Screen Shot

Promoted listings are moved to the top of your search page and removed ones are sent to the bottom of the page.

What implications this is going to have is too early to tell, but with everyone customising their results (well those with google accounts) google are going to take note of whats hot and whats not.

Could it be open to abuse? again too early to tell no doubt the black hats are already on the case.

What do you think of this new feature?

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Google Promote and Remove now everyone can be Number 1

One thing I would like to see tackled by the networks is the problem of expired codes and in my opinion this could be tackled by serving them up using JavaScript, by using this method the Code, the Offer and the Expiry Date need never be wrong again on an affiliate site (providing the merchant / network updates it).

This would work great on content sites too, where I am likely to use the current code for a merchant when I write an article, it would be fantastic if the code simply updated or disappeared after the expiry date.

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Expired Voucher Codes A Possible Solution

One of the main hurdles about extending my stay was that I hadn’t taken a laptop and there was work to be done, “no problem” said my good friend Mark Russell MD of Existem AM “we can set you up with a desk and computer in the office”. So thats how I became an insider at Existem Affiliate Management.

Working and observing at the office was a real eye opener, now I’ve been in this industry long enough to know the role of an affiliate marketing agency and have come across the good, the bad and the ugly in my time, well I have to tell you now these guys are great, (sorry Hannah honorary guy for a moment), and I’m not just saying that because they are friends of mine.

The whole team is dedicated to the cause of getting the very best out of each and every affiliate program they manage, the cogs are always turning as they provide the all important cohesion between the time honoured triumvirate of merchant, network and affiliate, its easy to see why Existem-am are dual award winners at the prestigious a4uAwards.

From an affiliate point of view Mark, Bruce (must not forget the genial Mr Clayton) and Hannah are a constant source of inspiration, they provide a plethora of voucher codes, content, creatives, best sellers lists and much more, all of which can be found on the excellent Existem Affiliate Management Blog. All that stuff doesn’t just do itself it takes a lot of bloody hard work.

Thank you Mark, Bruce and especially Hannah for making me welcome during my stay in Plymouth, I will return.

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Inside Existem Affiliate Management

Anyway I don’t like being an old whinge bag and I usually leave the complaining to others so in order to start looking at the bright side of things again I need to get a couple of things off my chest.

Merchants changing the URL structure of their websites… why oh why (like the points of view style?) can’t they put in place some form of mod rewrite / .htaccess to redirect old urls to new ones, not only will this save affiliates having a load of broken links it will also help the merchants own seo as the search engines will not be finding a million 404’s.

Reversals of sales - any merchant that has had an internet presence for any length of time knows what percentage of reversals they are likely to have, why not reduce the commission by this factor and pay out on everything, result happy affiliates and less admin to do.

Deeplinking - there really is no excuse in this day and age for an affiliate network not to have simple deeplinking in place, I wrote about Affiliate deep linking tools some time back, and these are excellent however, deeplinking should be as simple as adding the target url to the end of the affiliate code, its not rocket science.

Finally more a niggle than a moan, when you sign up to RSS by Email please don’t use an email address that sends an out of office reply because usually these go out between midnight and 2am and I really do hope you are out of the office at that time.

Right rant over now I hopefully can get get back to the business of trying to scratch a living.

If you have an opinion on any of my whinges or if you have a  moan of your own please leave a comment below.

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Mr Grumpy Affiliate Has Another Moan

Don’t get me wrong pictures in emails are great, they stand out and get noticed however when…

… there is nothing I can use as a base of an article.

So merchants if you like your shiny graphical emails thats cool, but if you can send  out a text version too you may get more promotion.

OK yeah some affiliates will just copy and paste the content as is on to their websites and say job done, but the true content affiliates will say “hey I can use this”, a rewrite (thats what the thesaurus is for) and a bit of embellishment and hey presto a piece of fairly unique content.

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Why I dislike graphical emails

So what have I done, well obviously my established sites take precedence so have been publishing lots of content for them, thanks for everyone who sends me articles it saves so much time and gets you more exposure too.

Some of the other things I’ve been up to come as a direct result of being at the a4uexpo here are a few of them.

