Continued from Part II…

Part Three: 2006 to 2010. Knock it all down and start again.

My return to Affiliate Marketing wasn’t exactly a joyous occasion, it was more of a firefighting experience. Balancing the books was pretty much impossible. I had £3,000 left on the company overdraft (which they refused to extend), and staff wages of £8,000 to pay on the 20th, along with PAYE of £1,500 and a VAT bill of £7,000 due at the end of the month. That was pretty much my first week back in the job. So I didn’t pay myself for four months, borrowed a considerable amount of cash from family and ramped up my own personal overdraft and credit cards to keep our heads above water and the remaining staff in a job.

Once we got over the initial firefighting, and the reduced expenditure that the redundancies and office closure brought kicked in, things actually started to get a little more comfortable, and I actually enjoyed being a bedroom affiliate again, knocking up websites and running things from my bedroom office again. Just as things were settling down, I got a message from Mark Russell that was about to shake things up rather a lot: “Would you be interested in selling Net Free Stuff?”.

He’d been chatting to Maz at IBG (then owners of Affiliate Future), and Maz asked the question. Mark promised to find out, and mentioned it to me. I asked what sort of ballpark figure they were looking at. Mark said that IBG were happy to put up around £100,000 for it. My gut reaction to this was to instantly say “thanks, but no thanks” – we’d actually turned down a few approaches several years earlier for more than twice that amount, and things were just settling down for us – the last thing we needed was another rollercoaster ride trying to replace the money that NFS brought in.

I chatted with Jason about it a few days later over a pint or two, and over the course of about an hour, we’d both changed our minds – Neither of us had any real interest in running NFS anymore – we ran it because it was our jobs, not because we enjoyed it. And given a big cash injection, we’d be able to pay off all the debt the company had built up in one swoop, and still have enough cash to start something new. It would mean a large dose of uncertainty, but also the chance for a fresh new start. A chance to “knock it all down, and start again, but with a big pile of cash this time” as I remember putting it at the time.

So we let IBG know that we would actually be happy to at least talk numbers with them, and we pretty quickly agreed on a price of £120,000. Once debts were paid off, solicitors fees paid, tax put aside etc, we’d have around £70,000 to “start again with”. NFS was bringing in around £5,000 a month profit at this time, so as long as we replaced that income within 14 months, and had no sudden unexpected large bills (more on that later…), all would be rosy! The due dilligence was a bloody nightmare, happening over Christmas as well, so I didn’t get many brownie points with the family that year! But we got through it, and finally completed the sale on 27th January 2007.

I’ll never forget the following morning, getting up to start work, logging onto online banking and seeing “available balance: £120,000.00″, and it then set in – we were no longer owners of a freebie site. The tag that had followed us around everywhere we went (I still shudder at the ignorant merchant who turned their back on us at a g2g with the words “I won’t waste my time talking to you - you run a freebie site”) was no more.

What the hell were we going to do now??

We had a plan of course. Pay off the debt, actually invest some time and money in existing sites such as Bingo Bongo and PrizeBug, and generally avoid burning out again. And of course that happened really smoothly.. not.

The aim with PrizeBug was to make it a much spammier version of NFS, but for competitions rather than freebies. Exploit the mailing list at every opportunity, but without doing the stuff that actually creates hard work and retains the strong community that NFS had. It’s been moderately successful, and still more than pays for the hour or so a week we spend on it. Bingo Bongo was a different matter – it was going to be our BIG project. The first thing we did was arrange a redesign (if anyone saw the previous incarnation, I hope your eyes recover soon), and as soon as this went live, we had huge budget to throw at the affiliate program, as well as PPC and offline promotion.

The problem with that statement? “as soon as this went live”.. Bingo Bongo was (and still is) a white label skin from Globalcom, and we were entirely reliant on them uploading any changes to the site. We worked with the template they gave us, and completed a redesign within 3 weeks. We handed the designs over to them and were told that there was “a short delay” for their techies to actually make the changes. How long is “a short delay” you might ask? A week? A month? Six weeks? No, all wrong. Eighteen months is how long it took them! Which, given we needed to replace the NFS income within 14 months didn’t work out very well for the huge budgets we were going to throw at it. Again, it makes a decent income now, but less than 10% of what it could have made if only we’d been able to get the redesigned site live in early 2007. Grrrrr.

But that was only a small grrrr. There was a much bigger grrrr to come at the end of March 2007. With all debts paid off, and work towards replacing NFS’s income underway myself and Jason went off to Amsterdam for an Affiliates4u/DFDS Affiliate event. Much was learnt, and some new deals were brokered. Things were looking up. Until I returned home to a letter from our landlords at the office we had vacated in 2006..

We actually had a lease until 2010, but with a break clause in 2007 that enabled us to get out “without penalty”. We exercised that clause, and as part of the end terms, the landlords employed a team of surveyors to travel down from Bristol (at £150 an hour and 40p per mile, payable by yours truly) to see that we had left the place in a reasonable state. At least that’s what I thought they were going to do. Turns out they actually thought that we could fully redevelop the property for them, and enclosed an estimate of the cost of doing so: £87,432 plus vat. Payable within 30 days. (a.k.a a sudden unexpected large bill).

