At first I was thinking that it could be EPC but that has risen from 4.88p in 2010 to 5.39p in 2012. On that basis I’d say that I’ve been doing better at attracting relevant visitors to my site – although in that sector there has been a noticeable increase in general prices. I’ve also become better at getting my commission rates increased above standard. I also ruled out the level of non-affiliate product reviews as the heat maps were so in favour of affiliate clicks.

However, after seeing the Affiliate Window blog post: “Why mobile Marketing is hitting affiliates in the pocket” and the stand-out comment that affiliates “lose out on £1.2m in commission for every 1% of sales through mobile handsets” I started to come out in a cold sweat. I had a flash back of dropping Buyagift an email about their mobile site being indexed in Google and wondered what my merchants were doing. Thankfully I got confirmation that Thornton’s were tracking mobile sites, whilst Cadbury Gifts Direct had a mobile site, but it looked like they weren’t and Hotel Chocolat didn’t have a mobile site.

Although I saw that Thornton’s conversion rate had increase from 4.53% to 7.42% from 2011 to 2012 and I just put that down to more prominent advertising. My Earnings Per Click was up, and AOV not really fluctuating, so what could it be?

My jaw hit the floor when I popped into Analytics and saw that now 24.77% of my traffic was from mobile devices. Furiously checking for last year’s data I saw it was 9.22% and the year before it was just 2.24%. Obviously Google Analytics traffic of particular devices has only recently kicked-in, I did notice that 11.26% of my traffic was via iPhones – and I knew how crap my site looked on an that far from being mobile friendly. Most of the revenue hotspots were being pushed to the side as people as people tapped in for the content.

I then thought I should found out how many clicks I was sending to merchants and realised they had nearly halved since 2010 even though this year I didn’t run AdSense and had slightly more landscape taken up by ads (no Panda affect this year as traffic was up significantly during the late March Panda update). But seeing the figure of CTR falling from 73% the year before to 36.7% this year was a huge kick in the teeth and proof that I really should have kept an eye on mobile stuff.

What were people doing? Well, when people first visit the site the text is far too small to read…

… so people were tapping in so they could read the reviews, which meant all the adverts were lost. From heat map analysis I knew that those adverts at the top where getting tonnes of clicks, but not mobile traffic, it looks like they were being ignored.

All the mobile plugins I’ve looked at just did the same, the content was there, but the monetization was lost. With a strange case of serendipity I hooked up with the guys at MyMCart in a consultancy basis and started to bash their referrer product around to see how we can make it even more relevant and useful for affiliates (I hope they appreciate the long emails and constant suggestions?). We’re at a stage where we’ve made heaps of progress in the last couple of weeks and we can start to allow a few affiliates to have a play.

Essentially the product is a suite where you can upload product CSV files from your favourite networks and that data will be organised and pumped out into a mobile version of a product listing site. I’m currently trying it on d.eals.mobi and doing a joint venture with cluck.mobi to ensure that Google gets on ok with it from an SEO point of view. But I see heaps of opportunity for affiliates because you can alter your own CSV files, tweak the product data and add content and use it purely as an SEO tool, or show banners within your site only when people are viewing with mobile devices and send them to merchants that have mobile sites and ensure you increase CTR and EPC. I’ll be providing the code this week to so you can drop links into category specific or search specific pages of your mobile site.

The idea is that’ll be a piece of cake to monetise your mobile traffic regardless of what platform you use or how you generate affiliate sites.

My big affiliate push this year will be mobile, as I want that damn commission chart to have a huge uplift next year. But maybe have a look at your own data and see how much mobile traffic you’re getting and if that’s deflating your clicks to merchants and commissions.

I’ve been struggling to find a perfect example of a big brand that is doing corporate blogging well. And at last I’ve found one. Whilst looking for information about the new iPhone, I came across the Dial-a-Phone Blog.

