19th January 2009 was the day we finally released the very first public beta version of Easy Content Units, and what a whirlwind year it’s been – the system has been tweaked literally (take note Jamie Redknapp!) hundreds of times to take on board new features, suggestions and improvements from users, of which there are now nearly 1,300! Amazingly, this tool that we created initially for use on our own sites has generated more than 24 million impressions on other users sites in the previous 12 months – not bad from a standing start!

To help celebrate our first anniversary, we’d like to invite you to take a peek at what the Pro version of ECU can do, with a very special £1 offer.. With ECU Pro, you get:

ECU Pro usually costs £19.99+vat per month, however if you join via the button below you can try it out for just £1. Yup, the full version of ECU Pro, for a whole month, for the princely sum of a quid (including vat). This is a strictly limited offer for the first anniversary of Easy Content Units, and will expire at midnight on the 1st February 2010.

Sorry, this offer has now ended. However, please click here if you would like further information about ECU Pro.

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

Happy Birthday to ECU!

Related posts:

1. Pro is Go! No prizes for guessing what the most frequently asked...

I’m always harping on about how great ECU is at converting views into clicks, and clicks into sales (Did I mention the AVERAGE clickthrough rate for this month so far is a whopping 11.46%? No? Well, it is.), but thanks to those wonderful people at dgm and JD Williams, simply using ECU will not only result in more people clicking on your links, and more people buying through your links, but you’ll also get paid more for those sales – 10% more to be exact!

JD Williams have partnered up with Fusepump to get their product feed spot-on – There’s now more than 3,000 products in there, and to encourage affiliates to use the brand spanking new feed, they’re offering an extra 10% bonus on top of the normal commissions for every sale made via the feed – As Easy Content Units are powered by the network’s product feeds, that means that using ECU to promote JD Williams on dgm will earn you 10% more for every sale (not to mention you’re likely to see more clicks and more sales!) as opposed to standard deeplinks etc.

The standard JD Williams commission structure:

becomes…

The JD Williams (Product feed and ECU) commission structure:

And of course, don’t forget that dgm links on ECU are totally free – they’re not subject to the revenue share splits that the other networks links are – just another way you’re quids in by using ECU and dgm.

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

Get paid 10% more – use ECU!

Related posts:

1. Paid on Results are on the ball Paid on Results launched yet another innovative new tool...
2. Paid on Results – What are they like? The Paid on Results affiliate program (to be found...
3. Still waiting to be chuffin paid It’s now four weeks to the day since my...

I’ve always loved the way Amazon work as an online retailer – They analyse just about every possible part of the user journey, and do everything within their power to not only close a sale, but increase basket size, and leave feedback about the product to help close the sale for future shoppers.

They think of just about every possible user objection, and offer a solution, all on the one page – Wrong colour (here’s the other colours), Wrong size (here’s the other sizes), not what I’m looking for (here’s what you might be looking for based on what other people eventually bought after viewing this page), it might not work (user reviews telling you it does.. or user reviews telling you it DOESN’T, but then a link to a very similar product that has favourable reviews).

I really enjoyed the Conversion Rate Experts session at a4uexpo last month all about increasing the conversion rate of your landing page – The upshot of it was that longer pages (with the RIGHT info, and the RIGHT call to actions) converted 170% better in their example. This caused some disbelief in the room as it goes against everyone’s main thoughts – Those long “letter type” sales pitches don’t work do they? It’s much better to have everything above the fold and get a quick conversion. So as if to ram home the point, the average length of a page at Amazon was put on the big screen, and guess what – it was huuuuuge!

Sure, the main call to action and main info was above the fold, but for those people who need a little (and especially those people who need a LOT) persuasion or reassurance (or even a totally different product), all the information they need is on that one page, and they are able to make an informed buying decision. Well, if it’s good enough for Amazon, then it’s good enough for me!

It got me thinking about how we can use Easy Content Units to display product information in some very different ways on the same page, thus following the CRE and Amazon model of providing all buying options on the one page for a product like the slanket. Again, I present a nice big image of the product, price info and a “buy now” call to action at the top of the page as you would expect. Most of the sales will come from this, but if I can persuade the people who have objections to buy an alternative product, then I can make more from this page, allowing me to spend more promoting it!

So, looking at the objections.. “I don’t want to buy from “Merchant X” – no worries, we can present a list of all the merchants who sell slankets.. “I want a different colour”.. Lets display all the colours.. “I want a smaller one” – Display travel and kids versions.. “I want a bigger one” – show the double slankets!

Now with a little bit of merchant inside knowledge, you could also create an Amazon style “You might also like…” unit of totally different products that people might be interested in – Products that don’t replace the Slanket, but simply increase your basket sizes (and commissions) by complimenting the product well.

If you’re selling a fair few slankets for a merchant, ask them what people who buy slankets also tend to buy.. Then promote those products on the slanket page – Amazon are the kings of doing this as they are able to target this very well, but this is something you can fairly easily replicate yourself with a little merchant knowledge – If people who buy slankets also tend to like Romantic Comedies and slippers, then promote Moccasins and Hugh Grant films on your page – they’re not going to be your biggest sellers, but they stand a good chance of increasing your overall earnings from this one page.

