Thanks Matt From Hotel Chocolat - But It Won't Fit In My Chocolate Fridge!

A big thanks To Matt Keys at Hotel Chocolat for sending over a great Chocolate Table as a thanks for promoting them. Well I did the the odd sale, and its always nice to get something as a thank you. The bonus will be taxed so its nice to sit down and enjoy the fruits of your labour in this way.


I've got a new chocolate reviews blog so I'll put it to good use on there and the commission on £40 isn't all that bad too.

Also a bit thanks to all the chocolate merchants that gave me increased commissions, content, products to review and was always there to answer questions and give advice. It proves that merchants, affiliates, networks and agencies can work very well together.

An Interview With Someone You May Know: Jules Bazley

Jules is founder of eMarketingSolution and I've recently found out they've just achieved a bit of a coup in the affiliate marketing world so I thought I'd catch up with him and find out been going on recently:]

Hi Jules. You've been in the industry for a pretty damn long time now. I remember meeting you and Pete in the dinghy basement that Affiliate Future had for offices, but what's been going on with you since those days back in 2002?

Hi Lee, wow you are making me feel old - I was actually in a meeting a few weeks back and was asked to give my opinion as an industry veteran, I guess time flies when you are having fun.

I think I actually started looking at affiliate marketing back in 2002 – back then I had a few affiliate sites (mostly for fun). I started with AF in 2003 when it was just 3 of us in that little office! AF USA was my main project a year or so later and I was out in NY setting things up for a couple of years, then in 2007 I came back to the UK as Commercial Director of IBG until the group was sold to TMN about a year ago now.

It was certainly a great journey and as you know I have made a lot of great friends along the way.


You've now founded eMarketingSolution, what has those experiences of being at the front line with sales and managing US strategy for AF taught you in your current venture?

eMarketingSolution was a logical step for me. Over the years I have done a lot more than just affiliate marketing, eMS was the perfect way to put some skills in to practice and start building a company that adds value to clients in a way that suits my way of working.

In recent years many networks and agencies in the affiliate arena seem to have forgotten what affiliate marketing is actually about; Performance based online marketing.

At eMarketingSolution we offer services on a pure performance model. The results I think are speaking for themselves.


I see that you're a generalist agency, in that you cover affiliate marketing, ppc, eMail, social and other forms of marketing and consultancy services, but what do you feel are the strengths of eMarketingSolution and what sets you apart from the other agencies?

eMarketingSolution offers a full range online advertising services but the focus has been very much on affiliate marketing and consultancy.

We have a small team but collectively have almost 20 years experience in the online space between us. We offer a really personal service that gives true value to clients. With the exception of consultancy every service works on a true performance model.

The obvious example is for our affiliate marketing clients, I don’t really know of any other agencies that will manage and grow sales through the affiliate channel on a pure CPA basis – and lets face it, that’s what affiliate marketing is all about – generating incremental sales on a commission only basis. So many people have forgotten that these days.

I think our mission statement sums it up nicely:

"eMarketingSolution.co.uk's mission is simple, to provide fairly priced online marketing services that adds REAL value to clients without compromising on ethics. We believe that success grows through education, transparency and commitment. We aim to pass on our knowledge and ethical methodologies on to our clients to build successful relationships that grow with the industry "

Last year we were talking about your client base and I was amazed. How the heck do you manage to get these big clients? I'm in awe to be honest!


Many of our clients as you know work with us confidentially, but I think a good example of this would be AffiliRed.com. We have worked closely with AffiliRed and manage all aspects of their affiliate marketing. Together (using experience of our team) we have created a new product that really works.

With AffiliRed we have created a platform that allows clients to be on multiple networks in multiple countries at the same time. The system manages everything from validating sales to distributing invoices to different departments.

I think it is sensible innovation like this, that has lead to interest by our clients. AffiliRed focuses on the Hotel industry and in a very short space of time, it has attracted clients like Barcelo.com, Hotelopia.com and many more.

I think the bottom line is offering a genuine performance related solution to clients that increases their online sales without additional costs and most importantly being able to deliver substantial results.


But now I've heard that you've recently signed a big name, are you able to tell us who they are yet? (I've had my nose to the grindstone, I've not noticed you mention them yet).

I had a feeling this was leading somewhere ;)

eMarketingSolution have just signed with CDWOW to manage all aspects of their affiliate marketing. It’s very early days as we are still in the handover period – but its definitely going to be a great project. CDWOW were a powerhouse in the affiliate industry up until a few years ago.

Since then website was acquired by a new company (Stomp Entertainment) and over the coming months we aim to build the affiliate programme back to its former glory. You will see a lot of changes over the coming months as we role out a whole range of new promotional tools – I think its safe to say that this will be one of our biggest challenges yet and I am really excited about it.


