I don’t give merchants the nod on incentives all that often. Generally they take the somewhat unimaginative form of “top selling affiliate” type awards.  Personally, I’m rarely driven to try a programme or new sector out on the basis of these incentives reasoning that it’ll be the well seasoned affiliates on a particular programme who’ll scoop all the prizes.

As usual though, the good people at Prezzybox seem to have come up with the goods.  Their rather topping winter incentive gives affiliates old and new the opportunity to win a swish 5 star holiday to Dubai.

The incentive runs from 1st October to 14th February and if you reach any of the below sales targets over the 4.5 months this promo runs for… you get a lovely prize!!

Even better, affiliates can win multiple prizes if they smash through the various incentive thresholds. So if you end up selling £75,000 worth of gift type gear you’ll get either 3 places on the trip to Dubai or 4 skiing places.

But Wait…. There’s More!

To make this truly accessible to affiliates of every type… there are 2 prizes that mean even new or low performing / inactive affiliates of Prezzybox can be in with a chance to win.  The best new affiliate and most improved affiliate will also score a luxurious trip to Dubai.

You can find more info on this great promo in this A4U thread.

Well done to the guys at Prezzybox for coming up with this great incentive.  I think this kind of promo is great for the industry!

Greetings fellow affiliates!  What do you mean “who are you?”  It’s me – Kirsty!!!

Well, after darned near losing my mind (as all brides to be seem to manage) I have to say that Duncan and I had the best day of our entire lives. The ceremony was amazing, the bridesmaids were beautiful, the champagne flowed… and get this… the sun shone.

We had a beautiful holiday straight afterwards in gorgeous surroundings which we both REALLY needed,  thanks to Kieron’s Kindness and Chris from Sunshine.co.uk.  From the bottom of our newlywed hearts, thanks to both of them for really being very topping blokes – it made an already special time simply perfect.

I’ll be back blogging and generally getting affiliate things back on track from today onwards, so I hope to be able to get some decent posts filtering through once again.  I feel so “out of touch” when I leave the blog to it’s own devices.

Next stop for us is the most excellent A4U Expo… can’t wait to see old and new faces there.

In the meantime, I shall let these pictures do the talking as I gently float down from the cloud I’ve been perched upon for the last 9 days.  It’s all a beautiful, beautiful blur!!

Signing the register, and before anyone asks the soft toy was knitted by my beloved Grannie.  It’s a lucky sweep, and a family tradition!!

The most beautiful bridesmaids in all the world – am I just paranoid or are they laughing at me?

Shit… does anyone know how to reverse park this thing?

Always at my happiest surrounded by men in kilts. Woo hoo!!

Didn’t take long for the groom and best man to start acting up, did it?

I take care of my own drinks service… Note BLUE SKIES and SUNSHINE in Scotland!!

Wow… it’s all looking very dignified, isn’t it? Want to see what happened after Duncs and I drank many glasses of champagne and a few whiskies?

I had a funny feeling you would!!

What a perfectly matched pair!

Hello Folks, well I had hoped to still have time to chuck out some well reasoned blog posts when I was in the run up to my wedding.  Hah!  I’m sure those of you who have already taken the plunge will realise the delusional nature of that belief.

And I thought coming home was going to be fun?  Oh deary, deary me… it’s not been dull.

I have always been someone who suffers from stress, but this really is something else.  I have chest pains, I can’t concentrate, and although I haven’t yet lost my temper about anything it gets harder to maintain my composure each and every day!

