When I first started of promoting gambling programs I only promoted casinos/poker/bingo rooms which had their own affiliate program rather than ones which go with network programs such as affiliate window. The main reason is because of the stats issue, you wan’t to see exactly how many people are playing, how many times the client has been download, how many registrations have been made, the total amount of deposits made etc and you can’t access that information on networks like Affiliate Window etc.

Another reason and a much more frustrating one is that a bingo/casino/poker room may one day just decide to drop their relationship with an affiliate network, this happened recently with Sun Bingo dropping their relationship with buy.at, my main reason for signing up with buy.at was to promote Sun Bingo, I made a lot of sales mainly due to their TV exposure etc so I signed up on a commission basis. It was frustrating enough that I only earned commission on sales for 6 months rather than a life time but if Sun Bingo drops buy.at then I make absolutely nothing. After getting no reply from buy.at I can only assume I won’t be recieving any commission after Sun Bingo drop buy.at at the end of the month. If Sun Bingo ran their own program like many excellent bing rooms do (Crown Bingo, Think Bingo etc) then I would expect to earn commission for the 6 months initially agreed.

As such I will find it hard to ever promote a gambling affiliate program through an affiliate network site and instead will rely on the gambling only affiliate networks, most of which are still paying me commissions from players I refered 4+ years ago!

What I’m drinking now - Scrumpy Jack

It might just be me, but when ever I’m out and about wether it be in a pub or a park I always see things through the eyes of an affiliates. For example a while back I came up with the idea of promoting truck rentals rather than car rentals after seeing hired truck drive past, after some minor research it seems that a) the competition is lower (42,000,000 for ‘car rentals’ 2,400,000) for ‘truck rentals’) and b) the commissions are substantialy higher. So I went on a bit of a PPC mission promoting this and made a decent profit.

I find it hard to even go out for a drink without thinking of things from an affiliate marketers prospective and I highly suspect I’m not the only one!

What I’m drinking now - Old Rose Cider

As any reader of the af4u forums will known sunshine.co.uk have been running a series of amazing affiliate incentives such as giving away holidays worth in excess of £2,000. The best thing about these incentives is that it’s open to everyone, sunshine.co.uk have created the competition in such a way that you don’t have to send £1′000s in commissions to even be considored, in order to win the latest competition all you have to do is a blog or write about your ideal itineray on any of the sunshine.co.uk’s destinations. IF you don’t have a travel site it’s the ideal time to get started.

I have never worked in the travel industry but decided to give it a shot despite the competition, I have always fancied a trip to india and noticed one of the destinations listed was Goa, a popular beach resort in India. I will post the URL of my site once launched, although I don’t expect to win with all the competition it’s still worth a shot not to mention the possibility of earning descent commissions (sunshione payout 7%).

One of the previous incentives was for affiliates to create a blog or website about any location on the sunshine website, not only was this an incentive for affiliate to get involved in the industry they gave full blown instructions on how to do it! checkout David Friskes excellent post here

Checkout the thread on AF4U or the excellent affiliate resource and blog section of sunshine.co.uk

If only other affiliate programs would take this sort of route more often!

A couple of weeks back I was thinking of laucnhing a campaign to promote business class only airline ’silverjet’ however a few back news was released that they failed to get much needed funding of around £12.7 million and today they have ceased all operations as of immediately.

Luckily I got out before I started although it wasn’t really a good idea to get involved anyway since Maxjet and Eos have rescently gone leaving no budget business class airlines flying at these prices.

Silverjet offered tickets at a 1/3rd the prices of it’s competitors (about £1,000 for a business class flight from london to Dubai)

Since it has suspended operations Virgin have announced heavily discounted flights for customers who have booked flights with silverjet (so any affiliates promoting silverjet get your Virgin Atlantic links up now )

Just read the following article, basiclly online gambling has been completely legalised in South Africa, a nation which reportedly gambles more than any other. If only the USA would follow suit!

Online gambling to be regulated and licensed in South Africa

Starting the week off in positive vein comes the news that the South African Parliament has at last approved a new Internet gambling law to strictly regulate and licence operators. The approved bill will now go to President Thabo Mbeki for signing into law.

A memorandum attached to the National Gambling Amendment Bill said the interactive gambling industry in Africa’s biggest economy was currently unregulated and “generally plagued” by crime. “This situation has resulted in a considerable loss of revenue to the national fiscus and compromises the country’s reputation as a responsible global citizen,” a spokesman said.

Reporting on the passage of the bill, Reuters said that it addresses the negative socio-economic effects associated with gambling and deals specifically with issues of problem gambling, player protection, licensing, taxation and advertising. Other media reports suggest that the legislation allows both Internet and cellphone gambling, as well as limited advertising for e-interactive gambling as approved by the Ministry of Trade and Industry, but this has not yet been confirmed.

In terms of the law every online player must be registered with a properly licensed interactive gambling provider who has been reviewed and approved, and affidavits will be required to ensure players who register are older than 18 years.

“The purpose of this Act is to ensure that all gambling activities are conducted responsibly, fairly and honestly to protect minors and other vulnerable persons from the negative effects of gambling,” a government statement said. Measures to obviate prolem or underage gambling include electronic monitoring systems.

Once signed by the President, the new law will be policed by South Africa’s National Gambling Board.

The National Gambling Amendment Bill has had a long and difficult passage through legislators despite an exhaustive study of the global Internet gambling industry commissioned by the government some years ago (see previous InfoPowa reports). The Bill has been the subject of heated and frequent debate before the Trade and Industry Portfolio Committee until it was finally agreed in the National Assembly that licensing and regulation was a better course than prohibition.

