After a comment from Lee, about a lack of post i though it was time to fire up the blog again!
2009 has started by being incredibily busy. As AffiliateFuture is the market leading travel network, January is therefore one of our biggest months of the year. Many people aren’t aware just how many people book their summer holiday straight after Christmas…well it’s a staggering number that do. With the credit crunch being around we weren’t sure what demand would be like and we’ve been suprised. Package holidays are the star performers at the moment, but the tour operators have been cutting capacity so things will slow. Later in the year you’ll see the dynamically packaged guys really come through – you basically pick your flight and hotel and create your own holiday. Destinations outside of the Euro are working really well, like Egypt but Egypt’s capacity isn’t huge so the likes of Spain will start to wake.
One area struggling is the airlines, you can get a return ticket to New York for £259 and there is plenty of availability. Don’t forget that a large chunk (£210) is tax and fuel supplements so these guys aren’t making much. Hitwise have given figures that traffic is 42% down in this sector, bookings however aren’t as badly hit conversions are really good. Couple that with some cracking commission – Virgin Atlantic are paying 3% to everyone. It’s not all bad.
To keep the blog a little more interesting i’m going to start answering some questions! So fire them over and i’ll post back.
Christmas shopping is well underway, but whats really happening?
Well good news is that online retail is up on last year, bad news is that we’re not seeing the massive increases we have in the past few years. The reason for this is that is consumers are being more careful with their purchases and the high street is trying to save itself with some cracking offers. I’ve not ordered a thing online this Christmas, i’ve been taking advantages of these sales. And i’m looking forward to the offers getting even better.
Second piece of bad news, commissions and average baskets are a lot lower.
Third bit of bad news, merchants are trying to dedupe channels.
Good news, conversions are up. Ecommerce sites are much better at converting your visitors.
A word of warning, there are lots of merchants on the verge of going under. Make sure your business can cope with loosing your top earners and for those networks that don’t cover your earnings make sure your prepared.
It’s worth looking at other sectors at the moment. Finance is great for those affiliates with good quality traffic, good quality traffic is an art as there are so many people looking for finance at the moment and many people can’t have it.
Mobile Phones, those retailers giving away free gifts and have top deals are absolutely flying.
Gambling – people seem to be having a flutter on the soft end of the market.
In case you’ve not started thinking about, January is the biggest travel month so start preparing. With average baskets on travel being over £1,000 and some decent commissions floating around you can’t afford to miss out.
On Thursday night we attended the Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards (IMAA) at the Royal Lancaster Hotel. We had been shortlisted for the ‘Best Use of Affiliate Marketing’ award so the dinner jacket was out as 10 of us attended.
To get shortlisted we had to jump through a number of hoops. Firstly we needed a cracking programme, well we didn’t have to look far as the www.sunshine.co.uk affiliate programme is one of the best run travel programmes around. With the programme being run by former affiliates they knew exactly how to run the programme. With them taking advantage of all the affiliatefuture tools we knew we had something that was worthy of being entered.
So the second stage was the entry. We had to justify the programme and why it should win. Fortunately we use a PR company to coordinate this. Ruth at Orchid PR was able to put together all the information and into a judge friendly format. The basis of the entry was very much about the results, at the end of the day if the programme doesn’t delivery sales then it’s no use to anyone.
Thirdly, we had to decide who was picking the award up! As the awards were announced it was starting to become obvious that the winners were very much about big brands and big branding campaigns. We were up against Play.com and Talk Talk. So we slightly suprised when our name was picked out.
After the highly commended at the A4Awards it’s pleasing to finally see AffiliateFuture pick up a big award. It’s also pleasing that affiliate marketing is finally being recognised in the broader would of digital marketing.
IMAA Awards
The 2nd A4U Expo got underway this morning at Excel in London. After the pre-event networking party last night there were some serious sore heads floating round the venue. Hannah and Bruce from Existem AM took the prize for looking like they hadn’t been home.
First piece of news is the launch of the Expo in Amsterdam in 2009, after the state of Hannah and Bruce i’m not sure if this is a wise idea!
The footfall at the event seemed better than last year, there was certainly an increase in affiliates round the stand.
Second piece of news was the launch of the Sunshine.co.uk top secret affiliate project. For those of you not at the event, it’s Sunpress a new plugin for Wordpress. It allows you to create a travel site in minutes using wordpress. I’ll upload a demo over the next week to show everyone, but it’s going to be a great tool for affiliates to create travel websites. More details will be up shortly on the Sunshine Affiliate Blog
Tonight is the river cruise, i’m sure there will be some more sore heads tomorrow!
It’s that time of the year again.
Every few months i run the www.theIDM.com affiliate marketing sessions. The affiliate marketing training course is run every 3-6 months and is a training course for people wanting to understand the basics of affiliate marketing. The course is an all day session run in London and it’s really aimed at the merchant side of the industry. The courses reach to a very wide audience and touch wood have all had good feedback so far.
It’s amazing to see how the market has changed each time i run the event as i spend a few hours updating the course. Here are several key sectors this time;
-Affiliate marketing is becoming an even closer part of the online strategy. Merchants are realising that too many sales are being generated by affiliates that would have come directly. Voucher Codes and Incentive sites are big part of this section. It’s very easy to work with these to benefit your business. Merchants also need to develop promotions specifically for affiliates.
-De-duping, with the credit crunch slowing down certain sectors merchants are looking at saving revenues by paying on less transactions. Now merchants have been doing this for years but haven’t realised it. De-Duping should be renamed optimising!
-Market changes – This has been the year of the big media sites becoming part of affiliate marketing. The sites that traditionally take CPM and CPC deals are starting to take more CPA. It’s a fine art to making these sites convert.
We’re testing the water with a case study from an affiliate…i’ve found one whose not too grubby and can leave their bedroom! He’ll be presenting on ‘A Day In The Life Of An Affiliate’.
I made a quick trip around Adtech this morning. This is the first time we haven’t advertised there as results weren’t great last year and actually looks like it was a good decision. The exhibition had more than halved in size this year. Adtech is traditionally a lead generation conference and usually full of American visitors. This year was no different. The drop in stands could be due to a number of reasons.
There was a big jump in US agencies/smaller cpa networks over. They’ve all been running campaigns here for a while but it’ll be interesting to see if any of them can get a foothold into the market.
We’re off to Adtech in New York later in the year which should be excellent.
