Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

Ever since I can remember there have been some strong views in the affiliate marketing world about brand name bidding and the latest hot topic in the industry is merchants de-duping their sales and reversing potential commissions to affiliates.

As someone that runs an affiliate network and someone that has in the past run a few affiliate sites I’ve been meaning to jot down some works about both for a while now and have finally found a few minutes to do so.

So let’s start with brand name bidding€¦

My view is quite clear - as a merchant there are very few reasons to allow brand name bidding - the only ones I can think of are:

a) You have a brand that is not possible to get trademarked
b) You’ve been waiting for ages to google to protect your trademarked brand
c) You don’t rank in position #1 in the organic search results

I’d welcome suggestions for other reasons but if your network is suggesting you allow it there is one clear reason why; they will make money from it.

I’ll highlight two things I have seen that show why on earth this is so mucked up.

A client being bullied by his affiliates

We were talking to a client based in American who sells online software. This client allows affiliates to bid on their very well known brand name and we suggested that they do this themselves and stop affiliates from doing so.

I was shocked when the client said they had spoken to their existing network and some of the affiliates and were told that if the policy changed, a number of the affiliates would stop promoting them and they would loose sales; essentially he explained that he felt he was being held to ransom by his affiliates but because they needed the sales they would allow this to happen.

What kind of world are we in when a client is saying he is being held to ransom by his affiliates!!

A network back hander

I’ve made it quite clear on previous occasions that when I have done affiliate work (especially the limited PPC I have done) I do not work with any programs that I manage; I feel this is an ethical decision that I have stuck to for years.

While we’re talking of ethics, imagine my surprise when a very large network that we were working with suggested to me that if we allowed a small closed group of brand name biddings, they would suggest that I myself was on that group.

Obviously I turned this offer down but imagine that this is not the first case of it happening.

So who should bid on the brand?

There are two very simple things you should do here/allow here:

1) Either set up your own campaign on Google, Yahoo and MSN for brand terms and bid on them yourself - you won’t need a large budget for this
2) If you work with an agency (on a % of media spend rather than % of sale basis) then get them to setup the campaign to do this, it will work out a lot cheaper.

I’d welcome further comments and suggestions from affiliates, merchants, agencies or networks about other reasons to allow this but still find it strange that there are so many closed groups for brands that really don’t need to waste money in this way.

Make sure that you come back to the blog soon for part 2 of my rant about merchant de-duping of sales!

I was directed to the Curve training site today and thought it was worth a mention.   It’s something that’s been on the cards for a while and it’s great to see it up and running with the first course organised for 3rd September.

Curve is a killer team with Jess Luthi, Helen Porter and Brendon Scott - all well known names in the industry and some of the nicest people I have met.   Courses are on Affiliate Marketing, PPC and SEO and I am sure that they will all be very successful and fill the seats.

The only criticism that I have is the fact that I am saying how good the courses will be and they don’t even have an affiliate program for me to use to get some cash for my kind words!

In all seriousness courses are a while off yet but if you are serious about learning about the industry and advancing your skills I can think of no better teachers

Not sure if this is old news or not, but found this today:

Wordtracker to launch UK Keyword Service

The new service will be launched at SES London, February 13th - February 15th, 2007.

You can register now to get the latest news on our UK keyword service. We’ll also send you:

• A fabulous launch offer
• Access to a free exhibition pass
• A 20% discount on any of the three conference days at SES London

The new UK service will provide essential keyword research for:

• UK websites serving the local market
• Businesses wishing to target the UK (the world’s fifth largest economy)
• Search engine optimization companies and design agencies with UK clients.

Wordtracker has built its reputation on good quality keywords from a reliable source - the metacrawler search engines Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com. We have now sourced a reliable source of UK keywords that has passed all our keyword quality tests and we are rapidly building an extensive database of UK keywords.

The UK keyword service will be incorporated into our existing database from the middle of February and you will be able to choose from Global or UK only search terms.

If you already have a Wordtracker account, then you will automatically have access to the UK keywords when we launch in February.

If you don’t have a Wordtracker account, there really couldn’t be a better time to take advantage of our fabulous launch offer. Register to get immediate details.

I just received an email offering $200 Free Adcenter credits via promotional code: DM-2-1106 

AdCenter Promotional Page

In case anyone hasn’t seen it, Paul Wright has put together a fantastic article on the use of some tools to generate thousands of keywords for PPC campaigns.

It’s an excellent read so if you have a few spare minutes you should check it out now.