Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

September is a big month for a few reasons.

1. The AffiliateFuture retail event on the 16th
2. Talk like a Pirate day on the 19th (Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrr)
3. My Eldest sons 6th (yes, 6th!) Birthday

And starting tomorrow… Tacheback.  This is a charity style challenge throughout the month - trying to raise £1m for the Everyman charity.   It’s really simple to get involved - sign up via their website, get some sponsors and grow your tache all month long;  you can also do it in teams, so if anyone would like to join me in this then let me know and we can pop along to the Finale night on the 30th September.

If I can get 5 people to join in then i’ll keep it on the for Expo in October - much to my wifes dismay!  I’ve set up a team on the Tacheback site so drop me a message below with your name / email and i’ll invite you in!

Sign up & Join in now - if your a lady then you could always sponsor me instead.

I’ve not done much link building for a while now, but looked back and found the following sites that I used to use for directories - all of which at the time were free and didn’t require any reciprocal links but it’s been a while since I used them so some may have changed their policies.

Here’s the list - please leave a comment if I’m missing some out that the world should know about, especially UK specific ones. I’ll have a look through them all when I have some spare time and find out if they are all still active (and free).

Prolink Directory
aCotm Directory
DirAll Directory
Free Website Directory
Free Web Directory
Optimize Directory
Increase Directory
Open Link Directory
Cute Directory
The Free Directory
Add Site Free
Best Net Sites
Fresh TV
Info Tiger
Great Web Directory
Klottra
18 and 35
W3Moz
Directory Free
Ablaze Directory
Red Lava Directory
Klottra
Double Directory
Top Dot
Webdirectory Netorado
Add 2Us
Zopso
Bee Directory
Name Directory
WebDir Addsite SubmitFree
UC33
New Concept Directory
777 Media
Directory Slick
Gain Web
Links Guru
Domain Link Exchange
Fat 64
The Web Directory
Creative Agency

Now if I could only submit to them automatically!

My wife has been trying to make our family much more eco friendly over the past 6 months or so and has now started up her first ever website to try and preach about it to the world!

The site is Mums Going Green and at the moment is a blog with her experience of eco living and a little bit about websites and products that she likes.

If you have an eco-friendly site and want to swap links then please leave a comment with the details below and I’ll get it sorted out for you.

The interesting test will be to see if she continues writing content of gives up after 10 minutes like I tend to do with most of my sites (well, give up after buying the domain, at least).

I got an email pop into my inbox today from a company called GlobalDirectMedia who I’ve been speaking to over the past month or so and who have been a pleasure to deal with.

The email was talking about an incentive to win a trip to Hong Kong in March 09 to see the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens tournament.

View more details here

It’s a great incentive - the only thing I would have changed is by making it “winnable” by more affiliates - the prize is doing to the Top 3 performers and I’ve often found that when running an incentive that way it doesn’t actually encourage anyone to increase their performance.

It was only a few years ago when merchants and networks were giving away MP3 Players every week (apparently Kieron had a wardrobe full of them) but it really goes to show how times have changed - trips to Barbados, Hong Kong, cars, motorbikes, can’t wait to see what’s going to come next..

As many will know, I moved across to AffiliateFuture a couple of months ago to start up the Affiliate Development team here.  So far it’s going really well; there is so much happening and with the release of our new product feed / content unit system just around the corner it’s clear that things will continue to go in the right direction.

With that being the case, I am currently looking for someone new to join the Affiliate Development team – ideally it will be someone who has working in affiliate marketing as either an affiliate, an affiliate manager or at another network and understands the concepts of SEO, PPC and other ways to generate traffic.

It will mean working from AF Towers – which are near Great Portland Street and getting in at a reasonable time everyday!

It’s a great opportunity so if anyone is interested drop me an email with your CV to james.little@affiliatefuture.co.uk

I’ve been playing around with the AF Voucher Framework (more on that here, here and here) over the past few nights and have put together a demo of it at my Discount Codes site.  It’s been a while since I’ve developed much so I thought I’d give a bit of a background into why..

Before getting into Affiliate Marketing I was a developer for One.Tel – an international (at one point!) Telephone & Internet provider.  When I started in development it was a case of getting the site build in dreamweaver but as I developed (I did this for about 3 years) I started building sites in PHP and some wicked stuff in pure CSS/XHTML (not a table in sight).

