Fancy winning an all inclusive holiday to a 5* Hotel in Dubai? Or how about a Skiing Holiday?

Prezzybox are giving away UNLIMITED PRIZES for our Winter Promotion. The prizes are:

• Star Prize One – 5* All Inclusive 7 Night Holiday to the Hilton Ras al Khaimah Resort in Dubai
• Star Prize Two – 7 Night Skiing Holiday in Europe
• Gold Prize – Golf Weekend at the Belfry OR Overnight Stay at a Luxury Spa for 2 OR Trip to Paris OR Rally and Track Experience
• Silver Prize – Porsche-v-Ferrari Racing Day OR Relaxing Spa Day for 2
• Bronze Prize – Mishake MP3 Player OR Spa Day for 2 OR Ferrari Thrill Ride

The Rules

The rules are simple!

1. Time Period. It’s called a Winter promotion as the time period is 1st Oct through to 14th Feb, so as well as Christmas, you’ve got January Sales and Valentine’s Day to generate sales.
2. Reach one of our targets as detailed in the table below and you are GUARANTEED TO WIN the relevant prize:

Prezzybox Affiliate Prizes

That’s right. We’re not limiting it to 1 or 2 affiliates. EVERY Affiliate who reaches one of the targets will win that prize.
So. If you generate £25,000 of sales YOU ARE GUARANTEED TO WIN an all inclusive 5* Holiday to Dubai.
It gets better…. You can win multiple places on the two Star Prize Holidays.

So, for example, if you generate £50,000 of sales revenue you can choose 2 places to Dubai or 3 places to Skiing and so on. There is literally no limit to how many places you can win and you get to choose where you go!

Bring the missus, a friend or a colleague.

But what if I’m not able to generate that level of sales revenue?

Well, so we don’t leave out any of our favourite Affiliates we’ve also got 3 special prize categories:

• Best New Affiliate (signed up after 01.08.08) – Wins a trip to Dubai.
• Most improved Affiliate (on same period last year) – Wins a trip to Dubai.
• Wildcard – Generate £500 of Sales Revenue and get entered into the prize draw to win a trip to Dubai. We’ll pick a name out of the hat at random.

That’s right. Every Affiliate who generates £500 sales revenue will get 1 entry into the hat. The winner (who will be picked out of the hat at random) will win 1 place to the Dubai Holiday.

And if that’s not enough we’ll also be rewarding our Best New Affiliate and our Most Improved Affiliate too!

Phew!

About the trips

5* All Inclusive Holiday to Dubai

The hotel is the stunning Hilton Ras al Khaimah Hotel in Dubai. It’s 5* and is all inclusive so you can eat and drink as much as you like. R & R will be the order of the day but there will be water sports aplenty and the opportunity to ride the awesome Dune Buggies.

Skiing Holiday to Europe

We’ll provide the flights, the accommodation, the lift pass and the ski-hire. All you need to do is come along and bring a ski jacket. We’ll then have 7 days of glorious skiing.

Whilst on either the Dubai or Skiing trips we’ll be giving you enough space to do your own thing, but will organise a number of group activities for the lucky winners. The only bad news is that you’ll have to put up with me (or one of my colleagues) as a chaperone to make sure everything goes swimmingly.

To enter into the competition all you need to do is email zak@prezzybox.com saying “I want to go!”

Good luck folks!

Zak.

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You simply have to watch this - click here - it’s awesome.

OK, it’s all the more special as I’m a Villa fan, but surely this is what the beautiful game is all about.

Ten ten.

TBW

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Prezzybox, like loads of other companies send all of our weekly/monthly newsletters via a 3rd party. We currently use an Email distribution company called Email Vision but are coming to the end of our contract with them. I’m therefore looking at all the options and thought I’d share my experiences. Basically - as far as I can see, we have 3 options…

1) Don’t send any newsletters. Bit daft this option, so we’ll move on…

2) Continue with Email Vision or one of their competitors.

This would be the easiest option as we’re already good to go. Email Software providers normally ’guarantee’ deliver-ability,  the have all manner of reporting/tracking tools and claim to “talk to the ISP’s on a daily basis” to ensure that their IP addresses are whitelisted. Hmmmm.

The obvious detriment of continuing with somebody like this is the cost. It’s not cheap.

