The Hitflip UK Blog

We’ve just sent the following newsletter out to our affiliates:

Great news for Affiliates this month, as Hitflip has announced a new 18+ verification feature for members. Conversion rates should increase dramatically as Hitflip becomes the only website where Hardcore Porn can be swapped. It’s not just porn, however, 18+ Action and Horror films are also now available on Hitflip. The new feature should lead to more people signing up, and also more flip sales, so you should see a great increase in earnings.

To help you promote the new feature, we have created a new erotic landing page. You will find the link in the text links section on CJ. There are also a number of other new landing pages, just some include: TV Series DVDs, Bollywood films, Hiphop music and Wii games. Due to Google’s restrictions, the erotic landing page cannot be used in Adwords, but you can link to it from your own site to see an increase in conversions.

You can find your specific links to the new landing pages in the newsletter or on CJ.

Well at least the delegates did Now don’t get me wrong: They sucked the Vodka out of the ice(sculpture) at what was to become a great after show party for a fantastic event.

Here are the shots of the shots:

What a fantastic expo. Over 40 sessions with experts from all areas of the industry and over 800 delegates to meet.

Time for shoutouts to some great people we met while we were in London:
Marcus Tandler (who also published a picture of Andre and myself eating fish&chips) , Christoph Cemper, Joost de Valk, Stefan Juhl, Joanna Ellis at Superbreak, Neil Sutton at Essential Travel, Jonathan Lender at L2multimedia, Rebekka Barnhusen and Peter Potthast at nonstopconsulting, Dixon Jones, Julie Hegarty, Mark Russel and Peter Wilson at buy.at

Matthew and his team (Greetings to Claire at this point) did a great job and we are definetly looking forward to the a4uexpo 2008 which will be happening on 14th+15th October (my birthday). So note down my birthday and the a4uexpo for 2008 in your calendars

Loads of others have already published their thoughts on the expo - be sure to check them out!

You may remember back in July Adam wrote about his deal with Chris Bishop from Hotel Chocolat to swap a Lamborghini and Ferrari experience he won at CJU in London for enough chocolate to make everyone here in the Hitflip office smile. Well Chris certainly kept his side of the deal as we’ve been munching through tons of delicious chocolate over the past couple of weeks.

Here are some photos capturing some of the excitement in the office as the chocolates arrived:

As you can see below, Chris sent a great selection of chocolates, and everyone on the Hitflip team would like to say a massive thanks to him.

Chris is nominated for Publisher’s Manager of 2007 at this years a4uAwards, and everyone at Hitflip will be keeping their fingers crossed for him this Thursday evening as the results are announced.

The TU Munich and CJ/Valueclick have conducted a survey together on the subject of Affiliate Marketing. Everyone who took part received the findings in presentation form a few days ago. I’m going to take the liberty of making some comments on a few areas that struck me while browsing through the presentation. But first it needs to be said: Good Survey! It’s great that someone has again done a fresh and well-conducted study on the topic! Now to a few comments.

• At the outset, one must assume a bias, as some of the participants (as I was) were recruited from the CJ environment. It’s clear that Affiliate Marketing will be seen as more important to these participants compared to the general population

• Often the findings seem quite obvious: Banner ads provide more traffic, and Affiliate Marketing more sales :). Banner ads are created mainly for Brand-building, and Affiliate Marketing mainly to bring more Leads/Sales. But it also has a lot to do with the commission model of the Affiliate programme. A solely CPC programme would send traffic figures soaring, but not so much the sales and leads.

• The length of service and budget for Affiliate Marketing have a strong correlation – in the active areas obviously. It’s impossible to create an active Affiliate base with thousands of Affiliates overnight. That goes for Merchants as well as Affiliate networks (see the negative example of Adcatch in Germany, who closed their Affiliate network in April). And whoever uses Affiliate Marketing in the long term sees that it is worth it, and then invests more, for example in the form of continually rising commissions (like we do ;-))

• I find the results of the criteria for the choice of service operators/ affiliate programme networks very good: stability of the system in first place! Then quality of service, and tools for measuring performance. Directly after this is the most important point for me: Size of the network – from my perspective especially relating to the number of affiliates.

