Moose on the Loose

Yep we still have these neanderthal cookie set ups, come on what kind of stone age set up is that we still see on a couple / few of the “major” networks?

Action Referral Occurrences, this is the number of times an advertiser will pay a commission within the *same* cookie period (ranging from 1 time to unlimited).

Here’s where there is room for confusion.

Many affiliates are make the false assumption that they earn commissions for “all” the sales during the active cookie period. Whereby the cookie gets erased after the first purchase and you don’t get commission on subsequent sales if they go on to purchase further items or services within that original cookie duration.

However, this is now metered by the ‘Action Referral Occurrence’ or “Recurring Event” setting. Sometimes it is just an oversight by a merchant but it can basically make you feel short changed.

Certainly if your program is designed to pay for customer acquisition then it’s not so much of a problem. For example With Credit Cards & Betting, however there could quite easily be more than one person in a household who could apply, hence some other programs in the same category do offer unlimited.

But if an merchant is selling their program as an ongoing revenue share for referred customers then they should ensure their action referral occurrence reflects this with appropriate unlimited occurrences.

Ideally any of these merchants listed below should change it to UNLIMITED. Action Referral Occurrences is often overlooked by affiliates so if you have a good relationship with the affiliate manager of any of these programs, it may be an idea to encourage them to change it..

As a suggestion to forum members politely email merchants you work with & explain that their terms of ‘1 time’ sales against long cookie periods weakened their offer to the point that they may not be promoted to their full potential.

How long has this being going on for, well I first posted about it on the forum over 4 years ago, not a whole ot has changed and because it says a certain cookie period or unlimited recurring events, does it actually mean it is? Am I being sceptical? Nope just realistic.

Solution: Deactivate merchant if they won’t listen or change.

As affiliates we suffered at christmas when a number of merchants set their commissions on Wii’s to zero percent. See Wii Are Not Amused. Yet when some announced they were reintroducing commission they expected us to be grateful … Fools ..

Now it seems Zavvi (formerly known as Virgin Megatore) are being just as foolish by announcing they will not be paying commissions on Wii Fit & Mario Kart.

The email was received on the 30th April, but the email says it took effect 5 days earlier. Shall I jump in my tardis & travel back in time to remove links? That really isn’t on! And what is that feeble excuse on the last line all about?

They are a merchant I would promote more, but this makes me reluctant.

“zavvi.co.uk regret that from 25th April onwards they will no longer be able to pay commissions on the following products:

– Wii
GTA IV – XBOX 360 & PS3
GTA IV Special Editions – XBOX 360 & PS3
Wii Fit
Wii Consoles
And from 1st of May 2008 any console bundles including any of the aforementioned excluded products.

zavvi.co.uk have been reluctantly forced to take this step due to extremely low availability of these products. “

Haven’t lessons been learned?

Shane Says “yup that line translates as .. we can’t get that many so we aim to make as much profit of those few that we can so we aren’t willing to pay any commission on them.”

Rich Says “Yeah, they are getting less and less chance of being included in a site I’m slowly setting up. I just don’t get the reason why it affects commission. They either mean general availability to customers is low, so they are saying ‘sod off and sell the less requested stuff’ or availability to them is low, but they wouldn’t be paying out commission anyway if they don’t have it to sell.”

You can follow & engage with the discussion on the A4UForum Click Here

A pinch and a punch for the first of the month to gently remind & strategically prod you with a cattle stick to submit your nominations for the a4uAwards as today is D-Day when the voting closes and those nominations are counted.

From the categories we are limited to voting, have your say, cast your tick by thinking out of the box & diligently nominating those people or parties who should be recognised in the industry for their efforts, so that unpopular choices, obvious block voting techniques & reciprocal voting get less of a look in & can be countered.

If any obvious BBG affiliates, agencies & networks get in, you’ll easily enough be able to draw the lines again. Don’t vote with your libido, vote with your head.

It will only take you a few minutes so get cracking now … mush-mush-mush!

