Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

Lots of readers of this blog may not have experienced Social Media Virtual currency platforms before, so I’ll give a quick overview, using Mafia Wars as an example.

Within Mafia Wars you’re able to use “Godfather points” to level up quicker, transferring them into topping up energy or gaining additional skill points – you get a certain amount when you start the game and can buy points using Paypal.

In addition to buying the points, you can also go and complete some CPA offers (taken from Affiliate networks) and depending on the offer and payment from the network, different points are available. So basically a glorified incentive site…

So now you have the background we’ll go onto what has happened in the past few weeks.   The Virtual currency community had a conference (Virtual Goods Summit) and Mike Arrington (Techcrunch Owner/Editor) went off at the now ex-ceo of Offerpal – a Virtual currency platform that work with the game developers.

His argument was that “most” of the offers available to the end users to get these points were “scammy” – using an example of a Mobile offer that charges a subscription of $9.99 per month; whilst I’ve never been a fan of mobile offers like this they tend to be heavily regulated these days and do normally display the details of the subscription in the terms and conditions, however these are typically ignored by the end user who is just signing up to get the free points.

The other point example that Arrington uses is Netflix (the US equivalent of Lovefilm) – saying that the quality of the users will be very poor and that they will look to get around their policy of one payout per user.

The Techcrunch article covers off all his points in more detail and is worth a read.  You can also see a follow up post by Offerpal which covers off most of the points raised.

Personally I believe that Arrington has raised some good points – but most of them have been raised badly.

Are kids stealing their parents credit cards or mobile phones and signing up for these offers?  Perhaps a small amount are, but I wouldn’t think that this is a widescope issue – the wider problem with ringtone style offers is that they are not clear enough about the costs and perhaps the developers (or the aggregators such as Offerpal) should be careful about which merchants that they work with in this sector.  Typically these offers are not scams but customers are often stupid and don’t read the terms like they should.

The Netflix example in my mind shows that Arrington doesn’t really understand the Affiliate / CPA market – companies like this are fully aware of what incentive sites are and work with them to ensure that the CPAs that they are offering work for them and are typically very analytical to ensure that this provides them with a positive ROI – Arrington seems to suggest that they don’t de-dupe correctly and states:

Netflix sees an overall lowering of quality and pays less for leads.

I just don’t buy in to that statement above – whilst incentive sites in general may affect over CPA advertisers it’s more the cookies that they are potentially taking rather than lowering the overall payment from them.  Whilst I don’t have much knowledge of the Netflix campaign that’s certainly the case with the Lovefilms of the world who understand incentive sites and their customers very well.

So what now?

All said and done the questions that Arrington has asked have indeed started to change the landscape – Facebook (and the game developers) have taken note of the comments and are now enforcing the FB Advertising Guidelines; meaning that a number of the offers have been removed; Gambling clients, Sweepstakes, Mobile offers, etc are no longer able to use this as an advertising channel for them.

It will now be interesting to see if these guidelines are continued to be enforced (as the guidelines have been out there since July 09) as a lot of the offers removed, such as the bingo ones, are big revenue earners for the game developers and companies such as Offerpal.

I’ve been thinking about starting a new affiliate project for a while now – not really with the aim of making a huge amount of cash out of it (though I can always live in hope), but more because I haven’t built anything new for a while and feel it’s about time to do so – like many others I enjoy the buzz of seeing those earnings come through from a new site for the first time which is reason enough.

So I’ve dug out a domain I purchased a while ago – FreeBingoCards.org.uk.   I’ve found in the past that .org.uk domains have ranked quite well; especially on MSN but it’s obviously a hugely competitive space.

The first stage when I start a new site is generally to brainstorm a few ideas on how I want the site to work, so here goes:

• Data capture will be an important part of the site, including the opt-in process so that I can market to these email addresses with offers in the future.
• After a user has signed up I’ll put together an auto-mail path – so I’ll get creative from a number of bingo sites and send a different email each week.  Gathering the email creative may take a while!
• Need to make a decision on if I use a CMS like Drupal for the site, or just build it in flat HTML… still undecided on this.
• After I’ve put the main template together, I’ll start by reviewing the top 10 bingo merchants based on their Hitwise or Alexa rankings.