I know the life of an affiliate management agency isn't the easiest, you've always got to deal with past reputations. How do you handle a brand that some may have lasting impressions of?

I think it’s important to learn from the past. Whilst often


So that's the past, what about the present. What do you hope to achieve for them?

Moving forward we have to look at the bigger picture. CD WOW are one of the most competitively priced sites out there. The product range is equal if not better than most of its competition and the brand itself is one of the highest converting sites I have ever come across.

Consumers love CDWOW and this means that the potential for affiliates is substantial. Currently we are looking at a range of new tools that will include things like proper data feeds, new creatives, widgets, plugins and a lot more – there is a lot of work going in to things and I think the results will speak for themselves..



And the future for you and the business. Where do you see eMarketingSolution being in 3 years?

You know me Lee, I can never stop working. The plan is to continue in a similar way to now. We are pretty selective with who we work with and will continue to make sure that every affiliate management client that we take on is something that will be interesting to affiliates and capable of growing into a well known success. As long as we continue to create ‘win wins’ with every client, I think the future is looking good.

We are also looking to role out some pretty funky tools in a few months, but I can really say to much more about that the moment, maybe we can have another chat in a few months and I can tell you more about that then.



What do you feel the affiliate marketing industry will be like then, do you believe agencies will have to adapt to the changing nature of affiliates?

Definitely – we work in the online space and things move along faster than anywhere else. As the industry continues to grow, agencies and networks will need to keep up with the times.

It is key that agencies and networks offering account management actually add value to the clients rather than just using this as an excuse to charge high monthly fees. Over the years I have heard some shocking stories about account management from agencies and I really hope that this is becoming less common.

At eMarketingSolution we try to add real value by creating tools for clients that benefit affiliates, merchants and networks – I really think this makes the difference and our clients seem to agree, so we must be doing something right.


What are the biggest challenges you feel that merchants have these days and what can be done to solve them?

I read a report recently by Econsultancy which had a quote from an affiliate about loyalty between merchants and affiliates – on the surface it was a fair quote but it really got me thinking.

“Voice of the affiliate - “Why should a merchant show loyalty? I have no loyalty; if another merchant pays me, then I will redirect traffic there. I don’t expect loyalty, as I can’t reciprocate.”

One thing that the affiliate industry needs is loyalty in both directions – I hope that over time this mentality can be adjusted – it’s the only way the industry can sustainably grow in the years to come. I also think that management agencies have a massive role to play in this – affiliate marketing is about creating long term successful advertising relationships. If this fundamental relationship is one thing that we can achieve for eMarketingSolution’s merchants and affiliates we work with, I don’t think there is much that cant be achieved.


And if anyone wanted to buy you a pint, or get you to buy them one .... which events are you going to this year?

It’s quite a busy year all round – I have already been to trade shows in Moscow, Berlin and Madrid but I hope to stay a little more local for the rest of the year.

Chances are that I will be at all the main affiliate events this year – I owe about 100 people beers at the moment, I guess its going be a pretty busy year ;)



Ed: Great stuff Jules, hopefully I'll be popping down for a beer soon.

Content For Links - Part Deux - Pot Shots

Just A quick response to Kieron's post about content for links. I do have issues regarding some of the points, as I believe "efficient use of the truth" is a good way to sum up part of it, and with access to Risk Disk you can prove a few things. But I'm not really interested in that bit.

Now Simon and I have had quite a few discussions via email about "content for links" especially as I reviewed what could be labelled as their work. But out of fairness I took the post down as I didn't feel reviewing one possible client could be deemed as representative of the whole picture. Even though my conclusions were on the whole negative, I thought I'd give them unfettered progress in trying to do what they do as well as realising "who am I to judge?" There are for more important people (the search engines) that are best fit to judge.

But there was one bit in their response to the chatter that tickled me:

As a final thought, if the content-for-links approach is so “black hat” because it is motivating partners through the value of the content to include a link, where does that leave, for example, content affiliates who are paid for the traffic – some via natural links tracked via merchant’s own programmes . . .or many bloggers . . or possibly the bulk of today’s social media system . . .where does it stop?

It's quite simple. Google understands that websites, in the main, exist to make money. But the content I and other bloggers write is purely motivated by making the sale. Our ability to earn depends on our ability to write interesting and informative content. Our motivation is not to increase the search engine performance of those we link to. In fact our wish is that we don't, necessesarily, want to help push them up the SERPS as that'd mean more traffic may go direct to them.

