The traffic on the website is very good, slightly below MrDaz.com presently, but should eclipse this site in the next month. However, as I said it is new. Which means it doesn’t have any Netcraft data, it doesn’t have any Google PageRank and it doesn’t have any history.

All of the useless stuff that pointless networks take into consideration when deciding whether they’ll take on a website or not.

Textlink-Ads said:

Hello Darren,

Unfortunately, at this time we feel that your site http://www.*******.com, does not meet our internal requirements to be accepted into the InLinks publishing program. We recommend that you continue marketing your website and generate a significant more amount of traffic to your site. Once you feel you have strong enough traffic — this normally takes a few months at least — you can feel free to contact us back and we will be happy to revisit the opportunity to work with you.

I was a bit annoyed and replied straight away with:

You probably shouldn’t base your decisions on Google PageRank.

Just a hint.

As a consequence I won’t be using Textlink-Ads on the site even when they consider it to have met their ‘internal requirements’. I offered them the chance and they refused, their loss.

It’s frustrating but as I say, they’re the ones who will miss out.

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So what does this mean? Well, for one it means that you’re likely to get clued up companies bidding on the brand names of other companies, so for example Tesco may bid on the keywords ‘Asda’, ‘Sainsburys’ and ‘Morrisons’, meaning they’ll get search traffic for people looking for their competitors. There’s nothing the other companies can do about.

Or is there? What they could do is allow their affiliates to bid for them. You see, now that there are no restrictions on brand bidding, there’s nothing stopping HMV, GAME, WHSmith and everyone who sells games and DVDs bidding on the Play.com brand. Therefore, Play.com will be losing a lot of traffic and sales to their competitors. If they were smart, they’d allow their affiliates to bid on their brand name as well, meaning the affiliates would be shouldering the PPC costs for them, in exchange for the commissions. Then, anyone looking for Play.com, rather than finding their competitors, they’d find Play.com through the affiliates.

That’s if Play.com were smart. Sadly, they’re not. They’re quite stupid. They, and a great many other retailers have panicked at the change in Google’s brand restrictions and have sent out this email.

Hi Darren,

Bearing in mind the Google changes on brand bidding which come into effect on Monday, we would like to take the opprotunity to draw your attention to Play.com’s PPC restrictions:

“Unless specifically agreed in writing with Play.com, Affiliates must
not:

i) purchase, license or operate any domain name which is confusingly similar to ‘play.com’;

ii) bid on the ‘play.com’ keyword, or any of its misspellings, on any of the search engines that currently operate web services; possible derivatives of the brand term are:

Play.com
Play
Play .com
Www.play.com
Play.com uk
Play com
www play com
www Play
www.play
play dot com
playdotcom
play .com uk
Play.c
Plya
Play co
Playcouk
Play.co.uk
www.play.co.uk
play uk

and also:

Playusa
Playusa.com
Play usa
Wwwplayusa
www.play.usa
www.playusa.com
ww.playusa.com
playusa.com
play usa com
playusacom
play.usa.com
playusa.com play usa

iii) use the keyword ‘play.com’ to perform paid search activity across any search engines that operates web services  and to that effect, Affiliates must add the ‘play.com’ keyword and its derivatives as above as negative matches to their PPC campaigns.

iv) use the term Play.com or its derivatives in the Affiliate’s ad text for driving traffic from Play.com’s competitors’ brand terms to Play.com’s site nor the affiliate’s sites.

v) drive paid or unpaid traffic from search engines directly to Play.com pages or the Play.com site overall. The affiliate has to use their own sites for traffic from search engines.

For the avoidance of doubt, the above restrictions or the specific terms of agreement regarding authorised PPC activity shall supersede any conflicting provision that may be found in any section of this Agreement.

These rules are effective immediately and should the Affiliate not comply They will be banned from the Play.com affiliate programme with immediate effect and also face potential lawsuit. “

‘Face a potential lawsuit’? What are they thinking? How stupid are they?

I worry for the sanity of these people. All that will happen now is they’ll lose business to their competitors, and I hope they do. I hope they lose a lot of business. Come on GAME, HMV, WHSmith and everyone else… bid on Play.com and the rest of the keywords Play have listed above. Take the customers from them. As they won’t let affiliates bid on the terms you’ll find them quite cheap too!

Happy bidding.

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You choose a video, enter your affiliate id, any tracking id you want and then the code adapts so the link is coded properly. You can preview your video on that page too, and even test the tracking.

