Whilst pay per click affiliate marketing can be a great way to drive high volumes of traffic through your site without having to worry about SEO and organic search results, there’s a risk that if you don’t do your research you’ll end up spending a lot more money than you make back in commission.

Flying blind into a PPC campaign is a sure fire way of losing your investment and wasting your time, but it doesn’t have to play out that way.

Merchant brand bidding constraints
Merchants haven’t been standing still in PPC over the last couple of years, evidenced by the ever growing number of emails we all see from direct merchants and the networks alike, forbidding us to bid on selected merchant brand names and terms. The more cynical among you may conclude that merchants have simply used affiliates’ PPC campaigns as free research, with the poor old affiliate taking the hit and the merchant getting plenty of rich data from which to construct their own effective PPC campaigns at little or no risk. Whilst this may be partially true in some cases, the reality is that merchants and their search advisers are simply, and rather inevitably, getting better at online marketing. In doing so, they have recognised that competing with their own affiliates for the same PPC “real estate” simply serves to drive up the unit cost of sale. Hence the constraints. Therefore, in architecting a workable PPC campaign, it is essential that you stick to any merchant bidding rules — if nothing else to avoid commission declines or reversals.

Keyword Research
Knowing the market and having a view as to how your PPC campaign is “likely” to play out is one thing, but actually making your money back and being successful with PPC is quite another. PPC campaigns sink or swim based on the keywords that you choose. It also goes without saying that the more competitive the market sector, the more difficult it will be to make any money from a PPC campaign. However if you think you’ve found an unexploited niche which you’re eager to fill, picking the right keywords should lead to some level of success. Most PPC affiliates are, by now, familiar with the concept of core and long tail keywords. The more specific the keyword, the less it is likely to cost per click and the more relevant the traffic is likely to be to the product or service in question. Conversely, the more generic the keyword, the greater the unit costs and the greater search volumes and traffic.

Most of the major search engines, perhaps most notably Google in the form of the AdWords keyword suggestion tool, provide extremely useful search volume data. Simply fire in some relevant terms and you will be presented with a list of related searches, together with the search volumes and the degree of advertiser competition for the term. This data, together with data from other sources such as Word Tracker and indeed your own data collected from previous campaigns and site visits should allow you to find the “sweet spot”, balancing unit cost, traffic volumes and relevance. The key when using these tools is to try as many different combinations as you can and to try and think like an average surfer looking for your product. When picking your PPC keywords you’ll also need to consider the geography of the campaign. If you’re providing a service that’s only available in a specific area then you’ll be able to filter out irrelevant results if you include a regional or nationally specific keyword. You’ll be surprised at the word combinations that some people use and the more time you spend looking for the keywords that will provide value and performance the more likely you are to save money rather than burning it through lack of preparation.

Negative Keywords
Just as important as the main keywords for your PPC campaign are the evil siblings, negative keywords, and your initial research should also cover this area. Essentially you don’t want a bunch of irrelevant but expensive hits simply because of a similarity or overlap in keywords. There are a couple of ways in which to identify potential threats before you launch the campaign. For example, if you’re trying to sell ‘blue tooth headsets’ you could get hits from people looking for blue toothbrushes, headbands and a whole bunch of irrelevant terms, all of which will cost you dearly without producing any meaningful results. One of the best ways in which to identify negative keywords is to use the various tools at your disposal to weedle them out. Otherwise just head to a search engine, type in your target keywords and note down any of the irrelevant entries that come up, blacklisting the keywords unearthing them as you go along. The degree of support for the exclusion of negative keywords varies somewhat based upon the advertising network.

