Playing catch up, I didn’t actually mention it here since, but we recently scooped the “best use of Affiliate Marketing” Award (well, OK, Affiliate Future technically won :P) at the IMA Awards at the end of last month.

You can read about that over here.

“I’m thinking of launching an affiliate programme…”

usually followed by one or more questions regarding their website, choosing a network and finding affiliates. Since most of the affiliate related blogs tend to only dip into this area, I thought I’d have a go at putting together a series of posts to help SME’s looking to get into Affiliate Marketing.

This first post will cover what affiliates expect of your website. It’s their traffic that they are going to share with you, making it your responsibility to give that traffic the best opportunity to convert that you can. It is surprising the number of merchants who launch on a network with the most basic steps seemingly overlooked in the rush to launch the programme.

So here are the basics, the items to tick off your list before looking to start your affiliate programme. Not all of them are easy, but you only get one chance to make a first impression, so it’s important to get it right.

1) Functionality - make sure your site works. Simple, huh? Make sure every link works, that your basket software isn’t buggy, your e-commerce system can support third party tracking,  your server capacity can handle an increase in traffic and your site structure is likely to be stable for a while to come.

2) Leakage - the possibility of traffic on your site going elsewhere or converting via another un-tracked channel. Phone numbers splashed across your site aren’t going to do you any favours with affiliates. While some may claim it’s a fractional percentage of visitors who go on to convert this way, unless you have undeniable tracking for this affiliates aren’t going to like it. Having links to other sites that possibly create a side revenue for you is also going to bring affiliates wrath. It’s simple enough to devise ways to hide these leaks from affiliate traffic.

Links: Local cookies, phone numbers, url tags

3) Conversion - obviously it’s in your own best interest to ensure you maximise your conversions. Affiliates will and do test out your site before considering promoting you. Spend some time looking at any barriers to conversions (having to register before buying is a favourite), even use a third party (paid or unpaid) to give you an opinion. Better to be pre-emptive than read about it on the forum!

Links: 108 conversion rate tips, understanding your visitors

4) Buy-In - This part isn’t strictly website related, but is an important fundamental before even considering affiliate marketing. You have to make sure everyone involved is committed to the concept, be it your board, your boss or very importantly your coders :). Dabbling at affiliate marketing isn’t likely to work, it needs to be a 100% commitment.

Links: Securing buy-in

The above are what I’d consider to be the basics on a fairly generic level. Different areas will have different priorities, but the basics should be similar.

In later posts I’ll discuss setting your commission levels, choosing your network and deciding on in-house or external management amongst many other topics! In true “Ask Kirsty” stylee, feel free to email in any questions! chris.c [at] sunshine.co.uk

We’re entering the e-consultancy Innovation Awards, specifically “Innovation in Affiliate Marketing”. We’ll be using sunPress as our entry. Fair enough, it’s right on the cutting edge of innovation in my humble opinion!

There is also a category for “Most Innovative Person in Digital Marketing“, which anyone can nominate you for at no cost. I’d like you to consider filling out the form and voting for me!

Why? Well Andy at 10yetis reckons it’s a good idea and since we’re media whores I’m happy to go along with it! It would also, he tells me, be good for raising the profile of Affiliate Marketing if I were shortlisted, or God forbid, actually win. But mostly because we’re media whores.

Fill out the form here - Vote for me!

then email it to - awards@e-consultancy.com

Normal non-egotistical service will be resumed shortly.

They are limiting this to the first 888 claims, as it’s their 8th birthday. Get in quickly!

On the 19th August I emailed Claire Taylor (née Hoyland) and confirmed we wanted to exhibit. 12 emails later that same day, asking Claire many many questions, we were booked in. Never having doing anything vaguely like this in my life I didn’t know where to turn! At this point I’d like to say how much of a star Claire was from that day until the actual exhibition, we really couldn’t have done any of this without her help.