Turns out the cheap lawyer we’d used when taking on the lease had left us wide open, and we were liable not only for the “upkeep” of the property, but to also retrospectively make improvements that should have been done 20 or 30 years before we moved in! More money was spent on solicitors (remembering this time that you get what you pay for when it comes to legal advice!) and we eventually did a fair bit of the work ourselves to bring the costs down (some examples of the estimated costs: “remove sticker from window: £60″, “empty rubbish bin: £250″, “remove poster from wall: £60″), but just escaping the nightmare of that office just cost us another £20,000 that we hadn’t budgeted for. Suddenly it looked like we needed to replace that NFS income sooner than 14 months…

We played around with several other sites, with varying levels of success, but after muddling through to mid-2008, we’d succeeded in just about replacing the NFS money and just about before it all ran out too! But I wasn’t happy with where it was coming from – it was still a lot of spammy, crappy stuff like the mailing lists and brand-bidding in the few places it was still allowed. I realised that we’d have to change our ways, and so remembering the initial point of selling NFS (knock it down and start again), I started creating some new sites, such as Away Grounds and I Love Algarve, that were genuinely useful sites on their own merits, and didn’t exist purely to try and make a quick affiliate buck. I was now going to be a pure content affiliate.

Of course building up informational resources such as these takes a long, long time and they can be hard to monetise, but then the days of making easy money are long gone IMO. This is a sustainable business that I can replicate and grow organically over the next ten years. They can survive recessions, which is another reason they were created. I could see that a recession was on its way by summer 2008, and so wanted to implement a price comparison widget into most of our sites. There was no way to do this on the networks, so I asked our techie if he could knock something up.

“Sure thing” he said, “I can amalgamate all the network’s feeds, and just pull the price info from there in a javascript widget”. Great stuff! “What else can you do with the info from the feeds?” was my next question. “Anything you want, as long as the info’s in there” was the reply, and if you’ve ever seen a cartoon in your life, you’ll know that this is the moment that the lightblub flashes into life above my head.. “So we could create our own content units, but for ALL the networks?”

And so Easy Content Units was born.. but that’s a story for another day…

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

A decade in Affiliate Marketing – Part III

Related posts:

1. A decade in Affiliate Marketing – Part II
2. A decade in Affiliate Marketing – Part I
3. Affiliate Marketing: The Boring Bits

Continued from Part I

Part Two: 2003 to 2006: Making a fortune, losing a fortune. Walking away. Forced back.

So where were we? Oh yeah, Adwords came along, and totally changed the game for me, and a lot of other affiliates. We were making a good living before, but once Adwords hit these shores, the game suddenly became easy, and almost overnight a decent living became £10,000 a month profit, and showed no signs of stopping there. The only question was how much better could it get? With the ease with which money could be made in PPC, I soon lost interest in running a freebie site, and took on Jason Brockman, my very first member of staff in April 2003 (he’s still here 7 years later and is now a director of the company) to look after NFS whilst I concentrated on the PPC. A techie then followed in the summer of 2003 to develop and build more sites.

This three-person setup worked a total treat for around a year. The PPC was going great guns, and I’d done particularly well in the gambling sector, using Adwords to bring in large numbers of punters new to the Internet who would need an online bookie account. In April 2004, I attended the very first buy.at speakeasy, which was being held on Grand National day. Unbelievably (this was pre-iphone days!) I didn’t check my stats until I got back to Devon on the Sunday night, and couldn’t believe my eyes when I did: I’d made £13,000 profit in one day. Thirteen Grand. On a Saturday. Without even being at my desk! That’s as much as I’d have earned in a whole YEAR working at the Day Job. I have the Midas touch!

Of course, looking back I didn’t have the Midas touch at all – I was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time. But no-one told me that at the time, and so I made some rather grand plans for huge expansion, taking on not one, but two offices, and from employing 2 people in May 2004, I’d employed 12 people within 6 months (not to mention another 4/5 agency staff that we used on a fairly regular basis. Kitting out the offices, paying solicitors fees etc set us back something like £20,000, and the wages we’d committed to would come to around £15,000 a month. “Not a problem”, thought ‘Mr. Midas Touch’, by this point the PPC was making nearly £25,000 a month profit, and we had a cash reserve of nearly £100,000 in the bank.

And then came Google’s bombshell.

With immediate effect, they were banning ALL PPC for gambling terms and websites. The source of huge amounts of dirt cheap, highly-targeted traffic came to an abrupt end, and along with it went my profit margins.. However rather than abandon the expansion project, it became even more important: As the bookies pay lifetime revenue share, I still had good money coming in from the signups I’d already made, so all I had to do was replace the source of new revenue, whilst the existing revenue paid for the expansion. I moved into retail PPC (or brand bidding to give it its more popular term!), and sure enough made good money (albeit nowhere near as good as the gambling PPC). Onwards and upwards!

Except the expansion wasn’t working. I soon found that I hated being responsible for two offices. I hated spending time there, and hated dealing with staff issues. I seemed to spend all my time there dealing with one problem or another, and neglected the PPC that was paying the bills. Despite having 5 times as many staff as a year earlier, we were now making less money. From making £25k a month profit in April 2004, we were losing £10k a month by October 2004. Suddenly ‘Mr. Midas Touch’ had become ‘Mr. Everything-he-touches-turns-to-sh*t’ almost overnight. A few staff members left of their own accord, a few were pushed out, and nobody enjoyed working there, least of all me. I wasn’t too far from “nervous-breakdown territory”.

