Commission Junction UK Blog

I’ve been pleased to see CJ move forward and start blogging over the last few months. It’s a nice mix of news and opinion and it’s not too commercial or offers based.

You can check out the CJ blog at www.cjblog.co.uk

2009 Predictions from Carl White and Alison Guise have been interesting but there is plenty of randomness on there too. i.e. Dancing on the BBC

I get quite a few emails from people about their new services and sites and although I would love to I just don’t have the time to test them all out properly but I’m sure they are mostly worth a look. Here’s a quick round up of what I have been sent lately

Let me know if you have tried any of these tools and have any feedback.

Just a quick post to remind you to complete the affiliate census. I’ve just done it now and it shouldn’t take you more than 10 mins Check out the rest of the excellent new Econsultancy site while you are there!

There are seperate surveys for UK and US affiliates but you can find all the details over on the Econsultancy blog

Almost anyone involved in online marketing has a hosting horror story – reliable hosting is hard to find. We were curious about who experienced super affiliates host with, so we conducted a round-table interview of sorts, and received insightful responses along with great advice. Our featured super affiliate interviewees are Al Carlton of SelfMadeMinds.com , Shawn Collins of AffiliateTip.com and Scott Jangro of Jango.com

Question #1 – Who Do You Host With?

Al	“For my US targeted sites like Coolest Gadgets I host with ASmallOrange, PowerVPS, BlueHost and a few other resellers. For my UK sites I use Clook.”
Shawn	“RackSpace. I’ve had dedicated servers with many different hosts, and RackSpace is the best. They’re more expensive than some other companies, but they live up to their claim of “fanatical support.” Their staff is incredibly fast, responsive and helpful.”
Scott	“We host at a number of places, tests that have accumulated over the years, but the one that we do the most with is LiquidWeb. We have several dedicated servers there running on a private network with load balancing. I’ve also been experimenting with several of the VPS/Cloud providers out there, Mosso, Slicehost, GoGrid, and Linode. I think we’re settling on Linode for fast deployment of servers. Hopefully this solution will help us scale better than we have been able to in the past.”

Question #2 – What are the most important features in choosing a web host for you as an affiliate marketer?

Al	"Uptime and speed of response of support, ideally being able to contact them 24/7 via IM or phone."
Shawn	"Reputation of the host, uptime, customer service and technical support."
Scott	"For us, the single most important feature is the ability to customize the server. We do a lot with custom code and need to be able to install apache modules, compile PHP, add in libraries and compile third party code. This is another reason we’re shifting away from Cpanel servers as we find we’re working around Cpanel more and more with the stuff we do."

Question #3 – You’ve probably had your share of bad and good hosting experiences. Do you have any tips for new affiliates looking for a hosting company?

Al	“Don’t rely on just your host for backups, do your own as well. If a host accidentally deletes all your data; get them to restore from a backup and move to another host BEFORE telling them exactly what you think of their crappy service”
Shawn	"Ask around on affiliate forums on which companies others are using. And don’t bargain hunt – I did that in the past and wound up with a company that only kept a one-day backup of my files. The long and short is that I was operating a forum and it was hacked (I didn’t keep an archive of the files locally), and the host didn’t respond to me within 24 hours of the hacking. They simply wouldn’t answer my calls or emails for an entire business day. During that time, their system overwrote my backup with the hacked version and I lost two years of content."
Scott	“You can save a lot of money by buying a year or two of hosting instead of monthly. Read the small print, but typically you’ll get refunded for what you don’t use, even if you buy in advance.”

A big thank you to Shawn, Al & Scott for contributing. This guest post is by Toni Allen from Who Is Hosting This, who have just added hosting reviews and hosting coupons to the popular webmaster tool.

I’d like to welcome Netklix as a sponsor of the blog. Netklix is a PPC advertising network, similar to Adwords content network where you can create an ad and run it across a network of sites. It operates on a PPC basis but instead of matching on a keyword basis it’s based on matching ‘channels’ or subject areas.

I signed up my Car Articles blog as a test site and picked 10 subject areas that fitted the content. This didn’t take long and I was then able to place ads with that are similar to adsense by using a snippet of Javascript code. An example is here

http://www.cararticles.co.uk/uk-audi-q7.html

The only downside here is that there doesn’t yet seem to be a lot of advertisers in my particular sector.

On the advertiser side the ad formats are fairly similar to adwords and the bids start at 10p. You need to open the account with a deposit of at least £19 so it’s a relatively low commitment to allow you to try the system. There is also a £100 Free Advertising offer running at the moment so you could take advantage of that.

Like any network, Netklix will have to continue to attract advertisers but all in all it would be well worth a look. In the early stages especially you’ll have more chance of getting traffic at minimum bids.

I was delighted to meet with Alison Guise and Cheryl Ingram for lunch yesterday in Edinburgh. With family life meaning that I’m no longer all that keen on trips to London it was really nice for a network to take the time to travel here instead. Especially since I’m far from being a high value affiliate to CJ, in fact I don’t think I’ve earned a payment this year from them as I’ve been working on other things.

Alison, Cheryl and the rest of the team have been working hard to improve things at CJ UK as the podcast with Alison also shows. Amongst others Doug and Nadeem seem to enjoying dealing with CJ again too.

Overall it’s good to see one of the older networks moving forward again and taking positive steps.

p.s. The other thing I learned yesterday is that ostrich is really tasty

If you are in the Edinburgh area or if you want to make the trip then I’m organising an informal Christmas drinks event this Thursday – more details and free registration on the eventbrite page.