December 2007

Merry Christmas from Existem!

It has been a very busy 12 months for all of us at Existem, and what a year it has been!

Within the last year we have launched the very successful a4uexpo Conference & Exhibition at ExCeL London, made Affiliate Marketing ’social’ with our new affiliates4u website, introduced the inaugural a4uAwards and launched our second cashback website Cashback Junction, whilst keeping all our other sites functioning!

Thanks to all who have liaised with Existem throughout the year, including our a4uexpo speakers, merchants, affiliates4u members, networks and agencies!

A big thank you to all who have encouraged and supported us throughout the year. We look forward to building on our relationships in 2008! - We have a feeling its going to be an awesome year!

Wishing you a Merry Christmas, and a prosperous New Year!

The Content Unit Showdown

As many of you know, at Existem we operate two cashback sites, and just in case you didn’t - they are FreeFivers and CashbackJunction. In keeping with the flurry of activity that we see at this time of the year, I decided to make a ‘gift wizard’ which in its simplistic form is a drop down menu of content units, each one program specific.

How hard can it be!? Well…

Three things that I need (only three!) to be able to add a content unit to FreeFivers are:

- A Maximum Width (to fit into our template)
- The HTML (or JavaScript if needs be)
- EPI tracking for each link (we are a cashback site, so a basic affiliate link is not enough, and in adding a basic link would most
likely cause support issues to rise, and my sanity to decline)

So, with that in mind - here are my thoughts on the network content generator tool thingys that I have been working with. I have not used all networks, as some don’t have the capability and some i don’t like :)

Here’s the Gift Wizard page:

Affiliate Window - using NOT their ShopWindow API etc, but instead using the Content Widgets secion. Setting up the template initially was pretty easy, however the flexibility of the template itself was restricted, and had to choose a teamplate that was the most suitable. The actual process of picking the program and products was available in JavaScript and also a PHP include. You can also put the EPI data into the generation process, and it adds this to every link. - 8/10

Buy.at - Using the ContentEngine, overall I found it very ‘fiddly’. Had some trouble in actually getting some products to show on the screen - for example - I changed the program selction to ‘All Approved Programmes’ (which is a lot!), the program category to Boys’ Fashion, and the search category to jumpers. I received a message saying ‘Your search returned no results - you could try: Selecting a broad range of programmes, use less search terms, use generic search terms’ (!) I’m still confused to this day! When I did manage to get some results I found the choice of fonts limited, and initially it was hard to tag my template style sheet onto it to make it look more appealing. - 5/10

Paid on Results - Using the Content Creator. Creating the template was a breeze, adding/selecting the programs and categories was also simple and speedy. EPI data was automatically added, and took aroudn 3 minutes to add a content unit to FreeFivers. Only problem I encountered was locating the best sellers for each program, as they are hard to find within the categories. A way round this is to sort the products by sales rank. Definitely the best - 9/10

Tradedoubler - Using AdTool - I was pretty shocked initially at the lack of retailers! A huge network and very limited retailers. Cummon guys! A nice touch on the AdTool is the ability to create your own personal template that wraps around the content. This could be used a lot more by myself to wrap a gift wizard design around it, but it hardly seems worth it with the lack of retailers! Good to see some retailers on here have adapted their own content units with more branding, which improves the look and feel. Simple yet effective. EPI data added easily through their JavaScript link. Please get more retailers on board! - 7/10

Webgains - AdCreator - Quite simple to prepare, however the design as a whole is pretty basic. Had problems with their EPI tracking through their JavaScript link, which took a while to sort - but thanks to Sachin for pestering his tech team - it did the trick and works well now. The selection of retailers is good, and the best seller option is a bonus in creating an appealing Content Unit from them. - 7/10

OMG - I noticed that OMG had launched their new beta ‘Content Module Designer’ - so I thought i’d give it a try. Designing the template went well and got through pretty quickly, however i was actually unable to complete a unit as every time i tried to select the colour of the text it would stall the page, and would then load up Access Denied problems! It could be a firefox error, so this may well be a heads up for you OMG tech guys!

All done! Apologies for the essay - but i feel like a fountain of knowledge when it comes to Content Units these days!