An Interview With Mike Field - MDS Battery New On Webgains

So MDS Battery are now running their programme with Webgains, and to celebrate their relaunch I'm giving away 1 ticket to the Existem Summer BBQ to top MDS affiliate on Webgains this month.

From what I can recollect MDS Battery is merchant ID 1 on Affiliate Future and first began in the world of Affiliate Marketing back in 2001. Although there weren't by any stretch of the imagination the first merchant in the industry, I'm sure their MD Mike Field has some views that many of the more recent merchants may find interesting.(*)

1) Back in 2001 what made you take the bold step and start an affiliate programme and why Affiliate Future when there were some more established players in the market such as DGM and Commission Junction?

IBG were developing our eCommerce website and decided that it would be a good idea to test their affiliate tracking solution and so set it up for us - we just went along with it as we thought it would be interesting to see how it turned out. There wasn't a conscious decision to look at affiliate marketing as method to increase our sales back then - we just fell into it.


2) Over the past 8 years or so you must have seen a huge change in the industry, not least the nature of affiliates. How have those changes affected you?

We've seen a huge number of changes in the industry not least the greater number of professional organisations that have affiliate marketing as their major revenue generating method.

Previously we would see a number of niche sites just adding the odd link in to our site. Today we've seen a substantial growth in generalist sites that don't cover any niche in particular, just shopping or offers in general.

3) I would have thought that you'd have hundreds of affiliates climbing over themselves to promote you guys seeing as you've got a great number of high-value products that can't be bought in the high street and with the model numbers it should be really easy for affiliates to PPC them. What is the nature of your affiliate base? Is it highly geared towards PPC or SEO?

The affiliate base is actually very reflective of the UK marketplace, with an even spread of affiliates in the PPC, reward and voucher code sectors accounting for the majority of sales. It would be fair to say that there is great potential as you say in PPC as there are lots of very specific searches. Similarly customers searching for the MDS brand will naturally gravitate towards reward sites if they are members. As MDS believes in providing the best prices it does not issue voucher codes, however the ranking of certain voucher code affiliates in natural listings accounts for their sales. There is a wider and untapped opportunity with content driven affiliates that will be the focus of the coming months.

We do have a very substantial PPC affiliate base as it would appear to be much easier for them to find keywords from our website or glean them from our product feed. I would put this down to the fact many professional affiliates wouldn't have websites targeting our niche.

Furthermore, there are relatively few battery merchants compared to gifts or more traditional electronic products so some affiliates would not consider it worthwhile to targeting our niche - even though you're right in saying we stock a good number of high value batteries.


4) I recommended that Existem AM took over the management of your affiliate programme after I spotted and valued the "abuse" of brand-bidding. Is that something you're looking to continue?

We're still in early days of our new more professional approach and we're keen to have a better understanding of what affiliate marketing adds to our bottom line and the benefits of leveraging the knowledge and experience that using an agency offers.

We've never had our campaign professionally managed so are looking forward to seeing what Existem can offer us.


5) Many affiliates just don't understand (sorry) how affiliate marketing fits into an overall internet marketing strategy (this is just my view as a very basic rule of thumb), let alone a complete strategy. How steep has the learning curve been for you with working with affiliates?

The main issue is that we have to work together. I feel that often other retailers use affiliate marketing because their competitors are using it, without actually understanding the pro's and con's. I see affiliate marketing as filling the gaps or niches that we can not fill as well as giving us greater exposure and sales in the more generic areas where we just could not hope to cover ourselves. There's so much demand for batteries and there's a lot of knowledge that affiliates have that allows us to mutually benefit from that fact.

One thing it took us a bit of time to realise is the exact nature of how affiliates promote us and which product ranges they advertise. Obviously they gravitate to the higher value products and we need to make sure that we still cover the lower unit price but higher sales volume products ourselves with SEO.

6) What have been the biggest mistakes you've made with your affiliate programme and how have you rectified them?

Basically not to manage the programme for the past 5 years. It's a definite mistake. Affiliates can offer you so much when you work with them - that's something that we've neglected. At first Lee [Ed: that's me] made us aware that of a few issues that we had with the programme whilst he worked on other areas and recommended that we hired Existem AM to get to grips with the programme and sort it out by ensuring that our affiliates got all the information and tools that they needed. We've rectified the situation by taking on professional help and making sure we're aware of our targets and that the programme is heading in the right direction.

Not managing it properly for the past 5 years. This is rectified by myself and Existem AM.

7) You've now launched your affiliate programme with Webgains. What was the impetuous for that decision and how do you feel it will enhance your customer acquisition strategy?

Basically when we took on Existem AM we thought it would be a good idea for a clean break, to start again and push forward with a new mindset. We'll be looking to grow the programme rapidly and feel that we are able to really do this with a fresh start as we'll be forced to re-evaluate every aspect of our programme without falling to the trap of taking the easy route of letting things stand as they are.