The Publishers Choice Awards are:
(These awards are only open to publishers)

• Publishers Choice of Account Manager
• Publishers Choice of Network
• Affiliate Manager of 2008

The Community Choice Awards are:
(Open to Affiliates, Merchants, Agencies & Networks unless otherwise stated)

• Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2008
• Agency of the Year (agencies are not permitted to nominate for this award)
• Publisher of the Year (affiliates/publishers are not permitted to nominate for this award)

This is YOUR chance to give deserved recognition to the companies and individuals who have in your mind excelled in Affiliate Marketing. Click Here for Details

You, or your company can enter the awards free of charge, see the site for details.

Voting in the Publishers and Community choice awards takes less than two minutes. Click Here to have your say, and ensure the awards go to the most deserving winners!

Affiliates4u Award for Excellence

Remember this year they also have a special new ‘Affiliates4u Award For Excellence’ where the winner must be nominated by the affiliates4u community

Where YOU (who is part of the affiliate community) can nominate an Individual, Team or Company to be awarded the “Affiliates4u Award for Excellence”

Click Here

To completing the straight forward form on the page and attach a short paragraph or testimonial. It’s as simple as that … fair exchange no robbery … Job done.

Make sure your star(s) get rewarded and nominate for this award before it’s too late.

Click Here for Full Details

Don’t be an apathetic washout, take a couple of minutes out to have your say.

Incentives are indeed terrific for affiliates and we like to encourage more of those with the wow factor, however before you get carried away banging up links to promote a particular merchant, look under the hood for a moment and think about the fuller picture.

I am, of course referring to the recent incentive from Sky TV which you can read to your heart’s content on Kieron’s Blog, which on face value only the incentive does look excellent, whether it’s the best incentive ever depends on what grabs your fancy, personally my favourites have been the Buyagift promotions along with others like the holiday in Barbados with Sunshine.co.uk.

So hang on … Look at the bigger picture for a moment … And ask yourself.

• Are you cheesed off with your cookie being over written by brand bidding groups?
• Are you brassed off with networks not coming up with suitable technical solutions to prevent cookies of content affiliates being over written, yet still both agency & network are quite happy to soak up the over-rides from commissions?
• Are you peeved that your hard work as a content affiliate is literally lining the pockets of the BBG’s?

Well that is exactly what has been happening with the Sky TV Affiliate Program for a few years now on Buyat, note the program is also on Affiliate Window but I am informed there are no BBG’s for the program on Affiliate Window.

So, basically for that extra work you do in promoting Sky, you’ll suffer more stealth tax where these BBG’s, Buyat & the Agency are literally leaching you by siphoning off your hard earned efforts as you line the pockets of the BBG affiliates. Thus any further incremental sales generated from the sheep promoting this program because of the incentive are just lining the pockets still further of these BBG affiliates.
If you possess the attributes of this charitable nature, then I hold nothing back and suggest that you are being taken for a mug.

“Does this incentive exclude all the affiliates within the brand bidding group, and guarantee that content affiliates will not have their cookie overwritten by brand bidders?”

On a side note I still prefer the basis of entry into an incentive whereby each sale = 1 ticket into draw proposition.

That’s why the solution I proposed is better for affiliates, and I will post why some networks & agencies won’t embrace it. Read: Sharing the Wealth – The Solution to Brand Bidding Groups.

Sky TV BBG Affiliates Offering Little Value To Incremental Sales

Now, I have a juicy database on constant stand-by for Sky TV related keywords, both brand & generic, and can easily illustrate multiple times over the little value they these BBG’s add.

Search for “Sky TV” on Google and you’ll see about 5 ads, a couple of which have sky in the bought domain (hmm). Most of which if not all of them are Buy.at affiliates. The landing pages are of reasonable quality, though not long ago some were directing straight to the merchant via an affiliate link.

Extend this to the numerous hybrid phrases like “subscribe to sky” and there are even less ads & so forth. So these affiliates are even lazy sycophants on hybrid terms (brand+generic).