How many ways should you skin the cat? Every way you possibly can! If it’s good enough for Amazon…

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

How many ways should you skin the cat?

Related posts:

1. Ways to beat Writers Block It happens to us all, regardless as to whether...

We’re always looking for ways to improve Easy Content Units – whether it’s just making affiliates lives easier or actually increasing clickthroughs and conversions to make a difference to the commissions flowing into affiliates pockets.

One thing we looked at recently was the use of video. Used correctly, video is a fantastic creative that can instantly inspire the “must-have” attitude that turns a browser into a buyer and is proven to dramatically increase sales.

However, affiliate take up of Video creative has historically been pretty poor, and a recent poll by a Client Strategist at Affiliate Window asked a simple question – why don’t affilates use them? The answers were very interesting, and allowed us to implement video into ECU in such a way that we could actually solve people’s issues.

42% of affiliates said they don’t use video creative as “The merchants I promote don’t offer Video banners”

15% of affiliates said “The videos are too specific, id prefer a more general advert about a promotion or sale”

11% said “I don’t know where to find them within the network interface”

With one powerful new addition to ECU, we can now instantly solve these problems (and more!)

You can now add any YouTube video to any ECU, instantly making it a VCU! Doing so is as simple as pasting the YouTube URL into the ECU interface – and that’s it! Now every merchant can have a video creative. You’re in control of the videos, so they can be as specific, or as general as you want. And finding them is a doddle – just go to YouTube, and search – find the one you want and paste the URL into ECU – simples! If you somehow manage to get stuck, Jason’s written a how-to guide here with images to help!

Videos can be added to any unit – even your existing ones – just hit edit, and paste the YouTube URL for the video you want.

Example VCUS
Here are some of the VCUs I knocked up last night, showing the power that video can add to a simple content unit, helping to create interest in a product/brand and get people into a “must-have” frame of mind.

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

Video cured the ECU star

Related posts:

1. Santa hats off to Prezzybox Buy Santa hats at Silly Jokes …Every year for...
2. Dragons Den: While the Den’s away… Deborah Meaden There was no DD this week –...

Everyone (myself included) bangs on about the importance of good content and how content is the real driving force behind creating a successful affiliate site, but there is something else concerning many affiliates at the moment: design. The forums are alive with questions regarding the battle between design and content; which one you should focus on, which should be your first concern when building a site and which is ultimately the final factor that will push your site into the mainstream and monetise your traffic.

The truth is that rather than being mutually exclusive considerations, any work you do on the design of your site and the content you put on it must ultimately achieve some kind of Zen-like balance. You can have great design paired with great content, but this takes time and effort and potentially money if you’ve not got the web design or graphical skills yourself. However, there is a glimmer of light in what seems to be a very dark tunnel (and no I’m not talking about the economy!).

Aesthetics vs. Functionality
It is essential that from the get-go that you understand the difference between the attractiveness of a site versus the other ‘design’ elements that enable you to make some cash from it. This is mostly because the word ‘design’ covers both of these areas. Having an attractive site is something that many people strive for, but in the real world pretty images and flashy, animated menu buttons do not reliably convert into commission. Actually they can be counter-productive.

Let’s consider for a moment the brutal fact that as affiliates, we are all in the referral business. Modern PPC, SEO and content affiliates are sourcing traffic at unit cost A and monetising it at revenue level B. Conversion rates here are king and optimising these requires a delicate balance. On one side of the equation you need a site of sufficient attractiveness to create sufficient confidence in the user to prevent immediate use of the back button — rather you want further navigation to the right exit point. The site must also be content-rich enough to meet PPC quality page requirements and / or to build natural search rankings. On the other hand you don’t want to create something that is so stunningly good that the user never leaves (and never monetises). Therein lies the challenge.

There are plenty of examples of fairly bland affiliate sites out there that do well despite the aging look of their pages. In many cases this is because they are designed well but in a way that isn’t obvious to the naked, judgemental human eye. What matters here is the intuitiveness of the site structure and a relatively simple layout with content placed strategically and in relevant areas of the site. Many site designers agree that keeping things simple doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll create something ugly or overly bland, and there are examples for both sides of the design versus content argument out there.

Aesthetics vs. Monetisation
What we are trying to illustrate here is that although design is important, and it is of course what every visitor ‘sees’ it is not going to be the sole determinant of revenues. What you should look to create is an accessible “veneer” of design that drives visitors straight to monetising content. It is the combination of the two that will give the best results in the long run. It’s important to remember that the average web user will ultimately be ‘looking’ for something online, whether it’s product information or views and reviews. An over-the-top design can only serve to distract from the main purpose here. The path to the “meat” of the content should be as simple and uncomplicated as possible.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel – AKA an Unsubtle Sales Pitch
It is hard enough to worry about hosting, basic design, navigation, on-page SEO, text content, linking, PPC management and all of the other factors involved in getting rankings and driving traffic. If you then have to worry about trying to build monetising content based on a mixture of individual text links, graphics and the vagaries of the data feeds from the various networks and merchants, the mountain becomes a whole lot taller. Then you have to merge it in with your design.

