Bit of a new segment from me this week.  I have always found that I learn an awful lot when I take on the role of a consumer and put in an order with the merchants I work with or am thinking of working with.  As a regular online shopper generally I thought it might be useful to me to attempt to share some of the things I discover about the merchants I put in orders with, and review the good things and bad things about their sites that I think might affect us affiliates!

What I think I’ll do is pretend that I am going to be looking at promoting whatever I’m shopping for and just try to show some of the things I think about when making my way around a site.

First Up This Week…. Prezzybox.com

What I went looking for: As my Mum and Dad are flying a very long way to visit me here in Australia for the first time I decided it would be jolly nice of me to send them some lovely travel slankets to keep them comfortable on their 24 hour flight.

Browsing…

Because I knew exactly what I was looking for I jumped right in and had a bit of a go at the Prezzybox search functionality. I started to type “travel slanket” into their search box and was delighted to discover some intuitive functionality on the go. This was a fusion of top search data and a really beautiful visual element featuring popular products.

What This Told Me: -

As a customer: Ooh, look. They have many more travel items for my parents trip. I note there is a travel pillow also, how useful.  I must take a look at that later and I’ll know exactly how to find it, I just need to pop “travel” back in that handy dandy wee box!

As an affiliate: This merchant has great potential for add on sales giving me a chance of enhanced commissions.  Bonus.  Hmmm… would you look at that?  If the “ruby wine slanket” is significantly more popular than the others then people might search on “slanket + colour” term variations. Must bear that in mind when I’m doing my PPC campaign later.  Clearly these are specific terms the manufacturer has applied to their colours, but I wonder if people might forget this and search for other colour variations like “red slanket” and “blue slanket”? How about the way the thing makes them feel?  It must be very cosy.  “warm slanket”? What about who it’s for? “Slanket for Dad”? Event – “Christmas slanket” Hmmm…..

On The Landing Page…

click here to view a travel slanket page in a new window…

Again I was very impressed.  Loved the product images, detailed product description, and also the “Like this? Then you will love these” product links towards the bottom of the page.  As a consumer I was reassured I was on a site with plenty to interest me and as an affiliate, I felt reassured I’d be sending my visitors to a page with plenty to interest them which increases chances of conversion and reduces chances of a bounce.

Adding To Basket…

Was lovely and simple and you could choose your different colour variations from any slanket page.  Loved the message. As an affiliate I realise the importance of customers knowing exactly what’s going on with their purchase progress – not everyone is as internet savvy as us and confusion leads to abandoned baskets!

Checking Out

Again, a great checkout page. As a consumer I could instantly see that my purchase was going to be secure and that I had a range of payment and delivery options.

The rest of the checkout process was quick and painless, 2 screens and I was done!

After The Sale

As a Customer…

I instantly got an invoice which meant as a customer I knew my order had definately gone through properly.

I made my order at 04.11 on Monday 27th July.  At 09.45 the same day I got a mail informing me the order had been dispatched. It arrived at my Mothers house the very next day!

As a customer this leaves me seriously impressed and I will most definately return as a repeat customer.  If my affiliate chum is very lucky it will be within their 60 day cookie period and it’ll give her the chance of another commission.

As An Affiliate…

My sale tracked on POR very quickly and all was as I expected with commission levels.  You’d be surprised how often this isn’t the case which immediately sets alarm bells ringing about whether or not I’m being properly rewarded for my sales efforts!

I also know that a merchant who ships their goods quickly has a lower reversal rate.  Buyer’s remorse?  Not when these guys are on watch!!

In Conclusion

Prezzybox is a great site for both affiliates and consumers.  No surprises there – We all know that Zak invests a lot of effort into making his site affiliate-centric.  That’s why he’ll soon be needing a new trophy shelf to store all his affiliate gongs!

As an affiliate I’m now completely sold on their great site functionality and am totally reassured that any traffic I send to them will have the best chance of converting.

Of course, not all of my reviews will be as glowing as this… but as Prezzybox were the inspiration for my new “Affiliate Mystery Shopper” section I felt it was appropriate to let them kick it off and show the others how its done

It might be the last of my fever wearing off after yet another dose of the lurgey, but i’m feeling incredibly generous and helpful today.  Yes, that’s right folks I’m going to reveal to all you loyal readers the stunning cutting edge technology I use to design my rather nice (if I do say so myself) affiliate landing pages.

Regular readers will remember that I showcased a design I’d come up with in a previous blog post.  For irregular readers here’s a refresher (and remember to visit more often in future – I’m not always going to be this kind with my catch up information!)

*Click image to visit the page this is situated on, my apologies for the distorted image I don’t have that much space to play with here!

Get Ready For A Massive Revelation – Here’s The Tool I Used To Create This Design…

Click Here To Reveal >>

Whaddya mean “What the f**k is that?”  That’s my patented mystery landing page construction method! Ahh, come on you guys know me by now.  Cutting edge technology? Pfft!  Pen and paper rules!

The point I’ve somewhat laboriously been making in this little bit of affiliate prose is that it doesn’t take a high tech solution to put out something that looks really good in Wordpress, or any other platform for that matter.  Once you have a page structure drawn out, it genuinely takes very little HTML knowhow to create a framework that you can use again and again to create beautifully structured pages to display your carefully crafted content in.

