It is spammy to email press releases around willy nilly.
It can also be stupid.
I've just been sent a press release from a new media agency offering SEO and Social Media to say that they redesigned and launched a new website for [UK Tourist Attraction #56]
Great. Why did you send this Press Release to me? The digital marketing agency I work for happens to have 'media' in its name. The emailer just sent that press release to a generic alias to an email address they assumed was a press media company. Sorry; we've no interest in making a news story out of the activities of a competitor!
As it happens we've no shortage of travel clients. We have clients that sell train, plane or coach tickets to [UK Tourist Attraction #56] and we have clients who have hotels and restaurants near [UK Tourist Attraction #56].
The press release is interesting to me. I have to wonder whether [UK Tourist Attraction #56] might be doing a little extra marketing activity to promote their new website. This is a good time to ensure our travel and leisure campaigns have enough PPC budget or SEO presence related to keywords relating to [UK Tourist Attraction #56] or the city it is in.
In fact, it gets better than this, because I was the web site of [UK Tourist Attraction #56] I found that they have a micro-site to generate hotel bookings for people going to see the attraction and staying in the city. That micro-site looks to be a white label/affiliate offering from one of our client's competitors.
There are a whole load of branded booking engines on a single IP address, as it happens. I didn't just discover one affiliate working for a client's competitor; I found a whole bunch.
So, all because of this badly targeted email press release from [UK Tourist Attraction #56]'s social media and search company... our clients are now prepped to expect a possible surge of interest in the attraction and the city and one particular client (who runs their own affiliate marketing) is mulling over whether it is worth approaching any of those affiliates.
In one word: Ooops
By all means; announce a success and a website redesign warrants a press release. Just think through what's going to happen as a result of the press release, though.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Watch What You Do With That Press Release
Saturday, December 29, 2007
New Nectar Card. No Brands.
I got my new Nectar card in the post today. The first thing that I noticed confirmed to me that I'm an odd marketing-tech geek type of guy. The big brands who initially sponsored Nectar, notably Sainsbury's, are gone from the card.
My old card had Sainsbury's, Barclaycard, Debenhams and BP logos on the front. My new card is %100 Nectar.
If you're not familiar with Nectar then it's best thought of as a loyalty card. I hand it in when I buy stuff in Sainsbury's or (more commonly) Debenhams, etc, and I accrue loyalty points. In return Nectar learn what I like and I eventually get to trade my points in for free stuff. Along the way I may get special deals where if I buy this or that then I'll get extra Nectar points.
Interestingly, Nectar is also a corporate super affiliate. I can go to the Nectar website and gain Nectar points for shopping at Amazon or iTunes - as if Amazon and iTunes weren't tempting enough. You log into the site using the last 11 digits on your card (as shown in the image here).
Every now and then there's a rumble that Sainsbury's will be leaving Nectar and either doing a loyalty card which is exclusively theirs or ditching the loyalty card concept all together.
I imagine what we have here is a typical affiliate comment - why should I engage in brand building for you? What do I get out of it?
Monday, September 17, 2007
Zavvi, Zavvi, Zavvi, oih!
Affiliates start your engines. Race!
The Virgin Megastores chain has been sold - to itself. Branson sold all the UK and Irish megastores to a management buyout team.
Here's the SEO angle. The new team is going to rebrand the stores 'Zavvi'. If you quickly pop over to Google and do a [Zavvi] search you'll see that the number one position is up for grabs. In fact, the whole of page #1 is going to be a land rush.
It'll be interesting to see if any of 'Zavvi's' mainstream competitors - HMV, CDWOW, etc, risk a brand bidding strategy. It's not very ethical but I doubt Zavvi will get the trademark paperwork done in time for launch at Google. It's more likely we'll see affiliates brand bidding and that's a different kettle of fish.
Update: I don't think they have the .com. The .co.uk was registered on the 5th of this month by "Broomco".
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Eye For Travel
Oh yes - another chance to talk search to a captive audience. Muahaha. *wheeze*.
On the 23rd I'm actually double lucky as I get to talk about affiliates and search (which is where we old boys started). I'll be talking about how to coordinate the two disciplines.
