Following on from my recent entry on where all the affiliates have gone, I thought I would start reviewing a few of the tools that are out there which make it a little easier for people to get involved.
First one is Easy Content Units, developed by the lads down at Big Idea Media in Plymouth.
What is it?
A few networks have begun to offer customisable content units, in which you can select specific products from their merchants to display and personalise the way in which they are featured on your site. ECU takes this concept one stage further and allow affiliates to generate content units with merchants across networks. So here is an example I knocked up featuring merchants from buy.at, CJ and AWin.
How did I find it?
The process was remarkably easy and I was amazed by the amount of stuff that is customisable on the content unit. Other similar technologies I’ve seen force the products into pre-ordained sized banners, but ECU allows you to dictate the size to fit your needs, particularly useful for people working with different blog formats. You can also customise numbers of rows and columns, colours, include “buy now” buttons and, on feature I particularly like, highlight best price amongst many others.
The coverage is superb, with 11 networks supported (only OMG are significant in their absence) and most of the merchants on those networks are featured – I suspect the ones that aren’t don’t provide decent product feeds.
Any grumbles?
A couple of minor points. Firstly the interface could do with a facelift. First impressions count so a more polished design would be beneficial. On the same note, even though it is ridiculously intuitive, I think a step by step guide to generating an ECU would be helpful for newbies.
Finally, one thing I noticed is that if a merchant is dual network then you are not given the opportunity to select which network you wish to promote through. Potentially could cause issues if a merchant or network is running an incentive, or if an affiliate has fallen out with a specific network and would prefer to work with the other.
How much does it cost?
It’s free!! The guys have monetised it by substituting your links with their own 20% of the time, which seems reasonable enough to me given the technical development time that’s gone into it. This will probably restrict the number of big affiliates using the service, but that’s not really the target market.
Where could it go?
I think it would be really good to see the networks get behind this and use it to introduce affiliates to the industry. This really is a remarkably easy way for all of those site owners currently using Adsense to be a bit smarter in the way they monetise their site instead of using Google’s catch all solution.
With the addition of Keith’s plug-in, ECU is a great way of monetising WordPress with very little effort. How to publicise this and engage the vast community of WordPress bloggers is an interesting dilemna, but the potential benfits are huge.
Summary
All in all a great tool. Intuitive, relevant and scalable. I hope the uptake is substantial and that networks assist in publicising the service. Answering one of the questions from my recent post, this is a way for merchants to position their products on affiliates sites with minimum effort or technical knowledge required. Good luck to Lammo, Jason and the team.
