Free Barbados Trip Promotion by sunshine.co.uk

For those affiliates who aren't yet aware, there is an ongoing promotion by new travel merchant sunshine.co.uk which could see you going to Barbados! Each of the past few years Affiliate Future has been running an incentive for affiliates, in conjunction with merchants where a group of affiliates get a free holiday to Barbados. This year sunshine.co.uk are taking part and are offering to pay for three of their affiliates to visit Barbados with the Affiliate Future trip. One of the places is to be awarded to one of their best performing affiliates but the other two are within the reach of any affiliate, even a complete newbie. They are also offering holiday prizes to other destinations and I have been lucky enough to win one to Majorca, leaving on Thursday of this week!

The prizes are being offered for undertaking a series of "missions" which will see affiliates progress to having a fully functioning website to promote sunshine.co.uk with. For the record, mine is based around a resort in Majorca and is called Palma Nova Majorca. This is an innovative approach which deserves to succeed and I would urge as many affiliates as possible to take part! You can see the latest "missions" by clicking here.

Leaving the incentives aside for a moment, this looks like an excellent program to promote heavily, particularly heading into the summer season. There is a dedicated affiliate area on the sunshine.co.uk website and there are three contacts available for live chat through the site, not just 9-5 either, these guys never seem to sleep! The affiliate area has a wealth of tools, banners and targetted adverts aimed at specific resorts to maximise conversion rates for affiliates. There are comprehensive datafeeds and RSS feeds with embedded affiliate ids.

Bristol Affiliate Marketing Meeting - 20 July

I started out early to go to the Affiliates4u meeting in Bristol. I had already established that i would be on the same flight down from Edinburgh as another affiliate blogger called Fraser Edwards. We duly met up and had a good chat on the plane on the short trip southwards before catching up with Clarke Duncan, another affiliate blogger and director of the Paid on Results affiliate network. We headed into Bristol for a tour of the Existem offices. (The company behind the affiliates4u forum which is the biggest affiliate marketing forum in the UK) We enjoyed a chat with Matthew Wood, founder of Existem and were kindly dropped off in the centre of Bristol.

I checked into my hotel and grabbed a couple of hours of sleep before heading to the Pitcher and Piano bar for around 4.30pm. There were balloons to mark out where the people who were there for the affiliate get2gether were sitting and I had very productive talks with several people as well as the continuation of running jokes from previous events. Yes John and Jason, i'm referring to your obsession with Captain Jack! It was good to put more names and faces together and to catch up with people I hadn't seen in a while.

It was a pity the very severe weather stopped many people from getting there or significantly delayed them. The hero of the evening was undoubtedly birthday boy James Avery who had cycled 120 miles in the p*ssing rain to make it to the event. The Buy.at and Affiliate Window bods were delayed severely as well but fair play to them all for persevering and turning up!

An interesting evening of fun and games followed though sadly I failed to win any prizes this time. I think Chris Frost mustn't have been entering any of the competitions this time because he didn't win anything. I'm sure he was trying to give other people a chance this time!

I got home around 7pm by the time I had got a train after the bus from the airport. The evening was spent int eh company of Harry Potter and co as the last book in the series had been delivered in my absence!

Amsterdam G2G Thanks

The affiliate marketing get together on board the DFDS Seaways "Queen of Scandinavia" cruise ship was fantastic and I would like to thank everyone involved in the organisation of it. I went down a day early and stayed at a hotel in Newcastle as it was easier than getting an early morning train.

I had a bit of a disaster with a website design client's website and had to prevail upon the kindness of the buy.at affiliate network who thankfully allowed me to come into their offices and sort things out using one of their computers. These folks are lifesavers and some of the nicest people you will meet in the industry.

After the emergency was taken care of, I returned to the hotel and met up with some like minded people in the hotel bar where we stayed for a few hours before heading out for the evening. I remember sitting back in my hotel bar around 4 or 5 am with a few people, one who was due to speak at the event the next day. I am pleased to say they made it, which is more than I did. I was extremely hungover and didn't surface until after 1pm and had to pay the hotel a surcharge for checking out late! I then made my way to the ferry terminal and was very kindly escorted on board, sweeping through customs without a second glance. No rubber gloves this time thankfully!

So I made it onto the ship and ino the Seven Seas restaurant with just enough time to grab a gorgeous buffet lunch. I was getting a bit of stick for turning up late and some people assumed I had missed the boat completely! That would have been horrible after coming down from Scotland for it. Had a pleasant evening networking and the next day it was off to the Heineken Experience which is a surprisingly good day out! (It was meant to last an hour but we stayed for at least 3! Helen Latto who was at her first ever affiliate event insisted that I take a photo of her with a barman who had an amazing moustache and she proceeded to get more photos in a similar vein throughout the trip! Got to catch them all! It's the next Pokemon i'm sure of it!

