Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

Today, we’re blessed with a Day in the Life of an a4uaward winner - Mark Russell from Existem Affiliate Management, winners of “Agency of the Year 2008″. I’ve known Mark for years and years and years (yes, he really is that old), and he had his Affiliate Marketing apprenticeship at Big Idea Media where I taught him everything he needed to know about Affiliate Marketing - Which networks were bandits, never trust agencies, Friday afternoons are for the Pub, etc, etc. All of which is completely useless to him as MD of Existem AM, but I’m sure he also picked up one or two things that were useful..

Mark’s also a fellow Plymouth Argyle fan, and therefore knows what he’s talking about. We even managed to squeeze in a quick away win at Charlton last season the night before a4uexpo, a feat we’ll hope to repeat with an away trip to Chelsea around the 2009 event. Without further ado, it’s over to the big man himself..

John asked me to write this 2 months ago and hey just had a chance to do it…sorry!!

Well here is a normal day in my life running Existem Affiliate Management:-

7am Wake up and put the kettle on and make a massive cup of coffee, while feeding the dogs and letting them out for a run in the garden, get showered dressed and head off to the office, maybe having checked a few stats while drinking coffee.

8am Being a nice boss pick staff up on way to work (must start charging for petrol…lol) get into the office for about 8:30.

8:30am make sure the coffee has been put on and the aroma of fresh coffee is filling the office. Work through list of tasks for staff to do that day.

9am Start sifting through the spam, and some good emails from affiliates and clients, look at what news we have to promote to affiliates about codes, offers, and top selling products.

9:30am Go for a cigarette and have first call with Bruce to see what the plans are for the day from his side, and what he needs me to get staff to do.

10am Check through the forum, and check emails and reply to anything that has come through overnight.

10:30am Start checking stats for clients while filling in internal reports of trends from day to day and week to week, and then compare each client to see if there is any similar trends.

11:00am start sending out newsletters that we have been working on yesterday and this morning, get staff to send to me to check and add some details then get blogged, forum posted and emailed through network. Speak to affiliates about some promotions as we all know speaking to affiliates before 11 is never a good idea, (especially John who never arrives at desk before 1pm if you are lucky…lol).

12pm Look through affiliates websites and help affiliates by writing content for their sites (if you would like any unique content please email me, mark@existem-am.com).

1pm Speak to clients and recommend offers that they can run and start discussing promotions for the months ahead.

2pm Speak to Bruce again on the phone and discuss upcoming meetings events and any new strategies, plan diary for the next few weeks planning where and when we both have meetings and organise a time for Bruce to visit Plymouth office.

2:30pm check forum and add any more news that we need to let affiliates know about.

3pm Start filling in reports and filing paperwork, although you never believe it if you saw my desk!

3:30pm Work on new business look at any leads we have been sent or any clients that have contacted us and check we have sent everything that we should have and follow up any leads and calls.

4pm Speak to more affiliates about any promotions that we have and update our merchant discount code section

4:30pm Check on the latest football news, anyone who knows me will know I really enjoy my football and love the Greens, watch out premier league we are on our way!

5pm Check forum and emails again.

5:15pm Debrief with staff and plan the next days work.

5:30 Speak to my wife Lorraine and find out what time I need to be home for dinner (if I am lucky she will have something in the oven for dinner, maybe not at the moment as I am supposed to be fitting a new kitchen not sure where time comes from to do that..Eeek.

5:45 Check and update worksheets for the day and check emails, forum and update database, start thinking about what we are doing tomorrow.

6pm Go home taking staff on way home, (good boss aren’t I?),

6:30 Get home and have some tea and spend some time with Lorraine and the dogs (2 border collies Lucy and Pippa).

8pm One last check for the day on the forum, emails and statistics for clients.

10pm Settle down to catch up on daily news with Sir Trevor.

11pm Bed…must be getting old!

Throughout this day there are cigarette breaks, in the office premises I work from we have to go to bottom of the car park to the smoking shelter and this normally accompanied with my mobile where I make most of my calls, (I get comments from other residents about me always being on the phone) quite often these calls have the sound of a helicopter in the background (not mine but the airport is close and also the hospital).

Coffee machine is on constant flow in the office all day, if I was to add in each coffee the post would twice as long…I do like my coffee during the day although I really should consider decaf.

Many thanks for (finally, lol) sharing a Day in your Life Mark - If anyone else would like to be featured in this series (or has been promising to for months but not got round to it yet.. not looking at anyone in particular.. you know who you are!), then please get in touch - Lammo Readers are loving these snippets of your working days, and are hungry for more!

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Quick Question: Does everyone who reads this blog understand what spam is? In a nutshell, it’s unsolicited email - junk emails that you haven’t asked for from people and websites you haven’t signed up to receive emails from. It’s the scourge of the Internet, and all spammers should be lined up against a wall and shot. Now, I thought pretty much everyone knew that these days, but it appears not.

