Case study – social media examiner

Top 5 tactics
Use a light box for a sign up form, in this CSS the forum gets 70% of optins
Bonus incentive lifts response
Confirmed double opt in boosts quality (engagement level)
Social proof (testimonials) reduces anxiety
Social media makes sharing easy

Results

Year on year growth of 234%
currently at 125k email assesses
Site averages 450k visitors per month

Next up tips for landing pages..

Use before landing page (opt in page)
Use after landing page (thank you page)

Case study – Social Triggers

Top 3 tactics:
- Use multiple forums, ie sign up form at top of page, in side bar, at bottom of content and at very bottom of page.
- varied copy and call to action, ie join, sign up, instant access, all on the same page via
- used social proof on landing pages

Results

- April – september last year, tripled list to 10k sign ups
- considered the biggest driver of sign ups having the different forms, and the done that worked the best was at the end of the blog content.

Onto after landing pages…

3 key tactics
- Deliver on signup expectations and offers
- Offer a follow up form on confirmation page (to ask further details and better segment your list)
- Test social media and email sharing – share this with your emal contacts, share via facebook, share via linked in, etc
- never leave your subscribers at a dead end.. Just having a thank you page isn’t going to do much..

Auto responders

Great way to cultivate longer relationships
Series can be as short or long as needed
Engagement analytics will guide you

Lastly.. social media

Incentivise sign ups on facebook
Customise the pages
Use sign up forms to gather email addresses via contests
Test different relevant types of incentives
Create autoreponders JUST for social lists

And the session ends. A little disappointed, didn’t really think there were any killer ideas, so the topic was a little deceiving and the bit about social media was pretty non existent. Seemed a little sales focused from aweber and the case studies were all from pretty small publishers/Advertisers. Perhaps get Doug Scott to do this talk next year!!

Time now to walk round the expo hall for a bit..

Will be interesting to see if cashback/rebate is mentioned and after a number of sessions at a4uexpo about incrementality it will be interesting to see if the US has similar views..

Apologies in advance for any spelling and formatting issues in the following post…

Traffic Patterns and Coupons sites

- Affiliates are supposed to have their own traffic
- do your affiliate sales match your own sale.. Try launching the sale early with affiliates and see if they get an uplift
- remove coupon code box, only show it when referred via a coupon site.
- place own coupons on checkbox
- use multiple cookies on each sale, shareasale support this.
- his programs don’t work with coupon sites unless they agree to add an extra push once a month.. Used the word incremental!
- coupon sites do add value..

Trademark birders

Exactly the same points as what I’ve said on my blog time and time again.. Worthwhile if you have a generic brand (used wedding dresses.com as an example). Also only other benefit around blocking your competitors.

Used the term modifiers, ie voucher code sites that big on brand +

Adware

Listed the good as large communities and showing ads in the SERPs.
Helps show over a competitor site. This may end up with a lawsuit…
Using cashback sites such as ebates as an example. Less regulation in the US or rules like we have in the UK..
Suggested the affiliate who loses a sale from adware could take you to court.. Crazy Americans..

Listed the bad as that it shows competitor ads over your own..
Replacing other channels with affiliate cookies
Lawsuits as mentioned above…

Cashback…

The bad… Adware
Audit your sales.. Check return rate and cancel dates
Low custom acquisition.. Customers go back and will margin cover this.
Fraud orders

The good
Move old inventory
Great exposure for new or small brands
New customer via media buys

I chipped in at this point to explain how big brands get just as much from cashback sites and how they should be used to support sales, etc. Also mentioned that our stats show a high level of new customers, both on big and smaller brands.

Self Shoppers

Is the goal of your programme customer acquisition? Only let them buy once..
What are my margins
Can be used to test the user experience and products for reviews
May be used to test tracking
How valuable is the customer

SEO

The bad..
Are your affiliate links back links (answer, normally no..)
Do affiliates take away from our internal efforts..
SEO affiliates can be asked to help knock out bad reviews..
Should we provide a keyword list? Ask affiliates to help knock out competitors here but if you close your program the traffic will go to the competitors.

