Q&A With Easy Content Units

Earlier this week you will have seen the launch of Easy Content Units by Big Idea Media Ltd.

I have spent time this week playing with these content units and speaking with John and Jason from Big Idea Media to make sure that our clients feeds are in the system for Easy Content Units.

Personally I think the system is very good, but I could see that some affiliates might have some questions, so I put a few questions to John about Easy Content Units:-

Why did you create Easy Content Units?
As content-affiliates ourselves, we were fed up with the sub-standard content units served up by the majority of the UK networks. They were inflexible, ugly, and of course could only be used with their own network’s merchants.

We therefore decided to design a system whereby we could integrate merchants from all of the main UK networks in the same place, and allow the system to be fully customisable to look good and fit any website. When building this for our own use, we realised that we had a really useful tool on our hands here, and that other affiliates might like to use it too.

Why should Affiliates use Easy Content Units?
Affiliates using Easy Content Units will find it easier to monetise their content pages, thanks to the depth of products (there are currently more than 2.5 million products to choose from, with thousands more added every week), and the fact that it can be fully customised to suit their website. Using ECU, affiliates can very quickly find relevant products from across all the networks, and by with just a few clicks of the mouse can have a unit on their site, containing deeplinks to those products, all embedded with their affiliate links.

Aside from the ease of adding products to a unit and resulting speed in getting links onto your site, there is also the added benefit of earning more money – we tested the units on a number of real affiliate sites over the 3 months prior to launch and found that on average an ECU content unit had a clickthrough rate of three times as much as a standard text link, and conversions from those clicks were twice the rate of the standard text link!

How can merchants use Easy Content Units?
It’s really easy for merchants to get their products into Easy Content Units – all they have to do is ensure that their product feed is up to date and submitted to their network(s). In most cases, we’ll automatically pick up their feed direct from the network, however if users would like to see a specific merchant that we don’t currently have listed, then as long as their feed passes mustard, we’ll add it where possible.

ECU is a great leveler for merchants – we give no preference to the big brands, and as long as they have a suitable product feed, the smaller merchants can get their products onto thousands of affiliate websites very easily.

How do you see Easy Content Units developing in the future?
We’ve got huge plans for Easy Content Units in 2009, but to be fair most of the progression will depend entirely on what affiliates want to see – We’ve designed a system that we think is pretty damn good, and the feedback we’ve had so far from everyone has been even better than we expected, but we’re not going to rest on our laurels – This is very much version 1.0.0, and we’re going to implement as many of the features and tweaks that affiliates have requested so far

You will also find more information here:- Easy Content Units FAQ’s

I would like to thank John for taking the time to answer these questions and I am sure if you have any other questions, John will be happy to answer them.
To contact john email john@bigideamedia.com