So stand #5 was booked, as a shell scheme. Job’s a good’un I figured. Hmm. Next came the graphics. Michelle at Caboodle was once again patient as a saint, as I dithered as to what it should actually have and she once again pointed me in the right direction. A few days before the deadline we sent off the graphics to Billy at Event Exhibitions who would be creating the stand boards. Here’s the design -

Obviously it had our Top Secret Project details on the two left hand panels, so we had to come up with something to cover it until after our launch. Between Michelle and Billy they worked it out using several metres of velcro and this specially designed PVC cover -

A couple of weeks before the event we contacted Camden Exhibition Services who sorted us out with a couple of nice tables and bar stools. Even this took a few hours to decide! I’ll also add that, when one is married to someone who works in the conference industry and they suggest some kind of unit or cupboard to store all the paraphernalia at the stand, you should really listen!

Here’s a few pics of our stand in the flesh -

On the set-up day we turned up to find the electricians had run our electrical connection right down the middle of our stand, between boards 3 and 4! Claire to the rescue again, she got them to stick it in the corner, out of sight.

After all that time, effort and money, our stand was dismantled and the boards chucked away before the last session of the expo had finished! I’d still happily recommend it to any merchants considering exhibiting in 2009, or even in Amsterdam. 

promotions.co.uk offers affiliates the opportunity to use a white label loaded with all the discount codes out there and a central repository of these codes for merchants and networks. Simply put it’s a free aggregator of discount codes! White label isn’t going to be the only delivery method, but you’ll have to find out more from Doug himself.

Anyway, this isn’t simply a blag for Doug’s new site. If you ever want a lesson in launching a site and building links, you would do well to follow this man around the internet.

Doug is also appearing at the a4uexpo this week, in the not-to-be-missed Super Affiliates session on Day 2. Keep a count on how many times he mentions promotions.co.uk during the session.

The good lady wife, Lorna, will be taking in her first affiliate event at this year’s expo. We fly out of Glasgow on Monday to arrive at London City at 2pm. Check into Novotel sometime after, then get to Excel to see our stand around 4.30pm. I’m also hoping to scope out the room where we’re doing our presentation to get a mental image and scare myself a bit, no doubt.

After a bite to eat at the hotel, Alan and I intend do a final dry run of our presentation in one of our hotel rooms to the rest of the sunshine peeps. Then it’s off to the pre-event party, sponsored by AffiliateFuture, in the Novotel which is handy. Being sensible, I should be tucked up in bed by midnight in preparation for the big day ahead. If you see me in the hotel bar after 4am, give me a serious talking to!

I do actually hope to catch a few of the other not-as-interesting-as-our-session conference sessions. On Day 1 I’ve picked the following -

WordPress SEO & Optimisation Strategies 
by Joost De Valk
10 Ways to Get the Most Out of your Paid Search Affiliates 
by Duncan Jennings
Extreme SEO Strategies for Affiliates 
by various inc Dave Naylor

I’d also like to catch the Affiliate State of the Nation session hosted by Fraser, but Lorna is flying home Tuesday evening, so I may have to slip away early. In the evening it’s the Thames Cruise sponsored by Platform-A. I’ve been paying AOL around £30 a month for a few years now, so I’m aiming to get some of my investment back at the bar Then it’s back to the Novotel for a few late night cocktails, all welcome!

Day 2 -

Dare to Be Different - Affiliate Programme Brainstorming
by Naomi Brown
How to Manage a Successful Affiliate Programme : Strategies from Award Winning Affiliate Managers
by Zak Edwards and Graham Keen (still waiting on my late call up )
Technical Innovation in the Travel Sector
by various including Pete Norwood
Meet The Super Affiliates
by Kieron Donoghue, Doug Scott and Jamie Harwood

Not sure I’ll manage all of them but will give it a good go! Then it’s off to the Travel Vertical Reception before crossing over to the Fox for a few more sociable beers. If you don’t see me at the bar of the Novotel at 4am give me a good talking to!