We've also made massive strides in the last 6 months / year to improve our conversion rates by constantly improving the shopping cart and user experience. So combined with that new start with the other forms of online marketing, we thought it'd be beneficial to continue that through our entire marketing efforts.

8) With the range of batteries you offer being so diverse and with the knowledge that you are incredibly popular for motorcycle batteries, do you feel that a future strategy to increase your affiliate base is to look for more generic affiliates that know how to drive volume, or to look for niche affiliates that have the ability to productively target specific niche audiences?

Both really. I'm interested in niche markets as we have a real passion for batteries and how people use them and it would be nice to increase our exposure on motorcycle websites, computing sites and the such like. However, I'm realistic and understand the fantastic volumes that the generalist sites can offer, hopefully some of those sites will choose to give us more exposure as we'll be offering them more communication and the site does convert exceptionally well.


9) Personally I know affiliate incentives can work really well. But I also know that it’s very easy for them to fall flat on their face if you can't get the coverage. Do you have any planned?

Affiliate incentives are tricky things to administer to ensure that they achieve sufficient exposure. However they do provide a benefit to affiliate recruitment levels and ongoing sales. Given that the MDS product range includes items that would be dear to an affiliate’s heart such as Laptop batteries, I would envisage that we will run an incentive at some point in the not too distant future.

10) Its all doom and gloom at the moment. But how is business?

Business is booming here. When people get into financial issues they don't buy new products they just try and "mend" them with a new battery or chargers. For instance, new motorcycle purchases are down 17% on the year. We've got a good selection of motorcycle batteries and chargers and they've been flying out of the door recently. The same can be said for our large selection of laptop chargers and accessories - they're doing really well at the moment. Also we've been selling quite a few digital camera batteries as people just aren't buying new cameras and instead just looking to spend much less on a new battery.

11) If you could give one tip to retailers launching an affiliate programme for the first time, what would it be?

Get someone to manage it that knows what they're doing.

Great Quote From Awin - And So True For SEO

The following quote can be found on an intriguing page on the Affiliate Window website:



But I think it makes so much better sense as:



But to me SEO is not only a science but an ART!

I'm sure most SEO's recognise the problem when those people you're involved with too easily see a set of circumstances and automatically assign causality to something that best suits their agenda.

I'm anal about getting down to real cause and effect. I obsess over data. I've proven over and over again that each visitor is not created equal.

The issue often arises in communicating cause an effect. This is difficult in traditional industries, but when you mix in the huge number of factors that affect rankings and revenue per visitor it leaves even more room for misunderstandings to arise.

Here's an example. Say you change the focus of your "intent" keyword and achieve a nil-sum improvement in terms of traffic numbers, but you get better converting traffic, what data should you be looking at?

Ok, here's some "intent" keywords from a client and the conversion rates from the keyphrases that include that particular keyword:

(site average) 3.54%
buy - 2.66%
best - 5.56%
cheap - 2.79%
cheapest - 3.70%
deal - 5.26%
price - 2.65%
delivery - 5.88%
" uk" - 6.56%
sale - 11.25%

Now it's just too simplistic to say that you should focus primarily on "sale" as it converts at 11.25% when you need to build in the volume of traffic available into your strategy.

Good SEO, to me, is about weighing up the keywords that drive traffic, those that convert, the product data available, their/your ability to implement SEO improvements and the overall marketing objectives of the organisations you're involved in.

One thing that does annoy me in this industry (Mark - I'm moaning as requested) is that people too easily say "X" is a cause of "Y" when there are several factors that go into event "Y" occurring - some in our control, some not; some are as a result of SEO, some not.

My biggest fear is SEO has turned into an "in box, out box" industry where people only care about visitor numbers and don't look into profitability or completely disregard the impact of SEO.

To me SEO isn't necessarily about increasing total visitor numbers, its about increasing the value gained from each visitor whilst ensuring that SEO contributes positively to the bottom line - just like affiliate marketing should do.

My hope is that affiliates, merchants and website owners become a bit more analytical and use the power that the analytics tools availabe to them. The only issue is that we all need to look at the data that matters and think long and hard, explore all other less convenient answers before assign causality.

Luckily I've been in the game for 12 years and spent the previous 3 years studying statistics and causality via an Economics degree, so I've seen all the "excuses" "reasons" under the sun. The real reason is often something a bit more tangential than you think.

Now go and read Freakonomics for real world examples of why relying on the most obvious conclusions can be the most misleading - and this has never been more true than with today's Search Engines.


N.b. I'm still catching up on emails sent during my jollies. So if I've not got back to yet, hold tight.