So what’s going to set me off in the end?  It’ll be one of the following: -

• None of my carefully procured undies fit me. This has led to the discovery that I am now sporting a stupidly rare bra size after losing weight.  My beautiful lacy (and comfortable) bridal bra and knickers had to be replaced with the one bra in Debenhams that would fit.  Horrible?  Of course!  An instrument of torture in the comfort department?  You betcha!!  This is a bra more suited to a female Gestapo officer than a lovely bride.
• My wedding dress is a different colour to the one I tried on in the shop. It transpires this is a common thing to happen as the display dresses tend to get “warmer” in colour due to being touched a lot, tried on, and generally getting a little grubby.  Before I ordered it would have been the time to find that one out!
• My shoes don’t match my dress. This means I had to buy another pair (for the third time).  That brings my tally to 1 x pair hideously uncomfy, 1 x wrong colour, and a grand total of £95 on bloody shoes I’ll never wear.
• I’ve just been informed I can’t dance backwards in my wedding dress. What?  I can’t what?  How am I going to get out of people’s way?  How can we do our first dance??? What if someone takes me out to the dancefloor and knocks me over simply by trying to give me a bit of a twirl?  The dress shop told me you could get hoops to go underneath a wedding dress. Advised me one might make me look too short in my rather flouncy number. Did they tell me why it might be a good idea from a personal mobility point of view?  No!!!  Not until it was too late to rig something up so that a simple step backwards didn’t result in me being on Funnyest Home Videos for the next 15 chuffing years!!!!!
• It won’t stop raining – At this rate we will need to buy a small ark to ferry our guests between the lavvy and our marquee.  Please, please, please, can someone turn the water sprinkler system off in Scotland?!?!
• My hen night - I know absolutely nothing about this.  I don’t know where it is.  I don’t know who is coming.  Is not knowing fun?  Unfortunately, it isn’t.  It should be exciting, but alas the old stress levels are too high.  That said, just about anything will stress me out right now, so I’ll probably really enjoy it at the time.

Anyhoo, I’m going to stop my list right there.  I can assure you that is just the start.  The in-laws begin to arrive in the area from Monday on so more fun will ensue.

My only comfort?  My stress levels are teeny compared to those being shouldered by my dear old Scottish Mammy, who looks like she’ll need a triple bypass any day now.

So… Normal Service Will Resume…

After I’m back from honeymoon!

See you all then for me talking sense instead of all that bridal nonsense.

Cheerio for now folks.

xxx

Well folks. We’re off to the airport in Brisbane in a few hours, ready to come back home and get married!

To say that Duncan and I are nervous is a bit of an understatement. All I can say is I’m not surprised brides are famous for losing lots of weight just before the big day. I’m in a permanent state of terror and there are still 19 days to go.

The good news is that we moved into our new pad 5 days ago and it is absolutely amazing. The former owners left the place positively gleaming and even came back yesterday to fix a leaky tap they’d discovered just as they moved out. And they say there are no nice people left in the world. Michael, the former owner, even gave Duncan a free lesson in how to change a tap washer!

If you haven’t seen pics of the new place, I posted them here a while back.

The Only Downside To The New House Is…

We’re gonna spend a LOT of time sweeping up leaves.

As you can see, Duncan is a big fan of occupational health and safety. Note the extremely safe bar stool (which has a swivel top) he used to get himself up onto the roof. I wonder if now is a good time for a life insurance policy? Hmmm…..

On the plus side, I love the view from my new office. I think I’m really going to love working in this space!

So for now guys, this is Au Revoir. I don’t arrive in the UK until Friday and there will be jetlag followed by frantic bridal preparations. I’ll try to blog, but I’m sure you will all forgive me if it ends up being a rant about colour schemes, tiaras or anything else that gets under my skin. I’ll try to retain my common sense, but who knows? Better people than me have turned into Bridezilla in the week or two before their big day!

Cheerio guys!

I was intrigued to read about the super-duper James Bond style “Top Secret Project” which Sunshine.co.uk announced would be launched at this year’s A4U Expo.

Of course I am a woman and therefore incredibly nosey, so after I challenged Chris to an arm wrestling match in a bid to find out, he immediately gave in and let me see the goodies. I am very scary when my nose is bothering me, so Chris mustn’t feel bad about being picked on by a 5ft 3 affiliate girl.

So What is This Vast Secret?

Well, I might have been scary enough to get Chris to let me in on the secret, but he’s managed to persuade me not to let the cat out of the bag. It would be unsportsmanlike after all the hard work these guys have put into the new concept they are launching.

