I started the blog back in February 2006 and it grew over the next couple of years to have 1000 subscribers and 34 podcasts ranging from one-to-one interviews to group discussions. All great fun but in more recent years I’ve had less to say about the industry and less involvement in it. I’m still working hard as an affiliate and running a number of sites but I just get on with that rather than writing about it.

Life is changing though and at the end of October I’ll be starting a full time job working with my church in Edinburgh. My faith in God has always been central in my life so this is a good opportunity to put it into practice. I’ll be spending time visiting folks at home and in hospital as well as putting more time into our community outreach work. I’ll also be glad to speak to real people in a day instead of staring at a computer screen. The church is based in the centre of Edinburgh so all visitors welcome if you are in town one day.

Affiliate marketing has been good to me and I’ll always love the industry. I was never cut out for making the progression to “Performance Marketing”….

RT @a4uexpo #PerformanceMarketing is like affiliate marketing but in suits ;o)

— Jason Dale (@onelittleduck) October 5, 2012

but I’ll still be working away as an affiliate in my spare time. It’s not retirement, more of a step back.

So thank you for reading my posts, listening to the podcasts and having discussion in the comments (blog comments! Remember them in the days before twitter ). It’s been great fun but for now it’s so long and thanks for all the fish

p.s. anyone want to buy a great domain name for a blog about being an affiliate?

Mostly this is due to emails from Tradedoubler which for years now have been sent in an unreadable font size when viewed in Gmail but today they were not the offender

I’m going to hide the merchant for now as I don’t really work with them but this is a great example of what not to do… (current commission rate on the program is 7%)

Dear All

We have traditionally not worked in a specific way with any affiliates but have just outsourced the management of our affiliates to XXXXXXX. This will mean that the affiliates will get more focused attention to drive the programme forwards. With this in mind we are reducing the blanket commission rates to 5% and this will take effect in 30 days.

Please do not hesitate to contact me should any queries arise.

Kind Regards

So the commission rate drops to pay for the agency which now manages the program? Or affiliates are to benefit so much from the introduction of the agency that they’ll earn even more with a lower commission rate?

I just can’t see the appeal for affiliates and I can’t understand the agency suggesting a model where the first move is a commission cut.

Any thoughts on this one?

The divide between your tracking from your own website and the affiliate programs has always caused me problems, I don’t just want to know that I’ve sent them a click which converted, I want to know the player journey, all the way from arriving on my site to visiting theirs, in order to help me optimise my marketing strategy and target converting sources more aggressively. This led me on to discover how to track my outbound clicks using Google Analytics, something which has helped me massively over the years.

I’ve provided a guide on how to track this and then use the information below.

How to add tracking:

1. To start you need to navigate to the site profile which you want to track clicks from and then enter into the settings section. This is done by clicking the cog in the top-right corner.

   

2. Now you’re in the settings section you should go to the ‘Goals’ tab. Choose which goal set you want to use (entirely based on your preference) and then click the ‘+Goal’ link.

   

3. The last step in Google Analytics is to fill in the goal information which you want to be tracked. You’ll find the following fields to fill in:

   Goal Name: This is what you want the goal action to appear as when you look at your reports. In my case I want to check the users who click through to SuperCasino, so I’ve set it as ‘SuperCasino Click Through’.

   Active/Inactive: Make sure you select ‘Active’.

   Goal Type: Ensure that you have selected ‘URL Destination’.

   Goal URL: This section you can customise based on your ordering preference. I personally break it down into goal set and then an indication of the target destination. So in this case it would be:‘/G2/supercasino/’

   Find whatever works for you here.

   Match Type: Select ‘Head Match’.

   Case Sensitive: Leave unchecked.

   Goal Value: Unless you can assign an exact value to each outbound click, for example with a CPC deal, then you won’t be able to use this. I sometimes work out an average click/revenue figure, however I prefer to leave this blank.

   

4. Now you’ve set up Google Analytics to report you’ll need to edit your outbound links to report the information you’ve set via JS. This is done by adding the following to your hyperlink code:

   onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview("Your Goal URL");

   So in my case, based on the information I entered in stage 3, that would leave me with the following URL in order to track SuperCasino click through rate:

   a href="http://www.supercasino.com/" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview("/G2/supercasino/");"

   All the outbound Castle Casino links that you have added this to will now track as a goal conversion.

