It’s time to meet the muppets
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!
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