Prompted by some recent posts on the forum - as we are now well into the 21st Century why do merchants and/or their agencies find it so difficult to update creative regularly, and more importantly, why do networks seemingly find it impossible to know when creative for a merchant is out of date. A quick search over the last few days and I've found plenty of merchants who still have creative for Father's Day, a fair few who have Mother's Day, some who have Easter, some who have Valentine's Day and even a few with Christmas (and ... View full article.

Affiliate Marketing is becoming a mature industry (or so we are told) - yet most merchants still don't understand what works when it comes to affiliate incentives. Let's start with a basic fact of life for most affiliate programmes - 80-90% of your sales will be provided by between 2 and 15 affiliates, with the rest providing the other 10-20%. Even within those 2-15 it is not atypical for 1 affiliate to generate 3 times as many sales as their nearest rival. SO - given those statistics (and no one ... View full article.

As many will know I am one of the first to moan (along with others) when a merchant closes their affiliate programme, or changes the terms and conditions at a moments notice (and don't take any of the following as condoning either of those actions - I'm still a firm believer that barring exceptional circumstances (and to my mind, "we are changing our marketing strategy" is not exceptional circumstances) - merchants/agencies should give proper notice (and affiliate networks should not sit on that notice when they are aware of it!) View full article.