Any Questions for Nicky Iapino?

I’d like to ask Nicky how she manages to remain so lovely and slim when many of us are developing “affiliate belly” because we sit infront of our computers all day.

OK, that’s a joke My serious question would be the following: having been in the industry for several years, would she say it is now easier or more difficult for affiliates to make a living than at the turn of the Millennium?

Looking forward to this interview!

Nadeem

In July 07, in an interview with Nicky, she was quoted that by the end of this year, the target for Afili.net was to reach No.3 in the UK. I am curious to know how far this has been achieved and if in hindsight was a little too ambitious considering the longevity of the likes of Awin, CJ and TD and their continued growth.
Or were you misquoted?

In what way does Afili.net differ from every other network?

Does afili.net work with spyware in Europe like Zanox?

How would you allay any fears that affiliates may have that Affili.net will still be around in the UK in two years time, this is in the context of cibleclick that came to the UK and then went back to its place of origin. Would you agree that some merchants and affiliates may be hesitant that Affili.net’s HQ is in Germany and if they wanted to, they could pull back at anytime, if so how can you reassure us all.

What’s going on in Europe? What industry should affiliates be focussing on if they want to diversify. Do affiliates have to have a website in different languages, do they need a domain name with country ext.

You recently attended a number of meetings with regard to the affiliate association and admitted that you were a bit disappointed that it’s seemed to have stalled. How do you feel about the IAB getting involved and why do you suppose they have suddenly become interested? As a supporter for an Aff Assoc, what is your vision re the role of an affiliate network within an aff association.

This whole business re Affiliate’s and brand Bidding, what is your perspective on this? What are your account managers advising their clients to do?

Having done consultancy for LinkShare how do you think they will perform in the UK?

Js

Q1. Do you feel we have maybe reached a critical supply & demand threshold, whereby there are maybe now too many merchants & not enough quality affiliates?

Q2. Having worked at several networks in your impressive career to date, what proportion of revenue would say is approximately derived from PPC affiliates either driving traffic directly to a merchant to or via an affiliates own landing pages / websites?

Q4. The concept of an Affiliate Association has already lost momentum, why do you think this is & what can be done to bring it back on track?

Q5. With Kelkoo, Pricerunner & Dealtime now making their product feeds available to carefully selected affiliates. Do you think networks have lost the edge in not developing a viable competitive solution when there was an opportunity to a couple of years ago?

Q6. I don’t want a political answer to this one. Judging by what’s currently happening in the marketplace, what do you think is Google’s perception of affiliates?

Q7. If in the near future affiliates were not permitted to use Google Adwords, what measures should a network be taking to counter what will be a massive shortfall?

Q8. With the plethora of wealth & talent in the affiliate marketing industry, why hasn’t it developed it’s own search engine to rival Google, with the full marketing force of affiliates behind it?

Q9. How will the role of a network change in the foreseeable future?

Q10. What’s the secret to looking so good?

Affiliate marketing has come on leaps and bounds over the years, yet still merchants/networks fall short in numerous areas including for example - tracking not working on launch of programs, communication, providing up to date and right size creative, poor creative and prominent phone numbers on site.

Why has the industry failed to learn how to provide the basics?

Also, and this follows on from the above. By not providing the basics to a sufficiently high standard, is the message from networks to affiliates one of do PPC and forget trying to provide content websites?

Do content websites have a future in affiliate marketing? Discuss ;o)

In the past year, a number of networks have attracted merchants who wish to promote a specific campaign or product. Obviously, marketing departments have budget restrictions while they calculate the ROI from different media drives, but often is the case that Internet Marketing is more successful than anticipated.

When a merchants online budget is spent, they sometimes reappear a couple of months later with the same network, same campaign/product and same payout. So my question, in a round-about way, would be;

How do Afili.net manage merchants expectations? I.e., do they PROACTIVELY work with new merchants, explainnig the likely success rate of a particular campaign, in an attempt to increase the merchants planned budget, therefore extending the life of a campaign?

When will Afili.net introduce their ‘planned’ affiliate referal scheme?