Eye for Travel - Affiliate Track and I'll be there at 2:30 along with Ushma Agrawal from Marriott International, David Stratton from Holiday Extras, Peter Potthast from Nonstop Consulting and Hedwig Wassing from Euro Relais.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
The Landwind Race
Once and a while affiliates who operate through organic search rather than just paid search are thrown a golden opportunity. They had one today. Brand Republic is reporting that Landwind is looking for an European agency. They've got £50,000,000 to spend.
Never heard of Landwind? They own the MG sports car brand these days. Landwind are one of the large Chinese car manufacturers. They're one of the many big Chinese companies which are eying up Europe. Landwind want to begin by capturing 1% of the car market in Europe (which would mean they need to sell about 15,000 cars).
I quickly checked to see what the European domain name oppertunties for Landwind are. The best ones are gone. I didn't investigate to see who owns what but it does look like www.landwind.co.uk is up for speculation.
A Google search today suggests there are about 1,600,000 results for the phrase [landwind]. There are no paid search ads.
We all know that that's going to change. This is the time where pages optimised for [landwind] can begin to claw that all important "conceptual market share" by being the first to talk about Landwind and cars on the same page. Right now this blog post has more history in Google for being about "Landwind cars" than most other English language pages. If you're a car/automotive affiliate then this is a golden chance for you.
There are other terms to consider; X-Pedition is the name of their SUV and they've an MPV called Fashion. [Fashion] is a bit generic but would couple well with some choice "car keywords". X-Pedition is almost giving itself to you.
Of course, the creative agencies pitching for Landwind's £50,000,000 would do well the address this (but they won't). Unfortunately, all too often Search Marketing is thought about late on. A good creative digital agency would be including "launch speed" in their pitch - just how quickly they can get their first European Landwind sites live. These don't have to be cracking sites. These just have to be sites that can begin to fight for Search Market Share for Landwind.
There's are a few learnings to be had here:
- Always think Search
- It is best to be prepared before your news hits the wires
- It pays to be fast - and if you are an affiliate, that's your advantage over the multi-national companies
Monday, January 15, 2007
Will Google's cost per acquisition kill affiliate sites?
I'm watching with great interest AOL bid $900m for Tradedoubler. The update is that TradeDoubler's largest share holder, Alecta, has said the offer is too low. Google News currently has over 100 stories on the bid.
It seems that affiliates have had a bumpy ride of late. Up. Down. Up. Down. Much of this is due to two things:
- Merchants not understanding that affiliates need careful management
When (sorry; if) Google rolls out a cost-per-acquisition model (this is a topic I've not talked to Google about and can therefore safely blog about it - and I must stress that) then that might change.
Would you go to a third party when Google could manage your performance based advertising?
Well. Maybe! AOL and Alecta certainly seems to think so. After all, right now the only way Google has of inserting content on publisher sites is through AdSense and that's limited. The likes of TradeDoubler offer far more sophisticated content options. There are product feeds to enjoy. There are even search engine fronts to put on your site. Further more, with affiliate marketing it is the publisher - who knows his site best - which is responsible for matching the best banner for his content.
The deal has other merits for AOL. AOL bought Advertising.com back in 2004. I've certainly seen Advertising.com appear as a merchant on TradeDoubler in the past. There is interest in tapping into all those page impressions affiliates generate. If AOL owned both companies - and if they worked together - the super affiliates could be converted into media publishers or even visa versa.
Then there's the video battle. Ask Google and Advertising.com who has the largest network of video publishers and you'll get a different answer from each. There's a battle to be fought there. It's certainly possible to distribute video through TradeDoubler's network. Video on a cost per acquisition model would be interesting... but video has a further twist; cost per play. The cost per click or cost per impression model is weak because there's no way of telling if the user really did anything. A cost per play model which defines play as "getting to the end" or "watching at least 50%" of the video would be one where the merchant knew for certain that they had audience engagement. Suddenly TradeDoubler's large network of sites is a worthwhile prize.
The news is not the best for everyone. Deal Group Media's shares, which had begun to rise from their all time low of 2p, seem to have begun to drop again. Deal Group Media's DGM Affiliates has a large network of publishers too. Who knows. If AOL is unsuccessful in their attempts to grab TradeDoubler perhaps DGM/Fuel will be in line next?
JC, over at AnotherJunction, will likely have some thoughts on this too.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
<$I18N$LinksToThisPost>
Gosh. Two posts in one week! Is the world ending? Have I come strangely addicted to blogging? No! No! (or I hope not on both accounts).
