If ever merchants needed a good reason to sort out their blinking well Xmas promotions before December 15th then this syndrome must be it. I’m sure I can’t be unique when I say I’ve had it with Christmas.  In fact, I’ve had it with Christmas for at least two weeks but have struggled gamely on.

My brain is currently at the point where me simply sitting in front of a computer screen seems to induce me to contemplate my navel closely for several hours interspersed with the odd visit to Facebook or Twitter to talk a load of shit.  This is in stark contrast to my usual feelings of energy and downright go getter-ness (another symptom is that I’ve started making up my own words).

Merry BuggerAllThisMass…

As I sailed out the door to the shopping centre at 10am this morning full of the spirit of “Bugger All This Mass” I said to Duncan; “I really don’t know whats up with me dear I really just can’t think straight.”

“What do you mean you don’t know what’s up?” He says.

“Eh?” I eloquently replied.

“You’re like this every effing year love!”

“I am?”

And it’s true.  I am.  There’s something about the push for Christmas trade that is incredibly exciting.  But bear in mind that much like an over excitable 6 year old I’ve been getting myself all wound up for it since the middle of June and making sure I was going to do as good a job as possible in getting those affiliate pennies in at this very lucrative time of year.

And So My Dear Friends, This Tightly Wound Affiliate Coil Has Unsprung…

I must have done quite well with my festive efforts, because my “Cant Be Assed Mass” has arrived almost 20 days early.  I feel as if I have now done as much as I possibly can for the big man in the red suit and as a result I’m like a balloon that’s been burst (by that over excited 6 year old we were chatting about a couple of paragraphs back).

I think my lack of motivation is in reverse proportion to the amount of money appearing on my screen when I log on to the networks each morning. The more thats there, the less I want to do! What little brain capacity that remains has been devoted to keeping an eagle eye on my margins.  Much time is being spent analysing every single penny I spend and click I send. So merchants, it is now too late to grab my ear with your latest and greatest promotions.  That ship has sailed and it’s captain is  roaring drunk in the wheelhouse.

What Now?

Well, I’d better get my finger extracted from my derrierre and my head out of the clouds.  Christmas might be all sewn up but January is still flapping in the wind.  I’ve got a LOT to do.

The only thing I can think of is to take the rest of the week off, power down, power up Sunday night and hope the old spring gets wound up again to get into my January promotions.

So Merchants… Please Leave My Commission After The Beep. Anything Else Will Be Deleted. BEEEEEEPPPPPP!!

Well, we have a new member of staff on the books here at Affiliate Stuff towers who is going to be helping us out with a bit of part time blogging about various subjects (but mainly knickers, bras, and swimwear related type stuff).

The Winner Is…

After careful consideration of a very long list of candidates we awarded a nice contract to….. MY MUM!  After 21 years of working in admin for a construction company she decided to make the big move and take voluntary redundancy. This has given her the golden opportunity to start her internet career and enj0y a nice bit of work from home fun just like her dear old daughter and son in law.  She’ll be writing for us part time and devoting a lot more time to relaxing, having fun, and all those little things she’s been meaning to do around the house for ages.

Like Mother Like Daughter…

She’s doing really well so far and I’m now pretty clear about whom I got my writing skills from.  Her knicker related prose is really rather good and she is even managing to post it all up into a basic HTML framework I have created for her.  It’ll take her a little while to get up to speed with the ins and outs, but she’ll soon be rattling out thousands of words an hour just like me!

I think it’s very cool to get the chance to give your Mummy a go at something brand new and exciting.  So Mum, I know you read this blog  – welcome to the affiliate business and I hope you really enjoy semi retirement!

P.S. I wonder if this means I should bring her to next year’s A4U Expo in London? I’m sure she’d have quite the little migraine after a few sessions of affiliate conferencing fun (not to mention the various after parties!!)

