Former darling of the affiliate world and large scale lingerie retailer Figleaves.com was this week sold to NBrown (the company behind  JD Williams) for the sum of £11.5m.  The business was put up for sale back in February for considerably more than the price it achieved this week (or so the Independent said). A bargain. Figleaves has never made a profit but has a good customer base and brand so I imagine that plus stock is what NBrown are paying for.

Frankly My Dear…

Back in the day, a takeover such as this would have had affiliates (including me!) quivering in their boots at the potential changes to the affiliate programme new ownership might bring.  However, new management in 2008 combined with some radical changes which were implemented with disappointing ham fistedness and zero notice meant that a lot of affiliates became disaffected and ceased promotion. It’s changed status in the affiliate world was apparent from the total and utter silence on its sale within the main UK affiliate forum, Affiliates4U.

I am still involved with the programme as I had a whole heap of traffic I couldn’t monetise elsewhere.  I’m glad I did hang in there now because in recent months a new affiliate manager has come onto the scene and has been working to rebuild some bridges, and put affiliate incentives in place.  A good indicator that the powers that be decided affiliates still had a role to play in their business model.  Something that wasn’t at all clear late 2008 and most of 2009.

As an aside, the new chap is making a big effort to push things forward again and the programme seems to be in very good shape thanks to his efforts (just in case you’re interested!).

A Good Synergy?

JD Williams’ cheap and cheerful type business isn’t an immediately obvious bed mate for the rather more sophisticated Figleaves.  However, apparently industry analysts think they could do well together.  Figleaves’ customer base is more mature than your average shopper (probably thanks to their great selection of hard to find items) which allegedly makes it a good fit.

One thing’s for sure – NBrown seems to know how to make a good profit and access to Figleaves 1 million+ website visitors each month provides them a great opportunity.

So What’s The Affiliate Future?

Inevitably there will be lots of changes within Figleaves, so I do wonder if this will impact upon the affiliate programme.  If it’s not loss making I’d hope they’ll only be looking to improve upon it and make it more attractive to affiliates (increasing that vexatious 3 day cookie for example).

Its clear they value the affiliate stream, as they have a programme for JD Williams but here’s hoping they don’t tinker with the payouts in lines with the ones they are currently offering – £8 for new customer sales, £4 where a new customer sale is made on PPC but where affiliates have played a part, 1% of basket value for existing customers.

And if they do… well so be it. I operate on a once bitten twice shy basis and Figleaves’ commissions now form only a small proportion of my business turnover. They used to be a honking great chunk of it – but I learned a valuable lesson about eggs and baskets there!  I imagine that most affiliates still promoting them would be in a similar situation.

I’ll be watching the outcome of this acquisition with interest. It will be fascinating see if JD Williams turns the goose into the golden egg.

P.S. That’ll be my one attempt this year at a Jason-esque headline. It was a toss up between the above and “Is The Figleaves Takeover a Load of Pants??”  I’ll leave it to the duckman and his recently awarded best affiliate marketing blog of 2010  from now on

Affiliate managers are often lambasted for making poor decisions and generally ticking affiliates off at times. For all of us, having a good moan about various programme managers who clearly don’t have two brain cells to rub together has become something of an occupational sport. I enjoy this as much as the next chap, but I do think it’s important to realise that there are a lot of affiliate managers who make real efforts to communicate, assist and add value to the affiliate programmes they are running.

Not one to usually give people free plugs or let on who I promote but…

One programme I’ve been really impressed with is CreditExpert. Their affiliate manager, Patrick Perraton, regularly sends out useful seasonal information on his program and also sends articles for use on affiliate sites out on a regular basis. Beyond that, he’s always good at dropping me a line to ask what I’m up to and if there’s anything he can do.

With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting for us affiliates to find out what a hardworking affiliate manager gets up to on a day to day basis and how one ends up walking the hallowed halls of affiliate management!

Patrick’s background in his own words:

Born in London, grew up in SE Asia, did my Bachelor in Business Administration in Vancouver, Canada – then completed the full circle and moved back to London. My first proper job was as a Sales and Marketing coordinator for a financial institution in London. I naturally got heavily involved with the website as this is where my main interests were and then ended up managing the operation of it. The company then got taken over and instead of moving down to sunny Bournemouth – I took the redundancy payout instead.