Its been proven that especially for products such as ours, video vastly improves conversion rates. This is especially true for any products that move or have an interactive element. I expect affiliates who use the player will also see an upturn in conversion. At the very least, it’s a fun piece of content to add value to your site.

You can see more about this on Firebox.com here. I’ll certainly be using these on a few websites over the next few weeks.

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This means anyone running eBay links on their websites will need to sign up to their new program and replace all of their links by May 1st to continue earning commissions.

Damn, that’s going to take me days.

The new platform will go live on April 1st, 2008 PST, at which point eBay will no longer be running its affiliate program through Commission Junction. Beginning April 1st, affiliates should register with eBay Partner Network and migrate their links from CJ to the new platform.

While CJ and ValueClick have been valuable partners to eBay throughout the years, we’ve decided to give our affiliate community a customized experience for eBay affiliates.

It also represents bad news for Commission Junction and ValueClick, they must be gutted.

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What is interesting though is how an extra 10,000 page impressions in a single day affected my Adsense on this site. You’d think that more traffic means more impressions, means more clicks thus more revenue. In truth, it’s quite the opposite.

One week later, when I had 10,000 less ad impressions, my Adsense ads tracked more clicks and more earnings. So an extra 10,000 impressions through StumbleUpon had no impact whatsoever on my Adsense revenue, other than drastically reducing my eCPM.

Of course the Stumble traffic did have an affect on my pay-per-watch video earnings

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However, sometimes the words on your website left by commentators aren’t always the sort of words that lend themselves to affiliate links… that is of course, until Amazon’s contextual advertising kicks in and picks out some utterly random and bizarre phrases.

For some reason Amazon has automatically picked out the phrase ‘bunch of complete twats’ from one of the comments left on my blog, and has linked it to the product of the Brady Bunch on DVD.

Why would Amazon have done this? Is the word ‘bunch’ sufficient for Amazon to pick out the product? Has someone at Amazon inserted the keywords ‘bunch’ and ‘twats’ together in the product entry for the Brady Bunch?

Whatever the reason, I don’t think I’m going to get any conversions from this particular link from Amazon.

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When you pay a foreign currency cheque into Lloyds TSB you have to fill in an A4 form which has 5 pages! Yes, 5 sodding pages!

It always takes the staff ages and usually involves at least two cashiers as few people know how to do it. Then when it finally does get filled in, I have to wait several days for the money to appear in the account AND I get charged a huge commission on the amount.

Why can’t Amazon.com combine the account with Amazon.co.uk and pay one amount via direct deposit each month? It would make it so much easier and I wouldn’t have to spend my Saturdays in Lloyds queuing up with people who only seem to be asking for a balance.

A balance!?!

I HAVE to go into the branch to pay this US Dollar cheque into my account. Why do these morons need to be there if they’re only after a balance? Use the cash machine, it will tell you. Use online banking, use anything. I don’t care. Just don’t queue up in front of me, wasting my time, just to get a sodding balance to your account.

And they were queuing up outside waiting for the bank to open for this.

Imbeciles.

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As affiliate networks go Pepperjam is one of the sleekest, sexiest designs around. I didn’t need to be asked twice to sign up, I mean, mentioning Star Trek on the front page made me leap right in

One of the most important things with any affiliate network that wants to be successful is transparency with the affiliates. Pepperjam have made giant steps towards this by detailing every aspect of their business on their own network blog.

The network already has some fairly big merchants on board, including Blockbuster and the bloggers’ favourite ReviewMe.

When I signed up for the network as a publisher I was presented with the all too familiar US focused sign up forms. This is a pet hate of mine, but at least Pepperjam’s did have a stab at making it easier for non US based affiliates. The problem was though is that it forced me to enter a VAT number, which is apparently essential for EU based affiliates.

I’m not VAT registered, never have been. I don’t have a VAT number. However I couldn’t proceed without adding one, so I had to make one up. I’m sure there’s an element of illegality in doing that, but hey ho.

I’ll certainly give the network a chance, but at the moment it is very US focused. If it starts to creep into my site network and oust networks such as CJ and Affiliate Window I’ll let you know.

