Our sites are run on an affiliate marketing model, where we use our online marketing skills to promote the latest products and special offers from major brands and specialist retailers in particular markets, and earn a small commission on sales in return for our efforts.

These costs are not passed on directly to the consumer, rather they are usually part of the promoting organisation’s overall marketing spend, and this approach is often an excellent way for companies to reach users that would otherwise be hard to find.

And we think (and hope) that our sites add considerable value for the consumer by offering a one-stop summary of available special offers as well as more in-depth information on brands and retailers, plus news and features from particularly relevant industry sectors.

Mostly, when working on these sites, we are dealing either with a company’s in-house affiliate or marketing manager, or specialist agency personnel to whom this work has been outsourced. That process has led us to compile this list of the five top things they do that make us happy.

Of course, if you’re an affiliate marketer reading this, your mileage may vary considerably. You may very well love the things we hate, and hate the things we love.

But, from the perspective of people who are working on long-term content sites, here are five simple tips to make us happy – and also keen to keep working with you:

1. Provide accurate, straightforward product links: It’s really thoughtful when an affiliate manager or agency sends us links customised with our affiliate ID and other details. And yet, we find that this isn’t always the most helpful way of doing things. For example, we might need to add a custom clickref. Or, if the URL is long, complex and contains many arguments, creating it through an affiliate network’s custom URL shortener can be a brilliant way of making sure nothing breaks. And, if we just want to check out a particular product to discover if it is suitable for one of our site niches, it’s useful to be able to do that at a click without inflating our tracking and yours. So there you have it – a few reasons why plain-vanilla links that allow us to apply the specific tools we need can often be more useful than the customised ones. Once or twice, they have come ready-supplied with someone else’s details – which is the best reason ever for not just pasting them in unchecked. And, er, sometimes they don’t work at all, get duplicated or link to an unrelated product. Check, check and check again…
2. Liaise well with your web developers: If you send us a great offer that we really want to promote, it always works best when there’s a custom page on the retailer’s website featuring that offer, since that builds customer trust and confidence. Or, at the very least, a mention of the offer, so the promotion’s existence is confirmed independently of us. And it isn’t completely unknown for the affiliate manager to get their offer emailed out, us to prepare our copy promoting it and then for the actual offer to never appear on the merchant’s website, or to appear with different prices to the ones quoted to us. That’s a no-no for so many reasons.
3. Sort out offers that run for a while: There may be very sound marketing reasons for running short, sharp 48-hour campaigns that persuade the customer to buy now, rather than going away and thinking about it. However, we have doubts over whether these are the best offers for content affiliates. If we’re going to write custom copy, do blog posts with attractive images and lots of deeplinks, include you in our latest offers round-ups and even use promotional banners in our featured front-page slot, then we need a little notice, plus an offer that’s not over as soon as it starts. If you’re targeting affiliates running email campaigns, short-notice, short-time offers are also likely to be a big problem. Putting a lot of work into a two-day offer just doesn’t compute, therefore we don’t do it.
4. Write some copy – and write it well: It is definitely worth writing a paragraph or two of copy at the top of promotional emails – it makes the offer look so much more desirable from an affiliate perspective. We take the point that everyone using the same words does not work at all well. However, it can so often be the starting point for our own ideas and inspiration. Also, do pay attention to the spelling, grammar and punctuation – where spending money is involved, people look for professionalism. It’s striking how some companies go to great lengths with classy graphics but spoil the effect with horribly amateurish copywriting – while others omit it altogether and pump out bare lists of product links as if they speak for themselves.
5. Build relationships: When you work in a niche with several similarly-named merchants, or where several offer the same product ranges at broadly the same prices, the merchant that stands out – and gets promoted – is the one that stays in contact. It’s always instructive to talk to people who emphasise their availability and approachability and then see how far that goes in practice – so if you stress that you enjoy working with content affiliates, it’s worth considering if your later actions bear that out and don’t drop off into a lengthy silence. Finally, the liaison people can sometimes only be as good as the support they get, no matter how hard they’re prepared to work on our behalf. We’ve had one excellent former agency member go to great lengths to help us organise a feature only to have the company that commissioned her fail to come through with the necessary expertise, through absolutely no fault of hers.

So – that’s our perspective, what’s yours? Leave a comment and let us know

Onlineability is very proud to support Radio Riel through its sponsorship programme.

Radio Riel: stretching the boundaries of online broadcasting

The project started out as an innovative way to bring content into virtual worlds and is now well on its way to being a fully-fledged internet-based public radio station. Listen here.

The station, which grew from a means of providing historically-accurate music at virtual events to a five-stream service incorporating an eclectic range of music, spoken-word and other programming, is celebrating its third birthday this week.

On the air 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it’s a tremendous achievement by founder Gabrielle Riel and everyone else involved. And we think it’s a template for the way content might come to be served up to users in the next iteration of the internet.

Just two reasons why we’re happy to be associated with Radio Riel and why we hope the association will continue for some time to come.

Happy third birthday to all at the station! Here’s an excerpt of the anniversary post from the station blog:

Radio Riel’s 3rd Anniversary and Radio Riel Reverie!

