Lyle and Scott have a long established history in golfing began in 1847 in Scotland. They grew to become one of the biggest designer clothing brands in the UK and USA for men and women. In 1975 Lyle & Scott is Granted the Royal Warrant by appointment to HRH The Duke of Edinburgh. Lyle and Scott today is still synonymous with clothing for world class golf players and in 2003 launched their vintage range to include a younger customer. Today Celebrities of the music scene and film can bee seen wearing official Lyle and Scott clothing.

The Lyle and Scott affiliate program will give affiliates 15% on all referred sales. 60 day cookie. This program carries a lot restrictions to ensure that the brand does not become diluted nor has any association with any “discount” websites. As LyleandScott.com is a recognized brand they do not allow PPC bidding on their name or variations. Below is a full outline of the dos and donts of the affiliate program.

We are not accepting coupon site at this time.

Brand & Keyword policy

Lyle & Scott is recognized worldwide and we must protect our brand to ensure that we continue to be one of leading clothing brands in the world. Because of this our Keyword and branding policy is restrictive.

We encourage Lyle & Scott affiliates to conduct their own PPC campaigns but in order to qualify as a Lyle & Scott affiliate, we do ask you to adhere to the guidelines below:

•    Do not link directly to the Lyle & Scott Shop website, or use an URL redirect to take the customer directly to the Lyle & Scott Shop website from a PPC advert.

•    Do not bid on the keyword ‘Lyle & Scott’, ‘Lyle & Scott shop’, Lyle and Scott or any misspelling of ‘Lyle & Scott’ e.g. lysescot, Lyle N Scott, scott and Lyle etc

•    Do not bid on any keyword phrase containing the keyword ‘Lyle and Scott’ or any misspelling of Lyle & Scott e.g. www.LyleandScott.co.uk, www.Lyleandscottshop.com, www.Lylescottdirect.com, www.UKLyleandscott.com, www.LyleScott.co.uk, etc

•    Do not appear under any keyword or phrase containing the keyword ‘Lyle & Scott’ or any misspelling of Lyle & Scott

•    Do not display the keyword ‘Lyle & Scott’ or “Lyle and Scott’ in your ad copy

•    Do not buy, own or bid on any domain names with the word ‘Lyle & Scott’, ‘Lyle and Scott’ or misspellings of ‘Lyle & Scott’ in the URL. For example, wwwLyleScott.com.

•    Do not display Lyle & Scott products on Google Product Search (previously Froogle™) as we have our own feeds in place.

•    Do not conduct any form of typosquatting. Typosquatting is a form of cybersquatting which directs a person to a false website when they enter a misspelling of the intended website. For example, www.LyleScotts.co.uk, www.LyleandScot.com

•    Do not include Trademarks or miss spellings in the subfolders of your URL structure e.g. www.affiliatesite.com/LyleandScott

•    Do not include Trademarks or miss spellings in the subdomain of your URL structure e.g. LyleandScottshop.affiliatesite.com

•    Whilst we understand that many affiliates are experts in search engine optimization we ask you not to specifically target Lyle & Scott or our trademarks, if you appear on the 1st page of one of the main search engines we ask that you do not promote any discounts or offers in the Meta Title of your page. e.g. ‘Save money on Lyle & Scott.’ Or ‘Lyle & Scott discount’

The LyleandScott.com USA Affiliate Program is being run through Shareasale.com affiliate network merchant ID 35032

This program is being managed by TheNoiseFarmInc.com

We started the new year with four new projects, the launch of Lyle&Scott US affiliate program, LoveHoney.com (USA) affiliate program and we have two new fashion clients coming your way. We are working on a music project and merchant driven platform to increase their sales. We even are entering into the film world, oh yes indeed.

Top merchants affiliate programs for us for last year were CityChicOnline.com, LoveHoney.co.uk and associated brands,AtticusClothing.com,IsabellaOliver.com

Top affiliate Networks for us last year were PaidOnResults.com, Affiliatewindow.com, LinkShare.com and Shareasale.com

So happy New Year to you all and we hope you had a great start to 2012

From all of us here and over there

We seldom see articles written about the income affiliate networks and merchants get that the affiliate will never see any residual income from.
Food for thought?