Driving CTR
At least two of the major advertising networks – Google and Yahoo – use the click through ratio (CTR) as one of the major factors in determining where your PPC ads appear in the list. From their perspective this makes perfect sense: after all their goal is to maximise the click-through rates for displayed ads and thus their own revenues. From your perspective as a PPC advertiser this is both an opportunity and a challenge. If you get the ads right, you could see them appearing higher in the list for a lower unit cost than some of your competitors. The inverse is true: no matter how much you pay, you can’t always buy the top spots! Driving CTR is not only about keyword relevance but encompasses the quality of your ad text and the visible relevance of your landing page URL and content (the content will also have associated costs in the form of the search engines’ “landing page quality score” so ensure your pages are high quality). You will almost invariably need to play with and refine the ad text, perhaps running multiple groups simultaneously to see which drive the best combination of volume and value (conversion to commission rates). The great thing here is that it is very easy to see what the competition are doing, with the top performing ads appearing . . .at the top! The landing page URL relevance is thus vital: try where possible to include the relevant keywords in the displayed URL. This can make a significant difference.

Refine refine refine
At the beginning you’ll want to sort out a reasonable spread of keywords, particularly if you’re aiming for a wide audience. As the campaign unfolds, you need to monitor the results continuously. Most of the major advertising networks allow you to play with multiple ad groups and campaigns and to monitor click-through rates in real time. Similarly, your own server logs and commission data from your merchants and networks should provide you with the all-important data regarding conversion into commissions so that you can balance the various elements of the campaign accordingly.

Site and conversion quality
We have written extensively around themes relating to site quality and maximising conversions / minimising leakage here at lammo.net. Nowhere are these factors more important than in a paid search campaign and it is vital that you get your house fully in order before commencing a PPC campaign.

Management costs
There are now endless tools, many of which are free of charge, allowing you to manage campaigns across multiple advertising networks. This is particularly important where the volume of keywords or ad groups is high: many affiliates fail to account for the cost of time in managing PPC campaigns and yet, as most of us are “time poor” there is a significant “opportunity cost” in real monetary terms associated with the time lost for other tasks that could have generated similar or potentially better revenue.

Dig deep
We’re not talking about longtail keywords yet again here! By digging deep we mean explore the opportunities presented by some of the lesser known advertising networks. Although there has been considerable consolidation over the last few years, there are some surviving “independent” advertising networks, some of which may be relevant to your target market and audience at lower unit costs. There are also endless sites out there willing to offer paid advertising, some of them at highly competitive rates if you are willing to take the time to hunt them down. All of this may help in further driving down the unit cost for relevant traffic.

Hopefully this hasn’t made the whole PPC thing sound too daunting and if you’re just starting out and haven’t had prior PPC experience then following advice and learning from others’ mistakes is better (and less expensive!) than making them yourself. Although words like ‘research’ may sound bland and anaemic, all forms of effective SEO and PPC are reliant upon deep market knowledge and keywords skills, so getting used to being thorough in the early stages will ease the pressure as your affiliate career progresses.

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

Stop Burning money!

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One of the key challenges with the keyword market is that it is a fickle mistress whether you are a lowly start up or a high flier. With keywords being such an integral part of both PPC and SEO campaigns, the right choices can make or break a business. As with most aspects of affiliate marketing, the main strategy should be about you finding a balance, in this case between the core, competitive terms and the longtail keywords. However, this is of course easier said than done. Understanding the merits of both core and longtail keywords as well as realising that the two are not mutually exclusive is a good place to start.

Why do you need to find a balance between the core, popular keywords and their more obscure longtail cousins? The primary reason is that it’s a lot easier to build yourself up in the organic search rankings and produce a stable base from which to operate if you combine the two rather diverting all energies to the core terms. This is because in an ever increasing number of categories, using core terms simply corners you into an extremely competitive market wherein all of your best linking and content creation efforts may have limited impact. When using core, competitive keywords most search engines will focus on the authority and history of your domain and the number of relevant “in-community” links above all else, relegating on page optimisation (where the barrier to entry is perceived as low) to a tiny proportion of the myriad of factors that go to make up your ranking. When you’ve got a partially established brand which is in competition with a mad number of other sites, this means that you can quite quickly slip down the rankings and your hard work will be potentially wasted.

