a4uexpo Review
Last week I attended my first a4uexpo at ExCeL. Overall the event was fantastic and I would definitely recommend it to any SEO or affiliate marketers next time. Read more →
Category: Affiliate Marketing
At A4U Expo London
As you read this I’m on my way down to A4U Expo in London.
I’m there to watch a few sessions and meet as many people as possible so make sure you say Hi.
Hopefully I will be able to publish the best tips from the sessions on BlogStorm so look out for that.
34 Days Until a4uexpo
The UK’s premier affiliate marketing event a4uexpo takes place in London on October 14th and 15th and I’m planning my first visit.
See you there! Read more →
Confusion Reigns With iPhone Affiliates
This is why I haven’t bothered to promote the iPhone this year. Nobody is organised enough to offer a decent deal for affiliates.
I used to sell hundreds of mobile phone contracts a month on affiliate sites and got a commission of £35 a time for them.
Sell somebody an iPhone and you get either nothing or £15.38 assuming the phones are in stock and the website doesn’t crash.
This is an email I got today from Commission Junction about O2:
iPhone sold out
Dear Patrick Altoft,We regret to announce that the current O2 iPhone is sold out. O2 is working on reintroducing it as soon as possible. Updates on new stocks will appear on www.o2.co.uk by the 10th of July. Once the iPhone is reintroduced commission will be £15.38
In the meantime remember that O2 also offers excellent commission to affiliates on the following products:
* The iPod Touch in 8GB and 16GB models. Commission is 4% of sale.
* Pay monthly phone applications at £35.00 commission and £3.50 for each pay as you go order placed
* O2 superfast broadband, with unlimited downloads and free customer service, 24/7. Commissions start at £10 up to £25.Please let me know if we can help out or if you have any questions.
Thanks,
Michael Brockett,
Account Development Manager
Commission Junction, a division of ValueClick, Inc.
This is an email I got today from TradeDoubler about Carphone Warehouse.
Carphone Warehouse: No Commission On Pre-order iphones.
Hi Patrick,
The Carphone Warehouse launched a pre-order service for the iphone this week. As you would expect,
response has been huge but at present, these pre-orderes will not be attracting a commission.We hope to be able to share news with you soon on whether there will be commissions paid on the
iPhone when it officially launches on the 11th July.In the meantime, you may see a rise in contract sales through the reports and also in your
TradeDoubler accounts. The iPhone orders will be deleted along with other returned/cancelled orders
so you can expect any increase from the iPhone to be cancelled out at the end of the month.Any questions, let me know.
jason.fuller@tradedoubler.com
Personally I’m holding out for the Nokia N96 instead.
Interview with super affiliate Keir McConomy / Spear.co.uk
Keir McConomy isn’t as well known as some of the US based super affiliates but when I heard him speak at the February Buy.at retail vertical it was clear straight away he knows about SEO and affiliate marketing.
Luckily Keir has agreed to this interview so we can see exactly what a super affiliate is and how an affiliate company can drive more sales in a year than the GDP of some small countries.
Your website, www.Spear.co.uk, describes the company as “one of the country’s leading super-affiliate companies”. Can you explain exactly what this entails?
Back in the early days of affiliate marketing, many affiliates, including myself, started as one-man band affiliates working from their bedrooms. “Super affiliate” is a term coined recently in the media to describe affiliates who have grown into large, professional companies. Spear is regarded as one of the leading affiliates in the country in terms of the volume of sales we generate and the size of the company.
I understand that last year Spear drove over £75 million in sales for your merchant partners. Can you share some other interesting stats with us? (eg number of campaigns, number of staff, number of sites, monthly uniques to your network etc).
Sure. Spear currently employ 25 staff. We have offices in the UK and in Poland. We specialise in SEO & PPC. We run affiliate campaigns in the UK, USA & Europe. We have multi-lingual capabilities and run campaigns in almost every European country. We currently have 1000+ active PPC campaigns and 1000+ live websites in our network. Obviously these range from very small to very big campaigns.
What is your role within the company and how did you get into affiliate marketing?
I am the owner and Managing Director of Spear.co.uk. I first discovered Search Engine Marketing and Affiliate Marketing back in 2002 when I ran a web development company. I have been passionate about it ever since. Spear was setup as a dedicated Search Engine Marketing / Affiliate Marketing company in 2004 after selling my previous company.
