Affiliate Window and Buy.at

London-based Digital Window creates UK’s largest affiliate marketing network.

Digital Window today acquired Newcastle-based Perfiliate Ltd., which operates one of the leading affiliate marketing networks under the brand name Buy.at. Together Digital Window and Buy.at form Britain’s largest performance-based marketing group, serving customers in the UK, USA and Scandinavia. Buy.at was previously part of AOL Inc.

Kevin Brown, CEO of Digital Window: “This transaction is a milestone not only for Digital Window, but also for the performance marketing industry as a whole. Both companies already excel in the areas of service, ethics and technology. Joining forces enables us to harness the passion and creativity of both businesses to the benefit of all our partners.

Read the full Affiliate Window press release here

What implications does this have to the UKs affiliate networks?

Well time will tell, but I am hoping this is a good thing. It would be brilliant if buy.at would run as a seperate network to Affiliate window but I expect one of two things will happen:

Bye, bye Buy.at. Possible. Both systems merge and the best of buy.at is ported onto the affiliatewindow back bone. But this would mean alot of work and I expect such a merging of systems would mean loss of jobs on one side or the other.

Or both networks proceed as complimentary networks, maybe they both take on select individual marketing verticles.

Both are possible, but my opinion is not worth much on these, waiting for comment from Lee McCoy, and already seen some very positive views from Here.org.uk. There will probably be a large selection of other ideas on what might happen to these affiliate marketing networks. Might be exciting times, though sometimes diversity is the best way forward.

Keep diversity. If you are members of both of these networks and no others join the likes of Affiliate Future, Paid On Results and  Profitistic. Remember, that 20% rule!

March 1st, 2010 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing, buy.at, affiliatewindow | no comments

The 20% Rule and Affiliate Marketing

Hands up who else hates rules?

When writing business books, ebooks or blog posts alot of ‘rules’ seem to appear.  Rules about how to run your business and when.

There is a 20% ‘rule’ in business that is applicable to affiliate marketing. As I have said I don’t believe in hard and fast rules applying to a very diverse business such as the affiliate empires that many of you have built. But it is a good guide line or just a concept you should bare in mind.

The basics of this ‘rule’ are that:

No more than 20% of your business should come from one source

and

No more that 20% of your supplies should come from one source

Well for the first point you may think. “I have thousands of visitors and hundreds of them carry out transactions each month”. But you should be thinking “oh, 80% of my thousands of unique visitors come from google”.

Short term this may not be a problem. The amount of traffic an affiliate can gleen from google can line the pockets of many. But one day things may change so enjoy it while you can. I had a site generating £300 (nearly $500) a day then google did one of its shifts (google dance if you like the term) and for the next 2 weeks generated about £1.50 ($2).  It took months to get the site back to a stage where it was turning a reasonable monthly profit.

If you are getting a huge amount of traffic from google and nice fat affiliate commission cheques on tha back of it use this as a grace period and start investing time (and maybe money) into other traffic sources (PR, PPC, Social Networking, Other search engines and directories).

On a similar matter do not rely on one revenue source! Amazon is great, eBay is fantastic also. But a change of terms, move of links can have a huge detrimental impact on the best of affiliate sites. Spread the load, use different merchants, different affiliate networks. See here for a list of Key Affiliate Networks.

Just a little food for thought there.

More coming soon.

February 26th, 2010 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing, google | one comment

Tracking Affiliate Sales and Tracking Them Right

Quick warning to any new affiliates out there, something I as an ageing affiliate wish I had drummed into me while I was young. USE SUB TRACKING IDS.

This includes any sub accounts, extra keyword tracking, campaigns, tracking IDs or whatever the affiliatenetwork or affiliate program you are getting commissions from call it. Don’t think ill do it later, if you are linking to a website using an affiliate tracking url/code set up the site/page specific tracking perameter there and then.

I built a number of niche focused affiliate sites using a piece of software using PHP, that mashes together amazon aws affiliate web service feeds with ebay results, presenting a broad range of specific products to the user at great prices. (yes it is a bit like this script but no nice interface, and alot less of the customisation power)

Now I have dozens of these niche sites, generated in place of any standard domain parking, as they give content to the website and generate a bit more revenue than a standard ppc domain name parking.

But in my haste I duplicated the standard tracking ID and didn’t give each site its own. Now I am finding that one or more are making some money, and I cannot tell which. Part of the joy of using the system was to test which domains and designs converted, but now I cannot. I have money in the bank but still feel some time has been wasted.

Now I have to go back and change the link urls (just one config file for each site, but it is still work) and then wait another 6 months to regain the data I should have been sitting on.

Oh well, such is life.

February 24th, 2010 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing | no comments

Voucher Code Backlash

So is this the beginning of the end of voucher code only sites?

Rules have been suggested for best practices. One BIG merchant has publically kicked off a big affiliate for not playing by their terms and conditions and with a number of othes tightening voucher use and terms that would restrict cross population of discount vouchers enforced by docking of commissions and potentially blocking affiliates has the day of reckoning for the the voucher site arrived at last?

Well the big point to make is - do voucher code affiliate sites make a positive impact to a merchant?

It is a subject that the morals and ethis can be bandied about for hours. Basically I believe discount sites, like cashback sites do have there place (just like cashback sites). Though not all of them are welcome.

Both are here to stay, and it is up to all affiliates to adapt and survive in what can be a dog eat dog business.

November 14th, 2008 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing | no comments

Free Voucher Code Site Software.

Yesterday I was invited to tinker with affiliatefuture’s new affiliate software - using the affiliate future voucher code webservice to populate a website with discount voucher code and affiliate links. More info and get the software here

It took about 2 minuites to install the basic setup, then I had a functional discount voucher site, nice.

The software is very simple and is really to be used as a platform for affiliates to develop and produce their own affiliate voucher code websites, so although useful from the outset for newbies and those not into php, it is a tool that will find its place with those code savvy enough to modify.

The first changes I made included, URL rewrites to give SE friendly and easy readable urls. Making affiliate sites open in a new window. Some cosmetic changes - but not many I must admit. (It is easy enough to drop a new template onto the site - free templates are available from places like oswd.org)

It is early days yet. I expect the basic script to be vastly improved over the coming weeks, I hopefully will have some time to modify my discount voucher site

August 21st, 2008 Posted by admin | affiliate marketing | no comments