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One Of The Dangers Of Outsourcing Your Link Building On The Cheap
Is that your cheap link building agency will annoy your affiliates enough to say something about it. Step forward SpectraBingo, who have obviously just started a link building campaign with some cheap service from the Indian subcontinent.
How do I know this? Well, I've seen a couple of really bad / incomprehensible posts at the Playing Bingo forum, both with IP addresses based in India and both mentioning SpectraBingo. Unfortunately only one of the link builders had the moxy to add a link to their signature to bypass the fifteen post before being able to add a URL rule. Obviously neither of the link builders know anything about Nofollow, as all the external links at the forum are Nofollowed and go through a redirection too.
Now, if you want to build up your links, try and avoid practices like this. Why? Well, now SpectraBingo are now in my book as link spammers. They probably wouldn't behave this way if they were doing it themselves, but thanks to the actions of the agency they've booked on the cheap they now have this reputation with me. Worse still, not only have they gained this reputation with me, they've done it without any sort of value from the links as not only are they Nofollowed, but the posts have been moved to a section that is not indexed by the search engines.
It's fair to say all us webmasters are link spammers to a degree. We all want our links out there on relevant sites, and will often do stuff to make sure it does. That said, whenever I try gaining links, I always try to add value to the site I'm gaining it from, whether it be on a forum, a comment on a blog or whatever. But having someone spam my links in my name? A big no-no and a big no thank you.
What's more annoying is I actively try to encourage people to post offers and promotions at the forum. People doing so need to put a bit of effort into posting around the forum as well as posting offer and promotions, but generally I'm happy for bingo companies to use the forum. The feeds from the forum get fed out to other site, so it worth their while to do so. Getting muppets like the ones SpectraBingo have employed is another matter though. And it's not just me. Jason at Loquax gets the forum spam as well as many others out there.
Perks Of The Trade - Bingo Affiliate Incentives
If you do a lot of affiliate work, sooner or later you'll spot offers for affiliate incentives. In the Bingo field there's a lot of them about - extra bonuses and competition prizes ranging from cars, to cash, to free mugs. It's a nice little perk, and I've had some nice little treats recently as a result of affiliate incentive schemes. So, in the tradition of many other blogs run by affiliate marketers, I thought I'd give a quick look at some of the treats I've got my mitts on.
One of the first nice incentives I got was an extra £1000 for hitting the next tier of sales with Gala Bingo. Last year I also won a Sony digital camera with Littlewoods Bingo. That came as nice little surprise as at the time, I didn't even know there was an incentive prize on offer. And talking of sod's law, I found out about it just weeks after I'd bought myself a new digital camera. Typical.
It went quiet for a while, there was one other nice prize of a holiday that I'll mention later, but that was it until now. There were plenty of affiliate incentive things going on, but none fell my way. I think Astro Bingo's opportunity to win a car was one of the better ones, but not one I was in the running for as I didn't meet the entry criteria. Then at the end of April, I got a nice mail informing me I'd won an iPhone courtesy of Chit Chat Bingo. I was aware of the competition, but didn't fancy my chances as I'd only referred the one player. Still, it must have been a lucky one as my iPhone is my new favourite gadget.
It didn't end there, there was a £125 bonus from Crown Bingo for sending them 10+ cash players over the last couple of months, a £20 voucher from Ann Summers Bingo and a mug and stickers from Paparazzi Bingo. To top it all, I got a phone call yesterday informing me I'd won a week in Barbados thanks to Foxy Bingo and affiliate future.
The excitement didn't last long as I realised it clashed with other stuff and wouldn't be able to take up the offer. It clashes with other work stuff I have going on, and I'm away the week before for the Bingo Summit and relying on family to do baby sitting duties. As I'm away now, there's no way I can spare the extra time, even for a trip to Barbados. Ah well, easy come, easy go.
The same thing happened last year, I also had been drawn for another trip, that time to Barcelona. It was pretty much the same set of circumstances as the current Barbados trip. Maybe in the future I can win one I can actually take (and take my wife on!)
As for the effectiveness of the incentives, do they make me alter the way I work and promote sites? Well, in truth, nope. I did switch affiliate links for the Barbados trip, but there was no extra promotion. All of these nice little extras have come out of existing practice. I'm not sure how other affiliates work with these incentives - keeping up with promoting who you want to win the incentives from could be a lot of work. Personally it's hard enough keeping up with it all, but as a nice surprise once in a while, it does wonders.
Big Banner Gripe. Literally...
If you've been following this still fairly new blog, you'll have spotted I tend to be a bit of a moaner. Well, not wanting to buck that trend, I thought I would quickly turn my sights onto another thing about working with affiliate programmes that really ticks me off, this time to do with the actual creatives they supply. Today my gripe is about big banners, or more precisely, the lack of them.