We are not for a minute suggesting that there is no point in focusing on some core terms on your site. As with so many elements of both PPC and SEO, they are an integral part of a long term game plan. However, the focus and balance between core and longtail should primarily be determined by the age and current stature of your site. The more established you are, the more core terms it may make sense to include in your activities. Conversely, new market entrants will need to gain as much leverage as possible with longtail terms before placing much weight on the more competitive terms. Ultimately it is about building a reputation slowly rather than going for the all or nothing keyword war where you’ve got more to lose.

So what do we mean by finding a balance? Essentially it comes down to using core terms and longtail terms in unison, and through this partnership the strengths of each will compliment and augment the weaknesses of the other, creating a workable strategy. This has been proven effective because essentially the organic search value of a set of well chosen longtail terms can be more than equal to that of a single competitive core term — if the longtail terms are comprised of a string of core terms using a “longtail contains” approach. This will create a more specific and targeted set of longtail phrases, generating traffic that will actually find the content of your site relevant.

For example, if you’re aiming at the sporting footwear market then you might consider using “trainers” as a core term to promote your site. However, the problem with that is that not only is the term “trainer” associated with many other off-theme sites (personal trainers, training and education in an endless set of subjects . . .) but it is far too general to necessarily convert well. In this case you’d be far better combining core terms and even brand names, for example “mens running trainers”, “mens Adidas trainers” and so forth. Note that the longtails here contain not only “trainers” but “Adidas trainers”, “mens Adidas” etc.

To throw another hypothetical example out there, if you were targeting the travel market, having “cheap online Sharm el Sheikh package tours” would potentially endow you with the attention of a specific audience. When combining keywords it is important not only that they are relevant and searched for in reasonable volumes, but that they can be easily injected into the content of your site, whether it is in link anchor text or liberally dispersed in your on-site content at sensible densities.

So much for the how and the why, but ultimately you’re in this for the money rather than to experiment with search engine ranking systems and the shifting trends of the average internet user, so why is the balance of core and longtail terms so important from a financial point of view? Essentially it’s down to getting the right kind of traffic to your site, and whether you’re going for PPC or SEO or both, if you combine core keywords into a longtail thread then you stand a far better chance of attracting a more targeted group of visitors who are actually looking for a site just like yours.

And who will thus monetise more effectively.

Although using longtail keywords in unison with core terms can sometimes feel as if you’ve opened a tap half way, that trickle of traffic can more readily be converted into a torrent once you’ve established your site (with traffic data such as bounce rate, CTR and so forth being ever more vital in achieving and sustaining rankings), and the quality of the flow in the longer term will make up for the small number in the early days. One recent statistic suggests that around 20% of searches made each day haven’t been entered for the last 90 days, if at all. This means that both the longtail and the core keyword have an important – indeed vital – place in PPC and SEO of all types, and that putting all of your energies into a core keyword only strategy, whilst rewarding in some cases, is by no means the only road to success. In some cases quite the contrary.

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

Choosing keywords for SEO and PPC

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The main goal for any individual running an internet marketing campaign is, of course, to achieve good positions within the search engines results for a number of relevant keywords that are known to convert into sales. This means that when an internet user searches using your specified keywords, they should find your website towards the top of the list. In an ideal world, everyone would be able to achieve this through natural / organic search using good search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques. However, as a result of the degree of competition inherent in many sectors and the many months required to attain strong rankings — even when you do everything perfectly — many are driven to use pay-per-click (PPC) marketing either as an interim solution or indeed as a strategic long-term approach for a given site, thus appearing as paid or sponsored listings on the relevant search engine results pages (SERPs). So what is involved?

Any campaign must drive relevant traffic to your site which converts into revenue. In the case of affiliate sites, this will primarily be through commission paid via the merchant or affiliate network for sales generated through click-outs via affiliate links on your site. Whilst in principle this may sound a simple enough task, the devil is in the detail!