I’m not allowed to give anything away, but here are some reasons you absolutely should be at their launch:-

• To get the jump on everyone else who’ll rush to join the Sunshine.co.uk affiliate programme – this really is that good!
• If you don’t think you can do a travel site or make it work for whatever reason – you can now. Trust me on this.
• It’s simply, totally, completely gosh darned exciting for our industry. If you want to see the future of affiliate marketing programmes it will be right there in the Platinum Room for you to see.

Want To Be Among The First To Know? Don’t Have an Expo Ticket?

Sunshine are that mad keen for as many people to be at the unveiling of their amazing top secret project that they’ve agreed to send one of my readers to the Expo on the 14th & 15th of October to find out!

Yep, that’s right. If you wanted to go to the Expo but just couldn’t come up with the moolah then now is your big chance!

Sunshine.co.uk are giving one lucky winner: -

• A full conference pass which includes all the amazing after parties.
• 3 nights accommodation in a double room at Novotel – right in the heart of the conference action.

Worried About Going On Your Own?

Don’t. You’ll also have the opportunity to hang out with little old me for general affiliate chat, Q & A, or beer and nonsense. Whatever you like. If you’re shy or don’t know anyone I’ll make sure that you’re not left standing in a corner on your own at any stage of the event (which you wouldn’t be anyway – but I’m giving you my personal guarantee!).

Want To Win This Great Prize? Here’s How!

Just drop me a line via my contact form with “Expo Entry” as the subject line. Tell me in 50 words or less why you want to go and how getting access to all the great info at this year’s conference will help your affiliate career.

More information on this year’s programme here: -

http://www.a4uexpo.com/london/

It goes without saying – but affiliates only are eligible to enter!!

Winner will be selected on Monday October 6th and informed by e-mail that their luck is in. Competition entries close on Sunday 5th.

If you want to be amongst the first to get in on Sunshine’s announcement, don’t delay… enter this amazing contest today!

It’s rare I post about merchants changing their commissions, I don’t usually feel strongly enough to complain. After all, merchants have to bear their margins in mind. However, this change from PhotoBox has just been so badly done and has left so many questions I’m afraid I have to make my concerns public.

E-mail Title: Commission change

Hi Kirsty,

I have been reviewing your site performances for the month and currently we are paying out more commission than revenue generated.

We won’t be able to operate like this moving forward as it makes no financial sense.

Looking at the sales figures the repeat purchase sales for your site are well below our programme average so I will need to change the commission we currently offer you.

I will be changing your commission as follows:

£2 for new customers orders
12% on repeat orders (was 8%)

I will make the changes on Friday at 1pm

Should you wish to discuss this in more detail please do not hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards,

Jamie

The return mail address is noreply@affiliatewindow.co.uk so alas my polite reply asking for more information simply bounced back. Not an e-mail address in sight either. This led the already irritated Miss McCubbin to decide to simply blog about it instead of asking Jamie what this decision was based on.

I’m Deeply Concerned About The Implications of This on Programme Integrity.

• To be fair, the site I have the links placed on is a free photo printing type site, so perhaps it does encourage freebie hunters. However, the majority of the traffic I send is general photo printing terms rather than freebie traffic. It is all highly targeted PPC traffic so I know there are no quality issues. Why my traffic is poor has me stumped.
• From my interpretation, they’ve based their decision on the performance in the current month alone? Surely I’ve read that wrong. For a decision of this nature looking at historic performance figures over say 12 months would be a fair metric to use. I’ve only sent them 22 leads this month, how many customers would repurchase within a month anyway? Not really a reasonable data sample on which to base the conclusion that I’m seriously under performing? Actually, even the 226 leads I’ve sent for this whole year isn’t entirely a decent data sample from which to conclude a lack of performance. I’m sure some Photobox affiliates generate that many in a few days.
  