Adam suggested that merchants should provide different alt tags and product descriptions for affiliates so that in it won’t affect your own seo, though this takes a lot of resource.

And that’s it. Quite a lot covered off and the issues are very similar to the UK, minus the fact that there is a lot more adware in the USA.

In the questions all were around coupon codes – the usa has lots the issues that the UK has dealt with on the IAB guidelines.. User generated codes, code theft, etc. But there is no large body in the USA like the IAB to stop this.

Enjoyed the talk. Check out Adams blog at www.adamriemer.me

My first session is from Vinnyohare.com and it’d actually 28 ways to improve your website, not 25. Vinny has a long history (since 1999) working online.

Interestingly the majority of the audience were just starting out a site, and most seem to be using wordpress – perhaps more of a beginner session.

Tip 1 – use google webmaster tools to find out where you rank.
Tip 2 – know your keywords, use google keyword tool, compete.com, etc. Also check what keywords your competitors use, suggests using SEOquake.
Tip 3 – Colors. Can Color blind people use your site?
Tip 4 – use title tags with your keywords and don’t copy other peoples.
Tip 5 – description tag, make sure its less than 150 characters. Use call to action in here and some element of curiousity.
Tip 6 – use keywords (don’t agree) he uses one keyword, suggests no more than 3. Says search engines say they dont use them but do (again, don’t agree)
Tip 7 – puts two search boxes on his site, one above the fold and one at the bottom.
Tip 8 – Logo – says logo helps build trust. Said lots of people don’t like link back to the homepage with the logo (really?)
Tip 9 – about us page – make it personal and easily to find on the site. Helps build test, mentions Socialtriggers.com as a good example of about page.
Tip 10 – blogs – try and have one, if using word press check permalinks are setup with keywords/post names.
Tip 11 – contact us page – just as important ad about us (I’d say more…). Suggests as many forms of contact as possible. Let the user know how long it will take to get back to them. Use a form to avoid spam.
Tip 12 – Privacy – google requires you to have a privacy page. Find free templates online.
Tip 13 – Trust – does your site have it, would you buy from your own site
Tip 14 – Email newsletters – have an offer to encourage sign ups. Use something like aweber with your blog content.
Tip 15 – navigation – is it easy to find items and is it helpful to users?
Tip 16 – Backlinks – do you have any, always plan to get more, find competitor back links. Use quirk search stats for firefox
Tip 17 – images – customers like them, don’t add too many to one page. Use alt tags, use picnik.com to optimise images
Tip 18 – how to videos, use YouTube, never have auto play.. Transcribe your videos at Speechpad.com
Tip 19 – landing pages – call to action and no other distractions. No side bars or navigation.
Tip 20 – internal linking – whenever make a webpage links to three other pages on the site. Should be natural flowing. Use google alerts with Link:// so you can see every time someone adds a link to your site.
Tip 21 – on page content. Matt cuts made a post saying google doesn’t use this. Vinny says bollocks, suggests keyword density of 3%. Suggests iwriter.com rather than elance
Tip 22 – site speed – what is your site speed, google use it as part of their algo. Webmaster tools has speed test tool. Cheap web hosting is not worth it. Says when he moved off go daddy his traffic went up 90%. gtmetrix.com is another good tool for website speed issues.
Tip 23 – blogs in your niche – find similar blogs, leave good comments. Vinny does this every Monday. Comments will usual help with traffic not rankings. Ask if they accept guest posting.
Tip 24 – forums – not as popular as they used to be since facebook killed them, but go and use them and become a master of the forum / niche.
Tip 25 – make lots of videos and make friends on YouTube. Free traffic, make sure they are helpful videos. Use link in description, include http to make it clickable. Use comments on other videos.
Tip 26 – twitter – is keyword in bio? Uses tweetadder to automatically add followers on search terms. Be interactive and don’t just blast out messages.
Tip 27 – facebook – setup a fan page, use a facebook approved. Make sure your follow rules for contests.
Tip 28 – Google+ – setup a business page for your sites. Find the most popular person in your niche, see who they are following and follow them. Believes posting your blog in Google+ will help your blog rank faster (don’t agree).