How to use the tracking:

Now you’ve started tracking outbound links you can start to analyse the data in order to improve your websites conversion rates.

The first and most obvious way to use the data is to correlate the click through rates that your affiliate program software gives you and that which Google Analytics reports. For example if I see 431 clicks to SuperCasino last month, but the software has only reported 200, then I know that something has gone wrong and I can conduct further tests to make sure data isn’t going missing.

Now the data starts to get a little bit more fun. We can break it down further to see the click conversion rates that each traffic source has provided us. This can help you work out the sources which actually convert for you, rather than just send you numbers.

As an example, previously I could only see that websiteA.com has sent me 5000 visitors in January and websiteB.com only 500, therefore I’ve always assumed that I should be focusing on getting a better listing on websiteA.com. However with this data you can see the actual conversions, and the visitors from websiteA.com only went through one of my links 25 times, whereas websiteB.com visitors went through 75 times as the traffic is a lot more suited. From filling the missing tracking link like this I could re-allocate entire my marketing efforts for the better!

As the above traffic sources images shows, most of our affiliate sites traffic come directly from search engines. But we want more information than that, so let’s break it down once again and find out how much each keyword converts for me. By doing this I know which keywords I should be targeting more aggressively, effectively changing my search strategy which was based just on volume.

An example of keyword goal conversations, with the keywords blocked, has been given below:

Out of the hundreds of ways to use this information, I’ll give you on final nugget. Breaking this down into geographic regions shows me which countries prefer which advertisements. For example I can see that visitors from the United States didn’t like the SuperCasino ad, so maybe we can serve them something else. On the other hand players from Spain loved it, so I’ll change the page layout to promote it more prominently.

I’m sure after all this you are seeing my point, the data allows you to break down conversion rates like never before, all using a tool most are familiar with. Take a few and install it, you may be as surprised at the results as I was!

About the Author:
David Merry is the Director of live casino CastleCasino.com and affiliate portal operator Right Casino Media; he initially started his online career in search engine optimisation.

For more information on joining the CastleCasino.com affiliate program please visit http://www.castleaffiliates.com.

Hi,

On the 06th December a visitor to your website clicked on an Affiliate URL
for a Merchant who has closed its Affiliate Program with Paid On Results.

The visitor was shown our Expired Links page, and given several other
related Merchants they may be interested in. This visitor followed one of
our related links and went onto make a purchase with Find Me A Gift.

Normally the commission due would just be added to your account, however
in this case you are currently not an Affiliate of Find Me A Gift. In
order for us to pass the commission onto you we first need you to join the
Find Me A Gift Affiliate Program

You can do this as normal though your Affiliate Control Panel, once you
have joined and been approved for this Merchant we will add the commission
due to you into your account.

If you have any questions please let us know.

Best Wishes,

Paid On Results Support Team.

Great use of technology to do something to reach a good outcome from an expired link. When the other options are sending the visitor through anyway or landing them on error page actually putting a solution in place that allows me to earn and another merchant to make the sale is fantastic.

A while back Josh Kahlbach got in touch to show me the ThirstyAffiliates WordPress plugin. I’m using it on one of my sites now so I sent Josh back some questions and here are his answers…

Tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi, I’m Josh Kohlbach, I’m a programmer from Brisbane, Australia. I’m the creator of ThirstyAffiliates affiliate link management plugin for WordPress as well as a handful of other non-premium plugins.

A bit about me?… Hrm, I’ve been into programming since I was about 13 years old (now 26), I have a degree in IT, and I’ve been studying business and marketing in my spare time for about the past 3 or 4 years.

What’s the idea behind this plugin?

The idea behind ThirstyAffiliates is quite simple and I’ve designed it to be a helpful and un-intrusive part of your affiliate marketing workflow.

I came up with the idea of an affiliate link manager after getting frustrated with having to create reviews for a computer hardware review site I was making and not being able to really track where my affiliate links were being used.

After a few times of needing to change one of my affiliate links and tracking down where I used that link in the past I finally did something about it.

Why your plugin and not others which have similar functions?

When I created ThirstyAffiliates I was actually looking for a plugin similar to mine to purchase. But everything in the industry was just so focused on cloaking and being deceptive by keyword link generation all over your blog. It just seemed like there was no tool that really focused on managing the links like assets.