3) Send Newsletters ourselves

When we first launched we used to send all of our newsletters ourselves and even sent them from the same server as our site was hosted. So what’s to stop buying/renting our own server with its own IP address and sending out our own newsletters? Especially when there are free tools which enable us to do this such as Openemm.org or you can buy a licence from people like Lyris.com.

Newsletter providers will say that this is a complete ‘no no’ as if you do this your IP address will instantly become black listed and you’ll never get an email into the inbox of any of the big ISP’s again. But is this really the case? Surely, as long as you are sensible and don’t spam the World and his wife to death then you’ll be fine. Admittedly you need to make sure the DNS and IP address are set up correctly, and you have to ‘warm up’ the IP address but I can’t believe it is that difficult to do. Are the email providers just scare mongering as it’s not in their interest for you to do it yourself or is there really an art to ‘getting in the inbox’?

The massive advantage of sending newsletters yourself is the cost saving. It’s potentially free. And, if the worst does happen and your IP address does get black listed, then surely you can sign up with one of the Email Providers futuristically and use one of their ‘white listed’ IP address’s.

So folks, I’m really unsure which way we’ll go. As soon as we make a decision we’ll keep you posted.

Cheerio.

TBW

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OK folks, this is purely a promotional post. So, if you’re looking for some words of wisdom or something insightful, then I’m sorry but you’re gonna be a tad disappointed.

So, what can you win?

Prize 1 - Win a 5* Holiday to Tunisia  with Prezzybox.

We’ve teamed up with our good buddies at The Co-operative Travel to give away a 5* holiday to Tunisia. Pretty neat hey! All you need to do to enter is click on this link and answer the pretty easy question.

Prize 2 - Win Prezzybox vouchers by answering this quick survey.

 We’ve teamed up with some more buddies - Carrentals.co.uk to offer some Prezzybox.com vouchers. All you need do is fill in this brief survey and Dougs your uncle, you’ll be entered into the draw to win some vouchers.

Good luck and toodle pip!

TBW.

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 I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but have been snowed under lately - slapped wrists - no excuse!

So, how did the Christmas in July show go?

Well, considering it was our first ever exhibition, and although it was pretty stressful in the run up, I feel it was a massive success. We made a LOT of contacts from lots of magazines, papers and blogs. This in turn gave us a good indication of what products will do well at Christmas.

We segmented our products into categories - for him, for her, for kids and for the home and this format worked really well as it enabled us to promote 20 products in each category which we feel will be biggies this Christmas. The journos seemed to like this format too and it’s one we’ll be adopting in the future.

A number of our affiliates popped over to see us and hopefully we made it worth their while by providing them with a goody bag and a look some of this Christmas’s big sellers. Thanks for braving the rain fellas.

I’ve included some piccies of the event for your perusal.

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Today is officially a sad day for affiliate marketing. That’s right, get out the hankies and give your snozz a good old blow because today sees Sarah Wellock of Affiliate Window fame pack up her bags and head off to pastures new.

Boo hoo.

For me Sarah epitomises everything that is good about AWIN. She’s hard working, really forward thinking, always positive and always looking out for our best interests. In short she’s been a real star to work with.

But all good things must come to an end and alas, today is Sarah’s last day. She’s moving to SEGA to help with the Internet side of the business and the launch of new games. And to help her with her…erm… work, we’ve sent Sarah a Pyramat Gaming Chair to enhance her game play.

So - good luck Sarah. I really hope things go well for you and I sincerely hope to see you back in the Affiliate Marketing Arena soon.

Toodle pip.

TBW.

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 Christmas is merely 178 days away (and counting), so you really need to pull your fingers out and start thinking about what products you’re going to be promoting this Yuletide.

For this very reason we’re attending a “Christmas in July” exhibition where we shall be displaying all of our top selling products together with all of the big hits for this Christmas to 100’s of prospective journalists for national newspapers and magazines.

The event takes place over 2 days in July on the 9th and 10th at The Vinyl Factory, Foubert’s Place, Soho, W1 and we would like to invite all of our affiliates along to come see us at the event! It would be good to catch up with all of you and will also give you a much better understanding of which products are going to be big sellers over Christmas this year. It will also allow you to start creating and optimising your pages for Christmas earlier so that you gain maximum exposure (and commission!) over the festive season.