Affiliate marketing for online retailers is just one type of service we can provide, drop us a line to find out what other services we can provide.

Maybe the idea of selling your products abroad is just too scary or you cant get your head around the product fulfillment or customer care issues. We have all the information you need to get going. We are located in the UK and USA, sister company is TheNoiseFarmInc.com

With our friendly staff and layman’s term approach, we can help you now.
Still unsure look what some of our clients are saying CityChicOnline.com, AtticusClothing.com, LyleandScott.com, lovehoney.com testimonials

We were delighted to hear that LoveHoney.com has acquired the brand CoCo de Mer. The sale comes quickly after their purchase of BeCheeky.com.

The business, which markets itself as an up market, ethical sex shop, selling lingerie, toys, whips and even crockery has two shops in Britain: in Covent Garden and Brompton Cross in London, and one in Los Angeles. Its customers include Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Read more

BeCheeky delivers great conversions by offering customers:

• A fabulous range of flirtatious and fun lingerie, including stylish and unique designs you won’t find in high street stores, and all at affordable prices!
• An increasing range of items that are hard to find on the high street or at other online retailers
• Safe and Secure Shopping
• Discreet, Fast and FREE UK Delivery
• Outstanding Customer Care
• Free 30 Day Returns – if you don’t like your purchase for any reason, our free UK returns policy mean you can have a refund or replacement for up to 30 days from your purchase date!

Why you should promote BeCheeky:

• A very generous 10% commission for accumulative sales under £1,000
• Rising to an amazing 15% for sales over £1,000
• Fantastic 120-day cookies to help you get that sale
• Automatically updated product feeds
• Industry standard size banners (but if you need more, let us know!)
• Dynamic content links
• 30 day validation period on sales
• Excellent conversion rates helped by our free delivery and returns
• Average order value £35
• Low level of returns (even with our free returns policy)
• High level of repeat purchases
• Tons of special offers and promotions, plus check out our best sellers for our top selling products that are just flying off the shelf!
• Regular weekly affiliate newsletters with tips, news and all the latest offers
• Program managed by affiliateprogramadvice.com
• Dedicated affiliate manager, just contact Catherine at affiliateprogramadvice.com
• We’re here to help, so if you need anything just give us a shout!

Demographics

• 60% female, 40% male – apart from November to February when this split reverses, with men typically buying lingerie as Christmas and Valentine’s gifts.
• Customers are generally aged between 20-45, with 25-35 year olds making up the second largest proportion of orders.

Click here To Join the BeCheeky.com affiliate Program

When: 4th October 2011

Where: Novotel London West
1 Shortlands
Hammersmith
International Centre
Hammersmith
W6 8DR
LONDON
UNITED KINGDOM

The Work Shops

The Exhibitors

The cost
Conference delegate £495 plus VAT
Conference DELEGATE – attend any presentation including the Keynote session, 3 Tracks, Workshops, Lunch, 2 Coffee breaks , post event cocktails & free access to post event website full AV & slides, video of ALL presentations. Price £495.00

Visitors FREE
To access the exhibition area and attend any workshops, in our opinion this option is a bargain!
Register

For full information go here
http://screenevents.co.uk/IR2011/index.html#

Location: Hilton Metropole, London

Get full details here
http://www.a4uexpo.com/london

Methodology

“AffliateBenchmarks™ reached out to a broad array of affiliate networks for recruitment support. In addition, some of the most prominent advertisers and industry news sources in this medium also assisted in recruitment to ensure a diverse pool of respondents. These various promoters helped enhance the outreach for AffliateBenchmarks’™ fourth research report by directing potential respondents to the highly intuitive, best-in-class platform developed by SurveyMonkey between the survey’s opening on July 1st and its official closing on September 1st. With their involvement, we were able to maximize the number of participants and ensure the report would be based on a representative sample of the entire market. Each participant was only offered access to the raw data; no rewards or payment were offered, which could have created answer bias. This report contains data from affiliates and advertisers around the globe. We thank everyone for their support. Due to data integrity issues, we have not included the agency/consultant data in this report and will release that data later once the issue is resolved. Questions can be directed to AffliateBenchmarks@Netx.com. We apologize for this inconvenience.” There were in total 7,279 respondents.
Survey shows that of the respondents the largest percentage of people categorized themselves as Affiliates/Publishers. The next largest percentage of respondents categorized themselves as Advertisers/Merchants with Agencies|Consultants|OPM representing the lowest percentage.”