I’d decided by Christmas 2004 that I wanted out. If I could have, I’d have shut the door there and then and walked away. But I was now responsible for the livelihoods of around 10 people, and so instead made a plan that would allow the company to carry on without me, whilst still giving me a salary to pay the bills. Over the course of the next 8 months, we merged the offices and allowed the staff numbers to reduce naturally (people were keen to leave anyway), and I focused almost entirely on increasing the companies income. I therefore launched a cutting edge (cough!) shopping directory that is actually still going today, and still makes a fair bit of money, and spent months populating it. We launched “Big Idea Management” as we spotted a gap in the market for an affiliate agency that looked after the small to medium guys – Everyone else was fighting over the big brands, so we targeted everyone else. This was championed and spearheaded by our head of Business Development (I think that was his title at the time.. it changed a few times!) Mark Russell, who managed to bring in some network experience in the very talented Bruce Clayton who had worked at dgm, and who agreed to work for next to nothing.

Summer 2005 arrived, and as agreed, I stepped back from the company, leaving it in the capable hands of Mark and Jason. Things were already looking a lot better than they had done 8 months earlier, and whilst the cash reserves had long since gone, we did poke our head out over the overdraft a couple of times a month, and with the future plans, all was going to be rosy. Except it wasn’t. There were still issues with staff not pulling their weight, the income from PPC continued to drop, Google dropped a few of our sites out of the index (don’t cry too hard for us – they were crappy spammy sites that deserved to be kicked!), and Big Idea Management was taking a while to start showing profit. The cash was running out, and the fact that I was still taking a salary (I still had a HUGE mortgage to pay, taken out at the height of ‘Mr Midas Touch’s reign) was a contentious issue at every board meeting.

Things eventually came to a head around a year after I’d originally stepped back, when it became clear that there wasn’t any money to pay everyones wages. So everyone got paid but me. Which I could swallow for one month, but beyond that, I was going to run the risk of losing my house if I didn’t get any wages (I was building up another business at this point, but it was no-where near at the level of being able to draw a wage from), and so I made the hardest (and most selfish) decision I’ve ever had to make. I wasn’t prepared to lose my house so that everyone else could have a job, so I returned to Big Idea Media, closed the remaining office and made half the remaining staff redundant, including Mark who I did not want to lose, but who I could no longer afford to keep.

Big Idea Management was the most cash-hungry area of the business, and so it had to go. Mark asked if he could take the existing Big Idea Management clients with him if he set up on his own, and we agreed that he could do that, after all he had won the contracts, and we were unlikely to be in a position to fulfill them. Mark then teamed up with Matt to take on Existem Affiliate Management, and they’ve not stopped since, winning every award under the sun and attracting investment from the buy.at dream team. Talk about the one that got away!

Initially, my concern was keeping the company in business, however before long I’d embark on the process of rebuilding a more sustainable affiliate business from the ground up.

Coming up in Part Three: “Knock it down and start again”

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

A decade in Affiliate Marketing – Part II

Related posts:

1. A decade in Affiliate Marketing – Part III
2. A decade in Affiliate Marketing – Part I
3. All Change! DGM go private, and IBG merge with TMN

It was my brother’s birthday on Sunday. Which is nice and all, and not really relevant to Affiliate Marketing. Except that 1st August isn’t just the day my brother was born, it was also the day that my career in Affiliate Marketing was born (albeit there’s a bit of an age gap between the two!!) – yup, 1st August 2000 was the very day that I decided to try and make some money out of “this Internet thing”, so as I’ve somehow managed to notch up ten years of doing this game, I thought I’d document some of my personal journey over the last decade, as well as looking at some of the changes in the Industry as a whole.

To help bring the memories flooding back, I’ve created a playlist to listen to whilst I write this post (you can listen too if you like!), which was almost as much fun as putting this post together. Before anyone complains about any of the choices, I’ve knocked it up really quickly using a simple “two songs from each year, no artist repeated”, and these are the songs that bring back the memories for me, rather than a “best of” collection!

Part One: 2000 – 2002. Getting started and going Full time
To put this into perspective, on the 1st August 2000, I was a 22 year-old Civil Servant, who had left school at 16 and with ZERO knowledge of web design or marketing. I simply hated my job with a passion, and knew I wanted out – the press was full of the dot.com boom, and all these guys my age were becoming billionaires just by having an idea for a website! So I scraped together enough dosh for a crappy computer, got online with my brand new “unlimited” dialup connection with Freeserve, and did a search on Yahoo (Google? What was that?) for “make money online”.

Which of course meant that I learnt all about Get paid to surf companies, get paid to read email, get paid to browse sites etc. All of which paid total peanuts unless you referred others to do the same. I found other companies that would pay me to get people to enter competitions, so I cobbled all of these “get paid to..” links together on a crappy little 3-page Geocities site that looked truly awful and thankfully can’t be found anymore!

Surprisingly, this crappy little site actually got a few people to signup for the various schemes, (mainly thanks to my spamming of various forums and newsgroups!), and before long I stumbled across this thing called “affiliate marketing” – It was just like the “get paid to enter competitions” stuff I was already doing, but less spammy. So I signed up to such awesome networks as YourCheque, Magic Button and UK Affiliates (Whatever happened to them?), and soon started earning (literally) a few pence here and there. Enough for me to invest in my first domain name, which I used on the site (kingjohn.co.uk.. chosen as I was working under the name “John King” at the call centre rather than some lofty claim to be 78th in line to throne!).

