Yesterday, Devonshire Terrace played host to Affiliate Window and buy.at’s first home and garden sector event, Al Fresco. A range of advertisers within the vertical attended for a summer BBQ and an afternoon full of networking opportunities with key publishers. Even the downpours in the afternoon could not dampen enthusiasms, as conversations continued indoors and undercover.

Each advertiser set up shop with two representatives from their performance marketing teams, to meet and greet with relevant publishers through an informal channel. With the continued emergence of advertisers and publishers within the home and garden sector, network hosted, vertical specific events are fundamental in developing long-standing and valuable business relationships. It was the perfect setting for both parties to showcase their affiliate activity, discuss tactical campaigns and propose opportunities for future programme growth.

As with all Digital Window events, a charity raffle was staged in aid of The Princes Trust, our sponsored charity, whose tireless work supports disadvantaged youths throughout the UK. There were a variety of themed prizes generously donated from advertisers, many thanks to all those who kindly contributed items for the raffle. In addition, the team at Flying Brands and Dealtastic provided an iPad which was picked up for the fantastic price of £270 in our charity auction. In total, £395 was raised for the Trust.

Photos from Al Fresco can be found on our Facebook page. If you attended the event and would like to provide feedback, please take five minutes to complete our short survey, we’d love to hear from you.

The Apple iPhone is the world’s number one smart phone and more and more people are using it to access the Internet. Because of its popularity, many big websites have created their own iPhone app so their readers can receive a much better user experience. You can get the John Chow dot Com iPhone app here.

Normally, creating an iPhone app is an expensive affair that requires hiring an iPhone developer and paying fees to Apple. Now, thanks to a new free service call Bloapp, any blogger can convert their blogs into a native iPhone app in less than five minutes.

Advantages of Bloapp

Besides being 100% free, Bloapp removes the following issues when creating your own iPhone app:

• Signing up for Apple iOS developer program $99/year (review takes around 1 month)
• Hiring iOS developer for your app
• Hiring UI designer for your app
• Developing the app (2-3 months)
• Waiting for 1-2 weeks for apple to approve your app in iTunes

Creating an iPhone app for your blog takes less than five minutes. All you have to do is register for a free account, enter some information about your blog, upload a logo, decide on the color scheme and you’re done!

Once you’ve saved all your settings, your app is available instantly in the Apple Appstore via the bloapp app that serves as the reading platform for your app. Bloapp even generates a QR code for you to promote your application to your blog readers.

If you don’t have an iPhone app for your blog and don’t want to spend the money it takes to create an independent app, then Bloapp is a pretty awesome solution. An Android version is coming soon.

Convert Your Blog Into An iPhone App with Bloapp

Following the announcement of their acquisition by uSwitch, we caught up with Top10.com’s Head of Partnerships, Julia Stent, to find out why this is such exciting news for both her team and the advertisers they support.

Top10.com has doubled in size since it was founded in 2006. That’s amazing growth – what factors have been most central to your success?

Top10 grew from a standing start in 2006 to over £10m in revenue by 2010.  The key factors to this growth were hard work, dedication and an amazing, passionate team.

There is no easy money to be made in affiliate marketing these days, and the broadband and mobile phones markets have always been hugely competitive. Our goal has always been to innovate, test and refine – and do things that little bit better than everyone else. We have never stopped trying to better ourselves since we launched over 5 years ago.

On a commercial level, we work strategically to support all our clients and work with them closely to help them deliver their goals within budget.

In what ways does uSwitch.com share the same vision and direction as Top10.com and in what ways do you bring something new to the table?

Since launching over 10 years ago, uSwitch.com has become one of the most trusted brands on the web, delivering the best prices to consumers for all the ‘home essentials’ including energy, finance, insurance and communications. We share exactly the same vision for helping consumers find the best prices and deals on a range of consumer products.

We are excited about integrating our comparison technology, speed testing and StreetStats products into uSwitch’s communications channel, and aim to offer a new level of service to millions more customers.

We also have a very similar outlook to uSwitch and their owners the Forward Group, in that we place a high emphasis on results, innovation and profitability.

The acquisition brings our focus on design, user interface and commercial partnerships to uSwitch and the Forward group.

Is there a time-frame for the transition to one portal offering independent price comparison and switching for all home essentials?

Our team are already busy migrating Top10.com’s core features into uSwitch.com and we aim to offer the best bits of Top10.com on uSwitch within a short space of time.

As you merge into a “one stop shop” for home services comparison, is there anything specific that our advertisers need to do to continue working with you?

We will be working with all are existing clients as closely as ever, the only difference will be more sales and exposure for our partners as we capitalise on uSwitch’s impressive traffic levels, consumer trust and brand recognition.

