The Hitflip UK Blog

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!

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!

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.

We have just sent out following note to our affiliates at CJ:

“Dear Affiliates,
due to high demand we have added deeplinks to our products in the textlink section. Now you can deeplink to search words and EANs.

All you need to do is replace XXX in the code with your required search word or EAN.

Example “Search Word”:
If you would like to link to all games concerning “Golf” on Hitflip:
http://www.hitflip.co.uk/entry.php?source=cj&ref=%zp&
dest=item_all&params=item_typ,4:searchstring,golf

Example “EAN”:
If you would like to link directly to the new Harry Potter book:
http://www.hitflip.co.uk/entry.php?source=cj&ref=%zp&
dest=item&params=EAN,9780747591054

Any Questions: Feel free to drop us a line at partner@hitflip.co.uk

Happy money making with the new functions!

Your Hitflip-Affiliate-Team”

Interested in promoting Hitflip and earning money with each new user? Check out our Hitflip Affiliate Programme

This is the continuation of ‘Affiliate Marketing 2.0 - Part 1: What has been said on the subject and what is Web 2.0′
As you have read, we believe we can recognise some trends with respect to Web 2.0. One of these is the new Work with Content. This new Work with Content in connection with Affiliate Marketing is observed under three stages:

1. Created or obtained content
2. Assimilated content
3. Dispersed content

Now that it is a little bit clearer what we mean, we will put forward three examples of how the points mentioned above can be effectively shown. In the following examples we use Video, Photo and dynamic text-content (RSS) but of course there are other types of content conceivable.

Examples of Affiliate Marketing 2.0 with Video content:

Video content can come directly from the merchant, from Affili.net VideoAds or the advertising of Zanox.tv. Affiliates can of course also make their own videos or video podcasts.

If you make your own content, the Affiliate-Links must be visually or acoustically installed. For example the text “hitflip.affiliatedomain.co.uk” can be shown in video, in order to recruit for the Hitflip affiliate programme. It is also possible that funny / viral videos can be associated with ad videos which are then put in an Affiliate-Link (e.g. with CJ Smart Links or similar technologies).

These videos can then be set up next to your own website or blog or with the many different video communities or podcasts in iTunes and similar portals.

Examples of Affiliate Marketing 2.0 with Photo Content:

Here we have already published a very good applied example from our own affiliates.
The content/photos/pictures can be made yourself or you can buy them. If it is not somewhat new/exclusive, you can also arrange them through clever combinations or new perspectives. (An example from Marcus with the WCs)

The adjustment of the content is then inserted accordingly with an Affiliate-URL in the picture.
The dispersion of the content can then occur on your own website or blog via photo communities or directly through News (2.0) sites like Digg.

Examples of Affiliate Marketing with dynamic text / RSS:

An RSS feed is a form with dynamic and continuously renewed text. These can come from a merchant (we offer our members some of it), from Affiliate networks (which I believe are called Dynamic Clicks by CJ and Superclicks - something we recently learned in London )

The adjustment of the content can then be seen in the regular feeds of the merchants to affiliate-links. Here is an example from one of our affiliates of an RSS advertising medium, (only available in German at the moment).
Further adjustments can be seen from ‘wider / bigger’, more specific RSS feeds, e.g. for a website about horror films, you may only receive a list of the new horror dvds from Hitflip. Adjustments of this kind are also of value for the user. Accordingly you can combine many feeds on the same topic into one feed. The circulation of feeds can be found under topic-specific tabs for Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle, through which one can reach a wider readership. Feeds can often also be put into the profiles of diverse social networks (in Widgets, where applicable).

New Work With Content: Summary

We have used three examples (video, photo and RSS) to show how with Affiliates 2.0 this content is firstly created/obtained, then adjusted and finally published and how the concept of Affiliate Marketing 2.0 has come about.

In preparation for the CJU, we felt the need to address a new topic.
We are often associated with the topic of Web 2.0 and our first working-title was “Influences of Web 2.0 on Affiliate Marketing”. We started with the classic googling in german and in english. We didn’t find the results very satisfactory. Mostly it was just “blah blah blah” without any concrete evidence and without good examples, and that’s not what we had visualised. Therefore, we have broken the topic down simply.

What is Web 2.0?

As an introduction, we simply took the characteristics of Web 2.0 websites from Tim O’Reilly as a starting point:

1. They improve by getting more active users
2. They integrate data from different sources, including their own users
3. They open their data to other websites, allowing mashups (API)
4. They make people get together and let them create an online identity
5. Make use of modern technologies for creating great user interfaces

Here is an example from Hitflip:

1. Network effect: The more people with items to exchange and the more choice available, increases the demand and the attractiveness of Hitflip.
2. Data Integration (we will publish more on this at a later point)
3. Open API for mashups
4. Online Identity which we call my.hitflip
5. We continously work on our featureset

From Web 2.0 to Affiliate Marketing 2.0

As the title suggests, the subject of Affiliate Marketing 2.0 will be introduced in different stages as this is becoming too long for a blogpost/working day. In the coming days we will post 4 further posts. The next three will be concerned with the main trends that we believe to have recognised in Affiliate Marketing 2.0. Those are:

1. The new work with content
2. Working with Social Networks
3. New ways to generate conversion

Finally, another blog entry is planned which will summarise the Affiliate Marketing 2.0 blogs and will also contain our lecture from CJU.