Now, I'm a massive fan of the leaderboard (728x90) and use it on most of my sites in a prominent, above-the-fold sort of position. It's a great way of both attracting the eye of a potential clickee and also giving your site some 'by association' joint branding.
I like to serve my banners via my OpenX ad server, as this allows me to do all sorts of things like geo-target and rotate the banners as users travel through the site. I know many are 'banner blind' but I find that if you can get the right sort of relevant offer/banner, and given its position on the page it can get some good click through rates and conversions. As a result, I like to have a good selection of banners that I can add to each new leaderboard zone I set up, to try and combat this banner blindness.
So, the last few weeks I've been setting up my new upgraded BANS sites, and one thing I've done with them is add extra affiliate partners to the pages. I've also added my favoured leaderboard slot in its usual top of the page position. I've gone off to get a range of banners to add to OpenX to rotate in the position, and what do I find. Loads of them don't supply banners in theses sizes. It's been true in my bingo work as well, a number of sites don't supply 728x90 banners as standard, and frankly, by doing so, they're all shooting themselves in the foot and losing out on some prime real estate on my sites.
Here's a couple of quick examples on some recent sites, and I'm not including eBay as affiliate partners, these are the extras above the eBay focused sites.
- Cheap Caravan Hire - 5 affiliate partners - 2 with 728 banners (Park Resorts and Butlins), 3 with no 728 Banners (Haven Holidays, Late Rooms, Park Holidays)
- Vintage And Custom Guitars - 4 affiliate partners - 1 with 728 banners (Guitar Centre), 3 without 728 banners (Guitar Trader, Musician's Friend, Instrument Pro)
And the list goes on. In bingo for example, the St Minver affiliate network now has 14 bingo sites on its programme, of which only 3 or 4 supply 728 banners as standard. I'm constantly finding myself frustrated at the lack of quality content at affiliate partners. Sure you can ask for custom built ones, but that just makes unnecessary work on my behalf, and becomes a pain to keep up with it all.
As a busy affiliate, I want an easy life, these things should be there as default. I don't want to have to waste time chasing up account managers and stuff to sort this now pretty standard banner size out for me. All these programmes have 468x60 banners as standard. All of them. Now, how hard is it to scale these banners up for the producers of them (with all the source files to hand) at the time of making the 468 banners? Please people in charge of the creatives, take a few extra seconds to add this size, then you can have my top slot and all those extra eyeballs for very little effort. It's a real no-brainer.
New And Dodgy Bingo Affiliate Promotion Technique
I'm sure what I'm about to mention could be applied to any number of affiliate programmes, not just bingo, and in applied, I mean by braver people than me. Why brave? Well, partially because it involves breaking copyright laws. Ok, so I'm checking a video feed on one of my sites to see the latest bingo videos, when I spot one for Madonna and Justin Timberlake. Slightly surprised, I visit this video to see what's going on. It's quite a clever little trick when you stop and think about it, let me explain.
Find a video that's going to be insanely popular, put you're branding on it and get it out on YouTube. Notice the prominent link on the right side? Here's a grab below.
Ok, marketing stuff on YouTube is far from new, I realise this, but to be honest, I've never seen it being done like this with bingo. Now, obviously Madge and Timb have nothing to do with bingo, but the idea is you get enough eyeballs, some will filter through and sign-up. So far the video I've featured has had less than 300 hits, but others by the same poster have had in excess of 30,000 and 20,000 hits.
Now, the more enterprising affiliates out there would be rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of that sort of traffic, but stop for a second and think about it. This poster is using copyrighted material that I'm 99.9% sure doesn't belong to him to push his affiliate site. How well does that sit with the likes of Mecca Bingo who are having their brand promoted in this mendacious fashion? If it was me, I would be less than impressed.
Ok, so there's little likelihood of the guy getting caught out, unless some bright spark looks at his whois information (oops) and it's in fact actually correct whois information, but given the music industry's recent attack on the copyright theft industry, it's quite possible the affiliate could land themselves in legal trouble. There are ways this technique could be applied with out the copyright infringement element and others are already utilising such methods.
Legal issues aside, it would also be interesting to see how well this technique converted for the affiliate. We've all tried advertising alongside non-relevant content, and whilst you may get lots of eyeballs, conversion rates generally tend to be very poor. To me it's akin to using the content network on Adsense or advertising on Facebook or something similar. Unless you're hitting the audience in the right place with the right intent, you're not going to see the rewards on the same level. That's in my experience at least, but maybe I'm just doing it wrong...
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