When I first started in affiliate marketing I don’t think there was a single affiliate blog that existed. I now find myself reading them on a daily basis, with many of them on my RSS reader and rasasa (a great tool if you haven’t yet tried it) feeds. More importantly, I don’t think I’m the only person - some of these blogs are heavily read by network, agency staff and other affiliates.

Real opinion
The key advantage of some of these blogs is the quality I find in the opinion of the bloggers. It’s sometimes hard to filter the ‘mood’ from a forum thread, but with a blog it’s easier - I find Lee and Paul both offer honest and forthright feedback, and this kind of information is invaluable to affiliate managers. These bloggers hold the respect of many other affiliates, and the support or (occasional) criticism in the comments section is sometimes just as interesting as the content itself. Perhaps the challenge going forwards for these blogs will be to hold the respect of both merchants and affiliates - it can be unpleasant reading negative feedback (particularly if it’s about a program you or your agency manages!), and I think the blogs that will gain the greatest share of readership are those that manage to be honest yet constructive.

Inspiration
Not only do affiliate blogs give praise and criticism to the managers of their affiliate programs, but they often provide a great source of both inspiration and help to other affiliates. Good affiliates are at the heart of affiliate marketing, so it’s clearly in all our interests to have good, well educated affiliates. For this particular purpose I find Kirsty’s blog an excellent example, and it’s a great shame that she’s leaving the country. Again, the forum is a fantastic place for affiliates to learn and ask questions, but sometimes a friendly face who’s willing to offer in-depth feedback to new affiliates is just what they need to get started. To know that the advice is coming from an experienced affiliate with a very healthy affiliate business is also a great confidence boost and a motivational push at the same time! I do hope that the ‘Ask Kirsty’ section continues.

Industry Insights
And if merchant feedback + affiliate help weren’t enough, there are some great affiliates out there that show a real knowledge of the industry and where it’s going. I find Fraser’s blog provides a great insight of what’s happening in affiliate marketing and it pleases to me see an affiliate going to the extent of using podcasts. Overall I think these blogs are becoming a mainstream form of communication for the industry and that all affiliates and affiliate managers alike can benefit from reading them. There are many many other good affiliate blogs that I haven’t mentioned in this post that I read often, and I hope to continue reading them too.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that traffic to non retail affiliate programs has now started its annual nosedive. By this time next week this traffic will be almost hit zero.

Even those promoting retail programmes will find somepoint next week their traffic is effectively switched off as the last delivery date is reached. So with a week to spare to Christmas, and most of our friends, family etc still at work, what can affiliates do to ensure their businesses avoid having a wasted week or 2?

Late Last Delivery

Clever affiliates (or maybe just those who don’t enjoy eating mince pies while visiting extended family!) will be looking very carefully at the dates over the next few weeks to make sure they’re promoting something useful every day.

A select few merchants will run very late delivery dates, and while they may not be your favoured merchant, you can provide a service to your website users if you link to these in the days when your regular programs cannot guarantee Christmas delivery. Clever use of PPC to target customers hunting this service could really prove to be a winner.

Check Network Lists for those delivering late, and be sure to read the newsletters for opportunities.

Special last minute products

Despite late last delivery dates, most regular products will have had even the latest of their merchants reaching last delivery by about Wednesday – a good week short of Christmas. It’s crucial to keep an eye on stock levels if you’re promoting actual products, many things will fall out of stock, especially popular Christmas items like gadgets.

There’ll still be some products though, that’ll see a massive spike in those last few days – think special delivery services like DHL, florists etc. In the very last minute, online services might become more popular as people are off work.

Early January Sales

Many of us get fed up of eating turkey quite quickly, and January sales are moving further and further back to make use of this.

Look out for the merchants starting their January sales in December. Many will start on Boxing Day. Maplin have their January sale start on Christmas day itself as do some other merchants. This is a massive opportunity to capitalise on the bored Christmas-day shopper looking to buy the presents they didn’t get and spend that Christmas gift money.

Don’t forget the armada of unwanted Christmas gifts hitting Ebay starting approximately 9am on the 25th! This is one affiliate program that’s bound to be buoyant.
So, enjoy your Christmas, and may your profits be merry!

Fraser has just blogged on receiving samples from Hotel Chocolat. I have to say, we received them too, and we’re just an agency. It’s a really nice touch and the chocolates are great.

It may just seem like another way to inflate your affiliate costs, but there are real reasons why I think this kind of thing is a great idea

Appreciation

It’s easy to take the loyalty of your affiliates for granted. There’s probably been a time when an affiliate has promoted an offer , launched a PPC campaign, or changed creatives for you at virtually no notice. A quick thank you is obviously important – but remembering them at Christmas will help reinforce to them that you really do appreciate their work.