• Highly amusing: 17.4% believe “Affiliate Marketing is just hype, and will lose its meaning”. Hilarious! A hype lasting 10 years?

• Very nice confirmation for our blog post New Affiliate Marketing-related Web 2.0 Business model– 70% of those questioned have the same opinion.

• Fascinating: 24.4% plan to build their own affiliate network – aha! Here I’m curious, did they perhaps mean a (network-independent) Standalone Affiliate Programme?

• Affiliate Marketing is used mainly by small and medium-sized firms. - I didn’t know that, but interesting!

So, in any case, the study is well worth reading!

Affiliateblog.co.uk is one of the best sites for UK affiliates and merchants (if not THE best ). We at Hitflip have it on our RSS reader and if you are part of the industry be sure to keep a track of the site.

As Fraser is a fellow scotsman it was a pleasure for me to send him a Hitflip T-Shirt and some sweets to make his day.

Not only has he added a Thank-You to his blog but he has also posted a Thank-You-Video:

Great sport Fraser - We love it!

Normally I start listening to “Michael Gray’s” song “I can’t wait for the weekend to begin” at this time on a Friday afternoon but today I have good news for you:

We have created new landing pages for books, music cds and audiobooks.
Good for you: You don’t even need to change your CJ links in order to target our new landing pages - we have made change easier than baking a cake -> all is done!

So all you need to do is lean back and wait for the weekend to begin…. Lucky you

Books Landing Page

Music CD Landing Page

Audiobooks Landing Page

DVD Landing Page

Video Games Landing Page

Sometimes when thinking back on the CJU EU it becomes quite clear to me: There comes a point in Affiliate Marketing where we need a higher level of detail in the terminology of various concepts. If it is about Affiliate Marketing, there are three possibilities to entitle the interacting parties (We’ll leave out networks here).

1. Affiliate/Merchant
2. Publisher/Advertiser
3. Affiliate Programme User / Partner

The combinations are listed in the sequence according to their popularity. I’m a big fan of the terms Affiliate and Merchant and on my trip to England I got new arguments for it!

For a UK user an Affiliate is not called a Publisher. (This is also the case when CJ internally uses this term for Affiliates). There are many clearly different types of Affiliates and only one of these are Publishers. That one is also only a subset of others. So below are the different types of Affiliates which I believe exist at the moment.

What types of Affiliates are there?

1. Publisher:

Affiliates which have one or more websites or projects and who include advertising materials of Merchants there. Most Affiliates operate SEO-intensively.

2. PPC Arbitrage Affiliates:

Affiliates which post ads via AdWords (and other keyword-buying sites) and channel traffic directly or over the landing-page of a merchant. It is not such a big topic in Germany but is a bigger deal in the UK. At Hitflip we have an extra keyword policy for these kinds of Affiliates.

3. Email Affiliates:

Affiliates who use the advertising material of an affiliate programme exclusively by email. You can often find many large, serious and relevant partners here that you would quite like to have.

4. Web 2.0 Affiliates/Affiliate 2.0

This is a new kind of Affiliate which in my opinion will become the most important. Andre gave a lecture on the topic at this years CJU. We have also given a more detailed report on this in our Affiliate Marketing Series here on the blog.

5. Spyware/Malware/Adware-Affiliates

The unethical kind of affiliate approach from which you should distance yourself.

6. Offline Affiliates

Via voucher codes on flyer, for example.

More roles are simultaneously possible.

Affiliates can of course be involved in other roles other than the ones mentioned above but nevertheless one must be able to differentiate between them. In the UK it goes without exception that most Affiliates use PPC. And those are not just individuals but separate companies with up to 50 employees. The above mentioned four kinds of Affiliate are in my opinion perfectly non-overlapping. They clearly apply to many diverse authorities.

Feedback/Additions:

We appreciate suggestions and feedback so that we can establish a clear concept. Are there other groups/kinds of affiliates?

