Easy Content Units has teamed up with KJ Beckett to offer affiliates a chance to win £250 worth of designer accessories packed into an Oakley bag!!!! Simply promote any www.kjbeckett.com product or products using Easy Content Units and get your links live by the 31st of November to go into an Easy Content Units / KJ Beckett draw to win the prize!

The winner will be selected at random. All you need to do is simply link to KJ Beckett using Easy Content Units on your site and send KJ Beckett’s affiliate manager (Liam) an email at affiliatemanager@kjbeckett.com with the URL address of where you are promoting KJ Beckett.

Stuffed into in the Oakley bag (worth £100) are prizes including… a French Connection wallet, Burlington socks, Simon Carter cufflinks, a Rip Curl beanie hat, Tateossian money clip and much much more! All the prizes would make perfect presents this Christmas.

KJ Beckett have over 7,000 products from 100s of brands making them ideal to promote via Easy Content Units. They also offer customers free UK shipping and returns, as well as the lowest international rates (from £1.50). They offer affiliates a market leading 11% base commission (increasing to 14%), a 90 day cookie, and have a great conversion rate (which peaks at Christmas), so great commission can be earned… so why not get promoting KJ Beckett now?

There’s even a managed unit which is regularly updated with our best selling products for you to use. Just add it to your account, and customize it, pop it on your site, and forget about it.

You’ll find KJ Beckett on Webgains, which means that free members can add their products to any of your content units, and know that your ID will be used all of the time, 100% commission for you!

The Gift Experience have released their Christmas incentive, which offers our members a special bonus.

Incentive:

We are offering a tiered incentive scheme based on the sales value you can generate, running through November and December.

• Everyone starts on 10% commission – Include The Gift Experience products in your ECUs and you will start at 11% commission
• Once you have generated £1000 you start earning 11%
• Once you have generated £3000 you start earning 12%
• Once you have generated £6000 you start earning 13%
• Once you have generated £10,000 you start earning 14%
• Once you have generated £15,000 you start earning 15%

You will need to inform Steve (details below) that you are using ECU and show him a unit on your site to be added to the 11% tier.

Managed Units:

There are a number of Managed Units available for The Gift Experience which you could use on your site.  Remember all our managed units are updated by the merchant, and can be styled to completely integrate with your site.  Here are some of the units you could choose from, if you’re signed into ECU, simply tick to add to your account, then edit them to your liking:

The Top Christmas Unit:

About the Program:

Network: Webgains – Find out more on their  Program Page

Affiliate Manager:

Steve Yates
email: steve@thegiftexperience.co.uk
msn: Steveyates1981@googlemail.com

Marks and Spencer (via Affiliate Window) are running a special incentive for content affiliates, which as most of our members are, I thought would be worth a special mention. In particular they are offering £50 gift cards for the best features or articles on their products or ranges.

This incentive involves creating a page/article featuring any of their products or ranges, and emailing (sandra.oconnor@affiliatewindow.com) a screenshot or URL to the page. They will select 3 of the best to win the £50 gift card each.

With ECU this will make things a lot easier for you, not only will you be able to show off their products to their full potential, but in a stylish way too. Couple this with your own content, and I am sure you have a winning entry. With over 16000 products, I am sure you will find some way to include Marks & Spencer products within your site.

There are other categories to enter too, including most improved affiliate, best new affiliate and Most Creative affiliate as well as top performing affiliate too, each will reecive a gift card as a prize.

Here’s some ideas for you to create your units:

Lego Range:

Boys Clothing Skyscraper:

Kenwood Selection:

Good luck with your entries! Email Sandra O’Connor with your screen shots and URLs to enter for this affiliate competition – sandra.oconnor@affiliatewindow.com

You have until 19th August to get your entries in

I have had many questions about how this effects users of Easy Content Units, so I thought I’d write a quick post about it.

Over the coming month(s), buy.at merchants will be migrating to the Affiliate Window platform. Switching of networks is usually a right royal PITA, but hats off to Affiliate Window, they have spent time developing a neat little tool, which means there’s very little affiliates need to do to – however there is one thing, and that is to map your Buy.at handle with your Affiliate Window account. Once this is done, you will not need to do anything else, their migration tool, ensures your buy.at links continue to track in your Affiliate Window reports – simples.

Here’s the step by step to ‘Mapping’ your accounts.

• Log into Buy.at
• Click on Affiliate Window
• Click on Mappings
• Enter your AffWin account details
• Link the accounts
• Job Done

You will notice that those merchants for which migration has started, will appear on the mappings page, and it will show their progress, until they are fully mapped and tested, when it will confirm that the process is complete.

Very simple process, thanks to Affiliate Window who put in a lot of development time, to ensure a smooth transition for affiliates!

As for ECU, in the short term we will be adding the programs via Affiliate Window, so that new products added to units will come through the new network, however existing products will continue to work fine through the Buy.at tracking.

We have been busy rewriting various areas of ECU, the first to get a public airing is our new Search. We appreciate, that our search has been fairly slow at times to look through all 13 million products, with this new rewrite, you should see significant speed improvements.

In addition to the cosmetic differences, the new engine will load your results, all of them, and then allow you to move between pages, adding products, without recalling the search, which speeds up the unit creation/edit process considerably.

We have also added a couple of new filters into the mix, which will help you narrow down the products for your units.

Keep an eye out for future developments coming soon.

Thanks for your patience!