Unfortunately since I moved out of development I’ve become a bit lazy – I blame things like Wordpress making it easy to get a site going in minutes and selecting from some pretty decent themes. I’m sure that I am not the only one who has gone down this route and is experiencing the same issues!

However since releasing the AF Voucher Code Framework I’ve started to get some of the passion for it back again; playing around a little more with php and mysql and hopefully releasing some nice little themes and add-ons that can be used out of the box.

In terms of Discount-code.eu itself – I picked up the domain about 6-8 months ago and have been wondering what to do with it ever since!  I tried doing the standard blog site and it got a bit of traffic but I didn’t really have the time to keep it maintained.  The idea here is that i’ll get the site into a stable position and then give it to someone else to keep up-to-date or just stick it up for sale.

On a completely separate point - has anyone actually ever seen a .eu rank for anything before?

Up until today I’ve been running on a desperately old version of wordpress and not only was I missing out on some of the new features but the database was also a little screwed so I was getting a few SQL errors popping up over the place.

Tonight I finally managed to sit down for an hour or so and upgrade - I’m using version 2.7 of wordpress which is still in beta so I’m sure there will still be a few bugs but it’s better than what I had.

I’ve also upgraded the theme - I’m not sure if I’m going to keep this one but it’ll do for now - comments appreciated.

You may well have noticed that I’ve not updated the blog too much over the past few months and I thought that I should explain a little about the lack of updates and why I’ve been so busy.

Firstly my personal life has been quite busy - as some of my readers will know, my wife, Lindsey, is pregnant with our third child.  The baby is due on the 25th December (!) and there’s been a number of scans and visits to the doctors / hospital to keep me busy from this aspect – add this up with having two kids already and I don’t get much time to myself these days!

On the work front I’ve been at AffiliateFuture for about three months now – it’s been a busy three months which have included a week in Barbados and more recently a few days in Boston for the Affiliate Summit – setting up a new department also means that I’ve been working pretty late and burning the candle a little too much.  Being the media whore that I am you can also hear a little bit more about what we’ve been doing on a couple of recent interviews too:

• Fraser Edwards Podcast with James Little
• Affiliates4u.TV Interview with James Little

Hopefully things will start to get a bit less insane in September as I’ve got a number of posts in my head that I really need to sit down and write.

The title of this post is not be being offensive, it’s a well known term that you can read more about on Wikipedia.

But onto the point of the post, in browsing an iphone forum today (my 3g iphone was delivered and is amazing!) an ad from google adsense got my attention:

The ad itself is rather nice and the case looks great (I think I’ll actually order one myself) but look at the stupidly long discount code!  Not sure why a merchant would have such a long code especially as it’s on adsense.

Has anyone else seen any randomly long codes like this on creative before?

KISS

I became angered once again with having Pay as you go and as I’d been wanting an iPhone for some time, I decided it was about time to switch back to a contract phone and try and get hold of one.

That seemed to be more difficult than I would have thought but after a few weeks of being out of stock, Carphone Warehouse had them back on their website and available for order.

Fantastic.

So I went though the relatively simple checkout process (not even using an affiliate link!) and saw that I could pick up my order from the store, rather than waiting for it to be delivered.. this I thought would be easier so I selected this option, pinged in my nearest store details and continued the order.   Confirmation was received on my email that they had got my order OK and would begin processing it… by this time it was towards the end of the day so I was hoping that I’d be able to pick it up either today (Wednesday) or Thursday.

Then this morning I received an email saying that my ordered had been canceled due to a security check failure!  If it was a credit check failure I could understand (I’m crap with money!) but the security warning was off.  It gave a phone number and said to call up if I wished to proceed but the original order had been canceled.

A little bit of googling and then a call to Carphone Warehouse then revealed that the reason for this is that with some handsets (the iphone being one of them) the could not allow store collection and it had to be delivered to my home address instead.  That’s fine and the phone is coming tomorrow, but there are a few things that this raises:

1) As the order had been canceled, if I had gone though an affiliate link one could only assume that this would also mean that the affiliates commission is canceled

2) It’s just poor customer service - they should either not allow store pickup on these handsets in the first place, or better still call / email me to tell me there is a problem with this method and put the order on hold, not cancel it completely!

I’d be interested to know how many other people would go down this route and how many would not phone up to replace the order, one would think a group as large as CPW would have a better way of doing this!

Looking forward to joining the iPhone club - just a shame I’m at work tomorrow and hopefully it’s delivered when my wife is in the house!