Fancy it? The event is free to enter and it would be great to see you there. If you’d like to book an appointment then please feel free to drop me an email or call 0870 1221 007 and we’ll get something in the diary. Alternatively simply drop in at the event between 9am and 6pm. It will be great to see you.

Toodle Pip.

TBW

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Prezzybox launched our Vidibox Video Content Units last year. For those of you who’ve not seen them, the Vidiboxes are basically banners with product videos embedded into them and look a little bit like this - below.

I’m convinced that the Vidiboxes work better than traditional banners for affiliates, so I’ve been meaning to do some analysis for some time now with regards to the success rate (and particularly the conversion rate) of products that have and don’t have demonstration videos, and thus confirm the validity of the Vidiboxes as affiliate content.

For the purposes of this research I’ve looking at 2 products - the original yellow Sun Jar, which has a product video (and a Vidibox) and the Sun Jar - Blue, which doesn’t and looking at how well each one converts.

The results are really interesting. I’ve compared visitors and sales over the last 3 (and a half) months and here’s my findings:

The main point that stands out here is the difference in conversion rate - with the original Sun Jar having an average conversion rate of 3.02% compared to the conversion rate of the blue Sun Jar of 1.27%. To me this is really interesting. The product imagery, product copy and retail price are identical in every way with the two products, apart from one product being blue and the other being yellow. The only differentiating factor is that the yellow Sun Jar has a product video and the blue one doesn’t. It appears at  first glance therefore, that the yellow Sun Jar has a conversion rate of 1.75% greater than the blue one because it has a product video. This fact is backed up by point number 2…

…The second interesting point to note is the product videos appearance on Youtube. You can see that by clicking here. In 9 months we’ve received 15,855 viewings of this product video, that’s an average of 1761 viewings per month. Now, even if only 10% of those viewing the video on Youtube (could be more, could be less - we’ve not tracked the clickthroughs) click through to Prezzybox and then buy the Sun Jar, then at the conversion rate of 3% we will have achieved an extra 48 sales and generate extra revenue to the tune of approximately £950 for literally shooting a product video and putting it on Youtube, all of which is free of charge. Now, obviously this isn’t going to make us our millions but if we repeat the exercise with every product that warrants a product video, the ROI will soon start to add up.

So - although I don’t have any specific figures as to our video content units increasing conversion, it would appear when analysing the actual product page, that conversion is significantly increased. I can only assume therefore that using a Vidibox will increase the CTR from affiliates to merchants and thus increase commission.

I really do advise affiliates to use video content. In the words of Peter Kay, “it’s the future”.

But how should you use the Vidiboxes? Well, that’s entirely up to you. Jason at Loquax, has been really ingenious with them, displaying them all for people to scroll through. You can see Jason’s handy work here or alternatively you can use them in place of traditional banners or content units.

So, in short, I’m really glad that we took the time and effort to produce our Vidibox content units. I’ll be pushing our creative team to do a whole stack more and also be pushing affiliates to use them more frequently.

Till next time. Toodle pip.

TBW

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I’m really honoured to be nominated for the 2nd year running for the Affiliate Manager of the Year. Thanks folks for your votes - you honestly don’t know how appreciated it is. Obviously I’ll be touting for votes now it’s down to the final 6, so in a shameless plug….  

So, the million dollar (well, lira) question is who’s gonna win? Well, I really do feel that this is a six horse race. Graham’s often telling me that he’s a thoroughbred, and my missus has compared me to a stallion on many occasion (in my dreams anyway!!). So, here’s a look at the competitors…

Chris Bishop (formerly of Hotel Chocolat and now of House of Fraser) is a good fella and is really passionate about Affiliate Marketing. Downside? Well, his footballing parlance leaves little to be desired as he’s an ardent Bolton Wanders fan….

Graham of buyagift fame is one of the nicest fellas in Affiliate Marketing. He’s one of the ‘old timers’ in the affiliate sector and really understands the affiliate model. Buyagift also run some cracking competitions for affiliates to win on a regular basis.

Alpha Rooms Dan Morley, again is another smashing chappie and his knowledge and wealth of experience belies his tender years. He also writes a great blog with loads of affiliate insights and thoughts.

Chris Clarkson has literally burst onto the scene with a fantastic Affiliate launch at Sunshine. As an affiliate himself it appears that Chris and the team understand the wants and needs of affiliates and are catering for them accordingly with their exciting new scheme.

