Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

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!

It’s back to the real world after a week away in Barbados for the Affiliate Future 2007 Affiliate Incentive. Whilst I still have the jet lag I’m starting get back into the rhythm of things and already trying to look of ways of getting there again next year.

This really is one of the best incentives out there (though I think that they should take us to an all inclusive resort so we don’t need to worry about paying for food and drink) and as an affiliate manager have now sponsored affiliates two years in a row and would advice other merchants to do the same - it doesn’t cost much and can lead to a very positive ROI.

Ignoring the networking, workshops and speed dating sessions (!) there were a number of excursions this year, the best of which being the Jolly Rodger (a pirate ship) where the rum flowed throughout on our first full day on the Island.

Also managed to take a journey to the north point of the Island in a mini moke (with the brakes failing a few times!) to an amazing cave with a glorious natural lake that we were able to swim in - absolutely amazing.

Harbour Lights was one of the best nights on the Island - an all you can drink place for about £12 where a number of us performance a fantastic buttercup rendition on the stage followed by a dance off (which I apparently won) with some locals.

So much more I could write, but will not bore you with. A massive thank you goes out to Pete, Costa, Mary & everyone else at Affiliate Future for organising the conference and fingers crossed that I get invited again next year.