Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

If you are an affiliate, affiliate manager, network employee or agency worker then the chances are that you are registered for the a4uexpo at the end of October.  The event is hosted on the 25th/26th October in the London Excel centre and looks by all accounts to be a right corker!

I’ll be standing around for most of the day on the altogether stall but aside from that here are some of the sessions I’m looking forward to attending..

Day 1:

11.30-12.30: Let’s Get Social

The Affiliate 2.0 Session. Uncovering how affiliates are uniquely placed to profit from Blogging, Viral and Social Marketing. Real life practical examples on facebook applications, bebo and second life. With an update on what’s hot this Autumn.

NB.  This one is with our SEO/Social Director, Ciaran Norris & the famous Lee McCoy.  A must.

13.00-13.45: Ad Exchanges & Ad Marketplaces Uncovered

This session will introduce you to the emerging world of Ad Exchanges & Marketplaces. Starting with an explanation on how ad exchanges & marketplaces work, the session will take you through how advertisers and to publishers can benefit from using an ad exchange.

14.00-15.00: Meet the Super Affiliates

Driving sales of over £500 Million for their merchants last year, these super affiliates answer your questions on strategy and hot issues within the industry.  Ask the questions you’ve always wanted to!

15.30-16.30: The Interactive Insiders’ Guide to Selling Your Web Business

Join Duncan Jennings & Sean Lafleur as they share their complementary experiences in selling & buying web businesses (with more or less success).

17.00-18.00: Extreme SEO Q & A

Extreme SEO Q&A session on Search Engine Optimisation, with both black, grey and white hat experts from SEO.

Then of course there is the a4uawards in the evening

Day 2

09.30-10.30: £2bn & Growing. Where Next for Affiliate Marketing?

Leading industry figures predict how affiliate marketing will evolve with this keynote session. Speakers inc. the President of Linkshare, COO of TradeDoubler, Chief Exec of Buy.at, and the CEO of Affiliate Future.

11.00-12.00 The Changing Nature of Search

The Internet is maturing at lightening speed and the very definition of “Search” is changing with it.

From “Google Universal” to “personalized search”, not only are the search engines changing the way they see search, but so are the users changing their search methods and in particular they are changing their perceptions of who they trust on the internet to point them in the right direction.

This talk looks at some of the roots behind these potentially seismic shifts in user search behavior and the search providers themselves to see the dangers and the opportunities that face both merchants and affiliates alike.

12.30-13.30:  Widgets, Blidgets and the Implications for Affiliate Marketing in the long term

How widgets and blidgets will affect affiliate marketing in the long term. Widgets, Blidgets this session won’t make you Fidget!.

14.00-14.45 -  Case Study - The Online and Offline PR Campaigns for the MillionDollarHomePage.com

Imal will be speaking on the topic of The Online and Offline PR Campaigns for the MillionDollarHomePage.com & The Mount Madonna School Raffle ( 2.9 million dollars raised).

Discussed will be: Public Relations and marketing strategy before launching a campaign, Global vs. Regional campaigns - how to make each a success, Positioning key messages in the media, How to be effective in interviews, Outreaching to the media both online and offline.

15.00-16.00 - Will you need a network in 2008

This session examines the recent trend of full service agencies establishing micro networks.
Some say designed to cream the top performing Paid Search affiliates. Here we compare and contrast these with traditional affiliate networks, and what this means for the sector and the traditional relationship triangle. I’m on this one - so please do come and ask some questions!

16.30-17.30 Paid on Performance Search - The Future?

Are traditional agency models such as charging a percentage of search spend viable in the increasingly competitive paid search space?  This session compares and contrasts them against benifits of paid performance search as popularised by Affiliate Marketing.

Phew.  I think that’s it - along with actually being on the stand it’s going to be a busy few days - look forward to seeing many of you there!

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

Earlier today I posted an article about the Direct Line Affiliate program (on OMG) and their new above the line TV advertising. I have a fair few readers on the blog so was unsurprised to see some traffic come though straight away but was quite amazed at how quickly google picked up on the article.

As you can see below I received a couple of visitors starting from just 1pm come though to the site - seeing as it was around 10pm that I posted the article that means it took just three hours to get into the serps for these terms.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen a term rank so quickly but the first time I’ve really measured it - I do wonder if this is a result of the normal google web spider or something to do with the blog spider; whatever it is it’s pretty damn good though.

I also ping a few different servers (list in the SEO Wordpress Guide I wrote in January) which may have something to do with it.  An example of this would be that another site that I run powered by wordpress recently ranked for a targeted keyword before I pointed even 1 link at it (or wrote any decent content)!  Google wasn’t displaying any links to the site either, so the only explanation I could come up with was that I posted some tests blog posts and got picked up from the pings.

