Be A Better Dressed Affiliate With House Of Fraser [With Added Style Advice]

I bet affiliates spend hours choosing what to wear to affiliate Get2Gethers. Personally, I wear what's been ironed. But others could do with the £500 worth of designer clothes clothes at House of Fraser if they enter the competition to mark the launch of their campaign on CJ.

So here's some people that should perhaps enter the competition:

Actually, Max is suitably attired for an informal g2gether. But perhaps next time he should go for the Bench Cotton short-sleeved applique polo shirt?

Steve, although no longer an affiliate, goes for the safe option of a checked shirt. Perhaps he should try: the Short-sleeved pique rugby shirt?

Purps isn't wearing a t-shirt that says Pussy. Perhaps he should avoid confusion in future and try the Oxford long-sleeved dress shirt? (p.s. pic supplied by Swifty7)

Mark Pearson should have really gone for something a bit more colourful (and not got it straight out of the packet) and gone for the tight-fitting yellow Short-sleeved crew-neck T-shirt.

Tom should have thought about what statement he was making with his black briefs that night. He should have gone for these Hom Micro swim shorts.

Mr Frost should have thought about how rum and coke would have stained his t-shirt at harbour lights and gone for something that would have masked the beverage he couldn't handle. May be he should have gone for the Superdry Cotton crew-neck printed T-shirt?

And my final bit of advice for all you single affiliates out there! Get wasted and rip your t-shirt - the girls love it (but make sure you keep your barnet looking good):

It also works with account managers:

So if you need sprucing up to get the ladies, (or men if you're a female affiliate) then get yourself £500 of designer wear from House of Fraser!

Here's the details:

The closing date is 31st July, so you've got to get in quick. What you've got to do is answer some quick questions and email affiliates@hof.co.uk (keeping the subject line) with your answers, name, address and contact details plus a link to a fully-working website.

The questions are:

1. When was House of Fraser’s transactional website launched?
2. Based on House of Fraser’s launch 5% net commission, how much would the sale of a Hugo Boss, formal single-breasted stretch wool suit earn an affiliate?
3. Which famous female singer currently has her luxury bed linen and bedroom collection stocked on the House of Fraser site?
4. How much would an affiliate pay for the Prada 80ml eau de parfum deluxe?

And if you wanted to know more about the HofF here's some details Chris has sent over (they may include the answers!):

• 5% of the net sales value*
• 28 day cookie
• Free Product Feed (available upon request)
• High average order value - currently £90
• Strong offers, incentives and promotions
• A dedicated account management team to maximise your revenue and provide updates on strong offers, incentives and promotions advertised with a strong creative suite.
* Excludes gift vouchers, P&P and non commissionable items (non-basket brand links - these are Arthur Price, Coast, Dorma, Karen Millen, Montgomery, Principles, Shoe Studio Group, Kurt Geiger, Carvela, Oasis and Wedgwood).

House of Fraser’s first affiliate promotion with Commission Junction begun on 26 June, to coincide with its SALE Event. Product feeds and other tools are available for the SALE and in preparation for the key Autumn and Christmas period.

One key difference with the House of Fraser programme is that it works with cashback, reward and loyalty sites – making it one of the few department store affiliate programmes who do. They are also looking to work with paid search, content and social media sites.

How To Build Links Easily & Without Spending A Penny

You know I'm always harping on about writing good content and the links will follow, well sometimes you need to give yourself a quick leg-up.

You have to start somewhere; so when you've got a site that really offers value, has something different or you're just desperate for links and eyeballs, here's what to do.

You probably won't have Google's Adplanner (which is awesome) or Hitwise, but you'll have access to Alexa, Dmoz Google and Yahoo!

If you had Google Adplanner you could just put in a few sites in your industry that come to mind and Google will list similar sites - here' you'll just export them to a xls and save them for the next step.

If you didn't have access to it you simply find a relevant directory listing in DMOZ and then think about relevant keywords for your topic. Put them into the Google Keyword Suggestion tool, and get yourself a good range of related keywords (say 50).

From this, just search Google and get some domains that rank well for those terms - add them to a spreadsheet and the continue to expand on them until you've got 20-30 domains (as a starting point, you could always do more if you wanted).

Then go over to Yahoo Site Explorer, and drop in the domains, click search and then select "Inlinks". Simply export them and then aggregate them into one spreadsheet and filter for unique links. It sounds complicated but it doesn't take long.

You'll now have a nice long list of sites for you to work through and see if you can establish a way for them to link to you. For one client I've got over 6000 links - some of their competitors are spamming with doorway sites etc - so I can ignore those.