I often link to online retailers that don't have an affiliate programme. I do this because often they have great products that I feel enthused about, I review them and link to them. Now should I rel="nofollow" them to fit your argument? Or should I do what Google wants and actually "vote" for them? Does it matter that they send the product that is being reviewed for free? Does that muddy the waters? I'm sure the sole purpose they do it is for the traffic and sales I send. If I get a whiff of anything about SEO from their side then I don't publish.

So Kieron and Simon, its very simple. Our content is designed to drive sales as the primary function, your content is designed to improve the search engine performance of your clients. It's that simple.

I've no issues with offering to increase the "value" of websites with great content and then getting a link back - that's what online PR is all about. It's just the quality issue I often have problems with.

And guys, I'd love to hear your opinion on Triond!

Does Offline Exposure Work? My Experience

I'm a 99% online person. I eat, breath, sleep online marketing. The paradox is that my consultancy business actually started in its current guise with a press release I wrote over 6 years ago (I was consulting under a different name from 1998). However, I always try and make the most of any opportunities to gain exposure that come may way - and many did come my way.

Earlier in the month I was featured as "Geek Of The Week" on Steve Wright's Radio 2 show. When I heard it I was driving back home up the M6 and was thinking about whether the server could cope, how many sales I'll make etc etc. Then I thought that they haven't mentioned the domain name and they were mentioning my name over and over again so I was wondering how people would split themselves between searching for the product and my name.

So looking at the keywords for this blog over the month it looks like there were only 33 visits to the site with "Easter" in them with an obvious blip when the day of the show:



For those just searching on my name there was probably an extra 8 or 9 visits. So altogether there was no huge affect.

And there was absolutely no traffic to the Easter Eggs site with my name in which was probably a mistake not putting it on there in the first place, however, I could not have anticipated the Radio2 coverage.

Thankfully I had created a Twitter account for the site and it was ranking nicely for the product name and my name so I picked up a few more followers - but nothing special:


As aside, Twitter sent the site 190 visits - but I didn't track out clicks direct to merchants, but I'll be doing that from now on.

Now, I then got some nice coverage in the business section of the Telegraph. But the numpties messed up the link to the site. However, from experience I know that traffic from online versions of newspapers is often woeful so I wasn't worried about that. Furthermore, with the transitory nature link juice of internal pages within newspaper sites and the fact it has no cache means I've not "lost" much on the SEO front.

I was interested to know what impact the article would have on the site's direct traffic. Well it was referenced to on the front page of the business section so I was hoping for a fair bit. In the week before the site was getting around 200 direct visits a day and on that Good Friday it got just over 300 - which I suppose was good as it was a Bank Holiday, but nothing special. What's interesting is that its been fairly constant at around 140 ever since and is now a staggering 1/3 of all the traffic (over the past 7 days).



But, I was wondering about all this extra exposure about Easter eggs offline, I was wondering about if that led to an increased level of traffic from that search term. Now both years I've had top spot in Google UK for that term and 4th in Google global - there's a constant there. Actual traffic from [Easter eggs] was down 26.64% but all search traffic that included "Easter eggs" as part of a search phrase was up 94.08% (against all keywords driving 76.15% more traffic).

So are people going longer and longer tail as many are suggesting? I would say so. Hopefully Heather or Robin at Hitwise could shed some light on that?

I'm going to look at the social media/SEO/email impact on the site next time out and maybe throw in some examples of how keyword use changes as we get up to events such as Easter and Christmas - hopefully you'll find that interesting. I may even look at how conversion rates change by merchant over time too?

At Last ... A Nice Video About Over-Optimisation

One of my pet hates is over-optimisation. But what is it? That's the holy-grail of SEO - how much you can get away with before it starts to cause a net reduction in traffic from natural results.

If you wanted a really simple discussion to get you thinking about if you've gone too far with your sites then watch the video below.

Much of my SEO time is spent bringing sites "back into the fold" or increasing the focus a bit more on to the user rather than directly on the search engines and the SEOmoz video is a good, basic introduction to that debate.

I don't 100% agree with it, but that's because its a complete introduction to the topic. One part I'd add when looking at focusing on users mentioned in the video was that you should think about whether visitors would like to your site. Now I know this is more likely with the advent of blogging and social tools, but I would also add into to that increasing the propensity that people would refer your site via email and non-crawled sources as it has secondary affects. There's often talk of what I call "flood effects" whereby if a site gets a lot of traffic from non-crawled sources that would have an effect on the site's rankings (controversial I know).

Furthermore, I'd add about thinking of users in the context of decreasing bounce rates. Now this is conjecture and not wholly proven. But I'd do everything in my power to decrease bounce rates from the SERPS because I know that they are measured on occasion. Keeping people in your site for longer, in my mind, can only have beneficial affects. But if you're running an affiliate site your objective may be to get people in and out as quickly as possible - you have to balance up wants and needs on this one.