I soon started working with more of these “networks” as one from Europe called “Tradedoubler” entered the UK, and one called “Affiliate Window” (’sounds like a double glazing company’ my dad said at the time.. more on him later), who one Thursday sent out a newsletter telling all their affiliates about some bloke called “Matt” who had created a forum where we could all chat about affiliate marketing.. What? There’s other people doing this? and we can all meet up on a fantastic website and chat to each other, swapping tips and tricks until our eyes bled from the (very) blue design? wow!

KingJohn.co.uk was starting to get a little busy now with traffic coming from a lot of directories (when people actually USED directories and it wasn’t just for SEO purposes!), and with a lot of people interested in not just the competitions, but also from freebies that we had listed. The freebies were so popular that I decided to take the site down this road.. which meant a change of name.. KingJohn was ousted, and in its place came “2001 Freebies”, the idea being: 1. The coming year was 2001, and 2. Having 2001 at the start of the site name/domain meant we’d be near the very top of the directory listings (which worked, and increased traffic ten-fold!)

2001 was the year it all happened for me in AM, and it was a pretty life changing year for me personally too. I got married in the April, and whilst checking my stats from an Internet cafe in the Seychelles during my honeymoon, I discovered that I’d earnt enough to earn my first cheque from Affiliate Window – for £13.51! That was it – I’d finally made money out of the Internet! All I had to do now was increase the amount – and I now really had the determination to do so. I’d spent two weeks cruising around the Indian Ocean, during which time I’d made regular sales from my website and was starting to earn a trickle of pennies now.

So upon my return I really cracked down, working 20 to 30 hours a week on top of the Day Job doing stuff to get more traffic into the site, sending newsletters out to my members, etc. Then one day there was a “free sim card” offer on Commission Junction. I can’t remember exactly what they paid, but I think it was something like $13 per sim. I sent out a newsletter and earned £3,000 in one day. That was around 4 months wages at the Day Job! so I went part time, allowing me to work on my AM business for around 40 to 50 hours a week, and doing 25 hours at the Day Job to cover the bills.

That didn’t last long – the more I worked on my AM business, the more money I made. So it started to cost the business money for me to go to the Day Job, and less than 3 months after going part time, I’d handed my notice in, and was going to become a full time affiliate! After having the security of a regular paycheck ever since I was 16, and having only recently taken on a mortgage and wife (who wasn’t working at the time as she was at Uni) this was a scary prospect. Then out of the blue one Wednesday morning, I got a call to say that my sister had died. One of the last conversations I had with her was about me leaving the Day Job, and she was worried I was making a mistake. Losing her so suddenly really left me with a “life’s too short” attitude, and I actually became ever more determined to make a success of the AM business. I completed my last day at the day Job just before Christmas 2001, and was excited about why lie ahead for 2001freebies.

What I forgot however was that after 2001 comes 2002. Some other bugger registered 2002freebies.co.uk the day after I launched 2001freebies, and whilst 2001 was a fab year, by early 2002, traffic had dropped off, and I kept getting asked why we were still called 2001freebies. Faced with the choice of changing the name every year, or ditching 2001freebies, I chose the latter, opting instead for a generic name that we could really build a brand out of. And that’s how “Net Free Stuff” was born!

I wasn’t sure about changing the site name again for the third time in 18 months, but bit the bullet and got a professional logo for NFS designed, and switched the site over to the new look on 1st March 2002 (I think!) – the response from members was really really positive, and they all told me how much they hated the old site! With a slightly better looking (but still designed by yours truly on a crappy WYSIWYG editor on Geocities, then uploaded to decent hosting) site, NFS started to attract press interest, and then came the biggie.. the launch of Google Adwords.

I’d been doing some PPC advertising on goto (soon to become Overture, then later Yahoo Search Marketing), but they never really had the volume at the right price to really make an impact. I started using Google Adwords on the day they launched, and almost overnight trebled my traffic for VERY relevant terms, which I was able to buy very, very cheaply – for every £1 I spent on Adwords, I earned around £2, and retained the membership data to market future offers to – it was a no brainer! The only question now seemed to be how much better could it get?

Coming up in Part Two: Expansion, Incorporation, Losing the Midas touch, Contraction, Un-corporating, Walking Away.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

A decade in Affiliate Marketing – Part I

Related posts:

1. A decade in Affiliate Marketing – Part III
2. A decade in Affiliate Marketing – Part II
3. Why you don’t need Affiliate Marketing ebooks to learn Affiliate Marketing

7th January 2002.. My first day as a Full time affiliate. I’d been working part time on my affiliate business for just short of 18 months before handing in my notice at the Day Job from Hell, giving myself a few weeks off for Christmas, New Year and Good Behaviour, and starting afresh to concentrate full time on my affiliate business. Few thought it would last.. I reckoned a year would be a good stint before I had to start looking for another job.

Fast forward eight and half years…

2nd July 2010.. My last day as a Full time affiliate. No, I haven’t run out of money just yet and taken a job stacking shelves at Lidl. Ever since last August, my priorities changed somewhat dramatically, and I had no desire to become one of those “successful” people who has piles and piles of money but doesn’t know their kids because they were too busy working every hour of every day.

