The Firebox Affiliate Blog

Recent Bestsellers (including the Flu) at Firebox

Wow, its been ages since I've done a blog post on here. In my defence, i've been busy with other things, and I've been caught up in the Twitter phenomenon. You can catch me at @NaomiMB, or the official Firebox account is @firebox.

Anyway, here are some of our bestselling products at the moment, to give you some ideas for what to promote...

Henry Desktop Vacuum £12.95
A bestseller since before Christmas, this is a mini battery-powered replica of the popular vacuum cleaner with a face.

Cyber Clean £7.95
Got a gross keyboard or other gadgets? This clever goo will help you clean them up safely. Also available in a minty blue version perfect for your car. Video creative available for this product.

Sex Panther £29.95
60% of the time, it works every time. If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch Anchorman, its very funny. This film tie-in aftershave is a Firebox UK exclusive. Video creative (see below) available.

Sega Mega Drive Twin Player Console £39.95 NEW
Pre-loaded with 15 classic Sega games, it will also play all your old Genesis and Mega Drive cartridges, and it comes with two controllers for some classic retro gaming battles!

Giant Microbes from £5.95
A product we've sold for a while, making a comeback (possibly to do with our current health concerns?). Before you ask, no Flu isn't the bestselling version, the Common Cold is! Although sales of Flu have been increasing.

Firebox at the Affiliate Future Retail Event

Last night myself and Alice, our new Marketing Assistant, took a trip into central London armed with a load of cool gadgets. We sponsored Affiliate Future's retail event, that brought together affiliates, merchants and agency staff from the retail sector.

It was held in the Bar & Pool area of the Haymarket Hotel, which made for an interesting atmosphere. It all went really well and we enjoyed chatting to people about gadgets and what's going to be hot at Christmas. Highlights were the synchronised swimmers and Pleo, our robotic dinosaur who proved a big hit.

Alice took some photos on her phone, so we thought we'd share them with you:

New Firetots baby range banners available

We're expanding our range of products with some new stuff for little Fireboxers called Firetots.

We've chosen the Firetots products in the same way we choose our normal range, finding products that are unusual and fun. Its aimed at anyone looking for a unique gift or product for kids aged around 0-3.

New products are being added to Firetots all the time, and I've uploaded some new banners to the networks to help you easily promote the range.

The Firebox Affiliate Video Player- more details

One of the unfortunate effects of not having a blog was that we launched our best affiliate tool yet without a blog post about it!

Back in March we launched the Firebox Affiliate Video Player, a brand new tool that allows affiliates to embed our videos into sites, complete with tracking. You can see the original announcement on A4U.

I thought I would take this opportunity to explain a bit more about how the affiliate player works, the code etc.

Here is an example of the player:

Our views on the recent Google Adwords change

Obviously this post would have been way more useful a few weeks ago, but I didn't have the blog running then!
The recent lifting of Google Adwords trademark restrictions caused a lot of discussion and a bit of panic within the industry. I even got quite concerned about it myself, not least because it would potentially mean a lot more work in monitoring PPC.

Before the change we sent an e-mail out to all our affiliates, and I thought it might be useful to publish this here, just to make our policy nice and clear, and it also might be useful for other merchants who want to write about policy in a non-threatening way. Incidentally, it seems to have worked, according to Keith Bond it was the e-mail out of the many he got that stuck in his mind!

The miraculous return of the Firebox affiliate blog

I'm back! Did you miss me? Did you even notice I was gone?

Our old affiliate blog has been broken for a good few months now, and I've finally given up on it and decided to start again. This has been helped loads by the fact that we've launched a new Firebox Corporate Blog called FiredUp. I've shamelessly nicked its design, adapted it a bit, and used it for this blog. Its still a bit of a work in progress but will get a lot better.

So what happened to the old blog? Well, it was very kindly setup and hosted by James Little, who bought the domain affiliatemanagement.net and loaded Wordpress onto it to allow affiliate managers to setup their own blogs. Unfortunately the domain got hacked, causing the blogs to break. As I need this blog to help me communicate with our affiliates, I decided that starting again was probably a good idea. Hopefully I'll be able to successfully load up some of my old blog posts into the new system, as it would be a shame to lose well over a years worth of posts :-(

The good news is that I've been saving up lots and lots of new posts about the Firebox.com affiliate programme and various industry issues, so will be putting these up over the next few days. I will try not to overdo it though.

I've also moved over from Wordpress to TypePad, so will let you know what I think about the differences between them.

In the meantime, this new t-shirt we're selling is probably quite appropriate: