Prezzybox Does It Again

I was going to write a post about how well Prezzybox had planned their affiliate Christmas promotions but it looks like John has beaten me to it so I’ll just link there instead

The summary is that you should read here about what you can win and then read here about the tools provided to help you win.

Podcast 33

I’ve recently been speaking to Chris Bishop (biography), Online Acquisition Manager at House of Fraser. We discussed a variety of topics including his early days as an affiliate, Hotel Chocolat & House of Fraser. We also discussed advice for affiliate managers, affiliates and issues around cashback for merchants.

 

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The a4uexpo is getting very close so I’ll assume everyone has booked up by now. If not then you can get a discount by using the page peel ad in the top right of the blog

I’m looking forward to my first expo after missing the last one due to the arrival of my daughter It’s her first birthday the weekend before the expo so I’ll be free this time to head to London.

I’ll be moderating the Affiliate State of the Nation Panel at 16:30 on the first day so I’m looking forward to that Check out the agenda for full details of all seminars. I looks like it’s going to be a difficult job to plan your way through the seminars with 4 excellent choices at each stage.

Hope to see you there!

I’ve just finished reading ‘Marketing Outrageously’ by Jon Spoelstra

It was an interesting read and while it does focus on selling tickets to American sports events and working with teams of sales people I’m sure some of the elements can be applied to affiliate marketing as well.

Here are some of the main points I took away

• What’s it going to take to be the best - In the book there is an encouragement to ask this question and I think it ties in with what people like Doug Scott & Chris Clarkson have been saying recently. Don’t limite yourself by thinking all you can do is the same as everyone else. Or that you need to think small and niche at all times. Set yourself a big target and work out the steps you need to get you there.
• Focus on Domination not Reach & Frequency - sounds a bit wordy but is basically making the point that advertising that focusses on reach and frequency is for big brands with money to burn. Instead you should work out where your target market are most often and dominate all the advertising there. It’s mostly written to apply to TV & Radio ads but I’m sure it would apply to web advertising too.
• What have you done today? - at the end of each day ask yourself what you did to make your business a success. Reading blogs & forums or chatting on MSN isn’t work that’s going to have a return but it can suck up so much time. I’ve spent many hours in the last couple of weeks moving websites from one host to another and updating domain registrations etc but I don’t earn anything from that. Make sure you know what actually gives a return and spend most of your time working on that.

So that’s just some of my notes from the book. As I said it’s pretty focussed on US sports but overall it’s worth a read.

If you would like my copy to read and you live in the UK then just leave a comment below and I’ll pick a winner at the end of the month.

It’s been said every year for as long as I can remember but I think perhaps mobile is actually now genuienly on the verge of being “the next big thing”. Now that I’ve picked up an iPhone and started to experience browsing the web in an equivalent way to the desktop combined with unmetered 3G usage then buying online seems much more likely.

So is this one big opportunity? In one way I’m tempted to go with it and build mobile versions of my sites or a shopping directory of mobile enable sites etc but I’m concerned about potential tracking issues.

Most mobile browsers will handle cookies so that’s ok but what about when incognito mode makes it’s way on to the mobile browser as standard?

Well various networks have different backups in place but are these mobile proof? IP based tracking would look to be a lost cause as I assume my 3G connection could end up with a different IP address everytime I connect. Flash cookies could well be hindered by the lack of a proper Flash implementation on mobiles. Is Veracitag mobile proof?

I’m probably slightly lacking the technical knowledge to know for sure but I’d love to hear from networks about how their tracking will stand up to mobile use.

I’ve had a copy of NMA sitting on my desk for a while because I wanted to write something after reading this article (subscription required). It’s a comment on some stats from Hitwise which show that the UK Search share in May 2008 was as follows

Google - 87.3%
Yahoo - 4.9%
Microsoft - 3.7%

Andrew Girdwood from Bigmouthmedia comments in the article that at times optimising & reporting for Yahoo is “wasting clients money” which I think is a fair point.

So what does this mean for affiliates? Do you still try and optimise for natural search in Yahoo & Microsoft? What about paid search? The market share applies the same way so is it worth actually running and monitoring your paid campaigns on anything but Adwords?

It’s interesting that from time to time I read about the lack of innovation in affiliate marketing and then I think on one hand that people forget how far we have come. It’s also perhaps because in the UK we are guilty of looking too much within our own community when some of the really interesting stuff is being developed by those who aren’t long time affiliates.

I’ve been watching Nooked for a while now and they have been releasing some really interesting widgets.

Firstly you can create a widget containing different products of your choice

I’ve gone for Skiing Holidays in this one. Then you can publish that widget to your blog/facebook/myspace page and start earning from it. It’s the type of thing that is definitely going to appeal to a blog owner who doesn’t want to get into the nuts and bolts of signing up with an affiliate network.

Once you publish the widget there is then an option to “Grab This” which would allow anyone to pick up your widget code and add it to their site but still earn you the cash.

Finally you can also earn for a year by referring people to Nooked. None of the links in this post are referral links as I want to make the point that I’m writing about them because it’s interesting and not because I’m being paid or trying to earn a bit of cash.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with what Nooked are doing. It’s a bit of a limited product set that they are working from at the moment but I understand that is to improve soon.

So what do you think? Is it the sort of thing that might work well on Keith Bond’s Fashion Style You or would it appeal more to the mainstream that doesn’t actually need to have heard of “affiliate marketing” to make some extra money?