Buy.at have today been acquired buy AOL in a deal that positions them now as a wholly-owned business unit of Advertising.com, part of AOL’s Platform-A organization.. Why is this not surprising? Well let’s take a look…

• During 2007 Buy.at have absolutely rocketed as a network, not just in terms of turnover but the types of clients they now have on board.
• New senior recruits (Kevin, Tyson, Louise et al)
• July 2007 they acquired Lightstate (a.k.a Shak) renamed Buy.at Leads
• In 2007 TechTrack 100 ranks buy.at in the top 10 fastest growing technology companies
• 2007 NMA Marketing Services Guide puts buy.at as the number 2 network in the UK (based on turnover)
• Successfully launched the Buy.at network in the US
• Launched a London office to better serve clients
• And way too much to post here

So given the above, all that was missing really was a solid investor like AOL, who let’s not forget have already expressed an interest in buying TradeDoubler (subsequently rejected by the TD shareholders).

Congratulations to all at Buy.at, Buy.at Leads and Perfiliate Technologies! I’m just sorry I’m not in Newcastle tonight for the party! Still there’s always hope that the London office might give me a call ;)

Full Buy.at press release here. AOL Press release here.

Post from Fish and Clicks: The Affiliate Marketing Blog.

AOL Acquire Buy.at Affiliate Network

The release has already been covered on many blogs, like here, here and here so this is just a quick post for any Fish and Clicks readers out there that may have not had the chance to pick up on this yet.

Serving as a simple overview to affiliate marketing the guide appears to be targeted mainly towards those less educated in the affiliate channel rather than those looking to dive deeper into advanced strategies. That said, it’s a well presented document covering all the basics with supporting case studies which makes a solid introductory read.

If you haven’t read it you can download the PDF here.

Post from Fish and Clicks: The Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Free IAB Affiliate Marketing Guide

Below is a copy of the exact letter sent from Steven Ballmer, CEO or Microsoft.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/feb08/02-01CorpNewsPR.mspx

Below is the text of the letter that Microsoft sent to Yahoo!’s Board of Directors:

January 31, 2008

Board of Directors
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Attention: Roy Bostock, Chairman
Attention: Jerry Yang, Chief Executive Officer

Dear Members of the Board:

I am writing on behalf of the Board of Directors of Microsoft to make a proposal for a business combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!. Under our proposal, Microsoft would acquire all of the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 based on Microsoft’s closing share price on January 31, 2008, payable in the form of $31 in cash or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock. Microsoft would provide each Yahoo! shareholder with the ability to choose whether to receive the consideration in cash or Microsoft common stock, subject to pro-ration so that in the aggregate one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be exchanged for shares of Microsoft common stock and one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be converted into the right to receive cash. Our proposal is not subject to any financing condition.

Our proposal represents a 62% premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock of $19.18 on January 31, 2008. The implied premium for the operating assets of the company clearly is considerably greater when adjusted for the minority, non-controlled assets and cash. By whatever financial measure you use - EBITDA, free cash flow, operating cash flow, net income, or analyst target prices - this proposal represents a compelling value realization event for your shareholders.

We believe that Microsoft common stock represents a very attractive investment opportunity for Yahoo!’s shareholders. Microsoft has generated revenue growth of 15%, earnings growth of 26%, and a return on equity of 35% on average for the last three years. Microsoft’s share price has generated shareholder returns of 8% during the last one year period and 28% during the last three year period, significantly outperforming the S&P 500. It is our view that Microsoft has significant potential upside given the continued solid growth in our core businesses, the recent launch of Windows Vista, and other strategic initiatives.

Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. In late 2006 and early 2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two companies might work together. These discussions were based on a vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected. While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing.

In February 2007, I received a letter from your Chairman indicating the view of the Yahoo! Board that “now is not the right time from the perspective of our shareholders to enter into discussions regarding an acquisition transaction.” According to that letter, the principal reason for this view was the Yahoo! Board’s confidence in the “potential upside” if management successfully executed on a reformulated strategy based on certain operational initiatives, such as Project Panama, and a significant organizational realignment. A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved.

While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:

Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.

Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform. Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.

Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.

Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.

We would value the opportunity to further discuss with you how to optimize the integration of our respective businesses to create a leading global technology company with exceptional display and search advertising capabilities. You should also be aware that we intend to offer significant retention packages to your engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines.

We have dedicated considerable time and resources to an analysis of a potential transaction and are confident that the combination will receive all necessary regulatory approvals. We look forward to discussing this with you, and both our internal legal team and outside counsel are available to meet with your counsel at their earliest convenience.

Our proposal is subject to the negotiation of a definitive merger agreement and our having the opportunity to conduct certain limited and confirmatory due diligence. In addition, because a portion of the aggregate merger consideration would consist of Microsoft common stock, we would provide Yahoo! the opportunity to conduct appropriate limited due diligence with respect to Microsoft. We are prepared to deliver a draft merger agreement to you and begin discussions immediately.

