Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

It was great to see Jamie Harwood from UK Web Media on the Sunday Times Rich List (Joint 29th on the Young Person Rich List with Katie Melua, Keira Knightly and Ricky Hatton, a little behind Harry Potter but way ahead of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lewis Hamilton). I remember chatting on messenger with Jamie at 3am not long after he’d just started out with Affiliate Marketing, and his passion and work-rate was second to none. He was also not adverse to taking calculated risks, and I remember being concerned as he was ramping up the balance on his personal credit cards to do PPC, although looking back now, it’s certainly a risk that paid off for him!

A lot has been made of the fact that Jamie is in a number of Closed Brand Bidding Groups, and yes, of course this will have contributed to his wealth, but then so has the fact he was willing to take on tens of thousands of pounds of personal debt to “try out” PPC, and was willing to work bloody hard in those early years to build a sustainable, scalable business. I don’t agree with BBG’s (I think they’re a little too close to a Cartel for my liking), but they’re here for now, and why shouldn’t people who can take advantage of them?

One thing that surprises me about the Young Person Rich List is that anyone under 30 with a personal wealth of more than £5m can make it onto the list - Given that, shouldn’t there be a LOT more affiliates on the Rich List? Granted, some of us old timers are sneaking over the age limit now, but I would have though Mr. Jennings and Mr. Wood are just two names that should have been on the list.

Jamie’s only got one year left on the Young Person Rich List, so he’s got to go some in the next two years to make the main list - He’ll need to increase his £18m pile into at least £40m to join Kylie Minogue, Jay Kay and Kate Moss at the bottom of the main list. Well done on a fantastic ahievement though mate, and can I be the 2,493rd person to ask: “Can I borrow a couple of million?”

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Can you hear me now? - First of all, my apologies for the silence over the last two weeks. Things have been so manically busy as we approached the end of some major projects that it’s been very difficult to find even 5 minutes to post to the blog. Normal service will be resumed from here on.

Proud to be Fat More and More - No, I’m not talking about my ever-expanding “affiliate belly”, although I do believe there’s a link between the size of your stomach and the size of your commission cheques - All that time sat at your computer writing content and blog posts means both get a little bigger each day.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m a 100% fat affiliate, as over the years I’ve had around 50 “thin” affiliate websites that offer nothing whatsoever of value to the end user, all of which made varying amounts of money. I’ve still got a couple of “thin” sites now, and I do partake in Brand Bidding where allowed (I know, boo! hiss!), but I also know that those are not sustainable revenue streams that I will be able to live off in 5 or 10 years time. And for that reason, I’m also slowly building a couple of “brand” sites and publishing somewhere in the region of 100,000 words of unique content every single month.

The “thin” stuff pays the bills today, and enables me to concentrate my time on the “fat” stuff that will pay the bills for the rest of my life. It’s naive to assume that people will ignore the easy low-hanging fruit that brings in shedloads of short-term money, but it’s also foolish to ignore the benefits of building long-term, sustainable revenue streams. Maintaining a sensible weight is the key to a healthy affiliate lifestyle.

Call me Mr. Chairman More - Two weeks ago, I was a humble affiliate. Now, however I am co-owner of a football club, having invested quite heavily (£35) into Ebbsfleet United Football Club. I’m so pleased to have been asked to form part of the small consortium, and I’m sure I speak for the other 28,249 co-owners in saying that we’re sure this is the start of a very bright era for the football club, and we have complete faith in Head Coach Liam Daish (until we lose a few games, and then we’ll be ready and waiting with the dreaded “poll of confidence”)

Does AM need its own UK Magazine? More - It’s a tough one this - I subscribed to Revenue magazine, but soon found I wasn’t actually reading each issue as it was too US-centric. I’d certainly support anyone who took the risk and published a UK Affiliate Marketing magazine. I’ve known so many publications go bust due to lack of advertising/low circulation/high publishing costs that it’s a hell of a risk. But there hasn’t been a decent read for the UK Affiliate since Internet Works went pop, and the Industry is much bigger now, so perhaps the time is right? I certainly won’t be risking my own money to bring out a publication, but will happily support anyone who does.

Dragons Den looking for Entrepreneurs - If you’re unable to handle constructive criticism and think that your business that earned you £20.79 last year must be worth “about a million”, then why not apply for Series 7 of Dragons Den? The BBC are currently looking for entrepreneurs, and have specifically targeted Internet entrepreneurs this year as some of the biggest investments from last series went to online companies such as Hungry House and Gaming Alerts.

If you’d like to take part, then please email dragonsden@bbc.co.uk call 0870 200 3003 or visit their website for an application form. Will I be taking part? No chance - I’d be far too nervous!

