Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

To start off with, tracking does break.  It happens.  It’s happened on programs that I’ve run and a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I even managed to break some buy.at tracking as a developer.

So the question that we have to ask ourselves is if enough is done to check tracking from the network perspective.

Sure – a good affiliate manager should be able to notice a problem quickly enough, but not all programs have good affiliate managers.

The networks make a lot of money and sometimes have handfuls of account managers, but how much effort would it be to have a small team of people who’s role in life is to place orders online and make sure that the tracking is working across all their programs?

Lets look at some figures to use as an example.  If a network had, for example, 400 Merchants on board.

A tester should be able to place around 4 orders an hour – 8 hours a day – 5 days a week.  This means that one tester would be able to test the tracking of 160 programs every week.

Get a couple of testers in and networks would be able to check every single merchant program once a week.

Whilst this may not eliminate the problem it may well mean that errors are tracked slightly faster and tracking is fixed quicker – resulting it more money for both the affiliate and the network.

So why isn’t it done?  My personal opinion is that networks tend to rely on Affiliates to warn them of problems with tracking – yet again meaning affiliates are becoming consultants working for free to help the networks gain the mega bucks.

I’d certainly welcome a network that had a more proactive testing department and I’m sure that something like this would encourage affiliates to switch their links across.

I often wonder why the marketing and technology teams behind UK TV stations seem to be so bad.  Channel 4 become the first UK TV station to launch a system that lets you watch the latest TV episodes online (although the BBC have been testing a similar service for the past 4 years).  The site uses DRM and charges you for each program that you download and watch (DRM means that it only works for about a week of course).

No wonder TV Torrents are so popular.

Then look at NBC on the other side of the pond.  I’m a bit fan of Heroes (have been for a number of months).  Their website and marketing over there is amazing.  There are forums (and good ones at that), there are character blogs, you can watch the whole show online (for free of course).  Sounds good eh?  Not finished yet;  there is an online novel (a new comic book is put online after every episode) and there is even is a Wiki for gods sake!

I am utterly flabbergasted with the features that NBC have pilled into the site.

It’s not a one off either.   Ugly Betty is another show that’s come over from the US.  Channel 4’s site for it is basic and has little to offer.  Then there is ABC in the US.  Features galore. A Shop, Podcasts, Dedicated Websites for characters, Spin off online only TV shows; they even have a competition for people to design a dress to be features in the show!

So why on earth is the UK so behind the times?  It’s 2007 and we can’t even watch our TV shows online!

Answers on a postcard please (or comment).

Since this plugin is a bit of an arse to get hold of, I’ve put a copy of it on my server for download.

A bit of history about the plugin.

It was created by Robert Deaton  and hosting on Something Unpredictable, which crashed due to a hardware failure and has not been back up since.

It works in Wordpress 2.0 – I have not tried it for 2.1.

Download No Ping Wait Plugin

It’s very useful if you you ping a lot of servers (A list of some good ones can be found on my post about Wordpress and SEO).

I’ve recently become involved in an email conversation with a merchant who is having a few problems getting Affiliates signed up and promoting his site.  Aside from the fact that the program is an independent one (and trust needs to be built up for these to succeed), one of the biggest issues he had with his site was the site itself.

Some sites just look like they will not convert.  There are really basic improvements that can be made. Even if you are giving away £10,000 CPA, it’s still £10,000 of nothing.

I’ve been working merchant side not for a few years and have looked at a number of ways to increase conversion rates – some working and some falling flat on their face, so here are a few things to look at:

• Is your checkout and quick and easy process?  Ideally there should be no more than 3 clicks from the basket to a completed order.
• Do you really need to take all that information?  Lots of merchants seem to be asking for more and more information because of the increase in fraud online.  This is fair enough but you should still never take more info than is required – ask too much and customers will shop elsewhere – you don’t need to collect five different phone numbers and ask what their fax is!
• Do you accept all payment types ?  Lots of sites don’t accept Visa Electron for example.  If you are one of these sites then make sure that you offer Paypal as a viable alternative.   I don’t have a VISA card and it annoys the heck out of me when I can’t pay for things using my switch – it’s 2007 for gods sake.
• Is the site itself usable?  Are products easy to find?   Conduct some usability tests.  You don’t need to go and pay thousands for this, all you need is to write up some tasks and get someone outside of the company (a friend or family member, for example) to give it a go and see how they get on.   Make sure they do it in front of you – watching what people do on your site can be extremely interesting!
• Use Analytics.   There is no excuse now – you can use google analytics for free!  Look and see where people are clicking using the Site overlay.  Look and see what the most popular dropout pages are.  You may think your site is perfect but that doesn’t mean everyone else does.