I’ve been meaning to post this Ask Kirsty for positively ages.   I’ve really been suffering with heat and humidity this week and have a head full of cotton wool to contend with and I’m going wheel it out so you all don’t think I don’t love you any more.  Panic ye not, the airconditioner is in the post as we speak and the office will hopefully have a better climate next week!

This particular “asker” had a lot of very good questions about many aspects of affiliate promotion.

1. In your post “Is There Still Mileage In Affiliate for PPC?” you say that most of your income comes from PPC, however, that post is about a year old.  Bearing in mind the crisis and everything, is that still the case for you and do  you feel PPC may still be a way to go in AM (particularly for new sites)?

I must say that this is no longer the case for me. Although PPC remains a big part of my marketing efforts my affiliate profit margins have been rescued in these troubled times by the addition of some SEO traffic. On some sites I now get 40 % to 50% or more of my traffic from organic search and estimate 30 to 40% of my overall sales come from free traffic.

That said, if you pick the right products and laser target your traffic there is no reason why you can’t have a perfectly good campaign on PPC alone. However I do now feel that SEO is essential to each and every one of my profitable sites. There are only two merchants I now work with driving PPC traffic alone and I’m currently working on an organic site for those also!

2. In addition to PPC and organic SEO, what other promotion techniques you find working for you and how efficient and time-worthy they are compared to the first two?

I’ve tinkered with Twitter, but I’m not aware of having gotten much revenue from that. It’s something I’m still learning about and monitoring though as I think it could be very important in the future. Other than that – there is the essential link building. It seems time consuming and is often frustrating but really pays dividends both in terms of traffic and improved rankings. I recently got one link that delivers me 800 very relevant visitors per month – just by asking nicely. Well worth the 5 minutes it took to write the e-mail!

3. Which of the common affiliate systems (e.g., Datafeedr, Easy content Units, others?) do you use on your sites (if any), and what features you like about the ones you use?

I don’t use any of the affiliate systems on my sites, I work with my own content and my husband creates feed magic for me in the form of shopping sections which I integrate into my Wordpress blogs to make them look / feel more like a standard e-commerce offering. If I was going to use one though it would be Easy Content Units – its an incredibly clever system developed for affiliates by affiliates. Highly recommended.

4. I heard (but never tried) that affiliates can get deep links from the merchants they advertise. Do you think those are worth the effort as a way to build links for improving site SERPs and/or getting some traffic?

I don’t have too many of these (one in actual fact!) however that’s probably because I don’t ask very often. It’s definitely worth asking via e-mail particularly if you have a good relationship with the merchant and they have a blog or similar where they might be able to provide you with a link. “He who asketh not getteth Hee Haw” as we say in Scotland

5. And the last. Many affiliates have lots of links to merchants on both their home and internal pages. Those links, however, may strip site of link juice and thus worsen its SERPs. My question is – do you practise nofollowing for the merchant links or any other way to go about that issue?

I use php redirected links on all of my sites. I do this for no other reason than ease of management. I suppose this is something you should give due diligence, but being a bit lazy I’ve not done much about it and still seem to earn a decent amount of money / get good traffic!

A while back I shared how I’d discovered you could create descriptions for categories, thereby giving those often useful resources a chance at ranking.

Having FINALLY gotten around to getting some content created for the categories on the website I intend to use this handy dandy little tip on, I was moderately horrified to discover that Wordpress will use these descriptions as link titles (well my theme does anyway).  That sort of volume of text showing up when someone hovers over one of your links is very unappealing as is the thought of how Google may react to 3,000+ words of text on every page of the site that isn’t always visible and is the same on each page!

So, if you decide to create nice unique content on your category page and don’t want mahoosive chunks of text flying all over your site, here’s how to fix it!

Just A Simple Edit…

One file controls all this hoo ha, and you’ll find it in: WP-Includes > category-template.php

Simply open this file and do a search for the following text snippet: ‘use_desc_for_title’ => 1

Change the 1 to a 0 thusly: ‘use_desc_for_title’ => 0

Save your changes.

And the pesky link titles should be gone!