I was amazed to watch a BBC Report on spam that was so scandalous it could have been written by a Daily Mail reporter - The video report can be found here and would have you believe that just by surfing the net and clicking on a link will result in your children receiving pornographic emails pushing drugs and penis extensions on them. Which of course is complete twaddle. But hey, don’t let the facts get in the way of a nice shocking story about how the Internet will kill your children. But the BBC don’t stop there - They delve into the source of all this “spam” to find out who’s behind it. And the “research” they did led them to believe that the chief peddler of viagra and xxx videos online is none other than Clarke Duncan via his website Free UK Stuff.

The evidence? Well, when the woman conducting the “experiment” searched Google for “free stuff”, Clarke site was one of the sites listed by Google. Convinced yet? No? how about this then - The woman clicked on the link to join Free UK Stuff, and was sent an email asking her to confirm she wanted to join and receive the weekly newsletter. She then clicked on the “confirm” link, and then.. guess what? She started receiving the weekly newsletter she had asked for. Or as she called it - spam.

She also did the same thing with UK Classified website Gumtree, and the report was summed up by the scandalous tone she uses to say “I clicked on ‘receive daily emails’ and they stared emailing me every single day!” Clearly, this woman does not understand what spam is - And it’s unbelievable that the BBC would parade this clueless woman in front of their cameras with the clear aim of shocking people into not joining websites such as Clarkes (even going so far as to name his site as a “spam-sender”).

It’s all part of an “experiment” from McAfee, no doubt to stir up scare stories such as these in order to sell their latest anti-spam product. Looking at one of the many blogs detailing their actions here (apologies it’s in Portuguese), it looks like they’ve also targeted my old site Net Free Stuff as a “potential spammer” because it also appears in the Google results for “free stuff” - yup, if Google ranks you, you’re obviously a spammer.

Now, anyone who knows Clarke will be aware that he takes spam as seriously as anyone, and that’s why he’s got such a strict double opt-in policy on Free UK Stuff. He’s certainly not a spammer, and the fact that the BBC can effectively label him as such without any recourse, which could of course kill a small business with such negative (if false) publicity is unbelievable. We’re all used to AOL users idiots who sign up for your newsletter and then report it as spam the minute you start sending them what they’ve asked for, but I believe this is the first time any of them have gone onto National Television and accused us of selling their details to porn merchants and drug dealers.

If you’re as shocked as I was about this scare-tactics excuse for journalism that could have put smaller affiliates than Clarke out of business without any justification, then you should complain to the BBC. And try and educate idiots like the woman who did this experiment as to what spam actually is.

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Deal Group Media launched their new “dgmcompare Broadband” service for affiliates yesterday, which apparently is an easy way to incorporate comparison tables into your website content for the various Broadband Affiliate Programs out there. Which all sounds great, but as a renowned technophobe, I still didn’t quite get it. So I asked Jess from DGM to explain it to me in English:

We are very pleased to unveil a new tool aimed specifically at broadband affiliates. dgmCompare Broadband is an aggregator of broadband offered at a micro-geographical level using either postcodes or consumers telephone number.

The purpose of this tool is for the use of the long-tail affiliates and we will not be using it for our own PPC/SEO use. It is targeted more specifically at those affiliates who are not already in the space. We do not envisage that it will affect any current activity on any of our current broadband campaigns for those of you already promoting them.

This is the first of a suite of dgmCompare products that we plan to launch in the coming months. Each will focus on different verticals offering similar levels of functionality. dgmCompare Broadband can be created to your specification through your dgmPro (www.dgmpro.com) account.

If you would like further information on dgmCompare Broadband please visit our website where you will find a complete breakdown of the product or feel free to contact Cat or Jess. We would also welcome any feedback you might have to help us with future product development.

That made things a little clearer, but still as tech-savvy as a plank of wood, I decided the easiest way to find out what it’s all about is to have a play around. And the results were amazing - In less than two minutes, I knocked up the following content unit:

That’s just one of the swish themes that’s available, and at the moment I’ve set it to sort the results by monthly price, which I notice shows temporary introductory prices (i.e. £4.49 for the first three months) and then doesn’t show the actual price you’ll pay for the remainder of your contract which is a bit annoying, but I guess users might be more inclined to click through to the merchant to find out the fine print, which brings up another point - Doing this much pre-selling of contract lengths, prices, speed, download capacity etc, could (or should) Post Impression cookies come into play on this unit?

And the icing on the cake - you can even add Broadband affiliate programs that aren’t on DGM to the unit! When doing the setup, you just choose the broadband provider from a drop-down box and paste your affiliate link in. You can do this for up to three broadband providers from other UK Affiliate Marketing Networks, which is a brilliant move - creating an affiliate-friendly tool that isn’t restricted to only work with that network’s merchants. Other UK Affiliate Marketing Networks should take note.

dgmcompare Broadband is still in beta, but as far as the first version of the first comparison tool goes, it’s a pretty good start - What will be the forthcoming comparison tools? Energy Prices? Mobile Phones? Credit Cards? Bookmaker’s Free Bets? It’ll be interesting to see how this one develops, and how the other networks will respond.

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