Nick Robertson, CEO of fashion e-tailer ASOS, has done a Ratner. This week’s he told New Media Age:
“Next year we’ll reintroduce affiliate marketing but as it should be, as opposed to affiliates as they were,” said Nick Robertson, ASOS CEO. “[There’ll be] no silly commissions being paid to grubby little people in grubby studios growing income at our expense, getting in the way of genuine sales.”
Looks like ASOS will have trouble recruiting affiliates, given the ‘who’s who’ they’ve upset:
It’s an all too familiar scenario. You’ve built the ultimate PPC campaign for a site, but the traffic simply isn’t converting.
A confession: I bought geek classic Getting Things Done by David Allen a year ago. I’ve never got around to reading it.
This year I vow to work smarter, including:
Search marketing (SEM) still feels like a dark art. Google are secretive about how bids are priced (cf. the AdWords’ Quality Score debacle), while Overture Yahoo Search Marketing is lumbered with an oblique editorial policy and a terrible interface (until Panama launches, at least).
Forget condos and strip malls. Domain names, the real estate of the Web, have been delivering far greater returns. How some of the savviest speculators on the Net are making millions from their URL portfolios.
(Inspired by Copyblogger’s The Mark Twain Guide to Better Blogging)
Forget 1984 or Animal Farm. George Orwell’s legacy to webmasters were his thoughts on copywriting.
Orwell died 40 years before Tim Berner-Lee got busy, but he understood the power of the written word. His most famous essay – Politics and the English Language – offers outstanding advice on how to write clean, concise and easy-to-understand copy.
That’s the kind of web content that makes users want to spend money, because they understand exactly what you are selling and why they should buy it. The very same web content that search engines lap up, because it’s genuine ‘quality content‘ that makes Matt Cutts go weak at the knees.
Ignore the word ‘politics’; Orwell’s advice applies to any topic. He diagnosed common problems with writing and offered six simple solutions:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I urge anyone writing for the web to tape these six bullet points to their monitor. Read them as a morning mantra, digest the Wikipedia precis now and print the full text to read tonight.