About Pepperjam:
Pepperjam is an industry leading full-service internet marketing agency offering marketing services and advanced technology in the areas of pay-per-click, search-engine optimization, affiliate marketing, and online media planning and buying.  The company was founded in 1999 by internet marketing expert, conference speaker, and published author Kristopher B. Jones. Pepperjam has received numerous awards and achievements, including recognition by Inc. Magazine for two consecutive years as one of the fastest growing privately-held businesses in the United States. Learn more at www.pepperjam.com.

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s George Lucas seems to be all about making money, it makes sense that Internet marketers could learn a lot from him, so without further ado…

If you find a niche market, exploit it.

It really doesn’t matter how good you are at something, if you find a niche market that no one else has discovered, exploit the living crap out of it. George Lucas isn’t the best director in the world. His script writing skills are entirely suspect or ‘shit’ as Harrison Ford once labelled them. This didn’t stop George creating one of the biggest franchises in movie history. He found that he could exploit the nerd culture for every penny of their allowance, and he gleefully took it.

This applies to Internet marketing as well. You don’t have to create the best website, or the biggest, or have the most Wookies. You just need to attack the niche with a fervent passion and saturate it. If you own the leading news site, the leading forum and the leading community site all within the same niche, you become the dominant player. As George Lucas has found, this brings very lucrative rewards.

If something works, re-skin it and use it again.

How many costume changes did Natalie Portman have in the Star Wars prequels? I’ll tell you, it was 7,963*. The reason for this was that George Lucas could then sell 7,963 different Amidala Star Wars figures. She’s the same figure, but with a different costume; and the nerds bought them. This couldn’t be truer of Internet marketing. If you create a site that works and earns you money simply copy the site, re-colour it, re-package it and use it for another site.

Repeat the process ad infinitum and then in a few years you might have as many websites earning you money as I have useless Amidala figures, all running off the same template.

Know when to delegate

Even a megalomaniac control freak like George Lucas knows he can’t do everything, so should you. If ideas are your forte and your time is best spent thinking, pondering and coming up with obnoxious CGI characters then that is how you should spend all of your time. If you need someone to write the code or design the site for you, hire a freelancer. Prices are cheap and money spent at this stage can be recouped easily on the time saved and the fact that you’ve had something done correctly by a skilled professional.

George Lucas tried to re-edit Empire Strikes Back when he thought that Irvin Kershner was ruining his film with all that ‘love’ crap between Han and Leia. Thankfully for all of us George quickly realised that Kersh was in fact correct and he let him finish the film his way.

See the bigger picture

I constantly get people wondering what it is I actually do, and how I make money. It’s not obvious to the average 9-5 guy. When George Lucas made Star Wars he waived his director’s fee in exchange for merchandising rights to the film. People at the time wondered how he was going to make any money from the project, now he has enough money to buy a small island, Australia perhaps. George had faith in his idea and knew it would work. He could see the bigger picture, something many people can’t.

To succeed in Internet marketing, particularly affiliate marketing you need to be able to look beyond the wage-slave existence that most people experience. Being paid a flat rate fee for a set amount of hours didn’t interest George, and it shouldn’t interest you.

Don’t be precious about your website

In ‘Return of the Jedi’ the battle on Endor between the Ewoks and the Storm Troopers was originally supposed to feature Wookies. I know, Wookies don’t live on Endor, but they nearly did. George changed the battle to Ewoks because he thought fluffy cuddly teddy bears would be more merchandisable. When everyone else told George that 3 foot teddy bears fighting Storm Troopers was ridiculous, he said “No… I’m going to make more money this way”. By Christ he was right.

The moral here is that you shouldn’t be afraid to make changes to your website that, although may appear to be at the detriment of the website, in fact make more money. George Lucas’ goal wasn’t to make a compelling film; it was to make a mountain of cash. He did this spectacularly well because he never lost sight of his goal. Always remember why you’re in Internet marketing.

* The figure of 7,963 was made up. I’m not certain Natalie Portman had this many costume changes during the Star Wars prequels as I fell asleep during the Phantom Menace and woke up around the time R2D2 was flying in Attack of the Clones. I presume the figure is fairly accurate however based on the crap that filled the shelves in Wal-Mart shortly after.

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Within 10 minutes of posting the thread I received a phone call from Chris at Affiliate Window saying that it was an error and that their engineers had no idea how it happened. It appears that the Sun website receive Amazon products through Affiliate Window, but the rest 0f us shouldn’t. I, apparently, managed to break the system.

Go me.

Thanks to Chris for jumping on this so quickly as well.

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