That’s when I joined CreditExpert (part of Experian – the UK’s largest credit reference agency). Launched in the UK at the end of 2003 – CreditExpert is now the UK’s leading credit monitoring and identity theft service. The product has grown very rapidly since its induction by providing customers the tools they need to ensure that they stay on top of their credit status and at the same time protect themselves from identity fraud.

The Role At CreditExpert!:
As the CreditExpert business was growing so quickly, the already successful affiliate program needed someone enthusiastic and motivated to take it on to the next level. So that’s where I came in – to make sure it reached the potential it deserved.

What do I actually do!!
- Develop rapport with existing and prospective affiliates to help them maximise their sales
- Create promotional campaigns and incentives
- Identify and recruit new affiliates on to the program
- Help new affiliates to use the networks if necessary
- Brief internal design team on new creatives to fit into affiliate promotions
- Analyse reports and stats
- Check affiliates are promoting CreditExpert properly and not damaging the brand
- Provide optimising suggestions to affiliates by sharing successful techniques and supplying copy, editorial and general tips
- Educate CreditExpert to both prospective and existing affiliates
- Engage in face-to-face meetings and attend networking events
- Liase with the affiliate networks to ensure they are doing the most for us they can
- Grow the affiliate channel so that it reaches its potential.

Phew! So if any of you thought that people like Patrick spend their entire day sitting formulating their next evil ploy to confound those “grubby little affiliates”, then you’d be entirely wrong (well, about Patrick at least!)

Finally, I asked Patrick what makes him feel warm and cosy inside when he thinks about his job, and what he hates the most!: –

Warm and Cosy: Educating an affiliate from scratch about CreditExpert and how to promote it effectively – then seeing them bring in applications. Its literally planting those seeds of success for a win-win situation.

Yah Boo Sucks To: Putting lots of effort to help affiliates strengthen their campaigns and from a select few – not getting the same energy back.

If you want to contact Patrick to see if you can make the odd quid or two promoting free credit reports, give him a hoy at: –
patrick .perraton @ uk. experian .com (remove spaces) He tells meCredit Expert fit well into most verticals other than travel and gaming – get in touch with him and he can show you how.

You can find out more about the programme Patrick runs for Credit Expert at: –
joincreditexpert.com

P.S – I absolutely wasn’t paid or bribed in any shape form or fashion to write this. I just appreciated Patrick’s kind attention and help and wanted to say a public thanks! See? It’s nice to be nice!

I was having a chat with an online buddy a couple of weeks back regarding monetising your affiliate blog. My own blog has damned little in the way of money making schemes on it. I want my blog to be seen as a source of information, not a way of lining my own pockets. Affiliate Marketers are wise to monetisation schemes in all shapes and forms, so a cynical money making exploit on my part would soon have all my dear readers departing in droves.

However, sometimes I think it would be good to find a way to create a small revenue stream to help motivate my posting whilst still providing good information for my blog readers and without filling the place with irritating text links and other distracting advertising methods.

Today I’ve just heard about Workcircle’s new blog widget which allows you to display affiliate marketing jobs of relevance to your readership. Much like the Bumpzee and MyBlogLog widgets, all you have to do is paste a small bit of HTML code into an appropriate location on your blog.

This is what their widget looks like in-situ: –

Jobs from Workcircle.com

Workcircle’s affiliate programme is paying for every click through to their job site. This cracking new tool is not just for Affiliate-related sites such as my own. You could pop this widget on a site covering just about anything (with a few choice exceptions!), and have decent quality information of relevance to your visitors which will earn you money. Workcircle have over 400,000 vacancies displayed on their site at any one time.

I’m always pontificating about the importance of covering niches, and I reckon WorkCircle’s new widget could be a great way to help monetise a lot of niche sites.

If anyone is using this programme I’d really like to hear how they are finding it. Please Contact me with any feedback and I will publish it to provide a balanced account.