There’s also Jasper from Jackpot Joy. Now, I’ve not met Jasper, but a number of people who I respect in the Affiliate Arena say he’s a good chap and a good affiliate manager so that’s good enough for me.

And what about Zak from Prezzybox? Well, he’s devilishly good looking so is sure to get the female vote ;-). No, in all seriousness I think we’re pretty switched on when it comes to affiliates and try to provide all of the latest tools so as to help maximise sales - hence the launch of last years Vidibox Video Content Units, our Affiliate Resource Centre etc.

So there you have it folks. In my opinion six really worthwhile competitors all of whom could win the award. I’ve no idea who will walk away with the accolade, but I’m sure it’s going to be a fun night for all concerned on the 5th June.

And whilst I’m on my soapbox I should also mention some of the people who’ve not made the final six. I’m really impressed with, and hear great things about Naomi from Firebox, so I’m surprised she’s not been nominated. The same goes for Ben from Evans cycles. Do we need to call a Stewards Enquiry?

Toodle pip for now.

TBW.

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Fathers Day is going to be upon us before you know it (June 15th is the big day) so it’s high time we got on with launching our Fathers Day Campaign.

Included in this campaign:

• Commission Increase to 10%
• Brand name bidding Competition. Win a Prezzybox produced branded landing page and exclusive brand name bidding for a month
• Fathers Day creative

First the good news. We’ve raised our commission to 10% to bring us in line with the vast majority of our competitors. So, when you combine this with all of our other great features (vidibox video content units, branded gift vouchers, branded landing pages, data feeds updated daily, creative designed specifically for your site etc) hopefully you’ll see that it makes perfect sense to promote Prezzybox. We’ll review this after Fathers Day and if it’s working well we’ll leave it at 10%.

With all the hulabaloo about May 5th and Google brand name bidding, we thought we’d seize the moment and turn a threat into an opportunity.Normally we don’t allow brand name bidding, but hey, to celebrate fathers day, we’re going to give away a branded landing page and allow someone to bid on our brand name - unopposed by other affiliates - for the whole of July. Pretty neat eh! Entry is really simple - promote Prezzybox using one of our vidiboxes and content units, email me the link and we’ll pick the winner out of the hat on Monday 16th June. Here’s an example of a landing page…

We’ve created a generic voucher code called FATHERS DAY (inventive I know). This will entitle all of your users to £5 off every order over £20. If however you’d like a branded gift voucher and landing page (similar to this one) then please email Ben or myself and we’ll get it sorted for you.

This includes:a) Vidibox Video Content Units Our database of  Our product videos portfolio is growing increasing larger. You can see the full selection here. So - feel free to either use one of our pre-built vidiboxes, or if you’ve got a particular product you would like to promote that we have a video for then let me know and we can custom build a Video Content Unit for you.

 b) Fathers Day Content Units

The design team have put together a number of content units promoting all of our popular Fathers day goodies in a number of different sizes. Here’s a selection.

All of our creative can be found be found on AWIN and POR under the title of Fathers Day and then the relevant name. If anyone struggles to find it, please let me know and I’ll gladly assist.

We’ve loads of great sellers that sold last Fathers Day, and some fantastic new products. Some definite you should be promoting are:

• Gamucci Electronic Cigarette
• Personalised Stig Poster
• Picoo Z Sky Challenger
• Stylophone
• TV B Gone
• Pizza Oven
• Personalised Fathers Day Calendar
• Elvis Presley Bath Robe
• Personalised Football Team History Book
• Hang out Hammock
• 6 in 1 Utilikey Multi Tool
• Antworks
• Talking Dashboard Homer
• Adrenalin and Adventure Activity Selection Box
• 20Q
• Powerball Signature Pro

Also - you can check out our new blog - Prezzybuzz.com - which features all of our latest goodies.

As we’ve increased our commission to 10%, we needed to do something to stop the finance chappies having palpitations. So, we’ve reduced our cookie length to 60 days. I’ve analysed this and the vast majority of our competitors only have a 30 day cookie so we hope 60 days is more than sufficient.That’s all folks. As always, if there’s anything more we can do for you - be it specific creative, voucher code or whatever, then give me a shout.

Toodle pip.

Zak.

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