• Some more information about exactly which metrics of rubbishness my traffic is displaying and how it differs from the “programme average” would have been appreciated too. It might just have given me some insight into how it could improve and made me feel Photobox were being totally transparent in their dealings with me.
• 48 hours notice? That’s just a little quick, isn’t it? Its not the way you’d treat a “mainstream” business partner. I find myself asking the question “why is it OK to treat affiliates this way?” May I be so bold as to suggest that 30 days notice along with an advance e-mail explaining the process and detailed reasons would be a more appropriate way to deal with this.
• Here’s the most important bit – Why is there not a general announcement going out regarding changes to programme terms? It concerns me deeply that rather than creating a transparent set of rules that affiliates can see before they join the programme, this merchant is choosing to create a new set of unpublished performance rules.
• For example, from the information within the e-mail I’m having my lead rate reduced and there is no threshold at which it might be increased again? Is this something that Awin have agreed to? If changes like this are made it should be within the broad terms of the programme, catered for with Awin technology. To have your commission reduced privately with no publicly agreed threshold for increase doesn’t seem terribly fair.

Let me make this very, very clear here – I’m not going to dispute the right of the merchant to make changes to the terms of their programme. The whole point of affiliate marketing is that the merchant should make a profit!

However, if Photobox are going to pursue this policy of assessing what happens after a lead is paid out it should be made absolutely crystal clear within the terms and conditions of their programme. For that matter, if they are finding a lead based renumeration is not working generally, wouldn’t it make more sense to alter the whole programme accordingly?

The overall tone of this e-mail just gets under my skin somehow. Perhaps it is the lack of notice, perhaps it is because it makes it clear Photobox don’t value me at all as an affiliate. There is no “I hope we can find a way to move forward” or “Perhaps you and I could explore ways to improve things”. It’s a case of “Like it or lump it”.

Well Photobox, I’m not a big affiliate of yours. My average 23% conversion rate doesn’t seem to impress you, nor did you seem inclined to check the outside possibility I might be able to increase volume or quality in the future. This year I’ve generated just 226 leads and last year it was only 319. Those sales come from a mini test site I set up and didn’t do a lot with.

I’ll simply say this Photobox. You’ll have 320 less leads in 2009. I’m pulling your links right now. The way this has been actioned has eroded my trust in your business ethics.

I will leave you with this quote from the Photobox programme page on Awin…

“we believe our affiliates are valuable investors our business”

Hmmm…

I wanted to wait a little while longer to make this follow up post about my progress with the Google filter my affiliate site has been suffering from. I’d have liked to gather a lot more data before declaring the process I’ve been through a success. However, I’m moving house on Friday and going home to the UK the following Tuesday, so if I don’t make this post now it might never happen!!

OK, so for those of you that don’t know about the issues you can catch up here, here and here on the Google filter fun I’ve been having with my site.

To Cut A Long Story Short – It’s Working!

I’ve just spent the most boring 4 weeks of my life visiting each and every page of my site and reducing the mentions of product brand names and other key search terms. I was starting to think it was all for nothing as there wasn’t a lot of improvement. Paranoia and stress are the companions of the Google filtered affiliate! This week, I have really started to see the benefit of those changes. In my previous post I was starting to see a few pages popping back into the index. This few pages have turned into several, and this increases every day. Basically I’m now seeing a lot of the pages I altered right at the start of this process returning to the index.

What Have I Learned

• Unlike the duplicate content filter, the over optimisation filter takes a few weeks to be lifted. Whether this is because of any time penalty Google applies to your site (which Matt Cutts has more or less said can apply in certain scenarios) or is simply reflective of the time it takes Google to spider and re-evaluate your site content – I don’t know. I read somewhere that when there has been a filter such as this applied to your site, it will be re-calculated the next time Google decides how much optimisation is too much. If you have a filter like this on your site, I would say allow 6 to 8 weeks for your changes to be taken into account.
• This is an algorithmic filter, not a manual penalty.
• This filter was in relation to on page factors rather than off page factors such as link building.

My site has now already returned to getting roughly 30% of its traffic from organic sources. This was the proportion I was getting before the initial problems manifested late in May. This is terribly exciting because the majority of the affected pages have not yet returned. Hopefully what this means is that my site will be better and stronger than ever because of the revisions I have made.