Enter Easy Content Units or ECU (created by a team containing yours truly) which provides you with a range of customisable units that allow you to add elements such as price comparison, related products and best sellers to your site. Your users will even be able to change options such as size and colour within the unit before they even leave your site. You can adjust the shape and size of the units to fit in with your site design and choose from over 8 million products to be included. It’s simple to create your own custom content units to suit your site design, and it will also provide your users with a simple interface that compliments the content of your site. ECU is designed to remove much of the donkey work of merging and managing those monetising affiliate links and data with your site design, allowing you to focus on the hard work of getting the traffic in the first place.

Tuning the Balance
So ends the sales pitch! Whether you use ECU or not, striking the right balance between on-page value, confidence levels and click-throughs requires considerable thought and a degree of experimentation. Even relatively subtle changes can make a significant difference to percentages and thus commission levels. Time spent fine tuning based upon stats is almost certainly going to be more profitable than time spent trying to create the world’s prettiest interface. Professional yet bland but effective and content-rich wins over pretty every time!

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

Which came first? The content or the design?

Related posts:

1. The world’s best Content Units… probably! After what seems like an eternity of beta testing...
2. Sticky content… or just plain stuck? “Sticky” is a popular expression used to describe a...
3. Link Building and Content Writing Building a successful website is easy. You simply need...

No prizes for guessing what the most frequently asked question on Easy Content Units has been for the last four months? Yup, it’s “When are you launching ECU Pro and removing the revenue share?” – Amongst the answers given to that question since January are: “when we exit beta”, followed by “a few months”, then “a couple of months”, “next month (hopefully), “mid-May”, “next week!” and last night I was finally able to answer with certainty “It’ll be tomorrow!”

And finally, we have launched Affiliate Pro for ECU – yay!

The key features thus far are:

* Removal of revenue share, so your links show 100% of the time.
* SEO Friendly units – All Pro members can now get their units in php code, which can be read by the search engines.
* Add branding to your units – You can now add a custom header/footer image to your pro units, to further fit your sites brand/style.
* Advanced Reporting – More detailed breakdown of units stats

Obviously, the removal of the revenue share is the one that everyone really wants, but we’ve also chucked in some extra features that people have been asking for, such as SEO readable units, more in-depth stats and the ability to brand their units. We’re always working on new features behind the scenes, and will release these out to pro members as part of their subscription on an ongoing basis – so if there’s a feature you’d like to see on ECU, just let us know, and if it’s a) possible and b) useful then we’ll do our best to develop it for you!

Affiliate Pro costs just £19.99+vat per month, and includes all the above features, our highly-praised customer service support, and all new upgrades, features and tools that will be built into ECU Pro.

To activate your Affiliate Pro account and start using the new features, simply enter your existing ECU username (click here to get one if you haven’t already got one) and click subscribe below to set up your subscription.

Your existing ECU username:

Is Affiliate Pro right for YOU?
If you’re likely to earn more than £100 a month in affiliate commissions, then YES!
If you want your content units to be read by the search engines, then YES!
If you want to add your own sites’ branding to the content units, then YES!
If you want more detailed stats information, then YES!

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

Pro is Go!

Related posts:

1. Happy Birthday to ECU! 19th January 2009 was the day we finally released...

Thanks to a unique partnership deal with dealgroupmedia, all dgm affiliates can now benefit from FREE use of Easy Content Units for every single one of dgm’s merchants – This removes the usual 80/20 split for all dgm merchants (the split still applies to merchants on other networks, and where a merchant is on dual-networks, you will need to ensure that you select the dgm version in order to benefit from the free links)

You can easily identify these free links – When searching for products on ECU, any dgm merchant will have a little “FREE LINK” icon next to it, indicating that your affiliate link will be shown 100% of the time for that product. Existing ECU members will find that we’ve automatically applied this to all your existing units, so you’re already benefiting from the free links. If you’re not already a member of ECU, then click here to join today and start adding dgm merchant’s products into your units for free.

This is an exclusive partnership with dgm, which you won’t find any other network offering for at least the next couple of months, and we are extremely grateful to dgm – they have recognised that ECU offers their affiliates a way of increasing productivity immensely (a quick look at recent stats shows the AVERAGE clickthrough ratio for an ECU is nearly 10%, and our own tests have shown a twofold increase in conversion rates) and therefore made it free to use for all their affiliates and merchants.

It’s refreshing to see a network championing affiliate innovation, even where it helps out their competitors too – dgm appreciate that all affiliates use almost every main network anyway, and their “network agnostic” approach to affiliate tools must be applauded.

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

dgm merchants are now 100% FREE on ECU

Related posts:

1. Send me free stuff! It crossed my mind recently, reading all about Frostie’s...
2. Fancy a free PS3, iPhone, Laptop or Blackberry? I’d like to welcome the nice people at Netpartner.com,...
3. Dear Merchants, not EVERY affiliate is trying to rip you off Here’s a new one for me – a rant...