Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

What a fun day!

A big thank you to buy.at for organising this tournament – it’s something that has been mentioned on the forum a number of times and from the chats I had everyone seemed to enjoy it.

For those that didn’t go, I’ll give you a quick overview of the day….

Over 100 of us all met down at Wembley Goals around 12pm, had a briefing tell us the rules at around 12.50 and then the games commenced.  Our team (the Affiliate Ninjas) consisted of:

James & Dan from Flightmapping
Lee McCoy & Steven Hall
Pete Dickenson & Neil Mitchell

It’s fair to say that the majority of the team had not played football in a fair bit and we were not really in it to win it but a lot of pre-match banter put the pressure on slightly!  We ended up in the same qualifiers as buy.at & UKWebMedia – both of which had their own kits made up especially!  Our first two games consisted of losing 9-1 and then 10-1!   Our last match, against Steak Media saw the team gel more and go on to win 5-4 (after drawing 4-4 and going on to play golden goal).

In the end the final was between Buy.at (who had been doing pre-match trials!) and Venturian Media,  who went on to win 6-0!

The day was finished with an awards ceremony and a free bar, giving everyone a chance to have a good natter.  I am proud to say that I won a trophy, even if it was for the play who €œMust try harder€!

The grudge match between the Affiliate Ninjas and the Affiliate Rovers didn’t happen in the end as half my team had to leave early but plans are afoot for a game in August for braggers rights.

In my previous role at St. Minver I had a blog installed to keep our affiliates up to date with the latest news and promotions – the systems were all tied up so I didn’t have FTP access to be able to get it up and running myself and it meant that no spamming filter was put in place, but comments were moderated.

This week the new affiliate manager started and one of the guys I used to work with sent me a message asking if I could remember the login details so they could start to use it again.

I attempted to login to get the username and password and noticed the following:

If there ever was a good reason to install Akismet then I suspect this is it.  Unfortunately it does show how bad the dark side of the industry is – especially when I only left about 3 months ago!

• Home >> RevenueToday.com The Performance Marketing Standard
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I am going to start this post sensibly – with a disclaimer warning any potential reader that they may well suffer poor productivity if they read on. There is your warning – you can no longer blame me if you end up getting fired, can no longer pay the bills and end up on the streets – not my fault, sorry, you’ve been warned.

Sometimes in life you find something that is so addictive you know that you will be hooked straight away. For some the addition is drugs or alcoholic, but for others it can be something like WeeWar.com.

After seeing a post on Sam’s site, CostPerNews, I decided to give it a go and make a few challenges – hours later I’m sitting on the computer in my underwear (TMI?) working out what will be my next move in the battle. I’m still not entirely sure what I am doing, but the site is basically an online version of risk.

If anyone does ignore my advice and signs up my username is (surprise, surprise) 3wdl.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a sucker for gifts and freebies so I wanted to write a quick post to thank Kieron for the very kind gift which you can see to your left.

For anyone that doesn’t know, Kieron writes on one of the most popular affiliate marketing blogs on the internet (that I recently helped redesign), which has a reputation for it’s strong content – insightful and helpful to everyone in the industry.

As a side point, gifts like this are a great way to say thanks in the affiliate industry! I would suggest that as an affiliate manager you should really get a budget for them and make sure you use it all up.

Thanks again Kieron – will have a toast on you when the time calls for it to be opened!

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One of the glories of the web is the number of visitors that come to your website / blog via longtail search terms – it can drive lots of targeted traffic but often visitors come to the site only the once.

A small bit of php can be integrated into wordpress to try and combat this. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Now just follow our few easy steps to integrate this into your wordpress installation:

1) Save cookie.php.txt to cookie.php somwhere locally.
2) Open up cookie.php.txt and change the text and feed URL to match that of your server.
3) Upload the file to the root directory of your server.
4) Open up your wordpress backend (wp-admin) and select “Presentation” then “Theme Editor”.
5) Select style.css on the right and add the following code (you can modify it to change the colors, etc) in the file somewhere:

/* Cookie style document */

.cookiestyle {
width:450px;
text-align:left;
padding:5px;
background-color:#EAF4FF;
border:1px solid black;
font-size:12px;
margin-bottom:15px;
}

6) In the Theme Editor, select “Main Index template” and insert the following line:

<?php include(“cookie.php”); ?>

This should generally go near the top of the file and in my theme is above:

<?php $countervariable=1; if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Do the same with the Single Post page

7) Re-visit the site and you should now see the message display – Refresh and it will disappear.

It’s another “nice touch” and if your content is high quality it may well encourage your visitors to sign up to the RSS feed and visit more often.

Regular wordpress users will know that there are hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of plugins on the web and recently I think I’ve found my favorite yet, Comment Relish.

Once downloaded and activated you are able to setup text within your wordpress backend and whenever someone comments on an article for the first time, they are emailed thanking them and linking though to the RSS feed. Here is an example mine:

John,

Thanks for your comment on 3wdl blog at www.3wdl.co.uk

I hope that you like the blog and if you want to keep up to date with all the latest posts then you can subscribe to our feed at: http://www.3wdl.co.uk/feed/

Thanks again,
James
www.3wdl.co.uk

John is now happy at the seemingly personal touch and is more likely to convert into a long term subscriber, especially with the link though to the RSS.

This and the Subscribe to comments plugin fit in pretty nicely and are features that anyone serious about their blog should be looking at. Both are available on the wordpress pack that I put together.

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• Affiliate Marketing Blog | James Little writes about Affiliate Marketing, Blogging and other random thoughts

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• Affiliates4u Widgets and Backs Buttons

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It really is fantastic to see when networks get it right.  I’d like to say a quick well done to Paid on Results, the first UK network to launch their own network blog.

I’m really looking forward to seeing more content on there and with my affiliate hat on it seems like another great way to get updates (especially as Paid on Results are one of the only networks not to spam people with newsletters!).

Lets hope that more networks follow their lead – it’s something that a number of bloggers (including myself) have been banging on about for a long time and good to see that it’s starting to happen.