Today I want to reveal the real me. When I started this blog a year ago I was exploring affiliate marketing as a way out of my deadend day job. I was hoping to make enough money to quit that job but at the same time I didn’t want to burn my bridges. The company I worked for was involved in setting up an affiliate scheme and there was a real chance someone would find my blog and realise I was planning on quitting. Hence I adopted the pseudonym Monty.

Why was I so worried about them finding out? I’m still not 100% sure. There was a healthy dose of paranoia certainly but also I was concerned that they accuse me of a conflict of interest (affiliate by night, quasi affiliate manager by day) or that it would undermine my negotiating power when it came to salary rises. There was also a potential conflict of interest with one of my affiliate sites which promoted a niche my employer was also active in.

Needless to say that none of these potential conflicts actually occurred. I was very careful not to do anything which was underhand or abused my position. In fact, by the time I was really getting going as an affiliate my employer had effectively pulled the plug on their own programme.

Yesterday was my last day working in that job. As I’ve previously blogged I’m moving into a new role working in the public sector from Monday and at last I feel I’m able to step out from the shadows and reveal my tue identity.

So hello, I’m Simon Briggs and I’m an affiliate.

I’ve just noticed (three days late) that it’s been a whole year since I started this blog. I might not have achieved my ambition of leaving the day job but I have learnt a hell of a lot about online marketing and I do have a new day job lined up so I’m moving in the right direction.

I’m planning to do another post in a day or two recounting what I’ve learned in the past year but I’ll just say now that I’m particularly pleased that this blog has achieved a PageRank of 3 and an Alexa rank under a million. Thanks for reading over the last year, thanks to everyone who’s subscribed to the feed and I promise I’ll try to most more frequently in future!

Yesterday evening UK time Steve Jobs unveiled the new iPhone and the much-promised mobile internet was born.

There have been many attempts at internet on the move in recent years but something has always held it back. No single device has covered all the bases. The new iPhone knocks those previous attempts to the floor and batters them to a pulp.

My much loved Nokia N95 has 3G and a competent built in browser but the screen is too tiny for surfing, there’s no QWERTY keyboard and until recently Vodafone’s data pricing made the mobile internet an expensive and unpredictable proposition. The built in wifi is good but you need to install a third party app such as Devicescape to make hopping onto wifi hotspots a breeze.

The new iPhone brings the Apple handset into the 21st century with 3G for high speed mobile internet access and has the customary huge screen, excellent Safari browser and multi touch interface. But what’s really going to kickstart the mobile web on the iPhone is the pricing.

At last the iPhone is available on the sort of price deals that UK and European mobile users expect. An 18 month £35 contract gets you 600 minutes and the handset is just £99. You can even get the 8GB model for free if you’re prepared to pay £45 a month. All tariffs include unlimited 3G browsing and unlimited wifi browsing via The Cloud and BT Openzone.

Pay as you go pricing is apparently “coming soon”. That opens the iPhone up to the mass market who don’t want or can’t get a contract.

The techy crowd are still bemoaning the low spec 2 megapixel camera that doesn’t include a flash and certainly that’s the feature that is a bit of a downer for me, but the mass market mobile phone users really don’t care that much about the camera. People don’t really expect their phones to take fantastic shots they just want to be able to take a few snaps when they’re out down the pub.

Of more interest to the techies though is the App Store. Apple have opened up development of iPhone applications and provided a one stop shop for selling your wares. This could be huge. What sells Windows isn’t the operating system it’s the applications you can run on it. No phone so far has had a wealth of applications that can easily be installed by the average Joe User. The iPhone may just be the first one that does.

So for us affiliates now is the time to start building the mobile web. I think we’re going to see a huge land grab over the next 6-12 months. It may not be immediately profitable but it’s going to be like Web 2.0 all over again : get users, build loyalty, monetise when you can. This is the mobile web 2.0 and it’s going to be massive.