Check out “watch football on sky tv”, there are no BBGs, which suggests they are only [exact matching] and not even broad matching. Talk about lazy & milking the brand!

Yet, when you extend this still further to generic terms like “watch football on tv”, there is not a sausage (not a single BBG Affiliate). That’s how lazy most of them are!

Make sure you read : Idiots Guide To Brand Bidding, How To Bid Like A BBG Pro by Shane. That’s how easy it is.

Blogging About Incentives More

Now I agree we should blog about affiliate incentives more often by spreading the word via blogs & the forum, so that the merchant duly receives incremental sales & an elevation in program status, but only for the right reasons. That is why I urge affiliates … Don’t Bother With The Sky TV Incentive !!! Unless You Have “Mug” Tattooed On Your Forehead” … until they do the decent thing wrt to preventing cookie overwriting of content affiliates & adopt my proposed solution to Brand Bidding Groups.

Sharing the Wealth – The Solution to Brand Bidding Groups.

To Be A Mug or Not A Mug … That is the Question.

In relation to Google’s Trademark Policy Change, I will expand my thoughts in due course, but you can view existing blogs & threads at the footnote of this blog entry. They cover quite a lot of opinion, for which I will precis in conjunction with my own viewpoints at a later date, but make sure you read these as it will give a better overview of the whole topic & the vulturism of those I deem as carnivorous annelid worms of the class Hirudinea, plus it will lead you into this next maybe slightly controversial observation / option (not necessarily opinion)

If a network, the BGG’s & the merchant have no consideration to the cookie over-writing of other affiliates, why should there be a consideration from content affiliates to their self professed omnipotent attitude & contempt in their treating of content affiliates.

Now, some might argue that two wrongs don’t make a right, but if you want to reclaim back some of what you may have unduly lost, then perhaps it’s reasonable enough for self preservation purposes to be a competitor of the merchant’s BBG.

By simply removing yourself or expiring the relationship with the merchant who has a BBG. Thus meaning the network has no jurisdiction over the relationship anymore & cannot be involved in any dialogue or reprimanding.

You can then bid on the brand / hybrids [brand+generic] / mis-spellings & promote a competitor who doesn’t have any clauses objecting to or you can arbitrage instead .. this Google policy change will be an arbitrager’s paradise. Noting : that hybrid terms [brand+generic] are less detectable in the sense they are often mistakenly identified as brand bidding when it was broadmatch on the generics anyhow. Make sure you use the Google Keyword Tool and check out synonyms, you will see that there is a lot of correlation for what is known as expanded match or I refer to as synonym. With the impending automatic matching this could prove even more beneficial.? Let’s consider it divine retribution.

Two wrongs can make a right, if any networks with BBG’s don’t have the respect for content affiliates & cookie over-writing, breaching contracts without proper disclosure, then why should content affiliates give an iota in return. Now as a competitor bidder you may not be able to have the brand in the ad copy, ad title or display URL .. so your click thru rate (CTR) maybe less & minimum bid maybe slightly more, but as long as a competitor advertiser is making a positive ROI which is what it is about (unless is a brand building exercise) then for every £1000 you earn that’s £1000 less for the BBG’s and £300 less (30% override) for the network, plus in tandem there is a trimming of the fat from the fat cats from both ends, the BBG’s CTR will decrease, minimum bids rise & ROI reduces.

So am I advocating this? You’ll have to decide for yourself, and be happy with your own conscious if you partake. But this is business and its survival of the fittest, these BBG’s & the merchants / agencies are affecting your bottom line without any care for you i.e it’s like an additional stealth tax. If your tax rate went up 20% you wouldn’t think that was reasonable would you? Therefore I will have no sympathy with all those parties involved in a BBG whether it be an affiliate, the merchant / agency or network … and those affiliates going head to head with the BBG’s won’t get any complaints from me.

Now, the problem is decent merchants will be affected by this too, so the gauntlet is if you decide to target merchant brands, then only go after those merchants with BBG’s. I’ll happily shared compiled lists of merchants with other affiliates.

