Posts Tagged Christmas
Learning From Affiliate Christmas Past
Posted by Jason Dale in Affiliate Marketing on November 16, 2011
Way back in the day we launched a festive shopping site called Xmastime. It still ranks, it still gets some traffic and over the years it’s had various refits. This year we’ve not touched it – no time and no inclination are perhaps the best reasons. Trying to guess what others want for Christmas whilst losing the will to live due to the lack of festive banners from merchants is not a good combo.
Planning For Affiliate Christmas
If you are running something Christmassy (and we are doing some stuff over on Loquax) then a few hints and tips never go amiss. Over on A4U they’re publishing hints and tips for affiliates from networks (Part 1, Part 2). That’s all well and good and very useful, but from an affiliate point of view should you be dropping everything in favour of the festive promotions and umpteen incentives that will be falling into your inbox.
Well I don’t think so… and rather than rewrite a whole new blog I’ve located my Planning For Affiliate Christmas blog from 2009. Hopefully it gives you a few useful bits of advice about jumping aboard Santa’s Sleighful of Incentives and Promotions for Affiliates (or Performance Marketeers).
Some Top Tips
The most important tips I can offer are be wary of the distraction Christmas can bring, be organised, and don’t be tempted to deviate too much from what you know. The endless emails of incentives, promos and commission chops and changes can be incredibly distracting – try and view them rationally and sensibly. A trip to Dubai might be a nice incentive, but is trying to win it at the expense of the last 11 months work? Just think about it!
By the same token, if you promote Widgets and Merchant X has been doing bumper Widget sales for you all year – now’s not the best time to test out Merchant Y and thrown Merchant X to the side. You might well find that Merchant X may offer you 5% commission and you get sales but Merchant Y may tempt you with 10% but sucks at conversion. Of course Y may just be a surprise – but if so why have they waited until now to get your business?
Organisation is also key to this time of year. To be honest Christmas Tips in mid-November is a little bit late in the day. Most affiliates looking to cash in will already be up and running (e.g. Quidco have had a Christmas countdown since the start of November – and that doesn’t organise itself overnight). You can still jump on board but try and fit Christmas in to what you do day to day.
Merchants, We Still Want Your Christmas Promos!
For us it’s not all bah humbug and Scrooge! Plenty of merchants run competitions around this time of year and if they get in touch with us with a little bit more detail then we’ll happily feature them on our blog – as we’ve done with John Lewis. It fits in with our site, has something that will interest our users and is great content. A perfect combo for us as an affiliate… and to be honest has more chance of generating a sale than if we spent the next few weeks updating Xmastime!
Any merchants/networks/AMs who want to know how they can get on to our blog then just get in touch… as long as there’s a competition angle we can use it!
Planning For Affiliate Christmas!
Posted by Jason Dale in Affiliate Marketing on September 29, 2009
Earlier this month a well liked gift merchant left me the $64,000 question on Messenger – “what are your plans for Christmas?”! I never replied to the question, mainly due to the fact that affiliate marketing took a back seat whilst a moggy had to urgently see the Vet (good news is she’s alright, just lumpy faced and gummy)!
Anyway, back to affiliate Christmas and I can exclusively reveal what we’ve planned for this year…… erm, actually it’s nothing!
No new gift site, no excessive updating of our Christmas Shopping site, no over excitement about all the cool incentives already on offer, no nothing!
The reasons for this are many fold.
1. Christmas Can Be a Big Distraction
It’s a big time of year for retailers, and with so many starting their festive lines now you sense that this year is even more important than usual. However, it can be a huge distraction for the 365 days a year site owner. We’ve now learnt that Christmas has to be part of our day to day work NOT let it take it over for a couple of months (as it has done in previous years).
2. Christmas Can Be Demoralising
There’s nowt worse for an affiliate than spending time putting together content and promotions for a merchant only to see that Mr Cashback, Mr Voucher Codes, Mr Big Brand or Mr A.F.Filiate has a humongous promotion (or special dispensation to break rules) that’s going to seriously over shadow anything you do (and they will, they always do every year!).
3. Christmas Can Be No Fun
Even before Santa’s emptied his sack down the chimney I’ve had enough of Christmas. Spending loads of time looking at trees, gift ideas, decorations and other stuff takes away the fun of the festive season. It’d be nice to enjoy it again!