Looking back at this years CJU EU in London I can put it in the words of Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe and Benjamin Franklin:

” Every second was of infinite value” as “lost time is never found again”

CJU EU was a great place to be and had deep value for all participants.

	Tim Waterstone - Founder of Waterstone (the largest book chain outside the US) held the the opening keynote and shared his thoughts on launching entrepreneurial businesses. It was great listening to Tim and his thoughts on entrepreneurs in general. An interesting thought was that he never wanted employees around him who wanted to work for him till the end of time but fellow entrepreneurs who would one day develop their own projects and companies.Tim pointed out that traditional bookstores haven’t really lost out due to Amazon & co. as online book stores are great for the long tail which traditional bookstores can’t deliver to in-house due to lack of space. He believes that the future will see the end of traditional sales channels for music - even though he believes it will take longer than some may hope. I totally agree with Tim on this point. Tim Waterstone pointed out that charisma is one of the most important characteristics for leaders - He has loads of charisma and I believe he left the stage looking at a ballroom full of inspired faces.
	Liz Jackson - Founder of Great Guns Marketing held Fridays opening keynote. Liz gained experience as a tele-marketer and had a wise boss who told her: “You have got 2 ears and 1 mouth - use them in this ratio.” Liz listened and performed. When asking the bank for a loan so she could start her new business there was only one side laughing - the bank. Liz was lucky though as the Prince’s Trust supported her with a kick-off of GBP 4000. When it comes to human resources Liz believes in intuition - even though her first hire was because she felt sorry for the woman, a mistake she didn’t do twice. Liz says “You can’t await people to invest in your visions unless we invest in theirs” and how right she is. “Luck is where hard work meets opportunity” - Liz worked hard and she believed in what she could achieve. In the first year after she founded Great Guns Marketing she turned blind - but she still has her voice and with her believe that she can change the world if she only wants to she can “see” more than many can dream of. Her main guideline is a quote from Henry Ford “If you think you can, or you think you can’t you’re right.”
	Not only the key-speakers were fantastic. I especially loved Catriona Campbell from Foviance. This girl is so full of power and she has stories to tell. One great story was the story of travelocity and a great example for translation vs. localization. Travelocity launched on new markets just translating the sites language files. When they launched in France the US management was wondering why the site wasn’t taking off. So they asked for a French peer-group. This lady comes in for the peer-group and they tell her that she is to test the french website “travelocity” and she says “no way!!!”. “Travelo” means transvestite in French… so the travel-site had launched with the name “Transvestite City” in France - I would say that this is very long tail
	On the publisher/advertiser breakout sessions Andre and myself attended the advertiser breakouts. On day 1 Martin (CJ), Karianne (CJ) and Andre (Hitflip) presented how you can use the technology of CJ for various innovative advertisement formats. Andre introduced Hitflip to the audience and how you can use web 2.0 sites for innovative affiliate marketing opportunities. In the next few days we will publish an extra blog entry on this topic - so don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up2date.
	CJU EU had loads of opportunities for networking and eating chocolate. On a sidenote: If you love chocolates you need to work for Adobe (just search for “click here” on google to find them) [I love insiders]. The champagne reception was great - the girls reminded me of the last James Bond movie “Casino Royal” and I really needed to watch my consumption as it just tasted great. Dinner was a dream and a signature for the landmark hotel in which CJU was located this year.
	Raffle tickets were sold for charity and we were more than happy to buy some to support “Kids Company“. Kids Company was founded in 1996 and provides emotional, practical and educational support to profoundly vulnerable children and young people in London. The great thing about charity raffles is that you can help and win at the same time and WOW DID I WIN!?! Thanks to Duncan at e-Conversions for sponsoring a fantastic prize: I will be driving a Ferrari and a Lamborghini - two Italian beauties for a day. A quarter million worth of cars - I hope they have a good insurance. Chris from Hotel Chocolat offered me the equivalent of the weight of the car in chocolate as a swap. He sure has understood how Hitflip works and his offer is really tempting

I would have loved to have headed to the airport in my new Lamborghini but life just told me that the time has come for the tube and Stansted Express - Life sure knows how to bring one back down to earth. Andre has noted down his thoughts in German and uploaded some pics of CJU EU to the internet. If you have also uploaded or posted your notes on the net let us know by leaving a comment

P.S. Oogolo.fr were brave enough to let a SEO panel discuss their new website They are in desperate need of links. So here you are: voyages en Egypte