Affiliate Future's Voucher Tool & It Pays Not To Work 7.5/5

I was slightly manic on Friday as I was in meetings with Joe Bloggs trying to get their affiliate programme into the next stages by meeting with their MD and marketing team. So I missed the launch of the new Voucher Code System on Affiliate Future.

Now, I got up this morning at 7am (yes a Sunday morning at 7am) to get some voucher code content together for my Christmas gifts blog as I wanted a change from content writing. I spent 2 hours selecting gadget and gift merchants on Awin, getting the links together, descriptions and trying to find non-exclusive codes. 2 bloody hours! I could have been in bed gently waking up to the birds twittering in the trees outside the house. But no I was faffing around with chuffing discount codes.

So I get a call from J Lil (cough) so we meet up for lunch as he was driving his wife back from Preston. We were chatting about the usual crap and he mentions Affiliate Future's voucher code finding tool! Bastard! It makes finding codes a piece of piss! It's a basic directory structure that allows you to navigate down the merchant tree and find codes suitable for your topic. You can even view all vouchers and export them so they automatically update your sites!!

The tool also allows you to differentiate between new, expiring soon and expired codes and gives you the opportunity to quickly get in touch with merchants to request exclusive codes. Bastards again!

I'm pretty much building my Christmas site around Awin's merchants as they've got tonnes in the gifts arena and dabble a bit in Webgains on it. But neither of these two networks can compete (in my mind and understanding of their offerings) with this new tool from Affiliate Future!

Like Hawkins Bazaar have codes listed on Webgains and both say "not to be used by affilaites" - like that's no good to me! Give me a code!

The Affilaite Window RSS feed from their blog is good, but it's not in the "code integration" frame of mind for me to get too excited.

Now Paid On Results - do offer a great tool but this is the first time I've been hell bent to include codes across many sectors and they don't dominate the gifts merchants, so I'd not had a good play to date. But I'll set that right.

All of this just shows that a bit of verbal communication and going out of your way (just off the m6 ;-) ) helps to get an affiliate with a real need for your tools to actually use them with greater emphasis and at the probable expense of another network.

p.s. it was also worth watching J struggle with his mixed grill - never thought I'd see the day!!

p.p.s. I can't wait for the other developments in store. I've got wood for them!