Another aspect that wasn't covered, and I hope it is in the future, is the appropriate use of display:hidden for controlling navigation elements V. keyword stuffing.

Anyway, enjoy the video:


SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - On-Site Over Optimization from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Am I An Affiliate Babe?

I'm just out with a bad back but I was made to go through the pain barrier to get the lappy out following a DM on Twitter from Andrew Girdwood mentioning bigmouthmedia's B.A.B.E. (Affiliate Blogging Excellence) award.

The aim of the award is to recognise the "affiliate blogger they feel has contributed the most to the affiliate community in the last year". Whether that is me or someone else, I hope that you support the award and give your votes as to the affiliate that has done this - there's some really good blogs out there.

If you did want to place your vote, then you can here.

Good luck everyone!

And the winner is .... (jammy :p)

After I announced my "Win £100 of chocolate" competition I've been interested in the guesses that you affiliates, merchants, networks and agencies have been entering. And since I made it "double of quits" I was hoping that an affiliate wouldn't win as I could spend the extra £100 on myself (I know, I'm tight!).

Well looking at the stats, the site got a slightly disappointing 6,546 visits on Tuesday 7th April which was less than I hoped, but is still a 61.19% improvement on last year. Which I suppose is quite good when I gave SEO'ing the head terms nothing more than a cursory look. O#;; go into more details about the stats, sources of traffic, the effect of my media coverage (how the heck did that happen?) in a week or so when I've got a good load of client work done). But here's the proof that Joe Connor is a jammy ... Not only did he win a place on the Barbados trip last year, went away with a skiing holiday that I couldn't go on, and now he's won £100 of chocolate that could end up being £200 if he wins a ticket to this year's Barbados Trip!





I've spoken to Joe and he says he's rammed for chocolate at the moment so could I wait a month? No pleasing some ;-)

So if you're in a winning mood, pop over to the Affiliate Future blog and see how you can win a trip to Barbados, including the 6 ways with Sunshine!

Easter Eggs - Radio Merseyside?

This is the website you want for all those lovely Easter eggs!

Turnining Into An Offline Whore - But Is It Worth It?

So a week ago today my name mentioned and my Easter eggs blog read from on the Steve Wright show - happy days.

Now I'm sat here after a couple of beers the night before, not enough sleep after a hectic week's work and preparing to appear on the Sean Styles show on BBC Radio Merseyside. Now my faithful Google alerts have picked up that I actually featured in the Telegraph today with the quote:

Lee McCoy runs www.easter-eggs.org.uk, a website that compares the prices of eggs and reviews the products.

"There's going to be a massive problem," he said. "The supermarkets have taken Woolworths' stock and have flooded the market to get customers in. The glut of Woolworths' eggs is really hurting people [especially] the small people.

"Retailers like Tesco are selling them for as 'three for £5 offers'. It is probably below cost. At Tesco the eggs are flying off the shelves. It will hurt the small retailers as it is making people become a lot more price-conscious," he added.

All good stuff. But How much traffic will it get? It's anyone's guess!

So off to buy the paper and carry on with preparing for the interview!

Update - I may be on Sky News tomorrow morning. If they can open up the Wilmslow studio as I can't make London.

Well that's off. The studio up here is booked and I won't travel to London.

Win £100 Chocolate - Double Or Quits With Barbardos Incentive

Well it looks like guesses over 6,000 would do well for the win £100 of chocolate competition I'm running.

But to make it interesting ... If you're the lucky winner of this competition and also win a Barbados incentive with Sunshine.co.uk (there's still time), I'll double that to £200.

Yep, that's right, you win my competition and win one of the Sunshine.co.uk places you get £200 of chocolate.

I was going to say that if any winner of my competitions win's place 4 (spread the love) then you don't get any chocolate but that's just not fair! So get entering both competitions now!

Amazon.com Tightens Affiliate Belt

Oooh. Belt tightening over in the states for Amazon.

Dear Amazon Associate:

We’re writing to let you know about a change to the Amazon Associates Program. After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you're not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.

As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. Also, in connection with this change, as of May 1, 2009, Amazon will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the Amazon websites in the US or Canada via paid search.

This change applies only to the Associates programs in North America. If you are conducting paid search activities in connection with one of Amazon’s Associates Programs outside of the US and Canada, please refer to the applicable country’s Associates Program Operating Agreement for relevant terms and conditions.

We appreciate your continued support and participation in this advertising Program. If you have questions or concerns, please write to us by using the Contact Us form available on Associates Central.


Sincerely,

The Amazon Associates Program