Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

Isn’t Karma a wonderful thing? - Who says there’s no justice in the world? Just five short months after “leaving the cast of Eastenders (Plymouth Argyle) to play King Lear (Leicester City)”, perennial liar Ian Holloway managed to add yet another relegation to his CV, this time dragging Leicester down to the third tier of English football for the first time in their history. Well, he did say he’d get them out of the championship!
It was a surreal final weekend to the football season for Argyle fans, with a rather subdued defeat at Wolves taking a backseat to events up at the Britannia Stadium, where another former Argyle manager Tony Pulis took his Stoke side into the Premiership at the expense of Hollowords’ side with a 0-0 draw (Christ, we saw enough 0-0 draws when Pulis was here!). Every Argyle fan was more than happy to trade a defeat to Wolves in exchange for wins for Stoke and Southampton, which would see justice done, and the Leicester Liar down yet again.

You have to feel sorry for the Leicester fans who’ve had to put up with the clown ruining their club over the last five months, culminating in their bitter rivals Nottingham Forest playing their football one tier higher than the foxes next season. Holloway refused to drop back on his media appearances all the while his team were struggling, and managed to waste millions of pounds on rubbish players in the transfer window - He even paid us 50% more than we paid for 96 year old Barry Hayles!

Ian Holloway would have been wise to check out the ending of King Lear before making his “wacky” quote about leaving Argyle - We’re just awaiting Milan Maderic to bring down the final curtain on this clown’s career, and send him back to his garden.

A co-reg is for life, not just for Christmas - We’ve just started marketing to those users who have signed up via an easycoreg.com content unit, and as part of the easycoreg.com setup, we pay all affiliates 50% profit share on ALL ongoing commissions for life. Not many people know this (as Michael Caine might say), and indeed as one affiliate said last week when we explained why we’d chucked him some extra dosh this month: “That’s absolutely brilliant… you have to shout this from the roof tops”

Well, I’ve not got a head for heights, so I thought I’d shout it from the blog instead - Many affiliates earned nearly as much from our marketing to existing users as they did from introducing new users, and if they keep adding to their user lists, then their commissions from easycoreg.com will keep on rising - Check your balance to see what we’ve added to your account, and remember - we’ll be paying you 50% profit every month, for life.

And if you don’t already work with easycoreg.com, why not? It takes less than five minutes to register your site and grab a content unit. You give us five minutes, and we’ll pay you every month for life. It’s as easy as that!

Days in their Lives - I just want to thank Laura, Nadeem, Red, and Helen for taking part in the Day in the Life of.. series - I hope you enjoyed reading them. I hope to continue the series with some more quite interesting people (When one or two of them get back to me.. hint, hint!) - If I’ve not already pestered you, and you’d like to take part (Whether you’re an affiliate, merchant, agency, or former Leicester manager), then please drop me a line via my contact page.

Typical British Bank Holiday (Well, not quite) - We had some decent weather for a change (although it’s just got even better now everyone’s back at work!), but it was nice to have a long weekend away from t’Interweb taking in some of my favourite pastimes - Footie (see above!), Music (Kooks, who were good, but not as good as at V last year) and Wii Fit, which is quite simply the most fun game available right now - You can keep your GTA4, I’m quite happy snowboarding and Rhythm boxing!

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During an interview with Chris Frost last month, I mentioned that it would be a fab idea for everyone in Affiliate Marketing to spend a month doing a job-swap with someone from “the other side” - i.e Networks become affiliates for a month, and affiliates spend a month working for a network. Whilst that’s just not feasible, I thought it would be great to virtually spend a day in the shoes of people from all corners of Affiliate Marketing.

So, as there’s no 24 this year, I’m nicking the idea of a ticking clock, though you’ll have to make your own beeping sound… The following takes place between 9am and 2am…

09:00am: zzzzzzzz

09:10am: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze button.

09:25am: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze button.

09:40am: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze button.

09:55am: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze button.

10:10am: Alarm goes off. Listen for five minutes, then get up.

10:15am: Make coffee, and commute to office.

10:17am: Arrive at office. Check emails, and delete spam, which accounts for 99% of the emails downloaded.

10:35am: Approve any pending websites and answer any support tickets from easycoreg.com users.

11:00am: Make second cup of coffee and answer pending emails.

11:30am: Head for the shower

12:15pm: Back at my desk, it’s time for the first piece of content writing of the day - A nice easy 500 word product review to get us started.

13:00pm: Now it’s time to update our competition site with a few competitions and schedule an email to go out to all our members tomorrow morning whilst I’m still snoozing.

13:30pm: Check for any more easycoreg.com pendings/support requests.

13:45pm: Download emails and delete spam, which now accounts for 98% of the emails downloaded. Respond to any issues immediately.

14:00pm: Time for lunch, which is normally a sandwich, cereal or soup.

14:15pm: Back for the main task of the day - two 1,000 word articles for an upcoming event.

15:30pm: Write briefs for our outsourced content - we outsource around 30,000 words per month, and it isn’t cheap, so a lot of thought goes into these briefs.

