I have just cast my own vote as follows:

Affiliate Manager of 2008
Chris Bishop (Hotel Chocolat)

Chris has always been of great help when I’ve had problems or questions. He encourages affiliate involvement, particularly at certain times of the year with competitions and incentives from HotelChocolat.

Affiliate Marketing Agency of 2008
R.O.EYE

Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2008
Kirsty McCubbin

Always a great read, as are the other nominees. I like the style and format of Kirstys Blog. Very inspirational.

Publisher’s Choice Of Account Manager 2008
Julie Wood
Always there and willing to help. A very worthy nominee.

Publisher’s Choice Of Network 2008
Affiliate Window
Always coming up with new tools to help promote merchants. Just won it for me over a very close second for PaidOnResults.

 Now, some merchants will sit on pending sales for a long time before validating them, two to three months isn’t unheard of. Not with these guys though. Each sale I have generated for them has been validated the same day, sometimes within a couple of hours. This is just such a refreshing way to deal with affiliates, we know where we are with commissions and what the expect at the end of the month. It’s this sort of programme management that gets a better and more prominent place on my sites.

Thanks GettingPersonal!

In order to get an entry into this competition, you need to join the programme on AffiliateFuture, post a banner or link on your site(s). Making 5 sales will also get you an extra entry into the competition. So, what are you waiting for, get those links up today.

Sunshine.co.uk are a great travel site that offers holiday makers cheap hotels, holidays and flights.

Dear ********

I would like to increase your commission levels by 10%, in return for a small favour.

I see you have sent us 1 click via affiliate window over the last year, and would like to offer you 11% commission on all sales PERMANENTLY if you would be willing to promote us a little more on your site.

If you’re interested please email me at ***********, and i can offer you help in increasing your sales with us.

For example we can offer voucher codes for your customers to encourage sales, or suggest best selling products that may be suitable for your site.

I hope to hear back from you, and thanks for your time…

Kind Regards,

I will certainly be adding more Needapresent information and products on my new gift related sites from now on.

More often than not this will be the first communication I will have received about the programme after signing up. Merchants will know who is active and doing well on the programme already, so sure, make an extra effort with those people. However, instead of giving the rest the boot, why not send them a reminder of why the prorgamme is such a good one to promote, offer incentives to get active, special offers, anything but the goodbye email.

I assume merchants want the most sales possible from a programme, so dropping affiliates won’t achieve this will it. You need to get the number of active affiliates higher, not chop the programme down, therefore limiting sales.

OK, Rant over!

So, to help populate these sites I will be needing a datafeed of merchant goods to offer my visitors. My first choice was to have the datafeeds from JustHom and DeadGoodUndies for JustUndies. The ladies will be getting a selection from BeCheeky or FigLeaves.

So, firstly all of these merchants offer the datafeed facility through the networks. Brilliant I thought. Not so…

The Figleaves datafeed is currently about seven months out-of-date on TradeDoubler. Not a good start is it? BeCheeky offer a feed through DGMPro and AffiliateWindow. They don’t have the same number of products as each other which I would have exprected. The offering from AffiliateWindow has about 300 less products. That offered from DGMPro has errors in. I’m told that the affiliate manager of Figleaves will email an up-to-date version of the feed when updates are necessary, but isn’t this missing the whole point of offering these throught the network interface?

Anyway, when I get a solution sorted I’ll post again.

So, onto the new interface. All I can say is Wow, what a really vast improvement over the old one. The first thing that you notice is that you are presented with a snapshot of your account in the center of the sceen. This shows a months summary in terms of Clicks, Impressions Orders and Sales etc. Unfortunately this is displayed in US$ even for UK based figures. I hope this can me changed in a later enhancement. Also on the right you have a list of the latest communications from merchants. Just above the message summary you have a new box that displays your ‘Things to do’. This will be a useful feature I’m sure.

Onto the next tab along the top, the Programs tab. In this section you have the standard list of areas within each merchant can be found. There are also sections that show New Advertisers, Premium Advertisers, Advertisers you have already joined and lastly and Private Offers you may be invited to join or are already participating in. All pretty standard stuff really, but nicely and clearly laid out and easy to use.

The Links tab is the next one. Here you find a list of advertisers you are a member of. Hover your mouse pointer over the advertiser name and you get a list of link types available. (Text/email, banners/images, Dynamic Rich Media etc.) Getting the link code is very easy and you’re told when the link is valid from and when it expires. I’m afraid I don’t have tokens for either the data feeds and web services so I can’t use these and so can’t comment on these at this time.

All in all I think this is one of the successful revamps of a network redign, they haven’t all been an initial success on other networks in the last couple of years. So well done to the team at LinkShare for a job well done.

 This time I have decided to use Workpress. It’s far easier to use and customise. I realised that my hosting has Fantastico De Luxe installed. Through this I installed Wordpress. This took about 10 minutes to do, so far so good. I then looked about for a new theme as these are apparently easy to install. I found one I liked, unzipped it and uploaded to my webserver. Within the Wordpress administration area you then see the new theme. Simply by clicking the activate link and your new theme is there for all to see! (wow).

I have been so impressed with this that I have held up developing a few gift sites I have domains for and today setup another site using Wordpress instead of designing the site myself. PersonaliseYaGifts is the result in a few hours. We’ll see how it goes in the next few days and weeks.

I received this Pressure Washer from the Wickes affiliate programme as a free gift for being one of a number of people to join the programme and get a link up on one of my sites. Fiona MacPherson, the programme manager, is an extremely helpful and plesant person. She sends out emails regularly with offers and codes to promote. Suprisingly, this is something you don’t always get from a lot of programmes. (That’s another story for later!)

So, getting onto the pressure washer itself. It arrived ready to be assembled. This consisted of putting the handle on, connecting the high pressure hose and finally putting the wheels on. It took little more than 20 minutes, brilliant!

The pressure washer was ready to go, and go it went. Connect to a standard tap or the end of a hose and you’re ready to go. The unit is compact and readdy quite powerful. It gets the green from patio stones, mud off the car with ease and with the cold weather and salt on the roads, it’s quick and easy to rinse off you car when you get home. It’s only downside for me is the length of the electrical cable, as with most goods you buy, they never seem to give you enough. Apart from this little niggle, I would recommend this pressure washer as a good middle of the road costing unit.

I’ve decided to get myself a blog. Why? Well, I think I need one to express and share my views and news on Affiliate Marketing and life in general.

I won’t make any promises about the topics and frequency of posts that I’ll make, but I will try to post at least once a week.