Ahhh it is February already. Amongst other things, this means that I am ready to give you the monthly installment of our collated tips of the week.

“If you are a publisher working from home then start the New Year on a positive note by developing good habits. You will probably be pleased to not have to accede to the disciplines of an employer’s office, but should nevertheless get dressed for work, spend fixed hours on the computer doing your affiliate marketing, eat well, and generally run your home office in an uber-professional manner. Otherwise you may find yourself losing motivation and becoming unproductive over the medium to long term.

There are ten excellent tips on working from home here on Microsoft’s small business site.”

Tom Leadbetter

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One of the most interesting things about affiliate marketing is that the knowledge within the industry is widely spread out. It is always worth taking the time out to hear from some experts, how they got started, what they think the burning issues are and any tips that they might have. You will quite often find some controversial opinions which will differ depending on who you speak to – the more you know the more you can build up your own thoughts and opinoins on the industry.

So – time to hear from one of said experts in the industry. Jason Brockman, Director of Easy Content Units (ECU) has kindly taken the time out to be interviewed for the CJ UK blog. So with no further adieu, here is a photo of Jason for the purposes of visualisation and then we will leap straight into the interview!

Tell us a little bit about youself!

I live in Plymouth with my wife, Emma, and three children plus one due in March! There’s  four cats, two chickens and a horse on the scene too.

What made you get involved in affiliate marketing?

John Lamerton (lammo.net) asked me to join him to help run Net Free Stuff back in 2003 which was our major site with over 100,000 freebie hunters as members.

Tell us a little bit about ECU

Basically we take all the merchants’ datafeeds, clean them up and pop them into our database. Then affiliates can choose to show a content unit on their site with a random set of products, or (and more useful) a specific list of products which they choose by searching and adding them to their units. The units are fairly customisable – I do not think there is anything you cannot do with them, from layout to colour to background. If there is let us know and we’ll add!

ECUs are being used to display product ranges, price comparison, to show accessories or related items, for PPC landing pages, by domainers etc…In fact, the only limit to their use is your imagination. Our showcase page shows how some of our members use ECU.

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“One of the most time consuming aspects of being a publisher is having to manually log into different affiliate network interfaces to view your statistics. There are solutions that enable you to check figures from lots of networks in one place. Most are US focused and don’t cater for all the major UK networks, but ones that do are Staagg and Affmeter. The former pulls statistics into a web or mobile interface and is free, and the later is a downloadable tool which costs $14.95 a month.”

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More new starters? Yes, more new starters. Let me introduce them to you.

Sam Richards has joined  us as the UK Head of Sales (as Florian has been promoted to Head of Agency & International Client Servicing – congrats!)  He is a picture of Sam taken very close up to his face

Sam is from deepest darkest Kent, specifically a place called Crockenhill. Some quick facts about Crockenhill you ask? Well in the latter half of the twentieth century Crockenhill was an important area for growing peppermint. The village is also currently creating a habitat for badgers which is nice. Despite this Sam is looking to relocate closer to the office in the near future as it sounds like his commute is a bit of a mission.

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We have collated a list of the final order dates for some of our merchants. We will updating this as more information comes available from merchants.

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Yes Way!

Here are our unbelievably magnificent mo-vemberers. Growing facial hair has never been so valiant. I realise that this photo may cause mass hysteria amongst the ladies of affiliate marketing however in the name of (er) journalism I feel duty-bound to report this.

Hang on a minute…. Before you get to see this vision of beauty let me tell you how you can help support the boys as they raise money for prostate cancer. You can click on this link – http://uk.movember.com/donate/find-team/ and search for Value Hicks.

A lot of you will know that Sainsbury’s recently ran an affiliate trolley dash competition. Well last month Dipa and Eleanor from the CJ team accompanied the winner Andy Hibbert, Head of Partnerships at artemis8 to Sainsbury’s office.  Note: Dipa was the one taking the terrible photo, Eleanor was the one trying not to be in the awful photo,  Andy was the one who couldn’t care less about the photo, he had his eye firmly on the prize. 

Here is the terrible photo:

Andy- artemis8 & Anna- Sainbury's

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Time has flown right past me so here is a double whammy of tips of the week.

September

“As many of you know, the words in H1 header tags are given weighting by search engine bots and contribute towards you ranking higher for those words.

If you think huge H1 fonts will make your web pages look ugly, you can use CSS to reduce their size. An example would be:
[STYLE TYPE="text/css"]
H1 {font-family: verdana,arial; font-size: 9pt; color:#ff4500}
[/STYLE] (replace [] with <>)”

Katie Harrod
Account Director

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As promised, I have some more new people to introduce after the charming Marta Casero a few weeks ago. Some more to come as well….

First up is Melanie Scheibner who has joined us as an Account Representative in Dipa’s team. We have stolen Melanie from our PriceRunner friends on the third floor. Secondly is Andrew Stephens who has joined as an Account Manager looking after the ValueClick/CJ short term campaigns.

So, let’s find out a little bit more about Melanie. Here she is….

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Alas I was not there at CJU this year so instead of telling you all about how sad that made me I thought it would be much more interesting to interview Luke Judge of Net Media Planet about his experiences there.

So how did you end up at CJU US?

One cold winter afternoon in early January my CJ UK Account Manager sent me news of a CJ UK competition that involved me taking a photo of the CJ UK team photo (wow – that’s a mouthful – Editor’s note, you can read all about it here) in an interesting place or situation. After racking my brains for 0.315624 seconds and generating 215.897034 results I had the smart idea of taking CJ UK to Las Vegas for the week. The next day I was off to London Heathrow and aboard a Virgin Atlantic flight. THe CJ UK team were with me at every stage, occupying the space in my inner jacket pocket between the pen, sunglasses and cuban cigar.

A few days later I had a handful of great photos with CJ UK all over Las Vegas. Thanks has to go to the brilliant support provided by photographer elect, Magnus Nilsson, for his creative input and support.

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