More on Ebay Revenue Share System

A quick update on the ebay revenue share:

As previously announced, from March 1st 2007 we’re introducing a new revenue sharing model for the eBay.co.uk Affiliates Programme. We’re excited about these changes because we think they’ll give you more opportunities to make more money.We’ll still pay you for the new ACRUs (Active Confirmed Registered Users) you send us: there’s no change there. But rather than paying a single fee for bids and Buy it Nows, we’ll be tying your earnings per bid and BIN to the revenue we get for the sold item. You’ll receive a percentage of all the revenue we earn (Listing Fees and Final Value Fees) from all winning bids & BINS made by visitors in the seven days after you send them our way.This means that when you send us quality bidders and buyers who purchase higher priced items on eBay.co.uk, will earn you more. Yes, that’s right: The higher the sale price, the higher the reward. However, be aware that this may not be the case in categories with ‘fixed fees’ such as Motors and Real Estate.

ebay.co.uk will offer 25% of revenue (under £100) up to 50% of revenue - for over £500,000

February 20th, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, affiliate, eBay, ecommerce | no comments

An Affiliate Program Is Not a Magic Bullet for Marketing a Website

Recently I have been hearing of companies being wooed by affiliate networks and then setting up an affiliate program with them without actually doing their own research.

Just putting up an affiliate program is not going to generate sales to make the program worth while. Although this is a paid on performance industry setting up an affiliate program is not simply a paid on results affair. Affiliate networks have setup, monthly and override commission fees, so you are going to have to make a number of sales each month simply to break even.

Even if you are a pretty major brand or have a real something unique to offer is is still a bit much to expect the affiliate program run autonomously. You may even get hundreds of affiliates to sign up in the first few weeks, but this means nothing without sales. Indeed those same affiliates have probably signed up to hundreds of different merchants and the current high turnover of new merchants means that given a few days they will probably forget that they have ever signed up.

So what is the missing piece? You have the sales site and products waiting to go out of the door, you have an affiliate program with a major network, you aren’t getting sales.

The missing piece is actually encouraging the affiliates to actively promote your site. There is a big difference to an affiliate that just adds your banner to one that actively promotes a merchant. Affiliates have limited time with which to promote every merchant that they subscribe to, they end up cherry picking the most lucrative for them. 

This is the role of an affiliate manager. The affiliate manager is the reason that affiliate programs succeed. There are a number of good affiliate managers (including myself) who can help your affiliate program. The best starting point is to contact me and ask how I can help.

Simple message is don’t expect an affiliate program to just grow active affiliates, the affiliates need careful cultivating to promote your site.

February 15th, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, ecommerce | 2 comments

Which Dragon Has The Best Website

Ok this is another post about BBC 2’s Dragon’s Den and we have only had one episode to date.

Having a look at the official website for Dragon’s Den (www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden) I had the idea to write a review on each of the ‘Dragon’s’ official Websites. After seeing Keith Bond’s post about SEOmoz I decided to use this to assess which of these official Dragon’s sites are the best.

Deborah Meaden

http://www.deborahmeaden.com/ 

Page Strength: 0.5 / 10

Duncan Bannatyne

http://www.bannatyne.co.uk/

Page Strength: 3.5 / 10

Peter Jones

http://www.peterjones.tv/

Page Strength: 3.5 / 10 

Richard Farleigh

http://www.farleigh.com/

Page Strength: 3 / 10

Theo Paphitis

http://www.theopaphitis.com/

Page Strength: 2.5 / 10

So there we have it Jones and Bannatyne tie first followed by Farleigh, Paphitis and finally Meaden. To be honest this is probably the order I would rank these in, only in a general webpage sense, the fact is that these people’s websites are carried by the people - brands. This sort of ranking tool is much more useful for you and me, affiliates especially.

Want to know your sites page Strength - see http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength

February 12th, 2007 Posted by scifind | SEO, tools, webdesign, Dragon's Den | no comments

Congratulations to Levi Roots - Plus advice to Dragons and Those pitching alike

Congratulations to Levi for securing £50, 000 funding for his Reggae Reggae Sauce on Dragon’s Den the other day.

If only all business men operated like him. The real victory here was for Style over Substance.