The session was OK, but a little basic for my liking. Could have been more interactive and show some examples. Don’t agree with everything he said but there were some whoops from people at the end so perhaps some people got something out of it. Didn’t ask for questions at the end either.

Time to move rooms and get to my next session in Are affiliates adding value?

First of all the inspiration from this is from distilled, specifically the presentation from Paddy and a previous post from Tom.

So lets talk first about the end results of what you’ll get from this:

• List of twitter followers
• Website address of twitter followers
• Website PR rank of twitter followers
• Alexa rank of twitter followers

Obviously with this info you can then build some targets of relevant sites & have an easy way of getting in touch via twitter DM.   It could probably be adapted to include the email addresses from the domain whois, but that’s one for another time.

It’s also worth mentioning that you could also do this to check other twitter users accounts – so if you are trying to build your own twitter profile then it may also come in handy..

Before you start: This can save you a lot of time and effort but it’s not perfect.  Google have a limit of 50 XML Imports per sheet so you’ll need to do a lot of copying and pasting if you have a lot of followers.

1. Get your follower details

The first thing that you need to do is export a list of your followers to CSV – you can’t do this on the official twitter site so you’ll need to head on over to Friend of Follow instead.

Pop in your twitter username and once it loads go to the “Fans” tab.  Now Export to a CSV.

2. Upload CSV into Google Docs

Log into Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) and select Upload.  Once all done open it up within Google Docs – you may need to add some more columns (click on far right column then select Insert / Columns Right).

3. Scraping the Web URL

Now the fun part starts.   Friend of Follow gives you some good info but it doesn’t give you the twitter users web address, to do this you are going to have to use a feature in Google called ImportXML to scrape it.    You could scrape this from twitter but in this case we’ll use Qwerty as it doesn’t force you to login.

Have a quick look at your profile within Qwerly and you will see that under the Profile info (example http://qwerly.com/twitter/3wdl) it has the website address.

So now back to the Google Doc.    The first thing that we’re going to do is create a column with the users qwerly URL.  This is simple and the formula you will need is something like this:

=”http://qwerly.com/twitter/”& A2

Next we’re going to do the actual scraping – this uses Google’s ImportXML function and again, you can refer to the distilled blog post here or Google’s own very limited documentation on it here.  Distilled also give ref to SEO Gadget so it’s own fair we pop in their link too.

So if you have a look at the Qwerly site you can view the source code on how they display the web URL, here is an example:

<h2>
<strong>Web</strong> <span><a href=”http://lovemonkeysblog.blogspot.com” rel=”me”>http://lovemonkeysblog.blogspot.com</a></span>
</h2>

So the formula that you’ll need for qwerly is:

=importxml(K2,”//h2[@class='website']//a”)

This is telling you to look at cell K2 (which is where we placed the Qwerly URL), then look at the h2 headings for a class called website.  Within website we just want the link (which is what the a is for).

So now we have a list of your twitter followers and their web addresses.   This is nice, but I want more.

4. Adding in Google Page Rank

You could probably scrape Google / another site to find the page rank, but in this case it’s actually 100x similar.  All you need to do is add a script into the Googledoc, to do this:

1. Go to Insert
2. Select Script
3. Search for Google Page Rank
4. Click Install
5. Select Authorize

Now go back to your Google doc and enter the following formula

=pageRank(L2)

Now you will see that the Pagerank should now be populated.

But why stop there?   Alexa ranking isn’t the best thing in the world, but I do still use it as a good guide over traffic to sites, especially as it’s free.

5. Adding in Alexa Details

Kudos to Stephen Fosktt for this one.   I played about with Alexa scraping for ages and was tearing my hair out because of their pretty awful source code before seeing Stephen’s blog and seeing that I could scrape it quite easily from the search results.

