Affiliate Marketing Blog

I would like to say a quick word of thanks to Elaine, Dave and Our Kev at Children’s Rooms for providing some items for my son’s school Christmas Fund Draw, one of the lady’s in the office wrote to me to say “the parcel was fab! a fairy princess single bed set complete with curtains, fifi single bed set, a thomas the tank sleeping bag and a princess sleeping bag.”

Cheers to everyone at Children’s Rooms however that was to much, but sure be a couple of delighted children when they win one of these and funds raised will be going towards stuff like free school trips for every child regardless of parents income, musical equipment and arts and crafts materials to name but a few things. It’s the first time ever that my son’s school has received a donation from outside the local area, and now that the Council Lawyers have finally given the full go ahead for www.hillington.net the Affiliate based shopping portal we hope that if that becomes successful with the parents, staff, family, friends and local community that maybe next year we can ask a couple of other retailers for a donation.

P.s. I know a couple of other people are sending in something, I will be posting thanks to each on an individual bases, you might as well get a link or 2 in return for your good efforts

Well done Chris C, Chris B and the rest of the crew at Sunshine.co.uk on winning Best Use of Affiliate Marketing at the Interactive Marketing Advertising Awards 2008 and I am sure AF played their part and should get a pat on the back also Ok its pun time, you’re a shining light and a ray of hope for other non multi-national companies, I am sure the big brands are feeling the heat! Oh dear, I will grab my coat!

After my blog post last week, Networks Get Your Own Merchant Content Correct. It’s time to highlight yet another thing that annoys me as it’s asked far to often and you would think with all the razzmatazz Networks make about how wonderful their tracking is that the following question would not be getting asked as often as it is.

“Hope you are well. I’m the account manager at xNetwork of xMerchant and I notice that you have been generating a number of clicks but a high percentage haven’t converted into sales.

I couldn’t find xMerchant located on your site and was wandering how you are currently promoting?”

So guys are you tell me your fancy tracking that is oh so great, and the “secret” spy software that knows what affiliates are up to can’t find a plain old link from one of my many sites?

Could it maybe be laziness on the part of the Network, that they just couldn’t be bothered checking or is it as I suspect, they don’t actually check where clicks are coming from?

It would be different if they wrote all your clicks have “no referrer” so we just want to double check but the fact is I don’t hide where my clicks come from so they would know this if they logged it.

Like my post last week, I have hidden who the Network (a different one this week) was that sent this as it’s not about making a fool out of them, it’s about saying. Stop wasting Affiliates time with pointless trivial stuff that any half baked system would know let along a super advanced one that you claim to have. Can we just get on with promoting Merchants please

I am about to undertake an experiment to see if one small primary school in Glasgow can get parents, staff, friends, family and the local community spending online via a website setup and run by parents in the schools Parents Council. I am interested in seeing if we can get the 5,000+ households in the catchment area using the website to search for and make purchases online and in doing so raise funds for the school.

Now I am aware that there are plenty of ready made solutions, indeed a few of the networks even have fundraising programs available but I wanted to make something where it can include Merchants from all Networks and where 100% of the commission goes back to the school. It will be interesting to see how the Networks, Merchants and Agencies treat this project, will they be supportive or not?

One thing that amazed me last night at the Parent Council meeting was how switched on the parents and staff are to the Internet and the effect it could have if it works out, however it did take a little explaining as to how it all works and there is a bit of disbelief that company’s such as Marks and Spencer’s, Next, House of Fraser etc would get involved. I explained it’s all about customers and marketing spend and that these companies are delighted to spend some of their marketing budget if we can deliver customers and as they use Networks as providers it’s not a big deal to have a small site like this involved.

So what’s the plan to make sure the momentum carries forward on this project? Simple, all parents will be informed of the site at the up and coming parents evening, a link will be added to the school website, a newsletter will go home and volunteers (parents and pupils) will leaflet the houses in and around the catchment area plus we should get some local press out of this.

This is my contribution to the schools fundraising effort, I estimate it will take up several nights and a few weekends this month to get it off the ground and approx one evening a month to remove out of date merchants and add new ones. Plus I have two volunteer parents who are ready to learn and help out. So if you’re a parent and you have a child at school, you should seriously give something like this a go, you never know what you might raise for the school. I shall keep you posted if this experiment works out, fingers crossed!