It Really Isn’t Rocket Science

The above design really only requires a very basic bit of HTML which I think most people new to HTML could learn in a few hours. All you need to do is just draw out the boxes you need to create on a page and use it to work out what table elements you need to create the perfect page structure. Once I have a template set up I save it in a text file, I then utilise high tech cut and paste skills to pop in the appropriate image URL and written content.

The beauty of the above example is that the vast majority of it never changes.  Instead of a quick product post I can easily create a lovely optimised landing page that gives users a good range of choices that’s relevant to the product they’re looking for.

You can too… now get your pen and paper out!

P.S. I made this post because I found the original drawing for the page in amongst some paperwork and thought some people might find it interesting.  I hope it helps

Greetings Affiliate Stuff readers!  How are you all?  Are you well?  As you’ll note I’m now back from holiday where I was unfortunate enough to contract a lovely dose of the flu from my Father in Law.  This has left me moderately grumpy and sleep deprived so I thought I’d treat you all to a wee moan-ette / cautionary tale about merchants who don’t respond to their mail!

Setting The Scene

OK, so before I headed off on my jollies it sort of occurred to me that I don’t often Take My Own Advice and ask merchants for an enhanced commission structure.  It further occurred to me that considering the amount of work I’ve been putting in recently that this was extremely stupid of me.

With that in mind I duly wrote to two merchants I think I can do much better for on one of my sites and asked for their thoughts.  Now, in the above linked treatise I said the worst you could get was “a polite no”.  Oh how foolish and naive I was – it is now clearly apparent that the worst that can happen is that you get no response at all.

What’s happened in this case is that one merchant whom I’ve only recently started working with has opened a dialogue with me and the other, whom I’ve been working with for almost a year, has chosen not to respond.

But Isn’t It Obvious What Will Happen?

Merchants be warned.  For should an affiliate of yours mail you with a query you may well think “No chance.  We’re not doing that, away with them!  I shan’t even dignify that with a response!!”

But what if one of your competitors with very similar nay almost identical product lines DID respond?  Furthermore, what if they said “Sure.  We’ll look into this.  We’d love to work with you more.  What can we do for ya?”

Merchants who don’t communicate or respond to their affiliates risk losing their loyalty.

Me personally, I am a very loyal affiliate.  I value a decent relationship above all else and I will frequently opt to send traffic to merchants whom I’ll make a lesser return from in terms of EPC but will ultimately profit more with in the long term from the benefits of a close working relationship.

If You Run a UK Based Affiliate Programme And…

There’s a hole in your stats where £5,000 of monthly sales I was sending to you used to be in the next few weeks then you can reasonably assume that this article was about you

Yep, its that time again.  We don’t seem to be able to let more than 10 weeks or so go by without hopping on a plane somewhere!  We’re leaving tomorrow morning to spend 10 days in New Zealand.  It’s mainly going to be a family visit and we will be travelling North to spread Duncans Grandmothers ashes on Monday.

Before anyone gets at all jealous, I should really let you know that it’s winter in NZ and we’re likely to be faced with beautiful weather conditions such as these: -

We’re not doing any serious touristing and will be spending time with family, celebrating Duncan’s Birthday on the 8th, and generally relaxing. I will try to post on here whilst we’re away but much will depend on whether or not I end up too cold to think, LOL.

Needless to say my case is filled to bursting with all the winter woolies I could gather (and 3 pairs of flanelette jim jams) and I have already double checked with my Mother in Law that a hot water bottle will be available for my use 24 / 7.

Isn’t it amazing how quickly you get soft about cold weather? You can see the Auckland weather forecast here!

11 degrees? I’ll freeze!  I’m off to look out my hip flask

See y’all on the 15th of July if I don’t manage to post before then.

I had a question from Dave this week.  I’ve helped him before getting started doing some PPC campaigns and he now has a steady flow of sales.  Unfortunately he’s not so crash hot on his profit margins!

Ok, at the moment im battling with increasing my profit. I know I can make this work now, its all about increasing my profit. Now I know its not what it should be proably because of my mismanagement of keywords. I know you should wait 100 clicks/1000 imp before you delete if you dont have a sale, but when youve got hundreds of keywords going on at once each costing the 7 – 12 p each, then it adds up doesnt it. So instead of only deleting after 100 clicks has been reached or so, do you go by how long they’ve been going?

I’m averaging about £40 – £60 commsion rate now per day, which is good, im happy about that, but my £20 or so profit can dwindle to as little as £3 or £4 by midnight that same day..So what is it i need to start considering when managing my account?

You definitely need to look at making sure your profit margins are better.  First of all, what is costing you the most money for the least return?  Are there any keywords in your account that have never brought in any money?  It might be an idea to consider weeding those out.  If there’s not a lot that you can discern in your campaign as being “dead wood” or “star performers” that can be worked on, then you may need to take a formulaic approach.

If a campaign is only breaking even or even losing you a bit, work out how much you earn per every click you send to the merchant.  Say you send 100 clicks and earn £15, this means you earn 15p for each click you sent them.  If you’re spending 20p to get these clicks then you need to reduce that.

There are a couple of ways you could approach this.  1. you could work out a reasonably desirable profit margin and reduce your max CPC to reflect this.  i.e. Just knock your bids down to 10p and take whatever traffic you can get. 2. Work out ways to get cheaper traffic to offset your more expensive traffic and bring down your average costs into a profit.

Re: not deleting keywords until you’ve reached X amount of clicks. I think you have to apply common sense to this as you suspect.   If keywords that are closely related aren’t working then you should definitely have a clear out.