Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

I’m sad tonight.  My (work) Macbook died.  I’ve had it for all of about 2 months, decided that as my iTunes database was getting pretty big (8gb) I would back it up.

Went through the backup process and about half way through writing to the first DVD it all froze up.  Did a hard reboot and now it won’t boot up & the disk is making some funny noises.

A bit of googling leads me to believe that it’s a HDD crash and that I have not got much chance of seeing my data again, and that I could be without my laptop for a few weeks, which would suck.

It’s a sad day - ever since getting the macbook I’ve been configuring it, buying some great software and generally enjoying being on a mac again.

I’m off to cry myself to sleep

This is a strange one.  As I’ve mentioned a few times, we (Altogether Digital) are soft-launching our new affiliate network in a few weeks time and as part of this I had a query for the IT director at the provider we are using.

To give you a bit of background, we decided to use a new ASP based solution (NOT directtrack!) after weighing up a number of different ideas.

Anyhow - back to my point.  I spoke to the IT Director about some additional functionality that we wanted to add and as part of this it came out that this provider (who currently run a medium sized US network) work on a first-in cookie basis.

In other words, if a visitor visits a merchant via Affiliate A and decides not to buy, but goes back and purchases something after visiting Affiliate B’s site/ad (within the cookie period) then Affiliate A get the commission, even if they did not generate the sale.

This is the opposite to how all the networks in the UK tend to work and I did have to pinch myself and confirm that I was not mistaking things, in fact, I asked Pete at Affiliate Future to confirm that they worked on the last man in basis and was greated with the following reply:

Pete says: how long you been in affiliate marketing..lol

So maybe it’s a geographic thing, I tell myself.   I get back in contact with the software provider and tell them that as things stand we would not want to launch with the tracking set that way - we certainly don’t want to encourage cookie stuffing after all.  Luckily all is fine and they are able to change the tracking method for our setup but I kept wondering if it was a US thing.

I asked Shawn Collins to clarify:

Shawn says:  that’s odd - LinkShare, CJ, Performics, Shareasale, etc - all pay on last referrer - I don’t beleive there is even an option to go the other way

Shawn says: that’s really such a big risk being invited - I like how MYAP does it - they let you decide by afifliate with last referrer getting paid as the default. I set it as first referrer for some adware affiliates back in 2002 when we were debating whether they were cheating

Shawn says: so they would only get commission if they were the first and only referrer, as I expected, their numbers dropped big time

So it seems it’s not a location thing but Shawn does raise a good point about Spyware, something that due to the efforts of Clarke, Jess and a number of others has never been too much of an issue in the UK (unlike the US where it’s been a long term plague).

I’m really trying to think of other reasons for a network to work this way - the only other slight benefit I could see (if you can even call it a benefit) is that it may make things harder for brand name bidders but I really would be interested in hearing the views of affiliates, merchants and networks alike to if this kind of policy would make much of a difference to them.

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.

To start off with, tracking does break.  It happens.  It’s happened on programs that I’ve run and a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I even managed to break some buy.at tracking as a developer.

So the question that we have to ask ourselves is if enough is done to check tracking from the network perspective.

Sure - a good affiliate manager should be able to notice a problem quickly enough, but not all programs have good affiliate managers.

The networks make a lot of money and sometimes have handfuls of account managers, but how much effort would it be to have a small team of people who’s role in life is to place orders online and make sure that the tracking is working across all their programs?

Lets look at some figures to use as an example.  If a network had, for example, 400 Merchants on board.

A tester should be able to place around 4 orders an hour - 8 hours a day - 5 days a week.  This means that one tester would be able to test the tracking of 160 programs every week.

Get a couple of testers in and networks would be able to check every single merchant program once a week.

Whilst this may not eliminate the problem it may well mean that errors are tracked slightly faster and tracking is fixed quicker - resulting it more money for both the affiliate and the network.

So why isn’t it done?  My personal opinion is that networks tend to rely on Affiliates to warn them of problems with tracking - yet again meaning affiliates are becoming consultants working for free to help the networks gain the mega bucks.

I’d certainly welcome a network that had a more proactive testing department and I’m sure that something like this would encourage affiliates to switch their links across.

I read a fantastic article in yesterdays G2 Magazine that I’ve managed to find replicate online.

I hate Macs by Charlie Brooker

Two of the best quotes from the piece:

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC).

Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame of all time, a plodding, dismal “adventure” in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year, the first shoot-’em-up game, Doom, was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac’s relationship with “fun”.

As pretty as Macs may be it still irks me that everyone throws themselves at them these days.   The iPod is inferior compared to other makes on the market but people buy them because they are the rage.  Someone who I work with has a Creative and still calls it an iPod and that tells you everything you need to know about them.

Sure - the iBooks are nice and if I was after a laptop (and had money to throw away) I’d certainly look at them before buying an Alienware laptop for the same price.

I’ve ranted about this topic enough for now - the article above says it all for me.

Wordpress 2.1 is released as stable later today.  It brings some good new features, some of which you may have already seen if you my Free Affiliate Blogs site, as Wordpress MU seems to use a few of them already.

You can find a great overview of what’s new in Version 2.1 on the Technosailor site:  Ten things you should know about Wordpress 2.1

I’ve got quite a few plugins and am slightly reluctant to upgrade yet for fear of breaking them, so will probably give it a few weeks before I try it out on this site.

I’m in the middle of writing a guide on Optimising Wordpress for SEO, so hopefully I won’t see too much impact from this.