The Right Keywords
Let’s start with the basics. Keywords are king in a PPC campaign (and indeed in a natural search campaign which we will cover in other articles). What keywords will actually drive traffic that will convert well? What keywords can you afford? These two questions often have conflicting answers. The very keywords that will drive the best quality traffic are often going to cost so much that only merchants and high volume affiliates with special deals will ever actually make a margin on them. But not always.

It is incredibly easy to lose money on a PPC campaign. Almost anyone who has ever run one will have made a loss at some stage. So, back to keywords — try to find a ’sweet spot’ between relevance and cost / level of competition. It may also surprise some of you to discover the generic keywords really don’t generally convert particularly well. Perhaps you have a niche site selling ‘Solid Oak Wardrobes’. Buying traffic searching for ‘wardrobes’ will attract everyone looking for high street MDF cheapies through to designer wardrobes costing thousands from a central London boutique. ‘Oak wardrobes’ is here a far more realistic term.

However you also need to look at volumes. Most of the major PPC engines will offer some kind of guidance as to likely search volumes for a given keyword. You need to look at volumes and your daily / monthly budget and work up a list of keywords that you reasonably believe will drive sufficient, relevant traffic at a sensible unit cost. You will need to monitor the campaign and adjust the number and scope of the keywords, constantly refining it to stay within the parameters you have set.

Click Through Ratio and Position
The major PPC engines now rank adverts, even those with significant different bid prices, based in no small part on the click-through ratio (CTR), in addition to keyword bid prices. Thus a well designed ad, correctly targeted, can potentially drive good volumes of traffic even if the bid price for the keyword is relatively modest. Equally you can be paying top dollar for a keyword and driving little traffic because your CTR is too low and your display position has thus drifted down. Again this is all about selecting the right keywords and of course crafting the best possible advertorial (see below).

Brand Bidding
This is now a major driver in keyword selection for a PPC campaign. Many merchants have now imposed constraints on bidding for their brand names. The reason is simple: if an affiliate bids on the brand and drives traffic and sales, the commission paid to the affiliate will generally outweigh the cost of the merchant driving the same traffic through direct PPC advertising in a well managed campaign. After all – why else would the affiliate bother! Affiliates bidding on brands thus drive up a merchant’s costs which, together with other effects on brand value and perception (and a strong desire to control these) is why many merchants have restrictions in place. Failing to adhere to the restrictions is likely to result in commissions being reversed or not paid and in removal from the affiliate programme in question.

Budgeting
The key here is to set a budget and to stick to it. Harder than it may sound. It is tempting to turn a trickle of traffic into a torrent by upping your daily limits with the PPC engines — but make sure that it is REALLY converting and that you have the financial resources to cover the costs.

Selecting a PPC Engine
Google Ad Words is probably the best known. For precisely this reason, unit PPC costs are frequently higher in Google than elsewhere although few engines can match Google’s coverage or indeed their campaign management and reporting facilities. There are a myriad of niche and sector specific search engines which may provide relevant traffic at a far lower unit cost. Other commonly used engines include Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture), MSN AdCenter and MIVA. As with most things, a mix of engines is better than a single source although it can make sense to start slowly with one engine and add more.

PPC Bid Tools
If you are running volume campaigns involving a large number of keywords and / or multiple search engines, you may also decide that you need some automated help in the form of bid management and campaign management tools. Whilst each search engine will provide some of this functionality as part of its user interface, most will only work on keywords managed within that particular engine. There are number of excellent software applications and online tools that use the search engines’ APIs (interfaces) to extract and manage the keyword and bid / cost data in one place. We may review these separately at some point here at lammo.net.

Quality Scoring
In addition to brand bidding constraints and the wider economics of choosing the right keywords for your campaign, many of the search engines, particularly Google and Yahoo have strict quality guidelines with respect to the landing page for your campaign and will massively elevate your PPC unit costs if your page fails to meet these criteria — or indeed may not authorise the bid / campaign at all. This is designed to eliminate pass-through, redirect and arbitrage approaches which adversely affect user perceptions of paid advertising. You need a good quality, information-rich site with relevant landing pages to which to direct your PPC traffic.

