but they're not as cracked up to be as some say.

Sometimes, it'll be a list of relevant sites that a website owner has created so you'll be able to get a link from them.

The thing is I hate the traditional method of searching for "sumbit url [keyword]" "add your site [keyword]" etc as every Muppet does that. Also most of the directories that you'll find are utter crap. Also more and more of them are charging for entry - and the title of this post includes "Without Spending A Penny".

Also you'd want to get links from sites/blogs which don't link to your competitors. So you've got to be clever. Conduct searches like "how does [keyword]" and post away. You could be even cleverer and try and spot blogs that reward frequent comments with "commentluv" - work out how to do that one yourself ;-)

You can also offer to write content for people and have your link included as a reference.

But don't forget, you need good quality content if you want to break out from the pack. Do something unusual with your site, do some research, put some graft in, or at the very least get lucky!

Also, don't forget link-building is exponential. The higher up the SERPS you go, the more visits you have and then you'll have more chance of attracting people that actually see value in your site and want to link back to you. In otherwords, it gets easier!

p.s. You could also use Google Answers and Yahoo Answers and reply with relevant answers ;-)

Everything You Could Possibly Want To Know About Google

Except the algo ;-)!

I get lost when I'm trying to find certain tools or services offered by Google and I came across this "Google Cheat Sheet" which has a list of all these services, their country domains, various query types (search operators), all the google calculator commands (when I can't be bothered to reach for my calculator), a list of all their blogs and other stuff. I'm sure it needs a bit of updating - but its still useful.

Don't forget you can zoom in.

What The Heck Is Going On With The Economy?

I've had a client blog about the CEBR report which shows that house prices in London have risen on average by 6.4% over the past 12 months. Now a client of mine who are estate agents in London has blogged about that they've seen house prices rise by a staggering 20% in some areas of London over the same period.

The thing is that we've been shown at every opportunity how bad the economy is. They're saying people are now in negative equity and some have seen 40% wiped off the value of their property.

We're also told that retail sales are down with Sainsbury and M&S shoppers are moving to Asda and Lidl, we're also told that car sales are down shed loads.

But what I see as going on is that over the past few years some people have made a serious wedge and are immune to the increases in utility and commodity prices - they'll spend what they like and how they like without taking a second thought.

Others are feeling the pinch big time and really struggling to cut costs.

I see over the course of the year a flight to "cheap", "discount", "offers", "free", and the such like keywords. I also see a move to lower-cost, even domestic holidays taking a greater share of the market. Merchants that offer real value for money will thrive.

I've seen it with another client recently where they're not offering products on sale and have seen revenue fall in the face of virtually every other competitor slash their prices.

Shoppers will flock to the internet in even greater numbers to find bargains - we've got to make sure that our SEO strategy is spot on to capture these "value-seeking" purchasers. Is your SEO ready for them?

Why I'm Paying For AdsenseLog

I never click on ads on Facebook as I never see them as being relevant (apart from the Wedding ones and that's just a bloody cheek seeing I'm engaged). But today was different. I saw an ad for AdSenseLog which took me to this Fan Page.

Now I'm a stats junky so I downloaded the free trial and hooked it up with my account and saw the lovely stats I'd only bother looking at in Excel every now and then!

As I run some sites that don't really focus on CPA then this sort of data is becoming increasingly useful to me. Site's like Route Planners, Halo Movie, 3D Cinema are all long term sites with variable uses - some of them include using the obvious benefits of creating niche content sites. I've pretty much just used it over the past 3 years as bumf to fill pages and haven't done any MFA sites for ages. They used to make about £500 a day :-( (I'm trying not to fall into the trap of chasing the quick buck and doing them again)

So here's the sort of stats it can chuck out (my real data and it lets you export into gifs/jpg/pdf etc:

Impression data:



I can even show payment information:



And stuff like daily averages:



You can even compare different channels and their performance overtime. From this chart you can see how HG (my old Get Holidays MFA site) gradually got picked up by Google, then got knocked out, then came back in again and then suffered a slow painful death. The same can be said for GS (my old Get shopping site) which was raking in a fair few quid until Google got annoyed by that one too.



So now I'm refocusing on content sites and with some of them focusing on CPC rather than CPA, AdSenseLog will be a central tool in my decision-making process.

p.s. they haven't asked me to blog about it and I've not received anything for mentioning the product.

Please Don't Promote The iPhone

So affilaites are only allowed to deliver incremental sales then? We're not allowed to ride the wave of hype to wonga-ville?

