Here are February’s tips of the month:

“Don’t set up a UK voucher code site! I know at least 15 publishers who are creating new voucher code sites as we speak and came across three more at the affiliate gathering in Canary Wharf, London last week.

I always say to publishers ‘think niche’. And if you must set-up a voucher code site, perhaps consider targeting some continental European markets rather than the saturated UK; countries like Germany have a dearth of voucher code sites.”

Florian Gramshammer

Senior Sales Manager

“In any PPC campaign, where possible, always split test your ads: create two ads in each ad group and let them run for a while. When it is apparent that one is outperforming the other, replace the less good one with a new one and start again. Over time you will gradually improve the performance of your campaign and save money!

If you want help with deciding when two ads have been running long enough to say confidently that one is performing better than the other, try using Brian Teasley’s free tool at SplitTester.com.”

James Lamb

Business Intelligence Engineer

“There are times when you’re trying to find out if there’s an affiliate or network link behind a text link or banner, but it’s masked or the URL changes too quickly for you to see the redirect URLs!

A tool called ‘Charles’ allows you to see all the URLs once you click on a text link or banner. You can download it here (I’ve been using it as a free trial for quite a while and it has not expired).”

Jason Baker

Head of Agency Account Management and Publisher Development

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 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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