During your session at the buy.at Retail Seminar you mentioned how your company switched focus from organic SEO to PPC a few years ago before re-focussing your efforts on building your natural rankings during 2007.
What are the main challenges you see affiliates facing when they try to compete in natural search and how are you overcoming them?
SEO comprises 2 areas, 1) on-page optimisation & 2) link-building.
In my opinion anyone can be trained to do the on-page optimisation bit. It is not rocket science. There is enough best-practice information out there in books, forums, etc. that anyone can learn to do that part. I believe links are the most important part of SEO. In my opinion it is 70% link-building and 30% on-page. Being successful at link-building is not something that can be easily trained. There is no set formula. You need to be a creative thinker and think outside the box about the possible sources to generate links from and the methods to achieve this.
The ability to get large volumes of high-quality links is what differentiates exceptional SEO companies from mediocre SEO companies. This is why we excel, as we happen to be damn good at this!
Last year Google threatened the business model of some large affiliate sites when they indicated they were not interested in having search results appearing in their index. Do you think this is a major concern to affiliates and how are you insulating your network against this threat?
I don’t see this as a major problem at all. It is technically very difficult for Google to prevent this due to all the different methods by which different websites construct their searches. It is 12 months on since that article and search results are still showing in the SERPS.
Also, I think it is worth differentiating between the 2 categories of sites referred to in that article. The first category are large, well-established shopping comparison sites like Shopping.com and Bizrate. The second are spam “scraper” sites that scrape content as search engine fodder and put ads on the page. In my opinion the first category of sites has a valid place in SERPS. If a user is looking for a “digital picture frame” and the link takes them to a page on one of the shopping sites that compares all the latest digital picture frames and has unique content, reviews, etc. then that is adding value to the user and the SERPS. I can see why people would argue that the second category of sites is not adding value and should not be in SERPS.
One of the key issues facing affiliate sites is being able to make the jump from being “just an affiliate site” into a legitimate business able to attract attention from the mainstream press. Have you any tips for making this transition? How hard do you find link building & marketing for affiliate sites?
This is interesting as this is what we are going through currently. Previously we designed affiliates sites solely for PPC & SEO purposes and to drive traffic into merchant sites. Now our business model is changing and instead of building hundreds of new small affiliate sites we are now focusing on developing large-scale real online businesses that will be built into big online brands. For instance, we have a new brand launching in July this year that is going to be massive! It goes far beyond a normal affiliate site. It is a sophisticated online business that has taken a team of people nearly a year to build. It is a proper business in that it genuinely adds value to the user and serves a function and is not just there to generate traffic through to the merchant. The aim is to build this into a household brand and a massive multi-million pound business in its own right.
My tips would be as follows:
- 1) Pick a specific sector to specialise in
- 2) Look what competitors are doing. Pick the best bits from each competitor. Aim to do what they do but better
- 3) Buy the most expensive domain you can afford as this is your brand. It is much more costly rebranding at a later date if the site is a success
- 4) Don’t scrimp on branding. Make the site look like professional company
- 5) Aim for repeat business on site rather than one-hit affiliate sales
- 6) Include community element and User Generated Content (UGC) – get users doing the work for you!
Every week I receive emails from people who are interesting in starting out in affiliate marketing but don’t quite know how. What are your top tips to somebody new to the industry?
It is tough if you are just starting out without lots of cash, resources, etc. Many of the big money sectors are already dominated by the big players. Pick a niche sector and focus on being the best within that sector. Look at what the competitors are doing and aim to do it better than them.
Thanks Keir for the interview, personally I found it fascinating and I’m sure most of the readers here enjoyed it too.
Mobile phone site for sale
Last week Blogstorm was on auto pilot while I was away skiing. This week I hope to offload some affiliate sites that have been untouched for some time.
The first to go is bjij.com a site that’s been online since early 2005. This is a unique opportunity for somebody to get a headstart in the lucrative mobile industry, the site would work well with either Adsense or affiliate programs.
Automatic keyword inserting affiliate plugin for WordPress
Today we are releasing a new plugin for WordPress that allows you to monetize your long tail traffic better than ever before. The plugin works by taking the keyword that a visitor used to find your site in any major search engine and turns it into an affiliate link.
This plugin works great on product sites and is especially useful if you send visitors to sites like Amazon & Ebay as the visitor will be given a cookie and you get credit for future purchases.
