Interview with Fraser Edwards - Part One

oh yeah - that’s me A couple of weeks back Nadeem Azam published an interview with me in the PrimeQ WeeklyQ Newsletter. In case you missed it here it is again. It’s definitely worth signing up for the WeeklyQ as the quality of writing is excellent. It’s one of the few email newsletters I actually read in full.

Most of the questions could justify a blog post in themselves so I’ll post this as two parts so it’s not too long!

Fraser, what were you doing before affiliate marketing?

I studied Computer Science at Edinburgh University and started doing web design work for a few clients while I was studying. In 2001, after uni, I fell into doing that full time and then, through building websites for others, I discovered affiliate marketing. From there I started to build my own sites.

What made you get into affiliate marketing and what did you start off doing?

I love the freedom of affiliate marketing rather then answering to clients so I moved more of my business in that direction. It was always frustrating to have a client change their mind or expect you to do extra work for free. It was great to leave that behind and only keep the clients I enjoyed working with.

I started out by creating a shopping directory (didn’t we all!), but back then it was possible to make it successful just by getting a handful of links from other sites. I built on this and started using product feeds and things took off from there.

What was it like working in affiliate marketing in those days? How has the industry evolved since you started?

I think those days were some of the best and I remember the first affiliate get2gether when there were only around 40 people in the room and everyone seemed to know each other. I used to work through the night and remember speaking to the same dozen people in the a4uforum chat room every night at 2am!

Things have changed a lot now though and obviously, as the industry has grown, it’s much harder to know everyone that’s involved. There have been a lot of positive developments but not everything seems to have changed for the better. Now there is more money involved, it seems people are more competitive and so at times it doesn’t seem as friendly as before.

What kind of affiliate marketing activities are you engaged in at the moment?

At the moment I’m spending a lot of time on the blog and podcasts but also paid search with a few merchants. Previously I would be signed up to every program going and build data feed based sites but now it’s more of a focus on a handful of quality merchants.

I also started a few new blog projects, some content based and one video blog which I need to produce a few more episodes for before launching properly. Video is going to be a big area so I am doing it as a way of teaching myself a new technology.

If you could start all over again all those years ago, what would you do differently?

I would start sooner! Buying up domains when so many were available would have been a smart move but I just didn’t realize the potential back then and also didn’t have the spare cash to speculate.

Uni was a good time but since much of affiliate marketing is self taught I sometimes wish I had just started teaching myself much sooner instead of studying so much theory. SEO was a much simpler art back when I started too, so I should have made more effort in that area.

How do you feel about developments with paid search? Does it appear to you that PPC affiliates are being attacked on different fronts with, on the one hand, merchants and agencies imposing ever-stringent restrictions and, on the other hand, Google trying to squeeze out affiliates?

Like most aspects of affiliate marketing it has got harder but affiliates will always be at the forefront of working out new angles and ways to generate traffic.

Like you say Google does seem to be trying to squeeze out affiliates. I do understand the motivation behind some changes but their methods can seem strange at times. For example moving to a single instance of a display URL was a big change for affiliates but I think it’s much better from an end user’s point of view.

However the recent landing page quality score changes have been much more haphazard and at times it’s unclear what benefit they are trying to achieve. It seems once a URL has been flagged as having a low quality it’s pretty hard to ever improve and so it doesn’t seem to support the continuous improvement that I thought Google were looking for.

A hot topic this one: what’s your opinion on closed group PPC bidding circles, in which a select number of affiliates are given the right to bid on the brand names without the contracts being given out to tender?

To be honest I still can’t quite make my mind up on this one and I think it depends on each individual situation. If a merchant wants to do their own PPC bidding I can see why they may want to restrict affiliates so that they don’t have to compete with them too. I think at times that it would be helpful to provide an alternative URL for affiliates to use.

If a network needs to find affiliates to handle a PPC campaign I understand why they go back to the same proven trusted affiliates time after time as it’s easy for them. But it is a recipe for things getting very stale if the same few affiliates are the ones making all the money.

My recommendation would be that if merchants do want to have a closed group it should be listed on the merchant information page at the network. The Account Manager’s contact details should also be there and the next date for retendering so that anyone who is interested and could benefit the merchant knows there is a way in.

I think the tendering process is a difficult one as the template I have seen for one network asks for such a level of information that it might take a smaller affiliate several days to prepare and it’s hard to sacrifice that amount of time on a speculative move.

In summary I think the tendering process is a natural progression and, as long as it’s a fair process, made public and open to all then I don’t have a problem with it.

Merchants should be clear they understand the pros and cons and decide for themselves that a closed group situation definitely makes sense for them though.