Over the next few months we’ll be exploring a lot more opportunities for our clients and we’re looking forward to talking about these projects with them very soon.

As an existing partner of Top10.com, O2′s Online Partnerships Manager, Sammy Elazab was one of the many advertisers delighted by the news;

“I’ve worked with Top10.com and uSwitch for a number of years now, both within my current role at O2 and in my previous guise at a network.  Both companies have excellent teams and are run very efficiently, promoting O2 across a number of products.  This acquisition can only have benefits for both them and their clients, combining a loyal and well known brand in uSwitch with the innovative and cutting edge technology that Top10.com have become renowned for throughout the affiliate and telecoms industry.  I will certainly be watching this space with excitement as to what they will bring in the near future.”

If you are an Affiliate Window advertiser and are interested in working with Top10.com, visit their Darwin Profile to learn more about their business and contact the team.

Tonight was game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals between the Vancouver Canucks and the Boston Bruins. Playing in Vancouver, fans had high hopes for their first ever Stanley Cup victory. However, like they’ve done so many times in the past, the Canucks let them down again by losing to the Bruins 4-0. Then a riot broke out. Right now, as I am writing this post, they’re still rioting on the street. There are cars on fire and looting all over downtown.

I’m not really shocked that the Canucks lost. They have a history of building up their fans’ hopes to a fever pitch and then slapping them down with a huge disappointment. I guess I really shouldn’t be shocked at the rioting either. After all, this happened 17 years ago when the Canucks lost to the Rangers in game 7. You think people would learn from history, but I guess they just repeat them.

I know I’m going to get comments that those rioters were not Canucks fans. I’m sorry, but they are Canucks fans. They wore the jerseys. They cheered on the team and they started a riot when the team lost. Sure, it may have been a small number of trouble makers but don’t go making excuses that they were not fans.

I was disappointed when the Canucks lost, but I’m more disappointed by the Vancouver Canucks fans. I can see why they’re considered the worst hockey fans in the league. They gave the best city is a world a huge black eye tonight. I guess it’s a good thing the Canucks don’t make it to the final too often. Once every 17 years is more than enough.

Many people have asked me what stat software I used to show my charts in my real life on page SEO case study post. The software is WordPress.com Stats and it’s one of the best stats plugin ever made for WordPress.

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your blog visitors. A tool like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information. However, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a blogger. That’s why Automattic, the creators of WordPress, created its own WordPress.com Stats to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface. Best of all, it makes all that information available right in the WordPress dashboard. There’s no need to load another browser window or a piece of software to view your stats.

Installing this stats plugin is much like installing the Akismet anti-spam plugin. All you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic. To get an API key for WordPress.com Stats, you need to sign up for a free WordPress.com account and WordPress will email you a key.

Once it’s running, WordPress.com Stats will begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave.

A small chart will appear in your admin bar if you are running WordPress 3.1 or later. Each line in the chart represents the traffic for the hour in relation to the previous hours. Clicking the chart will bring up the full WordPress.com Stats page.

Because all the processing and collection runs on WordPress.com servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use. WordPress.com stats report new visits typically within ten seconds.

Get WordPress.com Stats and six other plugins with my Free WordPress installation Service.

Last week we announced the winners in our ten year celebrations and the final recipient of a tin of gorgeous brownies was Swerve, the first merchant to record a sale on our existing tracking platform.

Ten years on and the designer clothing outlet are still running a profitable programme on the network. We caught up with Swerve’s Affiliate Manager, Qas, to find out the secret to their success.

Over the last ten years, we’ve seen big changes at Affiliate Window and major shifts in the industry as a whole. How has the Swerve brand changed and developed since 2001?

www.swerve .co.uk has gone from strength to strength over the past 10 years. What started out as a small business based in Reading, has now expanded to become an established name on the internet for discounted designer clothing.

Having been involved in the channel for so long, what’s the best piece of advice you could give a new brand launching on the platform?

Being part of Affiliate Window has given us the exposure to a very large audience. Our advice to any new comer is to be patient, and you will achieve your goals. A solid affiliate programme is not created over night and takes time and resource to build. We use our dedicated Swerve blog to communicate new products, offers and anything that may be of interest to both our customers and our affiliates.

Can you tell us something that affiliates still might not know about your programme?

www.swerve.co.uk offer up to 70% off top designer brands including Aquascutum, Diesel, G-Star and Hugo Boss; low prices and luxury products is a combination that proves irresistible to our customers, resulting in average basket values of £45. Couple this with our competitive 7% commission on all approved sales and it is clear to see why affiliates also enjoy the Swerve brand.

As an early adopter of affiliate marketing, how do you ensure that Swerve remains ahead of the curve?

