I had a very interesting chat with the lovely Julia Nisted yesterday.  She is one of the 5 strong team who runs the eBay affiliate programme throughout Europe in partnership with a variety of local agencies (including our very own R.O.EYE).

My apologies for being slow out of the blogging block on this, but I find it almost impossible to make any sense after 5pm these days.  Just ask anyone who has spoken to me on MSN in the Aussie evening!  The announcement that they are to scrap their current commission structure and introduce a shiny new CPC model was made at 1pm yesterday afternoon. Now, before you all dust off your ads for bizarre products such as used loo paper, fanny magnets, and blue bums (I have old screenshots to prove these existed), this is no ordinary CPC model.

Quality Click Pricing (Or QCP – affiliates do love a good abbreviation and eBay have obliged)

What is it & How is the CPC Defined? Understandably enough, eBay shan’t be making the exact nature of the algo used to determine click quality public.  However being an expert on just about everything (no sniggering at the back of class please!) I shall endeavour to explain.

In a nutshell the CPC eBay are prepared to pay will depend on traffic quality.  If your traffic brings in the goodies in the form of healthy sales and the provision of long term repeat customers, then you’ll get a higher CPC than people who simply scoop up every bit of random traffic they can find and shove it in eBay’s general direction.

In typical affiliate style my first question to Julia was, “So is this about eBay saving money on their affiliate programme?”  However, she assured me that this is, in fact, all about rewarding affiliates who drive good traffic and they hope it will ultimately result in eBay paying more out to them.  They don’t want to lose the affiliates driving “bad” traffic either – but they do want to encourage them to improve their traffic quality.

The new system will be implemented on 1st September 2009 so there’s plenty of time to get your heads around it.  You can read more about it on the eBay Partner Blog and also grab some handy tips on how to improve your traffic quality.

From My Point Of View…

It sounds like an incredibly positive change to the programme structure.  Regular blog readers will know I always view any change that asks affiliates to raise the bar as a good thing for the industry and the way affiliates are perceived.  To me, paying for the quality of traffic seems like a very fair way to apportion commission and it certainly makes eBay a more attractive affiliate proposition.

The changes seem incredibly innovative and it will be interesting to see how they develop!

As an aside… My year to date earnings for a niche site of mine on the eBay affiliate programme are a whopping £17.32 – however it may make an interesting case study later as it’s for a product / products that I know people in the UK can only purchase there.

So more from me on the changes and their effects later this year

I’ve not been getting many bona fide “Ask Kirsty’s” recently, was it something I said?!

I do get quite a lot of questions via mail, and I try to answer as many of them as possible (currently working through a backlog dating back to mid-july so please excuse me if you’ve mailed me and are hurt at my silence!).  However, recently the Ask Kirsty’s have slowed up considerably.

I know those people over at Affiliate Doctors are good and that they set lots of experts to answer your questions (including me!) but come on… I’m ever so nice and still fairly competent! I was here first too

So if you have a site you’d like me to review and you’re prepared to share the URL, give me a shout. You’ll even get a lovely link from this shiny PR4 blog for your troubles. Perhaps you have a burning question you’ve just not been able to find an answer to, or your site or PPC campaign has gone awry and you don’t know why?

Contact Me if you don’t mind everyone else sharing your woes and I’ll do my best to help!

Bit late with this one, we had some visitors last week and I didn’t have much time for blogging.  However, without further ado…

This is, in my opinion, just about the best occupation in the known universe and here’s my top ten reasons why!

1. No boss telling you what to do, no office politics because of what got said at the Christmas party, and definately, definately no blinking well commute to work.  Instead Kirsty is the boss, the only office politics is over how many cups of tea I’m allowed in a day and whether or not Duncan has been getting too much of our cats attention.  The commute to work?  Up 5 steps from the kitchen to the office and the work uniform is my trusty PJs!

2. Only working WHEN you want to. If I really don’t feel like working, I simply don’t.  On those days in life when I wake and discover I feel dreadful and can’t face the screen – I don’t.  “Today is a holiday”  I say.  And off Duncan and I trot to do something fun instead.

3. Only working ON WHAT you want to. Ahhh… this is a truly glorious aspect of our beautiful occupation.  I only set up projects that interest me.  If its boring, it’s not in my life. Hence I enjoy every second of my working day and get to immerse myself in promoting lots of really cool, weird, and wonderful things!

4. The Excitement. Every single day I wake up and I am immediately excited.  I’m still lying there with my eyes closed and already I am visualising myself up and in the office, tea in hand, stats on the screen and planning the day ahead.  It really is like Christmas each and every day and the gift is affiliate marketing!

5. Economy of Scale. One person really can create a business with a wonderful economy of scale.  You can set a project up, leave it running and maintain it in a few minutes a day freeing up more time to find the next income stream.  My new Australian accountant was absolutely blown away that one person could create so much turnover with so little in the way of manpower and resources.

6. The feeling of having found something I’m really “pretty good” at... All through my school days I was a good student, but just “average” and often struggled.  I excelled at nothing and failed at quite a few things.  Not a good feeling, as I really was trying very hard!  I now realise that structure and I don’t get along very well.  The more unstructured things are, the better I do!  The often bizarre world of SEO was right up my street, and as for affiliate marketing with all its bewildering twists and turns?  Well, I felt like I’d come home

7. The sense of achievement. Sometimes, when I sit back and regard what I’ve done with my life, I get a beautiful feeling of contentment.  All that I have done and acquired in life has come from the odd little nooks and crannies in my brain where affiliate niches are born.  This is not because I work for a company that has done well ergo I do well – it has all come from me.  It’s a lovely feeling of strength that boosts my self esteem and makes me feel incredibly comfortable in my own skin.  Also reassures me that having a slightly off the wall mindset is A-OK!