If you’d like to hook up for a chat, drop by our stand and say hello. If you want to pre-book a certain time, the boys at Existem have been working hard on the “Connect” system to allow you to book appointments with us. No-one has used it for us yet, feel free to be the first!

Fly home Thursday afternoon, with a monster hangover and a hatful of business cards. More importantly I’m sure,  some great memories and having met loads of old friends and even more new ones!

The event is being held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London on the 30th October. The judging panel includes a lot of top names from the marketing industry including APA’s Jess Luthi. 

I’d better go get my kilt dry-cleaned!

Then we badgered Matt into letting us launch our Top Secret Project as one of the sessions. We had to convince Matt it wasn’t just going to be a self-advertising puff piece, that we actually had something valuable to show the conference attendees. I’m pleased to say he obviously thought we had something interesting, as there we are, Platinum Room 4, Day 1 at 2pm.

Never mind an unreasonable aversion to public speaking (I assume I won’t like it as I can’t ever remember having cause to do it before), our Top Secret Project has grown several limbs since we first started it. I’d like to tell you it’s 90% finished at this point, but it seems to be always 90% finished at any given point. Whenever we settle on something, another opportunity to improve/radically alter something else pops up and off we go again. While I’m sure we’ll have some kind of finished product at the Expo, it’s now slightly terrifying that it might not go down well with our audience. Call it paranoia, but suddenly the doubts are creeping in!

On top of all this is the ever increasing number of deadlines involved in being an exhibitor and speaker. Today I spent most of the afternoon going over drafts for our stand design. “Put a big logo in the middle” was my KISS approach. Apparently simple isn’t always best, our designer reassures me. At some point next week we’re to hand in a first draft of our “launch” presentation. The week after, our final draft. At this point I have zero words and can barely open Power Point.

We’ve also to decide what furniture / fittings to have on our stand. Daily emails from various suppliers offering desks, laptops, plasma TV’s and much more only serve to confuse this Expo virgin. If you come by our stand and we don’t even have a chair, my apologies!

Like Fraser, this year really is my first Expo, having similarly missed last year’s event due to the birth of daughter #2, Lilly. I’m mostly looking forward to it, but it feels like I’ve got an exam half way through, so I may look much happier come 3pm on Day 1.

Our hotel was actually in Indiana, with Valhalla an hour and 20 minutes bus ride each way, so other than having a lie in on Sunday, we were up at 5am most days and returned to our hotel around 9pm most nights. Add walking several miles a day in 86 degree heat it’s the most tiring holiday I’ve ever had!

The highlight for me was the Saturday afternoon session, where Europe gained some momentum and 3 of the games finished on the 18th. I was standing about 10 yards away from the pin and the atmosphere was electric.

Now I love the USA. We holiday there every year and it’s people generally couldn’t be any nicer. But Oh My God if you’re ever supporting the away team prepare yourself. “Partisan” doesn’t begin to describe the crowd, there were a few times where you would start to feel very uncomfortable cheering on Europe within the mob. Despite golf etiquette being a fundamental part of appreciating the game, it didn’t stop the locals cheering every time something went wrong for one of the “Euros” as they deemed to call us.

Another highlight was Sunday on the 1st tee. A hundred or so “Euro” fans had squeezed into one of the stands beside the tee and gave the home support a lesson in singing. The standard response to any attempt by us aliens to get chanting was to be drowned out by “USA, USA, USA” ad nauseum. Better prepared by this time, the home fans were treated to a handful of songs from the Europeans in the stand. You’ll find a good description of the events here.

Also worth sharing, course radios were sold with 2 channels, one which gave the audio to the giant screens piping NBC and the other was BBC’s own Five Live coverage, which seemed very popular even with the home support. This could also have been something to do with the fact that NBC seemed to break for adverts every 4 minutes.

I’m greatly looking forward to Wales in 2010, if only for the opportunity to be as smug to the visiting fans when Europe reclaim the cup!

Top Quotes heard around the course from our American cousins -

“F**king Spaniard, get back to Britain”

“Communists!”