Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

If you managed to catch yesterdays article focused around brand name bidding then you may remember that the second part of the article was still to come and on another hot topic in the affiliate industry - merchant de-duping.

For those of you that are unaware it’s potentially worth reminding us all what I mean by de-duping before going on to talk about how I feel that it’s a disgrace that networks let merchants get away with it.

Imagine for a moment the following customer journey€¦

A web user, who we’ll call Bob, decides that they are in the market for a widget and goes searching on the web for different widget reviews to find the right one.  After spending a long time finding what he feels is the right widget Bob eventually clicks on the link to widgetstore.com.  He decides that he is not going to pay straight away (maybe he does not have the cash till pay day, maybe he wants to check with his wife, Margret first - who knows).  A few days later Bob decides to go ahead with it but as he didn’t bookmark the widget review site he searches for widgetstore.com and clicks on their PPC advert.

Bob pays for the item and is happy to find out that his item will be delivered in just a few days time.  Bob is happy, Widgetstore.com is happy but all of a sudden the Widget review site owner is not.

What happened, I hear you cry?  Well the agency that looks after the widgetstore.com marketing has decided that the sale did not originate from the widget review site, even if the cookie triggered, they have decided that it was of course their hard work in bidding on the widgetstore.com brand name that got the customer into buying mode and rejected the affiliate sale for that very reason - makes their CPA look a little bit lower too.

I may use a little comedy above but the reality is far from funny.   As merchants and agencies €œget smart€ more de-duping is done both network and client side and it’s not just brand terms in my mind that are unjustifiably causing affiliates to lose out on commission.

Yes - we all know that the last click €œwins€ is an industry standard but the issue here is massive and brings more questions than answers, here’s a few that I have..

1)    Why should content affiliates who spend hours and hours every day writing quality comparisons like the ones on widgets suffer and lose out because of multiple activity occurring.
2)    What kind of response do you think you would get from google if you tried to claw back the valid fees because of de-duplication?
3)    Why should affiliate networks sit on their back and let this happen?
4)    Why do affiliates have to put up with this crap.

I work in an agency and would never dream of doing this.  Here is an example of how we work it.

We work on an affiliate campaign and a huge PPC campaign with a sports retailer.  As part of the reporting process we look for duplications of order numbers across both the affiliate and PPC campaign.

We report back to the client on this happening and explain (quite rightly) that affiliates should not be screwed over just because the customer was not in €œbuy€ mode.  We explain that if we were to start reversing sales then less and less content affiliates would be in business and eventually it would get harder to get the sales in the first place.

Report - do not punish!

So how does it get sorted?

I think networks need to take a stance here and stop letting the retailers think they can get away with this; perhaps there is a better level of tracking required to stop it from causing problems and perhaps the last click wins needs to be revisited.

At the very, very, very minimum I think that the industry needs to ensure that the situation above in relation to widgetstore.com does not happen - perhaps de-duping will never go away but it should not happen on the brand name level like it is now.

One of the glories of the web is the number of visitors that come to your website / blog via longtail search terms - it can drive lots of targeted traffic but often visitors come to the site only the once.

A small bit of php can be integrated into wordpress to try and combat this. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Now just follow our few easy steps to integrate this into your wordpress installation:

1) Save cookie.php.txt to cookie.php somwhere locally.
2) Open up cookie.php.txt and change the text and feed URL to match that of your server.
3) Upload the file to the root directory of your server.
4) Open up your wordpress backend (wp-admin) and select “Presentation” then “Theme Editor”.
5) Select style.css on the right and add the following code (you can modify it to change the colors, etc) in the file somewhere:

/* Cookie style document */

.cookiestyle {
width:450px;
text-align:left;
padding:5px;
background-color:#EAF4FF;
border:1px solid black;
font-size:12px;
margin-bottom:15px;
}

6) In the Theme Editor, select “Main Index template” and insert the following line:

<?php include(”cookie.php”); ?>

This should generally go near the top of the file and in my theme is above:

<?php $countervariable=1; if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Do the same with the Single Post page

7) Re-visit the site and you should now see the message display - Refresh and it will disappear.

It’s another “nice touch” and if your content is high quality it may well encourage your visitors to sign up to the RSS feed and visit more often.

I’ve recently become involved in an email conversation with a merchant who is having a few problems getting Affiliates signed up and promoting his site.  Aside from the fact that the program is an independent one (and trust needs to be built up for these to succeed), one of the biggest issues he had with his site was the site itself.

Some sites just look like they will not convert.  There are really basic improvements that can be made. Even if you are giving away £10,000 CPA, it’s still £10,000 of nothing.

I’ve been working merchant side not for a few years and have looked at a number of ways to increase conversion rates - some working and some falling flat on their face, so here are a few things to look at:

• Is your checkout and quick and easy process?  Ideally there should be no more than 3 clicks from the basket to a completed order.
• Do you really need to take all that information?  Lots of merchants seem to be asking for more and more information because of the increase in fraud online.  This is fair enough but you should still never take more info than is required - ask too much and customers will shop elsewhere - you don’t need to collect five different phone numbers and ask what their fax is!
• Do you accept all payment types ?  Lots of sites don’t accept Visa Electron for example.  If you are one of these sites then make sure that you offer Paypal as a viable alternative.   I don’t have a VISA card and it annoys the heck out of me when I can’t pay for things using my switch - it’s 2007 for gods sake.
• Is the site itself usable?  Are products easy to find?   Conduct some usability tests.  You don’t need to go and pay thousands for this, all you need is to write up some tasks and get someone outside of the company (a friend or family member, for example) to give it a go and see how they get on.   Make sure they do it in front of you - watching what people do on your site can be extremely interesting!
• Use Analytics.   There is no excuse now - you can use google analytics for free!  Look and see where people are clicking using the Site overlay.  Look and see what the most popular dropout pages are.  You may think your site is perfect but that doesn’t mean everyone else does.

Don’t underestimate the importance of Conversion rate on your site and on your affiliate program - get it right and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

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.

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.