Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

I should note straight away that I do not for one minute encourage spamming of any shape of form - I hate it and am dead against it, but I have used AdderRobot to add relevant friends to my MySpace account before.

AdderRobot was recently bought out & have been working on version 4 of their software which was released to Beta at the weekend.   I have a full license at home but wanted to try it out on another machine (which doesn’t work usually) and noticed that the latest Browser Version Beta (not socket) seems to work fine.

So if you want to give it a try why not grab the Beta release.

This is quite possibly the most elaborate hoax that YouTube has created and extremely well put together.

The video claims that by sending a link to your gmail account and logging in and out for an unspecified amount of times, you will get past the “easter egg” and be able to access the Google TV Beta service to watch programs like Prison Break & The OC online.   Some of the comments on YouTube are excellent.

I have been going at this for about an hour.. If anyone can help.. Please reply too this thanks

I tired in excess of 300 times, at home and work. Can anyone send an invite? kylereilly at gmail dot com

So i haven’t been able to get it…been trying for like an hour…this is quite depressing.

I hope someone kills this guy.

SOLUTION: Turn computer off. Wash out, with eather soap and water(windex will do fine).
WAIT- for the computer to dry off 1-2 hours.
AFTER- you will instantly notice an increase in your compouters speed.

Just one week after Buy.at announced their new branding it’s now TradeDoublers turn to do the same.

Here’s the press release.

Newly designed product and service portfolio supports expanding needs of digital marketing community.

TradeDoubler, the pan-European digital marketing company has redefined and developed its product offering and image to address the growing demand for performance-based, online marketing.

The product range caters to advertisers and publishers who are looking to fully exploit the various marketing and advertising opportunities presented by the internet. TradeDoubler’s range of digital marketing solutions accommodates advertisers across multiple industry sectors whether they are looking to generate increased brand awareness or drive direct response in the form of clicks, sales or registrations.

Advertisers are shifting large portions of their budgets online in response to the ever increasing amounts of media time that consumers are spending on the internet. Leading advertising forecaster, ZenithOptimedia noted in a recent quarterly spending report: “Internet ad spend will grow 28.2 percent in 2007, while the rest of the market grows 3.9 percent.€

The revamped product range represents an expanded portfolio for TradeDoubler which has grown from an affiliate marketing specialist to a digital marketing services company delivering brand marketing and direct response campaigns online. The newly branded range includes:

€¢td Pull (Affiliate network)
Long-term partnerships between advertisers and publishers. Publishers are paid a commission by an advertiser when advertising on their website results in an actual sale or registration for the advertiser.

€¢td Push (Campaign network)
Short-term activity with pre-defined deliverables. TradeDoubler will create a bespoke network of targeted publisher sites to meet the advertiser’s specific objectives.

€¢td Reach (Ad network)
A plug and play network with extensive reach. An advertiser €˜plugs’ into the existing network of publisher sites and ads are rotated across the network reaching a wide target audience.

€¢td Talk (Pay-per call network)
Advertisers can use the reach of the internet to drive sales and registrations over the phone. td Talk allows publishers to easily promote more complex products and services on their website and receive a commission for phone calls generated.

€¢td Toolbox (Marketing interface)
A tracking and ad serving interface. Advertisers and publishers can track, analyse and optimise the performance of all online marketing activity (advertisers) or advertising carried on their website (publishers).

€œDigital is becoming mainstream with online advertising now accounting for a larger percentage of total advertising spend. The appeal of the Internet is that it can reach a mass audience as well targeting smaller niche audiences but most importantly and uniquely its success in doing both can be tracked and measured,€ said Nicola Reed, Head of Marketing at TradeDoubler. €œWe wanted to underline this metrics-based approach in our own positioning and product portfolio and also respond to the fact that marketing online is now as much about branding as it is about generating sales. The new product names are designed to speak the language of modern marketers and simplify the process of advertising on the Internet.€

TradeDoubler has also refreshed its own image to underline its full range of performance-based digital marketing solutions. A new website has been launched today. For more information about TradeDoubler and to take a look at its new branding, please visit: www.tradedoubler.com.
About TradeDoubler

TradeDoubler is a Pan-European digital marketing company offering a range of performance-based marketing solutions. TradeDoubler’s products and services provide companies with the tools and expertise to drive results online whether they are looking to generate sales or drive brand awareness. Headquartered in Sweden, the company boasts a unique European reach with local offices in 14 countries across Europe and a presence in a further four countries. With a breadth of expertise across multiple industry sectors and a network of more than 100,000 website publishers TradeDoubler helps deliver online results for over 1,000 advertisers across Europe including a mix of local and international companies such as Apple Store, Dell, Telia Sonera, eBay and Kelkoo.

