It takes minutes to explore a website and understand a little bit more about it, but with over 60,000 publishers in the CJ network cataloguing them is a major task! So why bother?  Well, it’s important to really know what each of our publishers do, how they work and then make sure that we pair them with advertisers to ensure sales are achieved and we’re targeting the right audience with the right adverts.  It helps both publishers and advertisers so it really is worth the effort.

We produce these nifty graphs for every affiliate

To ensure we get through all our publishers we take on the approach of divide and conquer.  As soon as a publisher is earning they’re automatically added to our publisher portal ready for review by a member of the Commission Junction team.  The review process is easy but thorough as we refer to it a lot when building programmes for advertisers.

Not only do we classify each and every site on the CJ network, but we sub categorise as well.  We look at the business model, category covered and content style to classify each and every publisher.  It then allows us to track each publisher and report more thoroughly for our advertisers.  We’re completely transparent and honest with our advertisers and it helps us build bespoke programmes and design successful affiliate marketing plans.

Search marketing – a quick overview

It was only in the early 90′s that the internet started to become a mainstream communication channel; as households gained access to faster internet connections, companies began to build websites for sales and marketing purposes. This in turn brought the need for companies such as Yahoo, Altavista and Google to appear as the web space became more crowded and information needed to be organised in a sensible way.

Search marketing was born.

With more and more websites competing for attention on a daily basis, brands had to find ways to make themselves heard among the noise. Since search engines used certain algorithms to index and rank web pages, brands and marketers started to think of ways to understand these algorithms in order to improve their ranks for specific keyword searches, and they’ve been playing a cat and mouse game with the search engines ever since.

Where next for brands?

In recent years link building / link popularity has gained an increased share of the SEO equation, and now accounts for about 60 to 70% of a site’s rankings. With this in mind, it is easy to understand why brands have been investing so much in social media development. How can you get a constantly increasing numbers of links to your site quickly and efficiently? By getting consumers to talk about your brand in social networks and link back to your site. While in principle this may sound very straightforward, it actually turns out to be fairly complex and time consuming process. In the past a brand only had to worry about their website and its content to get a decent ranking, but it now needs to rely on a completely unpredictable element, the consumer.

If a brand wants to achieve top positions in Google for example, it needs to control the flow of information on social sites as well as manage its reputation, which can demand a lot of resources and often requires a very specific set of skills. To be successful with search marketing, advertisers need to ensure that they find the right balance between SEO and customer service when developing their social media strategy.

Recipe for search marketing success

With such emphasis on link building in search engines at the moment, it is clear that social media and search marketing activities need to be planned together carefully. Advertisers need to define off site search objectives and expectations and monitor them on a permanent basis, while doing the SEO essentials properly on site. Only then will they be able to get the maximum return on marketing investment. It is worth keeping in mind that search engines are always updating their algorithms. Brands and brand owners need to keep abreast of these changes to be able to develop and adapt their search marketing strategies accordingly.

What’s integral throughout all this is to understand that the consumer is at the heart of any business, now more than ever doe consumers have a voice, and if a brand offers a good product and good service its consumers can be its greatest marketers.

We like to keep things straightforward at CJ and so it’s a first come, first served opportunity.  Simply pick up your voucher from below – you’ll have to hurry though, as they’re sure to be snapped up in a jiffy.

EEKC-ZHW8-R99T-A97Q-2R2

5VXF-FUUC-UYD4-TURC-QD8A

39NX-WRXA-P5GD-RG7J-8WS

5VXF-FUNX-9GCA-H8B8-W4QJ

5VXF-FULB-GAPS-9PPX-V42S

EEKC-ZGDX-667J-Y4PE-2ZJ

5VXF-FUEZ-3NDB-84CX-ZHEA

5VXF-FUCB-VR38-UW9J-UNNJ

5VXF-FU9N-GCY7-JU45-B2GS

5VXF-FU6V-BZ6F-YG9K-K2V2

These voucher codes, worth £75.00 each and expire on 24 November, 2011.

Just follow these three easy steps to redeem your voucher:

1. Click here to go to Google to create your AdWords account.

2. Log into your AdWords account and simply follow the step-by-step guide to create your first campaign.

3. Enter your unique voucher code after entering billing information.

To spread your reach further to high quality search engines and websites, go here to find out more about Search 123, the UK Pay Per Click search engine owned by CJ’s parent company ValueClick Inc.

