Owner: Keith's Affiliate Marketing Blog URL:http://www.keithbond.co.uk Join Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 12:22:04 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: UK Affiliate Marketing Blog Site statistics:Click here
a4uexpo - what I'm looking forward to Day 2 2007-10-08 06:52:11 How do you follow what looks to be an excellent day 1 well for starters a4uexpo have teamed up with SES - Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch - who are running a series of talks throughout the day and I am sure to be popping into a couple of them, in particular the 3pm session - SEO on Zero Budget - Case Studies catches my eye.
Full Agenda for day 2
I'm afraid I haven't got day 2 mapped out as well as day one however there are a few things I am looking forward to, I will attend The Changing Nature of Search - speaker Dixon Jones MD of Receptional and also Affiliate Marketing - The benefits and opportunities for the B2B sector - speakers Bruce Clayton of Existem-am and Matt Bailey of dgmAffiliates.
All in all a4uexpo is set to be a sensational event and a showpiece for the UK affiliate marketing industry.
Heres a quick recap as to what you can expect over the 2 days of the event:
Access to over 40 educational sessions, keynote and panel discussions
Unlimited access to th
a4uexpo - what I'm looking forward to Day 1 2007-10-04 07:43:08 When the mail dropped on the mat this morning I was pleased so see my train tickets had arrived for my trip to London the for a4uexpo (why in this crazy mixed up county are 2 first class singles cheaper than a standard return).
I'm not yet caught up with work after last weeks Affiliate Summit and it has dawned on me that a4uexpo affiliate marketing conference at Excel London is just 3 weeks away.
Unless you have been living a a box for most of the year you will have seen the advertising:
40 presentations, 40 exhibitors, 1 awards ceremony, 3 networking parties and SES @ a4uexpo.
It is going to be massive, the biggest event in the history of UK affiliate marketing. So what am I looking forward to on Day one?
Can't leave out Wednesday night even though it is really day -1 so here goes.
Wednesday 24th October
Firstly my Hotel, when I knew for certain I would be attending in the middle of last month I checked out all the hotels on the Excel complex which include the likes of Novotel
CoReg Made Simple 2007-10-02 03:46:56 Co-registration aka coreg is something that I have never really looked at in the past, it has always seemed to me to be a bit of an enigma shrouded in mystery, and commissions of 10p and 20p that were being touted didn't give me the impetus to find out more, after all it takes a hell of a lot of 10p's to pay the mortgage.
I was intrigued yesterday morning when I saw this on John Lammerton's Blog Making money just got easier which explains how John and his company Big Idea Media, based in Plymouth, had become disillusioned with their existing coreg provider and decided to develop their own system to use on their PrizeBug site (PrizeBug is on Affiliate Future) all this happened back in 2005 and Big Idea Media quickly found that they were getting better statistics and better returns through this custom co-registration system than with their previous partner's system, so the decision was made to develop a fully fledged coreg system for everyone to use.
The result is easycoreg, launch Read more:Simple
Blog Experiment Update 1 2007-10-01 06:48:40 Time to give you a short update as to how things are progressing with Blog Experiment
Buying Content.
The Original four articles on HD Advice have been on the site twelve days now with a fifth outsourced article published yesterday.
In order to maximize potential revenue I have added a few static pages using the excellent content generators from Paid on results and Buy.at, a couple of examples - DVD Players utilizes content from Advanced MP3 Players which I made using the Paid on Results Content Creator and Blu-Ray DVDs was created using the Buy.at Content Engine, pages using these excellent tools are dynamic and update automatically when the respective product feeds are updated (so merchants keep your feeds fresh).
Additionally the Dixons programme on Affiliate Window announced that a £5 bonus would be added for any sales between 24th and 29th September of their Sky - Pay Once Watch Forever package so I deemed it relevant content and banged up an article about it. It worked I have ge Read more:Update
When Affiliate Summit Came To Town 2007-09-29 14:15:34 The affiliate marketing world has never really had any barriers online, all one big community working together towards a common goal, however we are all individuals all with our own preconceived ideas and notions, and many of us tend to stick to our own home market often due language barriers and very little understanding of the markets and demographics elsewhere in the world.
Yesterday went a little way to bringing down some of geographical barriers when the inaugural AffiliateSummit
UK was held at the Olympia Conference Centre in London.
