Latest News
Join the Affiliate Marketing in Europe, LinkedIn Group
Evening, In our quest for global domination we’ve decided to create a LinkedIn group for publishers, advertisers, agencies and affiliate networks who have an interest in Affiliate Marketing in any EU territory, If you hit that criteria then you are eligible to join!
OSOYOU, Innovative Shopping Tool
Thought this new shopping tool from the team at OSOYOU.com was pretty awesome.
Great way of adding value for the user and no doubt earning a bit of affiliate revenue too.
It works by a member of the site visiting any partner merchant website, and if they like an item(s) they can save it to their OSOYOU style bank for them and their friends to review. A really cool way of utilising both the API’s / product feeds available from networks and investing in a new value add application.
Top Brands Account for Nine in Ten UK Internet Searches
An interesting ’short’ in this weeks hitwise.co.uk newsletter.
It appears “UK consumers are shunning generic Internet searches, such as ‘cheap flights’ or ‘broadband’, in favour of searching for popular brands. According to the Managing Your Brand Online report, the growth of branded search in the UK offers threats as well as opportunities for brand owners and marketers.
Eighty-eight percent of searches for the 2,000 most popular search terms in the UK during May 2008 were for branded terms, a figure that has increased from 65% in May 2005. The most searched-for term in the UK during May 2008 was ‘facebook’, which accounted for one in every 72 searches”
Is the longtail dissapearing? no, but this does give affiliates with brand related terms listed organically greater emphasis to increase rank for increased ROI. Is Brand + generic also becoming more important?
a4uAwards on Channel 4
Bit of a surprise tonight! For those that attended the a4uAwards back in June, you will have endured Olivia Lee gatecrash our Affiliate Marketing Awards ceremony for a Channel 4 comedy ‘Olivia Lee’s Naughty Bits’.
The sketch turned out to be pretty funny and it was great picking out industry faces from the crowd with Kevin Edwards, David Hall, Zak Edwards, Shane Robinson, Elaine Forth, Shakil Khan amongst others all in the limelight!
I’m not sure how you all put up with that 10 minute acceptance speech though!! The duo from Affiliate Window David Hall and Kevin Edwards was the best for me.
Here are a few pictures we took on the night.
We’ll be announcing dates for the 2009 Awards ceremony soon!
A bit of co-incidence is that I also saw whilst typing away our host for the evening on the Charlotte Church Show (my wife was watching this one!)
Life at Affiliate Summit Boston 2008
Affiliate Summit Boston, has a different feel this year, moving on from a hotel based location we’re at the Boston Convention Centre, with 2300 fellow delegates, 36% of which are affiliates, ASE has a large exhibition hall, and 3 simultaneous tracks running throughout the day.
I have just been to the ‘Ask The Experts’ Session this morning, though there are only 80 to 100 people here in a round table environment its a great opportunity to meet experts within the field of Mobile, Video and SEO, you get the feeling some people are missing out.
The show has overall been good so far, with a number of good networking opportunities, and a packed exhibition hall, the sessions have been for me variable with some excellent panels and moderated sessions.
Chris and I have been interviewing a number of figures here in Boston, some familiar and new to the scene, Chris will be uploading these over at affiliates4u.tv in the coming days.
Big thanks to the Team at Affiliate Future for their hospitality at the Top of The Hub - There were quite a number of unnoficcial networking parties last night and in previous nights. LinkShare for instance held a reception for their clients outside of the conference.
The official webmasterradio.fm party was cancelled which is a shame as these networking events are integral to the success of the trip, well perhaps that’s just in my opinion as It’s a great opportunity to sink a few pale ales with fellow affiliates!
The main difference here, this year is that affiliates seem to be making money more from the long-tail and niches within the marketplace, this appears to be confounded by the number of niche exhibitors rather than larger brands on the exhibit hall, Maybe it’s always been like this, but it appears more noticable this year.
If you’re here and would like us to catch you on film, buzz me on twitter or catch us as we roam the exhibition hall!
Looking forward to a busy day ahead, we have a number of meetings set up as well as a number of sessions in the diary to attend. Though I’m not sure if there is a party tonight, so need to arrange something today!
Designing a Wordpress Theme From Scratch (The Theme)
First off I’d like to apologise for the big gap between posts. I’ve been busy here at Existem HQ and haven’t had any spare time at night to finish off the theme.
Thankfully, I’ve completed it and it is available to download here now. You can preview the theme here
Below are the instructions on how to install the theme to get the most out of it. Please let me know how you get on if you use it. I will be completing the tutorial next week that will walk through how I took the html mock up and made it into a wordpress theme.
Included in the zip file are all the original psd files so you can easily adapt the theme to suit you.
Install Instructions
- Download and unzip the theme to your local themes folder
- Open up header.php and set up the variables in the header to link to your website. This will link the stylesheets etc to the correct place
- Change the page navigation (also in the header) to the appropriate pages on your site.
- Add your twitter script to the footer.php just above the body. This theme works best with only one tweet displayed. Remember to remove the dummy text from sidebar.php
- Upload to your themes folder on your website
- Add the archives, category and blogroll widget to the sidebar using the widgets page. The theme is set up to take these three by default, if you add others you will need to style them in the style.css
- Thats it, rock and roll