In light of the significance of this proposal to your shareholders and ours, as well as the potential for selective disclosures, our intention is to publicly release the text of this letter tomorrow morning.

Due to the importance of these discussions and the value represented by our proposal, we expect the Yahoo! Board to engage in a full review of our proposal. My leadership team and I would be happy to make ourselves available to meet with you and your Board at your earliest convenience. Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

We believe this proposal represents a unique opportunity to create significant value for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees, and the combined company will be better positioned to provide an enhanced value proposition to users and advertisers. We hope that you and your Board share our enthusiasm, and we look forward to a prompt and favorable reply.

Sincerely yours,

/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer

Chief Executive Officer

Microsoft Corporation

Post from Fish and Clicks: The Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Microsoft to buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion

A few immediate examples come to my mind, Kieron’s bank statement on sitepoint and of course the whopping 900k Adsense cheque sent to Markus Frind aka PlentyOfFish.com

Now I don’t know about everybody else but personally I really like it when an affiliate posts up his or her earnings. It’s also why I really like the simple idea of s.eriously.com. It’s a new, just for fun website launched by Paul Bourque of UberAffiliate.com fame. S.eriously.com acts as a one-stop gallery for all the big guns out there (with the option to submit ones that may be missing). It could also prove to be some very good link bait :)

The only downside for me was that it’s very US orientated but I’m sure with a little help from us UK folks we could change all that. Or can we? Other than Kieron’s sitepoint post I couldn’t recall any other UK affiliates doing something similar?

So I ask, are the US affiliates kicking UK ass or are we just sticking to our reserved British stereo type and keeping schtum?

Post from Fish and Clicks: The Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Seriously big affiliate cheques revealed

So what’s the best blog metric to use?

Well for me I’ve decided to put unique visitors and page impressions to one side and focus on subscribers to my RSS feed. Why? Well in my opinion 1 subscriber is worth way more than 1000’s of irrelevant uniques. If this blog were an e-commerce site 1 subscriber would be the equivalent to a sale. It’s a definable action, somebody has enjoyed an article I have written and actually made a the effort to sign up and subscribe to my feed. That to me says a great deal more that “you have had X uniques over Y days”.

This blog uses probably the most popular feed syndication tool out there, FeedBurner.com. (Acquired by Google last year) So what stats can I glean from their interface? Well unless I’m missing something very obvious not a great deal as the predefined date ranges are pretty restrictive. A report of the “last 30 days” seems a bit to short and “all time” too large. I did however manage to pull out the following, which are screen grabs of the last 30 days and the all time subscribers. It’s shows some solid growth which is great to see.

Last 30 Days

All Time Growth

An alternative feed burner tool, which I found a bit better to use was another developed by Joost de Valk (that man must have way too much time on his hands). This at least allows you to plot growth over the past 6 months, 1, 2 and 3 years which are much better time frames to measure against don’t you think?

Last 6 Months

All Time Growth

This time next year hopefully I’ll be able to revisit this post and report on even better results.

Post from Fish and Clicks: The Affiliate Marketing Blog.

The Best Blog Metric?

I came across a (very long) Rudyard Kipling poem today called The Mary Gloster which is about tycoon on his death bed talking to his son about his competitors.

This bit really struck a chord…

“They copied all they could follow, but they couldn’t copy my mind,
And I left ‘em sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind”

I thought it was a good way to end what has been a successful week.

What ever you do this weekend, make it original.

Post from Fish and Clicks: The Affiliate Marketing Blog.

You’ll never catch me

Recently I’ve been flooded with a new kind of spam here at Fish and Clicks. Similar to comment spam and track back spam these websites are simply auto generating their own blog websites by replicating the content of others, presumably by taking the contect straight from the rss feeds. An example can be seen blelow (for obvious reasons I haven’t hyperlinked to the actual blog)

My Original Post

The Spammer Post

A big thanks go out again to Joost de Valk for developing a Wordpress plugin called RSS Footer (originally requested by Shoemoney). The plugin allows you to simply add an extra line of content to articles in your feed.

Why is this useful?

Well now I can automatically insert backlinks to this website along with optimised anchor tags so that anybody finding the stolen content knows exactly where it came from. It also means that the spammers and scrapers are getting hit with my own links and it might even help towards with my own SEO. Nice!

I’m wondering though if having links on spammy websites if there’s any negative effects or association that might rub off. Perhaps some kind SEO guru out there can let me know?

Post from Fish and Clicks: The Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Spamming the spammers?

