Web Affiliate Marketing Blog

Whats the best way to keep people happy at no extra cost to yourself? Provide affiliates with a support system that doesn’t offer any support at all. Result!

It appears, in my experience, that this model of support has recently been deployed by Affiliate Future. Twice this year I’ve had reason to contact them about missing transactions and the “support” is somewhat lacking. Listening to grumbles and groans my experience of Affiliate Future support appears to be backed-up by a large number of other affiliates, which should set the alarm bells off in the Affiliate Future offices!
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The past week or two, has seen a lot of affiliates being messed around by networks and merchants with suspensions and partnership deals ending left, right and centre.

A bit of fuss has been stirred up following one instance where one merchant appears to have sent a blanket email culling most affiliates even without the network’s knowledge – more can be read on Jasons blog.

So to help networks & merchants better understand why affiliates get hacked off, this is how it works for me personally, and a lot of other small affiliates;

• We trawl through 100′s of emails every day and spot a new programme announcement on a network we’d like to promote in the future. Maybe not right now but in a month or so.

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In an attempt to keep up to date with the ever increasing Online Sales, I’ve been creating deeplinks as fast as the emails have been hitting my inbox. The firefox tools from Affiliate Window, Buy.At, POR and Linkshare have been a great help, or so I thought, helping reduce the time to create deeplinks.

As normal, I clicked on the AWin firefox tool hoping to create a deeplink for Shoes.co.uk, however it gave me the following deeplink;
http://www.awin1.com/cread.php?platform=dl&awinmid=1723&awinaffid=6012

Now as a busy affiliate, I don’t check every deeplink I create, but on this occasion thought I would. As it happens, the deeplink AWin generated for me sent me off to a completely different merchant – TotallyShoes.co.uk.
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As many of us affiliates know, today was the Official unveiling of the Top Christmas Toy Predictions for 2009. The announcements, made by British Toy & Hobby Association and Toy Retailers Association every year, are eagerly awaited by many as they form the basis of many marketing plans. Sadly someone forgot to tell the networks, agencies and merchants… Imagine if Santa was late?

I reminded a number of networks of this and even tried to help them further, by pointing them in the direction of the official website, suggesting they may want to prepare for it. As many affiliates have seasonal websites, it would have been both extremely useful, and beneficial to networks and affiliates alike, had someone taken this opportunity to shine. If a network had spared a few people, 2 hours each, an email could have been sent to a huge audience with deep-links to all the top ten toys.

I appreciate it’s not always the networks role, if for example, the merchant is “managed” by an agency… cough cough… But it just seems crazy that such a big annual event still goes almost unmarked, yet all other forms of media (news, print, TV) pickup on it, and report it.

During my own trawling  of merchants whilst creating deep-links for all 72 Christmas presents, I was disappointed to see that 95% of merchants still have no Christmas banners in place. In some cases, I’ve had to revert to using some from Christmas 2008 and even bank holiday banners just to get something in place!

Come on networks, agencies and merchants. Christmas is the same every year – get a bit more organised… please!?!?

If you still haven’t got your affiliate pages in place, you may want to take a look at Easy Content Units which takes the hard work of creating your own deep-links. Also available is the Official Press Release and my final observation… Take a look at John Lewis, who this year seem to be VERY competitively priced.

Not a single Argos link was required! Happy Days! :)

I’ve often wondered about the power of blogging after seeing Lee gets easter eggs and Kieron gets phones. Today I’m going to put it to the test and see if I can get myself a pen!

This quest isn’t for any ordinary pen… oh no! What I’m after is the “Montblanc” equivalent in the Affiliate Marketing world.

Platform-A, or Buy.At as most will know them, often appear at affiliate functions such as the A4U, AdTech, Affiliate Summit etc, and are usually world class leaders when it comes to goodie bags and the bits and bobs contained within.

In 2008, to promote their Platform-A branding exercise, they had some silver/black twisty ball pens created that were simply the dogs bollox in the pen world. These magical writing instruments screamed of beauty that Miss Universe can only dream of. The simple, yet effective smooth twist action revealed a ball that glided over paper similar to Torvil and Dean’s Ravel’s Bolero in 1984.

The problem with developing such a fine design, is that one must protect it due to its demand being so popular. Sadly the two specimens I managed to obtain have been “borrowed” – the joys of working in an office!

Sadly due to commitments, it’s unlikely that I will be able to get to any A4U gatherings this year (sigh of releif for those that pay the bar bills), so therefore will be unable to grab a goodie bag or two.

I wonder if  my blog is enough to grab the attention of Platform-A / Buy.At and secure another fine example of writing finesse…