4. Affiliates Aren’t Just for Christmas 1
This one really gets my goat! Merchants who for 9 months of the year never contact you but are suddenly your best mate because they’re offering an iPod Nano in their Christmas incentive and are hoping that you’re going to plaster your site with their Father’s Day creative. Erm, no!
5. Affiliates Aren’t Just for Christmas 2
Similar to that are the merchants who have never ever looked like they’re going to generate a sale in a million years (perhaps related to 2 above) who suddenly are expecting to feature in premium positions and/or replace your known converters in exchange for an extra % or two (remember extra percentage of nothing is still nothing before switching to unknown performers).
6. Planning Ahead
One of the biggest reasons is that I know we’re better off using our time planning ahead for the non-Christmas weeks and months ahead by focusing on what we’re doing, than spending time looking at retailers who may or may not convert in a comparatively small window of opportunity.
7. Time Management
Running competitions, updating extra content and doing extra promotion takes time. Time we often don’t have and time that’s often not paid for. For example we’d love to do some prize draws but don’t have time to badger sponsors, deal with their idiosyncrasies, keep them all happy and then run round come January to get prizes sent out.
Christmas can be a good time for affiliates and retailers do like to paint a pretty picture of loads of sales and commissions to be had. That’s possibly true, but in our experience going “above and beyond” for any retailer for affiliate Christmas isn’t always the best use of time.
Seriously, it’s worth stopping for a moment and thinking about your festive ROI in time and commitment terms.
Retailers are only considering their business and will do what they have too to get maximum affiliate coverage over their competitors. That’s fair enough, but you, as an affiliate, need to consider your own business. Do you have time to do extra festive promotion? Can you integrate Christmas into your current working day and campaigns? Do you think it’s actually worth the time you invest?
This is especially true with regards to incentives!
Whilst the Christmas incentives a merchant offers to affiliates are great, do be careful before running off in search of gold at the end of the rainbow. It might be worth merchants revealing just how much help and assistance they are offering the big boys and how much that could distract from any effort you put in or limit your opportunity in selected prize categories.
This is not to say we won’t do anything festive related, it’s simply a case of we’re not going to go too far off our current course or out of our way to accommodate Santa, Frosty and co. in an often desperate attempt to chase extra Christmas commissions.
Perhaps we have a plan after all?
Ask Jeeves For Voucher Codes – Good News for Affiliates?
Posted by Jason Dale in Affiliate Marketing on September 7, 2009
The battle for voucher code territory continues with the news that search engine Ask Jeeves has introduced voucher code results on it’s SERPS. If a user, for example, searches for the likes of Argos, Jessops and Pizza Hut, they get shown on the right hand side voucher code results from a partnership wih Bview, “an online community whose mission is to help others find good businesses and save money”.
It’s an interesting move from Ask, but the initial implementation is fairly basic.
For example a search for Argos, Argos Vouchers, and Argos Discount Codes will generate a code result, but a search for a Sony TV voucher code (as that’s the offer currently being promoted from Argos) and you don’t get a result.
According to Hitwise apparently food vouchers are quite popular! So what happens with a search for just a “Pizza”?
Well, you can find a Pizza Hut voucher code under a search for “Pizza Hut” on ‘Jeeves but if you just want a “Cheap Pizza” then they don’t tell you they have a code on offer. Most surprising though is if you search for “Voucher Codes” you’d never actually know that Ask Jeeves have their own code system implemented.
Perhaps that will change in time?
From an affiliate perspective any movements in the voucher code arena are not always good news. It’s going to be tough as it is with the PR campaigns of the big voucher codes sites gearing up for Christmas activity. Already MVC are planning an offline promotion whilst Vouchercodes.co.uk seem to be becoming the Jordan/Katie Price of the VC world as they’re in every newspaper we pick up these days (e.g. The Sun).
The one good thing we’ve noticed about the Ask Jeeves codes is that you don’t need to click to reveal any of them, so a user searching for a code whilst at checkout may not feel the need to click around and reset their cookies? It’s a small crumb of hope if nothing else.
Obviously the natural question is can we expect the same from the likes of other search engines?
Given their desire to earn revenue and the fact that voucher codes are a huge online business, both here and abroad, it wouldn’t be a massive surprise to see a similar feature roll out. Something similar from Google or Bing before Christmas and that certainly could put a cat amongst the presents this year!
