Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

The short list is out for the A4UAwards Community Choice and there are a couple of interesting ones that stuck out for me.  You can see the full list on the a4uawards site.

Publisher (affiliate) of 2008

• Click Angel
• Net Media Planet
• Quidco
• Spear
• UK Web Media
• eConversions

No chance of playing a spot the content affiliate here.. I have nothing against PPC affiliates at all but I did find it very interesting that these were the choices.  I guess it’s a funny one to vote for; most of the community that vote are affiliates and would find it hard to work out who to vote for – would be interesting to see a vote count for these.  With that being said – congratulations to each of the affiliates that made the list.

Publisher’s Choice Of Network 2008

• Affiliate Future
• Affiliate Window
• Buy.at
• OMG
• Paid On Results
• Webgains

Should not be suprised that there is no CJ in there, but no TD is very interesting indeed.

Good luck to everyone who made the list!

I was going to leave it a few weeks before posting the details about this but as more and more people seem to know  it’s probably better to do so sooner rather than later!

Some news from the streets.. I have recently handed in my notice at Altogether Digital and my last day here will be on 27th May.  On 28th May I will be joining Affiliate Future in a very exciting new role.

Ultimately the decision to leave was an extremely tough one to make and the reasons for making it will remain personal but it’s a really exciting time at Affiliate Future and I am relishing the opportunity of working for a network that I have been a client and affiliate at for a number of years.

The Affiliate Management Solution that Altogether Digital offer, as well as Altogether Ads will keep going without me and I’m sure that once it’s been officially decided an announcement will be made about the new management of this area.  I will of course be there for just under a month to ensure that this transition is a smooth one.

I would like to thank everyone that I’ve worked with since starting at eyefall/Altogether about 18 months ago for making it a great success and an enjoyable time!

If anyone has any questions about the transition please feel free to get in touch the usual way!

I’m finally back from holiday after two weeks out of the office and have managed to get around to organising the next London Affiliate Dinner, to be held on 30th May 2008.

It will be held at the Archduke near Waterloo station and you can find all the information on the affiliate dinner uk website.

Look forward to seeing some of you there.

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to our latest blog interview, this time with one of Scotland’s finest, Chris Clarkson – co-owner of online travel agent Sunshine.co.uk.

You may have read my complimentary post about Sunshine.co.uk recently and you can find out more information about their affiliate program at the Sunshine.co.uk affiliate center – I have voted for them in the A4UAwards and really do hope that they are rewarded with an award for the time and effort they have put into their program.

So on to the interview…

Chris – thanks for taking part in the interview. You’re a well known figure in the industry but for the unaware readers why don’t you firstly start by giving a bit of background info on who you are and perhaps how you got into affiliate marketing…

2003: I was a Championship Manager addict and decided my time in front of the PC could be better spent. I bought a domain and some hosting in January, messed about with some HTML, moved onto PHP in the May; I hooked up with my business partner Chris Brown through A4U in June/July; we re-built HW from Aug and launched it on the 5th December. All from a standing start of knowing absolutely nada about anything internet.

You’ve obviously been doing travel stuff for a long time, what has been the best travel experience that you have had and where were you?

Well that would be a rugby tour to Newcastle in 1995 but I can’t really share the experience! Our first company “conference” in Tenerife was pretty special, as most of our friends and families were there too, as we’re firm believers in nepotism!

You recently sold Holiday Watchdog to Tripadvisor – have you made any exuberant purchases since the sale?

Funnily enough, the first thing we bought was Timeshare! Chris B and I both splashed out on the Disney Vacation Club as a present to our kids, and possibly our grandkids.

Sunshine.co.uk is a new entrant to quite a crowed marketplace – what makes it stand out from the crowd?

No sales pitch here, try it yourself and see. We were affiliates and know what’s required to squeeze out conversions.

With your affiliate experience I think it’s fair to say that you’ve been producing one of the best programs around; you seem a big lover for affiliate incentives, recently giving away a Macbook and now offering a couple of trips away to the Affiliate Future Barbados event. Did you find that as an affiliate you would give a program more of a boost if they were running a good incentive?

Show me an affiliate that doesn’t like winning stuff! The incentives are great for affiliates if they win, but they are obviously there to give our affiliate programme exposure. We’re working hard and shouting loudly to make sure people know we’re here and I’m 100% confident we have the programme to back it up.

That may have been a sales pitch.

As I just mentioned – you are currently in the process of giving away two tickets to the Affiliate Future Barbados event, can you give our readers a little more information about how to get involved?

We were keen to make the incentive as open as possible to any affiliates, so we set aside two tickets for our “Daily Dose of Sunshine”, where I get to set missions that anyone can complete and get themselves in the draw for Barbados.

Some of the missions will be used to walk you through building your first travel site, others will just be fairly random and we’re also going to throw in some other holidays as part of the fun.

We also have a draw for one ticket for affiliates who do over 100 sales and every 5 more gets them another entry in the draw and…wait, did you find yourself nodding off? LOL

Will you be making the trip across there yourself this year to take part in the festivities?

I’m afraid not, and Alan and James (who went the in 2006 and 2007 respectively) are a bit gutted that as merchants we won’t actually win any tickets this year!

And finally… I’m told that your alcoholic preference is a bit girlie. Isn’t it time you took up drinking something a bit more manly?

Let me explain. In my twenties my rugby club was based in the town centre, across from pubs that were “young”. Alco-pops had just arrived and they were always on 2 for 1’s. As you know, rugby players like a drink, especially a cheap one. Vodka Red Bull became a firm favourite as you could buy it in jugs; jugs are bigger than pints; follow my logic? I do actually like a Guinness, so I’m comfortable in my metrosexual drinking habits. Pass the woo-woo.