So what do I like about the Dial-a-Phone blog?
1) Its useful! – There’s information about HSDPA with a little video-type thing to say how much faster it is than 3G. (Yep my N95 has it). There’s tips about how to upload pics to Flickr using your moby, there’s industry news about the new PSP and so much more.

2) It’s light-hearted – I like the post about the Beyoncé mobile phone and Jon Tickle.

3) It’s not plastered with advertising – I just hate blogs with so much self-importance that they plaster advertising all over it. People want accurate, timely information not to be physically assaulted with flash banners.

4) They tell you who the bloggers are – On the right its got a list of the five bloggers and you can find out more about them. I find it always nice to know the face and the details of the people behind the posts.

5) They let you add the RSS feed to multiple readers – This is something I’m falling down on with my own strategy and need to fix asap.

6) You can search the blog – another important feature especially as the blog is n the same domain as the main site, using site:dialaphone.co.uk in Google may not give you what you’re looking for.

7) They understand social media marketing – they do give away an iPhone in the blog – you’ve got to find the post though.

The design is pretty good – it’s not crap like mine. The colours match the brand, the design is tidy and, even thought the SEO is a bit lacking, it’s one that I’d add to my feedreader as I’d be wanting to come back.

I go and order my first two games, GT Pro Series (rubbish) and Red Steel (not bad). I play them for a bit and sent them back just after Christmas. Now I’ve been waiting nearly a month to get some more games to come back. But they never arrive. So I email them and say that I’ve sent them back but nothing’s come my way. Then they reply with:

Hi Lee,

We have not received these titles back from you, could you please forward your certificate of posting to us so we can remove these games from your list.

Kind regards
[witheld]
Customer Care Support
address: Swapgame.com Ltd, Coventry, UK

Are you kidding me? I’m supposed to get a certificate of posting from the Post Office every time I’m sending back a game??? You’ve got to be kidding me?!!

I’m still waiting for a reply but if it’s not satisfactory, I’ll be emailing my Wii Console and PS3 subscribers telling them to avoid SwapGame.

In fact, GameFlirt on Affiliate Future have been great, asking for advice and feedback. So if you’re looking to promote a games rental company, go for GameFlirt!

What shocked me was that there were over 1,500 completed surveys – boy things have changed since I’ve been in the game!

- Ages
But when you look at the ages, there’s no real surprises, 25% are 30 or under (including myself for the next month). But an interesting find is that over a third are 41 or over. Why that is, I have no idea!

But when you look at the “Active” element of each age group then you notice that most of those 20 or under are actually inactive, whilst those in the 31-40 age group are less likely to be active or do it when they can find time.

- Gender
When it comes to the gender of affiliates, if you’re male you’re more likely to be active than inactive. I’ll resist any sexist, stereotypical remarks – novel for me I know.

- Location
It would have been useful to compare the percentage of affiliates in each geographic location with that of the general population which would have allowed one to make comments like “you’re more likely to be an affiliate if you’re based in London than in Scotland.” At the moment you can only remark that if you’re an affiliate you’re more likely to live in the South East – which is obviously a different statement.

- Education
Again it would have been useful to have a comparison against the national average. The survey says that 48% of affiliates will have a bachelor’s degree. So can we say that affiliates are on average more educated than general “middle management” or company directors? Nope.

However, there is one interesting fact that only 26% of affiliates have done any sort of marketing course. I’m one of the remainder who haven’t. My excuse is that I got into Internet marketing before there were any IM courses and before I actually knew I was doing IM. I wonder how many of the under 31′s in the survey have marketing qualifications?

My circumstance generally matches the finding that “50% of affiliate marketers say that their education has ‘not at all’ helped their present knowledge and understanding of affiliate marketing”. Although, I’m sure a degree in Economics has helped in the peripheral aspects of running a business.

- Length of Time Being an Affiliate
44% of affiliates have started in the past two years. This isn’t too surprising when you see the new faces and names on affiliate marketing forums and boards. For me the level of noob questions on the A4U forum has increased whilst the more experienced affiliates seem to have moved into closed circles and now communicate primarily via messenger, perhaps?