Advertorial
Entire books have been written on creating effective PPC advertorial – the text to appear on your PPC ads. In essence, keep it simple and ensure that you emphasise the right points including price where applicable. Also ensure that the landing page URL displayed in the ad makes it clear that the site and page IS relevant to the ad. Ask yourself a question: if you were looking for an Oak Wardrobe, would you click on this ad? Also use the work of others as input – you can be sure that they will have been through a similar process and will have fine-tuned their ads accordingly. Don’t simply plagiarise but do take valuable pointers from the efforts of others. Be prepared to continually fine tune your advertorial.

Making it all Work
Perhaps the greatest joy of pay per click advertising is that the results are almost instant. Not only does this contrast sharply with the many months often required to achieve organic search results, but it provides instant feedback and input that allows you to constantly adjust and in some cases experiment with bids, keywords, advertorial and of course your landing pages themselves. In addition to the key factors above, also ensure that you are targeting the right country and audience. For example, consider switching off UK ads overnight so you don’t pay for US traffic!

If you approach your PPC marketing campaign in the right way it can be a cost effective strategy. With so many factors to accommodate, you should always start slowly and carefully and build experience before making major financial commitments to a given campaign. Good luck!

Further Pay per click Affiliate Marketing Information

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

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I was reading Ray Theakston’s Blog at the weekend, and a comment he made about not attending the a4uawards as they “didn’t seem quite right for bedroom affiliates like myself” totally hit home with me.

One of the main things that I loved about Affiliate Marketing when I first went full time in 2001 was the freedom that being a Bedroom Affiliate gave me. Having previously been a Civil Servant, not having to drag myself out of bed at Stupid o’Clock on a freezing January morning, put on a suit and tie and drive for an hour to go spend eight hours doing a job I hate was a breath of fresh air – I could get up when I want, commute in minutes (depending on how long it takes the kettle to boil*) and wear what I like (even work in my dressing gown if I feel like it).

* I even bought myself the Quick Cup Kettle (which gives you a cup of hot water in about 3 seconds) to speed up my daily commute!

And pretty much the whole Industry was the same – 3am MSN chats with fellow affilates over toast and Marmite was par for the course, and there was a brilliant camaraderie amongst affiliates that meant loads of business was done, but in a laid-back, casual way. Nothing sums this up better than a trip to the UKs smallest network (at the time) in 2003.

Whilst other networks thought affiliates would be impressed by their Mayfair offices, marble floors and walnut staircases, and spent fortunes plying them with Champagne and Canapes served by waiting staff, Buy.at were totally in tune with what affiliates actually want, and the six or so of us that travelled to Newcastle were treated to a trip to the footie (complete with obligatory meat pie), all the beer you wanted, a trip to an all-you-can-eat Curry house, and finished off with a banquet at Steve and Paul’s favourite Chinese Restaurant. Every one of us left Newcastle with huge respect for Buy.at after that, and of course that led to them becoming the massive company they are today. Whether they have that same understanding of what “Bedroom Affiliates” want is another blog post in itself, and I’m already running waaay too long on this one..

I tried moving out of the bedroom to become a “Corporate Affiliate” in 2004, having seen the signs that “The Industry is getting more professional”, moving into rented offices with a plethora of staff, and I ended up losing approx £200,000 as a result – I seemed to spend more time firefighting staff issues, dealing with red tape and building issues than I did actually working on the affiliate business. It was also a tough way of finding out that I simply work better alone, and not long after we increased our overheads considerably, our income also went DOWN rather than up – Not a good recipe for a successful business, and a massive contribution to me walking away from the Industry in 2005.

When I returned to Affiliate Marketing in 2006, I was adamant that it would be as a Bedroom Affiliate again, and the first thing I had to do was to reduce those overheads. Unfortunately, that meant I had to make half of the remaining staff redundant, which I think is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, and serves as a useful reminder that, as my last act as a “Corporate Affiliate” was to tell three people that they no longer had a job, I never want to have to do that again.