Where are the women in Affiliate Marketing?
The survey shows us that the affiliate marketing industry is still predominantly made up of men and what is remarkable is the percentage of male/female split is almost the same as the UK demographics in the 2009 UK Affiliate Census. By the way the UK have just closed their survey for the 2011 Affiliate Census so it will be good chance to compare using current data. I still don’t know why the overall ratio between men and women is so great. As I have stated before, it’s the perfect industry for women with children who want to generate income, be able to work from home and choose their own hours. I rarely come across Female Directors of our industry companies but more often than not, the marketing roles seem to be predominantly women as employees.

Over 65’s active in Affiliate Marketing
It was so great to see that 3.2% of the respondents were over the age of 65 which is in line with Royal Pigdoms social network research that the over 65’s represent 3% of social network groups. http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/16/study-ages-of-social-network-users/ According to Nielsen , although the over 65 only represent 10% of internet users in the US, the numbers are rising and it’s good to see that our industry is on the map within this age bracket.

Are you qualified?
The survey asked the question about the highest level of education that the respondent had.
28.6 percent of the respondents said that they had a college degree or equivalent. I would have liked to have seen an additional question asking respondents how much of their college studies had any relevance to what they were doing now. Affiliate marketing from an affiliate’s perspective is one of the few industries whereby no one needs to hold any qualifications at all. It’s all about experience surely? All any publisher really needs to know is how to set up an affiliate link, those clever techs out there have and are designing sign up and go platforms that can be used in place of a traditional website, example Blogger, Facebook, ,wordpress and so on. The technical skills of having to have a website in the early days are now a thing of the past.

Affiliate marketing is a part time career.
Again by comparison to that of the UK Affiliate Census in 2009/10 half the respondents In the US affiliate marketing survey did affiliate marketing as a part-time job. No surprises there, but what the survey did reveal is that the highest percentage of respondents only came into the industry in 2011. By contrast only approximately 1% had begun in 1994 (I’d like to shake their hands).

So is affiliate marketing profitable?
The majority of respondents got less than $10k per year with the top 2.7% earning over $400K per year. On first glance at these figures I immediately equated these figures as affiliate’s/publishers being in the less than 10k bracket but upon reflection with the likes of the high profile affiliate companies here in the US and UK they almost certainly would have to be in the over 400k bracket. It’s a shame the survey did not split this out. To put this in to context it should be noted that a high percentage of respondents did not or could not reveal their earnings.

What Affiliates look for before joining an affiliate program
I was bemused to read that Affiliate’s, when deciding on which affiliate program to join, the number one choice was the commission amount offered followed by relevancy then product & Price, with EPC (Earnings per click) coming in fifth place. Fair dues, EPC was the only metric of choice offered to the respondents, I’m still surprised that it was not the second highest when deciding which affiliate program to join. The amount of commission becomes meaningless unless the advertiser’s website converts. Most affiliate networks offer publishers the overall conversions of the Advertisers affiliate program allowing the publisher to make an informed decision before they join, however this metric can only be displayed to publishers if the Advertisers/Merchant has an existing affiliate program. Terms and conditions were third from last, I had expected this to be in the top three.

Which affiliate networks do you belong to?
The respondents were asked which affiliate networks they belonged to, the top six Affiliate Networks that most had joined were Cj.com, Google Affiliate Network, Click Bank, LinkShare.com and Shareasale.com, however the respondents only had a choice of fifteen affiliate networks to choose from. In the USA there are between thirty eight and forty five Affiliate Networks.

Did Affiliate’s have a favorite affiliate network?
Cj.com is without a doubt a monster in the industry and longevity has most certainly helped and we were not surprised with it being number one, followed by Google Affiliate Network and Click Bank.

Affiliate Techniques
It was encouraging to see that a huge proportion of affiliates are still using a myriad of techniques in order to get traffic and not just relying on one or two techniques. When asked about their pay per click spend, 44% said they would invest less than around $5k with approx 2% who said they would invest around $60k or more. But natural SEO search came out as the top choice followed by social networks.