Thanks for taking part in the interview and good luck to all the affiliates who take part! Remember that if you want to take part in the incentives or find out more information on the Sunshine.co.uk affiliate program then visit the Sunshine Affiliates Site.

I’m slightly late in blogging about this as I’m currently enjoying a few weeks off work with the wife and kids but the changes that google have recently made have some big implications for the affiliate industry and I’ve managed to find a few hours spare to jot down my thoughts on the various pros and cons.

I’m sure others have blogged about the topic already and apologise for a lack of links but I’m writing this on a trip to Manchester and for some reason Virgin have yet to enter the 21st Century and enable wifi on their trains!

So let’s firstly look at what the changes are.  For the unaware, trademark owners in the UK have been fortunate enough to be able to go through a very tedious process of registering their trademark with google and blocking anyone from bidding on their brand via the sponsored listings – the process may be slow but it has worked well.  In an effort to bring the policy inline with the US regulations however, this is no longer possible and on May 6th all previous blocked keywords will be opened up for sale.

This has big implications for brands across the online channels but as affiliate marketing is my “thing” I’ll try and stick to the various pros and cons of this – it’s still very early days and I’m yet to pass judgement but here’s some initial thoughts..

Pros

Better for the user ?
Whilst there is debate about if this is better for the user or not there is no little to argue with that it could help expose the user to products and services that they were unaware of previously and even help them save money.   If a user is searching for a previously blocked term like “ipod” they could see ads from various alternative suppliers like Archos who have a more superior product at a better price!

Good news for smaller brands
It’s getting easier to start an online store and there are some great “small brands” out there who can now start bidding against competitor terms, giving them further reach towards their target audience.

More volume though Affiliate Marketing
This is a biggie.  A VIOP affiliate will now be able to big against terms like “skype” and ultimately get more traffic and more sales – when paid search policies are done correctly this could be a great thing for the industry.

More brand affiliate programs
Rightly or wrongly Affiliate Marketing can all of a sudden be sold as a way to help protect big brands from being outbid by their competition – this could well mean we see more programs from bigger brands with more money to spend!

Cons

More Brand bidding / Overridden cookies
The most disappointing thing about all of this is that a few of us in the industry have been campaigning against brand name bidding for some time – my main issue with it has always been that it ends up overriding cookies from content affiliates as the last man approach is flawed by this.  It’s a real shame and hopefully we’ll see more done by networks to stop it from having such a negative impact;  Affiliate Window recently released a solution where cookies are not overridden by brand terms that seems a perfect way of preventing legitimate commission in being awarded.

Lower ROI for Merchants
Brand terms are cheap and increase competition will of course push up the prices of this – this may well see a much lower ROI to merchants; something that may end up affecting the overall prices to consumers.

Legal implications
Google may well of used the test case against Yahoo to define their position but that does not mean that it is legal for merchants and affiliates to target competitor terms; this may well lead to a lot of headaches and I don’t think it will be long before we start to see news in the tradepress of companies being taken to court for try to “pass off” as their competitor – be careful and check what you are doing is legal before doing it!

Harder work for Affiliate Managers!
There are some dodgy affiliates out there who try and get away with bidding on brand (or competitor) terms, even when it’s against the policy restrictions.  With all the terms being opened up the policing aspect will make it harder work for affiliate managers and networks!

That’s most of the things I’ve thought of so far – I sure there is plenty more that I have missed so please do leave a comment if you have any additions and I’ll get them added to the post.  It’s certainly going to be an interesting time for the UK market and hopefully the positives will outweigh the negatives but to be honest, I’m yet to be convinced it’s a good thing and been done for anything over than google’s profit margins!

I really need to work out how to make money from facebook – one of my fake profiles is going nuts!

Answers on a postcard please (well, in a comment..)

I’m on holiday at the moment (nowhere exotic – just spending time with the family) but wanted to take a quick break out of the day to say a big congratulations to Chris and Rob at CK Net who were purchased by Logicserve today.  Press release here (get a HTML version guys, PDF’s are so non-user-friendly!) for anyone interested.

I really like Chris and Rob and in our past dealings they have been really pro-active and helpful and I hope this acquisition brings them every good luck in the world.

I’ve managed to somehow miss The Apprentice before and only managed to see it for the first time towards the end of the last season. The final stages were enjoyable and with that being the case I decided to sit down and watch the first episode of the new series that started on BBC1 this evening.

Apologies as I know there are a number of fans of the show that read this blog, but what a big disappointment it was tonight. I had to turn the show off 15 minutes early. Ignoring the fact that the men were arguing and acting like little kids from start of the first task, the thing that really, really good to me was the bloody arrogance of some of them… to quote one of the blokes, who’s name I have already forgotten:

“Oh, I’ve never failed at anything, I see getting a B in one of my GCSE’s as a fail”

Tthis was one of the tamer comments, I’ve already had to remove all memory of some of the other ones from my mind before I started to get too frustrated.

Fair play mate – you’ve done well, you’ve managed to get on TV, but try not to act like a complete tit and destroy my viewing pleasure by acting like an arrogant toff.

Rant over. Hope other people enjoyed the show more than me!

I signed up to twitter back in December 2006 and after an initial burst of life I didn’t use it much – perhaps I didn’t get it at the time.

But now with the help of Twitbin and Twitterberry I am officially an addict.

For the unaware, twitter lets you post short (up to 140 characters) and could be seen as a more interactive version of the Facebook status messages.

When it really works well is when you learn about the @command, allowing you to comment on other friends “tweats” and forming interaction.  There are a number of US based affiliates and SEO’ers and it’s a great peak into their day to day life!

Check out my profile and give it a whirl – make sure you follow me when you’re all signed up to keep up with my updates!

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!