First Post!
Well this is my first post since jumping on the blog bandwagon. I’ve never been one for keeping diaries but something about having your own blog on the web appealed to me. I must admit I knew nothing about blogging really until the weekend just gone whereby I happened to stumble across this blog from Russell Beattie, a guy from the US who works for Yahoo! I found it really interesting and from there found some more blogs until I decided enough was enough and I just had to create my own! So here I am, of course I can’t guarantee my blog will be as interesting as Russell’s but I’ll do my best 
Something occurred today which unfortunately happens all too often in the world of affiliate marketing. I received an email from one of the large London agencies who represent a major credit card here in the UK. Basically the email was telling me that my information regarding the consumer offer (APR, cashback rate etc.) was out of date. Fair enough. But what got me was the way that they worded it: “Can you please update this asap and we would appreciate if you would regularly check the information so that your details always remain updated.” Hmm, now that wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t the fact that this was the first ever communication I received from the merchant in question or the agency representing them. What makes it worse in my book is that they never emailed me to inform me that the credit card had changed their consumer offer in the first place. I work with literally hundreds of merchants and I would expect to be informed of any major changes to the consumer offering so that I could better represent this to the public via my sites. Or am I being unreasonable? All I expect really is to be treated as a partner and a legitimate route to market. This isn’t happening at the moment with a majority of affiliate merchants but maybe they would get better results and create longer lasting partnerships if it did?
What I’m listening to right now: John Legend - Get Lifted (album)
Monday, April 4th, 2005 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
April 5th, 2005 at 6:06 pm
The problem is that many affiliate agencies literally recruit hundreds and possibly even thousands of affiliates and it is normal that less than 5% of these affiliates will actually perform. While they mess about dealing with updates etc. for the 95% that are not performing they do not pay sufficient attention to the 5% that are actually driving their business.
Being an affiliate manager myself I know what a headache updates can be for everyone involved and there is a grey area for whose responsibility it is. I would personally say ultimate responsibility falls with the network to make sure that each and every affiliate is communicated to and that this is followed up, this is after all what they are employed by the Merchant to do. All the affiliate can do is act on information they are given. Some responsibility does lie with the affiliate to keep their site up to date but in order to do this the network needs to keep regular contact.
With FSA regulations and Merchants getting more cautious of their brand online this will become an increasingly touchy subject!
July 31st, 2007 at 6:10 am
[...] Kieron Donoghue blog has been around even longer than this blog. It was started on April 4, 2005. In those early days, Kieron would end his blog post by telling what music he’s listening to. [...]
April 4th, 2008 at 9:46 am
[...] In The Day” on April 4th 2005 I made my very first post on this blog. 3 years later I’m still here and I’d like to think still going [...]