So, armed with a copy of the 4 hour work week, I started remodeling my affiliate business around two simple principles:

1. Outsource. Everything possible.
2. Automate. Wherever possible.

This means that where I was working 100 hour weeks a few years ago, I’ve been working average 40 hour weeks for the last year or so. My health is better than it’s been in years, the business is growing at a good rate, and I’ve been able to spend a great deal of time with Jack during the important first ten months. And now I’m taking that a step further…

5th July 2010.. My first day as a part time affiliate / part time Daddy Day Care – Er Indoors is returning to work next week, which means that we’d need to look at putting Jack into Nursery. We both decided that we didn’t see the point in both working full time so that we could pay someone else to spend time with our son, so we decided that we’d all go part time!

I’m now officially Daddy Day Care for two mornings a week (it’s gonna mean early mornings which is a shock to the affiliate system, but hey), and one full day. Jack’ll then go into Nursery for the two afternoons so I can work on my affiliate business, and Er Indoors will look after him for two days. Voila: I get to spend a whole day and two mornings of Daddy time, still run my business over two full days and two afternoons, and Er Indoors gets to engage in adult conversation again, whilst not abandoning Jack, who gets to socialise and play at Nursery a couple of times a week – everyone’s a winner!

How will this affect my affiliate business? Well, it may take me a little longer to reply to emails, and I’ll have to cut out the procrastination and idle surfing of forums, Twitter, Facebook etc, but as long as I can get 80% of what I achieve now (i.e the stuff that matters) done in 60% of the time, all should run smoothly. I’m not quite brave enough to take the “4 hours a week” stance of Tim Ferriss, but 25 to 30 hours is more than enough time to run and grow my little automated affiliate business, leaving the rest of my time free for the only job that really matters…

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

My last day as a Full Time Affiliate…

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1. Affiliate Marketing is going full circle
2. Meet Jack Robert Lamerton
3. Becoming a successful Affiliate is like eating an Elephant

There’s been a fair bit of debate recently about More Niche’s decision to introduce “Split Commissions” on their weight loss pill product Proactol, the idea being to reward not only the last referrer as pretty much every other affiliate program does, but to also award the first referrer with a flat CPA (currently £3.50). Now there are several arguments for/against this:

1. This will create a “land-grab” scenario where affiliates try to drop the first cookie
2. Last click works – “if it ain’t broke..”
3. Where will this lead? First referrers getting more than the last referrer? second, third or fourth getting a cut? All of which could confuse affiliates

Lammo’s take on this..
1. There’s already a “land-grab” to drop cookies – it’s called voucher codes and cashback sites. People who look to drop cookies will continue to do so, looking to be the last referrer.. they’re no more/less likely to try and be the first referrer IMO.

2. Last click does work, and has served us well thus far. However does that mean we shouldn’t look at different ways of working? As a pure content affiliate, I get as annoyed as anyone else when I close a sale only for Mr Shopper to go hunting for a voucher code and I get nothing. With the MoreNiche model I’d at least get some compensation for this, whilst the voucher code site still gets the main slice of the pie.

3. Of course some merchants will be thinking “great”, I can set twenty different commission amounts for different typers of traffic etc, but all that will do is confuse affiliates as to what they will earn (hint: that’s that’s the main thing affiliates really care about) – using More Niche’s example, pre-split commisions I’d earn from the sales I referred as long as they didn’t go sniffing around other affiliates sites before hitting “checkout”. Now, I’d also earn a little CPA on those sales too.

This isn’t going to make a huge amount of difference to the bottom line of most affiliates, but what it can do is motivate affiliates – It’s a little something extra (such as 999 day cookies, lifetime commissions, PI cookies etc) that merchants can have at their disposal to make their program more attractive to the right type of affiliate – If content affiliates are moaning that VC/Cashback sites are stealing their commissions, then offering split commissions such as MoreNiche have done could well help placate them.

It could well fall flat on its face, but I for one applaud MoreNiche for at least having the balls to try it out – Otherwise we’d all be sat here ten years time still talking about last click attribution and whether there might be a better way…

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Splitting the difference

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1. Voucher Codes – a possible solution?
2. Link-swapping and cookie-dropping
3. Should EVERYONE just be a voucher code site?

Lammo in Mourning – Well, it finally happened.. Plymouth Argyle were relegated from the Championship last week, and we’re going to be plying our trade against such giants as Rochdale, Yeovil and Bournemouth next season. Heck, we might even be playing Aldershot Town in a league fixture next season – This from a club that claimed to have ambitions of “Premier League football within 5 years” – You have to wonder if they meant the Blue Square Premier?

It’s been a long time coming to be honest, and if we’d stayed up this year, we’d only have struggled again next year, so it may be better to re-group, get some positivity back in the stadium (where we’ve only seen 11 wins in the last TWO YEARS), and mount a promotion/play-off campaign where we might actually have half a chance, and get the momentum going the right way for a change (and then crucially, build on that momentum rather than wait until we’re in decline again, and chuck money at bad/awful/indifferent players as we have done over the last 2 and a half years). I’ll be there cheering the team whatever happens next year – hopefully it won’t take us another 12 years to “bounce back”!

