February 2007
buy.at Launch in the US
Mal has finally launched in the US. Iv’e a great deal of respect for the team at buy.at. Three years ago they were a small but affiliate focussed network who grasped the ideas, concerns, and thoughts of leading affiliates at that time to create an offering attractive to affiliates who were just another ‘figure’ with others. This personalised approach so often neglected, won over the business of many top affiliates, and their loyalty has often remained.
buy.at who now sit as a top three network in he UK, have teamed up with Andy Rodriguez to combat the US market. I met Andy at the recent Affiliate Summit in Vegas, he’s a great guy making an awesome duo.
There is no doubt that the two markets are simlar yet hugely different in the way they operate. Mal appreciates this, hence the 18 months+ of research and planning that has taken place. Mal’s recent new forum on abestweb replicates the strategy to win the hearts of affiliates at a4uForum in the UK many moons ago, and I suggest it will work wonders.
buy.at have the largest technical team in the UK if not the planet in Affiliate Marketing, this advantage will hopefully see them shine through in a competitive market.
One last thought; Affiliate Marketing is borderless, so I am surprised that UK affiliates are unable to join up for three months? do our friends over the pond need that much of a head start?
PC World Drop Cashback Sites
Received an e-mail from PC World yesterday @ 16.15:
“PC World would like to thank you for all you hard work to date.
PC World has made the decision to withdraw working with Cashback & Loyalty sites. We want to make sure our consumers are clear on our prices. We have web exclusive deals and in store prices, adding additional cashback etc has caused some customer service issues.
We are working closely with our brand teams to bring cashback and loyalty sites back onto the program in the future. So please look out for upcoming announcements to the program.
This will be effective as of Friday 23rd February.
Once again thanks for your support and we look forward to working with you again shortly.”
Thanks for the notice. Have been speaking to a fellow cashback site employee, who infact made contact with me over this issue. How many times have we seen this before, on other networks, with other programs? Fair enough there may have been problems with the activity on the program, however nothing was discussed with either of us and whats more providing us with 8 hours notice to remove links, offers, creatives and provide an explanation to users is not good enough.
Where is the harm in calling top cashback sites into a meeting, where problems such as this can be discussed? As has been said many many times before ‘this industry is based on relationships’ - why are reputable cashback sites subjected to such poor communication, and ultimately a decreasing relationship with merchants? There has been no improvement over a long period of time, and something needs to be done.
Ford Mustang Billboard ads
Just a quick post.
I found these lovely billboard designs by Ian Hart which i thought i would share with everyone as i found them really impressive.
Have a look at more of his billboards here
Web 2.0 : The Machine is Us/ing Us
Whether we like it or not you just can’t escape all this discussion about Web 2.0 and even Affiliate 2.0 - For those who have no idea what its all about, I stumbled upon a short video on youtube.com that will you some background into what all the fuss is about in a quick and mildy entertaining way.
One Page, One Commission Structure?
It’s not easy sifting through countless e-mails from over 10 networks, trying to find the latest deals, programme closures, and even changes in commission structures - Fact!
What i’m sure will be echoed from all the big players in the Incentive sites area is that these e-mails arrive in bulk every day, especially for the likes of Tradedoubler and Buy.at affiliates, where each program has a ’solus’ mailshot stating each and every change made to your account - which is handy, but not overly practical.
Running an incentive site will usually see a rise in sales of certain programs during different times of the year, even without promotion. This usually causes us to move up a tier for the next month, which we have to change in the system when notified. Imagine hundreds of programs doing the same, the e-mails keep coming and you are constantly changing offers on your site. The problems arise if we drop down in the next month, and miss notification, or indeed aren’t notified.
Sensing my logic - can’t we have a program list of all our approved programs, followed by the current commission structure? A simple page can allow us to check the programs without having to sift through e-mails for changes, ensuring they are correct on our sites. This can be checked monthly to ensure correct commission amounts are added to our user accounts - Happy Days…
This issue has been spoken about before, where other incentive sites have posted through the A4uForum.
Let’s see some advances with this, eh networks!?
Coding Standards, Comments and Documentation
When coding in any programming language it is very important to use proper coding standards. In a nutshell a coding standard is a definition for how to write code, name variables/objects and indent code so that it is structured and consistant. This has the benefit of making the code a lot easier to read and understand which helps in finding syntax errors and making modifications more quickly.
There are many widely used coding standards to choose from. The most common standards are called Allman/BSD and K&R, and the one I use when coding is Allman/BSD.
An example of some badly written code:
if($hours < 24 && $minutes < 60 && $seconds < 60) {return true;}
else{return false;}
The same code using Allman/BSD:
if($hours < 24 && $minutes < 60 && $seconds < 60)
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
Proper commenting and documentation can also make code easier to understand, especially if someone needs to understand code that was written by someone else. Without comments it can be very difficult to work out what code does and can dramatically affect the time required to make modifications to the code.
Example code:
// Store user information from the database into User objects in the users array
for($i=0; $i<$this->num_results; $i++)
{
$data = $result->getArray();
$this->users[$data['user_id'] = new User($data);
}
This comment tells the programmer exactly what this block of code does. Without it a programmer unfamiliar with the code might have to spend time going through it to work it out. There are also ways of producing much more comprehensive documentation, such as using JavaDoc or PHPDoc. These are tools which use special comments in your code to generate interactive documentation on all the objects, classes and variables it contains.
This article only covers the basics of coding standards and documentation. For more information about code and coding standards please visit these links:
