This was the first seminar I attended, 9am Tuesday morning, presented by Liane Dietrich of LinkShare. The attendance wasn’t huge because of a printer problem at the registration desk (I’m glad I registered the previous night), so here’s a summary from a finance affiliate’s point of view for anyone who missed it:

According to Information Shopper, 92% of people have more confidence in online information than salespeople. I’ve met a lot of salespeople – is it bad to say this doesn’t really surprise me?! As soon as someone hits me with a hard sell, I immediately switch off. To find out whether a product was really worth buying, I would go online to find out.

Apparently I’m not the only one. According to Liane’s presentation, here are the percentages of people who research a particular type of product before buying:

Cars, computers – 80-85%

Vacuum cleaners, tools – 55-70%

Books, films – around 40-50%

Apparently mobile internet users will catch desktop users within 5 years. So there is no doubt that mobile is a huge growth market. Interestingly, 55% of mobile purchases are made from home. People are beginning to prefer the immediate connectivity of their mobile over sluggish desktop and laptop load times. As long as wifi or 3G makes the process easy and quick, people are beginning to purchase more and more on their smartphone. And they like doing it – 93% of people making a mobile purchase had ‘a good experience’.

As far as the finance sector is concerned, major innovation is underway. I have a UK banking app which allows me to check my balances and see mini-statements. In America they are ahead of this. Liane presented the new Chase bank iPhone application, which incredibly allows you to take a photo of a cheque, upload it to the app and hey presto! the money is deposited into your account.

People are spending on their mobiles. By 2015 £75 billion will be spent on goods and services via smartphones. According to Forrester research, 2.8% of sales are currently made via mobiles. Expect this to increase year on year.

The example of Japan was interesting too. Over half the Japanese have a smartphone, and in 2010 38% of affiliate revenue in Japan was accounted for by mobile. This trend is likely to spread fast.

Looking at the highest mobile growth rate sectors, I was surprised to see fashion at the top. The list was:

Fashion, Cosmetics, Tickets and Entertainment, Catalogue, TV Shopping.

Another noteworthy fact is that sales via PCs and laptops peak at the weekend in Japan – this is not the case with mobile purchases, which remains relatively constant throughout the week.

Liane concluded by answering the question ‘Is the industry ready for mobile affiliate marketing’. She acknowledged problems with M-commerce such as the varying behaviour of the various mobile browsers, and some buggy platforms. I think the general answer was yes though, and that if you’re an affiliate who is not thinking about going mobile soon, you should be – otherwise you may well be left behind…

What are your thoughts on the future of mobile affiliate marketing?

Well I’ve just returned from my first A4U Expo and my first thought is ‘I’m knackered’. It was worth it though. The value of something like this for a work-from-home affiliate like me is immense. It was extremely useful from a business point of view, and I had a great time to boot! Here are 10 reasons why you should attend the next one:

1. Seminars

Really helpful thought-provoking seminars covering a wide range of topics, all of which were in some way or other relevant to my affiliate business. There’s no way you can see them all, so just pick the most relevant to your particular niche. Ones that stood out for me were ‘How mobile is creating a buzz in the online performance marketing channel’, ‘SEO ranking factors 2010′, ‘Avoiding the Google slap’ and ‘Finance is back’ (for obvious reasons).

2. Speakers

So many expert speakers to listen to over the 2 days, a really good mix of SEO experts like Will Critchlow, Dave Naylor, Dixon Jones; super affiliates such as John Lamerton, Kirsty McCubbin, Nadeem Azam, Michelle Dewberry; and industry experts like Matt Bailey, Mark Russell, Carla Arrindell and Chris Worthy. Plus most of the MD’s of the main affiliate networks, and many more.

Every seminar ended with a thorough Q & A session, but there was plenty of time to meet the speakers after each session – they were all very approachable.

3. Venue

The ExCeL is without doubt the longest building I’ve ever been in. It takes about 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other. Perhaps Ollie from Route One could hand out skateboards at the west entrance next year for those of us staying in hotels near that end of the building.