You could say that the event started some fifteen hours earlier when Buy.at held the Affiliate Summit pre-party at the Firehouse in Cromwell road. If you have never been to a Buy.at event you have never lived, they are legendary, if there is ever an award for the most sociable affiliate network they will win hands down, as it is they have been nominated for 2 awards at the forthcoming a4uAwards. Any way I digress, the Buy.at party was once again an
Around and about in the uk affiliate marketing world 2007-09-24 14:43:52 Busy week this week in the UK internet and affiliate marketing arena's with Adtech London at Olympia on Wednesday and Thursday, which unfortunately I cant get to and Affiliate Summit London on Friday also at Olympia and I will be at this one. Which should nicely whet my appetite for the Inaugural a4uexpo Conference at Excel on October 25th and 26th .
There are a few excellent things going on in the UK at the moment too, here's some that caught my eye over the last few days.
Patrick Altoft (another Yorkshire based blogger) at Blogstorm has done a great mashup with google maps the Big List of UK Internet Marketing Blog email Patrick if you have a blog you want including.
Chris Frost has come up with The Perfect Affiliate Network, yes Chris I'll join your network.
Prezzybox have surpassed themselves with the Christmas creatives this year with video clips and a wordpress plugin amongst the innovations, a big thumbs up to Zak and the team, John Lammerton sums things up nicely Santa ha
Google now help with Sharing Stuff 2007-09-21 04:37:22 Google have launched a new social media concept which allows users to share web pages with their friends.
The service Shared Stuff allows you to share stuff in 3 different ways, you can set up your very own Shared Stuff page here is my page, or you can email stuff to your friends, finally you could simply post the page to some related social bookmarking sites.
Read more about Shared Stuff here this will tell you all you need to know about setting up and getting started with Shared Stuff.
Read more:Google
, Sharing
Blog Experiment Buying Content 2007-09-20 14:15:18 Last Friday I was working away on my websites, as you do, when an acquaintance asked me via messenger “would you like to take part in an experiment?”, so naturally before committing I asked for more information, “all I want you to do is host a blog for me, I’ll provide the content”.
Totally intrigued I said I’d give it a go, my friend then added that any revenue generated by the blog would be mine and he would pay for hosting and domain name, I thought about this and said no if the revenue is mine its only fair that hosting and domain cost come from my pocket.
The upshot is that my friend has discovered a source that will provide unique content at a very reasonable price and the experiment is to find out how well the content performs on this blog before he unleashes it to the big wide world.
The experiment will run for 90 days.
Next step was to think of a topic for the blog, my initial thought was Mobile Phones, as that is an area I don’t currently operate a site in, we Read more:Experiment
, Buying
, Content
UK Affiliate Marketing Awards 2007-09-12 04:48:23 The very first United Kingdom affiliate marketing industry awards are being held this October.
The award ceremony will be on middle evening of the a4uexpo conference at The Fox, ExCeL London at 8pm.
The purpose of the a4uAwards
is to recognise and reward those companies and individuals who contribute to the rapid growth of AffiliateMarketing
, bringing innovation to the industry and demonstrate Good Practice.
The a4uAwards will be purely driven by nominations from within the industry.
Categories Include:
Innovation in Affiliate Marketing
(Merchant Award)
Innovation in Affiliate Marketing (Network Award)
Innovation in Affiliate Marketing (Publisher Award)
Publisher's Choice Award for a Network
Publisher's Choice Award for a Merchant
Publisher's Choice Award for an Agency
Affiliate Manager of 2007
Merchants Publisher of 2007
Best New Merchant of 2007
Best New Publisher of 2007
Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2007
Best Agency Account Manager
Best International Publisher
Industry Champion
Inaugural a4uexpo Conference - October 25th and 26th 2007 2007-09-11 12:32:32 It just occurred to me that I haven't yet blogged about the inaugural a4uexpo Conference on October
25th and 26th 2007 at ExCeL London, this is going to be the biggest affiliate marketing event ever held in the United Kingdom so if you are involved in the industry be sure to get yourself along.