I pulled the surviving members of staff out of the office, and told them they could work from home full time, and paid them a little extra each month to compensate for their electricity/heating etc. They were also better off by not having to pay to commute to work, or pay £3 for a sandwich they can make at home for 20p every day. And of course, they can lie in bed for an hour longer, and work in their affiliate uniform (Jeans and T-shirt, or Summer Uniform of shorts and T-shirt!) We all meet up once a fortnight to check everyone’s still on course and happy, and touch wood, it’s worked brilliantly for the last 18 months.

As long as it’s still possible to make a couple of hundred thousand a year from your bedroom (or dedicated home office), there’s no way I’ll ever become a Corporate Affiliate again. Black Tie or Jeans & T-shirt? Champagne & Canapes or Beer and Curry? Spin & Politics or Honesty & Loyalty? I know which I’d rather have!

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

Why I’ll always be a “Bedroom Affiliate”

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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?”

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

Jamie and the Magic Touch

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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.

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

Maintaining a sensible weight is the key to a healthy affiliate lifestyle

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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…

Stan James Affiliates team?

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

Pretty, Pretty, Pretty good Telly

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!

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

It’s time to meet the muppets

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As promised, I’m keeping my eyes peeled for rubbish landing pages, and highlighting the offenders on this blog.

Today’s example of a merchant having no thought whatsoever for their affiliates is Desperate Seller on Affiliate Window.

Desperate Seller

On first impressions, this isn’t too bad – If you ignore the PPC ads for phrases such as “Cheap Car Loan” and “Car Insurance” on the Right Hand Side. Are affiliates paid their fair share of this revenue? I doubt it. Their EPC on AWIN index is currently showing as £0.11 – These keywords can command CPC’s of £1.00+ on most Search Engines, never mind the bingo and dating keywords they also have there (Relevance, Zero. CPC’s, High.)

Anyway, what you can’t see from that screengrab is the fact that Desperate Seller launch a pop-up window through their affiliate traffic, which is almost full-screen for Cornhill Direct:

cornhill direct

Now of course this is rubbish for two reasons:

1. Again, affiliates aren’t paid for this leakage – With Car Insurance being highly relevant to the market, and companies willing to pay £30+ for leads, it’s possible that affiliates would actually lose more commission by featuring Desperate Seller on a motoring page than they will earn from the “whopping” £5 commission that Desperate Seller pay.

2. Even if you still felt like promoting Desperate Seller despite all the leakage above, you wouldn’t be able to do any PPC for them whatsoever, as pretty much every PPCSE forbids the use of pop-ups on landing pages. So they’ve wiped out the biggest potential market for affiliates to send traffic to their PPC ads and Car Insurance and Loan lead generating Used Cars site. Clever, very clever.

The crap landing page police are still out in force, so I’ll keep you updated with the latest suspect merchants.

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

Crap Landing Pages: Desperate Seller

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Kieron Donoghue, the North-East’s most famous Peroni-drinker (excluding Gazza obviously!) has launched a fantastic new tool, which I think will prove to be invaluable to anyone doing PPC.

PreviewMyPPC allows you to see a preview of your ad, in real time for each of the main UK PPCSEs – Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing (formally Overture). It’s similar to the tool provided within Google Adwords, but shows you not only the standard preview, but allows you to see what your ad would look like in one of the top positions too:

One thing missing at the moment (It is still in beta stage, so open to feedback) is the ability to enter your ad for Google for example, and then switch to Yahoo, and transfer your ad across for you to tweak to their format.

Knowing Kieron though, this will be just the tip of the Iceberg, and I’m sure by the time he’s finished, he’ll have one hell of a resource on his hands. Now if only we could persuade him to come up with a decent UK-based keyword research tool…

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

Kieron launches new PPC Preview tool

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