Thankyou uSwitch.com

Many thanks to uSwitch.com for the unexpected parcel that arrived in the post this lunchtime.

Have you guessed what it is yet? Yep, a flat football…an official, hand sewn, FIFA World Cup 2006 football to boot (excuse the pun). Now if I could only find a valve needle I’d be able to blow it up.

I received this gift for my efforts in promoting uswitch as the portal to use for utility bill cost comparisons. As an affiliate of uswitch I always find them very proactive and they always keep me up-to-date with the latest energy price rise news – it’s nice to be treated as a partner.

Right, time for a game of 3 and in.

The New PayPal Credit Card

Whilst checking my PayPal account this morning (now there’s a very rare event) I noticed a banner promoting the new PayPal credit card. It immediately caught my attention because I promote a number of similar credit cards at my cardtart site.

I can’t see any real USP with this card. It’s managed by GE Money – a strong brand, but will people care? Yes, it offers 0% introductory rates on purchases and balance transfers (fee applies) for a 6 month period but this offer is easily matched with offerings from the likes of eggcard and morganstanley. Admittedly, the typical APR% is competitive at 12.9% but that’s only of benefit to those account holders who don’t clear their balance at the end of each month – savvy account holders will either pay the balance off or look to transfer it on again.

I like the strap line though… “Online. Offline. Anytime.”

They say that you can fund your PayPal account with the PayPal card but then as far as I’m aware you can add any credit or debit card to your account.

In summary, it’s a useful addition to the credit card market but it is no more competitive than any other offering.

credit cards – paypal – affiliate marketing

GHD As A Brand

I’ve been promoting GHD hair straighteners for about 3 years now and whilst doing some research earlier today I’ve realised just how successful the parent company, Jemella, has been at creating and promoting GHD as a consumer brand.

My research led me here – what a great name for a marketing agency! Propaganda and Jemella have worked together since 2002 and have a common link in Julian Kynaston, who is chairman of the former and also marketing director of the latter. Such is the strength of the GHD brand that sales have increased dramatically from £500,000 in 2001 to £46 million in 2004 and a projection of some £90 million for 2005/06. Phenomenal growth in such a short period.

I personally feel that there are at least three factors at work here. Firstly, the original GHD was a far superior product to any other hair straightening iron available (though by no means the cheapest) and secondly an aspirational brand has been carefully developed and nurtured. When any of my wife’s friends mentions hair straighteners, GHD is the only brand that gets mentioned – it’s like a must-have product and I rather suspect the relatively high purchase price gains peer approval too! Finally, in my opinion, the salon-only availability created brand exclusivity…you can’t just get the Argos catalogue out and buy a pair…this helps to create the must-have demand from consumers.

Where have the CJ staff names gone?

A revamp of the commissionjunction homepage was well overdue in my opinion.

I now get directed to uk.cj.com and get to see an admittedly smart looking welcome page with an above the fold welcome banner all done in flash. It’s not that fast to load though which I find a mild annoyance.

When I first saw the revamped homepage I noticed that the staff names were displayed alongside the staff mugshots. But this week, curiously, Ziggy, Sarah and the others that I can’t remember the name of, still appear but without their names being displayed – I wonder why?

Perhaps they were subject to targetted mail about the forthcoming java script links??

affiliate networks cj

adwords doesnt help me to spend my money

I’ve had some recent success with a merchants programme in an area that was completely new to me. In fact I think I need to place a new project in the queue for the particular marketplace because I believe that there is strong demand with not-so strong competition.

I’d set up my PPC campaigns in yahoo and adwords and specified my adwords daily budget, just like I always do. The budget seemed fine to me when I specified it. However, because my ad was performing well my spend was high too – though not high enough to hit the daily budget in the early to middle stages of my efforts.

Here’s the issue; just before the programme was about to end I received an email from adwords telling me that my campaign had been hitting it’s daily budget for the last 15 days and that if I increase my budget to £nn/day then I’d receive a very sizeable percentage increase in clicks. I’d just not noticed that I was hitting budget on a daily basis. I’m trying not to think about how much I lost in untapped revenue.

In one way adwords has performed exactly as it should. It didn’t let me overspend – fine, that’s what the campaign budget is there for. But, I think adwords could be better at highlighting the fact that a campaign is hitting the maximum budget. A little, but well positioned, exclamation mark or similar would suffice – just something to make me revisit the campaign settings. That way I can decide if I want to give google adwords some more of my money (I’m sure they want it).

I’ll send a suggestion to the adwords team and in the meantime I’ll better monitor my max budgets.

adwords – PPC

Useful SEO tools

I’m a recent reader of the very informative seomoz blog - it appears to contain posts of a high quality relating to various aspects of SEO and website marketing. Recently they posted about a new SEO tool on the block, seo-browser. It’s a useful tool with a mix of in site and external tools. The simple view offers a spider view of the URL whilst the advanced view offers the mix of internal/external tools. Having used it on a couple of my URLs it’s highlighted a few issues that required some attention. I’ll be using this tool frequently.

The second tool, page strength, is an seomoz in-house production. It collates information for a given URL from a number of sources in order to return a page rank out of 10. It’s very interesting with some useful information.

Looks like I need to improve my site promotion !

seomoz seo tools

I told you so…don’t rely on Google

As a result of the end of June changes to googles search algorithm some of my sites have been adversely affected – see, I told you that you should never rely on free, organic traffic from search results.

I’ve scanned some of the relevant forums and as usual everyone is guessing what sites may be being penalised for. Some webmasters suggest that affiliate sites have been targetted but I’m not so sure. Some of my affiliate sites have been hit but friends affiliate sites targetting the exact same keywords are still there in the top 5. Who knows what the issue is? My google sitemaps reports aren’t telling me that I’ve been a naughty boy.

Fortunately, although I’ve taken a revenue hit due to the decrease in organic traffic, I’ve been working on my PPC campaigns….hedging bets and all that.

All this has happened before and without changing anything my sites have come back some months later. However, this time I’m tempted to give my personal finances portal a complete revamp. Such a revamp is (very) long overdue – the layout is not too hot and I haven’t changed it because the site was ranking well for some UK credit cards that I target. I’ll give it some thought first – acting in haste…!