Buy.at/Holiday Watchdog sales More and More – It’s the time of the big money sales again. I have to say no-one deserves it more than the two Chris’s from Holiday Watchdog (Who will have to become known as the two Chris’s from Sunshine now) – They show that you can start with nothing but an idea and see it through to a mega-money deal.

I’m a bit more reserved about the AOL/Buy.at sale – It’s not necessary that it’s a bad thing but I remember how good Advertising.com used to be before AOL bought them and started running things – The UK arm is neglected with queries ignored by the various account managers who have taken over our account. I think I’ve had so many ad.com account managers they’ve fitted a revolving door to the staff room!

Campaigns are very thin on the ground, and are even expiring before affiliates are approved, even when applying within 10 minutes of the obligatory forum post, any questions that are raised within that post suitably ignored too. Long gone are the days when our ONE account manager (Where are you Kirsten?) used to know our business inside out and ring us up as soon as campaigns went live ensuring we pushed them.

As a result, our earnings from ad.com have plummetted since the AOL sale, and it’d be a shame to see buy.at go down the same road. I’m not suggesting for a second that is what will happen, but history can be a wonderful guide to the future sometimes (even if not for Investments!) – If you look at ad.com and CJ, there’s two network business models that I believe demonstrates that you can’t run a major UK network as simply a small branch of a US operation. I’d like to think that the buy.at team is large enough, and well established enough in the UK to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Show me the errors of my ways – I’ve been going through our old shopping directory this past week, checking all the links to merchants are working etc. As the site is now 3 years old, many, many of the links no longer work. It amazes me that many of these links are for merchants that have switched networks, and closed down their old network’s program.

All those old links have still been generating traffic for years, going to deadlinks. Which shows exactly why you shouldn’t close your old program down when changing networks – How many sales have those merchants lost as a result of those deadlinks? And I’m just one affiliate – multiply that by a couple of hundred rarely-updated shopping directories (I couldn’t possibly keep tabs on all the network-swapping that currently goes on for all merchants), and merchants are missing out on a fair few sales by causing affiliates links to stop working.

All of which reminds me – Commission Junction have always had this wonderful report – “Invalid links generating traffic”, meaning I can see at a glance where those deadlinks are on my sites. It’s such a useful tool for those with huge shopping directories as it lets you see instantly where there is leakage on your site. Why doesn’t EVERY network provide this report? It’s in their interests for you to maximise your earnings by replacing dead merchants etc. And it makes affiliates lives so much easier. Please, I would implore any network employee reading this to look into providing this simple report for your affiliates.

Woah, we’re going to Barbados… again – Following on from my post last week about how networks don’t incentivise their affiliates, Affiliate Future have just reminded me that I’m wrong, as they plot to take affiliates to Barbados for the thrid year in a row, as well as hiring out Casinos and Theme Parks in this country to give them a knees-up. So, my humble apologies to AF, who whilst not quite on the scale of The Utility Warehouse’s free cruise, certainly put the other UK networks to shame.

Argyle win at Leicester- It was great to get one over on the lying little scrote, and hopefully push him closer to the sack, which is no less than he deserves. Still the lies don’t stop coming either – In his pre-match interview he stated that “They (Argyle) were in fourth place when I left” – erm no Ian, we went up to fourth by winning the game after you walked out on the team four days earlier, and we were actually in tenth place going into your final game, but don’t let the truth get in the way of your ego.

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