Note: Yes, I know the pic is of Exeter getting relegated in 2003, but it looks a much better picture than any Argyle one I could find, and a scene that I’m sure will be repeated at the end of the 2010/11 season (assuming they stay up this season of course!)

Spare some change guvnor? – So the Sunday Times Rich List 2010 was released yesterday, and shock horror! I wasn’t even listed – still I wasn’t listed in the obituraries column either, so it wasn’t all bad! Someone who was listed though was fellow Plymouth entreprenuer Chris Dawson, who I profiled on this blog last year. Chris has had a fantastic 12 months, increasing his net worth from £160m last year to £250m this year, meaning he’s got more cash to splash than TV Dragon Peter Jones, Elton John, Mick Jagger or Michael Douglas.

How did he achieve this? By making sensible decisions during a recession, buying bankrupt stock at rock bottom prices from the likes of MFI and Empire Direct, and selling it via the Internet where overheads are low. He has further plans to expand his “The Range” chain of stores across the UK during the next year, and you wouln’t bet against him breaking through the £300m barrier in the 2011 poll – well done Chris!

It’s not big and it’s not cleverat – As well as Plymouth Argyle, last week also saw the inevitable decline of my least-favourite network, as Cleverat finally brought in the liquidators and closed their doors for the final time.

One of the very first blog posts I made on Lammo was concerning the launch of this network, asking what was the point? During their brief time on the Affiliate Planet, they managed to win not just one, but TWO Muppet of the Week awards for their general incompetence and awful attitude.

I doubt many affiliates will be shedding a tear over the demise of this “network” – I know I won’t!

Now that’s what I call an affiliate event 74 – I must say a big thank you to Linkshare for putting on their Symposium UK affiliate event in London last week, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was very well organised and an excellent chance to network (I even got to chat with a former Apprentice winner – fanboy heaven!) and pick up tips from some great industry bods. Why was it great? Everything ran smoothly, the day weas really well paced, with never a dull moment, but without feeling rushed.

The venue was stunning, with views of the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye basked in sunshine, the food was amazing – really top quality. The speakers, whilst covering familiar ground managed to captivate their audience with interesting tales and info. There were goodies galore in the trade-show style session, and even the evening event managed to avoid the all-too-familiar problems: the free bar wasn’t abused and so getting a single drink didn’t take 40 minutes, there was plentiful (very tasty!) nibbles on an almost constant supply, and on the few occasions that the DJ tried to pump up the volume, a quick word in his shell-like soon sorted that out!

So a huge thanks to everyone at Linkshare for a fasntastic day – I’m looking forward to the next one, although you’ve set the bar quite high now!

This week I have been mostly hating: Queen’s “We are the Champions” (here’s why)
This week I have been mostly loving: Spending some time as a tourist in London, rather than just rushing from meeting to meeting.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Down, Down. Deeper and Down.

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No excuse for bad service – Zak from Prezzybox had a great rant on his blog last week after he experienced awful customer service when trying to buy a new car. There’s no excuse whatsoever for this – your sales team are the face of your company, and as we look to exit recession, building up customer loyalty is more important than ever. Whilst no-where near the scale of Zak’s purchase, I did experice the same when trying to buy a new laptop last week.

Having spent 20 minutes being ignored by the scruffy, bored-looking “assistants” at PC World (all of whom actually avoided making eye contact with me in case they might have to do their job of selling me an item of computer equipment, I stormed out in a huff and went to the Comet store around the corner. 2 minutes later a friendly sales rep asked if I had any questions or wanted any advice. We chatted for a few minutes about my requirements, he recommended 3 different models, and 5 minutes later I was walking out of the store with my new laptop under my arm. The two experiences couldn’t have been more contrasting – as a result not only did PC World miss out on a £500 sale that went to their competitors instead, but I’ve moaned about them to anyone who will listen, blogged about them now, and will avoid shopping there in future for the printers, monitors, etc that I seem to go through on a regular basis.

So remember people like me and Zak next time you’re dealing with a customer – keep em happy at all costs, or suffer the consequences!

Edit: When finalising this post, I came across this article from last summer where PC World was voted the worst place to buy a computer.. good to see their plans to improve their customer service is working.. not! (actually if they avoid serving any customers, then no-one can complain about the customer service I suppose..)

Easy Content Units without the “content units” – We know that loads of people use ECU to find products really easily, but not everyone wants to actually make content units out of them.. sometimes you just want a straightforward text link or image for a product. Well now you can get that with a new feature for ECU Pro members – just search for the products you want, and we’ll make the deeplink for you – all you have to do is paste it wherever you want!

Cookies taste 12.9% better with POR – Paid on Results recently unveiled their shiny new interface, which is much easier on the eye than the previous version (even if many people will mourn the loss of “POR Man”), and one of the many new bells and whistles is a neat little pie chart that shows you how many sales POR tracked without the aid of a cookie that put simply, otherwise would not have been tracked.

Customers delete cookies all the time (remember when every newspaper told them that HAD to, else evil corporations would be spying on them and they’d get viruses every 10 minutes that would kill their offspring?), and so it’s reassuring to see that POR have taken steps to ensure that this doesn’t mean affiliates lose out on sales they have driven. In my case, 12.9% of the sales tracked by POR came via cookieless tracking – If only every network offered this.. I could do with a 12.9% payrise!

