Just been looking through my stats and I was pleased to see that I’d recorded two high value sales for Debenhams Flowers last week. One person spent £204.48 and another £67.50 on the same day.
Unfortunately, the Debenhams Flowers affiliate programme has been closed on TradeDoubler for four months so the commission reads £0.00. Looking further back at my stats, they were ironically the only two sales I’ve made for that programme.
So, I’ve set up my Gmail filter and sorted all emails that contain the word “closing”, “closure” or “closed” so that they appear in their own folder. I’ve currently got 90 emails in that folder going as far back as September 2006 with the most recent being “Hayes The Florist” received today.
Now, I can go through each of these and set a 301 redirect to an appropriate page. For Debenhams, I’ve simply redirected the Debenhams Flowers page to the main Debenhams page (affiliate scheme on affili.net). Or if I know I’ve got a high revenue earner in the same field I could redirect there too. 
Within half an hour of creating a new page, which includes an exclusive coupon code, Google indexed it and subsequently dropped it to its Supplemental index. Half an hour! Behave yourself Google!
Give me a break. At that speed, I don’t see why I should create any new content for you to spider.
The Truffle Shuffle page in question has a cached time stamp of “15th May 2007 09:08am” . I sent an email to Jess at affiliateprogramadvice.com only minutes earlier “May 15, 2007 8:42 AM”, saying the page was now live.
So, one good thing. Google indexed the page within minutes of it going live. But take a breath Google, let that twenty six minutes old page try and establish some history before you junk it.
I know my visitors appreciate the page as I made my first sale for Truffle Shuffle at 17/05/2007 14:30:53 according to Affiliate Window. I’d like more of your huge traffic to be offered the 10% discount. Now I’ll just have to keep that exclusive code, exclusive to my own visitors.
Next time a Halfords email arrives in my inbox I may have to ignore it. No sooner had emails gone out promoting an offer that would last a week. They quickly got amended and by 5pm Friday had been completely withdrawn.
Email 1: “NEW Halfords TomTom Discount Voucher code”
May 16, 2007 11:31 AM
Email 2: 10% off Bikes & Cycle Accessories at Halfords
May 17, 2007 11:25 AM
Email 3: New TomTom Discount Code
May 17, 2007 12:29 PM
Email 4: Amended TomTom Discount Voucher Codes
May 17, 2007 2:19 PM
Email 5: TomTom Voucher Codes De-Activated
May 18, 2007 5:09 PM
A search for ‘Halfords codes’ in Google returns my site on page one and so a few people will have left disappointed this evening.
One month after the launch of Google Checkout, I am directly benefitting as an affiliate.
Four weeks ago I wrote a post on A4uforum saying how the new Google Checkout was not tracking affiliate sales. The post kicked off an interesting and animated discussion.
In the last couple of weeks though, I noticed a steady shift of consumer interest. My traffic analytics showed I had a healthy set of visitors looking for “Google checkout shops” via Google and landing on my site. So I thought I may as well push it far as I could.
Last week I’d gone as far as building a dedicated page showcasing these shops that had the £10 bonus and that also had an affiliate scheme.
In the last few days I’ve made some “Party Delights” sales and I wouldn’t have even signed up to that programme if it wasn’t for GC.
I’ve also made a few Findmeagift sales. Theirs is a particularly good offer as you save £20 if you use the discount code as well. Before GC, I made few sales despite promoting them prominently across the Shop Codes site.
Elsewhere, I managed to get the Bedworld page out of the Google supplemental index by including it on this page.
So, all in all I’ve made a handful of sales that I wouldn’t have made without promoting Google’s £10 bonus.
What a bonus!