Being an early adaptor in the performance channel has meant that we have accumulated a very large number of affiliates. As time passes we will no doubt find more partners that have relevant traffic to drive to our site, either in the form of new technologies or niche fashion portals. This provides us with a well-established programme that consistently drives performance.

In regards to our product range, we are constantly monitoring the fashion scene to make sure that the lines we stock are bang on trend. New stocks are updated every week to ensure customers are provided with the cutting edge fashion in designer menswear.

What are you main hopes for the brand over the next ten years?

We simply hope to become bigger and better for both our customers and affiliates. So if you haven’t already done so, join up to our affiliate scheme and be part of our success story.

I’m sure most of you have heard of bbPress, the side project from Automattic that never seemed to get as much attention as their flagship product WordPress .

bbPress always marketed itself as ‘forum software with a twist’, but the reality was very different. In reality, it was one of the most basic forum scripts available and lacked what many forum owners would call basic features. Updates were sporadic at best and due to very few people using it, the support community for people who did use it was never great (a few good developers seemed to provide all the support).

When I launched my WordPress blog about a year or so I tested out several forum scripts. For years I had used vBulletin, which most people recognise as the most advanced forum script available, though I felt a strange sort of duty to use bbPress due to it’s close association with the WordPress platform. One of the advantages of using bbPress was that I could use the same user database from my blog, which saved people from having to sign up twice. I was also looking for something simplistic to power my forum so I was ok with the basic features it had.

Unfortunately, bbPress was a stand alone script which meant that it worked independently from your blog database. The script was setup to integrate with WordPress though most people found the integration process difficult and even when it was installed correctly, the integration seemed to play up every now and then (cookie issues). Another stumbling block from the script being separate from WordPress was the design. If you were competent with CSS, HTML and PHP then you would have found integrating your forum with the rest of your websites design fairly straight forward. Though WordPress was built on making things easy, and having to go migrate the design from your blog to bbPress (which used a different template system) was a pain.

All this is about to change as in a few weeks time as bbPress will no longer be a stand alone product. Version 2.0 has been redesigned to use the custom post type feature in WordPress and will therefore be released as a WordPress plugin.

This means that bbPress:

• Can be installed in seconds
• Will integrate with your existing WordPress design
• Will integrate with your existing WordPress user base

The first beta release of the plugin was released on May 21, with the second and third being released on May 27 and June 12 respectively. The first stable release of the plugin is earmarked for the end of June though I am currently using the third beta on my live site and it seems to be working ok.

The developers are still working on removing all the bugs though. I installed the first beta in my test area and got it working right away though it caused a lot of problems on my live website. I had to deactivate all plugins, install bbPress and then reactivate them one by one to find out what plugins were causing the white screen of death in the admin area (two plugins seemed to conflict with bbPress). I’m sure the majority of conflicts will be removed over the coming months.

At the moment the plugin comes with one design which is based on last years Twenty Ten theme. I’m surprised that they never based it on the Twenty Eleven design, given it’s imminent release in a few weeks when WordPress 3.2 is released, though it should integrate with your existing design very well. The documentation currently available for modifying your own theme is minimal though this should also improve over the next month or so; plus I expect lots of designs to be released by theme developers over the coming months once bbPress is used by more and more users.

So why should you all be pleased about a simple forum script like bbPress being released as a plugin? The answer is simple. All WordPress bloggers now have the option of adding a forum to their website in seconds. You don’t have to worry about integrating a stand alone script with WordPress, you don’t have to spend time customising the forum design; all you need to do is search for bbPress in the plugin section of your admin area and click install and you will have added a community to your website in seconds.

I encourage you all to try the plugin out if you have time. Those of you who are using the older standalone version of the script on your website will be pleased to know that the plugin comes packaged with an importer that makes migrating over to the plugin version of bbPress incredibly easy.

If you have any questions about the plugin that I have not covered in this article, please leave a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them

Thanks,
Kevin

Related Links: bbPress Homepage | bbPress 2.0, Beta 3 Announcement | bbPress WordPress Plugin

Kevin Muldoon is a webmaster and blogger who lives in Central Scotland. His current project is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News and Modifications.

HasOffers, a company that knows how to party, has just announced the development and beta application process of a new cookie-less technology enabling advertisers to see the true influence of multiple affiliate and publisher relationships on a single user. You can apply now to be among the first of a select group of advertisers, networks, and publishers with access to the Adtribution Beta, coming this summer.

“Everyone realizes buying habits are changing as users spend more time online, yet advertising platforms have stayed the same,” said John Marsland, User Acquisition at Zynga. “Each user decision is influenced by multiple publishers, and advertisers need the ability to compensate those publishers based on the part they played. That’s why I’m excited to see what HasOffers has come up with.”