After nearly a year of running this blog I’m pleased to announce that I’m leaving my day job. Actually that’s a little misleading. I’m leaving my current day job and taking up a new position working in the public sector managing a portfolio of websites. It’s a great career move and leads me away from the day-to-day coding which was getting me down and opens up some new doorways to me in project management

My affiliate ambitions have been a bit on hold recently as evidenced by the lack of posts on this blog. My current day job has been getting me down so much it was affecting my quality of life so I’ve focused on getting out of there by more traditional means. This is a great opportunity for me with new challenges and will give me some much needed job security too

I’m hoping still to have time for some affiliate marketing and it’ll be good not to have the pressure of trying to make a full-time job out of it. I think it’ll be more of a secondary, pocket money income for me rather than a career in itself

Plenty of time to reconsider my affiliate work in the coming weeks but first it’s off to the pub to celebrate my new job!

Adroll is an interesting new ad network I found via Techcrunch this morning. The idea is that Adroll allows groups of similar sites to get together and combine their advertising inventory. This combined inventory is then sold by Adroll for more than the individual sites would be able to get selling their own space.

The best bit as far as I’m concerned though is that it works alongside your existing Adsense advertising. The Adroll widget will show your usual Adsense ads and only replace them if they can get a better price through their own network. It would seem that there’s nothing to lose if you already run Adsense on your site.

I’ve just signed up this morning and created a community for UK Affiliate Blogs. If you fancy joining me, sign up with Adroll and join the community and we’ll see what happens. You might not be able to find the community straight away in which case leave a comment below or contact me through my contact form and I’ll send you an invite by email.

Woohoo! I’ve just found out I’ve won a free ticket to the a4uAwards in London’s swanky Park Lane Hotel.

Event organisers Existem had been running a competition to guess the name of the celebrity presenter for this year’s awards and yours truly got it on the second clue. It’s amazing what you can discover with a quick Google search and a Wikipedia page!

So me plus guest will be donning our finest on June 5th to see Michael McIntyre handing out the gongs. I’ve never been to a black tie event before - I’m thinking they don’t mean jeans, t-shirt and a black tie so I’d better head off to Moss Bros!

Now all I need to do is have a little affiliate success so I don’t feel a complete fraud surrounded by all the award winners.

UPDATE: Much to my annoyance I’ve discovered I can’t make it to the ceremony. I’d misread the date and not realised I have something else I can’t get out of. Grrrrr!

I’ve slowly been building up my discount code site at Easy Discount Codes over the past couple of weeks. I’m using Wordpress so I can hit the ground running without having to do any up front development work and I’m hoping to get purely SEO organic traffic to keep the profit margin up.

I’ve used the Wordpress category pages to display SEO optimised copy for each merchant and then list their offers below. I’ve tweaked around with the templates so that it doesn’t show the post text on the category page so that I’ll avoid the duplicate content problem.

Several weeks have passed by and my individual posts are getting indexed but not the category pages. I’ve been scratching my head over it, wondering why Google is being so damn slow at indexing the whole site.

And then today I had a close look at the HTML of the category pages and it hit me like a wet kipper about the face : I’ve got a meta noindex on the page. I’m actively telling Google I don’t want that page indexed. Grrrr! What a pillock I can be!

One quick untick operation in the All-In-One-SEO plugin and the metas gone. One little tick and it’s lead to me wasting about three weeks waiting for my site to be indexed. Moral of the story: check and double check what you’re doing. And try not to be as thick as me.

An interesting article at Techcrunch UK highlights that 70 percent of UK web users surf at the same time as watching TV. Nice to know it’s not just me. Quite often I’m doing something unrelated to the TV programme but I also tend to look up actors’ biographies or go off at a tangent and research something that was referred to in the programme.

The bit of the Techcrunch article which caught my eye though was this bit : “…adults who surf the web for content related to what they’re watching on TV are at the same time searching for products which appeared in the show….”. This is ideal territory for the affiliate who’s quick off the mark with their PPC campaigns.

For example, I remember watching the first series of Torchwood and thinking, “what’s that bluetooth earpiece Jack’s wearing?”. Doubtless other people thought the same and if you’d been quick enough you could have found the right headset, grabbed an affiliate link and set up a PPC campaign before the end credits had rolled.