A Side Effect of This Process Was..

That I realised the cross linkage between a lot of the pages on my site was really poor. I had written over 200 product based articles to compliment the main sections of the site. For the last 3 months not one of them has been generating traffic. I realised this wasn’t big bad Google, but the fact that the previous / next links within the article categories hadn’t been working for a while. This means a lot of them have been de-indexed and those that remain are linked to from perhaps only one page on the site. I implemented improved cross linkage and a sitemap on the blog, so I hope that means further growth is still to come when Google re-includes them.

Anyhoo…

The whole point of this post was – those changes I’ve described in all my posts did the trick.  I’ve gotten out of Google jail and am back on the SEO highway.

This has been a very positive learning process for me. It is very important to me that I get a significant proportion of my traffic from organic sources to protect my income from the ever increasing competitiveness in the PPC arena and all those other margin squeezing factors affecting the industry today.

Thanks to everyone who has commented or sent me a message, they all really helped me focus on what the issue was.

Woo hoo!!!!! Getting married, moving house, and escaping from a Google Filter in the same month?  What a charmed life I lead

People who’ve had apparently endless issues with the Google Adwords quality score might get quite excited by this headline. However, in the usual style of our good friend Google, they will be replacing the current system with one they say will create a fairer basis for evaluation.

Basically, they are going to tinker with the quality score once again. The new system is an attempt to create a more accurate quality score. As all us affiliates know, the QS is less than perfect and I’ll welcome an improved version. However, forgive me Google if I silently quake in my PPC boots in case you’re about to knock down my affiliate house of cards once more! It’s difficult not to get anxious when the big G-meister announces an all singing and dancing shake up to the status quo.

The Changes in a Nutshell: -

• The new quality score is calculated each and every time an ad is served in response to a Google search query. Google will use this data to work out which queries your ad is performing best for. Google says the data collection will mean your ad is more likely to show for relevant queries and less likely to turn up for irrelevant search strings.

• An end to keywords being marked “inactive for search”. This won’t mean a PPC free for all, so try not to get too excited. Google says that despite this, keywords which have been previously marked inactive for search are unlikely to get much traffic. According to them, their combined per query quality score and bid levels are unlikely to result in a good placement.
• Minimum bid is also up for the high jump. As Inactive for search is being scrapped, there’s no need to display a minimum bid for ad activation – that will already have happened. Instead, there will now be a “first page bid”. This will do what it says on the tin. Tell you what you need to shell out to get your ad on the all important first page.

What does this mean? Well, at first glance it just seems like Google is tweaking things to try and tighten up the relevance of their results. I also welcome the first page bid metric being clear, it will help me to judge how much I should be bidding over large groups of keywords and ads.

However, I’m interested in what will happen in the scenario where there are very few or no ads in response to an extremely niche search query. If I were Google, I’d recognise that accross all the millions of keywords falling into this category there’d be a significant hike in ad revenues from making sure Adwords ads were more likely to be served. Paranoid? Well, perhaps… but I will be really interested to see what happens with this one. I’ve often read anguished tales from affiliates who have had keywords of exactly this nature switched off who said they had excellent ROI from some golden niche they’d stumbled upon, only to have them slapped.

More reading here in this article on the subject by Barry Schwartz

I had a very intriguing mail from Ray Theakston earlier today letting me know he has a bit of a question for me about how to monetise his increasingly popular site. Uniquely, he’s asked me the question by posting it publicly on his blog. However, I’ve reproduced his post below for your reading convenience.

Dear Kirsty,

I’ve just relaunched a site that was badly neglected. It regularly had thousands of visitors daily peaking at 125,000 and I didn’t think anything of it but only recently that figure dropped to a lowly 200.

I’ve removed all of the original content of the site and I have spent the first few weeks of August re-building up the pages based around my previous most popular keywords and images.

After it’s redesign launch four weeks ago, I’m now attracting 1,000-4,000 unique visitors daily looking at between 5,000-22,000 pages and this figure is climbing daily.