Here is the full press release:
a4uexpo Conference Line-up Brings Fresh Speakers & Unique Insight to UK Affiliate Marketing Sector
Knowledge, expertise and tenacity will be on display at this year's a4uexpo, with news that the UK's first home-grown event is bringing together an unrivaled team of Affiliate Marketing experts & practitioners to present during the inaugural event's Conference Agenda.
The two-day Programme, which includes formal presentations, panel discussions and hands-on workshops, has been devised to assist delegates who are looking to Deliver a successful Affiliate Marketing campaign, Enhance and Maximise existing activity and realise the potential of Integrating Pr
XML Feeds the networks I work with and some I don't 2007-10-15 14:22:11 For a long time XML
feeds were a complete mystery to me, however with a bit of Yorkshire grit and determination, and a bit of help from Brian Edwards earlier this year I managed to make a bit of sense of them.
Many of you reading this will have different requirements from XML feeds to me so it will come as no surprise if the feeds I like are a thorn in the side to you.
Firstly I need to tell you what information I need to get out of a merchants XML feed, well I predominantly use XML feeds on a Fashion website so the following categories are a must:
Brand
Product Name
Product Price
Product Description
Product Thumbnail Image
Deeplink URL
Also its nice to have a second larger image.
In the feed reviews below some merchants are exceptions to the rule in almost all the networks, however these are my general findings.
The Networks I use for XML Feeds
Paid On Results (POR)
POR are my personal favorite, all fields are encased in CDATA which effectively eliminates parsing problems caused by
Lingerie posts too lewd for prudes at Bog Brush 2007-10-22 14:45:20 When BlogRush launched I signed up to see what all the fuss was about, the quality of the links was so poor that the code stayed on my site precisely 3 days, therefore I wasn't surprised this morning when I received an email saying my blog had been rejected, fully expected it to be due to inactivity, not having code in place etc, but no my blog was rejected for unsuitable content.
For the record the blog is the fashion blog Fashion Style You and has 2 full time authors (ok me and someone who knows what they are talking about) with additional material from a couple of others.
BlogRush Quality Guidelines:
The blog contains unique, quality content that provides opinions, insights, and/or recommended resources that provide value to readers of the blog. Articles, videos, public domain works, press releases, and content written by others are okay to be used on the blog, but the ratio of unique content should far outweigh content from other sources. Over 99% of the content is unique, alth Read more:Lingerie
, posts
, Brush
a4uexpo raises the bar 2007-10-27 17:00:08 Just nicely arrived home from the very first a4uexpo, now I expected it to be good, but it was more than that it truly was phenomenal, organizer Matthew Wood and his team from Existem responsible for Affiliates4u Forum certainly raised the bar and put on the greatest event that the UK affiliate marketing arena has ever seen, never having been to a US event I can't draw comparisons with them, so I will have to rely on people posting comments to see how 'the expo' measured up against them.
I think the key behind the success was the relaxed atmosphere of the whole 2 days (and three nights) right from the first sip of beer at the Buy.at pre-a4uexpo networking party, this event was going to be not only about forging professional relationships, education and networking, no this event was also about making friends and having fun, by the way this has been the central theme running through the UK affiliate industry for as long as I can remember, this is the only industry (I know of) where y
Random pictures from a4uexpo 2007-10-30 02:33:37 Since I blogged on Saturday about a4uexpo many more have put their experiences in to print notably the wonderful Elaine Forth and rising star Ray Theakston, if you have taken the plunge and published something about 'the expo' add your details to Have you blogged about a4uexpo? on the a4uforum and you will get the credit you deserve.
The Sunborn Yacht Hotel where a few of us rested our weary heads.
Me and Dan Morley of Alpharooms at Wednesday's pre-expo party
Speakers Jason Dale from Loquax and the dual award wining Zak Edwards of Prezzybox fame
Tom Fotheringham of DFDS Seaways and the legend Nadeem Azam.
Ray, Hero and Me at the Webgains Stand
John chilling out at the post conference party
The Waterfront at Excel this illustrates the size of the venue
Read more:Random
Blog Experiment Update 2 2007-11-01 08:17:42 The HD Advice blogging experiment is now 6 weeks old and has just completed its first full month.
For new readers the experiment involves the purchasing of unique articles and publishing them on the blog to see how well they perform, the upshot being if the experiment goes well my source will release his 'article service' to a wider market.