My tool puts the focus on managing affiliate links in one place and providing a really great interface for getting those links into your posts and pages.

I’ve actually crafted a specialised link picker tool just for that. Most other plugins just give you a list of your links to insert or a nasty shortcode to remember which is absolutely useless once you have 100+ links. You really need a proper tool once you’re getting serious about affiliate marketing with more than the odd link here and there.

My plugin also does importing and exporting using the WordPress importer tool which means that you can setup your links once and import them to new websites you’re creating, saving hours of setup.

What other wordpress plugins do you recommend for affiliate marketing?

There are some really great review website plugins out there. If I was making a dedicated reviews website again I’d definitely look into purchasing a premium review plugin. Especially one that gets the social side of things going with user reviews.

Also, not really a plugin, but there’s heaps of great integrations with mailing list providers like MailChimp and Aweber. Drop in their plugin and activate a widget – building a mailing list doesn’t need to be difficult, but it’s something every affiliate should be doing as the engagement on that platform is a lot higher.

Thanks Josh

Two sales from the same cookie which was placed on the 1st October 2006! More than 5 years ago I sent this visitor through and earlier this month they earned me £15. Now I know all the stats probably say that a huge majority of sales take place within the standard 28 day cookie but this shows that it’s certainly not all of the sales. Also note that the same click and cookie led to two sales. Not all programmes will have a cookie which is valid for multiple events. Many are for the first sale only.

Can anyone beat that time between click and sale? Most people would have been through a few computers in that time nevermind not having cleaned out your browser cache and cookies.

I used to have a lot of traffic that worked well for Buyagift and it seems I really should be trying to get that back again instead of chasing single action 28 day cookies. Just to be clear the cookie length for the Buyagift program is 9999 Days

Buyagift are on Affiliate Window and have an impressive Christmas incentive running at the moment.

An Affiliate Needs More Than Commission

Fraser’s blog here was one of the first I read before carving out a career in affiliate marketing. My first dealings with the industry were purely voyeurism.

I would watch in wonder, sixteen tabs up during my lunch break, trying to understand how such a simple business model could provide such a fundamentally different work environment to my 9-5.

Three years on and my position is reversed. I now shoot off my own advice as a blogger and full-time affiliate.

I get to hear many questions from newbies trying to break in to the industry. The curiosity has grown, and grown. It seems everybody wants a piece of the affiliate marketing pie. But what about those who have been around the block for several years and have felt their love affair with the industry begin to wear off?

I think every affiliate, sooner or later, has to hit the wall.

When the thrill of earning ‘easy money’ wears off – at least, that’s what it’s called by my friends and family – the real challenge of staying motivated kicks in.

Being a middleman is a tough gig. How do you stay motivated without the pride of customers thanking you, or without the credit for driving a company to the next level? We are invisible, and with no attachment to what we sell other than the numbers on the cheques we receive.

I’ve battled for many months to conquer the overwhelming feeling of indifference. Truth be told, once the novelty of making good money wears off, it’s pretty tough to be satisfied – unless you’re working on projects that inspire something greater than financial security.

Clearly, an affiliate needs more than just commission to stay motivated.

It’s hard to get out of bed to work on a website if that website is only ever destined to satisfy a disconnected algorithm in Google’s underbelly. How do you motivate yourself to rank for products that, all commission aside, you barely give a rat’s arse about?

I think this is a problem many affiliate marketers face. They simply fall out of love with their projects. They don’t truly believe in them in the way that a driven entrepreneur should.

It’s one of the reasons so few of our projects ever come to fruition. If we don’t enjoy working on them, we can find plenty of reasons not to work on them. I know I can.

I believe I’ve created the world’s most emphatic repertoire of excuses to justify my own lackadaisical attitude to the websites I don’t like working on. Just last night the dog ate my FTP password.

Indifference, lack of passion, lack of excitement… call it whatever you want. We all need to engage in projects where there’s more than just a financial incentive, but something that gets us out of bed too.

And so, the number one piece of advice I give to new affiliates is pretty simple.

