Affiliate Blog

so I’ve decided to open up one of my sites to the affiliate community, basically, affiliates are free to add as many articles to the site as they wish, with as many affiliate links or links to any site they wish, they can even put easy content units on there if they wish, the only big restriction is that there’s no adult content or spam, which I’ll be checking regularly. The site is totally Do-follow and my theory is that as more ppl start to post on the site, the sites ranking will improve, along with the PR, which will flow back into the sites it’s linking to. Additionally specific posts should rank for niche terms which will help support each individual post.

Its long been my idea to try and do something that builds upon the affiliate community and embodies the spirit of co-operation and mutual support that’s so common in this industry. as a result the whole project is totally free and all i get out of it is google adsense commission, which will help pay hosting fees and ultimately support linkbuilding again that will help the site rank and thus support any sites linked from it.

Why should i use it -

Its free backlinks, your only cost is an article of any length

Its not spammy, we’ll be policing this regularly

Its dead easy to use – wordpress, couldn’t be simpler

It supports the industry

It will help your site rank better!

You can use your own affiliate links!

how do I sign up?

sign up here, with your name and email and a password will be sent and you can being posting!

yes really, its that simple and yes, its that good.

I jsut found out off a us affiliate site that Amazon have decided that affiliate links posted via twitter will no longer be acepted and commissions will be declined.

Many merchants and networks prohibit affiliate links from being posted on forums or in blog comments and state links need to be on your own site. However no one has ever set a precedence for social media like Twitter and Facebook.( source)

This seems like an interesting move originally aimed at tackling those spammy affiliates who give us all a bad name, but again it seems like  broad stroke of a brush in tackling the issue rather than one that closly scrutinizes how affiliates market products, again spammy affiliates have ruined it for the rest of us. I can understand why merchants would choose to use such a strategy, but perhaps a better strategy to take is to create new ways of tracking traffic from these sources or dealing with it on a case by case basis.

Existem are an affiliate management agency recent awarded several prizes at the A4U awards, an industry awards ceremony like the oscars, for affiliate marketing.

They are having an excellent BBQ down in plymounth for affiliates, networks and merchants alike and is a perfect example of engaging with affiliates. you can book a place for this BBQ here.

as an affiliate there are millions of ways to generate affiliate commissions, some affiliates build thin one-page websites, whilst other affiliates create massive generic sites, there are affiliates who only work on discount codes and affiliates who work only on PPC, ultimately, its important that any affiliate understands the priciples of affiliate marketing and how these different methods work.

personally, I’ve chosen to focus on creating niche blogs, i decided to use this method as I’m pretty good at spotting niche markets and with limited tech skills, setting up a blog and the related ‘bits’ is something I can just about manage on my own, as a result my commissions haven’t been as high as other affiliates and the process of getting sites up and ranking in google is a little slower, but what it has meant is that I can be really focused and have the freedom to work on subjects that interest me.

Using a blog allows me to add content and link to merchants with out the hassle of digging into code and using wordpress means that i have a pretty broad select of themes and plugins to add to my blogs saving me time on setting up sites and giving me more time to focus on the marketing of the site.

as far as niche marketing is concerned, by allowing me to work on specific niches at a time, i can really do my research a focus on one subject at a time, this save me time as I can often just drill down on one subject, create a blog and leave the blog to work on a new blog.

Whilst my techinque might not be to everyones tastes and may not earn as much as the big hitting affiliates, its a proof of concept and does allow me to earn a little extra pocket money on the side.

affiliate management is a key part of any affiliate program, affiliate managers are highly skilled analyist and negotiators, we’re people-people and entreprenural by our very nature, infact, affiliate managers have to be in order to do the job we do, we have to negotiate deals and spot opportunities in a heart beat as well as manage the wider picture of the campaign over all.

Affiliate management is made up of several components -

Affiliate recruitment- Affiliate recruitment involves finding relevant affiliates and encouraging them to sign up to the campaign, as affiliates are essentially partnering with merchants they are free to work with any merchant they choose. typically affiliate recruitment involves, find affiliates based on the niche and products a merchant sells, finding their contact information and contacting them, tools such as Twitter, MSN, facebook, Linkedin, LinkCapture and market samurai and syntryx are used to help this process but ultimately its ‘knocking on doors’ and is very time consuming but necissary. Contacting affiliates takes the form of email, snail mail, msn, telephone, any form of communication is used and ideally personalized to get affiliates attention and ultimately encourage them to sign up.

Affiliate retention – affiliate retention occurs once affiliate have been recruited and ultimately this involves optimising affiliates for the program, affiliates need to be kept in the light of any changes and new promotions and need new and fresh content which can be provided by an affiliate manager, affiliates also need new creative and it is the affiliate managers responsibility to ensure this happens. Affiliates can be kept in the loop via emails, twitter, facebook and msn. Strategies need to be developed in order to incentivise affiliates to perform.

