Doug’s Mouthpiece – Droug.co.uk

Affiliates stealing from affiliates

Affiliate Money Grabbers written by Doug Scott

This is a quick snippet of a great post over at the Moose, all about Brand Bidding Groups:

• Search for “Sky TV” on Google and you’ll see about 5 ads, a couple of which have sky in the bought domain (hmm). Most of which if not all of them are Buy.at affiliates. The landing pages are of reasonable quality, though not long ago some were directing straight to the merchant via an affiliate link.
• Extend this to the numerous hybrid phrases like “subscribe to sky” and there are even less ads & so forth. So these affiliates are even lazy sycophants on hybrid terms (brand+generic).
• Check out “watch football on sky tv”, there are no BBGs, which suggests they are only [exact matching] and not even broad matching. Talk about lazy & milking the brand!
• Yet, when you extend this still further to generic terms like “watch football on tv”, there is not a sausage (not a single BBG Affiliate). That’s how lazy most of them are!

Now imagine you are someone who builds useful organic sites and drops cookies in the hope that people will come back to the merchant directly and purchase. How many of your cookie sales are being stolen by the Brand Bidding Groups who are just dropping the cookie when the customer searches for “sky”, as an example.

Being someone who does build organic sites it has made me think that I will ask now if a merchant allows brand bidding. I’d prefer to know if I have the chance of being stolen from. If you are a merchant and you want to make it public then either post here or PM me as I am sure I can help you:)

Doug wondering

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How to get into a merchant brand bidding group – without an invite

Affiliate Money Grabbers written by Doug Scott

Its here to stay so please everyone join in, even if the networks don’t invite you too. I had lunch with a large affiliate the other day and he was dribbling at the mouth.

Ok so how to join unofficially

1. Take names of top 10 merchants in a sector, eg Expedia, Lastminute, Opodo
2. Setup a campaign for a merchant like expedia
3. Set up campaigns for each keyword on exact match and point at expedia.DOUG.co.uk. This page looks the same as expedia.co.uk almost:)
4. Setup a campaign for Lastminute
5. Set up campaigns for each keyword on exact match and point at lastminute.DOUG.co.uk. This page looks the same as lastminute.com almost:)
6. Start bidding high
7. If merchants complains tell them to f*** off and bid even more for their name and send it to their competitors.

Wait till the dust settles and expedia are paying 25% more for the same traffic……laugh and Lastminute will love you.

Course all merchants may tell you to get lost, but I bet they all don’t.

A more serious post by Shane the pie man

CJ’s unofficial view

Doug laughing

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