Books Direct Innovation Recognised

Although I didn’t make it to the a4uawards this year I was delighted to see that Books Direct were awarded Highly Commended status in the Innovative Merchant of the Year category. Only losing out to the mighty Prezzybox and the Zak Edwards 10 step guide to winning awards

The Books Direct entry was based around the alternative to brand name bidding that Paul Wheatley and I worked on last year.

Here is an extract from the Books Direct email about awarding the prize money.

So there were a total of thirty tickets in the draw and the final prize pool totaled £17,331.86. Sarah Day – the Online Marketing Manager for Books Direct presented a company update to the attending affiliates followed by a short open discussion. Some interesting suggestions on how to improve the Books Direct programme were raised and we will be looking at how best to implement these in the very near future.

Finally, after months of anticipation the time came to pick the two winners. Helen Smith, Head of Online and Creative at Books Direct performed the honour and the first name to be pulled from the draw was easyfundraising.org.uk. Unable to attend the day we were able to contact Jonathan Scott on the phone later in the afternoon to share the good news. The second winning ticket that was pulled out belonged to Richard Gibson from Freebiejeebies.co.uk. Richard was in attendance and needless to say utterly delighted at the result!

So congratulations to both easyfundrasing.org.uk and Freebiejeebies.co.uk, both win a staggering £8,665.93 each!

It was good to try something a little different and hopefully it’s worked well for the Books Direct affiliate program as a whole.

I’ve fallen well behind on my blogging but I’ve got a few bits and pieces to catch up with and the first is a thank you to Trust William and Azam Marketing for this lovely selection of goodies.

I recognised most of the obvious gifts but I’ll need to do some research about the benefits of Manuka Honey before I give it a try!

The program is available on Webgains with a healthy 20% commission.

Just a quick post to make sure people are aware of this new award courtesy of Bigmouthmedia. The B.A.B.E award carries a £1000 prize for “the affiliate blogger they feel has contributed the most to the affiliate community in the last year”.

Now given my lack of blogging time due to spending more time being a dad in the last year I’m not really expecting to be in the running although the archive of podcasts do still get downloaded regularly. Strangely after going over the last few months of stats I still seem to be getting through 10 gigs of data transfer every week with about 60% of that going to China. Would love to know what’s going there if anyone has any clues!

But anyway the point of my post was to suggest a few blogs likely to be nominated, in no particular order here are the blogs I’ve paid most attention to in the last year.

• Lee McCoy – Some great analysis of different methods and tips on newer approaches like twitter etc. Twitter For Affiliate Marketing? Like Shooting Fish In A Barrel
• Kieron Donoghue – always popular & consistently blogging when the rest of us drop off for months at a time. In amongst the Spotify chat which I love there are also posts like Twitter for Affiliate Networks
• Jason Dale – again consistently blogging great stuff but calling a spade a spade while at the same time coming up with the best headlines of any affiliate blog. Are We Really Eating From The Same Cookie Jar?
• Self Made Minds – Scott & Al haven’t been as obvious in the A4U community so mistakenly I think they have been overlooked in previous awards shortlists. Posts like Scott’s Domain Buyer’s Guide have generated a lot of comments, discussion and are full of good info.
• Kirsty McCubbin – depending on which country Kirsty is living in during the week of judging I’m not sure of her eligibility but it is very much a UK blog so posts like Smart Thinking is More Profitable Than The Hard Yards in Affiliate Marketing! have been offering some great insights over the past months.
• John Lamerton – John will soon have his hands full with fatherhood so getting reading now before he runs out of spare time Topical posts like What sells during a recession? have made for great reading.
• Chris Frost – although Chris is out of the country so much on holiday I’m not sure if he qualifies as a UK blogger Please Stop Pigeonholing was a great post about a very current issue.

Now at this point I’m sure I’ll realise I’ve forgotten someone obvious so I apologise in advance and say that there are loads more great blogs out there but these are just a few that I think will be in the running

Just a quick post as heads up about a new mailing list that I recently signed up to called We Buy Websites where you can join and be kept up to date with brief ads from people wanting to sell a website. It’s run by Richard Kershaw and so he screens each ad before it goes out so that means you are not getting sent rubbish.

I haven’t yet bought a site from this list but often buying a site with some history behind it is a great starting point for better search engine rankings. Also if you can apply your own experience in a particular area to a site with a lot of exisiting traffic then you might be able to recoup your expenses just by making a few tweaks to the revenue streams.

Buying and then tweaking is the sort of thing that Scott at Self Made Minds often writes about so have a read there as well.

Good luck!

A while back I got a phone call from someone at Google Adwords offering to optimise one of my campaigns. I thought there was nothing to lose so let him go ahead and produce an optimised campaign. Time passed and he emailed me to say the optimised campaign was ready. I logged in and had a look to discover that all my negative keywords were missing which didn’t seem helpful.

I mentioned this on Twitter and got back responses from people saying similar things

Today I got a call from my optimiser that went something like this

Google: I notice you haven’t used your optimised campaign
Me: Yes, that’s because you removed all my negative keywords
Google: No – I just moved them to campaign level
Me: Nope, there is nothing there. I’m logged in now.
Google: Yes there is, just click ……oh…….(background noise)…… dial tone

Anyone had any better experience of Google optimising your campaign for you?

He did phone back 5 mins later and said we seemed to have got cut off but he had found my negative keywords and would put them in place now

Still not sure if I should actually run the campaign for a week in place of my own one!

I haven’t been writing as much on this blog recently partly due to not having the same spare time in a week and partly due to trying to get on with some real work instead.

I think I also got a bit fed up with complaining about the same old things that don’t change and it doesn’t seem as much fun to write about the affiliate marketing industry anymore so I thought I should probably try to write more about what I’ve actually been doing.

I’ve chosen to take some work again from a couple of old web development clients which really keeps things interesting. Just working on the same things each day and not getting out the office is a bit dull at times so it’s always good to keep up with a few different businesses.

I’ve also started a couple of new sites in field that I’m really interested in but don’t yet know too much about – wine! I’ve always enjoyed an occasional glass but I’ve never known what I was drinking or why I liked it so I thought it was time to find out and develop some sites along the way. This led me to starting a site about White Wine and one about Red Wine.

I’ve been using WordPress and the Thesis theme for these sites. Thesis is more of a framework to build on than the usual style of designed theme but it makes all the updates easy and is a great starting point. Definitely Recommended

Just heard that Will Cooper has left Tradedoubler. Now I’m clearly around two months behind the times and it might just be me but there doesn’t seem to have been much reported about that change or comment from the new CEO? This in itself seems quite a turnaround from the days when TD was leading the UK market.

I can still remember standing outside a pub in London with Clarke Duncan arguing with Will over spyware sometime in the distant past. While I strongly disagreed with the stance TD were taking at the time I always had respect for Will and the part he played in the company.

Where have TD gone since then and how are things going for you? Does this tweet from Loquax ring true for you or is it a completely different story?