The formula for Alexa is:

=value(importXML(“http://www.alexa.com/search?q=”&L2,”//ul[@class='traffic-stats']/li/a[@href][1]“))

Now your sheet has some really useful info – you can sort by how popular there are on twitter, their PR rank, etc.    As stated earlier, the big problem that you have is the frustrating limit that Google put on the number of XMLImports that you can do.   The sheet could be expanded to include other info on the web about these sites but this has been enough for me for now.

You can view the completed version to use as an example here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvoNoE_CqGaBdGFFSmRDbXlKMGtyN3NjU2hKdVRWV0E&hl=en

Make sure you check the other resources used, namely:

http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/how-to-build-agile-seo-tools-using-google-docs/
http://seogadget.co.uk/playing-around-with-importxml-in-google-spreadsheets/ and
http://blog.fosketts.net/2010/07/02/cool-google-spreadsheet-importxml-xpath/

Enjoy!

I was convinced to go to the conference earlier this year when meeting up with Dom, Ray and Jason at the London Affiliate Conference and as a ThinkVisibility virgin I was unsure of what to expect, despite hearing good things about it from other previous attendees.

After a few meetings in Leeds in the day I got to the conference venue, the Alea Casino around 8pm for a few pre-event networking drinks. Apparently it was due to be held elsewhere (as there is usually a pool tournament) but there was a double booking and I would say that another venue might have been nicer for the first night but it was still great to catch up with some old friends and meet a whole different set of digital experts that Leeds & the north seem to be hiding!

The conference itself started bright and early on Saturday and out of all the conferences I’ve been too it was easy to see why ThinkVis is so well talked about – Dom is a fantastic (and occasionally even funny) host who helps everyone get the most out of the day.

My first session was Lets talk about Links, Baby by Distilled’s Paddy Moogan.  Probaly one of my favourite and useful sessions of the day it had a few gems that I took away.  Paddy has already blogged about the conference so head over to the Distilled ThinkVisibility review for more info.   I’ll also be blogging my notes from his session later in the week.

Next was Mind Games: Using Brainwashing, Psychology and Cults to Boost your Conversion rates by everyone’s favourite conversion rate guru, Stephen Pavlovich.   My experience of optimising conversion rates is very old school/basic where things like the size of the buttons are thought to make a difference.   In a very interactive session (despite the lack of Wifi!) Stephen talked more about the way in which the brain works and how it can be manipulated during the conversion funnel.  Again, I took a bunch of notes and I’ll put a separate blog post up about soon.

I missed both Tina’s Performance Marketing session (where apparently she made a cake during her talk!) and Paul Madden’s outsourcing talk as I got chatting to Jason Duke over at Pzyche (who’s product looks very good) – I’m hoping that Dom puts these online at some point though as everything was recorded.

Next up for me was the Twitchhiker Story from Paul Smith.   Nothing to do with SEO but most of the twitters I’ve seen out in the ecosystem have stated it was one of the best presentations of the day.  I won’t write anything about this and suggest that you go and buy the book instead.  I got it a month or so ago and read it in a few days – funny, witty, exciting and as someone who reads a lot I have to say it’s probably one of the best books that I’ve read in a long time (and Paul didn’t even have to pay me for writing that).

The second to last session that I attended was One Domain, One Hundred Days, One Result by Gary Taylor.  Gary was a very good speaker but I have to say that the results from this experiment were a bit of a let down.   He wanted to essentially try working on two different sites.   One new one (3dreadytv.co.uk) that he built and another site which was already established that he purchased for £1.5k (http://www.rottweilers.co.uk/).

At the end of the challenge Gary showed the results from the past seven days.  3dreadytv.co.uk had 125 visits in that period and had generated about 90p revenue.  The Rottweiler site had generated slightly more – about £3.50 via adsense and amazon combined.

The results, Gary suggested, shows that it’s very difficult to establish and make money from a new site and often better to buy one instead.  I’m not so sure this is the case – after all, the Rottweiler site had been established for over 3 years and was only making a very small amount of revenue and at the rate it was going would take quite some time to make it back.   I don’t think that the days of handtyping a domain is at an end just yet!