One of the first things that Joost de Valk said in his presentation on wordpress SEO was that an RSS button cannot be big enough, so I am putting that to the test.

Also on various blogs I am implementing some of the wordpress plugins that Joost suggested.

Next up decided it prudent to test the Sunpress plugin that Sunshine have developed so have put it on an old European Holiday site of mine many thanks to James Zielinski for his hard work getting the search function running for me.

Also I am planning yet another new site specifically working with another merchant whose affiliate manager I had a good chat with at the expo, seems I have been an affiliate of theirs for a while, in all honesty I had not even put up a link, so I have redressed that situation and the sales have started coming, this would never have happened if this particular affiliate manager hadn’t been at a4uexpo.

Now I am working through my notes that I made at the expo lots of things still to do, some of the notes seem a bit disjointed but happily Matt Wood and the Existem events team have made most of the a4uexpo Presentations Now Available on SlideShare, which serves as a refresher, and has given me chance to check out some of the things I missed.

Now as if that isn’t enough to be going on with Ben Jesson and Dr Karl Blanks of Conversion Rates Experts, regular readers will know Iam a real fan of their work, have published a fabulous article on their blog 14 free tools that reveal why people abandon your website, so that has given me a stack of other things to do.

So over to you, What have you done since a4uexpo?

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What I have done since a4uexpo

I wrote that paragraph just after a4uexpo 2007 and it has to be said I was not disappointed, a4uexpo 2008 the Affiliate Marketing Conference and Exhibition was absolutely awesome in every department.

Highlights were many, it was great to see a higher proportion of merchants about, both as delegates and exhibitors, the social side as always was great nice to cement old friendships, and forge new ones, over a couple of drinks.

I wasn’t disappointed at all by the sessions that I highlighted in my article last week:

• Joost de Valk was excellent with his walk though of essential plugins for improving seo with wordpress.
• The Sunshine Boys, Chris and Alan launched their “secret weapon” an innovative wordpress plugin which I am going to enjoy playing with. They also have knocked up a trio of great wordpress travel themes to make getting that first travel site off the ground even easier.
• Karl and Ben of Conversion Rate Experts gave a great talk about about a few methods of converting website visitors, I was particularly pleased to see that there was a good representation of merchants in the audience. This talk was essentially a follow up to the one they gave last year if you never saw that click here to watch the video.

Other sessions I was particularly pleased to have attended were:

• Hero Grigoraki of Webgains and her excellent talk about the use of Voucher Codes, Hero was ably supported by an expert panel. Hopefully this has helped demystify how voucher codes work and the different ways they can be used, nice boost for my ego when Hero put up a slide featuring two of my content sites Fashion Style You and UK Fashion Boutiques as an example of using promotion codes on sites which are not solely dedicated to vouchers and discounts.
• I was very pleased I made the effort on day 2 to attend the early session presented by Gary Beal of StickyEyes, Gary spoke about a selection of great (and mostly free) tools for analysis of PPC and SEO campaigns.

Other Sessions I would have liked to have seen but couldn’t be in 2 places at once include:

• Mark Russell and Keith Budden with their talk about effective communication and incentivisation of affiliates, I appreciate this was aimed at Merchants and Agencies however I feel it never hurts to look at things from another perspective.
• I suspect Internet Marketing Howlers uncovered was a fun session.
• Practical PPC Strategies would no doubt have proved useful, I am currently running only a little PPC but any improvement in ROI is always welcome, and who knows what little joke google may have in store on the run up to Christmas, PPC may have to pay a larger role in my activities if I get messed about too much.

Hopefully I can pick up Video or slides from these presentations.

All in all a4uexpo 2008 was a tremendous success, I’m sat at home now with a million fresh ideas wondering just how I’m going to find time to implement them all, I have more than enough to keep myself busy until next years events, but that said a4uexpo 2009 can’t come round quick enough, bring it on.

Dates for your diary A4uexpo 2009

Amsterdam 28th and 29th April 2009

London 14th and 15th October 2009

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Awesome A4uexpo 2008

Monday 13th October

A4uexpo 2008 day -1 the Ignite Party in the Upper Deck bar at the Novotel Hotel, ExCeL from 7pm, a great opportunity to catch up with friends in the industry over a few cheeky beers and the added bonus of being able to collect my conference pass which saves time for Tuesday possibly equating to an extra ½ hours sleep.

