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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