That’s A Fascinating Looking File…

And I’m pretty sure it’ll do lots of cool things which I will investigate and report back upon in due course.  However, I might just leave it alone for now as I can do without accidently turning my site upside down, inside out, and back to front without knowing how or why I’ve blinking well done it in the run up to Christmas!!

Oh, and do take a back up of that little file before you change it, just in case you have an accident.  I’m way too good at editing the original file and accidently deleting a single (but crucial) character somewhere along the way whereupon our neighbours hear something close to the following: -

“Arrghhh, ohhhh, Noooooo!!!! F**K!!”

Then the line my long suffering and lovely husband is all too familiar with;

“Duncan!  This f**king Wordpress has f**cking well stuffed up the site again.  Get it Fixed!!”

“What were you doing right before this happened, my love?”  He will say, mild mannered as always.

“Oooh… Arrghhhh, I dunno!  Fix the chuffing thing, quick!”

*Ahem* so yeah, I hope you guys find this tip useful!  Particularly the bit about backing up your files first.  You don’t all have Duncan sitting in your office to swear at and make it all nice and functional for you again should you make a small error

Are you excited about all this Christmas trade everyone’s been raving on about recently? Can you smell the scent of cash? Are you going to be PPC-ing your little heart out to get it? Are you like a little kid on Christmas day at the thought of a bumper festive season?

However, with till bells already starting to ring and many people running oodles of campaigns, it’s time for my festive warning….

Beware… The Christmas PPC Grinch is Out and About!

You see, during the heat of Christmas trade it’s very, very easy to get carried away and indulge in the upping of PPC bids based on good performance… and then forget completely to analyse how much festive bang you are getting for your PPC buck. When this happens, that sneaky little PPC grinch can nip in and nick a good whack of your profit on a campaign or campaigns.  The result?  Yep.  The PPC Grinch has stolen your Christmas!

As an aside, this is just as true at any other time of year.  However at Christmas that devious little Grinch weaves his wicked magic, throwing glittering dust into the eyes of bedroom affiliates up and down the country.  They often don’t notice until later until they’ve chucked away a distressing wodge of cash that evil influences were operating in their PPC campaign.

Let Me Give You An Example From One Of My Festive PPC Campaigns…

I increased the bid level on one of my small campaigns that is experiencing a nice little lift by 1p, hoping to increase my positions and traffic considerably.  This equates to a 20% increase in what I’m prepared to spend. I did this about 4 weeks ago with absolutely topping results so I could expect the same again, right?

After my changes, my campaign was still in profit and had increased a little.  As it was only a few pounds a day I then forgot about it for a while and never saw it again until I happened to get a mail from the merchant and it reminded me to have a looksee.  Here’s what I discovered the effect of my increase was: -

Old PPC Bid

Average impressions per day – 9,149

Average Clicks per day – 110

Average CTR -1.2%

Average CPC – 4p

Average Cost Per Day – £4.40

New PPC Bid

Average impressions per day – 9,653

Average Clicks per day – 140

Average CTR -1.46%

Average CPC – 5p

Average Cost Per Day – £7.00

**edit, I had to change the above figures after I umm… goofed them up!  I was re-doing them after miscounting the average number of days in the second part when Duncan rushed into the office to tell me about a Kookaburra in the garden.  So I lost my place and got them all back to front – sorry everyone!

Yes Thats Right Folks…

To achieve an additional 30 clicks per day (22%) I increased my PPC spend no less than 37% which was enough to stuff my campaign margins.  Now, you might well say “that’s all very well Kirsty but any idiot would notice if they’d done something like that”.  Which broadly speaking should be true.  However I know of at least one idiot who has fallen into this trap during Christmasses past and she’s the lady sitting writing this cautionary tale.

Why?  Because too often at Christmas you simply count up your daily take – there’s just way too many campaigns going on and too many distractions.  It’s not until afterwards when you really analyse what went on and realise you goofed up!