PR

While the simple fact that your generosity may be published shouldn’t ever be a reason in itself to send gifts to affiliates, it’s hard to ignore the fact that most affiliates have blogs and therefore, just like this current Hotel Chocolat gift – your free gift is likely to put you in good standing in the affiliate community. Who knows, you may get affiliates promote your program just in the hope of the freebies.

Product Branding

If you can offer a Christmas gift to your affiliates from the range that you actually sell, then this is even better. It’s hard to ignore that the quality of these Hotel Chocolat samples is very good indeed, and we’ve all been enjoying them in the office over the last few days. Affiliates who have knowledge of your products not only are more likely to want to promote your program, but they’ll also really eulogise your products too.

What kind of gifts have you sent and received in the past? Has this had an impact?

One of the key challenges to running affiliate programs for clients is ensuring the channel not only provides substantial cost-effective sales, but that these are Incremental and compliment the overall online strategy.

Many affiliate programs do successfully reach a situation where all the sales are incremental and at a cost, but this isn’t by default – but hard work by both us and the affiliates involved.

With the perceived potential for aggressive affiliates to steal brand traffic, incentive sites to provide only customers ‘who would buy from us anyway’ and PPC campaigns to clash, it isn’t unreasonable for merchants to worry about this.

Yet despite these issues, I still believe the vast majority of affiliate sales are incremental. The following reasons highlight the incremental nature of the channel.

Specialist Sites

A key argument in favour of affiliates providing incremental sales tends to be the uniqueness of many sites. Hobby sites, community sites and many other specialist topic sites cover areas where traditional search or display campaigns cannot. Here, any sale gained is not only incremental (i.e. not taken the sale away from another channel) but also likely to be a good value customer, since the customer has a genuine interest in the type of products the retailer sales.

Affiliate Creativity

Without merchant sized profit margins to fall back on, affiliates are often forced to work on small margins and be very creative with how they promote their campaigns. Take the recent Iphone example in this weeks Internet Advertising supplement to the Guardian; an affiliate (not Apple themselves) successfully caught on the likelihood of people searching for terms specially related to the $200 price drop on Iphone’s and was able to exploit this with an ad targeted at users searching these terms.

Nokia also used the same iphone price drop to target a PPC ad at too, and so in this situation, the fast and creative thinking of the affiliate enabled apple to gain leads and probably sales they otherwise might have lost – to a competitor.

Indeed many affiliate sites are so unique at the time of being created they could almost be considered a new channel in themselves.

Affiliate Flexibility

Let’s face it, as well as being creative affiliates are often more flexible than your typical agency or affiliate manager. A well managed portfolio of affiliates will work 24/7 to provide sales for a merchant, and instead of taking a trip abroad over the bank holidays, many affiliates are working hard to maximise the sales potential of such periods.

Let’s imagine a huge news story broke at 10pm on a Saturday night causing a huge temporary awareness spike for a certain product/service, would the merchant be able to effectively launch a PPC campaign to capitalise on this in time? Most dedicated employees are out enjoying themselves at this time of night, and resting on a Sunday, but when you have a huge affiliate sales force, there’s an affiliate somewhere that’s going to be able to respond instantly, and effectively. Again, these sales are incremental, and, in a competitive market – vital.

Other changes

While many new and innovative affiliate campaigns are truly incremental and value sales for merchants, old methods of dubious value are increasingly being closed out. Google has taken care of the PPC arbitrage guys, and affiliate sites adding little value don’t tend to get as much traffic.

I’ve always been a great believer in the affiliate channel and its importance in a multi-channel marketing campaign. I also have a great deal of faith in affiliates to reach out to areas many merchants cannot. Whether it’s providing incentives, comparisons, exploiting temporary interest spikes or merely just scraping the extreme ends of the search ‘long tail’ there are many additional, incremental sales to be gained from affiliates, and for that reason amongst many, the channel deserves a serious place in the online marketing mix.

Welcome to the Brilliant Affiliates Blog

Hi! and thanks for visiting the brilliant affiliates site and blog.

The purpose of this blog is for members of the Brilliant affiliate team to publish, discuss and comment on interesting topics around affiliate marketing and the wider world of online marketing.

We promise our approach will be fresh, honest and forward thinking, feel free to give us your comments and questions on all things digital and we’ll do our best to provide you with some interesting content!

Happy blogging!

Martin Corr
Head of Affiliates