We had a good walk around Amsterdam, got some food and made it back in time to get the free bus back to the Ship. Another very drunken night ensued and it was a lot of fun. Sitting at some ungodly hour of the morning in a bar while a country singer was being persuaded to sing an REM song in the style of Johnny Cash is definitely something which will stay with me for a while. A fantastic night and fantastic trip and I hope to see a lot of the people at more events in the future.

The one downside was a lack of merchants, maybe due to a combination of this event clashing with an Affiliate Window one and a reluctance from some merchants, agencies and networks to leave London to go to an event. Those who didn't turn up missed a brilliant few days and I actually preferred the smaller turnout in some ways because it meant I had more of a chance to actually talk to people instead of it becoming almost "speed networking" which it is sometimes in danger of becoming at other events.

Affiliates 4 U Amsterdam Event - DFDS Seaways

There are still spaces available at what is looking like being one of the best affiliate arketing events I have been to yet. The event is being run by Existem, the company behind the incredibly popular a4u forum and will be on board a ferry from Newcastle to Amsterdam on 28th and 29th of March. For the £25 registration fee you get return travel to Amsterdam and a free buffet / receptions plus sessions with the Tradedoubler affiliate network and Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). This is an event that anyone who is even remotely interested in affiliate marketing in the UK should be doing their best to attend and I for one am looking forward to it immensely.

To register for the event, visit http://www.a4uevents.com/register.php

Full Time Affiliate Marketing - A Year On

I made a post more than a year ago about my excitement at quitting my day job to pursue the full time affiliate life so I thought it was about time to do an update on how I am faring.

It has been a bit of a rollercoaster and there have been times when I have longed for the security of a full time job but barring complete and utter destitution or the chance to work somewhere warm there is no way I would work for someone else again.

When I left my day job I promised myself that in a year's time I would be making x amount per month. I am not hitting this at present but I have maybe not been putting as much work in as would be required to consistently hit it. I have been coasting along comfortably for the most part and that can make you a little bit lazy. I had a horrendous start to 2007 though which has spurred me on to try a lot harder and to focus my energies more urgently on work and a little less on play!

The first few months of 2007 have been hard but it seems that things may be beginning to look up and I am looking forward to the rest of the year with increasing levels of optimism.

Nick Robertson of ASOS and his grubby little comments

I haven't been blogging much recently but felt compelled to put on record my displeasure at the comments by Nick Robertson, the CEO of ASOS, formerly As Seen On Screen. The comments appeared in New Media Age magazine and are highly offensive to affiliates, many of whom feel that they made ASOS into the brand it is today.

"Next year we'll reintroduce affiliate marketing but as it should be, as opposed to affiliates as they were" said Nick Robertson, ASOS CEO. "(There'll be) no silly commissions being paid to grubby little people in grubby studios growing income at our expense, getting in the way of genuine sales" - Nick Robertson, CEO of ASOS

Frankly it is shameful for a CEO whose company owe a large part of their success to the affiliate marketing community to turn on that same community in such a fashion. I can't see affiliates lining up to join their affiliate scheme when it relaunches if this is his attitude.

I firmly believe that people reap what they sow and if this is the case with ASOS, I await the harvest with interest.

Commission Junction Javascript Links

Commission Junction are definitely this year's Deal Group Media in terms of upsetting their affiliates. There has been an outcry about moves to replace text links with javascript ones served remotely by CJ. Prominent figures in the UK Affiliate Marketing industry Jessica Luthi and Keith Budden have both mentioned this in their blogs and it has also merited discussion on the A4u forum which is the biggest affiliate forum in the UK.

One of the main problems with the proposed change by Commission Junction is that many affiliates want to be able to control all the content on their own sites for SEO purposes. A javascript links is totally worthless in terms of SEO and under the new proposals affiliates wont even be able to choose the text of the links. Many experienced affiliates have worked out what makes sales for them and want to continue using their own tried and tested call to action phrases rather than leaving it in the hands of the merchants and the networks.

Another problem is where affiliates have built websites around datafeeds from different merchants. Changing the databases in order to accommodate the javascript code will be a huge amount of work for any decent sized affiliate. It may be easier to find merchants in the same area on other networks than to tinker with the basic setup of their sites.

This is quite a gamble on the part of CJ and they look like they are on the slide in terms of sales and will probbaly be dwarfed by a resurgent buy.at at some point soon as they are fresh from a £7 Million injection of venture capital.