It’s such a talked about topic because it’s important for both marketers and publishers.  Marketers are always looking to analyse their return on investment, learning more about their audience and consumer behaviour.  It’s also about bread and butter for publishers, making sure they get the credit and commission they’ve earned.

It’s a complex discussion with no one-stop solution.  I recently wrote a piece for A4U on this very topic – if you’re keen to learn more you can read it here: http://www.affiliates4u.com/news/2011/08/who-has-right-play-god-ongoing-attribution-debate/

“If you’re developing mobile websites, you need to bear in mind the diverse range of viewport dimensions you will be designing for.

Something that looks good on the iPhone may look different on an Android enabled phone and completely different again on a Nokia smartphone running Symbian S60.

At the very least, keep your mark-up W3C standards compliant and don’t rely on emulators – they are not yet sufficiently sophisticated to accurately reproduce what the phones are displaying. Ideally you’ll need to have the hardware to test out your cross-platform site.”

  

 

 

 

 

“To minimise the amount of spam you receive, you should place your email addresses online in a way that spambots usually can’t pick them up.

Write your email address as email [at] domainname.com rather than email@domainname.com.

If writing your email on a website using HTML, use Mailtool: to make it as user-friendly as possible for people who wish to contact you. Then obfuscate it with Hivelogic’s incredible Enkoder Form.”

Brezo Sanchez Ocaña

Account Manager 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“A large proportion of publishers I know own dozens if not hundreds of domain names. Later on they regret having purchased so many as they don’t have the time to build websites for them. Also they don’t attract the amount of type-in traffic they were hoping for. Therefore discipline yourself to only buy domain names that you must have.

Be cautious of hype-ridden new TLD releases. There is currently a lot of hysteria surrounding .co domain names, but they could end up being just as much of a damp squib as .tel, .ws and other TLDs. One thing many people are not aware of is a .co domain is seen by Google by default as a local Colombian domain; great if you want to rank well in Colombia, not so great if you wish to use it for a UK site.”

Dipa Shah

Account Director

 

 

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

“If you need some graphic work done and don’t have a designer, you could launch a competition at 99designs or DesignContest.

Once you publish your design brief, you will get submissions from multiple designers. You only have to pay for your favourite design, so it can save you a substantial amount of money.
”

Linda O’Connell
Head of Client Services

“Publishers should put care and attention into describing and categorising their websites and advertisers should ensure their program descriptions are detailed and up-to-date in the CJ interface. These vital things are often neglected. Sloppily written descriptions will reflect negatively on you.”

Ross Carder
Account Executive

“If you belong to any kind of link or banner exchange, let your credits pile up until the most lucrative period for your industry, when you generate the highest revenue per visitor to your website; in many cases this is Quarter 4 of each year. Then turn off the ‘pause’, flood the exchange with your ads and let the pounds roll in!”
Tom Leadbetter
Key Account Manager

October

“If you carry out any form of email marketing, it is imperative you split test subject lines. Some ESPs allow you to do this in an automated way. They will, of instance, send four different subject lines to 5% of your database each, and whichever has the highest open rate will then automatically be sent to the remaining 80% of subscribers.”

Brezo Sanchez Ocaña
Account Executive

“Alexa and Ranking.com give you an insight into how well hundreds of thousands of websites are doing, showing their traffic rank and other valuable data. They are far from perfect, but among the best free tools out there.

Both Alexa and Ranking.com are currently ranking Google, Facebook, Yahoo and YouTube as the four most visited web properties.”

Cath Caporn
Account Manager

“It surprises me how much effort advertisers and publishers put into getting high organic and natural rankings in Google, yet they ignore a golden opportunity to get premium placements in the SERPs and Google Maps via Google Local Listings. It’s simple to do… and free!

Find out more at Google’s Local Business Centre.”

Dipa Shah
Account Director

“If you use several social networking websites, it can be time consuming to update your status on each one separately. I recommend using Ping.fm or HelloTxt which allow you to update your status on lots of social networking sites from one place.

Tools like Twitterfeed can be set-up to update your Twitter automatically with the titles of your blog posts, and, if you want to get clever, you can syndicate the blog post titles to multiple sites by setting Twitterfeed to feed through to Ping.fm or HelloTxt.”