You can customise the link to go anywhere including your site search page if you don’t want to sell products. Screenshots of how it works are below. Please note that I don’t use it on Blogstorm so don’t try to make it work.
To install:
- Upload affiliateplugin.php to your plugins folder
- Edit buy.php to include your Ebay publisher id or change the link to somewhere else as you wish
- Upload buy.php to your main directory
- Activate the plugin
- Go into your WordPress > Options > Affiliate link options menu and change the link suffix & prefix
- Add the code below to your Single Post page wherever you want the ad to appear
<?php $referer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
ebay_ads($referer); ?>
Update: You might also like to integrate these scripts-
Redirect outbound affiliate links
Visitor searches on Google & clicks on your site
Keywords are turned into an affiliate link
Visitor clicks on the affiliate link
Agencies Managing Affiliate & Search campaign’s together
This is a guest post by Matthew Oxley. Matthew is an Affiliate manager for Brilliant Media, a full service media agency in Leeds.
Whether you’re an agency, consultant or maybe running your marketing activities online you may find yourself managing both the search campaign and affiliate campaign’s for one website. When contemplating such a scenario it might not always be clear whether it’s an opportunity or a potential hazard. While on one hand the potential for massive synergies exist, on the other a potentially troublesome conflict of interest needs to be managed. So how do you find the synergies without compromising your integrity?
Page Domination
Perhaps one of the best benefits of having control of both campaigns’ here is the potential to achieve search page domination. Consider the following search engine page: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Sky.
Here we can see that every single link above the fold on this SERP is a road towards Sky – whether that be through the agency PPC link, an affiliate link or the organic listings.
Clearly such level of domination is not always possible to achieve, since we have less control over the natural results, but covering all/most of the visible paid listings on a page is a good start to blocking out your competitors.
What’s important to such a strategy however is having positive pro-active agreements with your affiliates about where to appear – good, well-managed affiliates will be happy to agree taking specific positions on a page, meaning you’re not creating a price war over what would otherwise be a well priced term?
Strategic coverage
Expanding on the last point further, affiliates can also you gain presence on keyterms/services/products in a strategic way. What about those products where the PPC is just too expensive but you need a presence?
Affiliates can strategically come in here and get you organic or vertical search results which might well be cost effective. Don’t be afraid to share such information with your affiliates – trusted partners will welcome the chance to help reach your business goals, but do be prudent about *which* affiliates you work with on this basis – a mass email of keyterms for instance, wouldn’t be advisable here.
Conversely it can also be beneficial to share particularly effective terms with affiliates too. As well as the search domination reasons already mentioned, you may simply want to maximise a good source of leads. It may not be common for merchants to share their keywords with affiliates, but if generates more business then it shouldn’t be discounted – for a start you’ll have a base of very happy & loyal affiliates.
Trust
Ultimately a lot of managing both channels however, comes down to trust and integrity. Synergising channels shouldn’t and needn’t be about trying to steal your affiliates intelligence and use it on your own PPC campaign, but rather working together in a smart and transparent way.
Some affiliates know & understand that merchants, especially new ones, will have expanding search campaigns of their own, and often such affiliates are happy to help. Other affiliates will want to keep their keywords, content and knowledge a secret, and if you want the business from those affiliates you’ll have to respect that too.
Turning an affiliate website into a legitimate business
Today SelfMadeMinds.com has an interview with super affiliate Ling Valentine of Lings Lease Cars. Ling is a great example of somebody who has managed to turn an affiliate website into a real business that gets a lot of press coverage.
Ling is famous for being on the Dragons Den TV show and has been featured in almost every major newspaper in the UK. A huge amount of traffic comes to her website after people search for “Lings Cars” in Google, how many other affiliate sites have this strong a brand?
HungryHouse.co.uk gets Dragons Den funding
Despite not ranking for it’s own name on Google*, online takeaway website hungryhouse.co.uk won £100,000 of funding tonight from 2 of the Dragons on the BBC’s Dragons Den.
Duncan Bannatyne and James Caan invested for a performance related stake of 25% each with a 20% stake to be returned if targets are hit.
The site is still very new and doesn’t cover many areas outside London but it’s interesting to see Dragons investing in affiliate sites again, even one like this where the potential revenue is only 9% of a sale which probably averages around £15.
What do you think about the site?
* Since the program finished 2 hours ago the site has come from nowhere to 1st for the term “hungry house”. Google using query and toolbar data to correct itself in real time?
