pistol101 – Affiliate Marketing Blog

Yesterday i did it and completed the 2011 Virgin London Marathon. Amazing!

I headed up to London on Saturday afternoon and we checked into the glamourous Travelodge at Southwark. Carefully planned, rather than the hotel of choice! It’s 2 minute walk from Waterloo East and 10 mins on the train to Greenwich. An evening of pasta and chicken then Britain’s Got Talent! We’d gone for a walk on the Southbank and you can see the last few mile markers on the other side of the Thames. Scary!

Somehow managed to sleep and was up ready for the 8.13am train to Greenwich. The night before in Zizzi’s you could spot the runners a mile away, but it all hadn’t really sunk in what i was about to do. It was the moment i stepped onto the platform at Waterloo East – It was rush hour but with hundreds of scared runners! The biggest memory of the day, is how friendly London had become. Strangers talking on trains!

Arriving in Greenwich – wow! Some of the charities had their meet points at the station and there were so many people! I met with my charity on Blackheath. 114 runners with CRY – all raising at least £1,750 – so thats £200k for the charity, some people had raised so much more. Caught up with one of my friends from school – not seen her since school (well done Claire )

There are 3 start lines – i was at the red start (32,000 of us there!). It’s the one where you leave through the gates of Blackheath. The starts all meet by mile 3 – very odd site seeing the thousands of runners all meeting.

Took me just over 14.5 minutes to cross the line. The master plan had been to run about 9.5 min miles and then see how i was feeling a little later on. With so many people in the first miles i was a fraction behind my pace but i was relatively happy. However by mile 8/9 the reality of it being hot was starting to kick in – everyone always says drink and drink early but i’d drunk far more than i expected.

The first half of the race has lots of sights, running through Greenwich – you no longer run past the Cutty Shark as it’s being repaired but there were still thousands of people there, people were literally hanging out of building windows to watch! The next big landmark is Tower Bridge – certainly has the wow factor running across it! Tried to be a tourist and take some pics! Shows you just how many people there were running!

So i hit halfway at 2:11, about 5 minutes later than i had hoped for but still i was hoping that would leave me with plenty of energy later on (running the second half of a marathon quicker than the first is a real challenge). How wrong was I! Heading into Canary Wharf it all started to get a lot harder! My miles were just above 10 mins now but it was a lot of effort to keep them there – never really had this in training so early in a run. As we went through 15 and 16, the carnage started to happen, the first few casualties were going down. People were just fainting mid stride – very scary. The heat around the office blocks in Canary Wharf was unbelievable, it just trapped the heat and there was just no fresh air.

The London Fire Brigade were hosing people down – it was so nice! At 19 miles my legs just became lead and it was just a case of making it to the end in one piece.

All the way round the atmosphere had been amazing – crowds at times were 5 or 6 deep. Kids on the side were high-fiving you and felt like everyone was screaming your name out. Those last 7 miles really hurt but the crowds made such a difference! However the last mile and a half really really hurt – i really have no idea how i got down there and it all seems a blur. All you can hear is come on Pete you can do it – your nearly there. Was horrible watching a few more people being tended to by the St John Ambulance people in the middle of the road, especially the poor women who was inside the last 100 metres! Realistically i probably wasn’t far away from joining them.

Crossing the line was more relief than anything else – and then being hugged by random strangers! There was really no energy left in my body! Reckon it took me 20 mins to get my bag off the truck and up-to the charity meeting point. How grateful i was for a seat and a coke! The steps up to the meeting point were interesting, one guy never made those! Best place to pass out!

I don’t think anyone got any sense out of me for the next hour before heading home. It was certainly an amazing day and nothing will ever prepare you for doing it in those conditions. I will leave you with the following saying and that you should all put your name in the ballot you wont regret it!

When you stand on the Start Line, you join the club. When you stand at the Starting Line you earn your membership. Millions dream of being where you are. You are no longer a dreamer. You are a doer. Thousands more started a training programme but never finished. They started with the same enthusiasm (or more than) you. They started with more or less the same physical gifts or disadvantages as you did. They had no more and no less reason to be successful than you. But somewhere along the way, they lost that enthusiasm. Somewhere on the road or on the track or treadmill, they decided that the rewards just weren’t worth the effort. They decided that they could live without finding their limits, without challenging their expectations of themselves and without taking a hard look at their image of themselves. You didn’t. If you’re standing at the Start Line, you’ve not only accepted the challenge, but you’ve also beaten back the demons. You’ve conquered your imagination and self-imposed limitations. You’ve gone further, got stronger and become tougher than you ever imagined.