Brezo Sanchez Ocana

“If you are carrying our paid search advertising, give tier two search engines a try to extend your reach beyond the big boys. I’ll be the first to admit the majority of these send a high ratio of poor quality traffic, but if you manage to separate the wheat from the chaff, you could acquire profitable new visitors at low cost.

Among ones worth exploring are Valuelick’s Search123 which has developed a reputation for being a cost-effective complement to other leading PPC search engines.”

Cath Caporn

“It is expensive for publishers to attract high quality traffic to their websites. Instead of just funneling people straight through to an advertiser, you should encourage them to engage with your brand and capture their details. That means that you will have the opportunity to market to them again and again, and therefore increase your average revenue per site visitor.

Get your website visitors to join your mailing list, subscribe to your RSS feed, became a fan of your Facebook Group or follow you on Twitter.”

Dipa Shah

Account Director

“Quite a number of my PPC publishers have been Google Slapped of late as the big G begins to come down more heavily than ever on what they classify as affiliate squeeze pages or funnel sites.

It was quite a while back, in July 2006, that Google changed their policies to determine how ads are ranked in Adwords, if they are accepted at all, and you must remember to include lots of unique content on your websites, ensure they have at least several pages, incorporate links to a few other relevant sites, and try to offer something of value to visitors. This has the double benefit of benefiting you in the organic rankings too.”

Emmanuel Ogidan

Account Director

When asked to provide a topic this one seemed fairly self-evident. We were sure that not only would it be relevant but that we would have tons of information from which we could draw. It was also clear that based upon past and current performance Argos would be the ideal partner to talk through this. I’ve also done presentations with David Harding in the past so I was confident of it running smoothly.

The presentation followed a set framework. We would discuss current economic conditions and then we would correlate the Argos/CJ efforts back to suggestions on how to beat that particular trend through affiliate marketing. 

Market Conditions and discounting :First we discussed the market conditions in the UK and how they were impacting businesses. Without too much detail (as I am sure most of us understand the key trends), one key point of note is how discounting has impacted business and how Argos sought to turn that into their advantage. Primarily, many business have been discounting broadly where Argos have been discounting tactically to move inventory or take advantage of particular affiliate business models and their ability to target particular demographics.

Excellent Communication: This of course led us to the first of two key drivers of the programme: excellent communication. Argos has made it a point in the past eighteen months to engage at a greater level with the affiliate community and become ‘less anonymous’. Their broad-based communication strategy encompassed: one-to-many, one-to-one, and face-to-face channels.

• One-to-many: This was mainly newsletters and community advertising/marketing and was typically directed at increasing the reach of the programme and casting a broad net to pull in affiliates.
• One-to-one: For larger affiliates in targeted demographics/channel segments, the communication became much more focused and direct, specifically tailored to their needs and with an absolute focus on relevancy
• Face-to-face: Argos sought to engage with affiliates on a more intimate and direct level which CJ was happy to facilitate.

All of these communication initiatives drove greater affiliate loyalty and enabled Argos to target their needs in the appropriate direction. Optimisation was so successful that Argos currently has an active publisher base of over 42% and 37% of publishers actually drive sales. All of this on a programme with over 7,000 publishers.

Internal Management – The final pillar of success for Argos is the effective internal management of their programme. As we all know it is critical not to turn programmes on and off. ‘Blown budgets’ kill programmes. It negates hard affiliate work and drives down volumes even when the programme comes back up. By selling the affiliate marketing programme internally and treating it as an effective point of sale, Argos has been able to drive volumes forward without having to put on the breaks. The keys to winning the ‘internal sales pitch’ for the Argos affiliate team were:

• Working with a network which provides ample metrics to support any incrementality scrutiny
• Effectively using the affiliate channel to move inventory on a tactical basis.

Overall: Whilst affiliate marketing can’t offer a magic tonic for what ails many businesses out in the marketplace it, is clear from looking out there in the community that many affiliate programmes can underperform in an underperforming market. Times of distress are the exact times that you need to increase your reach and consider new business models – not close down avenues for growth. Affiliates are customers and need to be sold to, not just for their own selves but also so that they can share their learnings with their users. Finally, merchants must learn how to sell the affiliate programme internally – the budget should be forth coming, the margins correct and the ROI communicated outwards and upwards to key stakeholders. That way growth does not become an issue.

In summary, it really comes down to communication, incrementality, margins, budgets and reach. Getting all these facets in harmony will ensure that an affiliate programme can sell to the three target audiences that count – the affiliates, the customers and the internal organisation.