16:15pm: My head’s hurting by now, so time to wind down. Have a cup of tea and a kit-kat whilst reading the forum.

16:40pm: Check for easycoreg.com pendings/support requests and check emails. Deal with any issues.

17:00pm: Take the dog out for a walk.

18:00pm: Er Indoors arrives home from work. I cook tea for us.

18:00pm to 22:00pm: Me time. Spend time with Er Indoors, maybe watch some TV or a film. Or something else!

22:00pm: Er Indoors heads to bed (Every night’s a school night when you’re a teacher!), and I’ll head back to the office for a few more hours. There’s much less structure to this part of my day, but in the 2 or 3 hours I’ll put in here, I will check stats (This is the ONLY time in the day I dedicate to checking stats), and do a final check of emails. I’ll also chat with fellow affiliates on msn, and maybe post some rubbish on the forum to wind down. Finally, I’ll make a “to-do” list for the following day, and maybe catch some TV or a film before heading to bed.

01:00am: Head to bed, where I’ll read a book for 30 mins or so, before lights out.

01:30am: Lights out, start to drift off to sleep..

01:51am: Have a brilliant idea for website, lights on, write it down on the pad I keep next to the bed.. lights out again.

01:59am: zzzzzzzz

02:00am beep, beep, beep… Roll end credits.

I’m hoping to make this a regular feature on Lammo.net, and have a few more people lined up for the coming weeks. If you would like to take part, then please send your “Day in the Life” together with a brief bio of yourself to me using the following form.

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AF move to cookie-less tracking More - I don’t know if I’ve even mentioned it, but I’m not the most technically-gifted affiliate out there. But even I understand how cookies work in the context of Affiliate Marketing - User clicks on a link, a file (cookie) gets placed on their PC, network tracking code on order confirmation page looks for this file, If it’s there - user gets paid. Simple. Yes, occasionally the cookies get lost/deleted/blocked and the merchant gets a free sale. But you factor that into the program.

Affiliate Future have gone one step further though and announced that they’ve done away with the need for cookies, with their new patent-pending VeraciTag (?) technology that will “store anonymous tracking information in the web browser” which cannot be blocked as cookies can. One thing that has certainly been removed is my understanding of how this works (There should have been a “Whoosh” somewhere in this last paragraph, but I can’t be bothered to go back and put one in now).

I’m hoping this new technology will be used in conjunction with, rather than instead of cookies - Imagine the uproar if several affiliates noticed a downturn in conversion rates (”Ah.. it’s all AF’s dodgy cookie-less tracking’s fault” - even if it’s not) - Affiliates know and (for the most part) trust cookies. I applaud AF for thinking ahead and being pro-active in this manner, but they need to be aware that affiliates will naturally be wary of anything that replaces a long-established tried and trusted procedure.

Still looking for links - Just a quick update on my New Years Resolution to keep on doing linkswaps with relevant sites throughout the year, and it’s going well (I’m sure most resolutions go by the wayside by the second week in January), but I’m finding I keep bugging the same people, so to avoid annoying those poor affiliates a couple of times a week, I thought I’d put an appeal out there for anyone who’s looking for relevant links to their sites (which should be just about everyone!) to get some linkswaps going.

To make it easy for everyone, I’ve put together a page detailing all the areas I have relevant, content-rich pages about, together with a contact form that you can let me know what you have - Piece of cake!

Jumping on the bandwagon - I promised Chris from Holiday Watchdog Chris from Sunshine.co.uk that I’d get around to putting an affiliate link up for his new venture really really soon, especially as he’s putting up a Macbook Air as a prize draw. All I had to do to get an entry was pop an affiliate link up - easy! Well, easier said than done, as that conversation was a good ten days ago now, and I still haven’t got around to it (The problem is I don’t just throw links up anymore - I tend to accompany them with 800-1,000 word articles, so time is of the essence)

Then I spotted a post on Kieron’s blog the other day which had it all - Promoting the program (Which is available on Affiliate Future, and pays a brilliant 10% commish until the end of this month), and complete with affiliate link which give Kieron a competition entry. At which point I had a lightbulb moment and thought “Hey, I’ll nick that idea!”

Et voila - One affiliate link duly posted, and I claim my entry Chris! And I promise, hand on heart, that I will get around to writing that 800-1,000 word review that could earn me another entry into the comp (You get another entry for every five sales you make).. erm… really, really, really soon!

Cheltenham/Grand National tips - Just thought I’d share a little tip with you. With the Cheltenham Festival last week, we had a lot of betting affiliates placed easycoreg.com content units on their sites which of course contained ads for bookmakers, but also for a couple of Free Tips sites. Not only did those affiliates earn a fair whack from the units as people signed up for the bookie accounts and free tips, but they also captured the users data, meaning they can market to them again and again - starting with the Grand National in less than 3 weeks!

Never, ever underestimate the power of capturing user data - Especially in a situation you perhaps wouldn’t normally expect to do so like a betting site.And remember that every user who signs up via an easycoreg.com content unit is yours to market to for life once you’ve downloaded their data. And if you don’t feel like marketing to them, then don’t worry - We’ll pay you 50% of everything we earn from marketing to them - for life.

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