I do have a solution to BBG’s which can benefit all, which I blog later, which would be a win win situation for most.

Forthcoming Blogs:

1) A Solution To BBG’s group (before the idea gets nicked and a network or merchant does themselves.)

2) My Viewpoint on Google’s Trademark Policy Change?

3) How Long is a Piece of String? (The Answer)

4) Why I Am Considering Moving Away from CPA to CPC

5) Which So Called Leading Strategic Networks We Are Going To Dump & Why

Read these blogs & threads to keep up to date with Google’s Trademark Policy Change

• AdWords – Brand Bidding Group Feeding Frenzy Ahead !?

• The 10 Affects Of Google’s Trademark Policy Changes For Affiliates

• The new Google UK Adwords Policy – My view on the pros and cons

• Google Opens up Brand Name Bidding

• Google Revises Trademark Trigger Policy

• Should We Be Worried About Google’s New TM Policy?

• Which Network Do You Think Has The Most Brand Bidding Groups?

• Google trademark policy change

• Google Trademark Shake Up in UK

It is generally acknowledged & agreed that 0% commission has no place in the affiliate marketing space. There are enough threads & blogs pertaining to this which I will append later where several merchants were bought to our attention.

However, haven’t we been overlooking finance merchants?!

Now a finance merchant may have a suite of products ranging from various types of insurance to loans to credit cards.

If you examine the plethora of finance merchants available for affiliates to promote, do they all offer commission on their full suite of products? The answer is no, such that a program might only offer commission on a lesser popular product like business / commercial insurance when their core selling products might be car or home insurance which are all very easily accessible from the primary landing page and are on the main merchants site. In some instances I believe this is intentional, for those which it is not .. well it’s very convenient isn’t it?

In my personal opinion these program are a bit of a scam offering commission on what I believe are lower traffic areas of their site. In a way similar to a merchant offering zero % commission on products.

Granted some finance merchants may have a program set up for one of their core products like car insurance products, again, what about all the others within their suite?

There are enough examples of this on several of the networks if you take a few minutes out to look.

Cookie Cross Pollination

You’ll also notice that quite often with finance merchants, if they are offering commission on different products, they split these into different programs, one might be for selling car insurance & the other might be for home insurance. Assuming the affiliate is signed up to both programs, does the cookie pollinate across the programs? i.e. the customer visits via the home insurance link but might end up purchasing car insurance.

Why are we generally NOT fully informed?

My Gripe With OMG

Don’t get me wrong, there are a smashing group of people there. OMG can be considered primarily as a finance orientated network.

What grates me is that individual products for each merchant are separated into different programs, granted there maybe different budget allocations to each, but are we informed which have cookie cross pollination or more still why can’t we simply have one link which encumbers all for a specific finance merchant & then as long as we are signed up to their other products we’ll still receive commission from these. Personally I find it a real pain having to sign up to multiple programs of the same merchant & have multiple links which I might not need, many with the most lengthy superfluous program names I can imagine. ie Endsleigh Insurance on OMG have 7 separate programs & Buy.at have simplified it under the single program which is preferable.

Just imagine a retail merchant offering several thousand products & thus having a program for each product?

Come on OMG make life easier for us, you might find you’ll actually get more sales by simplifying & please get rid of all those brand bidding groups which I noticed when going through your merchants at the weekend.

Summary

On the whole I do think finance merchants have generally been getting away with things lightly & whether intentionally or conveniently enjoying the free ride on the gravy train, unless they offer commission on their full suite of products they could be deemed as merchants offering 0% commissions, thus why should different rules apply to them?

No doubt we’ll get counter explained as something about budget allocation & different departments of finance merchants versus the mark up & profit margins on retail products.

It looks like another big bear hug is in order for the guys up at Paid On Results with their latest development catering for expired links and closed programs.

Dead Links are Alive! … Like a phoenix which rises from the ashes ensuring that those potential extra pennies find their way into the coffers of affiliates.