8. The people I can honestly say that the people I have met and befriended in this industry are and incredibly interesting and cool bunch.  Even without numbers 1 to 7 just meeting them and hanging out with them would have been a life enriching experience.

9. Hard work – yep, for some odd reason there really is nothing I enjoy more than knowing that I have worked incredibly hard for everything that I’ve done with my affiliate business.  A good day for me is one where I’ve crammed in as much work as humanly possible within the hours I’ve decided to work (note I’m not doing 18 hour days – that’s a different thing!!).  Working hard is a great feeling.  And being honest guys and gals there are very few affiliates who have not worked hard for their money at some stage – even if they’re saying they don’t work all that hard now.

10. Being smug – yes, we all have to feel smug sometimes, and as you’ll see from numbers 1 to 9 I’m indulging in it right now.  However,  I feel particularly smug when I wander through the streets of a big city and see all the well dressed office workers rushing to their daily grind.  I walk on, dressed in my usual clothes that constantly have me mistaken for a backpacker or student and ensure salespeople blank me in shopping malls – smiling my insufferably smug smile

*gasp* Shock horror murder polis!  Yes folks it’s time for one of my rare negative posts!  However, as the title suggests it does lend itself to a follow up post with 10 things I love about this industry so never fear, balance will be achieved in due course

1. Affiliate managers who contact me dead keen to “work more closely with you and build a great relationship” and immediately ask “is there anything we can do to help you?” Upon taking delivery of my modest request for bestsellers info and regular contact re: new products I promptly never, ever hear from them again!

2. People who are rude / sarcastic to newbie affiliates on forums in situations where they really don’t need to be.  What gives with that?

3. Merchants who re-jig their databases putting in place new cutting edge technology which will not only revolutionise your conversions but will break every single image and link you’ve ever previously created for them. They are then mysteriously unable to implement URL redirects and contact you wondering why your conversions have turned to poop and asking you to pull your jolly well socks up.

4. When you have to complete an online assault course and answer 5 fiendishly difficult riddles that’d make a sphinx go cross eyed and head on back home – just to get a deep link from a network (OK, I exaggerate but you know what I mean!)

5. Affiliate managers who schedule a conference call with you and then don’t listen to a word you are saying, constantly interrupting you to get their point over.  Look, if you mean you want to schedule a monologue call with me – just send a tape recording and I’ll swear at it at a more convenient time for me!

6. People from outside the industry thinking I’m a pornographer when I say I market things online.  I dread that knowing look and the “Ahh… I SEE.”

7. Still not being able to switch off from work sometimes.  For all that I harp on about how fab it is only working 4 days a week, I often make up most of that time when I “nip on” to the PC for a wee while “just to check things out” on evenings and weekends and leave Dunc sitting wondering where the hell I’ve gotten to.

8. Little known fact: – Affiliate Marketing causes time dilation.  Why else can I plan enough work in a single hour to last Duncan and I a bloody year?

9. The “I’ll make you rich if you buy my course for just $4,000″ brigade.  What a bunch of arseholes – they make us all look dishonest, rip off people who can least afford to lose money, and I for one sincerely wish painful bowel complaints and a host of embarrassing and smelly illnesses on the lot of them.

10. Meeting people at networking events who think I work for an agency.  Because I own a pair of boobs.

11. Being so far away from all my affiliate pals

Yeah OK, I know that’s 11 but the last one is just a moan not a real “hate”.

Anyone got some other affiliate marketing grudges they might like to air?

Hey there guys and gals, and greetings from your newly rejuvenated affiliate blogger.  On the weekends I usually spend a bit of time working out a couple of things that might be kinda fun to write about on here.  This weekend it didn’t happen and I thought I’d explain why!

You See Doctor, I’ve Been Feeling Kind of Rotten…

After developing no less than 4 sites recently and then having the flu, or “death lurgey” as I called it, I was feeling like my affiliate mojo had sort of deserted me.  I have 2 more new projects I need to start as well as keeping all of my sites fresh and updated and I just couldn’t get going properly.

So I Decided What I Needed Was… something diametrically opposed to the virtual world of affiliate marketing.  Yes, it is a creative discipline but in the end I was left feeling it was just nebulous and that perhaps there wasn’t much point to it all.  At this stage Duncan suggested an ambulance as I’d clearly lost my mind  – but I had a better idea.

Doing Something “Real”

I decided to spend 4 days with minimal internet time (one of my issues is I never take a break from long internet sessions – regardless of whether its my “day off” or not).

Without banging on too much about it, if you feel jaded I suggest taking a total break from the online world. Go and do something real to get it all in perspective.  My solution was to spend 4 days procuring and then distributing 8 cubic metres (half a tonne) of bark mulch on my front garden.

I started work again today and feel totally revitalised.  I was able to pick things right up and tie off loads of niggly loose ends. Tomorrow I start the next two projects and I feel great about it.  All it took was 4 days backbreaking garden labour, ha ha ha!

Try it

P.S.

Here Are Some Piccies Of My Endeavours… Welcome To Affiliate Gardening World

Before

After

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.