Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

I’ve managed to somehow miss The Apprentice before and only managed to see it for the first time towards the end of the last season. The final stages were enjoyable and with that being the case I decided to sit down and watch the first episode of the new series that started on BBC1 this evening.

Apologies as I know there are a number of fans of the show that read this blog, but what a big disappointment it was tonight. I had to turn the show off 15 minutes early. Ignoring the fact that the men were arguing and acting like little kids from start of the first task, the thing that really, really good to me was the bloody arrogance of some of them… to quote one of the blokes, who’s name I have already forgotten:

“Oh, I’ve never failed at anything, I see getting a B in one of my GCSE’s as a fail”

Tthis was one of the tamer comments, I’ve already had to remove all memory of some of the other ones from my mind before I started to get too frustrated.

Fair play mate - you’ve done well, you’ve managed to get on TV, but try not to act like a complete tit and destroy my viewing pleasure by acting like an arrogant toff.

Rant over. Hope other people enjoyed the show more than me!

I signed up to twitter back in December 2006 and after an initial burst of life I didn’t use it much - perhaps I didn’t get it at the time.

But now with the help of Twitbin and Twitterberry I am officially an addict.

For the unaware, twitter lets you post short (up to 140 characters) and could be seen as a more interactive version of the Facebook status messages.

When it really works well is when you learn about the @command, allowing you to comment on other friends “tweats” and forming interaction.  There are a number of US based affiliates and SEO’ers and it’s a great peak into their day to day life!

Check out my profile and give it a whirl - make sure you follow me when you’re all signed up to keep up with my updates!

It’s been debated in the past about if affiliate incentives, be them performance related or not, work.  I’ve always been a big advocate of them and suggest them to all of our clients, here are a few of the prizes that I’ve had a hand in giving away.

• 2 Trips to Barbados
• Weekend break (with helicopter transfer) to Monte Carlo
• Alienware PC worth about £2k
• £1,000 Prize draw
• Plasma TV
• Higher CPA’s!

To bring this point home, I thought I’d do a small blog about my affiliate experience with incentives and if they work after Chris (who just sold Holiday Watchdog to Trip Advisor) set one up for his new site, Sunshine.co.uk

About Sunshine.co.uk

Sunshine.co.uk is an online travel agent, selling cheap holidays to a UK audience.  It was created by Chris Clarkson, a well known figure in the affiliate space after successfully setting up, and then selling, holiday watchdog.

The Incentive

Rather than write my own version, here is the details of the competition posted by Chris on 11th March:

To give you a push to get your links to sunshine.co.uk up and running, we’re going to offer a rather nice incentive for March.

Drool
We’re giving away a rather stunning MacBook Air (the 1.6GHz model).

Cool, how do I get my grubby polluting paws on it?
Simply add our links to your site and email me with the URL(s) - each site featuring sunshine links = 1 entry in prize draw!

AND

Make 5 sales in March (yes, including sales already made) = 1 entry in prize draw!

So you can have multiple entries = more chances to win the coolest laptop out there.

Huh?
Every sunshine.co.uk affiliate who enters has an opportunity to win the prize draw for the MacBook Air, no matter how big or small!

Get Signed Up
If you haven’t done already, you’ll now be itching to join our programme on Affiliate Future

T&Cs
Closing Date - 31st March 2008
The winner will be drawn randomly - this decision is final. The draw will take place on the 1st April.

Contact
Please send your URLs to the email address given in my sig below. Anyone who’d like any more info about our programme please get in touch using same email.

And now why I think it works

Here are the reasons it was always going to work:

• It’s available to everyone, all they need to do is get up a link
• It’s a decent prize, relatively expensive and brand new
• All you need is a website, it’s not industry specific

On a personal note it has spurred me on to do something with my travel orientated domain name, online travel offers.  Not only have I now got a site up (that I’ll post more on once my server backup is complete tonight) but I’ve also started a competition to help build up an email database€¦ the competition itself has got over 300 applications in just a few days and runs till the end of the year, so I have a few months to earn enough to pay for it!

And lastly, to top it all off, the program is run extremely well - within 24 hours I had some new creative and a top selling product feed built from scratch after asking for them to be setup.

So well done to Chris, Happy and the rest of the team for their work and not only will I hopefully end up with a new Macbook Air to replace my broken PC at home, I’ll also hopefully end up with enough sales to justify the 20+ hours that I’ve put in so far working on it!

Last but not least, if you are thinking about going on holiday somewhere nice, make sure that you use Sunshine as it will give me a higher chance of winning!

There are a couple of affiliate articles in today’s NMA that I thought I would share with my blog readers and comment on..

(Click to enlarge)

I won’t go too much into my letter that has been published as I’ve said it all before but if you do have any comment on them then do feel free to post a comment below.

In terms of the black list article - this is a massive, massive step forward for the industry. I’ve kept my comments on it to myself since the last IAB meeting but now it’s out in the open have decided to discuss it in more detail.

Essentially this has been led my Affiliate Window and TradeDoubler and the idea behind it is to ascertain what the white, gray and black areas of affiliate marketing are. Should toolbars, perhaps from cashback sites, that automatically use affiliate links when customer go direct to site be allowed to do this?

Whilst some have been critical of the IAB in the past this is in my mind one of the best things that has come out of these meetings to date and based on the suggestions it’s open to all networks, not just IAB members.

All this shows just how well the market is starting to mature and hopefully the IAB will continue to be a channel to fuel this development.

It’s been a while since Wordpress 2.3 was released in September but today should see the release of Wordpress 2.5.

I’ll likely be online later tonight to give it a test drive and I’m sure we will see loads of plugins and themes that have been broken by it, but here are some of the new features:

• New admin interface (looks quite neat)
• Widget based dashboard (wooo!)
• Built in Avatar support
• Tag management
• Full text feeds
• Automatic plugin upgrades(!)
• Built in Gallery feature

Just need to get a built in forum and bbPress integration and I’ll be a happy man.. Hopefully that will come in the next release.

Download will be from the usual place.

I might also upgrade Ciarans blog, which went live last night and should be added to your RSS reader!