Some of these pages will actually be blog posts and you can leave a comment. They'll probably have a nofollow on the links so there wouldn't be significant SEO benefit, but you'll still be getting eyeballs and visits from relevant people.

Other times they'll be directories, which is fine, but they're not as cracked up to be as some say.

Sometimes, it'll be a list of relevant sites that a website owner has created so you'll be able to get a link from them.

The thing is I hate the traditional method of searching for "sumbit url [keyword]" "add your site [keyword]" etc as every Muppet does that. Also most of the directories that you'll find are utter crap. Also more and more of them are charging for entry - and the title of this post includes "Without Spending A Penny".

Also you'd want to get links from sites/blogs which don't link to your competitors. So you've got to be clever. Conduct searches like "how does [keyword]" and post away. You could be even cleverer and try and spot blogs that reward frequent comments with "commentluv" - work out how to do that one yourself ;-)

You can also offer to write content for people and have your link included as a reference.

But don't forget, you need good quality content if you want to break out from the pack. Do something unusual with your site, do some research, put some graft in, or at the very least get lucky!

Also, don't forget link-building is exponential. The higher up the SERPS you go, the more visits you have and then you'll have more chance of attracting people that actually see value in your site and want to link back to you. In otherwords, it gets easier!

p.s. You could also use Google Answers and Yahoo Answers and reply with relevant answers ;-)

Everything You Could Possibly Want To Know About Google

Except the algo ;-)!

I get lost when I'm trying to find certain tools or services offered by Google and I came across this "Google Cheat Sheet" which has a list of all these services, their country domains, various query types (search operators), all the google calculator commands (when I can't be bothered to reach for my calculator), a list of all their blogs and other stuff. I'm sure it needs a bit of updating - but its still useful.

Don't forget you can zoom in.

What The Heck Is Going On With The Economy?

I've had a client blog about the CEBR report which shows that house prices in London have risen on average by 6.4% over the past 12 months. Now a client of mine who are estate agents in London has blogged about that they've seen house prices rise by a staggering 20% in some areas of London over the same period.

The thing is that we've been shown at every opportunity how bad the economy is. They're saying people are now in negative equity and some have seen 40% wiped off the value of their property.

We're also told that retail sales are down with Sainsbury and M&S shoppers are moving to Asda and Lidl, we're also told that car sales are down shed loads.

But what I see as going on is that over the past few years some people have made a serious wedge and are immune to the increases in utility and commodity prices - they'll spend what they like and how they like without taking a second thought.

Others are feeling the pinch big time and really struggling to cut costs.

I see over the course of the year a flight to "cheap", "discount", "offers", "free", and the such like keywords. I also see a move to lower-cost, even domestic holidays taking a greater share of the market. Merchants that offer real value for money will thrive.

I've seen it with another client recently where they're not offering products on sale and have seen revenue fall in the face of virtually every other competitor slash their prices.

Shoppers will flock to the internet in even greater numbers to find bargains - we've got to make sure that our SEO strategy is spot on to capture these "value-seeking" purchasers. Is your SEO ready for them?

Why I'm Paying For AdsenseLog

I never click on ads on Facebook as I never see them as being relevant (apart from the Wedding ones and that's just a bloody cheek seeing I'm engaged). But today was different. I saw an ad for AdSenseLog which took me to this Fan Page.

Now I'm a stats junky so I downloaded the free trial and hooked it up with my account and saw the lovely stats I'd only bother looking at in Excel every now and then!

As I run some sites that don't really focus on CPA then this sort of data is becoming increasingly useful to me. Site's like Route Planners, Halo Movie, 3D Cinema are all long term sites with variable uses - some of them include using the obvious benefits of creating niche content sites. I've pretty much just used it over the past 3 years as bumf to fill pages and haven't done any MFA sites for ages. They used to make about £500 a day :-( (I'm trying not to fall into the trap of chasing the quick buck and doing them again)

So here's the sort of stats it can chuck out (my real data and it lets you export into gifs/jpg/pdf etc:

Impression data:



I can even show payment information:



And stuff like daily averages:



You can even compare different channels and their performance overtime. From this chart you can see how HG (my old Get Holidays MFA site) gradually got picked up by Google, then got knocked out, then came back in again and then suffered a slow painful death. The same can be said for GS (my old Get shopping site) which was raking in a fair few quid until Google got annoyed by that one too.



So now I'm refocusing on content sites and with some of them focusing on CPC rather than CPA, AdSenseLog will be a central tool in my decision-making process.

p.s. they haven't asked me to blog about it and I've not received anything for mentioning the product.