Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

You may well have noticed that I’ve not updated the blog too much over the past few months and I thought that I should explain a little about the lack of updates and why I’ve been so busy.

Firstly my personal life has been quite busy - as some of my readers will know, my wife, Lindsey, is pregnant with our third child.  The baby is due on the 25th December (!) and there’s been a number of scans and visits to the doctors / hospital to keep me busy from this aspect – add this up with having two kids already and I don’t get much time to myself these days!

On the work front I’ve been at AffiliateFuture for about three months now – it’s been a busy three months which have included a week in Barbados and more recently a few days in Boston for the Affiliate Summit – setting up a new department also means that I’ve been working pretty late and burning the candle a little too much.  Being the media whore that I am you can also hear a little bit more about what we’ve been doing on a couple of recent interviews too:

• Fraser Edwards Podcast with James Little
• Affiliates4u.TV Interview with James Little

Hopefully things will start to get a bit less insane in September as I’ve got a number of posts in my head that I really need to sit down and write.

The title of this post is not be being offensive, it’s a well known term that you can read more about on Wikipedia.

But onto the point of the post, in browsing an iphone forum today (my 3g iphone was delivered and is amazing!) an ad from google adsense got my attention:

The ad itself is rather nice and the case looks great (I think I’ll actually order one myself) but look at the stupidly long discount code!  Not sure why a merchant would have such a long code especially as it’s on adsense.

Has anyone else seen any randomly long codes like this on creative before?

KISS

I became angered once again with having Pay as you go and as I’d been wanting an iPhone for some time, I decided it was about time to switch back to a contract phone and try and get hold of one.

That seemed to be more difficult than I would have thought but after a few weeks of being out of stock, Carphone Warehouse had them back on their website and available for order.

Fantastic.

So I went though the relatively simple checkout process (not even using an affiliate link!) and saw that I could pick up my order from the store, rather than waiting for it to be delivered.. this I thought would be easier so I selected this option, pinged in my nearest store details and continued the order.   Confirmation was received on my email that they had got my order OK and would begin processing it… by this time it was towards the end of the day so I was hoping that I’d be able to pick it up either today (Wednesday) or Thursday.

Then this morning I received an email saying that my ordered had been canceled due to a security check failure!  If it was a credit check failure I could understand (I’m crap with money!) but the security warning was off.  It gave a phone number and said to call up if I wished to proceed but the original order had been canceled.

A little bit of googling and then a call to Carphone Warehouse then revealed that the reason for this is that with some handsets (the iphone being one of them) the could not allow store collection and it had to be delivered to my home address instead.  That’s fine and the phone is coming tomorrow, but there are a few things that this raises:

1) As the order had been canceled, if I had gone though an affiliate link one could only assume that this would also mean that the affiliates commission is canceled

2) It’s just poor customer service - they should either not allow store pickup on these handsets in the first place, or better still call / email me to tell me there is a problem with this method and put the order on hold, not cancel it completely!

I’d be interested to know how many other people would go down this route and how many would not phone up to replace the order, one would think a group as large as CPW would have a better way of doing this!

Looking forward to joining the iPhone club - just a shame I’m at work tomorrow and hopefully it’s delivered when my wife is in the house!

Share options paying out and VC’s squandering money has led to the release of a new search engine, cuil (pronounced cool), created by bunch of ex-google employees.

If you’re reading this blog then it’s pretty likely that you already know this, so I won’t go into too much information about it but if you want to read more than I suggest looking here, here or here.

My first impressions of cuil were all good.  I liked the retro looking black and blue branding and I really, really liked the layout after you make a search; though that may well be more a case of it just being different.

I was impressed with the initial relevancy and the amount of sites indexed but then I started to notice a few things.

Here’s a screenshot from a search on AffiliateFuture.  It’s great that it ranks in the first couple of positions but where on earth do they get their image results for?  An Affiliate Window image under our search results doesn’t inspire me with confidence.

You’ll also see that if a space in (Affiliate Future) the main AF site does not appear on the homepage.  Oddly my blog does but again with a completely random image!

So overall – I like the look and feel and for a startup that has just launched it has a lot of potential but there is a fair way to go yet.

I’ll just post the video here - words don’t really do it any justice.

Enjoy.

Sometimes I really do despair and today the team at Zanox  helped me do just that.

Whilst browsing across the forum I noticed a post from Darren Hamer, Head of Account Management at Zanox about a new affiliate program for Glomobi, a mobile phone ringtine / game company that seem to be based in South Africa.

