I can’t believe I’m only getting around to posting this now! Last Saturday I got a chance to go to the Irish Web Awards in the Radison SAS Royal Hotel in Dublin. I have to say it was a great night and a big thank you should go to Damien and the rest of the organisers for putting on an event which isn’t one of those typical back slapping award ceremonies but more for deserving sites which are actually used and appreciated by the online irish community. Below are just some of the pics from the night, check out awards.ie for further details:

Congratulations to all the winners.

Headline Sponsor – Realex Payments

The winners are:

Best Online Publication – sponsored by Maximise

• The Irish TImes

Best Radio Website – sponsored by IGOPeople

• Phantom

Best Podcaster – sponsored by 3 Ireland

• The Persuaders

Best Videocaster – Sponsored by Irish Mortgage Brokers

• Look and Taste

Best Sports Site – sponsored by ArgusCarHire.com

• RTE Sport

Best Music Site – sponsored by Poll Daddy

• Nialler9

Best Entertainment Website – sponsored by Radical

• Entertainment.ie

Best Arts Website – Sponsored by Brennan Sabatini

• Dance Ireland

Best Technology Site – Sponsored by BH Consulting

• Silicon Republic

Best New Web Application/Service – Sponsored by Red Cardinal

• Kildare Street

Most Innovative Website – Sponsored by iQ content

• Decisions for Heroes

Best Discussion forum – sponsored by KRO IT Solutions

• Boards

Best Government and Council Website

• IDA Ireland

Best Education and Third Level Website – sponsored by National Digital Research Centre

• Talk Irish

Best eCommerce / Services Website – sponsored by Cybercom

• Curious Wines

Most Beautiful Website in Ireland – Sponsored by Beaut.ie

• Organic Supermarket

Most Useful Website in Ireland – Sponsored by DoneDeal.ie

• RTE

Best Social Media Campaign – Sponsored by OnlineAdvertising.ie

• Count Me Out

Best Practice – Sponsored by Spinnakerpro.com

• Cars Ireland

An Suíomh Gaeilge is Fear – sponsored by Edgecast Media

• NOSMag

Most Accessible Website – Sponsored by Insure.ie

• Rose Project

Best Website in Ireland – Sponsored by Realex Payments

• RTE.ie

The first event I’ll be attending is the BTW (Blogger Twitter Whatever) event being organised by Jason Roe in the Clarion in Dublin on the 3rd Sept. There is capacity for 150 and at the time of writing this there are still a few places free. I think one of the trending topics of conversation will be the debate started by Niall Harbison of simplyzesty.com on whether bloggers and pr fit together.

The second event I’ll be attending is an opportunity to meet with Brad Fallon. Brad will be speaking at a free marketing seminar in Dublin, tickets can be aquired for free from http://www.ultimatemarketingseminar.eu/. Thanks to Kevin from InternetMoney.ie and Kieran from Searchbrat.com for reminding me of this event.

So if your at either of these events come up and say hello!

Lately I’ve been really interested in the psychology behind peoples searches and how they interact online. i.e. people that search for “buy blue widgets” are more likely to buy that people searching for “blue widget styles”. This area has a huge influence on what and how you should structure your content and manage your email marketing.

One of the best guys to listen to in this area is Frank Kern. Frank is a surfer dude but also a people person and you can tell he just “gets it” when it comes to influencing peoples emotions online. Hell, if you search for him online, you’ll get nothing but references about how people feel he’s their friend and what an all around nice guy he is.

If you do a little more digging you’ll find that Frank was once busted by the FTC for running an alleged pyramid scheme. Now in saying that, it doesnt make him a bad guy, think Frank Abagnale from Catch Me If You Can or any good grifter. They all have talents for reading or convincing people, they just mightnt have always used them for ethical purposes. He openly admits this and actually when you think about it he must have been succesful at marketing it as at the time he was making half a million a year.

The video above is what Frank released as a promo for his Mass Control program. The information he gives away is amazing. He discusses modalities, the persona we need to portray when selling online, developing story lines to interact and engage with potential customers. Now I’m not telling you to buy Franks products, just watch the video and if you think the info is good enough, make up your own mind.

