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Affiliate Managers Are Honest People (well most of them)

March 7, 2007 By Greg Niland

Last week on my Internet marketing radio show GoodKarma I was discussing affiliate managers and the concept of skimming (the act of not paying affiliates for all valid sales). It seems I might not have been clear and some people might have misunderstood what I meant. My position is that every affiliate manager should know what skimming is NOT that every affiliate manager is skimming. There are many good affiliate managers that DO NOT skim, are very HONEST and are nice enough people I would take them home to meet my mom.
Affiliate managers have a hard job. They need to make sure the affiliates are promoting the program and not damaging the brand reputation. They also need to make sure their technical team is properly tracking sales and paying affiliates on time. Not to mention the many other things a good affiliate manager needs to do.

If an affiliate manager does not know what “skimming” is they can not keep an eye open to make sure it is not occurring. When an affiliate contacts them and wonders why their conversion rate has dropped with no obvious reason, the affiliate manager better know what “skimming” is and be able to truthfully say that is not the cause. I am lucky and have found several really good affiliate managers who do a great job running their programs and proactively finding sales that accidentally fall through the cracks and paying me for them. I have also found the occasional “rotten apple”.

The most humorous incident of dealing with a bad affiliate manager was when my conversion rate kept falling for 3 months until it was almost exactly 1%. When I confronted the affiliate manager, the person claimed to not even know what the concept of skimming was and said it was impossible for me not be receiving credit for all my sales. The next month my conversion rate rose to almost exactly 2%. And he still claimed he was not manipulating my affiliate account. Needless to say I stopped sending him my traffic and spent more time working on projects for the good affiliate managers that I know.

Filed Under: SEO

Trust Transference Game – Who do you trust?

January 10, 2007 By Greg Niland

In this online industry where 99% of the time you deal with people in cyberspace and not face to face, trust has always been a big issue.  Sugarrae had a great post talking about what makes you follow and trust someone.  The idea of transference (ie you trust your friend’s friends) made me see potential for an interesting game.

The game is called the Trust Transference Game .   The rules are simple.  I name someone I trust, that person must then name a person they trust, and so on and so on.  Please no repeating of names and you do not need to name the person you trust the most. 

You can post your explanation of why you trust that person on your blog and make that person feel all warm and fuzzy knowing that there is at least one person other than their mother that trusts them. I’ll keep updating this thread with all of the responses.  At the end of the game we’ll have a long (and probably weird) line of transference, it should be interesting to see where it leads.

Greg Niland
  trusts
Rae Hoffman
  trusts
Michael Gray
  trusts
Todd Malicoat
  trusts
Andy Hagans
  trusts
Cameron Olthuis
  trusts
Jarrod Hunt
  trusts
Chris Hooley
  trusts
Andrew Wee (honorary mention – SEOmoz peeps)
trusts
Planet Andrea
  trusts
Shoemoney
trusts
?????????

Filed Under: Personal

Sugarrae’s secret lover is Bob Saget!

June 26, 2006 By Greg Niland

Rae and Bob Saget in bed

This photo shows just how much Rae loves Bob Saget.  All this time she has been pretending to hate Bob Saget but it was just a poor attempt to hide her true feelings.  🙂

For more details check out Sugarrae’s Bob Saget love post

Filed Under: Personal

Beta Test – Google Base added to serps

March 21, 2006 By Greg Niland

It appears that Google is testing the concept of adding a Google Base search box in their serps.  Below is a screen capture of what Google is showing for the keyword “homes for sale”.  Since they are already showing three paid listings on top of the organic search results it is interesting they would take away even more page real estate to add a search box for real estate listings in Google Base.  If they keep this up it will not matter if you rank #1 since no organic search results will be above the fold.  Google Base is still free so it wouldn’t be adding revenue.  The tests I did returned pages that are already in their standard search index.  I don’t really see a good reason for this, unless Google is laying down the groundwork for more specialized searching (after all you can only expect so much relevance when you have a single user input box) Good luck Google with your beta test.  Questions, comments?  Speak up.

screen capture of googlebase added to serps

[tags]google base, google beta, google serps[/tags]

Filed Under: SEO

Those Google Engineer’s are getting better looking

February 23, 2006 By Greg Niland

Vanessa Fox of Google Engineering
A warm GoodKarma welcome to Vanessa Fox of Google Engineering.  Listen to her Google Sitemap interview at WebmasterRadio.fm

Filed Under: SEO

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