Tales from a 4 X 4: Merchants and Affiliates

Posted by Michael Briggs on November 23, 2007

Everyday there’s a narrow window of opportunity to free think before the first cup of coffee of the day.

I get up pretty early to make the commute to Glasgow and as I drive a 4 X 4 sometimes this takes a while, there not know for being fast.

I’ve started to notice that I have my best idea’s of the day in this magical coffee free hour or so the commute takes and I’ve also decided that when I get into the office I’ll take that train of thought and try to brain dump it onto my Equator blog. So here goes with my first tale from a 4 x 4, please excuse the grammar, spelling and some of the crazy thoughts, it is pre 8am and I still haven’t had that first cup of coffee.

Merchants and Affiliates 

While on the road today it came over me that Merchants and Affiliates don’t have the necessary feed back loops in place to make the most of this channel and the relationship companies have with their affiliates.

Firstly let’s look at both groups; I have been both at one time or another so I’ll talk slightly from experience.

The Merchant

The merchant tends to pick up on affiliate marketing while at a marketing or trade seminar and think to themselves “Why aren’t we doing that” and then they run off to a network pay the joining fee, make some banners and sit back thinking DONE!

Then, and it’s a big then, the ppc based affiliates are brand bidding and seo affiliate are buying up misspell domains and domains the merchant should own but was probably to busy glowing in there own success to think it was important. 

Here it comes the relationship killer, updated terms and conditions, no ppc bidding, no domain buying, no use of brand in URL structures, the relationship is dead, the affiliate hit the A4U forums and your program dies a whimpering death. The merchant then tells everyone in the company and any one that will listen that affiliates are just robbing bas*ards and it’s not successful.

The Affiliate 

These guys are at the forefront of internet marketing everyday, they don’t go to SES conferences to learn something new they go to meet their affiliate buddies and get drunk, they already know what works. Ever think an affiliate would buy advertising space of my space, I think not.

Most affiliates work on a bang and bust theory, when something works and they find a winning strategy, get the maximum out of it, when it’s slows down, drop that idea and move on.

So how can the two work together and work together well.

Firstly merchants have to see affiliate marketing as an opportunity to get the best online marketing people to work for them and then only pay them when they sell something. Think what would be if you could employ all your staff this way, your company would grow faster than any of your competition and probably faster than GE or Ford did in there heyday.

Help the PPC guys.

OK, they all know the brand bidding rules but these guys will probably uncover a niche market for your service or product that any marketing grad you ever hire couldn’t think of in a million years. As I said early this guys are at the forefront of anything that involves pay per click marketing, they think about it in their sleep - so engage them, work with them.

Try these:

• Do they require specific landing pages for campaign?
• Is there copy better, do they want their own copy on a landing page?
• Do they have suggestions to improve conversion?
• Do they have any long tail key terms that your company could expand on?

Helping the affiliate to get better at what he does can only be good for your business, many  merchants will think “I’m using my resources to help this guy make money with our product” YES you are, but engage the affiliates and constantly improve the relationship and make them a part of the team and the long term rewards will always outweigh the spend and time on resources.

Help the SEO guys. 

A different kettle of fish, you’ll never know whether you like what these guys are doing until they’ve already done it. The best method for helping the SEO guys is to give them the tools they need.

• Data feeds
• RSS feeds
• Widgets
• White label booking engines
• White label websites (even better)

These guys are always looking for content of any kind, give it to them, work out the duplicate content issues before hand and let them go.

There also probably your best way into the social media playground, ask them what tools they need and again, make them available.

Help the cash back and voucher guys.

These guys are a hybrid of the other two, they know abit about ppc and enough about SEO to get their site ranking, they don’t need much but constantly involving them in your marketing can have a great impact on your sales and traffic to your site.

• Have affiliate only voucher codes
• Make them co branded banners and buttons
• Test products on there sites
• Test promotions with them
• Use them as you’re A/B testing ground

Just remember that feedback is the key to making this channel work, give the affiliates your information in return for there feedback, the feedback will allow you make changes that will help your affiliate program flourish. It will also help you to improve your own internal ppc and seo campaigns.

And now I’m off for coffee……………………… 

Brand Protection: Social Media and Search

Posted by Michael Briggs on November 9, 2007

Over the past while many SEO and Online Marketing agencies have started to offer Social Media marketing as part of the the marketing mix, on further inspectation they all seem to be promoting the same product, Brand Protection.

So what is Brand Protection?

We all know that there are 10 natural listings on the first page of a search engine and we all know that a brand usually ranks in postion 1 and 2 for the branded terms, what about the other 8 positions?

For some brands particuliarly in the travel industry bad pr is always floating around on trip advisor and other review sites and for some brands this bad pr occupies some of the position of the first page of the search results.

In terms of a brand trying to deliver a message to new and existing visitors it must be able to control the messaging that is displayed on the search engines, a brand can’t say how good it is, people don’t believe self promotion. What new visitors are looking for is reveiws and testimonies meaning that the brand must control the messaging on postions 1 throught to 10.

How can this be done?

By using social media networks such as Wordpress, Xanga, Facebook, Bebo and Myspace to name a few, brands can interact and engage in conversion with customers through these channels. By promoting these channels in an effective way via customer feedback and special offers the brand pages on these social networks will start to rank in the natural listings with in the search engines and start to rank above the review sites and bad PR.

Does it work?

On many occassions we’ve been contacted by clients asking for this service although we never really called it brand protection and in many cases we succesfully promoted social media sites to out rank negative PR.