So Take Heed Of My Cautionary Tale…

Analyse each and every change you make to your Adwords campaigns.  Sometimes the increase you get from increasing your PPC spend isn’t really worth the extra outlay which means that mean and nasty old Christmas PPC Grinch can nick your hard earned cash and you won’t find out till his Christmas gold dust has cleared from your eyes.

This is a question I answered a while ago and then forgot to publish when my parents were here (note to self, use the Wordpress scheduling tool!). Someone needed help making their cake tin site a little more sweet and I was glad to help!

Hi Kirsty,

Am an avid follower of your blog and thought I would drop you a quick message to ask for some feedback on a website that we have. www.caketins.org.uk is the website and I’m looking for your feedback on how well you feel the site works?

We are getting a steady stream of visitors now the site has been live for around 5 months.

Most days we make a sale so I’m just looking for hints and tips on where you think we could improve, especially around increasing conversion?

That is a pretty nice looking site, so well done on putting it together. A sale a day is steady progress as well.

I think there are probably a few more things you could do to polish your offering and improve the performance of the visitors that you are getting as well as attracting in more. I’ll try to create a list here for you to action!

Overall structure of pages – I think this could be better. There’s an awful lot of text floating around and not enough in the way of images that will immediately show your visitors that you have some pretty darned attractive cake tins to sell them.

Calls to action – I think these could be improved dramatically. Get some nice looking graphic buttons or include a big bold link with Shop Now >> or More Info >> If you do use a link, make it bigger and bolder than the surrounding text. People don’t read internet pages properly so you really need to hold their hand when herding them through to the merchant.

Traffic Funnelling – When I clicked on your side menu (which is quite nicely done and visual) I expected to immediately see some more cake tins. However I was instead presented with a series of hard to see text links requiring me to drill down 3 levels. I believe you’re probably still working on this section right now, however I think you’d be hard pressed to keep people’s interest after the first page, so this needs some work. I suggest no more than 2 clicks within the site before you are ushering them on to the merchant.

The actual menu structure you’ve created for your shopping sections makes a lot of sense, so well done there. However I’d add some more unique content to try and get in some additional traffic around these areas. Write at least a couple of hundred words for each section and team them up with the nice images and calls to action mentioned above.

The Home Page – needs to immediately offer some great product options and have a nice strong structure. Create some nice offers and buying options that visitors will immediately see. The homepage should be showing the best selling products that you know a lot of people are interested in buying, or be showcasing top site sections.

Navigation – It would be great if you are able to offer people a shop-like navigation either on your top or one of your side bars. People do look around for these and they can help make your site look a lot more polished.

I don’t usually do blogging without making more than one effort to contact a company, but this time I’m making an exception and I’m making it for Tradedoubler and their dreadful support system.  I’m seriously considering indulging in a bit of brand name bidding because I reckon it might well be the only way to get Tradedoubler to actually talk to me in a time period that can be described as “less than an ice age”.

I submitted a support request quite a few days ago.  I know they got it because I got a “we have your support request” mail back.  I can’t remember how long ago and I can no longer find the mail, but I was already annoyed about it on October 28th when I posted about it on Twitter.

So In The Spirit Of Comparison…

Here is the time it took a recent support request from another network to be responded to.

Affiliate Window:

Ticket Submitted: 27 Oct 2009 23:53
Response: 28 Oct 2009 11:18

Within 3 hours of office hours resuming. Nice one Awin.

But Of Course, Tradedoubler Know All This….

Because people never cease talking about it on forums and blogs, and they have been talking about it for some time.  To be fair there has been one time this year (June I think) where a support ticket was answered within 72 hours, which I consider to be adequate.  I remember being distinctly surprised by this.  I’ll also be honest, this ongoing issue means I only ever contact Tradedoubler when its absolutely unavoidable.

Do I Need To Know The Secret Handshake?

I don’t have any contacts in there I can use (which is the first thing anyone suggests I need) but why should I need a direct line to one of their staff to get a simple request sorted? In this case I need my payment details altering before the next run else I’ll miss out, so I’m feeling moderately aggravated about the whole thing. 