Finally it was time for Dave Den by Dave Naylor.  Weirdly with all the conferences I’ve been at I’ve not actually had a chance to see Dave speak before and I have to say that it was very, very good.   A number of sites had put themselves forward for inspection before the conference and Dave showed them lots of great tips on how they can be improved.  He’s a very funny and engaging speaker too.

In the conference wrap up Dom also announced a new SEO award, the Jaamit Award, in memory of a previous speaker, Jaamit Durrani who was popular in the SEO community and passed away back in November 2010.

Finally Saturday evening saw a party also held in the Casino.

I was feeling rather rough (which I blame on food poising from the restaurant that evening) but took part in the Charity Poker match and enjoyed playing a little Guitar Hero on the big screen that had been setup.   Funniest moment of the night had to be seeing Richard Kershaw rock out on the drums!  Pure quality!

The next ThinkVis is planned for September and after attending for the first time I’d definitely say that it’s an event which I hope is around for a long time to come and one that I will become a regular attendee of.

There are plenty more I’d love to attend too but they seem to clash this year so all there is to say now is good luck to all the speakers and the team at Existem on what will hopefully be another fantastic event.

But now maybe we have some more reasons with the latest news coming from the US and the Revenews site.

Essentially it is claimed that over a period of five years, the two top affiliates on the ebay programme in the US were cookie stuffing and the case has gone as far as being investigated as a criminal case by the FBI.

The indictments charge Hogan and Dunning with wire fraud and criminal forfeiture. Hogan was charged with ten counts of wire fraud and Dunning with five counts of wire fraud.

I have to say, the figures here are astounding!   It may well have been earning CJ a lot of override but bearing in mind they would have had key account managers on the programme how on earth it went unnoticed for so long is beyond me…  Here are the numbers involved:

• Between 2006 and June 2007, Shawn Hogan (Digital Point Solutions) earned approximately $15.5 million in commissions from eBay. Hogan was eBay’s number one affiliate.
• Between 2006 and June 2007, Dunning (Kessler’s Flying Circus) earned approximately $5.3 million in commissions from eBay. Dunning was eBay’s number two affiliate.

That is around $21m commission between then in a year!  WOW.

The affiliates involved, if found guilty, could get up to 20 years in jail each.  Perhaps this will be a wake up call for some of the more black hat affiliates who are still working with some large networks about how cookie dropping is not just against the rules, but could also be against the law…

Read the full article here

It will be an interesting few months and I look forward to hearing the outcome from this case…

There have been rumors around for some time that they were struggling; a search on the brand name takes you to this page on the A4UForum where a number of affiliates have complained about having problems in getting paid from them.  The lack of a rebuff was a clear sign something was wrong.

From my understanding Cleverat worked with a number of merchants and were a key publisher, especially in the Finance space (i.e. Vanquis) but as the Finance industry suffered with the recession it seems that Cleverat were one of the “networks” that were hit the hardest.  Apparently they were also paying well over the odds in CPLs to try and get links switched across to them which seems to have been a bad move.

Tom Bryant, who owns the popular freebie site MagicFreebies comments:  “It’s crazy that they have been allowed to keep going for so long – I’m current owed around £10,000 which was due November 2009 but they cut off all communications and I just hope that the liquidators are able to re-coup some of the money owed.  To say I’m fuming would be an understatement.”

Looking at the Jaak Media site, it seems that Cleverat have been removed from here, and there are no notices on their other sites (Smart-Quotes, Mrs Cashback, etc) about them being part of the liquidation so it’s unclear if this is an oversight or if they are setup as independent entities and will keep trading.

I hope that the affiliates waiting for payment receive their commissions, or at the very least as much as possible from them and hopefully this will be the last of the lead based networks to suffer.

This is mainly a post aimed towards merchants and agencies, but if you are an affiliate or network then hopefully you’ll find my first blog post in what seems like years an interesting read all the same.