The location of the expo was the Platinum suite, and the way it was laid out made it extremely easy to network, find your way around and get to the seminars on time. It’s something that the planners at A4U obviously put a lot of time into, and it really paid off.

4. Food and drink

The thought of eating chicken and leek pie out of a cardboard box didn’t appeal to me at first, but it was actually very tasty and convenient, as was the sausage and mash on the second day. Water and soft drinks were in plentiful supply throughout the day.

5. Games

Some of the entertainment on offer in the exhibition hall included an F1 Driving Simulator complete with realistic F1 cockpit and force feedback, a dance mat, Ferrari driving simulators and a Blackjack and Roulette casino.

6. Competitions

I think I entered about 5 competitions to win an iPad simply by leaving my business card in a bowl. There were also prizes for the highest number of casino chips and fastest lap times on the racing games.

7. Free stuff

I thought I had bagged all the available freebies until I saw Dom Hodgson who looked like he might need a removals firm to take all his free stuff home. Amongst the things I picked up were a rucksack, T-shirt, memory sticks, highlighters, mugs, bottle openers and a few free beers from Affilinet, Clickbank and Webgains.

8. Expert roundtables

I am primarily a lead gen affiliate so I sat in on the Maximising Lead Generation roundtable on Day 1, where we had a thought-provoking discussion on, you guessed it, lead gen. I only wish I had time to visit the Google Instant and New Affiliate Marketing Techniques discussions too.

9. Parties

Great entertainment mixed with free booze until late in the evening – what more can you ask for. I only had chance to attend the first two parties, but believe me that was enough!

10. Networking

I’ve saved the most important ’til last. Networking was what this event was all about really. There were opportunities to network all over the place, from the exhibition hall to the party venues. I am confident that my affiliate business will massively benefit from this conference – I met loads of people who I will do business with in the coming weeks and months. I will definitely be attending the next one.

If you went to the Expo, I’d love to hear what you thought about it – please leave your comments below!

The Office Fair Trading (OFT) have warned 129 debt management companies that their Consumer Credit Licences will be revoked unless they take immediate action to ‘improve their standards substantially’.

The OFT carried out a series of undercover investigations that involved visits to many debt management companies. They found evidence that firms were failing to reveal the fees they charge and sometimes falsely presented their services as free.

Debt management companies target people who have money troubles and promise to negotiate a way to avoid going bankrupt by making regular monthly payments on their debts. In addition to failing to disclose fees, some of these debt management companies have no experience in personal finance and are not qualified to help.

Britain can be said to be in personal debt crisis, with more than £1 trillion owed by ordinary families. This situation has led to the current boom in the debt management industry.

More information

What are thoughts on this situation? Post your opinion below!

Excellent article by Nick Caulfield, Account Director at buy.at, on the finance sector of affiliate marketing

Read the full article here

My Home Finance, set up by the National Housing Federation, is designed to give manageable loans to people with bad credit histories. The scheme is being piloted in the West Midlands, and the aim is to provide an alternative to loan sharks in the area.

Customers on the scheme will have to go through a 45 minute interview process – if it is deemed they have a realistic chance of paying the money back, they will be able to borrow around £500 to be paid back weekly.

The APR of the loans is 29.9%, rising to 49.9% in April. Interestingly, this interest rate is higher than the maximum that credit unions can charge by law. However these rates are lower than the legitimate doorstep lending companies such as Provident.

As part of the scheme customers will also be offered debt help, and advice on how to open a bank account.

There is an estimated 4 million people in the UK without access to mainstream affordable credit. The NHF is planning to open up branches across the country and write up to 150,000 loans for people on lower incomes in the next 10 years.

What are your thoughts on this scheme? Have your say below:

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee today voted to keep the base rate of interest at 0.5%.

The fusion of Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing has been on the cards for a while now, but things are finally starting to happen. This is going to have an effect on finance affiliates.