Also if anyone else has tried this, I would love to hear your feedback, makes a change to do something for others and not just for yourself

It’s time to reveal a major new venture that is being undertaken by several leading Affiliates. House Price Spy was established a couple of years ago, however at the end of last year the decision was taken to expand the site’s horizons and see if House Price Spy could be made into a major force in the “house price information” arena. At this point I struck on the idea of finding out what would happen if you put together a number of leading Affiliates who each have strengths in different areas.

I contacted a few people to see who was interested and was very surprised to find keen support straight away, in fact so many were interested that I had enough people without even getting to talk to everyone I thought might be interested, who needs Dragon’s Den LOL

The goals of House Price Spy are probably as straight forward as it gets, to be the number one site in its area: attract 1 million members interested in property and of course generate good returns for the shareholders.

Months of work have been dedicated to making the new House Price Spy website, so check it out. Over the coming 2 weeks you will hear from a number of the other shareholders involved in this project, so for just now I am keeping it ‘hush hush’ as to who they are, you will just have to check out the blogs to find out who they are as they reveal themselves one by one!

Last week the BBC published an article about spam and a video accompanying it unfairly shows one of my websites Free UK Stuff, while talking about spam. I am pleased to say that after publishing this blog post and having received a number of blog posts (see list at the bottom of this message), forum posts and folk filing complaints on reading the article, the BBC made contact on the Friday of last week after receiving these complaints and reading this blog and others and removed the video later that day.

Today the BBC made contact to say they have agreed to publish a statement that I requested to be put at the bottom of the news article in question, so I could show suppliers, merchants and site users should they have any questions or doubts about what the video contained.

Ian a Journalist from the BBC who handled the investigation, removal and getting the statement published about this article is the type of person I kind of expect all BBC employees to be. He was very professional, didn’t take sides and while he had to report to his bosses before action was taken, he clearly done so quickly and called me back when he said he would, so I thank him for understanding the matter at hand and dealing with it swiftly.

Hopefully next time when a technology article is published an editor or journalist will be involved who understands the issues raised in the article and any accompanying video before they get published. Indeed it was pointed out in the past that some really good articles have been published on the BBC News about the very important subject of spam and how it gets in the way of legitimate communications between site owners and their members. The person who invents the total solution to spam will be a very rich person indeed.

Here is a list of blog articles posted in support, if I have missed anyone out please get in contact and I will edit this post.

BBC Spam Email Experiment Badly Researched

The BBC hasn’t a clue

The BBC Make Spam Out Of Fish!

BBC Investigation Into Spam, Poorly Researched?

“Clarke Duncan sold my daughter viagra”: BBC Reports

Lies, Damn Lies and the BBC (my personal blog)

Statement on BBC News Video featuring Free UK Stuff

And the A4U Forum where lots of messages of support where also posted in the thread BBC spam article featuring aff sites.

Thanks again for the support, shows what can be done when Affiliates stand up for each other, happy days

I found out last night that BBC News ran a story and video about spam that clearly shows my website Free UK Stuff and domain name and screen shots from the website and double opt-in email sign up system.

What is unbelievable in this “experiment” conducted by McAfee is that they have totally no clue about what is email communications for registered site users and what is spam, the stuff you get that you never agreed to. If you watch the video you will be left thinking Free UK Stuff sells on your email address and you will get thousands of spam messages because of it, its totally shocking just how poor the editorial process has been in allowing these slanderous lies to make it on to the web as if it was news worthy facts.

I have run Free UK Stuff since 1997 and have over 1/4 of a million users. Since 2000 we operated a very strict double opt-in system that records the person that joined, at what time, from where, what browser they used and so on to prove without a shadow of a doubt that someone has asked and then click on a link to complete the sign up process to join the Free UK Stuff Members Newsletter, a weekly email that tells members what is going on at the site and often features 2 or 3 site sponsors or adverts. This is all clearly stated to the members before they join and they can opt-out automatically at anytime.

So I have done some research on the person that joined our site and who agreed to receive our newsletter, and here is what I found.

Log Evidence

She first arrived on the site having searched Google for “free stuff”.

82.10.200.6 - - [09/Apr/2008:09:42:08 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 6014 “http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=free+stuff&meta=” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

She then started the process to join the site 1m 47s later.