• “Paid On Results launch a unique way for Affiliates to deal with expired links. In the ideal world, as Merchants close a program, Affiliates will nip on and remove the links replacing them with relevant new Merchants. However, we are very aware that the time involved in just hunting down the links over a number of sites can be very time consuming and, as one large affiliate pointed out, some times a few links get lost in the mix and are very hard to track down. “

Now affiliates have their own preferences on how they wish expired links to be treated, from the options below it seems they have catered for a vast majority of choices which include:

• “Display the standard expired Merchants page, with related Merchant links.”

• “Display your own customised expired Merchants Page. You design it and we automatically insert the most relevant Merchants from our Network.”

• “Continue to redirect to the expired Merchant as normal. Of course no commission will be paid.”

• “Redirect to any URL of your choice.” (My Personal Preference)

• “You can even show related Merchants links with the cut and paste in code that we provide.”

By default, if you do nothing, they will display the standard expired Merchants page, with related Merchant links.

This will all cater for all historical programs within Paid On Results, for example you can send the visitor back to a page on your site and show relevant merchants along with your own content.

The system is about you sourcing & removing your dead links whilst the information emails come in, so you at least have the benefit of potentially making some money in the short term until you have removed the dead links, where previously you were making zilch.

It doesn’t just stop there, if that wasn’t enough, you are even alerted to potential sales from the defaults page for merchants you might not be signed up with.

• “If one of the related Merchants we have chosen on the expired Merchants page is not one you’re an Affiliate of currently and if you make a sale via this Merchant you will be sent an email inviting you to join the program. If you do so within 7 days of the sale and are accepted (note currently we only show Merchants with an auto-join policy) then you will be rewarded with the sale. You should consider removing and updating your expired link with this new Merchant as clearly your customers are interested in buying via that Merchant should a sale happen. “

• “The new system doesn’t just do all that, we will also email you every day with a list of expired link locations that have been clicked on (note that you do not get an email if nothing was clicked on). This will allow you to more effectively find and deal with old links on your website, and will hopefully lead to greater conversion as your site is full of live Merchants you can actively make money via.”

I am looking forward to seeing this in action, because when I view the reports on some other networks, I do see a number of clicks for merchants which have closed and don’t have the foggiest idea where they are coming from.

Even at this moment I am tediously spending a couple of days cross referencing programs across several networks whose can’t quite grab the conception of communication, perhaps it’s too long a word for them to comprehend. But from two of the four networks we feel are notorious for this. One had about 15 program closures we were not notified about & another was 40-50.

Cheers Paid on Results for looking after my pennies so that the pounds will look after themselves. Dead Links are Alive!

One may say be a fat affiliate for longevity & survivability another may say be a thin affiliate to milk the cow whilst it is fat. Why is it one or the other?

Simply do both at the same time & it’s a potential win win situation.

At the moment we hear these buzz words like … “thin” … “fat” … “length” … “girth”, take your pick on whatever grabs your fancy, but realistically in 5 years time, 10 at most, what is affiliate marketing going to look like? Is it going to be recognisable?

Some folk might reference to the classification of that current buzzwords “Web 2.0” & “Social Media”, where we could point to a few individual sites which may possess sustainability qualities, or do they? U-Tube (I still like) which might have a longer slow burn than Facebook (the novelty factor wore off quickly for me) & very much like an evolved version of Friends Reunited or Classmates. Where if you refer to predecessors like Friends Reunited & My Space, which with hindsight are maybe now considered as passing fads, but these are successes for only a few.

Please note using “Web 2.0” for monetisation is a different conversation and it’s worthwhile checking out Lee’s Blog … Guide: Social Media & Affiliate Marketing (Speaker’s Notes) which is from his excellent presentation at A4UExpo.

Hypothetically speaking, assume a network cuts 4000 cheques a month for those meeting the minimum payment threshold. Maybe a quarter of those do affiliate marketing full time, I haven’t checked the census.