Well that was an awful weekend of waiting around for something to happen. It appears that early hours on Friday morning, the host of the server where the product data is held decided to do some routine maintenance on the server. This meant the server needed rebooting which they completed. Unfortunately, it rebooted in safe mode, which meant access to the server was denied for our services.

This meant our safe guard for your units kicked in, and they continued to be shown on your sites, our redirect tracking was removed and replaced with your own affiliate network deeplinks as per our protocols, ensuring your revenue stream.

Once we contacted the host, they immediately rebooted the server and put it back into normal mode, which meant everything was back to as it should be, and I reopened the front of site whilst continuing data checking.

It became apparent that through the search, that some of the product data was corrupt, which when we investigated, found that the tables holding the product data had indeed corrupted when the host rebooted the system. We then had to close the front of site, to prevent any data loss, or access to the product data.

We then set about repairing the corrupt files, which as you can imagine takes a fair old amount of time. Saturday morning when things hadn’t completed, I contacted the host again to find out the status of the repair, and why access to our system had still not been restored, to find that the server was offline, due to a power supply failure.

They replaced the faulty hardware, and switched us back on, we checked if the data had repaired, it hadn’t so we restarted the repairs. Again having waited for hours for the repair to complete, I called the host to see what the state of play was, which they replied, no idea, it’s nothing to do with us, and promptly hung up. Well as you can imagine I was left speechless, but set about finding solutions for my self.

I have done this, and found the product data hadn’t been repaired, so have called it quits on that line of action. We are currently undertaking a full data import which I envisage taking a fair while to complete. Whilst this is happening, we are taking the opportunity to rewrite a few different areas of ECU which have been causing speed and performance issues for you guys, most notably the searching of products. So not all doom and gloom coming out of the ECU camp, we’re sorry we continue to restrict you from editing and creating new units, but rest assured, that your units are all safe and continuing to earn your commissions.

I will continue to update Facebook and Twitter with progress, and hopefully will have an eta for the opening of the admin area shortly.

Below are the merchants we have removed and added since the last update. Please check your units to make sure they are up to date.

Closed and Removed:

Menkind via Webgains
My Craft Store via Webgains
My Hobby Store via Webgains
Tiso via AffWIn
Jeanzunltd via Webgains
Sara Berman via Webgains
i-nique via Webgains
Dino Direct UK via Webgains
MP3 City Guides via Webgains
Kiddicare via Tradedoubler
Ryman via Tradedoubler
Liberty via Linkshare
Focus DIY via AffWin
Viking via Webgains
First Aid Warehouse via Webgains
Fone Craze via Webgains

Additions:

Affiliate Window:

Rutland Cycling
Racing Green
Adini
Merlin Cycles
Brandosa
Weight World
made.com
Zalando
PayasUgym

Webgains:

TW Steel
New CID Cosmetics
Puffin Book Club
Bag a Camera
Mattress Planet
Bed Style
Health Monthly
Psyche
Shore
Warner Leisure Hotels
California Dreamin
Sarah Raven
Matinee Tickets
Bluebird Mobility
Trimsole
Dealtastic

Paid on Results

Elvi
Gere Menswear
Little Mistress
rucomfy Bean Bags
Sounds Live
Worn By
Yuki Tokyo

Linkshare

Question-air
Pack Your Bags
Urban Industry
Glassworks Studios

Have fun, and if there are any merchants you cannot find in the system, and would like to promote, let us know below or on a support ticket.

Here’s a summary of new merchants added this week:

Webgains:
Bucks Boarding
Pro Trolley
Mattressman

AffWin
Ryman
HQ Hair
Furniture FInders
Azendi
Norfolk Country Cottages
Marsdens Cottage Holidays
AX Paris
Nite International

Linkshare
Mainline Menswear
TM Lewin
Sport Discount
Pure Dash
Ralph Lauren

We have just rolled out a new feature for you, which enables you to change the name of the products in your units. This is especially helpful with your layout of your unit as some product names are not the best.

Some are too long, and some not at all descriptive, so close to useless. But with our new function, you can set your awn product names.

For those of you who use PHP out put for your units, the fact you can change the product name along with the description will help your SEO efforts too, providing unique content for your site, compared to others using merchant datafeeds.

To access the new feature, simply click on the ‘Edit Product Details’ link found below the customisation box and above the unit preview as shown below:

Hope you like the new addition to our features, if you have any suggestions, please leave them below:

Here are the merchants we have added this week:

Webgains:
Homes Direct 365
Urban allotments
Bags of Love
Go Pumpkin
The Sun Care Shop
A Coombs Pet Centre

Paid on Results:
Belle Lingerie
Bill & Ben The Cartoon Men
Chloe Beck
Cooks and Kitchens
Games Basement
I Love Cutie Pie
Letterbox Love
Office Supplies Supermarket
MLP Training
Styles UK Designer Clothing
The Stock Shop
Urban Eclectic
We Admire
Whats About Town

Affiliate Window:
Menarys
Suit Direct
Bid TV
Golf Store Europe
Clarks
Teufel
Farm and Cottage Holidays
Hostelbookers
Holidaylettings
Lastminute Airport Parking
Premier Man

Tradedoubler:
O’Neill
Matalan

Linkshare:
Kaliko
Alexon
Reiss
Eastex
Minuet Petite
Kew
Dune

We are having problems importing the following feeds, but are trying hard to get them in for you:

Dash (LS)
Monsoon (LS)
Paprika (LS)

If there are any merchants you cannot find but would like to include them in your units, let us know on a support ticket.