Buy.at coming to Plymouth More - After mucho campaigning, the buy.at team are coming to Plymouth this Friday afternoon for a day of networking and fun. So if you fancy a day on the Sunny south coast, taking in some Clay Pigeon Shooting and an evening of fun with the guys and girls from buy.at (as well as the chance to talk turkey with them of course!), then make sure you email events@buy.at to register (it’s free) before Wednesday to grab your place at this top event.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Affiliate Marketing Muppets - I’ve long considered a “Muppet of the week” award for this blog, but always refrained from doing so as I was worried I was turning into Affiliate Marketing’s version of Victor Meldrew as it was. But there’s no harm in highlighting some truly incompetent people every now and then, so it’s time to meet the muppets…

My first set of Affiliate Marketing Muppets are the team at online bookmaker Stan James. As a brief overview of how not to run an affiliate program, they have managed to:

• Ignore every email I’ve ever sent them
• Take over two perfectly run programs (Bet Direct and Better Bet) and lose the tracking.
• E-mail all affiliates over the Christmas Holidays, informing them that they will need to manually change all links ever put live, as they won’t work otherwise.
• Fail to note that the new links actually fail to work.
• Ignore email from affiliates pointing out that links don’t work
• At the time of writing (3 weeks after informing them, and 5 weeks since they took over the Bet Direct and Better Bet programs), the links are still not working, and not a single sale has been tracked.

As Statler and Waldorf might say: “They’re not half bad… They’re ALL bad!”

Hacked off - I’ve just discovered that this blog has recently been the victim of a hacking, and as a result, half of this post has now been lost after the hacker tried to place a link (in French, and unsuccessfully it has to be said) to his online poker site and ended up deleting half my content too. As far as I can see, that’s the only place the Croque Monsieur has had a go, but I’ve changed my passwords just to be sure.

“Dodgy” brand bidding More and More - It never ceases to amaze me when merchants change their terms and conditions and then instantly start slagging people off for not complying with them. But of course, that’s nothing compared with merchants who slag affiliates off who do comply with the t&c’s.

Now I’ve made a few quid out of brand bidding over the years, but always within the merchants terms and conditions - Or at least as far as I know: Too many times a merchant has changed their terms, and not bothered to notify us. They then send a shi**y email asking why we’re brand bidding. If you are going to move the goalposts, at least let the players know!

Finally, the return of decent Telly - My Sky+ Planner has been looking pretty bare over the last month or two - Christmas Telly was particularly rubbish, and I’ve been whizzing through my Lovefilm wishlist as I refuse to watch some Z list “celebrity” sing karaoke, dance (even if it is on ice.. yawn) or sit in a living room when there’s some paint I could watch dry.

Rejoice though, as decent TV is about to make its return, with the return of Torchwood (Doctor Who with swearing and lesbians) on Wednesday, and Prison Break and Curb your Enthusiasm next Monday. It won’t be long before 24, Heroes and Lost return too, and we’ll all think TV is brilliant again. And then Big Brother will come along to remind us that it’s not.

Mac update More - I’ve been running on the mac for two months now, and thougt I’d start up the vista pc last week to see if anything had changed: Well, it crashed on its first boot, so not really! I did persevere though, and apart from the constant crashing, I have to say I do prefer working on the pc: I never realised how much I missed roboform, or Napster, or Windows Mail, or Live Messenger. It just felt right. So I’ve made the decision to go back to a pc.

I can’t obviously work with the crash-whenever-I-feel-like-it attitude of vista, so I’ve ordered a pc with xp on it - Should be with me this week, and I should be back working at optimum speeds and levels before long. I’ll still hold onto the mac, as it’s certainly been a capable backup, but I just prefer the pc environment (Sorry mac lovers!)

January Sales now on - Argyle have sold a number of first team players so far in the January transfer window, with Barry Hayles, Akos Buzsaky, Dan Gosling and Sylvan Ebanks-Blake all heading out the exit door, resulting in Argyle receiving a total of around £3.5m for them. David Norris is also being hunted for around £2m, and Peter Halmosi is being lined up for a £3m move to Wigan.

All of which means that the already-wafer-thin squad is in even stronger need of new bodies fast, and our play-off ambitions have shown to be nothing of the sort. Nothing personifies this better than the fact the team who went down 1-0 to Burnley at the weekend featured two youth team players who had never even been on the bench before.

It’s not a nice time to be an Argyle fan right now, but I do think we need to wheel-and-deal at this level (buy for £200-300k, sell for £1-2m) for a few years to be able to really compete with the big boys and make a realistic (rather than hopeful) push for the premiership. We’re certainly not going to do it on average crowds of 12,000, and as long as the replacements for the outgoing players are of similar quality, (and brought in soon!), we may look back on this period in a few years and say “That’s why we can now afford to buy Mr X” etc. Or of course, we might be saying “We had a chance of getting into the Premiership, but sold all our best players”

Hindsight - It’s a wonderful thing!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!