• Selecting Affiliate Campaigns
• Building Affiliate Sites
• Obtaining Backlinks
• Content Creation
• Email Subscriber List Building
• Plugin Management
• How to increase earnings in a niche

Luckily for me and you Mark has actually put the webinar online and I’ve embedded it below. The interview lasts for over an hour so it might take a second to load. Check it out !

Now with Affiliate Bloggers, I’m used to seeing paid posts. This is normal, their aim is to make money online so why wouldn’t they do paid posts. I have no problem with this, most put up disclaimers when they do it. What I do have a problem with is when they plug bullshit especially when it’s a paid post.

Think about it? You spend months writing good content, build up your readership levels so you have some influence in your area and then you blow it by doing a plug for a dodgy product or service. Why would you do it?, let alone do it for just $250 bucks, well thats the question I ask Tyler Cruz.

I’ve never met Tyler or corresponded with him but I have been an avid reader of his blog. Why? The No. 1 reason is his honesty. He’s not afraid to disclose the affiliate sites he runs, he shows you his earnings, even his weight loss battle! So you can imagine my disappointment when I came across a paid post for Usocial.net?

Why am I dissapointed?

I’m not dissapointed that its a paid post but in the product he’s chosen to promote for $250. I mean the advertisers own hype isn’t even real. If you look on usocial’s own twitter services page they claim to have 18,000 followers on twitter, yet when you check twitter.com/usocialdotnet ,they only have 14,000 followers.

Secondly they are selling services which claim to get you up to 100,000 followers yet they only have 14,000. When you search for a review of their service, I could only find one valid review of their digg service ( http://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.com/forums/general-poker-affiliate-forum/514-usocial-net-review.html ) which wasn’t very promising. Basically the reviewer said that all their diggs had come from newly created accounts.

This is interesting when you consider their wording for their twitter services:

“we’ll bring you 2,500 brand new Twitter followers to your existing account”

The key here is “brand new”, what good is that for marketing purposes? There all bogus accounts! Any other reviews I could find were all created by Alexa Darver an Affiliate whoose identical review is everywhere. Even in a legitimate media article (http://www.mediabuzz.com.sg/asian-emarketing/march-april-2009/353-usocialnet-creating-a-buzz-in-the-social-media-scene), they state themselves that they are just creating accounts:

“instead of selling a software and leaving the users alone with the hassle of creating needed accounts and spending time submitting their links every day, they offer a compact and simple solution”

I enjoy Tylers blog and I will keep reading but in this case, I think it would have been worth Tyler spending 5 mins vetting the advertiser. Is it worth the potential damage it can do to your reputation for plugging an inferior service for $250? You decide!

Fraser Edwards has been involved in affiliate marketing for more than 5 years after starting out in business as a website developer. He has an excellent reputation in the industry and his affiliate blog is on the recommended reading list of this years AffStat Report.

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Fraser for doing this interview, I know he’s quite busy with 2 projects at the moment www.redwine.co.uk and www.whitewine.co.uk and I appreciate that he took the time out to do this.

So here’s the interview:

1. Frazer, I got to know you via the blogroll on affiliatetip.com and from doing research on the affiliate marketing industry in the U.K. For the benefits of readers who might not have a clue about who you are, can you briefly introduce yourself and describe your experience in the industry?

I stumbled into affiliate marketing back in 2001 when I was running a small web development business.  After finding the UK affiliate community at http://www.affiliates4u.com/ I picked up a lot of tips and quickly switched to being a full time affiliate and gently dropped my clients J  I’ve worked on a mixture of projects at first only relying on natural search and then switching to paid search. In 2006 I started my blog and podcast interviewing many of the top affiliates and networks in the UK.

2. Now you’ve been blogging about this industry for over 5 years. In this time there has been a lot of changes online, i.e. the birth of social networks, twitter, etc. What would you say is the biggest change in 5 years to have had an effect on the affiliate industry?

I think the biggest change has to be the dominance of Google and how much it controls what affiliates can do.  5 years back it was a simple process to get anything ranked but now you have to approach it differently.  Paid search used to be a different ball game too but the opportunities aren’t quite as easy to find now.