Thanks Guys For Barbados But I Won't Be Going Next Year

I must admit that this year's Affiliate Future Barbados event was fantastic and I must really thank Chris from Sunshine for making it happen and the guys for making it so enjoyable. The biggest thanks to two people though: firstly J Lil for being a great host and being there for me when I nearly went to prison! And also Charley Shiner making the nights hilarious - I still don't believe you found those knickers on the floor of the McBrides! I'm sure they were personally retrieved! But also thanks to him I've got inspiration for a cracking blog! A cracking domain name has just been purchased :-)

Also a big thanks to Ant from Love it Large (launching soon) and Cho Yung Tea (going to put an order in!) who sponsored the Rum Ball Rally and made it such a hoot. It was hard work trying to organise it with J Lil but I'm sure everyone enjoyed it.

The thing is that I won't be trying to win a ticket for next year. The reasons being that despite there's talk of even more people going next year, I feel that its about time that people that have never been before should have more chance of going - I've now been 4 times (3 with Affiliate Future) and its such a hoot that others should enjoy it. Another reason is that, what with getting married this year, hopefully Laura will be about 7 months pregnant (if all things work out) so I can't really leave her.

But here's a few pics to leave you with (I didn't get my camera out much)

Risking life and limb:


Team Fun II Celebrating finding a goat, or was it a sheep?


Birds do it, bees do it. Even educated snails do it:


Might as well get another pic in whilst we wait for the beers to arrive:


Is it illegal to drink and drive in Barbados?


Didn't find any


Not the only day that Tom wished he didn't get up in the morning:


He was pretty pleased to catch this fish


Nadeem takes a break from Marilyn:


Sexy Beast Ray:


Its Still There:


Fat Rain:


Bird:


Lizard thingy:


Kat hitting the waves


Scene From James Bond:


Not Scene From James Bond:


Just look at the colour of the sea:


It was only a couple of feet:


I just love Crane Beach:


The effects of over-exposure to the sun:

Avoid Paid Posts - So Official It Hurts (Or Should Do)

Don't you just love those people that start businesses based on a misunderstanding of Google's T&C's or at least don't modify them as they change?

Going back over Matt Cutt's presentation "Straight from Google: What You Need to Know" (.ppt) there's a slide (44) that is entitled "Avoid paid posts" - how much more obvious does it need to be? But if you still can't grasp the concept here's the slide:



But what does "spam" mean and what does "not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites" mean? To my mind it's a bit too muddy for my liking.

If people take the "spam" element as content that is completely, or largely unrelated to the theme of the site the "content for links" sits on then there are a number of people that should be VERY worried!

And what's more, the declaration element is getting even fuzzier when you consider that Matt allegedly dumped Shoemoney on Twitter for a paid-per-tweet. As a side note, I did think Shoemaker's reply a bit childish!

Ahhh! So There's A Name For It: Katamari Philosophy

I've always believed in this tactic but never knew the name for it. My view has always been that as an affiliate blogger that you should focus on a small niche such as "trainers for one-legged pygmies" (no offence to people with one leg or pygmies of course!) and then you should gradually roll out of that niche as you gain a level respect and coverage of that is sufficient to sustain it.

So reading Matt Cutt's presentation: “Straight from Google: What You Need to Know” from WordCamp San Francisco and in particular slide 33 and then searching on it I found Andrew's description of the Katamari Philosophy:



I know that I missed this presentation, but I can't be aware of EVERY piece of SEO dialogue :-(.

Other things that Matt said was that you shouldn't obssess about links and page range. And I completely agree with that. If I'm in a niche that I'm totally confident about then I spend about 0.5% on overtly thinking of links, 95% thinking of content and 4.5% thinking of (and implementing) the on page SEO.

There's many affiliate blogs that have worked well at gaining a reputation that in term generate inbound links and it doesn't take me how to do it, every second tweet seems to be about it these days, but just try and be original and don't fall in to the trap of having a formulaic approach to building reputation by thinking that if a post has A,B and C that it will DEFINITELY work.

I'm currently implementing the Katamari Philosophy on the small niche (relatively) that I bang on about into a less small niche and its a fascinating process. What's more interesting and satisfying is when you work in only slightly related niches and as you imply the Katamari Philosophy they're consumed by the new site:



An example of this would be my Easter Eggs site linking towards my generic chocolate site - relevant and fair to link.

But then you can also use other, generally non-related sites but which has a slightly related post to help gain support (links and traffic) to both your other niches and the Katamari site. This may be a post about a chocolate football on my old Euro 2008 site linking to both the chocolate site for that product or the Easter eggs site via a link to a general post about football Easter eggs.

Again, as you dominate the micro-niches and then the larger niche then you can use those to spawn new micro-niches and start the process again.

Am I the only one that finds affiliate site evolution interesting? :-(