I’m not quite sure of the traffic as Servage, Statcounter and Google Analytics are all giving me different results. This may be down to how I am presenting the content. The graph above displays the lowest figures of the three, so it’s looking promising.

Speaking of Google, they have been in touch to say that I can’t promote Google Adsense on the site. You see the content is a bit risque, as you’ll soon tell from my most popular pages:

/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-upskirt/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-see-through/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-flashing/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-nipple-slip/

I’m wondering how I can monetise the site. I don’t want to fill it with full adult porn adverts, so is there anything more subtle I could do?

I’m sure many merchants in the affiliate marketing space won’t want to be associated with a site that focuses on drunk celebrities and includes the odd not-safe-for-work image. The site has profited in the early days though from promoting the likes of Figleaves and JackpotJoy with traditional banners.

I’ve also spotted that a link from my Befuddle home page to an rss feed of my shopping site ShopCodes is ranking highly for some voucher code related keywords. So whilst that page was created as an experiment, I think the site has the potential to exploit the retail market.

Google certainly seems to like the influence of it’s status, being eight years old with a PR4 and it’s WordPress formatting.

My pages are being indexed within hours of posting. The quickest I’ve spotted is two hours between page creation and the page to be indexed by Google on page 1 and for someone to search for a celebrity and land on my site.

The site is on page 1 of Google for the following terms if not the #1 spot itself.

# drunk celebs
# drunk celebrities
# celebs
# uk celebs

Who or what can I promote? You’ll see there’s an advert on there for an adult dating site but that is merely a place holder as I want to see what click-throughs it receives. (At the time of writing, it’s got a CTR of 1.02%)

I also know I’ve got a worldwide audience. Visitors from 147 different countries have visited just recently and this is broken down as such …

The UK appears low at 8% but Analytics says the UK accounts for 33% of my traffic and the visitors spend an average of 4.5 minutes viewing content. They seem to stick around

All the best. Cheers,
Ray

Greetings Raymond!

What an interesting site. I saw it prior to your re-launch and the new design definately makes it way more user friendly and “sticky”.

I suppose the issue that you have is as Adsense says – the content is a little on the “naughty” side. It’s tabloid naughty though, not terribly XXX adult. It probably is just risque enough to put a few merchants off, however it clearly brings you in a lot of traffic. Getting rid of it is therefore not an option!

I could agonise over who will and won’t let you promote them, but lets do this from an optimistic point of view. In an ideal world where anyone and everyone you apply to accepts you with open arms.

There Are A Lot of Obvious Product Areas of Appeal To Your Users

For every one of your celebrity names, I’d create a shopping section / category. Link to it from your drunk celeb categories and make “shop for celeb gear” part of your main menu structure. Given your varied demographic, I might create a page or pages that features offers from your top 2 or 3 countries. If it became worth your while later on you could use some IP detecting technology to send your visitors to the right pages for their country of origin.  You can then use these pages to punt the following: -

• Any products your celebs are currently putting their name to. All the usual things celebs get involved with, perfumes, aftershave, own brand clothing labels. David and Victoria Beckham are an excellent example of celeb branding gone mad.
• Any products they have been seen to be wearing.  Or products that look a lot like some controversial / popular outfit a celeb has recently been papped in. Merchants are always quick to talk about when something they’re stocking has been seen on a celeb or featured in a glossy. Sign up to their newsletters and use their info to help you quickly and efficiently place up to the minute, relevant products on your pages.
• Any products celebs have said they use.  For example, loads of Hollywood types are squeezing themselves into SPANX knickers to make themselves look slim on that red carpet.  Also celebs are often dropping names of skincare products such as Zelens (Cat Deely and Thandie Newton use this product).
• Products celebs are being paid to advertise. Beyonce is currently advertising L’Oreal products, David Beckham is or has been on Nike products, and lets not forget Dita Von Teese being the current face of wonderbra.
• Less excitingly, there’s always the old biography and autobiography book sales plus any albums currently on release by your featured celebs.
• Push subscription offers to celebrity gossip and style magazines.