2007 has been a great year for Fish and Clicks with visitors and subscriber numbers on the up. It’s been a lot of fun and I hope 2008 will be just as great. Anyway, enough blabbing, on with the stats…

Top 5 (most viewed) posts

• Paul’s WordPress Plugins
• Top 10 tips to solve MSN AdCenter bulk upload problems
• Save your CTR, start using Google Adwords preview tool
• Google Christmas Present 2007
• Microsoft adCenter Affiliate Program

Top Referring Websites

• http://www.affiliates4u.com
• http://www.a4uforum.co.uk
• http://www.bumpzee.com
• http://www.keithbond.co.uk
• http://www.stumbleupon.com
• http://www.google.com
• http://www.affiliateblog.co.uk
• http://www.onelittleduck.co.uk
• http://www.leemccoy.co.uk
• http://www.affiliateprogramadvice.com

Top Keywords

A total of 1896 keywords and search terms registered for the year (not sure if this is good or bad?). The top 10 are listed below and where possible I’ve indicated my google rank on those search terms in brackets:

• paul wright (4th)
• affiliate marketing (18th)
• adwords preview tool (5th)
• affmeter (2nd)
• fish and clicks (1st)
• affiliate blog (5th)
• Kevin cornils (1st)
• Affiliate marketing blog (5th)
• Google Christmas present 2007 (1st)
• Tyson pearcey (1st)

Some interesting terms in there as far as I’m concerned. First we have the pure vanity listing for my own name, Paul Wright. It might take me some time to knock paulwright.co.uk off the number one spot but I’ll get there.

Affiliate Blog and Affiliate Marketing Blog are my ideal search terms and I’m happy to be ranking around position number 5 given the quality of the blogs listing above me.

Finally we have the appearance of Tyson and Kevin from Buy.at. What on earth is that all about? Well all I’m going to say is that you guy’s better send me lots of nice stuff this year or I’m gonna start using those number 1 listings to my advantage ;)

So that it’ what do you think? If you run your own affiliate marketing blog why not lift the lid and show us what’s going on inside?

Post from Fish and Clicks: The Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Blog Statistics 2007

// new 5% and 10% voucher codes

In addition to out January Sale we’ve also got a new and exclusive affiliate voucher code for you. Customers that spend £30 can now get 5% off the total basket, spend as much as £50 and get 10% discount! To use and activate the voucher code simply deeplink using the flowing url. The discount will then automatically be deducted at check out. Expires 31st Jan

http://www.buycosmetics.com/default.aspx?PromotionCode=BB510

Don’t forget, all orders over £20 qualify for FREE standard shipping.

If you need any help deeplinking or activating the voucher code please do not hesitate to get in touch.

// new creative

To support the new offer we’ve put together some creative and uploaded them into the management area. You should find banners with dimensions 120×60, 468×60 and 120×600 now available.

// hot products

It’s new year, it’s January and that can only mean one thing - detox and diets. If you’re looking for suggested products to promote in conjuntion with the new voucher code above then look no further than our Body Zone section. Here you’ll find Weightloss, Detox and Stop Smoking products which all sell very well at this time of the year.

If you would like any help promoting the BuyCosmetics.com affiliate program please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Kind Regards

Paul Wright

Affiliate Marketing
t: +44 (0)20 7923 6854
e: paul@bluebarracuda.com

Post from Fish and Clicks: The Affiliate Marketing Blog.

BuyCosmetics Affiliate Newsletter Jan 08

The Winter Sale is a site wide promotion however the following categories will help you to further drill down and focus on key sales areas.

• Boys Winter Sale
• Dolls Winter Sale
• Games & Leisure Winter Sale
• Girls Winter Sale
• Lego Winter Sale
• Pre-School Winter Sale
• Soft Toys Winter Sale

To help you with your promotions even more we’ve highlighted a few key products below which are proving to be very successful.

// hot products

Totally Glam Activity Set
Get Glam stamping with a creative activity set.
WAS £8.99 NOW £6.99

http://www.hamleys.com/invt/0000000525303

Magic Moves Baby Ball
VTech Learning on the move.
WAS £16.99 NOW £12.49
http://www.hamleys.com/invt/0000000036293

Crawling Chou Chou
Chou Chou can crawl just like a real baby.
WAS £24.99 NOW £18.49
http://www.hamleys.com/invt/0000000662759

Maxilos & Spinax

Maxilos: A pawn in the fight against the Toa Mahri.
WAS £29.99 NOW £18.49
http://www.hamleys.com/invt/0000000875542

Thomas Race On The Rails
Thomas the Tank Engine Race On The Rails.

WAS £29.99 NOW £22.49
http://www.hamleys.com/invt/0000000990507

Bridge Chase
Get Glam stamping with a creative activity set.
WAS £39.99 NOW £22.49

http://www.hamleys.com/invt/0000000873604

Bubbling Bath Fun
Get Glam stamping with a creative activity set.
WAS £34.99 NOW £25.99
http://www.hamleys.com/invt/0000000477422

Lego Fire Truck (8289)
Get Glam stamping with a creative activity set.
WAS £59.99 NOW £37.49
http://www.hamleys.com/invt/0000000526574

Transformers Metroplex

Get Glam stamping with a creative activity set.
WAS £49.99 NOW £37.49
http://www.hamleys.com/invt/0000000506808

If you would like any help promoting the Hamleys.com affiliate program please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Kind Regards

Paul Wright

Affiliate Marketing
t: +44 (0)20 7923 6854
e: paul@bluebarracuda.com

Post from Fish and Clicks: The Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Hamleys Affiliate Newsletter Jan 08