Since this plugin is a bit of an arse to get hold of, I’ve put a copy of it on my server for download.

A bit of history about the plugin.

It was created by Robert Deaton  and hosting on Something Unpredictable, which crashed due to a hardware failure and has not been back up since.

It works in Wordpress 2.0 - I have not tried it for 2.1.

Download No Ping Wait Plugin

It’s very useful if you you ping a lot of servers (A list of some good ones can be found on my post about Wordpress and SEO).

I recently decided to give Affilistore v1.0 Pro a trial after seeing some good reviews about it over the web. The creator is a regular contributor to the A4UForum and his technical skills are second to none.

As a mini-case study I’ll be documenting the process, describing how I get on with the install and hopefully suggesting a few potential features. My initial fears are that it will be difficult to get organic traffic with most of the text coming direct from the product feeds so this may be one of the more challenging aspects of the project.

For this I am going to use the domain name treatdad.co.uk which I purchased a few years ago and never did anything with (much like most of my domain names in fact).

7.15pm: The wife is out for the evening and it’s time to boot up my FTP client ready for action.
7.18pm: All uploaded. Time to view the Readme documentation.
7.21pm: Skimmed though, created a new MySql Database for it and assigned user privledges.
7.27pm: My progress is halted by an error when I try and run the install.php script - apparently I have what is known in the industry as an €œInvalid default value for ‘priceLimit’€. I’ve emailed Steve and asked for a solution. Decide to tidy the house a little whilst I await a reply.
7.53pm: Just got a reply with a replacement install.php file which seems to work. Need to pick up a datafeed now so going to sign up to Paid on Results and give Prezzybox a try first.
8.09pm: I’ve managed to sign up for an account, full of the datafeed and complete the installation. I made an error with the IMGUrl and tried to change this, but couldn’t find an easy way of changing the fields and regenerating the site, so had to delete the feed and try again.
8.10pm: The site seems to work, though I’m not sure where the €œSimilar Products€ part comes in. Apparently a Waters Friend Corkscrew is similar to a Silverstone Ferrari experience!
8.18pm: I’ve noticed a couple of bugs that need to be ironed out. The navigation is a little broken for example. I am going to try and add a second feed next.
8.32pm: Second feed added. Figures out the problem with the navigation which was due to a slightly broken feed - remove the extra fields that were not required (lots of image locations) and managed to fix it. Spoke to Steve who also said that there is the option to hide categories which could have done the same job.
8.41pm: I’ve added a news entry and will try and get one added every few days in the lead up to Fathers day - this is the best way I can think of to get some content driving though visitors

A quick point to make

In just over an hour I’ve managed to get up a fully functional site with two different feeds feating thousands of products - bear in mind the fact that I had a small problem with the install script and that’s pretty good going! The features are very good and I’m already sold.

My next main port of calls will be do try and change the skin a bit (I need a logo). I’ve managed to stick some tracking tags up so will look forward to my first visitor. I also want to add some more feeds from some different networks and see what happens!

So where do I see this product going?

My initial thoughts were to focus on some community aspects of the site - as most of the content is going to be duplicate (as it’s from feeds) there should be features to allow product reviews (with a simple CAPCHA form - no need for registration) and build some kind of community on top of it (simple blogs, forums, etc) - basically as much UGC as possible.

I’ll continue to add more details as the project goes on but for now I should go and do some more tidying before the wife gets back and wonders what I’ve been doing with myself for the past couple of hours.

This is not the bees all and end all of guides and I’m sure there are plenty more out there, but I thought I’d pop a few things onto my virtual notepad in the sky after a number of Wordpress installs that I have done recently. All of the following work with Wordpress 2.0 and will most likely work with 2.1.
Titles

One of the first things to change after installing wordpress is the title section in your wordpress template. Out of the box it usually has the title on all of your site as the Blog title, which is obviously rubbish for SEO. There is a plugin that you can use further down in this guide but this will also do it for you.

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo('name'); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo " - "; bloginfo('name'); } elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title('',true); } ?> </title>

To do this go into your admin area, select Presentation then Theme Editor. If the theme is a good one it will be in the €œheader.php€ - just replace whatever is in the title tag at the moment.

Mod Rewrite

The next thing you should change is the URL structure - Search Engines really don’t like the standard variable, e.g. something.com/p=73. Make sure that your server supports Mod_Rewrite and select one of the options from the admin area / options / Permalinks. There are thousands of different structures that you can use but my personal fav is: /news/070%post_id%/%postname%.html. This is optimised for google news after reading a few bits on the web about the structure required - if you don’t plan to try and get inclusion here then the default Date and name based option should do you good.