I got this email from Buy.at, and although I understand that CPW have limited stock and they don't want to be paying commissions on products they'd sell normally, but surely saying that we're not allowed ot promote the new iPhone in any manner including links from our sites and PPC is a bit daft.

And also reducing the commission rate for this product is totally ludicrous!! This can only come about because of the exclusive nature of the product! This is artificially keeping it's cost high and ensuring that the cost of acquiring each customer is as low as possible as the iPhone PR machine is letting everyone know you can't get it elsewhere.

I'm praying for a free and open market one day. Not impressed. Anyways, here's the email:

Dear Lee,

The much anticipated Apple iPhone 3G is due to go on sale on Friday 11th July.

Carphone Warehouse will be paying affiliates a fantastic £20 commission for all Apple iphone sales generated.

They will also pay commission for all Apple iphone orders from the 7th July that then convert to sales once the product goes on sale.

Commission is based on one important factor, affiliates are forbidden to promote this product under any means, including; links to the Carphone Warehouse Apple iphone page and pay per click. If any affiliate is found advertising the Apple iPhone, Carphone will not pay any commission on the sales generated. buy.at will be monitoring affiliate sites carefully to make sure there are no breaches. This is due to the very limited stock.

Please contact me on the details below if there is anything you are unsure of.

Kind Regards,

Sarah

But on a good note, I got this shortly after the buy.at email:

Thank you for ordering with Carphone Warehouse Online.

We are happy to tell you that we have processed your order. It will shortly be dispatched from our warehouse.

At least my iPhone is on its way :D

the bad news it's dispatched by CityLink - there'll be a good chance I'll spend the next week trying to get it delivered as they'll sniff at my front door and drop a card in.

Join Our Fantasy Football League

So the footbally season is nearly upon us. Unlike previous years I've chosen my team way before most tours have started.

If you think you can beat my scientific calculations and thrash my team then sign up to our mini-league (I'm sure there'll be an A4U one too which you can tag yourself against too). The code to join is "26916-9485" and you can do so my clicking here

What do you think of my team?






I'm going to substitute Ronaldo out if he has his op as we won't be going to Madrid.

Tell Me Why ....

I don't like Mondays ...



A week ago we were on our way back from Barbados where much hilarity was had and now I'm sat at my desk with a to-do list as long as my arm, the whether is crap, I've got a VAT return to do, I've got more emails I can deal with (even after deleting 2,000 yesterday), I'm moving into a bigger office so have to sort all that rubbish out, there's only 3 months until my Christmas site needs to be finished ..

So, i'm trying to look at the positives ...

1) I'm not affected by the credit crunch directly
2) I've got a roof over my head
3) The fridge is stocked
4) I've got some great memories of Barbados
5) I've got some cracking mates
6) I've got cash in the bank
7) I'm getting married next year
8) I've got some awesome sites in progress
9) I'm just about to book another holiday (although it's not for another 3 months!)
10) I've got some fantastic clients
11) She hasn't found the photos yet ;-)

So for all you miserable buggers - cheer up!

Learning From Your Mistakes: Austria-2008.co.uk

I started my Euro 2008 blog over two years ago and it was my first foray into a mass-event blog so I was really feeling my way.

I didn't put too much effort into it, just the odd couple of hours a week but did enjoy it. But now as I'm starting in earnest on my World Cup Football and Euro 2012 sites I'm wondering what I've learned.

So here's my thoughts:

1. I didn't do enough link building. The site is in DMOZ and some other directories, but I should have worked harder link building and publicising it via blogs etc. I relied too heavily on links from other sites.
   
   
2. I didn't do enough link bait. I managed to get 2,000 visits in one day from a post about a fake England shirt but I should have carried it on and tried to do something every month.
   
   You can see that spike here:
   
   
   
3. I should have focused on the successful long tail keywords and prepared them much earlier on. Despite there being 43,000 different keyword variations that the site was found from. I could have easily doubled it.
   
   
   
   
4. I should have looked to monetise it more in other ways that adsense and football shirts. there was loads of Sky stuff I could have done. I should have lost my dislike for the company and the affiliate programme and taken the cash.
   
   
5. I should have known that England weren't going to qualify as it was chuffing obvious that Mclaren was crap manager and we wouldn't make it.
   
   
6. I shouldn't have stopped working on the site when when we didn't qualify - I should have looked at the betting angle. I don't like betting, so again, I should have left my morals at the office door.
   
   
7. I shouldn't have had two holidays during the tournament. This seriously messed things up. I could have still kept the traffic flowing if I'd just done a couple of match review posts a day.
   
