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.