After the massive debate last year wether Absolute poker were allowing super user accounts (account where certain players can see all opponnents hands) it has become apparant that a similar issue has occured with UltimtaeBet Checkout the thread on 2+2. If this is true then it’s obviously another major blow to the genuine online poker companies. Ultimate bet has reportedly ripped players off for several million $

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showthread.php?t=208114

Yet another cashback site has been launched, but this time by one of the big boys.

Users can use the Microsoft live search engine to search for products, and see instantly how much cashback they will recieve. Advertisers can list products and set cashback rates giving microsoft their slice of commission too, thus cutting  out the risk of using PPC methods to achieve sales.

Imagine if this eventually spread to google? advertisers wouldn’t need to use PPC, google would still get their commission and users wouldn’t bother visiting any other sites if they can get cashback just by using their favourite search engine.
Certainly makes the future a bit more scarier for affiliate marketers sending traffic to merchants for specific products.

See the Microsoft live cashback site here

Just recieved my 3rd email this week about another affiliate program closure (this time on affiliate window)

Affiliate Window regret to inform you that the above Affiliate Programme is now closed. Please remove all existing links immediately.

Thank you for your efforts in promoting this Merchant.

We apologise for the lack-of-notice regarding this closure but this is only ever done to protect you as an affiliate, and us as a network.

We suggest the following list of merchants in this category that you can swap your links to:

thankfully I don’t promote this program heavily, but why was I not notified of this before, giving someone 0 time to remove all links is a bit unfair, someone at some point must have known in advanace this program would be closing soon.

Also remember the apprentice tonight, 9pm :), the teams travel to Marrakesh to bargain with some of the toughest bargainers on the planet, looks set for a cracking episode

What I’m Drink - Water it’s been a hot day

This might be useful for a few of you. This is a list of tools that I have found usefull when doing affiliate marketing.

StatsRemote
This piece of software allows you to check your stats on literally hundreds of programs. Many people spend way to much time during the day on logging in to sites and checking sales and signups etc, statsremote automaticly gathers your stats and shows the amount of clicks/sales day by day. It can also workout how much your spending each day on google adwords etc. It costs $29.95 a month but you can get a 3 day free trial and they offer discount on longer pre-paid options.
http://www.statsremote.com

Digital Point Keywords tool
Keep track of your search engine positions can be time consuming and tedious. This tool makes it a lot easier to keep track of an unlimited amount of keywords and URL. It will check up to the first 200 results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Once you are all setup you simply login to your account and click ‘check all’ and the script will then run through all the keywords and track their positions on the search engines. You can then view your positions and how they change over time as well as create a graph showing the fluctuation of your positions.
http://digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords

Roboform
A very usefull tool which does two things.
1) Keeps track of all your usernames and logins for all sites. It will also log you in to the sites at a click of a button
2) Automaticlly fills in forms with your details. IF your like me and can’t stand filling in form after form, roboform will automaticlly match your details to the form details on which ever site your visiting.
The software acts like a toolbar on top of your browser (similar to google toolbar etc) to give you quick access to whichever sites you wish to access.
You do have to pay to get the most out of this software but it is very cheap.
http://www.roboform.com

Nameboy
Finding a descent and memorable domain now-a-days is getting harder and harder, nameboy is a type of search engine which seeks out the best domain names which are available using your keywords. It can sometimes pull up some very good domain which are still avaiable. Well worth a bookmark!
http://www.nameboy.com

FireFTP
FireFTP is an FTP application that utilises tabbed browsing in firefox. Instead of having to run a separate application you can now use a fully functional FTP client from within firefox!
http://fireftp.mozdev.org/

Blogs and forums
Yes, this may be an obvious one, but forums and blogs gives users an invaluable amount of information for free. If you are looking to promote a new niche that you aren’t 100% familiar with you can get an incredible amount of highly useful info from related forums, a research tool full of your target users which is 100% free!!!

Please bookmark this page it will be updated, also feel free to comment with more tools and usefull sites

After checking my stats at some random affiliate site it occured to me just how little information there is.

The online gaming industry is obviously a huge market worth billions so why can’t some affiliate programs invest in some decent stat report systems. The biggest offender in my opinion are sites like Vegas Affiliates (although it’s a very good program) the stats are displayed day by day showing how much commission you have generated and how many clicks sent, this is all well and good but it doesn’t offer much insight in to the sort of traffic you are sending. Casino Rewards on the other hand show information about all the players including Age, Country, Games Played etc this is incredibly usefull info which allows you to further target your audience. I don’t think it’s to much to ask for an affiliate program to include the follow:
Day by day stats of traffic sent.
The refering URL of every sale so you know which of your pages actually work.
Data about your players such as the sort of game they are playing.
Custom campaigns, much like showing the refering URL it’s very useful to find out where your active customer come from.

Other things I believe a good affiliate program needs.
Specific Payment Dates - This is certainly more specific weithin the online gaming industry. Payment dates are all over the place especially for the previously mentioned Vegas Affiliates. Programs on the retail side of things often give specific dates that you can expect payments (i.e. affiliate winow)
Multiple Payment Methods - This isn’t to much of a concern as most programs now offer bank transfer. But sites simply offering a cheque option often leads to extra charges (thanks to hsbc) as well as a very long delay if the cheque is in $USD and I’m converting to £GBP
Fast support.  Anything over 24 hours to respond to an email is just to long. Also how hard is it to have telephone support??

What I’m drinking now - Pint of icey cold stella