   
8. I should have worked closer with content providers and merchants and add content to the sites. I had some of the football shirt retailers sending unique content and ideas through, but I should have worked harder on this.
   
   
9. I should have started with a email-capture competition or a simple registration form so I could have mailed people through the tournament and increased revenue that way.
   
   
10. I should not have got fed up with all the spammy registrations on the forum and actually approved the legitimate people so they could post - and actually post myself.
    
    
11. Web 2.0 stuff like the Google My Maps and including them in your site not only provides useful information for users that they'll link to from other sites, but also you can get traffic from searches on Google maps itself. Check out my Basle stadium guide page. (I did these the day of the last match - I wish I bloody waited for us to qualify before I did them!)
    
    
12. Remember that dmoz isn't just there for being there's sake. It can actually deliver traffic and be a source for other site owners to find and then link to you. Dmoz was my second biggest site referrer:
    
    
    
13. I should have actually taken time to participate in relevant forums and built links and users that way.
    
    

It's all good fun though. My World Cup site is ready to be blitzed for qualifying. And I'll slowly build up content for my Euro 2012 site.

The work I've got to do now is leverage the 2008 site for links and traffic, and see work out if I'd just want to let it go out to seed or if there's anything else I could do with it. There's some PR on it and should I just turn it into a footy ShopWindow type thing or just forget?

The Olympics Doesn't Exist In Affiliate Land

There may be a few travel merchants you could monetise your 2008 Olympics traffic - but what else. For virtually every event we're inundated with relevant offers and creatives to make some cash out of international sporting events, but I can see diddly-squat for the Olympics.

I can see the So You Know The Olympics which is no longer on TD and now I have to join Clash Media.

I'm getting a shed load of traffic and can only really monetise it with Adsense.

I know I don't want to put a great deal of effort into the site as a letter may be landing on my door-mat. But surely there must be some merchants that have relevant offers?

Does anyone know of any (I've applied for the Amnesty one)?

Manchester DGM BBQ RSVP

So who's attending the Manchester BBQ that DGM are hosting on 21st July?

I couldn't make the recent A4U event in London, so would be great to meet some of you again that went to the AF Barbados trip and some of you guys I haven't seen for yonks (that's for you Helen).

It's one of my missions this year to do more with DGM - I owe it to them as they've got some cracking merchants for my Christmas presents blog as well as some my niche robot blogs.

So get along - it'll be a hoot!

p.s. I won't be asking any questions about my other affiliate blog - no matter how drunk you get me!

Welcome To The Affiliate Bitch

I think sometimes we keep our opinions to ourselves and when we do express our true thoughts we're often caught up in the dilemma about our views harming our business relationships.

That's why I've created Affiliate Bitch where we can all have a moan, people can ask questions and get honest answers, without worrying about the repercussions.

If you'd like to air your views in secret then email affiliateb @ gmail.com with the email address you'd like as a login and we'll sort it out.

Don't forget, your email address doesn't have to identify you so you're safe.

It's about time all the corporate, less pass everything through the MD, rubbish was banished and the real views of people working in the industry was made available to all.

Update: we've already had some taker-upers!

More Affiliate Future Barbardos Trip - Selected Pictures & Videos

Somehow I managed to blog yesterday about the first part of our Barbados trip. I'm feeling less of a zombie now so I'll continue.

On the way back from the first trip we decided that as we didn't see the caves and Hannah really wanted to, we'll pay another visit the next day and take in another beach or too.

So we trecked up to the Animal Flower cave via KFC for breakfast. Due to the dodgy signs in Barbados it took us longer than we'd hoped - but the reward for the trudge was outstanding.



I'd been in the caves a few years ago but it was still fantastic to go back. There's some sea anemones which were cool, however the highlight was swimming in the pool within the cave. It was fantastic swimming around with the "team" and watching them get washed up as a huge wave came in :-)



Hannah tested her underwater camera on various parts of my body:



We trudged on, after some refreshments to Crane's Beach and stopped for some photos opps on the way:



Crane's Beach is just fantastic. Apparently it's one of the top ten in the world according to some fella - could have been Jay Lill.

I'll have to get the vid off Joe Connor as he has a fab one of me body-boarding.





That night started off with some grub in the hotel and then a karoke. I've only uploaded one of James's tunes, although Naomi sang an awesome tune:



I even had a go!



We then headed over to the Ship for some live music and rum & coke:





and then back to the hotel for some more rum & coke.



I'm not sure what time I finished that night - but I felt it in the morning!

More to come tomorrow.