Have to be honest I have done very little with HD Advice this month, 3 new outsourced articles have been published:
Blu-ray DVD’s
HD Gaming: Xbox 360
Set Top Boxes
Plus I wrote a review of Setanta Sports.
Stats:
Well as predicted last month the blog on here caused a little spike with 72 visitors that day but it settled back at the 45 mark for the following few days then steadily grew in stature to a peak of 164 visits on 22nd October.
Altogether HD Advice received 1354 unique visitors in October, who found the site using 364 different keyphrases 82 of which got more than one hit and the highest achiever accrued a massive 210 hits.
Revenue:
Re Read more:Experiment
, Update
Paid On Results launch Payment On Request 2007-11-09 09:28:14 Paid On Results have done it again :o) They have listened to what affiliates want and delivered it.
From tomorrow (10th November) no more waiting to get paid anymore, we choose just when would like payment for sales generated via Paid On Results as they are launching their new Affiliate payment system Payment
On Request, the only requirement is that you have at least £25 of validated commission in your affiliate account and you are set up for BACS payment.
This bit is taken directly from the Paid On Results Blog.
Payment On Request is a BACS only option, it’s payment when you want. Simply submit an invoice via the Affiliate control area (you click just 2 buttons and the invoice is fully generated for you) anytime you like subject to meeting the minimum of £25 validated commission in your account, so no more waiting 6 weeks to get paid.
Cheque and Paypal payments will remain on the traditional payment model, so now is the time to convert your account to payment via BACS, so you can
Buy.at Xmas Cracker 29th November 2007-11-14 08:18:05 I’ve said it before and as it’s my blog I will say it again…
“If there was an award for the most social affiliate network Buy.at would win hands down”
…that said the Buy.at events are always very professional too.
This years Buy.at XmasCracker
is on the 29th November
at Apartment - Newcastle Upon Tyne, and in my opinion its a must attend event for everyone from the seasoned affiliate to the total newbie, merchants too should also get along, you will make loads of contacts so take a pocket full of business cards.
BT, Sky, Thorntons, a4uexpo 2008 and Euroffice are sponsoring this years event.
If you have never attended an Affiliate Marketing event this is the ideal opportunity, you will be able to network, put faces to the names of some of those people you are working with, build up valuable business relationships and also enjoy yourself at the same time.
Places are limited so register for the Buy.at Christmas Cracker here while you still ha
POR payment at the speed of light 2007-11-14 01:42:29 On Friday when I wrote Paid on Results launch Payment on Request I never in my wildest dreams expected to get paid as quick as I did.
Saturday was launch day for the new payment system so I logged into my POR account to be met with a message telling me payment centre was off line due to upgrades . I next logged in Sunday morning, so can’t tell you if things went live Saturday or not, and was able to raise an invoice for all the validated commission in my account, remember this was Sunday when the banks are closed, this morning I checked my current account to find a deposit from POR went in yesterday Tuesday, just one working day .
This is a far cry from having to wait weeks to get paid, well done POR.
Related Posts Read more:light
5 bloggers blogging (affiliate marketing networks that is) 2007-11-12 01:43:45 Back in March I asked in my post Merchants Who Blog who would be the first UK Affiliate Marketing Network to take up the challenge and start an affiliate related blog, we saw the very first rise to the bait in June when the Paid On Results Blog was launched the Webgains Blog was next followed by buy.at who launched a blog in support of their content engine.
Things on the new networks blogging front then died down for a while PrimeQ launched what they called Affiliate Cafe, in September but it seems to have disappeared.
At the end of October new network Altogether Ads launched their blog at the same time as their Network.
Finally on Friday the Affiliate Window Blog was unveiled.
All of these Affiliate Marketing Network blogs can be seen on Internet Marketing Blogs in the Networks section group by channel so see them all listed individually.
That so far is the lot (unless of course you know better).
Related Posts Read more:bloggers
Paid on Results launch Payment on Request 2007-11-09 09:28:20 Paid On Results have done it again, They have listened to what affiliates want and delivered it.
From tomorrow (10th November) no more waiting to get paid anymore, we choose just when would like payment for sales generated via Paid On Results as they are launching their new Affiliate payment system Payment
On Request, the only requirement is that you have at least £25 of validated commission in your affiliate account and you are set up for BACS payment.