Plugins

The plugins section is one of the best parts of wordpress - there are so many different ones out there but my personal recommendations are:

• Ultimate Tag Warrior - by far the best tag software out there and can also work well with URLs if you have Mod_Rewrite on.
• SEO Title Tag works with Ultimate Tag Warrior and is what I use for most of my sites - the code used at the top can work just as well but this is easier to customise.
• Marketingpop SEO plugin also requires Ultimate Tag Warrior and can work quite effectively.
• Sitemap Generator generates a sitemap.xml file that you can send to google & yahoo. Google’s webmaster toolkit page is very good and can help with getting indexed faster than usual.
• Social Bookmarks will put some nice little buttons under your posts and allow people to submit your post to digg, reddit, etc

Pings

I generally ping the following servers, some of them are great, some are not, but here is my list none the less. You can set these up in your Options > Writing in the Wordpress Admin area.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

Other things to think about

If it works with the post then make sure that you trackback a few blogs in your posts (as long as they are relevant obviously) - the more relevant links back to your site the better and should bring you a little bit of traffic.

MyBlogLog was recently purchased by Yahoo which means it’s likely to get a lot more users over time - sign up an account and add the widget onto your site, not only will it help give you a visualisation of who is visiting your site but you’re mug will be displayed on other blogs you visit and you can sometimes get a bit of traffic from keeping your face on some of the bigger blogs.

Use Social bookmark sites. Submit to Digg, Submit to Reddit, and check out onlywire.com and submit each one of your articles every time you write a post - it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes and they can bring quality backlinks.

That’s it for now - Hopefully this is an article that will continue to develop as time goes by - if you have any other suggestions please do leave a comment and I’ll add them in.

I should really note that I don’t for one minute claim to be an SEO expert, I know little bits and bobs from knowing a few really good people in the industry and reading sites like Threadwatch.

So today sees the launch of the SEO World Championships, sponsored by eastpoint, an SEO company.

The target phrase will be released at around 6pm GMT, which happens to be when I am on the train home, so I won’t be able to get the first .com registered.

The rules are quite simple and it’s all based on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.    There are some nice prizes and it will be interesting to see how well it is picked up by the SEO community.

If you are taking part, please do comment and let me know.

As mentioned in my previous posts on the Affiliate Challenge, I decided to launch a new site dedicated to Unfair Bank Charges.

I thought that it would be interesting to post my stats since it went live. To give a little overview of the timeframes involved, I purchased the domain on the 1st January. On the 2nd put up a Wordpress install and started to get content up for the 3rd / 4th January. The site was at a €œcomplete€ point on the 6th January.

The first crawl by google was on the 3rd January and the second on the 9th January. I saw my first rankings appear on the 10th January.  (Sorry for the quality of the images below - I only have MS paint at work, which is a bit crap).

Obviously the visitor levels are quite low at the moment, but it’s good that I have started to rank for some terms & with the addition of further content this should start to improve over the next two weeks.

Although the domain name was picked because there were few avaliable, I’m starting to regret this. It’s hard for people to remember & i’m starting to think about buying a new name and redirecting it.

A few posts ago I mentioned that I would be entering the Affiliate Challenge. I’ve now been working on a few hours and it’s very much underway. Seeing as the concept has already been revealed by Detective Matt, I thought I would reveal a few details.

The site is aimed at the Unfair Bank Charges market - there is currently only one affiliate program that offers a revenue share on this service, so I imagine that adsense will also be used across the site.

I decided on using Wordpress to update the site as I’ve been hugely impressed with it since converting my blog over in November.

I’ve only made a few modifications to the form, but I have installed the following plugins which are certainly some of my favorites:

- Adhesive: Allows €œsticky€ posts
- Admin Menu: Displayers an admin toolbar at the top of the site when logged in
- Adsense-Deluxe: An adsense plugin, surprisingly.
- SEO Title Tag: Allows you to do loads with your title field via one of the option pages
- Sidebar Widgets: Allows you to modify the sidebar quickly and easily via the template section
- Ultimate Tag Warrior: A tagging plugin that’s used on this site too and is required for SEO Title Tag
- WP-Forum - A build in wordpress forum

I still have a few more to install and will update when these are done - now that the site has started to take shape my main priority will be to get some content created and then look to get a few links in. At the moment I’m hoping to get quite a bit of content sorted by the end of the week and then a bit of link building over the weekend.

I’d also like to run some kind of viral email - I’m still deciding on exactly how this will work but I have a few thoughts in mind.

Hopefully within the next two weeks I will start to see a bit of traffic.

Oh - almost forgot the link: Unfair Bank Charges

David Naylor is doing a Microsoft Live Search Engine Test and is asking people link though to his Matt Cutts blog url.

Wonder how this one will play out….