If you wouldn’t do exactly what you’re proposing for the reward of $0, then you probably shouldn’t do it at all. It’s passion and the desire to see projects through to their conclusion that separates the rich from the poor in our business. Do yourself a favour and work on something that gets you out of bed, or you’ll find yourself wishing you were back there long before lunch.

Finch

A couple of weeks back I went along to WordUp Edinburgh which was an informal one day conference about WordPress. Organised by WPScotland it was a good day to see what everyone else is doing with WordPress. Talks ranged from WordPress in large companies through to voluntary organisations with a mixture of presentation and discussion.

I can’t add much to the many good reports about the conference already written but thought I would note some of the many plugins that were suggested throughout the day.

In no particular order….

For Theme Development and Testing

• Log Deprecated Notices
• Debogger
• Theme Check

For Other Stuff….

• Custom Post Type UI – Making life easier for creating Custom Post types.
• Widget Logic – choose when you want your widgets to appear.
• Image Widget – Uploading images to widgets.
• Chimpexpress – Use existing content from your WordPress site to populate your latest Mailchimp newsletter.
• Mailpress – Similar to the above plugin but without using Mailchimp. Probably only suitable for smaller mailing lists.
• WP Help – Create help information as part of the WordPress dashboard. Ideal for handing over a site to a less experienced editor.
• EasyBlogging – Ideal interface for a new user by hiding away all the complicated stuff!
• Rolescoper – Better control over user roles for multi author blogs.
• Zend Gdata – Clever stuff this one. Allows you to link to data stored in Google Docs. I was shown this for linking rota data in a Google Docs Spreadsheet to the Adelaide Place Baptist Church website and I think it also has much wider potential use.
• ManageWP – This is the worker plugin for the main service at ManageWP. Recommended by both Wordskill & Canary Dwarf. Should make life easier for managing a number of different WP installs. I’m going to explore this one a bit further soon.

I’m sure there were many more plugins suggested as solutions to specific questions but that’s all I managed to scribble down over the course of the day

Perhaps the merchant isn’t quite fully appreciating affiliate marketing or perhaps they just have really really good banners?

Only the first purchase made by the customer will be paid out on, and only if they buy the product related to the link that they clicked through.

On the 15th of each month a verification process will go through the system and any sales that don’t meet the above criteria and/or were de-duped against another of the AA’s marketing channels will be deleted from your account.

The first one surprised me more. The second is perhaps more widely spread but I still don’t think it’s reasonable. I’m not active with this merchant but do others think these terms are fair? Would be interested to hear opinions below.

15th March 2001

Earned my first ever commission via DatingDirect on Tradedoubler.

It all started here when I was amazed to earn money this way. Previously I had been running a small web development business but I was always just selling time so if I went on holiday or couldn’t find work etc then I didn’t earn.

Back then I remember getting my advice from alt.www.affiliate, an old Tradedoubler Yahoo Group which I think was started by Andrew Girdwood and of course the very early versions of Affiliates4u when it was on ezboard and still well worth a look for a trip down memory lane. Like when we all got excited about the launch of Google Adsense

Over the next couple of years my business started to shift away from having clients and doing web development and more into full time affiliate marketing and I seem to have been there since.

June 2003

I organised “The Limo Club” where a bunch of affiliates got together and hired a limo to go round London and try to meet all the major networks in one day.

As well as being a great day out it was a series of useful meetings and also a chance to put some pressure on the spyware issues of the day.

The following day was an affiliate get2gether at the Kensington Roof Gardens. This event was a big step up from the previous pub based events but no one could have imagined the a4uexpo in the future.

My Sites

Over this time I had expanded with a few different sites but my most successful was FullSteamAhead which is now a shadow of it’s former glory. It was a general shopping directory, list everything, datafeed & more site. I can’t track it down now but the Alexa graph showed a steady ascent with loads of traffic followed by a cliff drop on the graph when Google kicked me out. I think it just ended up being too successful and the overuse of datafeeds meant I ranked for every random product that was going. Lesson learned and time to move on.

Around this time I seemed to be doing well for Euroffice, Dabs, Figleaves & ASOS but the fields I worked in changed so much over the years. For example I’ve had a good few years of doing well from gift experiences with buyagift and also a good spell of ranking number 1 for ‘ghd hair straighteners’ which was nice. These things come and go for example I don’t think there will be an old timer in the industry that doesn’t remember jumping on the Britannia DVD Club program when it launched on buy.at

When I look back I know I should have worked harder in one field to dominate and built a brand but instead I’ve always jumped about a bit getting tempted by the next new project to work on and moving into a different field.

