JohnOBrien.com

The team behind the site pagerank10.co.uk have recently designed a new price comparison website pricesuk.net which features product feeds from many UK merchants.

The great thing about this for the affiliate marketer is pricesuk.net are offering merchant sub feeds for sale on a first come first served basis for only £199.00 per year meaning you can own and have your affiliate id embedded into all the products for that particular retailer with over 120 feeds still available when I last checked with more being added on a regular basis.

All the individual product feeds are linked to the main site so they work together as one big price comparison website, feeds are sorted by product on the price comparison section, but are also categorised by the merchant’s name.

Hosting is covered in the price and pricesuk.net will update the feeds or you can update them as frequently as you like by entering the URL to a csv file. You also have the option of altering products & columns displayed per page.

To kick start the site’s promotion and SEO the product feeds containing affiliate id’s have been imported into relevant pagerank10.co.uk full page ads with the products being displayed across the top of each ad, relevant products are displayed if someone uses the pagerank10 search, relevant products are also displayed under the “relevant pages” and links to the feed categories are also in the pagerank10 categories.

Based on the success of pagerank10 and the hard work of those involved I decided that pricesuk.net could be a very successful project to get involved in, so I have brought 4 sub feeds so far including PC World, Carphone Warehouse, John Lewis & Toys R Us.

Webgains have just launched their voucher management tool which provides;

An overview of available discount vouchers with start date & expiry dates, individual commission per voucher and promotional details.
Voucher code based tracking as last referrer.
Reporting on voucher code use for each order.
Offline marketing tracked and reported online based on the voucher use.
 
The voucher tool gives the affiliate the ability to see all the discount codes, not only  the generic codes, but also those created specifically for them.

The voucher management tool can be found in the webgains affiliate area under the programs tab, named voucher codes, affiliates can view available vouchers for each program they are joined to and enabled to use the tool, broken down by availability, generic and exclusive codes.

The exclusive codes will only be visible to the relevant affiliates. The retailer will have specified the voucher code, the start & expiry dates, the details of the promotion, the destination and the specified commission for that voucher.

Once the vouchers have expired, they will be removed from that list unless the merchant changes the expiration date.

If an exclusive voucher code has been used in the online order, that transaction will be attributed to the relevant affiliate, overriding any cookie data and preventing other affiliate marketers from using the exclusive voucher.

The voucher code used will also be reported in each orders details page, so that affiliates can see which codes are performing well and run extended reports on the vouchers themselves.

The voucher tool also offers the chance for offline marketing to be tracked online, as webgains don’t need the cookie data for exclusive vouchers, so if a shopper uses the code they saw being advertised offline, you still get the commission. 

To view all the affiliate programs that are using the voucher tool you can check in the affiliate area under programs, search programs, voucher code enabled yes/no. Affiliates can also see which programs have vouchers available in the programs joined/not joined area, where there is now a new tick box in the choose columns.

Webgains new voucher tool seems a fair way of dealing with unauthorised discount codes being used and some sites that may “borrow” the vouchers from other discount voucher websites without asking to use them so well done to webgains for creating it. 

I think discount code sites have a very prosperous future along with cashback sites with more and more merchants generating codes for affiliates to use every week. I think its time to get in on the party so watch this space for more details of a new UK voucher code site in the pipeline.

Buy.at have started a great mobile phone affiliate incentive today called mobile mania.

The competition gives anyone on their affiliate network the chance to win up to £3,000 by promoting at least 3 of the 9 mobile affiliate programs from 3 Mobile, Carphone Warehouse, Dial-a-Phone, O2, oneStopPhoneShop, T-Mobile, The Phone Spot, Virgin Mobile & Vodafone during the period 11th February - 6th April.

To win you will need to increase your mobile contract applications over the next two months. The biggest % increases in contract applications will win one of the prizes.

The affiliate competition has been split into three groups to make it fair for everyone with the group you fall into dependent on the number of mobile contract applications you have sent in the last two months.

Group 1; 0 - 50 applications – prize of £1,000.
Group 2: 51 - 100 applications – prize of £2,000.
Group 3; 101 + applications – prize of £3,000.

The winner of each group will be the person that makes the biggest % increase in the total number of applications they submit and if you have sent less than ten mobile phone applications in the previous two months then you will have a starting rate set at 10 sales.

The 2008 affiliate marketing awards have just been announced which will be held at the park lane hotel in central London on June 5th.

There will be 14 awards this year as follows;

Categories;

Best use of creative.
Best network innovation.
Best merchant innovation.
Agency of the year.
Publisher of the year.
Best use of affiliate marketing as part of an integrated campaign.
Affiliates4u award for excellence.
Publishers choice of network.
Publishers choice of account manager.

Vertical awards;

Finance.
Retail.
Gaming.
Travel and leisure.
Technology and telecoms.

The affiliate awards will be judged by a panel of leading affiliate marketing experts and submissions have to be in by the 25th April 2008.

Entry for each category is free and you are able to enter as many categories like.

You need to submit an A4 page executive summary to the category you would like to enter with any supporting evidence and if your submission is short listed you will be contacted  in early May.

There are also two publishers choice awards which will be chosen by members from affiliates4u, these being “publishers choice of network” & “publishers choice of account manager”.

For more information on the affiliate marketing awards visit a4uawards

The overture search tool and the UK version have been useful assets for the affiliate marketer for as long as I can remember, it shows search volumes of a previous month for individual keywords and websites, and what obviously makes it so valuable to affiliates is it lets us see what terms the consumers are typing into the search engines when looking for a product / service, and in what numbers. I know it doesn’t include google search results but you can times 5 -10 the overture results for google according to popular opinion.  

So what has happened to the overture search tool? it seems yahoo who now run it have reduced its functionality heavily in recent months, but in the last week I haven’t been able to load their pages 95% of the time and if they do load any search ends up in an error page, please don’t tell me this tool is now being made redundant, I will have too search hard to find a like for like replacement to this very useful service.

Also I found the overture search tool helps me when I’m searching the daily deleting domain lists, I only do this every other-day now as having over 1000 domains is very hard to manage and I don’t  really need any more at this point in time (unless a real gem is dropping) and I’m now dedicated to developing existing “good domains” to create new affiliate sites rather than just forwarding the domain names to pay per click sites.

Other alternative tools worth considering when researching keywords are wordtracker, google & MIVA