This was all fine until I noticed a very odd condition in their terms.  See the screenshot below:

No SEO allowed?  Let’s ignore the fact that this can’t really be defined as a Keyword policy for a second… No SEO allowed?  I thought that we had seen the end of programs putting up such silly conditions, but alas, I was wrong.

So does this mean that content sites can’t promote it at all?  Should they use their robots.txt file to block spiders from getting to it?  I think we need some more information on this condition Zanox, or rather, just remove it completely, as it’s stupid.

My day was then made complete by searching for the Glomobi brand name on google and seeing that ranked position 3 & 4 in the serps is a blog slagging them off for being fraudsters, spammers and general crooks.   You’d think after that was so high up that they would WANT some SEO done by affiliates to provide better results!

Another good example of this is Ocean Finance back in April last year and look where that got them - they don’t even rank on their brand name

One of the most interesting panels at the recent buy.at speakeasy was the Agency/Super Affiliates panel chaired by Tyson.  There were a few of the usual questions about what it actually is that agencies do and how they fit in before getting on to one of the key topics at the moment – de-duping.

After I initially asked about this topic there was some debate about how de-duping should work and how potentially the “last man in” approach should be changed in the future but Doug shouted out something from the back of the room that sums everything up for me at the moment.. Give affiliates transparency.

Is that really too much to ask for?  Surely the networks just need to have a little snippet under the program details with information such as:

Does the merchant allow brand name bidding? Yes / No
If yes… Is the brand open to all affiliates or via a brand group?  All / Group
Does the merchant de-dupe on their affiliate sales against other channels?  Yes / No
If yes… Is the de-duping also across brand terms?  Yes / No

Perhaps a few more too but I’m sure that would be a good start.. The question is why don’t more networks do it?   I raised this topic at one of the first IAB sessions that I went to and unfortunately the majority of the networks around the table at the time (you can probably guess who) openly refused to do so, saying that this information was confidential.

If affiliates are openly losing out on sales because of a harsh de-duping process then surely this is something they should be aware of, ideally before spending time and money promoting the campaign?  Unfortunately I fail to see why this is too much to ask but I will (perhaps stupidly) hope that this kind of transparency starts to be the norm as merchants and networks realise that being honest can actually work in their favour.

Yesterday I headed across to the buy.at speakeasy for their daytime and evening event. It was the first time I’ve managed to make the daytime part of Speakeasy and I’ll try and give an overview from the parts I can remember (should have taken notes!).

Firstly the Keynote was from a guy called Ian Jindal.  I must admit that as much as I follow the “Web2.0” world I haven’t heard of him before and will keep a lookout in the future.

Ian was a very good speaker – he engaged with the audience well and cracked some jokes to keep the audience entertained.  One of the things that I perhaps took the wrong was however is that Ian seemed to contradict himself by one minute saying that he felt that the country was in a recession and then later suggesting that clients should be spending money on Flash enhancements to their websites, citing this as an example:

Martin + Osa

I would have thought that if we were in a recession the cost of items would be an important factor. We’ve already apparently seen that the clothing retail market is constantly lowering it’s prices because of the level of competition and surely if (as suggested) more sites concentrated with features like on the Martin + Osa site it would drive the costs up?  The main question that this raises is if enhanced features like this have a real effect on the conversion rate.  I’m not convinced but would welcome some examples of where it may have happened.

There were some other neat things raised in the presentation – AMPL (attention profiling mark-up language) could have a big effect on the future of shopping in the future (perhaps another few years down the line) and the use of Microformats on google maps is something I would like to look more into.

The other interesting thing that Ian showed us was a demo of Pronto – a social shopping website.  The firefox plugin was slightly concerning from an affiliate point of view - here is how it works:

1)    You download their Firefox plugin
2)    You visit a site like Amazon.com and view a product
3)    A popup will then appear suggesting that the price can be found better elsewhere

Hopefully this won’t catch on too well as it could effect a sites conversion rate and send affiliates traffic elsewhere!

Have half-written a blog post about some of the other points so will try and get it up tomorrow.

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!

• Aug 19 : An update on the lack of updates
• Aug 18 : Keep it simple, stupid.
• Aug 13 : iPhone order, Carphone Warehouse and Leakage
• Jul 29 : Search Engine Review – cuil
• Jul 9 : Lee McCoy - Dancing Queen