For a spell I did well from adsense alongside the affiliate stuff as many people did but over time my sites and interests changed again. On my best Adsense day I sent 1,457 clicks earning a couple of hundred pounds at which point I probably put my feet up for a few months and paid the price again Yesterday I earned £2.10

Spyware

Around 2004, 2005 spyware was really at it’s peak and the affiliates of a4u did a great job of working together to get some regulation in place by the networks. I remember taking an old laptop, getting it infected and recording just what was going on. Slowly the networks adopted some rules against this and to date I don’t think it’s as much of a problem here as it is in the US.

2006 The Podcast Years

In June of 2006 I started recording podcasts with various people in the industry. To date I think I’ve recorded 34 podcasts but haven’t added to them in the last couple of years. It was a fun way to learn and share more about the industry but the time involved just became a bit too much and had to give way to real work that had a financial return. I enjoyed speaking to everyone involved but a few of the more popular ones in terms of comments were Doug Scott for some straight talking, Kieron Donoghue about how he got started & a group discussion on discount codes. Here’s one from 2007 that’s topical now.

Recent Years

I got married in 2004 and then in 2007 my daughter was born and my business week changed completely. Very much like John Lamerton’s recent post I’ve been kind of part time since then. I don’t really work outside of Monday-Friday 10-5 and spend a heap more time with my daughter including regular half days here and there. In the early days I would regularly have been working at 2 or 3am but it just doesn’t fit with life now! Leaving the world of affiliate marketing and entering the world of mother & toddler groups has been a good change and my wife and daughter always come first for me.

2008 saw me get along to my first a4uexpo and it was amazing to see the change in the industry. It’s great to see the growth and the recognition that the industry gets and to have things on a professional footing but I confess I do miss the atmosphere in years gone by. No one would ever dream of sharing this kind of information in a post like this these days. What’s changed? I’m not sure I guess it’s inevitable as things grow that it can’t have that small team feeling where we all know we’re doing something new.

Now I’m working on a number of hopefully good quality content sites and slowly trying to build brands around them. I’ve learned that I can’t have all my eggs in one basket and I can’t keep starting new things. I don’t have as many working hours so I need to be careful with how I spend them and accept I can’t do everything. I’ve accepted that I don’t need to earn millions but I’d rather enjoy life. Like Kirsty I want to be a Pretty Good Affiliate and don’t wish I was ‘Super’. Slow and steady is the way forward even if it is a little dull these days!

Sorry for the self indulgent trip down memory lane but if you’ve read this far you must have some memories to add in the comments about the last ten years or so

There has been quite a bit of coverage about Impact Radius in the last week but if you were like me earlier today then you might still be trying to work your way through the press release to actually figure out what’s in it for affiliates. Thankfully I’m just off the phone to Ricki Jones (ex Affilinet, CJ & Wheel) who will be heading up the UK office and so I’ve got a bit more idea of what’s going on now

The company grew out of the realisation that often a traditional affiliate network could best serve their clients by getting out the way and letting affiliates speak directly to merchants. Even when networks offer a full affiliate management service to their clients it’s hard for them to know either side of the business as well as the people working in it each day. So with that in mind Impact Radius is about offering a solution rather then a service.

3 Key Issues for Affiliates

1. Open Conact – Yellow Pages style directory with full contact information for both advertisers & affiliates (media partners in Impact Radius terms) This means it should be easy for both sides of the relationship to contact each other and to find relevant partners to work with.
2. Pricing Structure – Impact Radius override fees are much lower than most networks with the highest level being 10% and sliding down with volume. The transparency means that you know the full costs to the advertiser of your activity and so for example you could suggest a higher CPA based on sending a higher volume of leads that would bring the override down.
3. Negotiation – using the directory you would be able to find merchants and approach them with an offer of a commission rate that would be acceptable to you. This is managed by insertion orders back and forth which are all logged when the agreement is made. Up for discussion would be commission rate, cookie duration, minimum CPC’s, any performance caps, incentive tiers and any other specific terms and conditions required.