Campaign planning – planning any advertising campaign is an important part of marketing, its the same with an affiliate program, due to the nature of affiliate marketing a long term strategy needs to be taken making planning all that more important. Planning should include analysing the merchant site to ensure compliancy and a good checkout process, ensuring that commission levels are high enough to be competative and attract affiliates, ensuring there is a clear shedule of reporting and creative delivery as well as promotions between the affiliate, affiliate manager and the client.

Incentive planning – Planning incentives is important to ensure that there is enough PR for the affiliate program, it also helps to support and spike the interest of consumers and should be viewed as a core part of any affiliate program. Incentives should be geared towards getting a specific result, and should be planned with adquate time to allow implementation. Incentives can take the form of bonuses, tiered commission structures, prize draws and give-aways.

Affiliate policing – Affiliate marketing is all about closing a sale, for the most part this isn’t an issue, in that most affiliates will happily abided by the merchants terms and conditions, however, particularly in PPC, terms and conditions need to be very clear and well policed to prevent such things as brand name bidding and direct linking. AdsSpy.com, AdGooroo.com, iSpionage.com, HitWise.com, PoachMark by BrandVerity, KeywordSpy.com, SpyFU.com, KeyCompete.com, and The Search Monitor can be used to support this, and for monitoring true content affiliates google alerts and a good old google search can help indentify any new articles relating to a merchants affiliate program.

Tracking and program maintainance – whilst typically these would be convered by a tech team a good affiliate manager should understand how to setup tracking and the implications tracking has on a merchant site, they should be able to make recomendations on where best to place tracking to ensure that it the right perameters are being recorded in the tracking, and the right KPI’s are being tracked.

(in some cases) Billings and invoicing – in some cases there will be multiple networks as well as special partnerships with affiliates, these all need to be handled by an affiliate manager to ensure that the right results are being delivered, as a result some affiliate managers get involved in the billings and invoicing process.

One of the pains of being an affiliate especially a part time affiliate like me, is the sheer number of merchants, terms and conditions, voucher codes and all sorts of other restrictions put in place by merchants who, may or may not understand affiliate marketing. Networks typically take a back seat for most small affiliates when it comes to allowing affiliates to sign up to a campaign, which is fair enough, typically the network will rely on the merchant to approve their affiliates and the merchant can take a few weeks to go through, and even then as an affiliate you might not get approved, for what ever reason.

I’ve been using skimlinks, a tool designed as an amalgamation tool for affiliates and whilst its great, it doesn’t have a datafeed feature which as an affiliate i find invaluable, the great thing about skimlinks however, is that their approval process, whilst strict means that once accepted I can promote what ever merchant I like so long as I include a little snippet of code on the site, you might argue that tradedoubler have something similar but the difference is, with skimlinks I can start a site in this way rather than fussing with the code of an already setup site.

I think that if networks were more strict about what affiliates they took onboard and if there was a universal terms and conditions that applied to all merchant it would make life a hell of alot easier for true content affiliates such as myself.

I agree that there might be issues with merchant who have particuar requirements and it’s not a one size fits all solution, but time is money and networks should support affiliates by providing a quick and efficent sign up process, Affiliate Future and Webgains are better at this than most. I think networks could take a page out of skimlinks in terms of managing affiliates and helping to support affiliate.

I’ve been mulling over this partly out of curiosity and partly because some merchants I do affiliate management need this kind of information to make decisions on how to incentivise their affiliates, I touched on the fact that you need to budget for these here, and that affiliates like to be incentivised with ‘things money can’t buy’, I posed the question ‘whats the best ever affiliate incentive you either seen or won, ever, in all history?’ to affiliates  (here) and i got some fantastic responses.

The Barbados Trip by Affiliate Future came up quite a few times and no surprise really when you consider its an all expenses paid vacation in Barbados for a week along with all the trappings of a millionare lifestyle, a week of fun in the sun with drunken affiliates.

BuyaGifts trip to Las Vegas came up – again a big trip for affiliates, some even got a change to fly fighter Jets which was pretty cool to say the least, they also got to go to a gun range, drive indy cars and visit gentlemans clubs, not a bad present considering most affiliate would shell out an arm and a leg for this if they did it themselves.

One affiliate mentioned he got a Limited Edition Rolex Submariner as well as several other highly collectable watches. IWoot got a mention for their ‘Heli-boarding’ expereince, and Fontastic apprently offered up a car. BT despite all their misgivings gave away a holiday to Paris for two, Books direct gave away £17,000 in cash to two affiliates and Affiliate Window Christmas incentives got a mention as well. one of the most original came from a US network that rented out the playboy mansion, complete with bunnies for a weekend for affiliates.

so whilst the competition for the best ever affiliate incentive firmly rests on the Affiliate Future Barbados Trip, the question still remains, what makes a great affiliate incentive that will actually get affiliates motivated?