Some of these dates are interesting for cross-border-affiliate-managers in Germany and some for UK travellers/residents:

September
07.09. Affilinet Pokertournament (Cologne)
25.09. - 26.09. OMD (Duesseldorf)
28.09. Affiliate Summit (London)

October
25.10. - 26.10. A4uexpo (London)

Either Andre or myself (or even both) will be attending these events. As I am moving to Cologne in September so that I can synchronize my heartbeat with Hitflip’s heartbeat I might miss some of the September get2gethers.

Any of you guys around? Leave a comment

Quite a few days have gone by since we begun the first three parts of this series ‘Affiliate Marketing 2.0′. To remind you, here are the links to the first three parts:

1. What has been said on the subject so far and what is Web 2.0?
2. The new work with content
3. Working with social networks

Back to the last topic - since we wrote Working with Social Networks there have been some interesting posts/news. If you want to build your own small social network you can find 9 tips with Techcrunch here. Also a reminder of why not to spam on MySpace like this guy.

New Affiliate Marketing-related Web 2.0 Business model:

In the small world of Web 2.0, new business models are created which do not use the words Affiliate Marketing but on closer inspection are actually very similar. The following are a couple of representative examples.

Zlio

Zlio is a collection of many different smaller online-shops and traders. They are then taken apart into product layers and then new shops can be put together with the single products of the various traders. For example there would be a shop with blue products and in there you would find blue jam from trader A, a blue football from trader B and a blue computer keyboard from trader C. These shops run under the nickname MeShops (a little like the Amazon aStores but with different traders.) So if you put together a MeShop with blue products and get traffic there, the traders will be paid via Zlio - similar to a normal PPS (pay per sale) payment.

Squidoo

With Squidoo you can manually put together an ad for a specific product. For example if you want to write an article for your blog about a mobile phone, you can put together an advertisement for it into a widget on your blog. If someone buys the product through the widget then you earn with it - like an ‘Affiliate Widget’.

Chitika

Chitika is a bit like AdSense, purely with products.: context-sensitive product recommendations. The so-called MiniMalls have even got an integrated price comparison and search function. The beauty of it for the affiliate is that the customer stays on the site. Affilimatch from Affilinet is similar.

Impact on Affiliate Marketing

How meaningful these business models will become and whether they will have an impact on Affiliate Marketing - as we know it - will show with time. In any case it is interesting. Perhaps it will not substitute the current market of affiliate marketing but extend it, as they win completely new person’s groups as quasi-affiliates.

Summary:

According to our assessment, a subset of characterisitics apply to an “Affiliate 2.o” in the practice of Web 2.0.

1.You become better with more active users

2.You integrate data from many different sources

3.You bring people together

Once again to summarise more concretely we have arranged the main points of Affiliate Marketing 2.0 below:

• The new work with content: Still more varied reuse of content than was previously known.

• Social media and networks have a lot of noticeability and traffic and therefore lots of opportunities for affiliate earnings.

• There can be significant Affiliates who are publishers (see our article about the different kinds of Affiliates) but who don’t have their own website. For example they may have a profile on a social network with lots of traffic. The most recognisable example is lonelygirl15.

• Creative and innovative work with new methods pays off.

• If you have separate projects you can profit in matters of search engine optimisation from engagements in social networks. See for example our posts on Videocommunities and Photocommunities.

• In contrast to Affiliate Marketing via PPC, you can earn more money from visitors with the above ideas.

Please take a look at our Hitflip powerpoint presentation.

We hope you liked our short series on Affiliate Marketing 2.0 and would love to hear your comments/feedback.

In our short series about Affiliate Marketing 2.0 we addressed the subject of the new Work With Content and we will continue now with the subject of Working With Social Networks.

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is already a subject for many companies. Hitflip has had a Myspace site for a long time (and also for Hitflip Germany) where you can add Hitflip as your friend. That aspect of social networking is of course only one part of SMO. Social Networks (such as Myspace, Bebo, StudiViz etc) are also of interest to affiliates! There you’ll find a vast array of users who spend a lot of time there. Naturally these ads are more or less directly placed by the operator but there is still scope for imagination. On the topic of Working with Social Networks for Affiliate Marketing, we believe there are two steps to understand:

1. Potential to build noticability
2. Potential to monetarise noticability

If an example can be given of Affiliate Marketing in Social Networks, it must be Myspace as it is the largest and most popular.