But when will the business men walking into the den learn REGISTER YOUR DOMAIN NAME BEFORE GOING ON DRAGON’S DEN. Well done to Levi (Keith) for registering the .com (see his site -http://reggaereggaesauce.com)  - but you forgot the .co.uk - registered not long after the program aired and is now pointing to a parking page.

I am sure that the new owner will be willing to sell this domain back to you Levi BUT it would be so much easier to think ahead and spend that £6 something to register a .co.uk to stop it being picked up by someone else.

This also goes for the Dragons, Peter Jones  and Richard Farleigh invested £50k in this business - knowing full well that the brand was going to get a big push to millions on national TV and they still didn’t have the forsight to spend £6 on a domain name.

GOT A BRAND - BUY A DOMAIN NAME - simple message Don’t Know How? No excuse Click Here and take two minutes to register a domain name (at the time of writing .co.uk domains are £2.59 a year and .com domains £8.99 a year)

Read about Levi and the dragons here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden/

Reggae Reggae Sauce Site - http://reggaereggaesauce.com/

Peter Jones’ Site - http://www.peterjones.tv/

Richard Farleigh’s Site - http://www.farleigh.com/

February 10th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Dragon's Den, Domain names | no comments

Dragons Den Returns. BBC2 8pm Tonight

I love this program.

I begain watching it as an insight to business - but now it is mearly an X Factor style farce with the Judges/Dragons just putting down the often mad ideas pitched to them.

Any one unfamiliar with the format? Probably not - but would be enrepreneurs pitch their business / product for investment.

Originally I thought this was going to give an oppertunity to those struggling to find investment, unfortunatly now the Dragons only want to put money into established business that I would imagine would have no problem getting a load from the bank. Would love to have a program - or even videoblog of one of the more off the wall inventors / business persons that DID get the funding (The egg cooker bloke, the Dr Cap kids etc).

Anyway BBC2 8pm tonight - watch it

More info on the BBCs Dragons Den webpage

February 7th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized | one comment

2007 UK Affiliate Key Dates For Sales!

With Christmas now a distant memory here is a list of dates in 2007 that could be useful for gift sites.

Feburary 14th Valentines Day

Feburary 20th Shrove Tuesday

March 1st St Davids Day (Wales)

March 17th St Patricks Day (Ireland)

March 18th Mothering Sunday / Mothers Day

April EASTER 6th Good Friday, 9th Easter Monday

April 23rd St Georges Day (England)

May bank holidays - 7th and 28th

June 17th Father’s Day

October 31st Halloween

November 5th Guy Fawkes Night - Fireworks

November 30th - St Andrews Day

February 6th, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, affiliate, British, tools | no comments

Internet Marketing Acronyms

February 6th, 2007 Posted by scifind | Uncategorized | no comments

Buy.at programme - Adams Kids in Administration

Just got this from buy.at

Please be aware that Adams Kids has gone into administration. As a result, they are unable to guarantee payment for any future sales from this date.

I would therefore recommend that you remove all links to Adams Kids at the earliest opportunity, as we will need to close the programme later today.

Both Adams Kids and buy.at wish to apologise for the short notice and thank you for your efforts in promoting the programme. As soon as we have more information regarding the long term future of the programme I will let you know.

Kind regards,

This is a great shame - not only as it was a top childrens clothing brand - buy the missus loves the shops

February 2nd, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, affiliate, buy.at | no comments

Shopping Cart Software.

Small side track from Affiliate Marketing - but I have been working with various shopping cart packages these past few month on a variety of side projects. Just thought that I would list the major contenders here along with a few thoughts.

osCommerce and Derivitives.

I have been using osC for years but have passed over the original osCommerce package for some of the derivitives.

I have used the major osCommerce derivitive CRELoaded on several projects of late, most notably www.shopscifi.co.uk, www.cricketretail.com and www.somethingsmellsnice.com after a bit of a teething problems a year or two ago with  CRELoaded I have really adopted this as my shopping cart software of choice.

The other major osC derivative shopping cart software is Zen cart, though I have not used this directly I have seen it in action with ForbiddenPlanet  and am quietly impressed by the results. 

All the major osCommerce derived software have great communitys supporting the shopping carts with help, advice and contributions in form of modules

Away from osCommerce software there is still alot of choice.

CubeCart.