So let’s get straight into it and be honest here – whilst the perception of affiliate marketing continues to increase (and rightly so) this does also mean, even with a strong approval process on your affiliate programme, that the chances of abuse or fraud get bigger.  Detecting it is challenging but it’s one of the most important tasks to ensure that you don’t pay out when you shouldn’t.

Lead programmes are often the most common problem but it really can affect everyone in the industry.  For example, a few months ago I was innocently browsing a bittorrent site and an advertising message came up saying “This site is brought to you by Sky Digital” – the whole page was taken over with the Sky site and further investigation showed it was an Affiliate on their buy.at programme opening the site in an iFrame (screenshot below).  I passed on the details to Helen and the affiliate was removed from the programme (and hopefully the network) the next day.

Imagine how negative this could have been for the Sky brand… You can almost see the headline “Sky Digital sponsoring illegal downloads”!

From a merchant and agency perspective it’s actually quite difficult to stop this kind of abuse, after all, not many networks give you the referral URLs of where the sales or leads have been generated to protect the affiliate from having their ideas of information stolen, but there are tools that you can use to help you.

Tip 1 – Lag time analytics

Most networks will let you pull of a report that shows the time between a click and a sale – this may be presented a number of ways, either with the actual time that the last click & the sale were generated or actually be displaying the “lag” time in seconds.

A suggestion of what you can do here is start to categorise your affiliates and look out for non-standard lag times.   For example the lag time coming from a voucher code will generally be very low (as it’s often the last place that a user comes before completing their transaction) whereas a non-brand paid search affiliate of a content affiliate will be longer.

If you start to see very short lag times for affiliates that don’t fit into the brand/voucher/incentive types then it may be inductive of an affiliate using adware/spyware or at the very least someone to check with your network to find out more about how they are driving the traffic.   Very long lag times may be where affiliates have been cookie dropping (like the example above) and be especially important for some of the larger brands – again, categorise and check up on it, often it’s not that the affiliate is doing anything  wrong of course.

Tip 2 – Checking Transaction Times

Is going against your programme terms abuse?  We’d say that it is and you can use transaction times to check out where this may be happening.

For example, if you see a high rate of out of office hours transactions coming from a particular affiliate then it’s likely that they are using a day-parted PPC campaign – not always abuse obviously but if you have tight PPC guidelines (that more and more merchants do have these days) and block brand then they may be doing this to make sure they are bidding on brand when you are less likely to be checking.

You can also look out for temporary increases in traffic and sales too – this could just be where an offer has been featured on one of the deal sites but it could also be that an affiliate has sent out an unauthorised email campaign and if you’re very brand conscious then this may be against your terms and conditions.

Tip 3 – Checking Conversion rates

Again, just like with Lag times different types of affiliates and different promotional methods will give higher or lower conversion rates – someone that comes from an incentive site is likely, for example, to have a higher conversion rate and grouping / categorising your affiliates comes in handy again here.

High conversion rates will often indicate brand bidding and very low conversion rates may indicate adware/spyware so its definitely another one to check.

Tip 4 – Using Analytics

You can use Google Analytics (or other analytics packages!) to get to grips with your inbound referrers – not everything will be picked up because the traffic comes from an affiliate network but as technology evolves more information is starting to be made available here.

Bits you can look out for include:

Referrals from Webmail clients (yahoo, hotmail, etc) means that one or more of your affiliates has either featured you in their newsletter or send a solus email out.  Not indication of abuse but if it’s getting lots of clicks then you should check to see if it is something that you have provided them with or been authorised to send.

When I worked client side for a gambling company we used a few incentive sites and the volume and quality was often low but manageable – one day an incentive site decided to feature us as their main offer without telling us and it cost us a lot of money.. It would have been nice for a warning so that we could have at least budgeted for it!

Referrals from Search Engines may well show that you have affiliates using paid search and sending the traffic direct to site.  One of our clients at AffiliateFuture recently noticed this in their google logs and as the affiliate was going against the Paid search policy they were removed from the programme and their commission was revoked but they were a “house hold” name in the affiliate industry.  Perhaps an honest mistake, perhaps a deliberate one.. who knows?