This bit is taken directly from the Paid On Results Blog.
Payment On Request is a BACS only option, it’s payment when you want. Simply submit an invoice via the Affiliate control area (you click just 2 buttons and the invoice is fully generated for you) anytime you like subject to meeting the minimum of £25 validated commission in your account, so no more waiting 6 weeks to get paid.
Cheque and Paypal payments will remain on the traditional payment model, so now is the time to convert your account to payment via BACS, so you can sta
Blog Migration 2007-11-11 14:09:14 Well I’ve finally done it, migrated this blog from Drupal to Wordpress.
I have taken the time to do a bit of house-keeping and deleted a few of the non relevant posts like the singing sheep.
Undoubtedly there will be the odd teething problem so if you come across anything please contact me.
One problem I had was with comments and unfortunately I lost all of them, however I have installed Lucia’s Linky Love plugin which Kieron recommended, as this rewards regular contributors by removing the no-follow from the comment link, not going to say how many comments get you the link love however I wont set it too high to begin with.
Related Posts Read more:Migration
Blog Experiment Update 2 2007-11-01 08:17:37 The HD Advice blogging experiment is now 6 weeks old and has just completed its first full month.
For new readers the experiment involves the purchasing of unique articles and publishing them on the blog to see how well they perform, the upshot being if the experiment goes well my source will release his ‘article service’ to a wider market.
Have to be honest I have done very little with HD Advice this month, 3 new outsourced articles have been published:
Blu-ray DVD’s
HD Gaming: Xbox 360
Set Top Boxes
Plus I wrote a review of Setanta Sports.
Stats:
Well as predicted last month the blog on here caused a little spike with 72 visitors that day but it settled back at the 45 mark for the following few days then steadily grew in stature to a peak of 164 visits on 22nd October.
Altogether HD Advice received 1354 unique visitors in October, who found the site using 364 different keyphrases 82 of which got more than one hit and the highest achiever accrued a massive 210 hits.
Re Read more:Experiment
, Update
Random pictures from a4uexpo 2007-10-30 02:33:41 Since I blogged on Saturday about a4uexpo many more have put their experiences in to print notably the wonderful Elaine Forth and rising star Ray Theakston, if you have taken the plunge and published something about ‘the expo’ add your details to Have you blogged about a4uexpo? on the a4uforum and you will get the credit you deserve.
The Sunborn Yacht Hotel where a few of us rested our weary heads.
Me and Dan Morley of Alpharooms at Wednesday’s pre-expo party
Speakers Jason Dale from Loquax and the dual award wining Zak Edwards of Prezzybox fame
Tom Fotheringham of DFDS Seaways and the legend Nadeem Azam.
Ray, Hero and Me at the Webgains Stand
John chilling out at the post conference party
The Waterfront at Excel this illustrates the size of the venue
Related Posts Read more:Random
a4uexpo raises the bar 2007-10-27 12:58:15 Just nicely arrived home from the very first a4uexpo, now I expected it to be good, but it was more than that it truly was phenomenal, organizer Matthew Wood and his team from Existem responsible for Affiliates4u Forum certainly raised the bar and put on the greatest event that the UK affiliate marketing arena has ever seen, never having been to a US event I can’t draw comparisons with them, so I will have to rely on people posting comments to see how ‘the expo’ measured up against them.
I think the key behind the success was the relaxed atmosphere of the whole 2 days (and three nights) right from the first sip of beer at the Buy.at pre-a4uexpo networking party, this event was going to be not only about forging professional relationships, education and networking, no this event was also about making friends and having fun, by the way this has been the central theme running through the UK affiliate industry for as long as I can remember, this is the only industry (I kn
Lingerie posts too lewd for prudes at Bog Brush 2007-10-22 14:45:59 When BlogRush launched I signed up to see what all the fuss was about, the quality of the links was so poor that the code stayed on my site precisely 3 days, therefore I wasn’t surprised this morning when I received an email saying my blog had been rejected, fully expected it to be due to inactivity, not having code in place etc, but no my blog was rejected for unsuitable content.
For the record the blog is the fashion blog Fashion Style You and has 2 full time authors (ok me and someone who knows what they are talking about) with additional material from a couple of others.