I have played with this and it is OK. Nice and tidy. Limited functionallity in the free version - but fork out the £40 (or so) for the full version and add some of the contributions and you have a fantastic little shopping site on your hands.

http://www.cubecart.com/site/home/ - again there is an active forum and dedicated mods and skins site at http://www.cubecart.org/forums/index.php

X Cart

X Cart - Professional - slightly more expensive and there is a very affordable support and a huge range of (paid for) addons. Best thing about this is that it uses Smarty Template Engine based templates, thus making it exceptionally easy to drop chunks of code into a template - ie:

<title>{$entry.Name|title}</title>

<a href={$entry.Name|link}>{$entry.Name|productname}</a>

There is not so much a development community - but a competitivly priced development team to provide help support and extra functionallity .

CMS Addons

It is worth noting that popular CMS systems have ecommerce plugins. Drupal have an ecommerce system see here.

Joomla has an ecommerce plugin - virtuemart 

 Free And Simple eCommerce Solutions.

Ok - so after all this we must pay a quick mention to the PAYPAL shoping cart  - there done it. Ideal for the trader with no programming knowledge - other than the occasional bit of HTML and no budget to get a developer in.

A slightly more elegant system  - free and easy is mals eCommerce this works in a similar way to the paypal shopping cart but can intergrate with a number of different online payment systems a fantastic implimentation of this can be found at http://www.bridal-jewellery.co.uk

February 2nd, 2007 Posted by scifind | oscommerce, cubecart, xcart, x-cart, ecommerce, php, mysql, paypal | 2 comments

Affiliates Guide To Going Full Time

This can be one of the most important decisions of your life. The upgrade from being a hobbiest / part time affiliate to making affiliate marketing your full time employment.

I don’t think I have ever met a fulltime affiliate who hasn’t used the phrase ‘never regretted it’ though it is a very big step and a life changing decision.

I suppose that the first thing - before all else is to ask yourself “Why Do I Want To Become A Full Time Affiliate?” If the answer is (truthfully) “because I can!” then your battle is just about won.

Financial considerations are one of the most important. Can you earn enough money to keep yourself (and your dependants) to the manner that you (they) have become accustom to. Remember that in becoming a full time affiliate you will be loosing a second income! Does your affiliate income cover your costs of living? You cannot be too sure about this question.

Financial fallbacks. You need this. If you are relyant on one source of affiliate income - natural/organic SEO traffic, PPC etc - be aware that these markets can change overnight, search engines can change their algorhythm, PPC terms can change. There are two things that you must to to cover this.

1) Have Savings. Have a pile of untouched money sitting in the bank. Usually covering the equivalent of 6 months rent or morgage and other most basic bills. This is the fallback position. If things start to go wrong you know that you have financial support to get you through the worst and start building back up - and then if the worst comes to the worst get another fulltime job.

2) Diversify. As soon as you have the freedom of time from dumping the full time job, don’t spend it all on the golf course. Move into new sectors, finance, retail, utilitys gaming etc and if you are a PPC person - build a website , if you are a SEO person invest a few pounds a month in PPC to start building up your ppc budgets.

Another pointer, as you will be stepping down in income (hopefully just temporarilly) you may be entitled to some tax benefits, you will have to inform the IR if your income changes dramtically for things like working family’s tax credit. This should server to help you in the first few tight months.

One other consideration other than going full time affiliate - you could phase out the day job by cutting back on hours, and moving to full time affiliate status in phases.

There are other considerations than financial.

Will full time affiliate marketing make you happy?

For most (aslong as the finance is covered) I am sure that the answer is YES. But you have consider the fact that you will be working for yourself, by yourself! You will lose out on the daily contact with people that you may have had at your employers. So spending some time on the golf course each week could be a good move afterall. Also don’t coop yourself up. 95% of affiliate marketing is done on a computer / at a desk. Get out. Network and have a little fun during the day away from the PC. Join a gym or whatever takes your fancy.

There may never be a good time to start full time. There will be times that you definitly shouldn’t. The key point is that taking up affiliate marketing full time is a big step and sometimes it is a little ste of faith. Do all you can to prepare for the worst, but don’t think of the worst. Put your best efforts in and you’ll be a man my son  you can make it in affiliate marketing full time.

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February 1st, 2007 Posted by scifind | affiliate marketing, affiliate | one comment