Don’t underestimate the importance of Conversion rate on your site and on your affiliate program – get it right and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

Every so often I find something I’ve created in the past and put it online again.  This time it’s Sul n James – a stick figure series that was created out of pure bordom around 7 years ago.  It was a colaberation between myself and Sul, who I went to college with.

This is probaly the best of the lot.

Perhaps I used to have a slightly warped mind.

The Barbados Affiliate Incentive is back. Organised by Affiliate Future it is by far the best incentive that I have seen offered by a network & merchants and after winning a ticket myself last year from a merchant (who I only promoted due to the competition) I’ll definitely be vying to get out there again.

The basis is that Affiliate Future convince a number of merchants to incentives their affiliates and offer a trip to Barbados in some form of prize draw. Last year 26 of us went out to Bridgetown. I only knew a few of the people attending when I left and came back having made some really good friendships. More importantly, I learnt that Mount Gay Rum is the best drink in the world and have drunk about 5lts of it since!

If there are any affiliates looking to win a trip to the Caribbean in June then keep an eye out for the details on the Affiliate Future site or their A4U Forum. I’ve been told that a number of merchants are looking to launch the incentive on 1st March.

So far the only Merchant to launch is Littlewoods Bingo (a program that I am managing for another week before I leave). Details of how to win with Littlewoods Bingo.

Hopefully we’ll see a lot more of these incentives for 2007 – they can work very well when done correctly and it’s something that more merchants should be looking at to help increase the awareness of the program and the overall sales volume.

A bit of a long shot posting it here, but I’ll give it a go none the less.

I’m about to embark on a new (rather exciting) project and am looking for a designer / HTML coder to create a logo and some page mock ups then put them into HTML/CSS.

Ultimately as this is being built from the ground up I don’t have any spare cash to put into the design so am looking for someone with the required skills that wishes to be my partner for the duration of the project and in doing so will receive a share of any profits generated.

If you are interested in working on the project or want to sign an NDA and get some more information then please get in touch.

From VNUNet:

The government of Cuba has announced plans to take the whole country open source as soon as possible.

Communications Minister Ramiro Valdés announced the plan at a conference in Havana, and said that Microsoft had cooperated with government agencies and intelligence services in the past.

Valdes insisted that the information technology industry is a “battlefield” on which Cuba must fight.

He also highlighted a quote from Bill Gates, who described open source enthusiasts as “some new modern-day sort of communists”, pointing out that this would be a badge of honour for Cubans.

The article goes on to say that Cubans are developing their own linux distribution called Nova, based on Gentoo and that estimates are that there are around 3,000 Open Source developers based in Cuba.

It’s an interesting article on a number of fronts – linux is known to be more secure than windows and I’m sure it’s not the first national that has decided to move towards this technology (although I suspect that most would chose Sun).

With the advancements being made with GUI’s like KDE4 it will be interesting to see if some of Microsofts dominance starts to buckle – especially in the corporate environment.

If you are a regular reader than you may remember my review of AffiliStore 1.0 on the 12th February. I’ve not touched that site since (despite promosing I’d do more with it) but yesterday I received my first commission of £1.30.

So exactly one week after the site was created it was indexed on google and made a sale; not bad going, especially when this is the only site that has linked to it.

I’m going to attempt to create a custom theme for it over the next few days and look at the content units.   Will be interesting to see if the sale was a fluke and when/if the next one comes.

NB.  The site created was Treat Dad 

I liked linkedin – I’ve “connected” with some people I used to work with but the fact that you need someones operational email address can be a bit of a pain.

Today I found the fantastic Linkedin Fast Generator widget which you can see in it’s full glory in the left hand navigation of this page.  Once you click on it it will send an invite directly to me so you don’t need to worry about which email address I happen to be using.

Kudos goes to Andy Beard.