3. Now with 5 years experience behind you, do you have any tips for the readers of what you would do differently if you had to start again?

To start again I think I would have focussed on building 1 or 2 really top quality sites and creating a brand.  Instead I think I spent too much time churning out throw away sites that earned well for a few months but don’t do anything for me now.  The guys that built genuine brands and invested their time in just one site are the ones that I have seen do well and sell up and exit.  I really think you need to work on something you are interested in too.  For example I did well from promoting perfume site but in the end I realised I didn’t care enough about perfume to take it to the next level.

It’s advice I’ve given myself this year and I’m working on fewer different projects.  My main project for the next few months is going to be White Wine www.whitewine.co.uk and Red Wine www.redwine.co.uk which are in the early stages but I’m getting loads of new content on there and aiming for the long term.

4. On your blog over the years you have done many podcast interviews with affiliates. What would be the common characteristic amongst them all that you think made them successful affiliates?

I think most successful affiliates have to be hard working and self motivated.  It’s one of the biggest myths around that it’s ‘easy’ to earn money online.  It’s definitely possible for most people but it’s going to need a lot of hard work.  In my early days there were a good number of fellow affiliates up working all night long and that’s the dedication it takes if you are expecting a full time income.

5. AffStats 2009 has just come out and there is some interesting stats but the one that interested me was regarding how many campaigns/offers affiliates run at the same time. Whats the most offers you’ve had running at the same time?

I used to run loads of different merchants at the same time, probably into the hundreds through various datafeed sites.  Now I just work seriously with a handful.  I tend to work more in retail commission based programs rather than CPA lead based stuff.

6. Theres a lot of information online regarding affiliates running successful campaigns, i.e. make 20k a month etc. I believe that most experience comes from failure and the key to optimising campaigns is by analysing the data and tweaking accordingly. What would your ratio of successful campaigns to unsuccessful campaigns be?

Well I logged into my adwords account just now and I have 5 active campaigns and 126 paused or deleted campaigns so that gives some idea.  Many of these are things that worked for a time and then dropped off or things that I tried and never worked at all.  I agree that you need to get on and fail a few times to at least start learning.  There is lots of great advice out there but don’t spend too much time reading and instead just get started and learn as you go.

7. Theres a lot of discussion currently about PPV traffic. Have you used it yourself yet? And do you think that it provides any sort of value traffic?

I’ve got to admit it’s not something I’ve tried yet or really know much about but from a quick read it’s never going to compare with quality targeted traffic.

8. Out of all the interviews you have conducted, which is the one that really sticks in your mind? (This should hopefully send some traffic back to your site)

I think the interview with Doug Scott has had the most positive feedback http://www.affiliateblog.co.uk/doug-scott-asap-ventures-interview.html

Doug is involved in some pretty interesting projects, has been very successful and is a really straight talking so I think people appreciated the advice he gave.

9. Apparently UK affiliates rely more on SEO than PPC when compared with their US counterparts. (http://econsultancy.com/blog/3452-10-differences-between-uk-and-us-affiliate-marketing) Do you think this is true? And do you belive this will change?

Econsultancy do a lot of great research and that’s an interesting post.  It’s certainly the impression I’ve got as well.  I think PPC was huge in the UK but has faded a little more as merchants have looked to take control of this again.  I think also that the US seems to focus more on CPA offers via PPC but the UK seems more based around retail merchants and less lead based so I think this changes the promotional method as well.

10. Can you describe your first successful campaign, i.e your feelings when you realised it was going to be successful, your feelings when it peaked and what you did when you knew it was coming to an end?

My first successful campaign was an accident when someone started advertising a similar URL to one of mine on national radio J It got me hooked on affiliate marketing but I started a few different projects as I knew just one source wouldn’t last.

When I first realised that I could make money from affiliate marketing while sleeping I knew that it was always going to be better than billing hours as a web developer.

11. What do you think will be the trends in Affiliate Marketing in 2009/10?

There is a standing joke over here that everyone says “mobile is the next big thing” and we’ve been saying that for 5 years now and it’s never happened.  I still don’t think mobile ecommerce is about to be huge but I do think we’ll see some really interesting iPhone apps and that’s an area I know affiliates are looking