Smart Smoker recently approached us and asked us to come up with ideas to increase their online sales. The challenge was on!

A bit of background info… Smart Smoker are a long term client and have a great product which really does sell itself as soon as people find out about it. So all we need to do is make people aware of it!

Our first task, way way back, was to start SEO’ing their website… The competition for the phrases electronic cigarette etc was relatively easy back then but has now become a pretty competitive area. We have 1st page rankings (usually top 3) for most of the main phrases and this has resulted in very healthy sales for Smart Smoker. We are rightly very happy with this but it means we have already explored this avenue. Next…

PPC is usually another good avenue to boost sales but is a non-starter as Google don’t like the phrases. Damn, next…

Social media is just starting to work for Smart Smoker. Their Facebook and Twitter followings are on the up and our tracking shows that these, combined with competitions, are resulting in some good sales! Great stuff, next…

So now we are starting to run out of mainstream/everyday ideas. We are beginning to go after new phrases in their SEO, this will undoubtedly generate more income but we needed something a bit more immediate. Welcome to the ring, Affiliate Marketing.

For those of you that are new to Affiliate Marketing, it is a relatively simple concept. It’s a bit like having a product and then getting a deal with a chain of stores who are all willing to market it for you. Obviously they will want a bit of margin for this but you are happy as it introduces you to customers who you haven’t had contact with in the past. In the web world, affiliate marketing works like this:

1. We sign you up to an Affiliate Network (there are lots and not all will be suitable for you).
2. This gives us access to a network of affiliates. These affiliates all own websites and want to make money from them.
3. We construct an attractive deal for the affiliates. This may be a 10% commission on all sales etc
4. Some affiliates will signup straight away but they need managing properly and incentivising (we help here!)
5. We then go looking for the cream of the crop of affiliates. These 10% of affiliates will be responsible for 90% of the sales that your affiliates will generate. They take a bit of work but the deals can be very lucrative.
6. We constantly monitor and adapt your campaign to improve your results and keep the affiliates interested.

You might be wondering what this means in ££££’s and especially for Smart Smoker. Well, a couple of months back we started a UK affiliate campaign for them and this is now generating an extra 10% pcm, fantastic stuff. However, affiliate marketing is massive in the USA so we went on the hunt for that cream we mentioned earlier, the 10% that generates 90% of the extra income. After an exhaustive search and competitor analysis we found a major player in the e-cig affiliate world who was interested in hearing what we had to offer. A quick flight across the pond and a couple of meetings later, hey presto, Smart Smoker have a new affiliate on board who is capable of generating more than double the income the entire current UK site is doing… Exciting stuff hey!? Well, 2 new websites are due to go live in the next week or so and the affiliate campaign should be launched in the last week of October. We are going to be holding on to our hats because it could take off very quickly, fingers crossed!  Hopefully it’ll be a nice Christmas present for the guys at Smart Smoker.

We’ll keep you updated once it all goes live and share the story of this already successful partnership