Tuesday 14th October

11:00 - 12:00 WORDPRESS SEO AND OPTIMISATION STRATEGIES - speaker Joost De Valk.

As around 90% of my income comes via my blogging efforts this hopefully will tell me where I’m getting it right and where I’m getting it wrong and most importantly what I can do to improve.

14:00 - 15:00 SO YOU DON’T DO TRAVEL? - speakers Chris Clarkson and Alan Gilmour.

Short lunch break on day one for me, Chris Clarkson and Alan Gilmour launch the sunshine.co.uk Top Secret Project, a revolutionary new tool for affiliates, if everything else Sunshine have done since they launched their affiliate program is anything to go by this is sure to be mind blowing and I am convinced it will put my haphazard attempts at being a travel affiliate back on track.

Wednesday 15th October

12:30 - 13:30 HOW TO INCREASE CONVERSIONS: A NEW APPROACH, BASED ON PSYCHOLOGICAL METHODS - speakers Dr Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson

The highlight of a4uexpo 2007 for was the session that these guys did and if this is anywhere near as good it will keep me in ideas and strategies for months.

On both days there are a couple of other interesting looking sessions which I may well pop into but I don’t want to plan too much ahead and end up all sessioned out. The ones mentioned above are ones I do not intend missing.

Highlight of a4uexpo 2007

I mentioned above how much I enjoyed the session by Dr Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson so here is a video of it enjoy.

Conversion Rate Experts session from a4uexpo 2007 from Affiliates4u on Vimeo

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What I am looking forward to at a4uexpo 2008 and one of the highlights of 2007

Another great research tool one which looks at historic orders is the Paid On Results Basket Data Report, here is a quick overview.

Log onto your POR account and click Basket Data in the reports menu and you get a report something like this.

Hovering over the title of the product gives a thumbnail pic and some product data.

Clicking the product title reveals a sub-menu:

• View monthly performance for this product
• Visit the Merchants website
• Create Product Links

Options 2 & 3 are self explanatory click option 1 reveals yet another useful report:

Suffice to say all this data is excellent, it reveals the type of product that is selling, this in turn poses several questions:

• do I promote the best sellers more?
• should I try and increase the exposure I give to other products?
• are the best sellers products I have written most about?
• why is x product not selling even though I spent a lot of time and effort pushing it?

etc etc, hopefully you get the picture and I’m sure you will come up with many questions and ideas of your own that can be generated from this extremely useful tool.

While the POR Basket Data Report is a powerful tool not enough merchants are using it, so far you can get reports for:

• Dead Good Undies
• Ducti
• Everything But The Music
• Freemans
• Grattan
• HQhair
• Kaleidoscope
• Magscriber
• Miller Brothers
• Millet Sports
• Pressies 4 Princesses
• Prezzy Box
• QED-uk
• RedSave
• The Funky Hair Group

I hope a few more merchants realise its worth in the near future.

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Paid On Results Basket Data Report - a useful research tool

Allow me to introduce to you a selection of industry professionals from across the spectrum of UK Affiliate Marketing.

The Merchant … Naomi Brown of Firebox.com

Affiliates4u.tv - Naomi Brown from Firebox.com from Peter on Vimeo.

The Affiliate Network - James (J Lil) Little of Affiliate Future

affiliates4u.tv at ASE Boston, Affiliate Future from Peter on Vimeo.

The Affiliate Marketing Agency - Bruce Clayton of Existem AM

Affiliates4u.tv - Bruce Clayton from Existem-am from Peter on Vimeo.

The Affiliate - John Lammerton of Big Idea Media

Affiliates4u.tv - John Lamerton, Big Idea Media from Peter on Vimeo.

Well there you are I hope this gives you an insight into the type of people you are likely to bump into at a4uexpo.

a4uexpo 2008 is on the 14th and 15th of October at Excel London click here for more details.

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So just who will be at this a4uexpo thingy?