- Hours spent working
From the survey you can establish that a quarter of all affiliates do over 10 hours “work” a day. But it would be interesting to find out if they’re actually doing “productive work”? How much was copy creation, advert writing, stats checking, networking, social marketing or time-wasting?

- Source of Income
57% of full time affiliates earn some money elsewhere, it would have been interesting to find out where from? May be it’s consultancy, running a network, a bricks and mortar business etc?

- Level of Income
The big shocker of it all was that “Half of all respondents (49%) earned less that £500 a year.” So how can you really surmise that 12% of affiliates work over 10 hours a day but only earn around £500 a year. This just doesn’t add up. So it would have been good to divide the level of work done with the level of income earned.

And the 2 people that said they do over £2mil in their spare time can they please give me a call?

- Business Relationships
What I found surprising was that 11% of affiliates work in partnership. I’ve tried it, and it’s a good idea when you can mix skills to form a complete team then it’s worth it.

- Number of Websites
3% of people have over 100 sites, ooh I remember those spamming days! I’ve getting there with around 60-odd though.

-Converting traffic
40% think that SEO is the best way to get converting traffic. They’re obviously not doing PPC right!

- Number of Networks
15% only use one network. Bloody hell, there’s benefits in choice. No network has the best merchants in any given industry.

- Which network?
I would have thought all would have been signed up with Tradedoubler, but only 87% were. 48% use Affiliate Window and 44% use Affiliate Future. But it doesn’t say if there’s a tendency for active affiliates to use one network over another.

- Which Sectors?
It was good to see a fairly good spread between which industries affiliates work in.

- Why wouldn’t an affiliates promote a merchant?
The biggest reason why an affiliate wouldn’t promote a merchant is the quantity and type of links offered – I take it this means the availability of dynamic banners, html banners, flash etc? It would have been good to have specifics.

- Google damaging the industry
36% of affiliates would agree, the survey says! After recent events, its fewer than I expected!

I had a site I was going to do something with ages ago called Movovo. Back then I’d try throwing loads of rubbish up there and see what happened. Now it’s no where in Google, the “site:www.movovo.co.uk movovo” command doesn’t work, nor does link:www.movovo.co.uk. But when you just search on that word, movovo, there’s loads of sites that reference it and link to it.

But you do find sites like those below.

So why the heck should I bother spending my time developing “white hat”, “content rich” sites (I do have them) when I can go back to knocking out 40,000 pages a day and plaster them with ppc ads?

I’m fed up with the good guys spending their time building quality sites whilst the spammers out there rip us off?!

Matt Cutts’ team, imo, should be doing more to make the Google search results a far more compelling offering – somehow !

They blatently haven’t fixed the 301 redirect scraper sites and are happy to kick out sites that replicate navigation or boiler plates within their content sites but are happy to leave the utter shite in!

BTW. I’ve set the domain and hosting to cancel on the end of the contract (this year I think). As I just want to get rid of all that rubbish I used to have.

find-cameras-online.info » Blog Archive » Cameras – Movovo - A new …

Movovo - Christmas Presents

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uk shopping,?????????? ?? Veranika

uk shopping,?????????? ?? Veranika

Dell

Tee & Co Gloucester Accountants, GL1, 01452 500050

Car Insurance For Northern Ireland :: pearlies.co.uk

Anti-Virus Bulletin: 04/23/05

Savapoint Voucher Codes and Discount Coupons

They are suspending paying out on the programme when the budget has gone(around 22nd Dec) until the end of the month, when the January budget kicks in. But that’s ok – there was a couple of days notice. Don’t worry about all the careful
search engine optimisation the affiliates have been doing – we’ll have the trial but we just won’t pay for it.

For me 2006 has been characterised by absolutely woeful merchant & network communication. Affiliates have been moved down the order of priorities for both parties.

