AbeBooks UK Affiliates Blog

Marketing vs. Technical Skills

The A4U Forum has an interesting survey happening right now, it is asking "what is the correlation is between your marketing and technical skills?"  The results are not mind blowing, but still interesting.  This is a topic that is often debated in the industry, being an Affiliate Manager I come across all kinds of different skill sets, I personally don't think there is one set of skills that guarantees an affiliate to be successful or not.  I have seen highly successful affiliates who focus 90% on marketing and affiliates who focus 90% on the technical side both being highly succesful. At the end of the day I think it has a lot to do with hard work rather than having more technical or marketing skills.

AbeBooks UK Affiliate Survey

In keeping with the post from last week, we here at AbeBooks are releasing some of the findings the AbeBooks UK Affiliate survey we conducted in late Novemeber and since have being working compiling the data.   For those of you who did not have the chance to fill out the survey, please take a few minutes and fill it out.

Affiliate Survey

What type of Affiliates are in the program?

This first chart shows that the majority of the affiliates in the AbeBooks programme are Professional affiliate marketers working full-time. 

After communicating with many of you over the past months I can say this is chart is likely a bit skewed, however once you take into account the "80/20" rule, where 20% percent of the affiliates, drive 80% of the revenue then this chart does seem to reflect our active affiliates.  This trend is different from the Affiliate census, they found most affiliates are in the part-time/ hobby category, nevertheless I am sure if they looked at the affiliates driving revenue, then I am sure their metrics would be similar to what we have found.

Creatives-

The survey was very clear, our Affiliates want more static banners, HTML creatives, and text links.  The affiliate census also highlighted this area they concluded Affiliates consider quality links as one of the most important items for programs. 

Open Ended Comments:

Coupons Dedicated to Affiliates- This is something we are currently working on and it is scheduled to launch in 2007.  Please check back here at the blog for the latest news.

Improve DataFeeds- We realize our datafeeds are very large and awkward however we can work with you to make them smaller and more manageable.  If you want to give the feeds a try please drop us an email would love to get you on board.

More Keywords for Affiliates- Just send us an email, we have tons and tons of unique keywords we can send out.  The long tail possibilities are endless with 100 million books.

E-Shops Similar to Amazon- This is a great idea! it is not currently on our roadmap, but hopefully will be soon.

Over the next few weeks we will be releasing more of the findings from the survey as they become relevant to the posts. As always if you have comment or suggestion for programme please don't wait until the next survey, contact us today we always appreciate the feedback and comments.

UK

have now finished compiling the results from our very own Affiliate survey we conducted in Late November 2006.  It was great to hear from all of our affiliates and the responses we received will really shape and drive this program forward.

Affiliate Census

E-consultancy has just released their first edition of the "Affiliate Census". It provides a good analysis of who the affiliates are in the UK, they have done a very good job in highlighting what affiliates want and the main drivers for why they sign up for programmes.  One thing I found interesting is how much some of the affiliates are making, just amazing!  Look for future posts from AbeBooks where we will compare the Affiliate census to the AbeBooks Affiliate survey we conducted this past November.