However, you can’t have 4000 Facebooks or U-Tubes, so what will happen to those 4000 cheques cut or 1000 affiliate who are full time businesses. Will it evolve or evaporate down to a concentrated few hundred fat cat affiliates, if that even, who have the resources to recoup a healthy income.

Hold on though … Facebook, MySpace, U Tube, Friends Reunited are NOT affiliate sites, so why are they even referred too by affiliates?

What are good examples of “fat” affiliate sites? I don’t go around checking what affiliate sites are out there, so I admit that is ignorance on my behalf, unless someone wants me to offer an opinion of their site. I am only familiar with a few friends sites, who are as long in the tooth as me, and yes they are certainly top notch.

However, could we partially, not wholly, blame networks in not providing the tools over the past 5 – 10 years to expedite affiliates into developing fatter sites, or should this lay at the doorstep of the affiliates for not taking more initiative.

Google may have inadvertently revealed another one of its underbellies, and there are few to be exploited. If you read Shane’s Blog … Google Embedded Site Search – Brand Abuse ? Apart from the valid points on there like a bigger wedge of cash derived from advertisers, and brand losing their brand status cos of the search capabilities, thus levelling the playing field a little. Yet, Google keeps advocating spin about “content rich” sites and so forth, but hang on if these so called “content rich” sites become too “sticky” then it means less users going back to Google to search & less advertising revenue for them. So would they want to list sites which are too sticky, well in theory no, but they want decent search results thus thin ones are thrown into the mix. Thus Google’s Embedded Site Search may have been the compromise, illustrating that Google is keen to keep search on it’s own site for revenue driven purposes. That’s the clue, the philosophy of keeping search on your own site.

A couple of years ago I suggested that if most affiliate sites had search functionality on their site i.e. organic search, I don’t mean just for products on their site. Then it will give less reason for visitors to leave & use other search engines. It won’t be much of a dent initially, but will depend how well you market it, how good the results are & how many affiliates embrace it.

Thus we have the following pointers for Survival of the Fattest

• Affiliates develop their own search engine & market themselves? I hear affiliates are quite good at this thing called marketing.

• Affiliates start having web search on their sites to keep users within site.

• Affiliates in different niches combine content or different verticals for one super site.

• Affiliates start planting the seed to users of other search engines apart from Google.

I am a little more optimistic, that with the right consolidation of skill-sets within this industry, affiliates can make a significant dent in the monoliths monopolisation, not go head to head, but out flank them. Affiliates know how to manipulate traffic & inform users, they just need to be more shrewd in how they do it.

i.e. Do you add content to Wikipedia or do you add content to your own sites or better still get users to add it to yours on various niches instead of Wikipedia. On the whole I find this whole content discussion thing viewed as too black & white with buzzwords used too liberally once again.

Crib Notes: Google Adwords

One thing I will say, Google looks for a shopping cart, with some direct to merchant paid search we have done has in the past, the ads have been affected for those merchants where the secure transaction went off site, it was something Google mentioned to us in passing as they were also looking for an on-site shopping basket, and even though the sites had decent enough content, they considered it a bridging page.

Maybe you should trial having ALL external links from your site going via redirects & https (note https !!!) & rel=”nofollow”. Fake the basket.

When using adwords, treat your sites as disposable & don’t get emotional about them, like SEO I guess you never know when you might get hit & are no longer the teachers pet, simply play kiss chase. They hit you by kissing your proverbial backside goodbye, you run (copied content over to another domain), they chase, rinse & repeat.

Just because you get spanked it doesn’t necessarily mean your content was bad, make a few modifications & whack up a new one. This maybe “thin” & “narrow” minded, but it’s no reason why you cannot operate as a “fat” & “thin” affiliate concurrently, why should it be one or the other?

Your “fat” site can then be your fallback biatch.

What exactly is unique content? How can we define it once and for all?

I don’t know the answer to the question, so I am asking the question instead.