Policies, not Politics – Apologies for mentioning politics for the second blog post in a row, but I stumbled across this neat little site the other day.. Basically, it gives you the main parties policy/stance on a range of issues such as Crime, Education, the Economy etc, without telling you which party the policy belongs to (though it’s not too difficult to spot the BNP policies!) – You then choose the polocies you agree with, and at the end they tell you who the policies belong to, and therefore who you should vote for.

If only the election worked this way, we might actually get the people running the country who can do the best job with the best ideas. Unfortunately it’s a two-horse popularity contest, and a majority of the electorate will vote the same as they did last time because “they’ve always voted labour/tory” without the slightest clue about how their chosen party intends to govern them for the next 5 years – When the prospective chancellors (and Vince Cable) take part in a TV debate about how they will prevent the country being bankrupted in the next five years, and four times as many people choose to watch Eastenders on the other channel, you know you’re in trouble..

This week I have been mostly hating: The football league table.
This week I have been mostly loving: Eating far too much chocolate, and spending time with the family

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Are you being served? Err, no actually!

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Next making friends again – Oh dear, Next just can’t seem to get on with their affiliates can they? Not content with dropping commissions for Christmas, bidding on their competitiors brand names and kicking bloggers off the program for posting anything remotely negative, they’ve now kicked half their affiliates off as they’ve “run out of budget” – now I’ll never understand the marketing genius that decided their affiliate program (which after all only pays out on sales, so as long as you get the maths right at the start should make more profit the more it costs you..) should have a fixed budget as with newspaper/radio advertising.

But then with geniuses like that, and a prime minister who sold off the countries gold assets for a 1/4 of their value, raided old folks’ pension funds, and hiked up the national debt to record levels under the guise of a “prudent” chancellor, this country’s got not hope, and it’s no wonder we’re suffering through the longest recession in most of our lifetimes (we hope.. Gordon might actually be elected to do the job come June..)

Apologies for the political rant.. I had a pop at Nick Clegg last week too, so I guess in the interests of fairness I should have a go at Tory Dave next week

Affiliates 4 New – Yes, I know the new-look a4u launched earlier this month and I’m about 3 and a half weeks behind the times, but I was sunning myself on a beach in Tenerife at the time, and have only just caught up with the deluge of emails that taking a fortnight off entails – I could do with another holiday now! So having finally had a decent chance to look at the new improved a4u, I have to say it does look a vast improvement on the previous version – There are some teething issues that I’m sure the team will iron out (excluded forums, vanishing mark as read buttons and having to log in every time to name a few), but I no longer have to look at entire screen full of Murray Newlands blog posts all over the homepage, so that has to be a bonus.

I’m also loving the “Off the record” posts every Friday, and hope they will continue in the same vein they have so far!

Sorry! No discounts! – So Red Letter Days are launching a new system that will hide the voucher code box for non-voucher/discount code traffic. Well done them, and it’s always nice to see a merchant taking ideas put forward via this very blog and implementing them.. What next… Clash Media to start paying their affiliates?

Onwards and.. erm.. Downwards? – Many people have commented that I don’t talk too much about Plymouth Argyle on here these days. Well, a quick peek at the league table will tell you why that might be! We’re currently second-bottom, five points from safety with eight games to go. To be brutally honest, we deserve to go down, the football we’ve played over the last two seasons has been awful, and we’ve seen a skillful side of young, promising players sold off one-by-one and replaced with overpaid, hoofball-playing journeymen. Crowds have gone from 14/15,0000 to 8/9,000, and we looked to be down by about October, having taken just two points from our first 30.

Ironically, the man behind all this failure was Paul Sturrock, the very man who dragged us up kicking and screaming from the bottom league to the Championship. He wasn’t the man for the job this time, and since he was replaced just before Christmas by another living Home Park legend Paul Mariner, performances and results have improved. Unfortunately the board left it too late to make the change, and I don’t think there are enough games left to pick up the points required to survive. This weekend sees the return of the dishonest one to Home Park for the first time since his exit, and it’s sure to be an emotional day for all concerned. There could be some unpleasant scenes methinks if the result goes against us..

This week I have been mostly hating: Affiliates who think they’re celebrities
This week I have been mostly loving: The new Courteeners album, Falcon

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Next making friends again, and a (mini) political rant

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I’m pleased to announce that Lammo has (somehow?) been shortlisted for the Affiiate Marketing Blog of the Year award at the forthcoming a4uawards. After also being shortlisted last year, I didn’t expect to make the cut for a second year (especially as I didn’t even nominate myself this year!), but sure enough I received the phone call, so it must be true!

Whilst it’s very nice to be shortlisted (thank you very much whoever you are that voted for me!), I’m also mindful of the fact that I’m no-where near on the same playing field as one or two of my other nominees – Whilst none of the nominated bloggers do it for the money, fame or awards, there are certainly more deserving blogs than mine that deserve to win. Hence my sympathy for Nick Clegg – Sure, he could theoretically be Prime Minister come June 4th, but everyone knows that isn’t actually going to happen in a month of Sundays, and we’ll be ruled by Mr Cameron or Mr Brown for the next 5 years.

So, as Nick Clegg should really say in his party election broadcasts: “Please don’t waste your vote on me – vote for someone who has a chance of winning!”

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Now I know how Nick Clegg feels…

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Leakage is the term most commonly used to describe the sales that might have occurred if the visitor to the site had not decided to continue looking elsewhere for more information, a better price or some other purchase “trigger” before completing a transaction.