Please visit www.tradedoubler.com for further information.

Media contacts:

Aparna Choudhari Gray
Direct Line: + 44 (0) 20 8834 3416
Email: aparna.gray@bitepr.com
Bite Communications

Nicola Reed
TradeDoubler
Email: nicola.reed@tradedoubler.com
Direct Line: +44 (0) 20 7798 5814

The fabulous super affiliate & blogger Keith Bond has released his first version of Internet Marketing Blogs UK, an RSS aggregator inspired by Scott’s Bumpzee.

I’m a massive RSS/Feed reader fan so it’s great to see sites like this coming out and Keith’s latest release is sure to be a must read for a lot of us.

He’s also taking the feeds from AffiliateManagement so if you are in the Affiliate arena and have yet to sign up to this free service you should definitely get started.

I’ve been off sick the past two days with the flu and am reluctantly back in the office today as I’m popping over to CAP Euro later on.

One of the things that has stuck me most over the past few days is how much I miss my kids.   Sometimes being a working dad (with an hours commute into the office) can really be quite depressing.   I’m out of the house for about 7.30am and the kids are up around 7.45am.  I’m back at home about 7.30pm and the kids are already in bed, so I only see them at weekends.

Kieran was born when I was 20, so I was quite a young dad;  people in this industry seem quite astonished that I’m a father of two at 24 and often ask if I would have done anything different and the answer is always a resounding no - my kids mean the world to me.

Anyhow - not sure on the point of this post; just sad to be away from them again.

The results from the first ever UK Affiliate Census (conducted by AffiliateProgramAdvice) are now available to download from E-Consultancy.

With over 1,500 respondents the to the survey which was released in November they provide fruitful reading.

Fraser has already posted some of his initial thoughts on his blog.  I’ll be going though them tonight and posting some of the highlights.

Download the full results

This is not the bees all and end all of guides and I’m sure there are plenty more out there, but I thought I’d pop a few things onto my virtual notepad in the sky after a number of Wordpress installs that I have done recently. All of the following work with Wordpress 2.0 and will most likely work with 2.1.
Titles

One of the first things to change after installing wordpress is the title section in your wordpress template. Out of the box it usually has the title on all of your site as the Blog title, which is obviously rubbish for SEO. There is a plugin that you can use further down in this guide but this will also do it for you.

To do this go into your admin area, select Presentation then Theme Editor. If the theme is a good one it will be in the €œheader.php€ - just replace whatever is in the title tag at the moment.

Mod Rewrite

The next thing you should change is the URL structure - Search Engines really don’t like the standard variable, e.g. something.com/p=73. Make sure that your server supports Mod_Rewrite and select one of the options from the admin area / options / Permalinks. There are thousands of different structures that you can use but my personal fav is: /news/070%post_id%/%postname%.html. This is optimised for google news after reading a few bits on the web about the structure required - if you don’t plan to try and get inclusion here then the default Date and name based option should do you good.

Plugins

The plugins section is one of the best parts of wordpress - there are so many different ones out there but my personal recommendations are:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior - by far the best tag software out there and can also work well with URLs if you have Mod_Rewrite on.
• SEO Title Tag works with Ultimate Tag Warrior and is what I use for most of my sites - the code used at the top can work just as well but this is easier to customise.
• Marketingpop SEO plugin also requires Ultimate Tag Warrior and can work quite effectively.
• Sitemap Generator generates a sitemap.xml file that you can send to google & yahoo. Google’s webmaster toolkit page is very good and can help with getting indexed faster than usual.
• Social Bookmarks will put some nice little buttons under your posts and allow people to submit your post to digg, reddit, etc

Pings

I generally ping the following servers, some of them are great, some are not, but here is my list none the less. You can set these up in your Options > Writing in the Wordpress Admin area.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

Other things to think about

If it works with the post then make sure that you trackback a few blogs in your posts (as long as they are relevant obviously) - the more relevant links back to your site the better and should bring you a little bit of traffic.