Affiliate Marketing In Social Networks - an example from Myspace:

In order to make it possible to get attention on Social Networks, you must be connected to friends. That happens only when you communicate nicely and reasonably. Spam is punished with elimination from the site and then your efforts are for nothing. Something which is in the background of Affiliate Marketing but which can make sense is to have multiple profiles that are similar. Take for example that you have a profile for a particular type of beer and one for a particular type of car. Friend links with MySpace are also often explicit ‘fan-professions’. You can see that very clearly with band profiles. Many will connect with you as a friend because of that. It can also work with the above mentioned examples of a brand of beer or a certain car.

Of course you shouldn’t just copy the text of your advertisement onto your profile. It is best when it creates more value for visitors and also facilitates the addition of more friends for you. This increased value can occur through lists from funny videos or through a meaningful tutorial. On the subject of beer, for example, you could have a video showing the different ways of opening a beer bottle without a bottle-opener.

When you have a group of friends on MySpace, you then have many opportunities to communicate with them and with every communication you can place an affiliate link at a reasonable point. With MySpace, for example, you have a Blog and when you add something to your Blog your friends are notified. You can also leave messages in friend’s guestbooks, but: Don’t Spam!!

If, however, a friend of the beer profile gets a funny picture about beer in their guestbook they won’t mind. Then you can attach a link to your picture to beerbooks.affiliatedomain.co.uk. and the link is then an affiliate link to Beer Books at Hitflip. (There is more information on this available from our Affiliate Marketing 2.0 topic “Examples of Affiliate Marketing 2.0 with Photo Content“.) Entries such as this can not only be read by your friend but also by your friend’s friends, showing us again the fascinating range of social networks. In particular because these messages come from ‘a friend’ they are better received than an obvious advertisement. You must strike the right tone with these messages in order to be successful in the long-term.

Affiliate Marketing In Other Social Networks:

The following applies for the above examples: If you annoy or mistreat your friends by sending them too many ads, they will a) go and b) there is a high probability that you will have to leave the network. So that is something to avoid. Aside from that, there are many interesting possibilities.

An example from Twitter:

Andre uses Twitter under the name Hitflip (in German). If he posst a message in the Log Files, he can record every visitor who has read it. More fascinating however is that you can make Multi-Channel Marketing from it, that the friends, if applicable, can receive their Twitter MiniBlog Posts by text, email or RSS feed. And without costs or a technical set-up! And the people who added you as a friend want to receive your messages. What more could you want?!

An example from MyBlogLog:

MyBlogLog (Hitflip’s profile here) is really good for building a connection to your readership. You can see what overlapping of interests people have and then create a targeted profile or project.

An example from specific/targeted Wikis:

To use the first example, you could build a Beer-Wiki with your friends from the beer profile. You can do that for free at pbwiki. Ideally your MySpace friends then help to keep the content updated that they then use themselves. Then you can of course include an affiliate link to books about beer or something like that in your wiki.

An example of Social Bookmarking:

We will stick with the beer example, because it’s easier to communicate the ideas using a concrete object. You put together a collection of links on the topic of beer on Delicious or Mr. Wong and mix in a few affiliate links. You’ll find out quite fast, how well it works with your MySpace beer profile or Beer-Wiki.

An example of Social News:

At Digg, Reddit, Yigg, Webnews, Seoigg and co. you can include an affiliate link into some really fascinating stories.

An example of building your own social network:

Instead of ‘poaching’ in other social networks, you can build your own piece by piece (for free at Ning.com) then you can combine and integrate the above ideas to devise your own concepts. There perhaps it is worth ending our study of SEM .

Example from Second Life:

In Second Life you can also see examples of affiliate marketing. One of them is reproduced in the Amazon Affiliate Blog (currently only available in German)

Affiliate Marketing in Social Networks…

…is as versatile as the social networks themselves. With a little bit of imagination - we believe - you can create many new opportunities for Affiliate Marketing 2.0.