Stopping potential sales leaking out to a third party is surely one of the most critical elements of success in Affiliate marketing. Leakage represents genuinely missed opportunities. It is hard enough to build suitable affiliations, develop the website and fight the competitors for high search engine rankings, without throwing away the sale.

Are you selling, or are they buying?
It is worth remembering the old adage that the best salespeople never actually sell anything. They merely induce the purchase by establishing a favourable environment to which the purchaser will relate and from which he or she will ultimately buy. Understanding the visitor’s intentions is as difficult as it is vital. Much depends on your keyword strategy. If your site ranks strongly for highly generic terms, you may see considerable traffic but the buying intention may not be there. The more generic the term used to find you, the less likely the visitor is to buy. Each visitor will have preconceived notions of what will meet their needs, even if they cannot articulate them. The job of the affiliate is to understand and relate to those needs by presenting information about the product or service in relevant and positive terms, also in the tone and style appropriate to the visitor’s own mindset.

Whilst it isn’t possible to directly ask the visitor how you can help them (although some affiliates are starting to engineer sites with a more interactive feel), In every market sector, there will be many commonalities of interests. Understanding these commonalities becomes the basis for effective communication. It is also a reason why the selection of a market niche in which to operate as an affiliate is so important. Your understanding of the sector and your communication of it will determine the visitor’s degree of comfort and the likelihood of a purchase.

The relevance of content and monetising links
Developing content is arguably the most important of all of the information communication skills. It has to be interesting, well written, grammatically and linguistically accurate and relevant to the mindset of the visitor. Far too many websites dwell on product features without consideration of the benefits to the purchaser. What may be obvious to the affiliate is not necessarily so to the consumer and the latter may simply not appreciate the subtle differences between competing offers without having them explained in terms that may be clearly understood. It may be a sound investment to outsource content creation to professionals to ensure that the message is clear and conveyed in a relevant way.

The balance between “pre-sell” pages and monetising pages or links is also vital. Clearly you will want to engineer your site in such a way as to drive as many visitors as possible through the “sales funnel” to click on an affiliate link and hopefully monetise. For SEO arbitrage affiliates, this may mean the placement of well-designed affiliate links at the top of most pages, accompanied by rich explanatory content underneath. It is a delicate balancing act between creating a site that is sufficiently strong to rank for SEO purposes and to instil confidence in the consumer without being SO good as to prevent them leaving via an affiliate link!

These factors are where so many affiliates struggle. The content might be worded badly or simply not include some critical piece of information. If the content is packed with monetising links for every keyword and phrase, as so often occurs, the chances of irritating or confusing the visitor and sending them to a competitor increase.

Design aspects
The “look and feel” of the site as a whole contributes hugely to the end result. For the average Internet user, the way in which a site looks and feels is integral to creating comfort and trust. “Funky” design might appeal to some user segments, but not to others. The reverse is also true, where a “neutral” design might work for some categories, yet be wrong for others. Cute graphics can also be problematic, not only because they may not appeal (or load properly in some browsers), but also because the excessive use or poor placement of graphics may create page load time problems and issues with search engine indexing and thus ranking.

As a general rule, always assume that graphics may not load and avoid relying upon them in the communication of vital messages. Design quality again is a delicate balance. For most sites, somewhere in the middle ground between Norah Batty and Elle McPherson is needed. The greater the degree of arbitrage, the less attractive the design needs to be. Conversely, the more delicately balanced and “consultative” the sale, the higher the quality needed.

Closing the sale
A vital element of any site that is to sell effectively is that it must be easy for the visitor to take action. Obvious perhaps but often ignored. Subtle designs can lead to overly subtle call-to-action monetising links or buttons. The site becomes little more than an electronic brochure, albeit attractive, and a virtual invitation for the visitor to look elsewhere before purchasing. The home page should contain all the important information about your site, links to relevant pages with offers or key products.

Clutter and irrelevancy will put off visitors instantly. Conversely, if the visitor feels comfortable with the site and the information presented, they may not only buy now to generate commission once, but may bookmark you only to come back again, recommend friends and family, all contributing to a long term business relationship and monetary value.

Critical mass and confidence
One of the most common complaints from the users of affiliate sites is that they lack a feel of ‘completeness’. With only a modest number of relevant products or merchants displayed, the consumer is left with the feeling that all of us know only too well – “nice site but maybe I need to check Pricerunner, Kelkoo, eBay . . .as well” We all know how hard it is to manage and constantly update from diverse data feeds, text links, direct merchants, networks and so forth. Using an aggregated solution such as Easy Content Units (ECU) can help in addressing these issues and demonstrating that all important completeness to the user. There are many other ways for affiliates to reduce leakage. In combination with completeness, one of the most effective is to include price comparison in the site content, again handled for you if you use solutions such as ECU. The greater the set of products, the more likely it is that comparisons will include the iconic brands within the category, therefore increasing the perception of credibility by association.

Ultimately, the reduction of traffic leakage will become an ever more important part of the affiliate game plan as competition heats for both natural and social media traffic and merchant PPC restrictions continue to bite. A well-designed strategy starting at the top with keyword focus and running through site design, link placement and affiliate data sourcing will all contribute to turning ever more of those hard won visitors into hard cash.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

What can you do to reduce leakage?

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