Or if you’re a fan of cookery or home improvement shows you could be advertising the products used and save people searching around for them. Most people don’t know how to use Google properly to do their own research  so they’ll likely search for something like “Property Ladder dado rail”. If you’ve done the research for them you can take them straight to the product they’ve been looking at on the TV a few minutes earlier.

With some popular shows appearing on BBC3 a few days before they run on the more mainstream BBC1  you can get a headstart on those PPC campaigns before the great unwashed masses see the programme.

It’s just been announced that the renowned sci-fi author Sir Arthur C Clarke has died at his home in Sri Lanka aged 90.

I have to admit that I’ve never read an Arthur C Clarke novel but there’s no doubting his influence on the sci fi genre and, although slightly less well-known, also on international communications. Sir Arthur is credited with inventing the concept of geostationary satellites which now enable worldwide communications in milliseconds. He came up with the idea that a satellite orbiting the Earth at a height 35786km above the surface would remain over the same point of the planet enabling it to be used to bounce signals from one part of the world to another. That orbit is now known as the Clarke orbit and that region of the Earth’s atmosphere as the Clarke belt. It was geostationary satellites that enabled us to watch live on TV so many of the events that shaped the world’s history in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Whilst best known as an author, Sir Arthur will also be remembered by people of my generation for his TV series Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World in which he investigated psychic phenomena.

As a geek and a paid up member of Liberty I take a close interest in internet privacy and it’s been all over the news for the past week or so. There has been a huge outcry and backlash against Phorm who have signed deals with major ISPs to track their users’ browsing habits and serve them targeted ads.

You can see to the right of this article that I’m linking to one of the anti-Phorm campaign sites. But as an affiliate my income depends on being able to track users as they move from my site to the merchants and retaining that tracking for perhaps 30 or more days. How can I be pro-privacy, anti-Phorm and an affiliate all at the same time?

Trading potatoes and sheep

Our economic system is built upon the notion of trading. Way back in history we would eat only what we foraged or hunted. Later we came up with agriculture and grew our own food. Then some bright spark came up with trading. I grow potatoes, you rear sheep. I exchange something I have for something you have. We agree on a price which is acceptable to both of us and a trade is made.

Google provides free web search but they still need to pay their staff. What am I prepared to trade in order to get access to that site? My attention, my time and my interests have a value. An advertiser will pay for targeted access to my attention for the time that I’m using Google. That’s the trade that we make in order for me to get access to free search, email and so forth.

Similarly, a supermarket shopper can sign up for a reward card to collect points and get discounts. This involves handing over some personal details about your shopping habits in return for those discounts. Personally, I don’t have rewards cards but a lot of people do. To them, that personal information is worth the value of the discounts they’ll get. To me, my privacy is more valuable and I’m not going to make that trade. That’s the choice we make.

Trust

Phorm want your personal browsing history to sell to advertisers as a profile. Your browsing history has a value to them. Would you let them have it? Maybe if you trusted them and got something good in return you would. But Phorm have a history of distributing spyware and the ISPs have been less than transparent about how the system will work. Can you trust them with your info? You might trust a supermarket chain with details of your shopping but would you trust them if they started telling your doctor how often you bought booze or your wife when you bought condoms?

There are a lot of reasons to be suspicious of Phorm and frankly they’re offering me nothing in return, certainly nothing to the value I place on the private data they want from me.

Afilliates

And what about affiliates? Yes, we make use of tracking cookies to enable our business and, no, a lot of the time our visitors aren’t aware that this is happening. The difference is how we use tracking cookies. We are not building a browsing history. We aren’t identifying a single user visiting multiple sites. We don’t set cookies that last for years. We’re just using them to track the success of our referrals and to claim the reward we are due for introducing the customer and the merchant. I’m happy that the use of cookies in affiliate marketing is above board. A website visitor can always set their browser to reject third party cookies or clear out their cookies at the end of a session if it suits them.

Profiling based on browsing history is a lucrative business but it’s also very difficult to do it correctly on an anonymous basis. When AOL released anonymized search history for their users back in 2006 it very quickly became apparent that individuals could be identified from the history of terms they searched for. We don’t know that we can trust Phorm with that data, we derive no benefit from them having it and we should err on the side of caution and resist this invasion of our privacy.