Lets Try This One More Time…

I am now off to re-submit my request. Perhaps they did reply and it got lost somewhere in cyber space, or perhaps my request vanished into the ether quite at random. But  is it absolutely out of the question that a multi million pound company might have a communications system that works?  Or am I being foolish?  Tradedoubler have beautiful offices in the centre of London, a massive client base, and an internation operation.  But do they have a support ticket system that works?

Lets leave that one for Tradedoublers newest member of staff to answer….

Computer Says No…..

P.S. Read This Post About Their 2007 Same Day Response Promise.

**edit – I had contact from TD and it transpires that they did respond to my original support ticket (on the first working day they got it) it’s just that I didn’t get it. So they did do what they should have – but alas because they don’t have a support section for me to log into and check on these things, I didn’t know. This is a bit of a shame as the network are probably copping bad PR for “ignored” support queries that they answered promptly and efficiently. I feel TD need to invest in one of these as I think people would see a marked improvement overnight in what is often seen as a poor support service.

Well, the parents have left the building and have all returned home safely.  We had a fab time and it really was all over way too quick.

As always after a few weeks off, re-starting work will be a completely mammoth task.  This time it should be relatively easy for me, I’ve got some accounts stuff I need to catch up on, need to prepare a brief for the guy who writes my content (a great way to feel like you’re getting back in the saddle without really having to do much!!), and need to finalise moving my business here to Australia under a new company name.

Did I say It’d Be Easy?!

Nobody with an aversion to swearing should ask me about the last point on my affiliate to do list.  I had to open a GBP account here and was staggered to discover that none of the staff in my local NAB branch had a clue how to pay my cheques in for me.    I first had the audacity to try and pay in my cheques on Thursday, but after a seemingly endless wait whilst the teller checked with any staff member she could grab to see if anyone knew what one of these accounts was, called a helpline, printed a form, read the Ts & Cs, etc -  I was informed that as I had no ID I couldn’t give them any money.  This took us 30 minutes on my parents last day in the country.  I think the teller was glad there was some glass separating us because I could have melted it quite easily with the 1000 megawatt glare which I treated her to.

Upon returning today clutching my form (which as an aside would make any beaureaucrat beam with pride), and no less than two forms of idenfication I enjoyed another hour stood in the bank whilst (the same lady as her bad luck would have it) made phone calls and generally admitted she had no clue what the form was on about.

“Oh, it must be a new product.” My poor teller twittered.

“No, NAB have been doing these accounts for at least 2 years. The terms and conditions are dated 1997″ I managed to say (very nearly politely)

“Oh.  You’d think they’d have told us”

At this stage the teller beside her leans in with “Nobody here knows how to do that you know.  It’s new.”

“Yes, I can tell” I said, winning several awards for diplomacy.

After 2 or 3 more eternities, another call to a helpline, a debate with some other tellers about one or two of the options on the form and what they might mean, she trooped off to the managers office to get him to countersign my application to give them some of my money.  After 20 minutes she returned and declared,

“Manger’s never seen one of those forms either.  He didn’t have a clue what it was about.”

“Oh how super, you must feel so much better!” I enthused (winning 3 baftas)

So Webgains and Affiliate Window I may well be asking you to reissue some cheques.  They’ve probably been sent to Outer Mongolia for all I know.  The only silver lining in todays sterling customer service experience was seeing the look on the tellers’ faces when I remarked,

“I’ll be in every month doing this you know.”

“Can’t you get paid electronically?” They gasped.

“NOPE!” I beamed.  “See you again later in the month!”

Hopefully that will be the most of the switchover sorted now, it took them no less than a  month to even open my account so it’s something I’ll be really glad to see the back of.

I should be firing on all cylinders by the end of the week and getting back into a nice bit of Christmas type fun.  Now I (allegedly) have somewhere to store my money, this will actually be worthwhile again!