There are a host of other features that should also be interesting for example flexible payments (daily if required!) and also facilities to track offline activity through unique voucher code, pay-per-call and unique URL tracking.

Time will tell how it works out as aspects like the directory idea might be hard work to reach a tipping point before it becomes an “everyone who’s anyone” type directory. Overall though I think it’s a really interesting business and it will be intriguing to watch how it finds it place in the UK market.

Three and a half years after sending this visitor to Buyagift I’ve just made £7.76

The affiliate program is on Affiliate Window and I interviewed Graham Keen from Buyagift around the same time as I sent that first click

A quick note to thank Gone Digging for the wine I received recently. It’s great to see the personalised bottles for real and in the boxes it does make for a great gift.

The Gone Digging affiliate program is on Webgains and they are also running a competition at the moment to win yourself some personalised wine. You can follow Jim Kinloch on twitter for more info about how to win.

It’s also nice that I can write two articles about this gift including one over at my wine site about personalised wine gifts

Thanks also to Nadeem at Azam Marketing for sorting this out.

Currently eBay pay out a CPA on new users and a percentage of revenue from sellers fees but from 1st September they are going to switch to a new concept which they have called Quality Click Pricing. As the most simple level this is a switch to CPC payouts which may seem like a strange step at first but the CPC payment is going to be based on the quality of the traffic and vary for each publisher on a daily basis.

The quality algorithm is based on both the short term and long term value of the click to eBay with various elements deciding an EPC on a daily basis. For example sales completed closer to the click time would be valued higher as there is more direct evidence that the click contributed to the sale. In some ways this is an attempt to vary the ‘last click wins’ approach that is currently in place with most affiliate programs and to help content affiliates and others who produce quality sites. Since eBay can tell what a click from a specific affiliate is normally worth to them then it’s a creative way to pay appropriately.

Julia said that the motivation for this change was to see their good affiliates rewarded with higher payouts and their bad affiliates to earn less as an incentive to improve. eBay believe that some of their smaller affiliates are providing some of their best quality traffic and so this allows them to invest in growing that side of the network. During the beta test they also found that it encouraged some affiliates to work on improving their traffic either through developing their own sites or looking at their traffic sources.

More info is available on the eBay blog including the official press release.

From my point of view it seems a bold move and I hope it’s one that works out well. It’s nice to see a creative approach to solving a problem and they seem to have avoided the Adsense approach which leaves you without a clue about why some clicks earned so much more than others. I’d be really keen to hear in the comments any other opinions or from people active on the eBay Partner Network about how you think the change will affect you.

As a side note we also discussed that eBay doesn’t seem to be talked about much in the UK affiliate marketing community and I wasn’t totally sure of the reasons behind this. Are many of you active on the eBay network? Given that eBay.co.uk’s unique audience was over 17m in June this year it seems we are all buying and selling there but not talking about the affiliate program!

Leo Fogarty sent me over some questions via email which I did my best to answer for his blog. Head over there and have a read if that’s of interest.

Clarke Duncan, Director and Shareholder, spoke about the company’s new identity:-

“This is an exciting time for Paid On Results as we continue to grow steadily and recruit additional staff in the face of the global recession. The rebranding reflects this excitement and optimism. The future for Paid On Results sees further growth aided by an increased emphasis on sales and marketing. Today Paid On Results can look to the future with confidence, largely because of its strong background in bringing to the fore innovative technology and in employing knowledgeable, friendly staff. We will continue to build our independent business based on these strong foundations. “

The Books Direct entry was based around the alternative to brand name bidding that Paul Wheatley and I worked on last year.

Here is an extract from the Books Direct email about awarding the prize money.

So there were a total of thirty tickets in the draw and the final prize pool totaled £17,331.86. Sarah Day – the Online Marketing Manager for Books Direct presented a company update to the attending affiliates followed by a short open discussion. Some interesting suggestions on how to improve the Books Direct programme were raised and we will be looking at how best to implement these in the very near future.

Finally, after months of anticipation the time came to pick the two winners. Helen Smith, Head of Online and Creative at Books Direct performed the honour and the first name to be pulled from the draw was easyfundraising.org.uk. Unable to attend the day we were able to contact Jonathan Scott on the phone later in the afternoon to share the good news. The second winning ticket that was pulled out belonged to Richard Gibson from Freebiejeebies.co.uk. Richard was in attendance and needless to say utterly delighted at the result!