I’ve just read a presentation from this summers Adtech saying that affiliate marketing is a no risk marketing chanel…Wrong and infact so wrong it’s unbelievable. Affiliate marketing if done correctly is a very powerful advertising channel (please note it’s advertising) if set-up and managed correctly.

The online sector is still in it’s infancy and is unfortunately littered with people that don’t know their arse from their elbow. It’s becoming more apparent as the pressure is increasing on retailers to look after margins. 

So how would i run my programme with all these risky affiliates around? 

-Brand PPC. No affiliate would be near any of my brand terms or variations. I’d make sure my trademarks are registered so that no one is using them in their Google ads. If my competitors were bidding on my brand, i’d be flattered and then would have a number of landing page sites pushing them out or letting them spend their budgets quickly.

-Generic PPC terms. Again i’m running as much of this myself (either me, my marketing manager or outsourced to a PPC agency). Long tail keywords i’d certainly open to my affiliates and affiliates bidding on generic terms to their own sites (provided they aren’t promoting me in their ads). Between us we’ll have everything sorted.

-Voucher codes. All voucher code sites would be removing their click to reveal on codes. Voucher codes would be very heavily targeted to new customers, ie 10% off your first purchase. Voucher code box would be removed from my site and any voucher codes would be available from links. Returning customers, sorry voucher code sites but your getting a lower commission.

-Incentive sites. Again i’m paying more commission for first time customers and less for returning customers.

Both voucher code sites and incentive sites have major reach, yes they will overwrite affiliate cookies, i’ll cover this when i get to deduping, however they have loyal bases. I’d be getting to know these guys and working on promotions to get people buying…Savvy Tips, email marketing, forums, tenancy agreements….the list is endless.

Reporting, now here you need to be sad, and have your internal reporting pulling back everything. So you can instantly pull back a report by affiliate, teaching my about their business. Average basket, lapse time from click to order, % of returning customers, % of new business and much more. Paul Smith (formely of IWoot) quoted that 70% of his business from Quidco was returning customers, great feedback however there are two massive unkwown questions of the 70% – who would have ordered the products from Firebox (Presents for Men, GadgetHub etc) and from the 30% – who were new customers how many would have still bought the product? I’ll ignore the question of no Quidco link and people going to the other incentive sites!

Deduping – i can probably write a post on this alone, which i’ll do one day. However to sum it up, affiliate marketing is part of advertising your site. Offline is great example of how this works, i walked past a billboard in the street, i saw the advert in the paper, my friends told me about the product, it was on TV during XFactor…. You can’t dedupe easily against this and you have to pay to for each channel. Affiliate marekting suffers as it’s easy to work out the last click and pay for this, however people need mutiple kicks to go and buy things. Why affiliate marketing uses the last click model is becuase you could in theory pay commission multiple times taking you over the profit margin per product.

It’s no secret but several networks are evolving to allow merchants to be paying multiple times for the same sale. This is a very exciting development as it means the true value can be given to affiliates. Content affiliates, this will be very exciting for you guys as your going to see more transactions, and don’t be worried about earning less commission per sale watch merchants understand your value and start rewarding you properly. It will take time to understand the value of each affiliate.

Back with my merchant hat on, i’m running the same path analysis across all my marketing spend and adjusting my spends accordingly. It’s not going to be easy to understand the true value. Lots of merchants de-dupe against every possible channel, you are damaging your programme.

Now other issues with my affiliates;

-Affiliates buying through their links…please keep doing this and thanks for your hard work promoting us. Don’t promote me and we’ll have words about your activity!
-Typo domains….go and buy everyone of these you can get your hands on, too late affiliates/domain parkers have them? Get talking to those people to redeem them as quickly as possible.
-White Lies…that affiliate isn’t sending traffic from where they say they are. Get yourself a copy of Brandwatcher and Hitwise you’ll soon be able to spot the rouges doing things they shouldn’t.  Check refering urls from all your sales.
-Affiliates SEO, as the merchant if your site doesn’t rank higher than the affiliates then it’s time to optimise your site properly and get some links in! 

Customer interaction, pick up the phone and call your customers to find out more about their buying process. Why has your customer come from Mutual Points having clicked on 2 content sites. Find out what makes them tick.

Unfortunatly running your business properly is not always possible if your business is small. It’s not cheap, man hours and reporting tools to do this. However a good affiliate network will do this to a degree for you (you’ll end up with higher monthly fees and a higher cost per sale).

I’m sure people will have some questions so please fire them over and i’ll explain further.