What Merchant offers do affiliates find work best
We had a problem trying to interpret this section, from what we can ascertain it would seem like affiliates get a better conversion when a merchant offers free shipping, this could be the top most liked promo. From our own research, free shipping + coupon works well.

What a great question!
“Are all of the websites you indicated above revealed in your affiliate profile?”
Only half of the respondents said that they reveal all of their websites and just under half said that they did not. If we take out the 5% that said the affiliate network does not support multiple URL listings then we see that a lot of affiliates do not display their multiple websites. What this means for an affiliate manager who has to approve affiliates before allowing them to join the affiliate program is that he/she is making a judgment call based on the site that the affiliate submitted when he/she joined the affiliate network. It’s a split second decision that could mean the difference between accepting or denying a potential gold mine for the merchant. How many affiliates have had emails saying “sorry your application was denied…” If the affiliate networks offer affiliates the option to list multiple sites, then in the affiliates own interest to list all of their sites. If the Affiliate Network does not support multiple listings then they should add this feature as it is in their own interest. As the survey reveals, there are some affiliates who have up to twenty five sites and up.

Why do affiliates stop working with an Advertiser/Merchant?
The top answer was because the affiliate was not generating enough revenue, which links into what do affiliates look for before joining an affiliate program see above. If the Affiliate Network has the metrics to show an existing affiliate program’s overall conversion / EPC (Earnings per click) then affiliates can make the judgment call before joining the affiliate program. If an Advertisers website simply does not convert or has low conversions for anyone, then no amount of traffic the affiliate sends will convert any better than without the use of affiliates. Most Affiliate Network tracking works, some better than others, but basic sale tracking works, so the affiliate network can’t be blamed here for poor conversions. It is black or white, either the affiliate is not sending relevant traffic, or the merchant does not know how to convert the traffic he/she gets. Affiliate Programs that do well are the ones where the Merchant has a good user friendly website with product demand and the right prices.

Don’t call us we’ll call you
Overwhelmingly, affiliates prefer to be emailed when being contacted by Merchants/Affiliate Managers and Affiliate Networks with only 2% opting for a phone call. Why? Because Affiliate’s are busy people and want to do things in their own good time. If just half of the respondents work part time on their websites, I would imagine that some affiliates will be working outside of office hours and at weekends where the only means of communication would have to be email.

Erm you don’t live here!
When asked “Where are you located?” 51% said that they were from outside the USA. This is an example of how affiliate marketing from an affiliate’s perspective has no country restrictions. The internet has facilitated the affiliate for just about every obstacle that may get in his/her way including language and currency. By contrast when Merchants were asked about their location over 70% said they were based in the USA.

In conclusion
By comparison to other affiliate surveys across many years, what we know is… Affiliates come and go like waves. Most of the big money making affiliates of today will in time be replaced by new big money making affiliates. The small affiliate generating one or two sales per week or month is just as important as the big affiliates as they represent a significant proportion of revenue for the merchant. The majority of affiliates are still part timers and prefer to be left alone to read their newsletters, this is not to say that some don’t prefer the phone call its horses for courses. Affiliates do read Affiliate Network and Merchant specific emails providing there is news in it, I bet that’s a relief to some people. Affiliates do use their own website analytics in order to monetize their traffic and Affiliates use social networking as a means to promote their Advertisers and represents a very large proportion of revenue.

Affiliates look at the commission percentage before anything else when it comes to choosing an affiliate program, so merchants take notice of this. I’m hoping that affiliates will continue to look at the Advertisers overall website conversions too before making their decision to join a program and if the network does not display or facilitate this metric, contact the merchant before joining the affiliate program and ask them what the overall website conversion is, average order basket and what the customer retention percentage is.

We already knew that Affiliates come from all walks of life and now from all around the world, they are diverse and many have the skills and knowledge which they use to drive targeted traffic to the merchants website.

Affiliate Marketing is global and it can only get better.

For more information about this survey please go to
http://affiliatebenchmarks.com/

AffiliateProgramAdvice.com and The Noise Farm Inc now have the results of the UK Affiliate Census and we will be comparing UK and US after we get the green light from our friends at Econsultancy.com We already have some staggering differences, stay tuned.