Leaving The Day Job

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As a geek and a paid up member of Liberty I take a close interest in internet privacy and it’s been all over the news for the past week or so. There has been a huge outcry and backlash against Phorm who have signed deals with major ISPs to track their users’ browsing habits and serve them targeted ads.

You can see to the right of this article that I’m linking to one of the anti-Phorm campaign sites. But as an affiliate my income depends on being able to track users as they move from my site to the merchants and retaining that tracking for perhaps 30 or more days. How can I be pro-privacy, anti-Phorm and an affiliate all at the same time?

Trading potatoes and sheep

Our economic system is built upon the notion of trading. Way back in history we would eat only what we foraged or hunted. Later we came up with agriculture and grew our own food. Then some bright spark came up with trading. I grow potatoes, you rear sheep. I exchange something I have for something you have. We agree on a price which is acceptable to both of us and a trade is made.

Google provides free web search but they still need to pay their staff. What am I prepared to trade in order to get access to that site? My attention, my time and my interests have a value. An advertiser will pay for targeted access to my attention for the time that I’m using Google. That’s the trade that we make in order for me to get access to free search, email and so forth.

Similarly, a supermarket shopper can sign up for a reward card to collect points and get discounts. This involves handing over some personal details about your shopping habits in return for those discounts. Personally, I don’t have rewards cards but a lot of people do. To them, that personal information is worth the value of the discounts they’ll get. To me, my privacy is more valuable and I’m not going to make that trade. That’s the choice we make.

Trust

Phorm want your personal browsing history to sell to advertisers as a profile. Your browsing history has a value to them. Would you let them have it? Maybe if you trusted them and got something good in return you would. But Phorm have a history of distributing spyware and the ISPs have been less than transparent about how the system will work. Can you trust them with your info? You might trust a supermarket chain with details of your shopping but would you trust them if they started telling your doctor how often you bought booze or your wife when you bought condoms?

There are a lot of reasons to be suspicious of Phorm and frankly they’re offering me nothing in return, certainly nothing to the value I place on the private data they want from me.

Afilliates

And what about affiliates? Yes, we make use of tracking cookies to enable our business and, no, a lot of the time our visitors aren’t aware that this is happening. The difference is how we use tracking cookies. We are not building a browsing history. We aren’t identifying a single user visiting multiple sites. We don’t set cookies that last for years. We’re just using them to track the success of our referrals and to claim the reward we are due for introducing the customer and the merchant. I’m happy that the use of cookies in affiliate marketing is above board. A website visitor can always set their browser to reject third party cookies or clear out their cookies at the end of a session if it suits them.

Profiling based on browsing history is a lucrative business but it’s also very difficult to do it correctly on an anonymous basis. When AOL released anonymized search history for their users back in 2006 it very quickly became apparent that individuals could be identified from the history of terms they searched for. We don’t know that we can trust Phorm with that data, we derive no benefit from them having it and we should err on the side of caution and resist this invasion of our privacy.

Affmeter is an essential part of any affiliate’s setup so I was rather saddened to learn that it is no longer going to be available for free.

I discovered Affmeter shortly after becoming an affiliate last year. It’s a really handy bit of software that logs in to all the affiliate networks you are signed up with and amalgamates all your earnings into one report. Every half hour it pops up a message on the screen telling you how well (or in my case usually, how poorly) your earnings are progressing. Best of all it’s been available for free.

So it was somewhat disappointing to be greeted with a message today informing me that the free version is being discontinued. It looks like the announcement was made last week but the news has only just caught up with me. It’s a shame but I quite understand their reasons. I’d often wondered how much money they made off their Pro version when the free version did 99% of what most affiliates want. Obviously not enough to keep the wolves from the door.

As someone who develops software for a living, I know how much time and effort it takes to produce a quality product like Affmeter. There’s nothing similar on the market that I’m aware of and the people behind it are very responsive to affiliates’ needs. It’s a well-respected product but you can only get so far on the respect and good wishes of your users. Bills need paying. Stomachs need filling.

