Just wanted to say this is a really valid point and am delighted to see it raised from the horses mouth so to speak I’m forever banging on about taking a personalised approach when approaching affiliates. It does take a lot longer and you need to do your homework on who you are talking to but in my experience it gets a much better response and goes a long way to building good long term relationships with people which we all know is the key to success in this industry!

Helen

if you ever want to know who runs a website then use a WHOIS lookup tool such as http://www.whois.ws. All you do is enter the domain and it tells you who the owner is.

Also, I would avoid emailing websites that have no content related to the programs you are promoting, these emails will just be perceived as spam. Instead I would just focus on contacting websites where you think your programs will create a good match, and when you do make sure you send a personal email like the one I received from HSBC

Anyway, thanks for your comments and the feedback. Much appreciated.

I hope you are well?

I read with inertest the comments you have made re the approach I took when contacting you about the affiliate programmes I manage. I agree that the approach I undertook wasn’t personalised however I didn’t know that etoys was your website. I always contact affiliates I know by phone or personalised emails however Etoys was found on Alexa and there were no contact details provided, I could only find an email address for “contact” on your website.

I do understand that etoys per se wasn’t directly relevant to the programmes mentioned in my e mail however many affiliates have several websites and I often find that affiliates are interested in more than one of the programmes. I am grateful for you highlighting issues in my approach and will take on board your comments when recruiting in the future.

Kind Regards,

Adeel Farooq

Just a quick note to thank you for inspiring me into the affiliate marketing game. I got started around 14 months ago after reading your blog and will quit my job this July. It took me until Dec 06 to make around £3k per month profit and now I’m up to around £7.5k monthly - and I’ve not even started to use Yahoo and MSN paid search engines as yet. I’m aiming to triple the latter profit number by Xmas. Not bad for a soon to be former secretary.

Two questions I had concerns your structuring of your Google Adwords campaigns. How many keywords do you typically put into your adgroups - and does this differ if they are long tail keywords as opposed to being high volume/specific terms? Do you generally use phrase and exact matching?

Thanks again Kieron.

Caroline