If there is traffic coming through with no referrer then it may well be affiliates masking their links and removing the referrer from the users session.  Some affiliates just don’t trust networks or merchants to see where their traffic is coming from but personally I always suspect that affiliates masking their links on purpose may well be doing something against the terms.

Tip 5 – IP Addresses

This tip really speaks for itself.  Check the IP addresses for transactions, if you are seeing multiple transactions coming from IP then you may have problems.   This could be that your network is using some advance technology (so for example with Veracitag on AffiliateFuture all these transactions show on the same IP address)  but often it is more likely a someone doing something dodgy.  We kick affiliates off our network daily for filling out multiple lead forms time and time again.  It must take them ages and I can’t believe they are stupid enough to think that they won’t get caught out but there are ebooks being sold on ebay which tell people to do this to earn additional income – scary.

Tip 5 – Check the sales or leads even after you have paid out

I’ve left this tip till last as its one of the most important things that you can do and really does show where there could be fraud on your programme, not just abuse.  This may be from an affiliate or it may be from an incentive site user but the outcome is the same.

As more and more networks and merchants look to improve the validation time and payout to affiliates this can lead to potential problems.

For example, depending on your sector you should be looking for an abnormal amount of chargebacks (gaming) and returns (retail and telecoms).  Validating quickly can lead to a stronger affiliate programme but as mentioned, it’s always worth checking for abuse here.

If you’ve got a lead based programme then you should really validate the email addresses and make sure you are not paying for bounce backs too – also check how long it is before a user unsubscribes, if it’s after the first email (or before) then they have probably signed up for an incentive and you should check if you are allowing this.

I’m sure there is plenty more of this but the overall advise is there for all to see.  You will get abuse, you might even get fraud.  Plan for it, be wary of it and make sure that if you’ve got an affiliate programme you’ve also got the resource and the systems to manage it correctly and check things like this.

In the past 10 years I’ve done the following (in pretty much this order)..

• Left College, got a job working in a call centre for One.Tel
• After 1 month, moved from the call centre to do Tech Support for One.Tels newly launched ISP
• Was introduced to Lindsey by some friends on a trip to Birmingham
• Moved from Tech Support to Web Development for One.Tel
• Moved in with Lindsey, renting a flat in Tunbridge Wells
• Announced that Lindsey was pregnant with our first child
• Moved into a house in Tunbridge Wells
• Had our first child – Kieran, born in September 2002
• Moved up North to One.Tel Manchester office – spent 6 months living with the in-laws
• Got a house in Leyland, Lancashire
• Got married on Friday 13th August, 2004
• Announced that Lindsey was pregnant with our second son
• Moved back down to London
• Moved into Marketing Role at One.Tel
• Moved to Field and Trek as their first Internet Marketing Manager
• Jacob was born in May 2005
• Moved from Field and Trek to a dodgy mobile phone company where I stayed for all of one month
• Sold my first Affiliate Marketing site for £1,500.
• Moved to St. Minver as their first Affiliate Manager
• Launched the St. Minver affiliate platform
• Went to Barbados with AffiliateFuture for the first time
• Moved to Eyefall (now Altogether Digital) as their Affiliate Director
• Went to Barbados with AffiliateFuture for the second time
• Spoke at A4UExpo London
• Employed Ken and Renee to build a successful team at Altogether
• Announced that Lindsey was pregnant with our third son
• Moved to Head of Affiliates at AffiliateFuture
• Went to Barbados again
• Was an Usher at Simon’s Wedding (who I’ve known since I was around 3)
• Had our third child – Connor was born in December 08
• Spoke to Affiliate Summit Vegas
• Spoke at A4U Europe
• Went to Barbados again

I’ve already started to set some personal goals for the next 10 years (which includes having no more children!) and already it’s looking like a busy 2010 with lots of plans both professionally and personally.

So all that is left for me to say (albeit 5 days late) is that I’d like to wish all my readers a very happy new year – let’s hope it’s a successful one for us all!