Adding a Poppy To Your Logo For Remembrance Day!
Christmas logos are already appearing on many websites - you know the drill a bit of snow here, a picture of Santa there - as many try to cash in on the most wonderful time of the year for shopping and retail. However, few make an effort to add a poppy to their logo for Remembrance Sunday and Remembrance Day - which is a real shame. Wouldn’t it be great if Santa could be held back just for a day or two so that big and small online businesses could do their bit to promote Remembrance?
Perhaps it’s because people don’t feel it’s necessary?
Most certainly there’s no website owner type media pack on Poppy.org.uk to encourage site owners or online businesses to promote this worthy cause. It’s not like they’ve not embraced new technology either as they are web savvy enough to include a Facebook application and email add-on in their new ways to support.
By simply adding a small poppy to your logo for just a few days, you’re helping to remind your users of Remembrance Day as well as demonstrating your own support.
Surely that’s got to be a good thing to do?
What Promotion Can A Merchant Get for Just £20?
On Friday I received a nice little message from the affiliate manager of personalised gifts merchant Gone Digging. As I’d just signed up for their program Jim kindly offered me a freebie. Now freebies are good (write this down merchants) and some that we’re offered do find there way to a new home in Duckland. However, we wanted to try a little experiment and Jim kindly agreed to this…
… unsurprisingly it’s a competition but this time it was to run via our Loquax Blog instead of our usual prize draw type pages. On the blog the user is asked a question about Gone Digging and they have to respond via the comments.
Now remember the prize is worth £20!
For that there’s promotional content (which will remain on site), traffic, brand and site awareness and come Thursday the competition will also feature in our newsletter. Plus they get a plug on OLD! Not bad for a prize worth just £20, eh!
We’d love to see more entries (and expect them) - although it does seem the blog mechanic has an impact on entry levels compared to a standard “join our mailing list” prize draw promo. However, just as a comparison we’ve seen a £200 of Star Wars toys competition with just 49 blog comment entries, and a High School Musical 3 Mobile Phone prize with just 35 entries!
Most certainly we’d love to see the traffic generate sales for Gone Digging (and any other prospective sponsors) not just now but in the future and we’d also love to run more of these competitions via our Loquax Blog! So we are keen to hear from merchants who would like to sponsor a giveaway or two - it doesn’t have to cost you a lot either (although the better the prize, the more interest it will generate).
If you’re interested then just contact OLD. Please note UK only! Thanks!
So How Do We Tell Networks & Merchants What We Do?
Despite being in affiliate marketing for what feels like eons now, it’s still a shock to the system when a merchant rejects you for reasons which aren’t valid for your website or because quite frankly they have no trust in the affiliate to promote them properly. In recent months we’ve been dubbed a cashback site (we’re not), a voucher code site (well yes we have them, but that’s not the be all and end all) and a gaming site (ditto).
On top of that one network even went so far to close our account with them (temporarily) because they didn’t believe our volume of traffic was legitimate (it was)!
Having spoken to a couple of people (and here I’d like to thank Matt Bailey at i-Level and Darren Newmark at Linkshare for their help) it was concluded that we’re either often overlooked, rejected, or totally forgotten about because no one knows what we do at Loquax. Most assume (quite correctly) that it’s something to do with competitions, but never one’s to sit around to wait for the grass to grow we’re (at least in our own eyes) a little bit more than that.
So a “Guide to Loquax” has been written. It’s a PDF file (thanks to Frostie) that explains what Loquax does in affiliate marketing. Hopefully it will give networks, merchants and agencies a bit more insight into Loquax and encouragement to work with us!
The big question how do we get this document out and about?
First off we could (and will) send it to networks via affiliate managers we know - likewise agencies - but the concern here is will it be lost or will it not get passed around to merchants (perhaps no one is actually even interested… ooh paranoia time LOL).
Which then got me thinking… wouldn’t it be useful if on a network management system there was an option for an affiliate to include a document explaining their work on their accounts. I know there are “profiles” but the reality is they’re pretty useless and lack significant depth (if they worked, no one would say we were a cashback site).
Offering such a facility would have to be limited to some affiliates (established/trusted/got off their backsides and written something types) otherwise a merchant may feel swamped by several hundred documents. However it would offer (1) the affiliate would know that it’s accessible all the time to the merchant and (2) if there’s any problems with a merchant - e.g. rejections or they’re just interested in that affiliate then they have access to an indepth resource.
Affiliate marketing has changed a heck of a lot - even in 2008 - so much so that we have felt the need to put together this information (accompanied by some lovely quotes from Zak Prezzybox, Sean Carter and Bruce Existem AM - thanks guys) so that networks, agencies and merchants understand what we do - and hopefully that will encourage them to work with us now and in the future!
If you would like a copy of the document please feel free to contact me!
The Greatest Ever Viral Game - King of Guitar from King of Shaves
Be warned this game could seriously waste a lot of your affiliate marketing day! This is the latest game for King of Shaves and it’s called King of Guitar. Based on the highly popular Guitar Hero format it features tracks from Electric Six, Eureka Machines, Beanius, The Dead Petal and The Wildhearts. Having just spent far too long playing this game already today I thought I’d share it with the rest of you…
Don’t blame me if you don’t get much work done today!
Update : I’ve removed the viral game from the site because the music was getting annoying every time I visited the blog. For free content it’s pretty good, but Killerviral need to have a tag in so that the music can be switched off!
OMG, Affiliates and Compliance!
First off I can understand why merchants, especially those in the financial sector, are concerned about compliance. Ideally we’d have everything on our sites 100% accurate, but you know things (like sites you run) get forgotten, content left behind, other things take precedence or heaven forbid we sneaked off for a few days off. Sometimes the network screws up too and doesn’t know where the banners are served from - and the result is one pretty fobbed off affiliate!
In September Virgin Money via OMG emailed us clearly showing that a banner, on one now just about had it website, was not compliant. Yet, the banner was being hosted on OMG’s server! After a few emails back and forth it was finally agreed that yes the banner was on OMG’s servers and needed replacing. We replaced it with another of their hosted banners!
We were then informed that we’d be removed from the program as we’d not been compliant despite having changed the creative to the new banner on their server (and the error being OMG’s!). The result of this was one quite annoyed affiliate! Short of going to Norwich it was impossible for us to change the banner!!!
Thankfully the “misunderstanding” all sorted out and all was well… until today!
Now I’ve been in/out of the office over the last week or so and have only today started to respond to network emails and lo and behold I find that OMG “have just completed an audit of all affiliates currently showing as live on the Virgin credit card campaign, as such we are unable to find any Virgin links on your website/s Could you therefore please advise me as to whether you are indeed promoting the Virgin credit card at present and if so as to where I can find it on your site/s?”.
Unfortunately I’d not got round to emailing them the links, so we’ve been removed (yet again) from the program. You could say, quite fairly, it’s our fault for losing the links (although is 7 days really enough time to reply - do affiliates not have holidays of over 1 week?)
However, what I don’t quite understand here is this…
If OMG could find our site with the wrong banner on in September and then they could find the site to remove it from the program after we’d changed the banner - why can’t they find it again in October? The link has not changed… and they obviously know the sites where banners are being shown otherwise they can’t email affiliates pointing out their noncompliance showing OMG banners!
Anyway from now on I will rest easier as all the Virgin Credit Card links have been removed - so no more compliance issues to worry about. I appreciate networks have to do “their job” but picking up on affiliates for noncompliance for showing a banner that the network is serving but then removing them from the programme because they can’t find the same link a week or two later is just wasting time!
My time is better spent switching links to other networks!