Performance advertising, also referred to as affiliate marketing, has become an $8 billion industry in the U.S. alone, making it the fastest growing advertising channel. Yet the disparity
between increasing Internet usage and online advertising budgets remains tremendous. Even though performance advertising has laid the sales foundations for companies like Amazon.com, Netflix, and even Groupon, it is still very limited by the tracking technology available to support it.

“We hear from people all the time – my affiliate program sucks,” said Lucas Brown, CEO of HasOffers. “Frankly I’m not surprised. That’s the real reason we entered into the performance advertising space, because we believe technology needs to fill a gap. Advertisers have no transparency, and they are often double and triple paying for acquisitions while some of the most valuable publishers are losing out big on commissions. This makes it really difficult foradvertisers to increase their online advertising budgets and allow the industry to grow. We’ve been working on a new way to measure influence on buying decisions and can’t wait to unveil the beta this summer.”

To support long-term growth in performance-based, online advertising, HasOffers is currently in production on a second edition that targets the need for more reliable, more transparent tracking technology to support advertisers, networks, and publishers in a quickly changing Internet landscape.

Apply for access to the Adtribution Beta

Last week saw the 7th annual European A4U expo event, hosted for the 2nd consecutive year at the Hilton Hotel in Munich. This year, 800 delegates from across the globe came together for a jam packed two days consisting of thought-provoking conference sessions covering the latest industry topics, a bustling exhibition hall with a number of brands represented, and for the first time, expert roundtables and speed networking events.

Europe’s leading performance advertising network, zanox was a platinum sponsor of the expo. With their exhibitor stand in a prime location, they displayed a strong brand presence and capitalised on the networking opportunities available.

Michael Hartwig, Chief Marketing Officer for zanox comments: “Attendance at the a4u is ‘mission critical’ for the zanox team as there is still a strong demand for information regarding the performance channel. The need for networking at the Expo is crucial; with a large number of relevant people from within the industry all under one roof, it is the ideal place to start conversations.

For zanox, the event was a huge success. Through five valuable contributions on panels and live talks, we underlined our market knowledge and leading position. The feedback we received from the audience was extremely positive and we are already engaged in discussions with potential business partners as to how we can apply our learning’s to their business.”

Digital Window’s Strategy Director, Kevin Edwards and Client Strategist, Owen Hewitson joined the 69 other guest speakers taking to the stage to present a network perspective on key topics within the channel. Day One kicked off with a joint panel session from Affiliate Window & buy.at, Top10.com, and Debenhams discussing Performance Marketing and the World Beyond.

The presentation examined how online spend continues to grow exponentially on a global scale, with an estimated 42% increase within the next three years. The UK affiliate market alone has seen a significant uplift of over 50% growth in the last three years. The session continued by looking beyond the basic online model to the up-and-coming innovations such as telephone tracking, mobile purchasing, offline voucher redemption and multi-channel promotions. Several case studies were presented which proved the value of these concepts, including Debenhams’ multichannel campaign examining how affiliates can drive offline sales through vouchers. The results were astounding – affiliates accounted for 43% of sales during the duration of the campaign; 57% in-store and 43% online. The full presentation can be found here.

Owen Hewitson’s session, Before, After and Around the Click: Publishers as a Branding Force and a Sales Force, delved into the evolution of the performance channel, where affiliates have become brands in their own right, changing relationships with advertisers to become affinity partnerships which are brand-to-brand. According to the latest Hitwise list of the top 100 retail sites in the UK, many companies listed are publishers as well as advertisers. Additionally, affiliates have achieved brand recognition through multiple specialties which has resulted in the blurring of promotional boundaries, representing and introducing new branding opportunities. Owen’s presentation in its entirety can be found here.

Matt Wood, Founder of Affiliates4U says: “The A4U Expo continues to innovate, push boundaries and create a real international platform to celebrate the success of the performance marketing industry while helping to shape its future. This year saw the largest international audience from across the world ever seen before. It’s events of this nature that introduce fresh ideas, strengthen existing relationships, and create new contacts that will help meet business and personal objectives for attendees.”

On Day Two, the audience was captivated with keynote speaker Rory Sutherland who captured the perfect images of the state of the online industry with his witty and entertaining analogies. Through use of practical examples which were easily relatable, Rory demonstrated how performance marketing can play a key driver in the changing of consumer behaviour. ‘People’s perception of exclusivity affects the understanding of its value, proving that value is entirely subjective.’

To view photos from the Expo please visit the Affiliate Window facebook page. Video recordings of the Digital Window speaker sessions are available on the Affiliate Window YouTube and Vimeo pages.

For press enquiries, please contact:
Lisa Chaikin
PR Manager – UK & US
Affiliate Window & buy.at
e: lisa.chaikin@digitalwindow.com
t: 020 7553 0333