Then I will come onto what is recognised by search engines as unique content and how to avoid duplicate content issues. There are easy ways around duplicate content issues, which I ‘llexplain later as well as how some ultimately comes down to copyright, they are distinctly different.

As for Fat Affiliate or Thin Affiliate … my answer is in allegory … Does one buy milk from the supermarket? … or does one buy a cow & milk the cow whilst it’s fat for oneself.

Is it simply the volume or detail & description that makes something perceived as unique? What one’s perception of unique content might be, may not be to another. By scrambling the same words around & injecting a few others, in theory (whatever that theory is) does it actually make it unique? Thus are we using the correct adjective?

Is content simply something which is reworded, rephrased, re-mocked or rehashed & then put out there in some form, is it basically one & the same thing?

How many ways are there to describe a widget or the paint colour chart at your local diy store. Unique & quality is down to user & individual perception / evaluation, what you call light blue I might call topaz, what you call green I might call jade .. or ..

• Woodgate scored the winning goal for Spurs

• Woodgate headed to score the winning goal for Tottenham Hotspur

• Woodgate leaped high above Cech outwitting him to head the winning goal in the Carling Cup Final

• Woodgate leaped high above Cech outwitting him to head the winning goal for Tottenham Hotspur in extra time of the Carling Cup Final to beat Chelsea 2-1 and win their first major trophy since 1999.

The result is the same .. Woodgate scored the winning goal! .. so is any more unique than the other when it boils down to basically the same point?

Writing your version of an event or a product is still a re-edited version of the event or product detail, where it probably becomes more unique is via personal experience of an event or use of a product or experience of a services.

Do affiliates need to oversell, pre-sell or worse still pre-sell twice

Prefill the Basket – Don’t Presell the Customer Twice

Now for the Pise’ La Resistance

What is recognised by search engines as unique content, and a way of avoiding duplicate content issues & what some ultimately comes down to copyright, is distinctly different.

Let’s take a hypothetical example … you copy a full blown article from Wikipedia …

Say for example something about Imhotep, the first architect of the pyramids of the non royal population of Egypt, and the first mortal to be heralded as god-like.

How will the search engine spider measure unique content? On the site it will display exactly the same as the Wikipedia article, however the source code is different. Using simple coding you can randomise which words appear as hard coded, which display via javascript & which appear image based. The spider / bot cannot fully differentiate, by randomising the process you can fool the search spider / bot into thinking you have unique content which is constantly /intermittently changing (thinking its updating) through simple randomisation. Thus, though there might be copyright issues for articles or you have used the description from a merchants product feed for example … to the search engine you have fooled them into thinking it’s unique content & you’ll potentially avoid content duplication penalties.

I am not questioning the need for unique content, but questioning what the true definition is & if we use the adjective “unique” or phrase “content is king” too liberally, without analysing the actual core substance of the written material.

Just a little thought for you, expanding on a recent blog entry, is for paid search affiliates to be a little wary of a possible trend in the keyword policy for merchants, whereby merchants will start restricting you from not only bidding but also APPEARING / SHOWING. Putting you at the mercy of Google’s expanded match or possible full introduction of automatic broadmatch or any other paid search engine’s broadmatching algorithm.

First of all let’s cover some real basics, and I mean basics.

Currently most merchants with restricted keyword policies say don’t bid on their brand, which is fair enough, though they should ensure they actually register the official marks they own with the respective paid search providers.

The misspellings & variations has a different discussion of its own pertaining to it’s merits, though these keyword policies too are respected. However, does a merchant really know what they ALL are? The answer is NO, so in essence the standardised “no misspellings & variations” policies you see illustrates that either network or merchant or both isn’t thinking outside the box. For example is that merchant appearing in number one spot organically for those? Many merchants foolishly think that because they might appear number one or high up in organic search, even on their brand, they get a 100% CTR, when by rule of thumb it is probably a fraction of this. Even if you think reasonably, say 60%, that is still 40% leakage! Which can be offset still further (not completely) with a paid search advertisement in place, assuming they know ALL the variations & misspellings?

