In the first week of December, content affiliates of JD Williams will be able to see how many sales and how much commission they are losing to Pay-Per-Click marketing.

JD Williams has recently relaunched on the dgmPro network and all sales that bring in new customers will be rewarded with a potential £8 commission, no matter the value of the sale. This initially tracks as £4.

If the sale is for an existing customer the affiliate receives 1%. However, considering that JD Williams pulled out of the affiliate marketing area earlier this year this is still good news, especially as they’re back before Christmas, with a clear remit to attract new users.

If the affiliate generates a new customer sale though and the customer later goes off to Google and clicks a JD Williams pay-per-click advert, then they’ll not get paid the full £8 commission but the original £4.

I can already see that I have signed up over a dozen first time customers by promoting the selection of JD Williams Incentive Codes. This is from a total of 48 sales. Not bad, one in every four of my referred customers is brand new. That’s good business. In fact considering I’m having a poor month, I’m very impressed that I’ve generated almost 50 sales for just one merchant.

See voucher codes do generate incremental new business. Just ask Alpharooms Affiliate Manager Dan Morley.

“Things actually look good in favour of voucher sites. Sales coming in, using the vouchers are mostly new customers.”

What will be interesting to see is what proportion of those sales turn into the golden nugget of £8. It may paint a general picture of how content and code sites are losing commission to pay-per-click brand bidders. We shall see.

Ok, we have the EXCLUSIVE code. We have the product. We have the deeplink. The blurb. The price. The expiry date.

We have an image of the product.

We have instructions on how to use the code. We even have a screen grab of the checkout process highlighting how a code is used.

So you’re telling me this isn’t content?

It’s all content in my eyes and it happens to be on a damn good domain too. It happens to be a site called Shop Codes and so primarily it promotes Shop Codes.

Some affiliates out there don’t like sites that promote shop codes but I tell you one thing customers love these sites and what they provide. As a site owner that promotes save £6 here on a Christmas present, I’m capitalising in on those savvy shoppers who want to save a few pounds here and there.

Once I’ve gone through all September’s expired codes and added all the new ones for October, I’ll add even more codes and content and screengrabs and banners and drive more sales, whilst others watch on.

It’s 10:30am and ShopCodes has already received more unique traffic than it did in a whole day in March. Yesterday was it’s highest traffic day since the heavy sales period of 27th and 28th December.

The majority of this traffic was not for people searching for codes. It’s Silly Sale Season and many high street stores such as Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins and Laura Ashley are offering up to 50% off.

My highly optimised site – for codes – is now converting visitors at up to 35%. So one in three of my sale-searching visitors are clicking through to the merchants pages and spending thousands. If only I knew this before.

You see I own a domain with the word ‘codes’ in it – a fact that will soon see my commissions being decreased by Dorothy Perkins – and I have always prioritised codes over any other type of promotion. This was down to the templating of my site and the fact that with a sale you just don’t know when it ends.

Only yesterday I generated £3,500 worth of sales to one of Dorothy Perkin’s high street competitors, netting me a substantial £400 worth of commission. And this was just one merchant, others which have not performed for me before have started to take spots in my Top 10 merchants list … once dominated by Figleaves and JD Williams.

This is not a fluke. Since my recent return of holiday I took a different approach to adding content to my site. As I had 3,500 emails to catch up on and hundreds of codes to add, I ignored them all.

I then worked on the last email in approach. So if the last email was about a code, I’d add it. If it was about top 10 products, I’d add that content. If it was about a sale, I’d add that content.

The result is I’ve a lot less codes on my site than I really should have but have now got a variety of alternative content, that is converting well

… with no ‘Click to Reveal’ in sight.

For the first time ever since I’ve owned both a mobile and a laptop, I’ve had a complete break away from affiliate marketing.

During the first half of June I’ve enjoyed my third holiday of the year in Zante and returned for a weeks training course and exam.

Whilst away from home for 2 weeks I was ‘always on’ and connected but rather than checking stats, reading my thousands of emails or editing files, I just updated facebook.

When I packed my laptop, this wasn’t the intention but whilst out in the sun I felt like I deserved a complete break.

Previously I’d have worried that my sites traffic and commissions would suffer. This month, I’ve been thinking ‘So what. I’ll catch up and get my site back up to speed later.’

So I’ve been bathing, flirting, drinking, dancing, learning, revising and everything else but update my site and things are looking promising.

In the last week that my site wasn’t updated AT ALL, it made over £1,000 in commission. During the whole of June I’ve edited only 8 files. That was on the eve of me travelling to Bristol to study for the ISEB Intermediate Certificate in Software Testing.

So, during June I’ve earned £200 per merchant update I’ve done. Not bad, earning approximately £800 per hour. If only it escalated that way.

Now that I’ve had more than my fair share of holidays in this first six months of 2008, it’s now time for me to do a lot more than 8 updates per day, never mind month.

It’s time for me to start adding the June codes before they expire in 2 weeks and earning more than that grand a week.