Friday was a good post day I received a couple of bottles of wine from my good friend and affiliate podcaster extraordinaire Fraser Edwards.

Fraser has recently acquired the websites www.redwine.co.uk and www.whitewine.co.uk in order to get the word out rather than mess about with business cards he decided to get a few bottles of Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc printed up instead and distribute them throughout the internet community.

So far I have enjoyed the Merlot here is my short review.

The dominant features of this wine are black cherry, blackberry, a trace of vanilla and just a hint of nutmeg, all in a well structured wine with soft tannins. It is the ideal type of wine to age, because it has a great deal of character plus satisfactory structure for lengthy development over time. You could if you wanted drink it directly with food, or lay it down for a few years to mature.

Actually those tasting notes are complete bollocks partly made up and partly plagiarism, while some of it may be true and it was an excellent bottle of red I’m no wine connoisseur more Ozzy Osborne than Oz Clarke in my drinking habits.

Incidentally Fraser is currently running a competition where you can win a case of wine this closes at the end of July 2009, look on the sites for more details or follow @whiteandred on twitter and re-tweet to enter.

Those of you who work with me and a few of you that don’t are probably aware that my main area is fashion, as you may appreciate there are a lot of fashion merchants out there and its a often a case of me picking the easy options when choosing what to write about, if I have content about a merchant I am more likely to give them prominence than if I have to do my own research and totally write articles from scratch.

Don’t get me wrong I am not against writing stuff from the ground up and probably between 6 and 12 articles daily are all my own work.

So what do I require to push your programme?

In a word CONTENT!!!

Unique content is best and it will push you to the top of the pile, I have a wonderful agency person who sends me 3 unique articles a week for one of the merchants she looks after, consequently 3 articles a week get published for that merchant.

So what kind of stuff am I looking for?

Well the answer is absolutely anything fashion related, short articles work best for me in the 150 – 200 word region.

One article will get you exposure, one a month gets you regular exposure, one a week… etc you get the picture.

Tell me and my users about your brands, your ranges, your new stuff, your best sellers, your clearance department, celebrities that use your products, media attention they have gained, anything really, it is all useful.

If you send me unique content I will use it.

If you send me generic content I may use it.

If you send me nothing I don’t have a starting point.

What else can you do?

Let me know when your products have been on TV or in the papers and magazines, the fresher the better, I got a heads up about a range of products that were featured on a Channel 4 programme recently, so I wrote a short piece about them, it wasn’t fashion incidentally but a health product which I could use on the main fashion site, from the moment I published they literally started flying off the shelves and I know for a fact a lot more publishers than me benefited, as the product was not unique to one merchant, a few more sales were diverted in the direction of the one I promoted thanks to being guided by the agency looking after them.

I have just realised it is a year as of yesterday that I wrote about this very same subject How To Push My Buttons And Get Me To Promote Your Wares just shows not a lot has changed.

A big thank you to everyone who sends me content, has already sent me content and is about to send me content.

Being a bit of a lazy blogger its unusual for me to post more than 3 or 4 times a month on Keith’s Affiliate Marketing Blog often its a lot less, so it takes something special to make me do two posts in one day.

I had just hit publish on the Hootsuite article when my daughter told me Interlink had left a package for me, think she was a bit disappointed it wasn’t for her as she is 18 tomorrow and covered in chicken pox so not able to celebrate with her mates.

Well the mystery package turned out to be my prize from The All Up And On What Would You Buy Challenge run by Existem Affiliate Management.

I have always been of the mindset that you have to be in it to win it although with this one it was a little different, I had been looking for an angle to promote all-up-and-on and here was the perfect hook 3 products from their range in 3 different price bands, so I spent a little time sifting through the site and couldn’t come up with inspiration for a single post, no it spawned two The All Up And On Challenge and In the Kitchen with All Up And On.

Anyway come judgment day I was lucky enough to be one of the winners and today took delivery of the awesome Hucks designchain™ which you can see below stuffed with a few affiliate essentials.

Thanks to @allupandon and @Existem_AM for this fabulous prize and for running such a fantastic winnable incentive.

Just like Willy Wonker in Charlie and the Chocolate factory, Books Direct are giving away ‘Golden Tickets’ and just like Charlie Bucket I have got my grubby affiliate mits on one.

“So whats the point?” I hear you say, well there could be up to 15,000 points.

Books Direct are currently running a brand bidding funded incentive prize draw.

Based on a suggestion by two affiliates Fraser Edwards and Paul Wheatley Books Direct stopped their privately run PPC activity and instead these two affiliates now run the campaign at no profit to themselves. All commissions that are generated through this activity is being put into a prize pool and this money is to be re-distributed to active affiliates on the Books Direct programme.  This experiment has now generated over £12,000 and the final pool could be as much as £15,000.

When the draw takes place 2 lucky golden ticket holders will share the pot, definitely an affiliate prize worth winning.

Full details of how to get your self your very own golden ticket can be seen on the a4uforum in the article Books Direct Brand Bidding – Prize Pool

404

Page not found

The page you requested cannot be found on the server

Basically its an invite to the user to hit the back button and disappear from the website, also its a potential sale lost.

On the high street if a product is sold out its place on the shelf is soon filled by something else, so why not on the web.

Simply revamp the 404 page to say something like:

We are sorry but the product you are looking for is currently not available,

however here are some similar items.

Then list a few items from the same category, this will make your site more sticky and improve the chances of converting the visitor to being a customer.

The potential of 404 pages is limitless, you could add a search box, a full list of departments, brands, ranges etc etc.

Take a look at your site statistics how many 404’s are you generating?

What if just 1% of them was converted to a sale?