Some affiliate sites are earning in the region of £xx,xxx,xxx a year – to give you an example one of the key affiliates in the uk is made about £295.68 off one of the programs I manage, so if you multiply that by the 5000 campaigns in the uk you get £1,478,400 in commissions each MONTH! OK, lets be conservative and say that only half those merchants actually made a sale for them,  you’re still looking at £739,000 a month or £8,870,400 a year.

Because affiliate marketing is such big business and there are many affiliates who’ve become millionares as a result, incentives are going to need to be pretty darn tasty, I remember once talking to an affiliate about a football jersey he’d won and he mentioned ‘forget about the t-shirt, I can buy that myself’ and that pretty much sums it up.

At the end of the day affilaites are in the game to make money, incentives are a perk, an extra push. If you really want an incentive to make waves, its got to be something that money can’t buy, this is why the barbados trip, the playboy mansion and flying jet fighters made such a difference. Giving away free samples may be nice for affiliates but don’t expect sales to sky rocket as a result of a free sample pack, if you want to make a real difference, offer up a space flight or a dinner date with Alan Sugar.

Affiliate marketing involves a lot of networking both for affiliates to meet other affiliate and for networks agencies and merchants to get in on the mix and meet even more affiliates, its a great way of negotiating deals and having a good night with like minded people, I’ve not been to an event where the entreprenural spirit is as active as at an affiliate event, and its a warm and informal place to do business, if you’ve never been i seriously recommend you go along and have a gander. On 29th July 2009 at Imbibe Bar 173 Blackfriers Road London SE1 8ER 12 of the largest UK affiliate networks will be sponsoring an affiliate get together free of charge with a BBQ and complimentry drinks, as demand is quite high places are limited to 2 people per company and I highly recommend going along, you can get the flyer here and sign up here.

I’ll be there so if you see me be sure to give me a shout!

Affiliate marketing isn’t cheap, its not just about paying on a cost per sale or CPA. Ultimately a merchant should look on affiliate marketing as business partnerships, where the merchant is the supplier and the affiliate is the distributer. Put simply, the merchant has products and needs customers; affiliates have potential customers but need products to sell.

Many networks and agencies will have you believe that affiliate marketing is as straight forward as pay on results, however if you consider the various aspects of an affiliate program you’ll realize there are some hidden costs.

lets go over the basics -

1. commission – this is the amount that will be paid to the affiliate in one of three models – fixed fee, percentage of sale, or percentage of lifetime value of customer.

2. override – typically, networks will charge an override, a commission of the commission, this is usually 30% of the commission, so if a product is £100 and commission is £10 then override would be £3, and the total cost for commissions to the merchant would be £13.

3. Fixed fees – both networks and agencies charge fixed fees, typically if you use an affiliate management agency the fee for a network will be lower or cut altogether. Fees range from £1000+ a month and are very much dependant on the campaign and the level of management needed, whilst this is can be an expensive cost what you are paying for here is the expereince, planning, reporting and management that will make all the difference to a new affiliate program.

4. affiliate incentives -  whilst not an obvious cost, this needs to be budgeted for and can be expensive, when setting up an affiliate program you should have some budget to allocated to creating incentives for affiliates this will greatly aid affiliate management.

5. consumer incentives, typically merchants will already have allocated for this, if not, this should be considered as part of the planning for an affiliate program.

asides from these costs you’ll also need to factor in the costs for techinal team and creatives, both of which are required as part of any affiliate program.

I spent the weekend running experiments rather than watching the tennis, and I have to admit it was a very successful weekend from a learning perspective.

First I tried the ECU wp-o-matic technique, and it took me about a hour to setup the site, figure out how to work a cron job and build a feed in ECU, after this stuff had been sorted, i tested the site and it worked amazingly well. I did a second test on another exisiting site and it took me 20 minutes including setting up a cron job and building the feed. The only down side was whilst there was content in each post, it was standard and I still needed to add more to these posts, but this was easily solved and a longer term part of optimising the site, overall, this is one technique I’ll definately be using, and definately work the £19.99 a month on ECU Pro, which you can get here. I’ll be watching the performance of the sites closely to see what happens however given that this is a technique for populating a site and isn’t related to SEO or the performance of an affiliate site, i would suggest this was a success.

Next i setup a small site to test a theory based on the conversation I had with a Black hat made-for-adsense affiliate. The main reason for me doing this was to see if there was anything that could be learned that could be used to improve the performance of a legitimate affiliate, initially this strategy looked like an amazing way of filling out a blog in a matter of minutes, once the blog was made, it was literally – fill out a for and press a button and your entire site would be content full. amazing, however, the content was no doubt duplicate and would only really benefit niche marketing. Still it was a worthwhile test.