So congratulations to both easyfundrasing.org.uk and Freebiejeebies.co.uk, both win a staggering £8,665.93 each!

It was good to try something a little different and hopefully it’s worked well for the Books Direct affiliate program as a whole.

I recognised most of the obvious gifts but I’ll need to do some research about the benefits of Manuka Honey before I give it a try!

The program is available on Webgains with a healthy 20% commission.

Now given my lack of blogging time due to spending more time being a dad in the last year I’m not really expecting to be in the running although the archive of podcasts do still get downloaded regularly. Strangely after going over the last few months of stats I still seem to be getting through 10 gigs of data transfer every week with about 60% of that going to China. Would love to know what’s going there if anyone has any clues!

But anyway the point of my post was to suggest a few blogs likely to be nominated, in no particular order here are the blogs I’ve paid most attention to in the last year.

• Lee McCoy – Some great analysis of different methods and tips on newer approaches like twitter etc. Twitter For Affiliate Marketing? Like Shooting Fish In A Barrel
• Kieron Donoghue – always popular & consistently blogging when the rest of us drop off for months at a time. In amongst the Spotify chat which I love there are also posts like Twitter for Affiliate Networks
• Jason Dale – again consistently blogging great stuff but calling a spade a spade while at the same time coming up with the best headlines of any affiliate blog. Are We Really Eating From The Same Cookie Jar?
• Self Made Minds – Scott & Al haven’t been as obvious in the A4U community so mistakenly I think they have been overlooked in previous awards shortlists. Posts like Scott’s Domain Buyer’s Guide have generated a lot of comments, discussion and are full of good info.
• Kirsty McCubbin – depending on which country Kirsty is living in during the week of judging I’m not sure of her eligibility but it is very much a UK blog so posts like Smart Thinking is More Profitable Than The Hard Yards in Affiliate Marketing! have been offering some great insights over the past months.
• John Lamerton – John will soon have his hands full with fatherhood so getting reading now before he runs out of spare time Topical posts like What sells during a recession? have made for great reading.
• Chris Frost – although Chris is out of the country so much on holiday I’m not sure if he qualifies as a UK blogger Please Stop Pigeonholing was a great post about a very current issue.

Now at this point I’m sure I’ll realise I’ve forgotten someone obvious so I apologise in advance and say that there are loads more great blogs out there but these are just a few that I think will be in the running

I haven’t yet bought a site from this list but often buying a site with some history behind it is a great starting point for better search engine rankings. Also if you can apply your own experience in a particular area to a site with a lot of exisiting traffic then you might be able to recoup your expenses just by making a few tweaks to the revenue streams.

Buying and then tweaking is the sort of thing that Scott at Self Made Minds often writes about so have a read there as well.

Good luck!

I mentioned this on Twitter and got back responses from people saying similar things

Today I got a call from my optimiser that went something like this

Google: I notice you haven’t used your optimised campaign
Me: Yes, that’s because you removed all my negative keywords
Google: No – I just moved them to campaign level
Me: Nope, there is nothing there. I’m logged in now.
Google: Yes there is, just click ……oh…….(background noise)…… dial tone

Anyone had any better experience of Google optimising your campaign for you?

He did phone back 5 mins later and said we seemed to have got cut off but he had found my negative keywords and would put them in place now

Still not sure if I should actually run the campaign for a week in place of my own one!

I think I also got a bit fed up with complaining about the same old things that don’t change and it doesn’t seem as much fun to write about the affiliate marketing industry anymore so I thought I should probably try to write more about what I’ve actually been doing.

I’ve chosen to take some work again from a couple of old web development clients which really keeps things interesting. Just working on the same things each day and not getting out the office is a bit dull at times so it’s always good to keep up with a few different businesses.

I’ve also started a couple of new sites in field that I’m really interested in but don’t yet know too much about – wine! I’ve always enjoyed an occasional glass but I’ve never known what I was drinking or why I liked it so I thought it was time to find out and develop some sites along the way. This led me to starting a site about White Wine and one about Red Wine.