Less Directly Related:

• Add a general shopping section with offers and product articles of interest to your demographic.
• Use your advertising space to promote particularly irresistable discount code offers and current merchant sales.
• As you’ll have already worked out, a bit of bingo type stuff is a decent fit for your audience.  I have no idea what the conversion rates would be like.  I’m suspecting less than stellar.
• Start gathering newsletter subscribers as soon as possible and push the odd irresistable offer at your members.   Could bring you in a nice dump of money every now and again if you choose your offers wisely and don’t pollute the subscribers with too much marketing rubbish.
• General designer clothing offers could be a good fit.  Merchants like Yoox give a good opportunity to help wannabe celebs find some discount designer bling.

Equally, anything and everything from the above sets of ideas could simply be added into a fully integrated shopping area of the site without cluttering your celeb pages at all.  Adding quality, unique content relating to these product areas would probably lead to some pretty fine search engine positions given the trustrank your domain probably has.

Loads of people online search for products they’ve seen on TV and celebs.  If you get your SEO right and make sure you keep up to date with what Oprah is talking about or what bra GMTV have just recommended, you could get some really sweet sales.

Whilst We’re Here, You Can Further Develop Your Traffic Through The Addition Of: -

• Celebrity news articles focusing on your users’ area of interest. Mainly documented drunken antics (of which there are many), gossip about what they *might* have done, and also celebrity trainwreck type stories. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan could probably populate a site all on their own. Stories such as the hilarious Ralph Fiennes incident involving a Qantas air hostess and an airplane toilet would have your users returning again and again.

I hope this has given you some ideas Ray.  To be honest I sort of envy you this site, I’d really love to have something like this to have a bit of a play around with.  I think that with the right content, product placement, and SEO you will have an extremely valuable bit of internet real estate on your hands.

You may even be able to give me back that fiver you whipped out from under my nose in Newcastle!

Hot off the presses at R.O.EYE towers they’ve scored a massive business partner in the form of the recently launched Ebay partner network – the auction giant’s very own affiliate platform, replacing its relationship with Commission Junction.

R.O.EYE say their “objectives are to further develop the network through servicing the needs of the existing affiliate base, including their effective optimisation and recruiting more publishers. We are also working with eBay to maximise activity from new affiliate business models, which are at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing and are beginning to generate significant volume. “

Grand objectives and corporate chat aside, I have to say that I’m geniunely delighted for the team at R.O.EYE. If you’d asked me yesterday who would be associated with this huge brand name I’d have said “I dunno, some faceless big London agency who don’t actually have a clue about affiliate marketing or how to deal with the affiliate base. No doubt they’ll have fed Ebay a load of branding and corporate nonsense and blinded them with their association with other big names like Sony or Apple.”

How wrong could you be?! I apologise humbly Ebay, for underestimating your good judgement.

I’ve always held the Manchester based team in very high regard. The account managers there have always been very responsive, knowledgeable, and most importantly – gosh darned nice people to deal with. I think the fact a big name like Ebay have chosen a team who actually have decent, in-depth knowledge and good relationships with their affiliates bodes really well for the future of the network in the UK (and says something about the way Ebay want the programme to be run).

It’s a long time since I have done anything with Ebay, but I think having a contactable team in the UK with a proven track record within the UK scene will do wonders in terms of my own inclination to work with them. I’d like to think that this attitude will be fairly representative of a number of my industry colleagues.

Pretty exciting times at R.O.EYE and I’m really looking forward to seeing the direction they take the programme in. In my very humble opinion decisions like these are very positive for our industry and I look forward to seeing the affiliate centred developments to the Ebay network in the coming months and years.

Congrats guys, it’s great to see some fellow Northerners doing well

Oh, and the shiny new Ebay team are Chris Worthy, Ben Friedman or Pooja Kashyap. Give them a shout if you’d like to find out more about how you can work with them and Ebay. Contact number can be found on the R.O.EYE website.