82.10.200.6 - - [09/Apr/2008:09:43:55 +0100] “POST /cgi-bin/join.pl HTTP/1.1″ 200 10675 “http://www.freeukstuff.com/join.html” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

3 days later she finally clicks the link to join the site as a member, the only email she had from us was at 9.43am asking her if she wanted to be a member, 3 days later she decided that yes she did and completed the double opt-in process. An email was then sent welcoming her as a member.

82.10.200.6 - - [12/Apr/2008:12:35:12 +0100] “GET /gsgxCihwbdgxrvrdvAyx/h HTTP/1.1″ 200 20325 “http://webmail.mcafeespamexperiment.com/horde/imp/message.php?index=8″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

3 hours later, when she was filmed for the video showing on the BBC Website she clicked the link again, and this is what they filmed.

82.10.200.6 - - [12/Apr/2008:15:41:11 +0100] “GET /gsgxCihwbdgxrvrdvAyx/h HTTP/1.1″ 200 20327 “http://webmail.mcafeespamexperiment.com/horde/imp/message.php?index=8″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

Time Line of BBC News Video

Here is the time line of the BBC News video destroying our hard earned reputation as being the UK’s number one Free Stuff website.

0.07s - Site name is clearly visible on screen, it’s the only one highlighted with a blue bar.

0.43s to 0.48s - Site web address is clearly shown on screen, they roll over and highlight it.

0.48s to 0.51s - They click on the email from Free UK Stuff will talking about the “spam” that arrived.

0.52s - you can clearly see the link you must click on order to join our double opt-in email newsletter, If you compare that part of the video with our log evidence you can clearly see this is the same persons email.

01.01s - she claims that by clicking on our link, the one she just clicked on again that it generated “more spam” now it’s funny how she could know this as if you look at the log evidence above you will see she was only a member of the site 3 hours before they filmed her clicking the link again. Clicking the link again won’t make you a member twice, as you have already joined, so you get sent to the welcome screen.

01.06s - she says it’s not just her, and that her 14 year old daughter is receiving daily emails, then we see footage of her going on about spam that has nothing to do with us what so ever but if you watched this “news” piece you think we are the worlds worst spammers and not a shred of evidence to say we have ever spammed anyone yet we feature so highly in this report.

What makes this all even more unreal is that we are regularly asked by different BBC departments to list “freebies” such as games, show tickets and so on our site http://www.freeukstuff.com/atoz/b.html I wonder if this lady signed up to the BBC mailing lists that they would consider their own mailing lists spam also, because that’s what this news article is saying in this day and age it is preferable to send an email instead of chopping down trees to send a letter, that irresponsible and reckless reporting destroys the reputation of hard working people like myself can pass as a worthy news story. Not once did the BBC contact us in the making of this news article.

• View the BBC News Article here, view the video and compare the times above.

• Visit Free UK Stuff.

• Make a complaint about this shockingly poor news story to the BBC and help educate them on what is spam, note if enough people complain and more than enough Affiliate voices around, they have to publish a response to this. It’s very easy to do, just email, write or call the complaint line.

Nope this blog post is not a sad excuse to use a title based on a song, I will leave that to the king of song titles changes, Jason. Also I am not even trying to win one of the many holidays and prizes up for grabs via Sunshine.co.uk nice that they are and all.

Why do so many Affiliate Companies have websites in Beta? It used to be the case that “beta” was the final stage before realising your software yet some of the betas are going on 2 years now, so what’s so badly wrong with the sites or software that they have to keep them in “beta” for such long periods. Now I have my guesses and the two working theories is that it’s either because of the giant mess DGM made of the now infamous “DMG Pro” so everyone is worried they might make such a mess of things and tag on “beta” so they can say well it had a few bugs. The other working theory is that it’s monkey see, monkey do for example Google’s Gmail has been in beta since 2004, yes that’s right 4 years in “beta testing” and that makes the couple of years some Affiliates Companies have been in beta seem like nothing. As far as I can tell Gmail is working as you would expect, maybe I am missing something.

It’s been going on for months mostly because a couple of bad eggs have been cookie stuffing and so robbing real content Affiliates of the hard earned money the deserve but more recently (today) a Discount Codes Podcast discussing the subject was released over at the top Affiliate Blog (puts this one to shame) by Fraser Edwards.