Posts Tagged "sunshine"
You’re Going To Need One Hell Of A Big Carrot!
Let’s presume you want to grab the attention and reward your hard working affiliates, yet at the same time, have them sell more of your goods or services.
Better still, how about motivating not only your top affiliates, but also the old, dormant affiliates – the ones who could suddenly turn out to be the NEXT BIG THING! How are YOU going to do it Mr Merchant?
The way you communicate your incentive, has to stand out from the 10’s of others we, as affiliates, receive on a daily basis. Be realistic as to who will be tempted by your incentive and who you are hoping to target in the first place.
A 2% increase in commissions is unlikely to tempt new or dormant affiliates, yet may gain extra exposure with existing, well performing ones.
In the past we’ve seen some merchants taking the decision to cull dormant affiliates when, in my opinion, opening up communication channels would have been mutually beneficial. I’m not suggesting every merchant should need to offer extravagant prizes or incentives, but a small cost (in money or time) could reap huge rewards.
One that recently caught my eye is being offered by DFDS Seaways. To promote their latest incentive, they aren’t relying on the usual email from a network, or a tweet or post on the A4U Forums grabbing my attention. They’ve actually gone and produced a video!
We also have the usual suspects who continually lead the way, ones that other merchants could learn a great deal from – and its not all about giving stuff away!
Prezzybox regularly offer great incentives and are this year planning on offering a “holiday or two” for their Christmas incentive and are open to other suggestions! As usual, they’re a step ahead most by already offering affiliates with the tools and seasonal support need for planning a Christmas site.
BuyAGift kick of their Q4 incentive that lasts for 3 months, meaning all affiliates have an opportunity of obtaining entry into the prize draw. With a possible jet set weekend to Monaco up for the offering, this is one most will want to win!
SunShine have in the past taken affiliates away to Barbados as part of Affiliate Futures annual networking event.
Red Letter Days have kicked off their Christmas Campaign, set to run for 3 months, with rewards for all affiliates at different tiers. Any affiliate that reaches a particular level is guaranteed a reward!
With such cracking incentives and rewards being offered already, it’ll be interesting to see what comes along in the next few weeks in order to tempt affiliates to promote one merchant over another. At this time of year, I’m greatful I’m an affiliate and not a merchant!
Read MoreBarbados – An Affiliate Future Incenctive Out Of This World
7 days have now passed since my feet once again touched British soil after spending a week with an eclectic mix of people on the beautiful island of Barbados. The group was made up of affiliates, merchants and a few Affiliate Future staff after they ran the 3rd successive affiliate incentive trip to Barbados. I was lucky enough to have once again won a place, this time courtesy of SunShine.co.uk, after they offered a number of prizes enticing affiliates to join and promote their new programme.
Due to SunShine.co.uk offering such a prize I decided to give it the competition a go, and as such entered a completely new vertical to me. However, it wasn’t purely because of the prize on offer, it was also down to SunShine.co.uk being a VERY approachable merchant, one that’s available on email, phone and MSN and one that constantly introduces new and innovative ways to help affiliates!
I appreciate that not all merchants would be willing to spend £’s in order to send someone to Barbados, especially an affiliate who may not yet have proved themselves. However, it’s worth looking at what you will get for the £’s you spend!
- In most cases, you will attract lots of new affiliates. Some of these will be new to the sector (like myself) and therefore won’t have forged relationships with your competitors, so you naturally have an edge already!
- Most affiliates will make extra effort and push a little harder to win a trip to Barbados than win a 1% commission increase.
- Receive plenty of exposure from affiliates, not only in way of affiliate promotion but blogging and general network.
I hope to see more merchants on the Affiliate Future network take part and offer even more places for next years trip. Come one… lets fill every room in the hotel! Apart from the obvious fun had by everyone, including scuba-diving, horse riding and jet-skiing, the trip was a fantastic opportunity for those lucky enough to have been present, to ‘do business’ in a very relaxed non-resitrictive atmosphere.
This year I’ve returned home completely refreshed and have a whole load of ideas ready to implement, mainly focusing around the merchants whom I met and those that put the prizes up for offer… so it really does work!
Hat off, and thanks to both SunShine.co.uk and to Affiliate Future for being a leading network when it comes to arranging such incentives for affiliates. I understand I already have a place reserved for next year, as the official Scuba Diving shaperone ;)
Read MoreDeeplink Your Way To Barbados
The latest Mission from Sunshine is too add a simple deeplink to your travel site and you could be the winner of a cheeky little trip to Barbados. Now the thing that strikes me about this particular mission is the how easy it is for all affiliates to easily and quickly throw a deeplink up. For the matter of 1 minutes work, you could find yourself sunning it Barbados for a week of fun and frolics!
Whats the best way to deep link?
Well, luckily the Sunshine affiliate area have all the information you need. You can of course create your own deep links, but personally I would recommend using the RSS feed they have made available.
The RSS feeds can be tailored to a specific country, resort and month, thereby showing your visitors the latest special deals. It means you can easily and quickly show deals that are relevant to your site or specific page. To understand better, take a look where I have quickly (and crudely) introduced it;
Dahab Resort
The Wordpress Plugin I’ve used to import the RSS feed into my wordpress site is called Feedlist and is available for download here.
Is it really that simple?
Yes!
Thanks to Wordpress, the Feedlist plugin and the RSS Feed provided by Sunshine, you can create deeplinks on your website with minimal effort. The best part of using the RSS Feed is that it will continually and automatically be updated, meaning you can offer your visitors the best deals available, and at the sametime, being in with a shout for the Barbados trip of a lifetime!
Bring me Sunshine Monkey
Its been a while since my last blog update, mainly because there hasn’t really been much to say and I’ve been a little busy doing stuff for a change.
I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Portugal courtesy of Paul, not realising that the reason I was asked to go over was actually to entertain children for 6 days! As in typical Frostie fashion, I managed to miss my plane home (thanks Keith for waking me up) and had to pay a crazy sum of money to get a flight 4 hours later. Still, was all good fun, especially mopping up sewage following a down pour.
Whilst away, I managed to get a few hints and tips from both Paul and Shane which has resulted in a new website being created in Wordpress. I think they were both shocked as whilst away, I did manage to get a fair bit of work done, and created a new site completely, whilst starting another that is of both interest to me personally, and makes use of one of the most active merchants out there – Sunshine.co.uk.
Thanks to Chris and Happy at Sunshine, I have managed to play around with all of their affiliate tools, and have even made use of their RSS feeds showing the latest special deals they have for certain resorts. The site also incorporates Simply Scuba widgets which Amo at Affiliate Window kindly created a nice little besoke style for me (well, maybe he got his minions to do it… I don’t know).
So Scuba Diving Egypt went live and somehow, after only 4 days, my new website and new domain name was ranking 5th in Google for a pretty generic search term. Now I need to start on some serious link building, so if anyone out there has a travel related website and they’d like to swap some links, then please get in touch! In the meantime, I shall continue with content and design tinkering.
So if ever you hit a bit of a low, get stuck for ideas, have no drive then I can honestly say that week in some sunshine can really get you back on track 
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