BlogRush Quality Guidelines:
The blog contains unique, quality content that provides opinions, insights, and/or recommended resources that provide value to readers of the blog. Articles, videos, public domain works, press releases, and content written by others are okay to be used on the blog, but the ratio of unique content should far outweigh content from other sources. Over 99% of the content is unique, a Read more:Lingerie
, posts
, Brush
XML Feeds the networks I work with and some I don’t 2007-10-15 14:22:44 For a long time XML
feeds were a complete mystery to me, however with a bit of Yorkshire grit and determination, and a bit of help from Brian Edwards earlier this year I managed to make a bit of sense of them.
Many of you reading this will have different requirements from XML feeds to me so it will come as no surprise if the feeds I like are a thorn in the side to you.
Firstly I need to tell you what information I need to get out of a merchants XML feed, well I predominantly use XML feeds on a Fashion website so the following categories are a must:
Brand
Product Name
Product Price
Product Description
Product Thumbnail Image
Deeplink URL
Also its nice to have a second larger image.
In the feed reviews below some merchants are exceptions to the rule in almost all the networks, however these are my general findings.
The Networks I use for XML Feeds
Paid On Results (POR)
POR are my personal favorite, all fields are encased in CDATA which effectively eliminates parsing problems caused by
Writing unique content 2007-11-17 14:34:34 One question I often get asked by newcomers is how do I write unique
content, sometimes this question comes after they have been penalised by the search engines for duplicate content.
There is no definitive answer however here is one method I have been known to use.
Take the content that you are sent by merchants and networks in newsletters and make it your own, for example checking recent emails one merchant had some copy which included the following paragraph:
Waiting for the Christmas rush, take care of your customers and give them great opportunities to start their Christmas shopping the best way!
Now I could just reproduce that on my web page however it is highly likely this may be done by several affiliates, also it may be on the merchant website and possibly even posted on a forum and published in a blog (well it is now), Google will eventually get round to indexing many of these very similar pages and there is no guarantee which one it will chose as original source. Best thing
Merchants taking the Wii where will it end? 2007-11-23 16:05:15 Commission leakage has always been around but it used to be a bit more subtle like a mile high flashing free phone number, now some retailers have plumbed new depths in the bid to avoid paying commissions.
On the back of the news from certain mobile phone outlets that any iPhones sold via affiliate links if copy has not been approved will not be eligible for commission, (come on what if we are simply promoting something else and the customer buys one by mistake), we are now seeing the worrying trend from some big name electrical retailers that no commission will be paid on the Wii
console.
Imagine if it happened in a high street store.
Manager “Have you got a minute Jones?”
Jones “Certainly sir”
Manager “I’m afraid you won’t be getting paid for the last half hour while you served that last gentleman”
Jones “Why is that Sir? the customer purchased an Apple iPhone (or Wii)”
Manager “Well you see Jones he came into the sh
The Ideal Merchant / Network email 2007-11-21 06:20:59 Being a one person business my time is extremely precious and when I get the many emails from affiliate networks and merchants (oh and please don’t send them all on a Friday afternoon things get missed) I tend to skip through them highlighting those that maybe I can use, then go back through them actioning them often choosing the easiest to handle first so I get more pages up.
The ideal communication has among other things:
Plenty of text which I can rewrite as unique content
Deep links to the various items and offers mentioned in the email.
My affiliate code already inserted in the above mentioned deep links.
This email received today for Cloggs via Webgains sent by Mark Russell of Existem-am has it all.
Great Brands, Great Prices For Christmas:
“Ho Ho Ho” said santa to the elves, look at these boots that have just flown in on Rudolph express. Want comfort and style? Look no further than the Ugg Australia Boots for Christm
Shopping Cart abandonment revisited 2007-11-29 06:21:47 I have just been reading a thread on the Affiliates4u forum started by Jess Luthi P3P does it matter any more? which is very worrying this quote from Jess stood out:
… 9 out of 10 merchants site who dont have P3P but who have an affiliate program, I could not add a product to the basket
As I commented on that thread it is yet another reason for shopping cart abandonment, which equals less sales for merchant, less commission for affiliates and less override for networks.
For the record the other posts where I have touched on shopping card abandonment are here
Christmas is coming checkout your checkouts and Why do people abandon online shopping baskets?
Related Posts Read more:Shopping
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