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

If you are in the Edinburgh area or if you want to make the trip then I’m organising an informal Christmas drinks event this Thursday – more details and free registration on the eventbrite page.

More details in this thread on a4u or the same on acorndomains.

The competition kicked off at 9am in Edinburgh yesterday and so during the morning I thought I would follow events and see how quickly he was found but in the end no-one apart from the social media whirlwind that is Mike Coulter managed to catch up with him.

With that in mind I thought it was time to hit the road so accompanied by my wife and one year old daughter we drove into town, abandoned the car and took off up the High Street in search of his last known position. I think we managed to get ahead of liveguy and ended up on the castle esplanade where all the staff & stewards were wearing liveguy style bright read coats just to confuse the issue.

By this point I was getting help from Kieron by SMS along with Twitter support from davelaw00 , weblivz, ewarwoowar and michellepen so thanks to you all for the advice!

We started to wander back down the High Street and suddenly spotted him standing on the corner so I ended up sprinting down the road to greet him with “You’re liveguy and I’m a Vodafone winner”. After a bit of hesitation liveguy confirmed I was a winner but only because the morning netbook had not been claimed by Mike so it was carried over.

The afternoon netbook had been claimed five mins earlier by Jay from Freak Marketing author of a really interesting facebook app called Get Them In so that’s worth a look too.

We had to hang around for another ten minutes or so to sign a model release form! We filled in the paper work and then headed home. The only slight down side was that we now have to wait for up to a month to actually get the netbook sent out It would have been more exciting to go home with it there and then but that’s just a minor issue.

All in all it was great to meet liveguy and leave a winner and it’s a great promotion and demonstration of the capabilities of the Vodafone Netbook. It was also good to meet Stylist Brighton from Shiny Media who was also on the trail of liveguy and here is her video from the day. I arrive near the end!

Check out the liveguy website and see if liveguy is visiting your home city as it could be well worth getting out there to look for him!

I then had some time to take in the exhibition and hang around at the Existem-AM stand which seemed to be where you could find the affiliates throughout the conference!

Next session was about PR by 10yetis and once again it was an excellent presentation with some great tips. I was surprised to hear that free newspaper The Metro is consider the most influential newspaper.

From there I moved on to the presentation by Nora from Sedo which was interesting as I’ve been getting more into domaining recently. The number of cases studies of businesses which have rebranded just to match a generic domain was pretty amazing.

Finally I made it along to the Super Affiliates session which was both entertaining and inspiring. In some ways it wasn’t so much about learning new information (apart from Shak’s story which was new to me!) but about being inspired about what is actually possible.

The second night party was really enjoyable although the private Sky party did mean things were a bit disjointed which was a shame. Maybe that’s just because I didn’t get in but it did mean I couldn’t catch up with those who were behind the closed doors!

All in all it was a fantastic couple of days and a job well done by all at Existem.

I had an early start but got down to London in time for the intro by Matthew Wood from Existem and the keynote by Michael Nutley from NMA then the full programme started at 11am.

I went to the Wordpress SEO session by Joost de Valk which was excellent and packed full of useful tips. I think I probably need to set aside a couple of days to install about 20 plugins now though! The most useful tip that I took away was to look at hardcoding certain parts of the wordpress theme like the blog title instead of causing another database query for something that never changes. Load time has always been the one area of Wordpress I’ve been disappointed with so I’m hoping that making these changes will help.

I went to the bonus lunchtime session held by sunshine.co.uk where they released their sunpress plugin which looks pretty impressive and will be a great starting point for a Wordpress travel site.

Next session I went to was the Extreme SEO session which was fairly lively and in between the chaos there were some great tips. Lots of chat about taking out your competitors with negative SEO rather than improving your own site though which was slightly disturbing! The dominate subject was link building and it does seem to show that as long as you take care of some basic on page SEO issues the main thing you should be worrying about is links.

The final session of the day was the Affiliate State of the Nation panel which I moderated. It seemed to go pretty well and there was some good discussion about issues facing the industry. Most interesting for me was the issues about affiliates either wanting to grow large businesses or keep it as a lifestyle business. Thanks to Kieron for speaking up on that point of view. I was also amused to be sitting on the stage watching Shane Robinson fall asleep in the second row.

It was great at the end of that session to bump in to Pete Sipple from Frequencycast which is a podcast I have been listening to for some time and which I would highly recommend.

Finally the night finished with a cruise on the Silver Sturgeon which made for a great end to the day.

It’s a great looking site too and now that I have bought a Wii to go with the Wii Fit I’ll be staying signed up to keep an eye on the best prices for games.

The summary is that you should read here about what you can win and then read here about the tools provided to help you win.

I’ve recently been speaking to Chris Bishop (biography), Online Acquisition Manager at House of Fraser. We discussed a variety of topics including his early days as an affiliate, Hotel Chocolat & House of Fraser. We also discussed advice for affiliate managers, affiliates and issues around cashback for merchants.

I’m looking forward to my first expo after missing the last one due to the arrival of my daughter It’s her first birthday the weekend before the expo so I’ll be free this time to head to London.

I’ll be moderating the Affiliate State of the Nation Panel at 16:30 on the first day so I’m looking forward to that Check out the agenda for full details of all seminars. I looks like it’s going to be a difficult job to plan your way through the seminars with 4 excellent choices at each stage.

Hope to see you there!

It was an interesting read and while it does focus on selling tickets to American sports events and working with teams of sales people I’m sure some of the elements can be applied to affiliate marketing as well.

Here are some of the main points I took away

• What’s it going to take to be the best – In the book there is an encouragement to ask this question and I think it ties in with what people like Doug Scott & Chris Clarkson have been saying recently. Don’t limite yourself by thinking all you can do is the same as everyone else. Or that you need to think small and niche at all times. Set yourself a big target and work out the steps you need to get you there.
• Focus on Domination not Reach & Frequency – sounds a bit wordy but is basically making the point that advertising that focusses on reach and frequency is for big brands with money to burn. Instead you should work out where your target market are most often and dominate all the advertising there. It’s mostly written to apply to TV & Radio ads but I’m sure it would apply to web advertising too.
• What have you done today? – at the end of each day ask yourself what you did to make your business a success. Reading blogs & forums or chatting on MSN isn’t work that’s going to have a return but it can suck up so much time. I’ve spent many hours in the last couple of weeks moving websites from one host to another and updating domain registrations etc but I don’t earn anything from that. Make sure you know what actually gives a return and spend most of your time working on that.

So that’s just some of my notes from the book. As I said it’s pretty focussed on US sports but overall it’s worth a read.

If you would like my copy to read and you live in the UK then just leave a comment below and I’ll pick a winner at the end of the month.

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]]> http://www.affiliateblog.co.uk/affiliate-marketing-outrageously.html/feed 5 Fraser EdwardsnonadultNews and Interviews with UK based Affiliate Marketing experts