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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Running on auto-pilot - You’ve got to love Wordpress haven’t you? If I hadn’t told everyone I spoke to for a few weeks beforehand, you wouldn’t know that I’ve actually been on a fortnight’s holiday - Thanks to the mighty WP (as well as a couple of colleagues, a load of outsourced work and some custom CMS systems), all of our sites ran exactly as normal during the fortnight I was away, and the ten days I’ve been back that it’s taken me to catch up.

I love the fact that I can schedule stuff to go live at any time in the future (Shame you can’t do it in the past, would help solve any Google sandbox issues), as it means I can sit here and write loads of content in the middle of the night, or whenever I’ve got a spare ten minutes, and it can go live at the optimum time for the respective audience - We’ve started doing it with email newsletters now too, and it’s a fantastic way of working - Gone are the days when I had to be physically sat at my desk if I wanted something going live at 7am, or a week on Wednesday. Now I can do it all on the rainy days and schedule it to go live on the Sunny days whilst I’m at the beach - or that’s the plan anyway!

Giving up on email - The first thing I did on getting back from my holidays was download my emails from the previous 14 days - A grand total of 6,439 emails. Of those 6,439, approx 2,900 were instantly trashed by my junk filter, and of tyhe remaining 3,500 ish emails I had to sift through to try and weed out a) the junk that was missed by my crap junk filter and b) the crap (which is different from junk - it’s still useless, but at least it’s not unsolicited) to be left with 61 emails that I actually needed to read or take some action on - 61 out of nearly 6,500!

That’s less than 1% - Basically 4 useful emails per day out of an average 460. It took me more than three hours just to sort through the emails, and I’m not even the main contact for the networks! So I reckon it’s about time I took a leaf out of John Cauldwell’s book, and ban email. Anyone who’s actually got something useful to say can catch me on MSN Messenger, or PM me via Affiliates4u or Facebook. I’ll still download the emails once a day so I don’t miss anything urgent, but it’s been fired as my main communication tool in the ten days since I’ve been back, and I’ve got so much more done now I’m not spending 20 minutes per hour sorting emails!

Muppets on a Grand scale - Sorting through the emails I discovered a promotional email from the Affiliate Team at Ladbrokes, encouraging me to give them a push for the Grand National which was “only days away”… Well it was around 359 days away as it was sent six days AFTER the Grand National, a feat that is surely worthy of a rare Muppet-of-the-Week award.

Especially as the email contained the phrase “what better time to promote betting on the Grand National with Ladbrokes?” Should I tell them?

Loving The Apprentice - I reckon this is the best series so far.. Thanks to sky+ I didn’t miss any episodes during my hols either, so I’m fully up to date. The best bit has to be the way they’ve all been asked to big themselves up to camera before failing miserably. I think they’ve also got some great characters in there - After thinking Raef was an arse the first week, he’s really grown on me, and of course there’s still a couple left who you just love to hate (Jenny and Jennifer).

It was great to see Lucinda turn it around last week - Without a doubt, she’s been the dippy, clueless one who’s let the side down every week so far, so when she was made team-leader they seemed doomed. But she proved to be a great manager, and did everything correctly (Market Research, Supply, Booked sales appointments, put the right people in the right jobs, etc). Of course it wasn’t enough as the other team (who did no market research, booked 0 appointments and spent the whole sales day arguing) somehow wandered into a huge sale off the streets and won! I think “SrAlan” made the right choice in firing Lindi, but should have let “The best salesperson in Europe” go with her..

Game Over - So, Plymouth Argyle’s season is over, having failed to make the end of season Play Offs, after hitting the self-destruct button in recent weeks giving away goals left right and centre to fall out of contention. We’re still on course for our best finish in 20 years (and our eighth consecutive year of finishing higher in the league - carry this on, and by by the year 2038 we’ll be Premiership champions!).