The next step is going to be to put together a calendar with some deadlines of when I want each stage of the site finished – I often find that this helps with making sure that I stay on track with the timelines and can plan it around the kids parties and the TV schedule!

I’ll look to do at least one post a week on the blog with an update on this project until it’s live and then keep the updates going once I’ve started the link building and traffic generation.

Suggestions and feedback are always welcome!

I’ve not blogged in a while, but after a few people moaned at me at the rather excellent Expo about it, I thought it was time to try and get a bit more going again.

So I’ll start this with a rant.   As regular readers will know, as well as now working for a network I still operate a couple of affiliate sites which pay for some beer tokens every now and again – not as much as I would like, but with a wife, three kids and a full time job it’s difficult to find the time!

Anyhow – when I apply to programmes it is generally with the explicit aim of doing some revenue with them, perhaps I’ve purchased a niche domain and want to use them on this site for example.  I don’t sign up to every programme under the sun as some affiliates will do.

Today I received notification that I had been suspended/removed from one of the programmes that I am signed up to due to lack of activity.  It’s not the first time that this has happened but does lead me once again to ask why there is such a lack of understanding from merchants that do this?  Do the networks advise their merchants that it’s a stupid idea? I believe they should…

The only good reason I’ve ever heard for this is that some networks charge merchants on a CPM for their banners being displayed, and the costs for this are sometimes more than the commission being paid – but this is more of an issue in the states from what I understand.

I challenge anyone to give me another decent reason for this, especially for a retailer.

I would suggest that any merchant who has thought about doing this thinks again for the following reasons:

• Just because I’m not promoting you currently doesn’t mean I won’t in the future
• If you reject me, I will just use your competitors in the future and you’ll be the ones losing out
• If you communicate with your affiliates via newsletters then just by being signed up I’m likely to receive and read these looking for more opportunities – surely the more affiliates that read this the better

I’m all for rejecting specific affiliates if their harming your brand / reputation but just culling all the non-active affiliates really is stupid.

I’m after some help.

Can anyone explain to me the whole DGM and Linkedin thing?  It’s being advertised on the Affiliates4u site at the moment but I just don’t understand the benefits of it.  I get (and use) linkedin – it’s a great site for connecting with business contacts, getting some good introductions & finding who some of the key employees are at a company, great.

But what’s the point of having a link to it in DGM?   I’ve not managed to spend the time digging out my login details (as I’ve not used DGM since the launch of DGMP..) but their website doesn’t really seem to explain what it does and the benefits of the mashup (if you can call it that).  Is it just for getting in contact with whoever manages the campaign at the merchant?  If so what’s the benefit of linkedin over an email address (or a comms centre)?

Answers on a the back of a postcard (or in the comments..).

Wordpress is a powerful tool and I use it for quite a few sites that I have built but it’s plugins can be limited and at times I’ve had to look at other solutions.

One of the big things that I wanted to be able to do when building a site is create a review site – none of the plugins that I previously looked at handled this very well so I ended up installing Drupal as it was more powerful for this.

However, a new (paid) plugin has recently been released called WPReviewSite.

It’s currently just under $100 (so about £55) and includes both the plugin and theme to get a review site running pretty quickly out of the box.

Here are some of the features listed on their website:

• Adds Star Ratings To Your Comment Forms
• Sorts Your Posts by Weighted Average
• Integrates With WordPress Administration
• Powers a Whole Website or Just What Parts You Want
• Doesn’t Modify WordPress Database Tables

I’ve given it a quick go and it seems very powerful, although the proof is in the pudding and I’m aiming to get a full site using this within the next week or two and will publish the URL when it’s all up and running so you can give it a test drive

More information about the plugin and theme on their site