As you may know, I published my first book using Amazon KDP. While I learned a lot of new skills like typesetting, editing and more, I chose to use a writing and layout tool I was already familiar with – MS Word. However, the official support for MS Word isn’t great. There are a few […]
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Boost your sales with our beginners guide to Awin Access
An independent guide on what to think about when launching and managing a new Awin Access affiliate program. Our handy pointers will help you get the most out of Awin Access.
Overreach by affiliate vendor tags, with examples
Many digital tech vendors provide services that need a tag to be placed across an entire website – not just on confirmation pages. While often necessary to power their tech solution, this always-on approach can become a backdoor for collecting far more data than necessary. In this article, I am going to share two first-hand […]
First Impressions of Googles NotebookLM
This morning I decided to take Google’s new Notebook LLM experiment for a spin, specifically the ‘Studio’ feature, which will generate a podcast style recording from your inputs. I fed it one of my own blog posts as the source and hit “generate”. I used the recent article about the EasyList as input. It’s a […]
Notes on Working With TrustPilot
Consumers often consider TrustPilot to be the most trusted review platform on the Internet, but for brands working with them is not always a pleasant experience. These are some notes about getting the most out of what a lot of people see as a problematic or controversial partner. These are real-world tactics I used to […]
The EasyList, AdBlockers and Affiliate Marketing
Major affiliate programs often blame lost conversions on ad blockers. It’s a vague explanation that shuts down the conversation without solving the problem. Yet most marketers don’t understand precisely why performance suffers or how blockers decide what to block, and a lot of affiliate marketers have never heard of the EasyList. Ad blockers rely on […]
HotHouses: Where Affiliate Fraud Gets Even More Toxic
We talk a lot about affiliate fraud prevention in affiliate marketing, but almost never about the business models built around abuse. The publishers who set out to do fraud. Affiliate marketing has always had issues with what we loosely term affiliate fraud – unauthorised PPC, brand bidding, fake coupon codes etc. But what if I […]
Go2cloud.org and subnetworks in affiliate ad-hijacking
If you manage affiliate programs for well-known brand names, you’ll eventually run into unauthorized PPC bidding, or ad-hijacking. You probably already know, but just in case, ad hijacking refers to a practice where affiliate publishers bid on your brand name or branded keywords without permission, or in breach of your affiliate programme rules. It is […]
App for Lidl SilverCrest Smart Audio Wifi Streamer
Nearly a decade ago, I found a piece of hi-fi equipment in my local Lidl supermarket – the ‘Silvercrest Smart Audio wireless hi-fi adapter‘ (SMRA 5.0 A1). It was a wi-fi music streamer with a decent feature list, despite being as cheap as chips. I bought one on a whim, though I didn’t have a […]
Unlock the hidden potential of zipped csv files with Google Sheets
In digital marketing product data is often essential to make certain tasks or types of promotion possible. Publishers, advertisers and agencies often rely on simple text files containing product information or keyword lists to power their activity. That is sometimes harder than it should be when the file is ‘zipped’ or the file in in […]
Using copyrighted images in affiliate product feeds
Product images are a key tool for affiliates but they can raise concerns about copyright. Do affiliates need permission from the copyright holder? What do you need to consider, and what do you do if there is a complaint?