Today I received another YSM newsletter that announces a new break through ranking algorithm:

On February 5, 2007, we are introducing a new ranking model in the U.S. that considers an ad’s quality and bid amount. The new model is designed to help you spend less time in bidding wars and more time creating the most relevant, effective ads, which can help drive better results for your business.

Ad quality is determined by:

1. The ad’s historical performance - its click-through rate relative to competitors and normalized for position.
2. The ad’s expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

Well, that is new

At least they’re trying to learn from Google. YSM really is the worst and I don’t like at all spending time with it as I think it’s really user unfriendly. Also there are a lot of other things that I don’t like about it which I might talk about another time.

In the end of 2006, E-consultancy in association with Affiliate Program Advice have put together the most accurate reflection of the UK’s affiliate industry and did so with the support from virtually all the leading UK networks. It’s really interesting and provides thorough insights to the question who (UK) affiliates actually are.
You can download the results for free.

Right after Andre and me were philosophising about PPC affiliates in the UK Keith Bond, earning his income from PPC marketing, stated his point of view today.
Not surprisingly he’s convinced that there are advantages for the merchant in giving the whole SEM subject to their affiliates instead of doing it on their own. He concludes:

Basically the PPC Affiliate does the majority of the work involved in PPC advertising but only makes money if it’s done right, thus minimising the financial risk for the merchant. Leaving the merchant free to use the budget saved in other areas of the business.

Yeah, well. Sure there’s a smaller financial risk. However if you’re certain that your products can generate a profit and you hire someone who knows his business (or is capable of learning it) there’s almost no risk at all. If this is settled what do I need a budget for when I actually earn money with every click I pay for? At Spreadshirt we’re running our campaigns based on CPO restrictions and I adapted that philosophy as I think it makes perfect sense. An affiliate wouldn’t do anything else. For every Dollar he spends he needs to get more than a Dollar in return. However I think that they should be able to run additional campaigns. No problem with that.

According to AOL’s press release they’re planning on buying TradeDoubler.

Jeff Bewkes, President and Chief Operating Officer of Time Warner, said: “We’re pleased to make such an appealing offer to TradeDoubler shareholders. Not only does our offer provide an attractive premium valuation, but it also will enable TradeDoubler to play a key role in our strategic focus on growing our online advertising business in Europe. With AOL and Advertising.com, we have built a robust online advertising business in Europe, and TradeDoubler will help us accelerate the growth of this business.”

via Internetmarketing-Blog.de

I remember really well two online marketing get2gethers which were really different from each other. The first one took place in Düsseldorf, Germany in the middle of September. Back then I still was the affiliate manager at Spreadshirt. As always keeping my eyes open for affiliates that might be interesting for our programme. There weren’t too many however apart from some affiliates whose business it was to recruit other affiliates the majority would call themselves SEO. I think those people can generate a lot of sales. They don’t seem so interested in the t-shirt business as there’s less money to make than elsewhere but I’d say just give it some time until the more profitable markets become too competitive.
Anyway, only one week later I got the great opportunity to attend the ad-tech as well as the famous a4u get2gether in London.
Guess what: not even once I heard the word ‘SEO’. Instead everyone seemed to be into PPC. In the end I barely bothered asking as the answer would have been PPC anyway. I was pretty disappointed about that as I knew we already had some PPC affiliates promoting and there’s only a very limited number of positions on Google and Yahoo.
Now I’m back to this subject. Since I launched my UK coupon website recently but haven’t done anything to push it in the search engines I thought it might be time to check out the backlink structure of my competitors. I have checked out like 7 or 8 already and only two of them have at least some serious backlinks at all. All the others don’t seem to care at alle. Nothing that deserves to be called a backlink structure. The websites themselves aren’t optimised either (as far as I can tell). Of course this is good news for me and it might explain why I’m satisfied with my rankings already (although I also expect it to be a newbie bonus from Google).
I’m gonna focus more on the UK site. I’d need more time to do it properly but for starters I’ll just do my best with the resources given and I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to make some additional pocket money.
Btw, I don’t know many UK SEO blogs either (if any at all).