Three years ago, on June 1, 2007, Edward Pearse, Mitsu Figaro, Red Caliber and Gabrielle Riel launched Radio Riel, an internet radio station based in the virtual world of Second Life. Radio Riel’s goal was to provide historically appropriate music at events in the 19th Century, Victorian, Steampunk, Second Life community, The Independent State of Caledon.

Radio Riel was initially a single audio stream that we used for live events and to play Victorian music daily from 4:00pm – 8:00pm SLT. That Fall, the additions of Diamanda Gustafson and Elrik Merlin took us to a new level of providing music 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Soon afterward, Otenth Paderborn and Soliel Snook joined the team.

In 2007 and 2008, Radio Riel established itself as the premier source for historically appropriate and specialty music on the Second Life grid. Our Presenters knew how to provide the perfect soundtrack for any event, from a Medieval bonfire to a Baroque masked ball to a 1920′s speakeasy dance to an early 90s rave.

Read the rest of Gabrielle’s post here.

Two of the biggest, McLaren and Ferrari, held old-style press launches with accredited media assembling at a venue – the former at a sponsor’s headquarters in the UK, the latter in its base in Italy. The whole thing was streamed live over the internet for fans to see which was progress of a sort. But, frankly, it did remind us a bit of those newspapers that, in the earliest days of the web, scanned in their pages and made them available wholesale as giant images.

A third, new entrant Virgin F1, tried and failed to hold what it called a digital launch to celebrate its digital car. That meant designed entirely by computer rather than employing the more traditional (and expensive) method of using a wind tunnel. But a technical hitch meant no pictures appeared on the computer screens of expectant fans, journalists or (doubtless) competitors.

Which brings us to Williams F1. The Oxfordshire-based team is F1 aristocracy in that it has won numerous championships and enjoyed the services of drivers such as Ayrton Senna, Nigel Mansell, Damon Hill and Alain Prost. But in the past few years it has been gravely disadvantaged financially – the price of retaining its independent status in the face of a manufacturer-dominated sport.

Williams chose to unveil its new car through what looks very much like a viral marketing campaign featuring a “spy video” promoted on YouTube. On our motor racing site Brits on Pole we’ve taken a look at the nuts and bolts of the campaign and tried to assess how well it worked. Read the article below:

F1: Did Williams’ “viral car launch” pay off or backfire?

Has the Williams F1 team just staged the first-ever viral launch of an F1 car? And, perhaps more importantly, did it work?

The team, famous for concentrating its resources squarely in engineering and finding innovative solutions to fill in the areas around the edges, was one of several that opted to avoid a high-profile car launch this year, after plans for a joint event between the teams fell through.

Some teams opted to launch their cars online – including an unsuccessful event by Virgin F1 that was scuppered by technical problems – and some simply opted to turn up for the first or second scheduled test.

McLaren and Ferrari staged conventional press launches but added a new twist by making the proceedings available for fans to watch live via streaming video. Other teams, including Sauber and Renault, chose to unveil their machines during the first test session of the year at Valencia.

The top line from Williams was that it too would be taking that approach. But then a piece appeared in Autosport directly after the car’s pre-test shakedown at Silverstone on Thursday January 28 entitled “Exclusive: First image of new Williams.” Read the rest of the article here…

This year the site, which follows the fates of British drivers in all forms of open-wheel racing including Formula One and its feeder series GP2, the World Cup of Motorsport (A1GP) and the American IRL series, has been experimenting with lap-by-lap updates during grands prix – a process known as live blogging.

This has won it plenty of new readers and has greatly expanded the range of coverage that it has to offer. And, as a result of the increased interest, these posts will now be on offer as a free ebook at the season’s end.

Onlineability director Lisa Hutchins said: “Brits on Pole has been a great opportunity for us to try out all kinds of tools such as contextual advertising, optimisation techniques and traffic-building strategies – as well as being enormous fun to do.

“We hope that, while offering readers an entertaining and well-written motorsport blog that we enjoy working on, we can also develop and hone our skills in a key area of our business.”

* The Brits on Pole ebook will be issued at the conclusion of this year’s Formula One season after the Brazilian Grand Prix at Interlagos on November 2. If you want to receive it, drop us a line via our contact form.

MyBathroomFinder, part of the MyShoppingFinder brand launched a year ago by web development agency OnlineAbility, aims to help make sense of shopping online.

To celebrate its first anniversary it has added the following:

• A new directory of bathroom and home improvement retailers means that users can find the company supplying the product they need easily and quickly without hunting through a long and irrelevant list.
• A new features section means that they can access help and advice on all kinds of subjects from bathroom design and accessorising to DIY help and consumer advice.
• A new and improved newsletter function helps users keep up to date with the latest developments in the world of bathrooms.

The site teams up with all kinds of UK retailers, from specialist bathroom stores to high-street home improvement giants, to promote thousands of online bathroom products.

It also doesn’t neglect the little luxuries that make a bathroom complete, like lovely soft towels and relaxing body care products.

But it’s not just about shopping – the site also carries home improvement tips, advice, design features and a host of other information, including a blog that’s updated daily with new products, offers, advice and all kinds of news from the world of bathrooms.

The MyShoppingFinder brand already features a MyKitchenFinder blog – and a fully-featured MyBedroomFinder site is slated for release early in 2008.