There have been so many merchants that have treated us affiliates like shit. You could say that it’s part of the industry and we should just cope with it. But us affiliates should make a stand and name and shame those merchants and networks that don’t:

a) give us reasonable notice before suspending campaigns
b) give us adequate notice of a change in commissions
c) don’t pay on time
d) inform us that their site architecture will change so deep links won’t work

So my merchants that don’t give us what we deserve are:

1) Which?
2) Beautyslueth

If you do a search for Aerospace recruitment agencies, you’ll see three sites that use doorways:

• TipTopJob;
• TwinServe;
• JP Recruit.

It shocked me that Google still hasn’t managed to kick these sites out. The worst culprit is TipTopJob which I’ve known about for years as I used to do supply SEO consultancy services to the market leaders – but I’m still suprised that the tactics I adviced my clients not to continue with a good 3 years ago are still being used to success today.

The only reason I can see that they’ve not been kicked out to date is that they’ve built up some “trust” with Google and they’re cutting them some more slack.

I remember having a site using the same sort of format about 3 years ago and it lost 95% of it’s Google traffic over night whent they really started to clamp down on duplication. To my mind they’ve been ratcheting up their duplication onslaught ever since, but some still they’re letting some sites through.

Another thing that has peed me off recently is that despite Matt Cutts posting a year ago about a hotel site in Bath, UK that had a shed load of links “hidden” with css to be 1px high. What makes me chuckle is that they’ve not even tried to hide the formatting in an external css file, it’s in the page and even called it “tinytext”:

.tinytext { font-size: 1px; color: #FFFFCC; text-decoration: none; line-height: 1px;}

come on Matt, how blatent does it have to be before it’s removed from the index?

The site for those that want to know is Villa Magdala.

This is the code that they use to hide the links is below:

<div class="tinytext"><br /><a href="contents.html" class="tinytext">Contents Page</a><br /><a href="description.html" class="tinytext">The Villa Magdala – A Description</a><br /><a href="links.html" class="tinytext">Website Links</a><br /><a href="2000years.html" class="tinytext">’Two Thousand Years of History’</a><br /><a href="directions.html" class="tinytext">Maps, Directions &amp; Travel</a><br /><a href="history.html" class="tinytext">History of the Villa Magdala</a><br /><a href="ideal.html" class="tinytext">’Bath – the Ideal Base’</a><br /><a href="accolades.html" class="tinytext">Accolades &amp; Awards</a><br /><a href="contact.html" class="tinytext">Contact Us</a><br /><a href="roomrates.html" class="tinytext">Room Rates &amp; Tariffs</a><br /><a href="info.html" class="tinytext">Useful Information</a><br /><a href="http://store.ohtee.com/" class="tinytext">Anti-Virus &amp; NOD32 online store</a><br /><br>We are located in Bath in the UK overlooking peaceful Henrietta Park and just minutes level stroll from the historic city<br />centre, offering lovely, top quality hotel (aka guesthouse or bed and breakfast) 5 (five!) Diamond accommodation for a<br />vacation, holiday, business or break in England, UK. Keywords describing our accommodation include room, bath, bed,<br />guesthouse, break, breakfast, Britain (and Victorian Britain, and bed). Located in a classic Georgian street, with Georgian and<br />Victorian architecture abundant – stay in a five Diamond guesthouse in England for your vacation.<br><br />Vacation in a Georgian guesthouse or Roman guesthouse, Villa Magdala hotel, peaceful, bed – and UK accommodation in bath – <br />experience the shopping, park, tourist attractions, vacation, villa, accommodation! For business, or as a tourist on holiday or coming to travel in<br />England in Britain; whether to travel, or on a family (family) holiday with the family or on business in Britain, we would love<br />to welcome you to the Villa Magdala, beautiful Victorian accommodation close to the centre of Roman Bath.<br /></div>

There’s me having a site removed because I duplicated the league tables for the EURO 2008 qualifying rounds for my users to see – I made the mistake of putting them on every page of the site, I’ve also made the mistake in the past of labeling my blog posts – but there’s sites actively trying to “game” Google and they get away with it!

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