So it’s a shame that a good thing has come to an end but I’ll be paying the very reasonable upgrade fee (less than £20 at current exchange rates). Affmeter Free is dead, long live Affmeter Pro.

How did I react when I saw Max the student affiliate’s earnings online? I raced into the kitchen to drink some milk just so I could race back to the PC and spurt it out my nose all over the keyboard. Here’s this 18 year old kid pulling in more off one affiliate network than I’m making at nearly twice his age in a fulltime job! (yes, I know it’s only turnover not profit before anyone says)

After I’d calmed down a bit, wiped up the spilt milk and reassured the neighbours that my loud exclamations were nothing to worry about, I read the rest of his posting. Essentially he’s asking why we’re not more open about our affiliate earnings and he signs off by asking other affiliate bloggers for our reasons for either posting or not posting our earnings. That did get me thinking. My immediate reaction is to get defensive and say that I don’t want to show people my earnings and why the hell should I? But the honest answer is that I don’t want people to find my affiliate packet a little limp and inadequate.

I’ve been working seriously on my affiliate business for about six months now on an evenings and weekends basis. I’m not somebody who has an awful lot of patience and the fact that my affiliate earnings are bumping along with no obvious sign of improving is leading me into the “could give it all up now” mindset. I’ve heard many a successful affiliate describe this point in the development of their business.

And this is where the wonder of blogging and community comes into play. Reading about other affiliates’ successes and how they got where they are now keeps me going in these gloomy times. I’m sure Max and Keiron and Shoemoney all took time to learn their craft and build up their business. They didn’t just start one morning then head down the bank that afternoon to collect the wheelbarrow load of cash they’d made. So Max, thanks for posting what you did. I’m not sure I’ll want to do the same when I’m in your position but if I do ever reach that position it’ll be thanks to people like you keeping me inspired.

Well, it’s going to be a long time until I can go fulltime as an affiliate but I took the day off from my “proper” job today to try to get a good chunk of affiliate work done. I started out the way I always imagined working from home would be like by sleeping through the alarm and getting up an hour and a half later than intended.

I moved on to reviewing stats, reading blogs and answering emails over a cup of freshly brewed coffee then settled down to have a long, bitter and swearword-infested fight with PHP and XML. I was trying to convert the XML from Amazon’s web service into a nice CSV file to use with Affilistore. I quickly learned that Amazon provide you with easily enough XML rope to hang yourself with. There’s far more data in their feed than I could ever need and so I spent ages trying just to figure out which bits of it were which. Then my rustiness with PHP paid me a visit and I spent a similar number of ages referring to the manual trying to work out how to manipulate said XML.

In the end I got something not entirely dissimilar to what I was trying to create but was not at all pleased that I’d wasted half the day trying to get it. It’s my intention to create a more general Amazon to CSV tool to put on this website but it’ll have to go sit on the backburner where so many of my other bright ideas are waiting. As much as I love Linux my years spent coding .NET at the day job mean development would be a heck of a lot quicker if I just bit the bullet and switched to hosting my sites on Windows.

By this point it was lunchtime already. In the day job, lunch usually marks the point at which my productivity takes a serious downturn but working at home I’ve actually got more done in the afternoon than the morning. This is a good sign as it kind of suggests that working for myself suits me.

I’ve discovered that one of my old, neglected sites is still seeing a fair bit of traffic and that most of it comes from the US. So I’ve installed openAds to rotate the banners on the site and geo-target them to the visitors. I’m thinking of revitalising and relaunching the whole site since people seem to still like visiting it.

I’ve also set up a PC at home with Fedora Linux so I can do development work, launched some PPC campaigns and done some tweaks to another one of my sites. All in all I feel I’ve been quite productive and I’ve certainly got more done in one day than I would have done in a week of just doing affiliate work in the evenings. Unfortunately you don’t get quick results in affiliate marketing (at least I don’t) so it’ll be a while before I see if my hard work pays off. In the meantime it’s back to the day job tomorrow - only four days until the weekend