MyBlogLog was recently purchased by Yahoo which means it’s likely to get a lot more users over time - sign up an account and add the widget onto your site, not only will it help give you a visualisation of who is visiting your site but you’re mug will be displayed on other blogs you visit and you can sometimes get a bit of traffic from keeping your face on some of the bigger blogs.

Use Social bookmark sites. Submit to Digg, Submit to Reddit, and check out onlywire.com and submit each one of your articles every time you write a post - it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes and they can bring quality backlinks.

That’s it for now - Hopefully this is an article that will continue to develop as time goes by - if you have any other suggestions please do leave a comment and I’ll add them in.

buy.at have today announced their new branding & tagline. The logo which they have had since they started in 2002 has been replaced and the new tagline is “more profitable growth, faster”.

Here is what they have to say on it:

This strapline embodies our focus as an affiliate network in 2007 and conveys that we are committed to overdeliver to our clients and partners. The market is maturing fast and so are we, the re-brand captures this in the new logo and following strapline.

I prefer the old logo, but putting aside the re-brand I really like what buy.at have done recently. Their new management area from both a merchant and advertisor perspective is very nice; i’m always a sucker for flash reporting interfaces!

They are certainly one of the best networks in the UK and hopefully the new changes will help continue to propel them.

Wordpress 2.1 is released as stable later today.  It brings some good new features, some of which you may have already seen if you my Free Affiliate Blogs site, as Wordpress MU seems to use a few of them already.

You can find a great overview of what’s new in Version 2.1 on the Technosailor site:  Ten things you should know about Wordpress 2.1

I’ve got quite a few plugins and am slightly reluctant to upgrade yet for fear of breaking them, so will probably give it a few weeks before I try it out on this site.

I’m in the middle of writing a guide on Optimising Wordpress for SEO, so hopefully I won’t see too much impact from this.

Last night I attended the second game of the ANPL (Amateur National Poker League) in my local bar and won for the second time in a row.

It was an excellent game - certainly the most exciting live tournament that I’ve played, even if there were only 14 people taking part.

The game started off at quite a slow pace - you are given 3,000 chips and the blinds are 50/25 - it all kicks off about 8pm and there is one break at around 9-9.30pm.  At the break everyone is given another 3,000 chips, even if you have already gone out.

So back to the game - I ended up one of the two people who were out by the break - I don’t think I had more than one pair for the entire first half and I suffered with the blinds increasing.

I came back into the game in the second half and was obviously in last place, I was a man possessed and within a relatively short period of time had started to increase my stack dramatically - it may have been a change in my style of play or maybe lady luck had started shining, but either way I was on fire.  Within 30 minutes two people were gone and I was the chip leader.   Play continued and after a few more exists the two tables were merged and into a final table.   I was the chip leader and was trying to play quite aggressively whilst everyone else was playing pretty safe.

Then I lost it bad - I had a pretty good hand - an A K suited.  The flop showed another A K so I had two good pairs.   I went ahead and forced someone all-in who seemed quite reluctant.  Cards were turned and they had a pair of 7’s so the odds were on my side.   A 7 was the last card to come out and I lost a stack of chips and was no longer leading.  At that stage of the game if I had won the hand I could have finished the others off pretty quickly.

Anyhow, play continued and then the opposite happened - again I went all in with a pretty crap hand - trying to bluff and pick up what was on the table.  Calling my bluff another person at the table went all in - turned out they had a pair of A’s (one from the deal, one from the flop) and I had bugger all.   I ended up getting a flush and pushing them out of the game.   I went on from there and all was quite quiet until there was just two of us left.   I was the chip leader and the blinds were now 8,000 and 4,000.   The other guy was the big blind and it was now 11.30pm.   I went all in without even looking at my cards.   He looked at his and did the same, fancying his luck with a pair of 8’s.

I ended up winning with a pair of 10’s (one from the deal and one from the flop) and I am now on 272 points from two games, ranking me about 3rd in the country in the ANPL league.

Was a really good night out - it’s the only time I really go out in the evening in the week and a few beers and game of poker go down well.

NB.  I also dragged Ste along, who also ended up on the final table in his first live game.  You should not however let this fact make it sound like all the players were crap and this is certainly not the reason I won!