I made him define what he wanted to have and what he wanted to do in both timeframes. At the top of the list was a mini-retirement to Thailand or South America.

Done and done.

Charlie just returned three weeks ago from Buenos Aires. It was there he developed a rather keen interest in Brazilian girls, who were visiting Argentina as tourists. Two weeks ago at around 2am, while preparing the new book launch at my house, he somehow accidentally (riiiiight) got stuck in a Flickr slideshow of Brazilian models.

The photos belonged to someone named Jeremiah Thompson.

Digging a little deeper, it turned out that Jeremiah had an incredible story. Two years ago, he decided he wanted to become a professional photographer of Brazilian bikini models. That, and he wanted to get married. Despite the fact that he was from Montana and had no training, he made both happen in record time.

This is his wife-hunting story…

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It is not unusual to read blog posts pre­dict­ing the end of affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing; as recent as last month many were pre­dict­ing “The End” with the release of Google’s instant search, and a cou­ple months before this it was Google’s Caf­feine update that was going to leave us all on the high street beg­ging for change. So it can be a lit­tle con­fus­ing when you read that 24.4% of those that responded to this sur­vey make between £5k and £10k per month and a stag­ger­ing 70.8% cited Affil­i­ate Mar­ket­ing as their full time occu­pa­tion. This does not hold the hall­mark of a dying indus­try, in fact if I was not already an affil­i­ate I would be seri­ously con­sid­er­ing it about now. I do believe how­ever that it is the full time affil­i­ates that are the most likely to respond to such a sur­vey, so this is prob­a­bly not the average.

The big win­ner in this sur­vey appears to be the much loved Affil­i­ate Win­dow Net­work. Just under half the respon­dents to this years sur­vey stated that it was their net­work of choice, and although I did not com­plete this sur­vey I do agree. This year has been a dif­fi­cult one for many of the net­works as the full effects of the eco­nom­i­cal down­turn started to trans­late into poor sales results for many high street brands, and affil­i­ates alike. 2010 is the year that the DGM Net­work went into admin­is­tra­tion, leav­ing many affil­i­ates and cred­i­tors severely out of pocket, and high­light­ing the impor­tance of choos­ing a net­work that is finan­cially sound. I was never a mas­sive fan of the DGM Net­work and there­fore rarely used them, so when the admin­is­tra­tors came knock­ing I was owed a mere £5.38. Other affil­i­ates how­ever were not so lucky, with one being owed a stag­ger­ing £70,089.64. So what makes Affil­i­ate Win­dow our favorite? Some of the rea­sons stated included that they were trust­wor­thy, reli­able and also pro­vide an easy to use inter­face. Affil­i­ate Win­dow appears to be going from strength to strength, and with their pur­chase of Buy.at ear­lier this year, they cur­rently have over half the UK mar­ket share.

It appears that trust in the mer­chants to pro­vide a great con­vert­ing web­site and cre­atives is low, and many affil­i­ates cite this as their largest con­cern, with com­mis­sion rates falling in to sec­ond place. In fact affil­i­ates appear to be so con­cerned about their mer­chants online mar­ket­ing strat­egy that 76% of the respon­dents believed they were bet­ter at dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing than the mer­chants they were pro­mot­ing. Con­cerns were also raised over com­mu­ni­ca­tions between mer­chants and their affiliates.

Another area of con­cern high­lighted by the sur­vey, and of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to me is the large amount of fraud­u­lent traf­fic that appears to be going through our affil­i­ate links. I have noticed recently that a larger pro­por­tion of sales gen­er­ated are being rejected by my mer­chants and can only assume (from the lim­ited data that I am pro­vided with) that this is a direct result of fraud­u­lent trans­ac­tions. This is a seri­ous mat­ter, and to be hon­est plays on my dis­trust­ing atti­tude towards some mer­chants. I would expect a lower per­cent­age of declined leads and sales when send­ing traf­fic to larger mer­chants with the finan­cial resources to com­bat such activity.

In con­clu­sion the report prob­a­bly does not tell us a great deal that will help us in our day to day busi­ness but does make an inter­est­ing read. If there is one bit of infor­ma­tion that can help you become a prof­itable affil­i­ate (bear­ing in mind that 70.8% of respon­dents are full time affil­i­ate mar­keters) it is that 61.2% of those respon­dents con­cen­trate on con­tent mar­ket­ing and SEO as their main sources of traf­fic. Also, 46% of respon­dents cited retail as their main sec­tor, fol­lowed by travel (24%), Finance (8%) and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion & gam­ing last (4%).

I would like to say a big thanks to Big Mouth Media for con­duct­ing this sur­vey, and pro­vid­ing some inter­est­ing insights into the UK affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing indus­try. Please down­load the full sur­vey here.