I'm simply enjoying the gap between Christmas and Hogmanay (or New Year as SEO Sassenachs would call it). Addictions are much more likely to be in the form of tracking down episodes 128 and onwards of Inuyasha on YouTube, or anywhere, now that Google's pulled the series or through Untold Legends 2 on the PSP.
That Untold Legends 2 link goes to Amazon (old habits die hard - I paid for the second time through Uni via SEO and affiliate deals) and it reminds me that I've not been on the site in aaages. How can I tell? Amazon have keywords in the URL. I would have noticed that the very second that happened if I was a regular visitor. These days, yep, I tend to go to Tesco, Tesco Direct or Game. Linky!
With this brief lease of extra time I've taken a few hours to muck around with Blogger. I can't be accused of doing that in the past! Gosh. I am determined to use Blogger for this blog. This is Google'n'Blog. It seems appropriate. I'll Wordpress elsewhere. Google has so much work to do - still, and this is Blogger 2. The new custom layout options do not, and may never, work with FTP publishing. Although there is a lot still to do I can see why Google like the system. It's simple. It scales. The $dollar$ variables remind me of old TinyMUSH code (and that's showing my heritage). First off was fixing a bug in this new (to me) template. The bottom of posts end with <$I18N$LinksToThisPost> which, clearly, does not look right. It just takes a second to work out that the second dollar is in the wrong place. It should be <$I18NLinksToThisPost$>. You could just change that to "Links To This Post" as HTML text though. I say that because I've not yet found a way to change the values of the $variables. Keep in mind I've only been mucking around for a few hours and most of that time seems wasted on waiting for the entire blog to re-post after each tweak!
The "personal opinion" disclaimer has been put back in. It's naff but something tells me that that's important. The blog title Andrew Girdwood now links home. The 302 redirect on the domain level is now a 301. Not sure why I had it as a 302 to begin with... I suspect I had plans to grow a little portfolio or test site at the domain and have the blog as a part of it. Well. Ahem. Should that ever happen then Google will pick the changes up quickly enough for me. Individual blog post headings (like <$I18N$LinksToThisPost>) on the front page link to the actual blog posts. I've kept them as >h3< tags too.
Yes! *gasp*
H tags as links!
I did it! I did!
It makes perfect logical sense to me. The title of the post/article/story goes to the page for that post/article/story. The front page (think of a news paper) as an overall heading and then is divided into equally important sections - which are the <h3> areas.
This is not spam. I shudder to imagine the number of people who would worry about this.
I'll continue to muck around with Blogger and look for improvements. Hopefully Google will do the same. I'm hopeful that now it's on a new platform it'll be easier to maintain, tweak and improve.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Amazon swearing
During a meeting with a client I had the joy of bringing an Amazon page up to the big presentation sceen and foolishly picking a Trainspotting book to review.
In case it's not clear from the screen grab, Amazon's first two SIPs are: "shitein cunt" and "cunt sais". Thanks Amazon. Just what I wanted to show everyone.
If you're curious Amazon's search results for shitein cunt are here.
And guess what; sure we have Trainspotting and Porno but also The Language of Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction by Ismail Talib. Of course!
Monday, January 09, 2006
TradeDoubler duplicate content
TradeDoubler is the big European affiliate site. It's aimed at the high end of the market and does not aggressively recruit affiliates though it certainly goes after merchants.
Today TradeDoubler launched a number of "Free content" initiatives. Webmasters can simply cut'n'paste pre-written text provided by TradeDoubler and the merchant into their own site. This goes beyond adding a banner or a content unit but to actual content. Whereas this is aimed at PPC users - free landing pages, essentially, - it'll not have a good natural SEO effect. It's a good way to get into trouble for duplicate content. If you're paranoid you'll worry about Matt's post about "Math SOS" who put live entirely off topic pages and sold links from them. It's important to note that that's not the same as creating a content page and putting affiliate links off from it. Previously Matt had said that sites which sold links would loose their ability to pass PageRank on, this is clearly something different.
And yes, the sly will notice that I link to TradeDoubler with my own affiliate link. Heh. Scrubbing up an extra £2? Nooo. (I'll claim) Just giving an example of a valid affiliate link.