I’ve been using WordPress and the Thesis theme for these sites. Thesis is more of a framework to build on than the usual style of designed theme but it makes all the updates easy and is a great starting point. Definitely Recommended

I can still remember standing outside a pub in London with Clarke Duncan arguing with Will over spyware sometime in the distant past. While I strongly disagreed with the stance TD were taking at the time I always had respect for Will and the part he played in the company.

Where have TD gone since then and how are things going for you? Does this tweet from Loquax ring true for you or is it a completely different story?

You can check out the CJ blog at www.cjblog.co.uk

2009 Predictions from Carl White and Alison Guise have been interesting but there is plenty of randomness on there too. i.e. Dancing on the BBC

Let me know if you have tried any of these tools and have any feedback.

There are seperate surveys for UK and US affiliates but you can find all the details over on the Econsultancy blog

Question #1 – Who Do You Host With?

Al	“For my US targeted sites like Coolest Gadgets I host with ASmallOrange, PowerVPS, BlueHost and a few other resellers. For my UK sites I use Clook.”
Shawn	“RackSpace. I’ve had dedicated servers with many different hosts, and RackSpace is the best. They’re more expensive than some other companies, but they live up to their claim of “fanatical support.” Their staff is incredibly fast, responsive and helpful.”
Scott	“We host at a number of places, tests that have accumulated over the years, but the one that we do the most with is LiquidWeb. We have several dedicated servers there running on a private network with load balancing. I’ve also been experimenting with several of the VPS/Cloud providers out there, Mosso, Slicehost, GoGrid, and Linode. I think we’re settling on Linode for fast deployment of servers. Hopefully this solution will help us scale better than we have been able to in the past.”

Question #2 – What are the most important features in choosing a web host for you as an affiliate marketer?

Al	"Uptime and speed of response of support, ideally being able to contact them 24/7 via IM or phone."
Shawn	"Reputation of the host, uptime, customer service and technical support."
Scott	"For us, the single most important feature is the ability to customize the server. We do a lot with custom code and need to be able to install apache modules, compile PHP, add in libraries and compile third party code. This is another reason we’re shifting away from Cpanel servers as we find we’re working around Cpanel more and more with the stuff we do."

Question #3 – You’ve probably had your share of bad and good hosting experiences. Do you have any tips for new affiliates looking for a hosting company?

Al	“Don’t rely on just your host for backups, do your own as well. If a host accidentally deletes all your data; get them to restore from a backup and move to another host BEFORE telling them exactly what you think of their crappy service”
Shawn	"Ask around on affiliate forums on which companies others are using. And don’t bargain hunt – I did that in the past and wound up with a company that only kept a one-day backup of my files. The long and short is that I was operating a forum and it was hacked (I didn’t keep an archive of the files locally), and the host didn’t respond to me within 24 hours of the hacking. They simply wouldn’t answer my calls or emails for an entire business day. During that time, their system overwrote my backup with the hacked version and I lost two years of content."
Scott	“You can save a lot of money by buying a year or two of hosting instead of monthly. Read the small print, but typically you’ll get refunded for what you don’t use, even if you buy in advance.”

A big thank you to Shawn, Al & Scott for contributing. This guest post is by Toni Allen from Who Is Hosting This, who have just added hosting reviews and hosting coupons to the popular webmaster tool.

I signed up my Car Articles blog as a test site and picked 10 subject areas that fitted the content. This didn’t take long and I was then able to place ads with that are similar to adsense by using a snippet of Javascript code. An example is here

http://www.cararticles.co.uk/uk-audi-q7.html

The only downside here is that there doesn’t yet seem to be a lot of advertisers in my particular sector.

On the advertiser side the ad formats are fairly similar to adwords and the bids start at 10p. You need to open the account with a deposit of at least £19 so it’s a relatively low commitment to allow you to try the system. There is also a £100 Free Advertising offer running at the moment so you could take advantage of that.

Like any network, Netklix will have to continue to attract advertisers but all in all it would be well worth a look. In the early stages especially you’ll have more chance of getting traffic at minimum bids.

Alison, Cheryl and the rest of the team have been working hard to improve things at CJ UK as the podcast with Alison also shows. Amongst others Doug and Nadeem seem to enjoying dealing with CJ again too.

Overall it’s good to see one of the older networks moving forward again and taking positive steps.

p.s. The other thing I learned yesterday is that ostrich is really tasty