I turned up more than an hour later than planned and confess to being a little nervous - weird meeting up with a bunch of people you don’t know - especially as I am a little new to this whole thing. However, that worry was totally unnecessary as Richard and Ken could not have been more welcoming and made a great point of introducing everybody and saying what they did.

So ended up chatting with people from all areas - other affiliates who are also relatively new to all this, a PPC affiliate, one or two merchants, network people (good to meet my contact at Affiliate Window - hi Edwyn!) and a couple of agency folks too. Nice mix of talking shop and chatting about general stuff.

It looks like this will be a regular event so hopefully more and more people will come along in the months to come. In particular, if there are any new kids who didn’t fancy it I would encourage them to be there next time as it is very very worthwhile.

Thanks are due to Richard and Ken.

I got an email today from Flowers Direct. This is the first paragraph…

You have have been suspended from the Flowers Direct (mid:189) affiliate
programme. Please do not respond to this automated email, if you would like
to discover the precise reasons for the suspension please contact the
affiliate manager direct from your account.

Was there really any need for that? Why could they not have started the email with ‘Following a careful review we regret that we have taken the decision to…’ Short of putting swear words into the email Flowers Direct could not have been rude. Maybe their agency or maybe Affiliate Window wrote this - maybe it is just a ’standard’ email - but whatever, the result is the same.

I actual fact I don’t promote Flowers Direct and even if I did I don’t have enough traffic to create the tiniest blip on their sales - but that is not the point. I might want to promote a flowers merchant in the future and I might become a super-duper super affiliate!

At a push I can see why they might want to dump affiliates who do not promote them (although I am not totally sure that it can be that much of a pain to have 1 more record in their database) but I really cannot understand why they have to be so rude!

Rant over!

Every time I have a ‘what shall I do now’ moment I find myself (almost without realising it) logging on to my Affiliate Window account to see if a ‘pending commission’ has popped up or checking the number of clicks I have got on Adsense. And, surprise surprise, because I am new to this the answer is nearly always the same as last time I looked (approximately 45 minutes earlier).

Now - I don’t have the same problem of wasting time with checking Amazon sales as they only show the results up until the day before. I like that - I only look once a day - keeps my mind on the job in hand.

On reflection - this really is more my problem than Affiliate Window’s or Google Adsense’s - but I bet I am not alone.

The copy that I had back from the lady in Ontario was, in my opinion, excellent - it was a lot better than I could have done (admittedly not hard!) and the turnaround speed was incredibly fast. So - methinks - I am on to a winner here.

I then went back to Get A Freelancer with a project for a different site I am working on but with a very similar brief to my first attempt. Again I got a lot of bids - 19 I think - so had plenty of choice. Because of the success of using somebody from the American continent, who has English as their mother tongue, I went with a bid from a lady in the USA. Quite frankly it has been less than impressive. I had to ask her to redo elements of the first lot of text she sent through - that was OK. Then the remaining text just has not turned up - no communication. Nothing.

We are not in a huge hurry for this text so I have not chased it up yet but nevertheless this is pretty shoddy and not what we are looking for in the longer term.

So - my conclusions based on this limited experience are…

• Write a thorough brief for the freelancer - this will ensure you get what you want and give confidence to freelancers that they are dealing with professional buyer which, in turn, leads to more bids
• Don’t assume that using a freelancer who has English as their mother tongue will guarantee quality writing
• Choose a freelancer that has at least some track-record and check their reviews
• Agree how payment will be made from the beginning
• Treat freelancers fairly - they are only human!
• Communicate with the freelancer and explain what you want in as much detail as possible
• Ask for a portion of the work to be done first which you can then check and provide guidance before the freelancer does all the work
• Check the text in Copyscape - it is very cheap and could save a lot of hassle in the future
• Pay the freelancer as soon as the work has been finished and checked
• Give feedback via the freelancing website.

If there are any other tips for successfully outsourcing copywriting please let me know - I am still rather new to this!

I don’t know why, but I got quite nervous posting my first project on the site. Bit of the unknown I guess and not being exactly sure what to say and all that. Anyway - wrote a nice description of what we need (20 product reviews to be researched and written - 300 words each) and hit the ‘go’ button.

I then thought I would tidy up before heading off home and see if anybody had placed a bid in the morning - in the time it took me to wash up my coffee mug I had got 5 proposals!! These guys must be sitting there clicking the ‘refresh’ button on GetAFreelancer and waiting for the next project to appear.

The average price is around $60 - that is $3 per product review - that is £1.50 each!! The feedback on most of the bidders is excellent so this is looking pretty good to me.

Now I’m getting nervous again - is this all too cheap? Is it going to be a complete waste of time with a load of rubbish text? Or is this the way forward?

I’m thinking (and hoping) it is the latter.

This brings me on to the recent A4U Expo held in London’s Excel Centre. It was an excellent event again (I went last year too) and I will write about the different sessions in other posts.

However, the session that gave me most inspiration was Million Dollar Blogging Strategies by Al Carlton. Al runs a very very successful website called Coolest Gadgets. Among the many pearls of wisdom that Al gave during his presentation was the point that he outsources all of his content writing. All of it.

At that moment the penny dropped - this is where we have been going wrong for all these years. While we have been building websites for other companies and complaining that this meant we have no time to write on our handful of affiliate sites we could have outsourced all the writing to a freelancer.

So the mission now is to look at some freelancing websites and see how this whole thing works. GetAFreelancer and eLance - here I come!

It is inspired by some graffiti that I used to walk past many years ago when I was at university in Bradford. At the top of a road in this rather grim northern town was a wall and on it was written in white paint “It’s a mean old scene” - and, quite frankly, it was! The words always struck a chord with me and, 20 years later (yes I am that old), I have found a way to use them.

I should also say, just for the record, that I have great affection for Bradford - I spent 5 very happy years there, met my wife there and met many of our friends there.

While looking on Google to see if there was anybody else who had noticed this marvellous piece of ’street art’ I was initially surprised - and then, on reflection, not so surprised, to find that it is, in fact, the title of a book all about Bradford by an author named Jim Greenhalf.

And so there you have it - the story behind the name and It’s a Mean Old Scene by Jim Greenhalf - my first affiliate link!