And of course there’s still something to cheer for - Every member of the Green Army will be a member of the (former Argyle manager) Tony Pulis fan club on Saturday as he faces Ian HolloWords’ Liecester City knowing a win will propel his Stoke side into the Premier League. It’s not that we want to see Pulis there, it’s just that he will relegate the Lying Little Media Whore if they beat them (And Southampton don’t lose to Sheffield United), and nothing would be better karma than that!

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POR resurrect deadlinks More - We must all remember the true meaning of Easter - No, it’s not all about Eggs and Chocolate (whose idea was it to discover a hidden love of KitKat Chunkies and Mini-Eggs two weeks before going on a beach holiday?), but of course Easter was when the Easter Bunny came back from the dead or something…

Which (in a strange tenuous way) leads us to the news today that Paid on Results have announced their latest brilliant idea based on what affiliates actually want. Following a rare (cough!) rant on Lammo last month about the way networks deal with deadlinks, I was greeted with the familiar sound of silence (and/or inaction) from most parties.

That was until Clarke from POR caught me on MSN earlier today to unveil POR’s latest work - The Paid (on results) Expired Merchants System (or PEMS for short - You really should work on the acronyms Clarke, though it’s better than “Free UK Stuff”

To sum it up in a nutshell, it puts you in control of your traffic, even for merchants that left the network many moons ago - Some would rather their links went to the merchant still, others want the network to show related merchants, other still would like their visitors to be sent to a custom page on their own site. Well, with PEMS, you can choose whichever one you prefer!

And best of all, you’ll get an email whenever some leakage occurs on your POR account - Every time a deadlink is clicked by a user, you’ll be notified (in a daily summary) where that link is, and hence you can set about replacing it with one that will earn you money - which in turn earns POR more money… which leads me back to the question I asked 6 weeks ago - Why doesn’t every network do this? So far, it’s only CJ, Webgains and POR that are leakage-free.

An Interview with a Lammo - A quick plug for Frostie’s Blog, where I was recently interviewed as part of his “Meet the real…” series of interviews, which has also featured some of the brightest stars in Affiliate Marketing. And Zak Edwards.

Why haven’t you voted? - Whilst I won’t be attending the a4uawards this year, I was surprised to read today that there have been just 30 votes cast, falling way short of the 1,000 target that was set. I know I was one of the 30 that had voted, and really am surprised that more people have not exercised their right to vote.

Whoever wins the awards will be crowing about it for the NEXT year (see.. I can do subtle), so make sure that this year’s winners are deserved - It’s no good moaning “Why weren’t My Favourite Merchant nominated?” if you didn’t nominate them yourselves.

I know it’s tough for some people to be given a blank form - People prefer to be led by a tickbox vote, but by having to actually think about who to vote for, we should end up with a much better nominee list. It only takes a minute or two to place your vote, so why not do it now (well, wait until you’ve finished reading my blog first.. oh, you’ve gone…) . The first round of voting closes in 30 days… and counting..

Playoff Push still on.. just - With just six games to go before the end of the season, Argyle are still in a play-off position.. just. A win against then-league-leaders Bristol City two weeks ago followed by a draw against then-third placed Watford (who are the ugliest footballing team I’ve seen at Home Park since Luton Town under Joe Kinnear) has left us in sixth place, but with Ipswich, Crystal Palace, Wolves and Charlton all breathing down our neck for that one remaining place. Even Cardiff in 13th place could move to within one point of us if they win their two games in hand.

It’s going to be an exciting run-in with games against Coventry, Charlton, Sheffield Wednesday, Preston, Blackpool, and Wolves to come, we’re going to have a massive say in who goes up, but also in who goes down. Either way, I’m keeping May Bank Holiday weekend free for the Play-off finals..

Don’t forget Sir Alan is back - Finally a quick note that The Apprentice is back on the Telly this week (Wednesday at 9pm) - Hopefully they’ll be a better crew than we had last year, although a quick look at the trailer reveals a few of the usual stereotypes - Over made-up “power dressers”, posh boy and barrow boy. Still, we only watch it for the back-stabbing and bitching.. we know that Sir Alan wouldn’t really employ any of them if he wasn’t being paid to..

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