What merchants / networks fail to realise is that paid search & seo are not so different entities, if you ask this simple question.

“Do you agree that it’s unreasonable to expect a merchant to pay commissions on sales generated on their brand name by affiliates appearing in organic results?” … My answer is that I think it is unreasonable. Each has an element of cost & can be influenced to a certain degree but not ultimately controlled because of paid search & search engine algorithms. How do you know you haven’t had sales deduped because the last clickcame via a merchants own organic listings?

So many merchants / networks show there naivety on this alone!

A similar understanding can be thrown in the mix with hybrid phrases (brand +generic), there is then a likelihood of an increased number of sponsored ads bidding on the generic element, with merchants holding the brand part, still mistakenly thinking they get a maximum CTR rate from organic search, though if they are marrying this with paid search too (assuming they know ALL the hybrids, this is more measurable metric)

This related article will assist in the discussion to.

Say No ! to Restricting Affiliates Using Generic Terms in Paid Search Advertising

Now for the point of the blog …

To Not Appear or Not To Bid … That is the Question

Being asked (not dictated to like a scolded child) not to bid on brand, is fair enough, if an affiliate is using generic & product terms, a network / merchant / agency forcing negatives to cover expanded broadmatch issues & the possibly impending automatic match is over stepping the boundaries. Issues with Google’s algorithm for example are between the network / merchant / agency and Google et al … not the affiliate.

Ethical affiliates will respect not bidding on the brand & even misspellings / variations, but poppycock to negatives. Paid search affiliates will have thousands of adgroups & a number of accounts. To negative match every adgroup, account. merchant or site they promote is not only impractical, impossible but also unreasonable.

Put the boot on the other foot, If affiliates turned around to a merchant and demanded that the merchant put in a negative keywords for EVERY affiliate … i.e. 20,000 affiliates … which is an equal & reciprocated demand, do you think for one nanosecond that the merchant or network would agree or comply with this? No, they wouldn’t … so back off!

Now for the foreseeable trend, which affiliates should be wary off. Merchants & networks are going to try & circumnavigate this Google or paid search broadmatching problem by sneakily introducing a clause instead of saying you CANNOT BID on a phrase, YOU CANNOT APPEAR or SHOW FOR A PHRASE.

Take this as a warning, a few parties are really going to try this on by forcing negatives on paiod search affiliates.

Thus, yet again I refer to the aforementioned reasons, the onus is on the network / merchant / agency to register their actual marks with the paid search providers and apply pressure on them to stop aggravating affiliates. Any network that permits this to continue can expect an exodus of paid search affiliate (whatever the degree) unless they STOP putting the onus on & dictating to affiliates, because affiliates will bite back twice as hard or worse still simply abandon you.

So remember, forcing negative keywords is no jurisdiction of the network or merchant or agency. If you do, then you’ll need to re-examine the Pyramid of Perception.

Click Here for the Pyramid of Perception

Stop thinking SEO & Paid Search are different entities, preventing a merchant from appearing in organic search to a certain degree is just as easy or hard. So why aren’t SEO affiliates having the same restrictions imposed on them, ranking reasonably on Paid Search or Organic Results has their own elements of individual skill.

Why not turn to a SEO affiliate and say no more meta tags or name=”robots” content=”index,follow” or forcing javascript or images to be used for wherever the merchants name, variation or misspelling is mentioned.

Totally unreasonable isn’t it! Then in the same manner so is forcing negative keywords on paid search affiliates! When it seems there is lack in equality of who is receiving all the slaps by the happy-slappers, when perhaps neither paid search or seo affiliates should be be getting slapped at all.

Part of the problem is the training & perception of many network employees & merchants was incorrect from the start, so much so that it becomes ingrained as a bad habit, which needs to be reprogrammed, as bad advice is being given out.

But please heed this warning, as these are & will be further introduced without you fully realising and only then will it be from a network taking the side of a merchant, which is a familiar story with several networks. If it does, dump that merchant & if persistent the network too.