First, SEO will become a little more straightforward if anything. Instead of having to optimise for 3 search engines, you will only have Google and Bing to worry about. It would be wise to start reading up on Bing SEO techniques asap if you haven’t already.

Now the bad news – PPC may be a little more complicated. If you are running a PPC campaign on Yahoo! but not MSN Adcenter, your account will be automatically transferred to the Bing platform. The problem is, there are differences between the platforms. For instance, AdCenter has 3 match types, whilst Yahoo! only has 2. You will need to optimise your Yahoo! campaigns so that they are ready for the transition. If you have accounts with both AdCenter and Yahoo!, you should be ok – now is the time to focus on building up your AdCenter campaigns.

Yahoo and Bing only have a fraction of the search market compared to Google. However, the merger provides further growth potential, and whilst the PPC volumes are lower, they are generally easier to deal with than Google, and it is easier to get a better return on your PPC investment.

Last night Google Instant was launched. It is meant to save the user between 2 and 5 seconds per search. Now while Google Instant may be great for people who can’t type, it is not likely to appeal too much to finance affiliates, or affiliates in general.

The long-tail keywords are likely to suffer a drop in search volume, as Google pre-guesses what people want. So people who intend to type in ‘loan quote for new conservatory’ may find what they are looking for at ‘loan quote’ or even ‘loan…’. You could argue that people who do go on to type in the full long-tail phrase will be more likely to convert at the back-end, so while the long-tail traffic may drop, the quality of the traffic should improve.

What this probably means is an increase in competition for mid-tail keywords like ‘loan quote’. A relevant, informative ad will be more crucial than ever.

It also opens up a whole new raft of keywords available to finance affiliates. Will affiliates now start bidding on the word ‘lo’? or ‘ins’?

Maybe Google Instant will be universally hated by users, and disabled on most browsers – I can’t see that happening though.

What do you think will be the impact of Google Instant on the finance affiliate industry? Let us know by leaving your comments below:

I came out of University with a history degree and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I got a job through a friend working for a new internet marketing company where I worked for 3 years. During those years I learnt how to create and run Adwords/Overture/Espotting campaigns for clients, and I set up affiliate programs for clients in areas like car finance and secured loans. One of our highest-producing affiliates was a guy called Michael Anthony.

Anyway, I was made redundant in 2005. I had 1 month’s redundancy pay to keep me afloat whilst I found another job. That’s when I discovered the newly created Affiliate Marketing School. I was assigned a ’Headmaster’ called Paul. Through loads of help from Paul and Michael, I managed to set up a finance website (despite having NO web design experience) and an Adwords campaign, and began to sell leads to the school. I think I made about £1000 profit in the first month with an outlay of £1000. The next month I risked £2000 and made £2000 profit. I stopped looking for job interviews at this point.

The next few months I was making a couple of grand profit a month working from home. A modest salary but bear in mind the working hours – about 2 hrs a day! With a little more work I managed to scale this upwards.

I’m now living a lifestyle I couldn’t have dreamed of a few years ago – a direct result of joining the Affiliate Marketing School. I’ve had 2 great holidays in Whistler with the school where I’ve met some great friends. Things have become much tougher since the recession so the working hours have increased slightly since the ‘good old days’, and I’m not resting on my laurels, but my example is one of many, of what you can achieve as a member of the school. Paul, who taught me much of what I know about the industry, is currently touring Australia for a year with his family using affiliate earnings.

Are you an existing finance affiliate looking for the best (highest paying, most reliable) place to sell your leads? Or are you a newbie who wants to become a finance affiliate and enjoy more money, more time and less work?

First, download the free finance affiliate guide over there >>>>>>>>>>>

Second, contact me below and I will get you set up at the Affiliate Marketing School, which contains a wealth of free useful advice, and I will guide you through the process of beginning to make money as a finance affiliate. The best thing about it is it’s free – it’s not some ‘get rich quick’ ebook or subscription service. It’s just a regular internet forum.

Fill in the form now to get the ball rolling:

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