Affiliates4u.com is the heart beat of the UK affiliate scene. What was once just a forum is now a forum with added “2.0″ style functionality.  Users can create communities, to bring affiliates together on common interests. There’s a great blog aggregator which pulls in feeds from top UK affiliates and gives the users the chance to “back” or “slap” blog posts.

The forum is frequented by the most respected names in UK affiliate marketing, as well as representatives from the major networks which makes it an ideal place to keep up to date with the latest promotions, incentives and very often groans about the actions of networks or their merchants.

Affiliates4u has also been responsible for putting together well attended get togethers, including the recent very successful A4uExpo.

Find out more by visiting Affiliates4u

Buy.at are one of the top affiliate networks in the UK, and have come on leaps and bounds in the last couple of years with the signing of some really top brands.

Merchants you will find on Buy.at include: 3 Mobile, Carphone Warehouse, GAME, Butlins, John Lewis, Expedia, HMV, Nokia, Laterooms,  T-Mobile, Waterstones, Marks & Spencer, Match.com and National Lottery.

At the time of writing, Buy.at is straddling two affiliate interfaces. An older, less impressive one, and a slightly more snazzy “V3″ . Neither seem perfect but both do the job.  Buy.at’s control panel does quite helpfully tell you the referring URL for your clicks, but unfortunately not for your sales. Like most networks though, you can insert unique identifiers into the affiliate link to track where your sales have come from.

Cool extras include a downloadable widget which runs on Yahoo’s Widget service to keep you to up to date with your earnings. You can also access your earnings data with web services, making it easy to develop your own interface for getting stats however you like. I have a nice text only stats page which I can get to from my phone.

I definitely regard this Newcastle and London based network as a must have in my affiliate arsenal. You can find out more by visiting Buy.at

What do you think of the Buy.at network? Please use the comments section to leave your thoughts…

Affiliate Future is a London based affiliate network. They are particularly well suited to the travel affiliates, with lots of travel merchants available. Compared to some other networks, they are short on recognisable brands but do have lots of merchants available in all the usual sectors.

I don’t enjoy using the interface at all. It’s clunkly, not intuitive and makes basic tasks difficult. Even finding a merchant to join can be an arduous process. On the plus side, they do some useful stuff like video interviews with merchants to help you understand their proposition.

Our verdict is: if you’re a travel affiliate, sign up. If not, have a look at their merchant list before deciding if it’s worth bothering. Visit Affiliate Future for more information.

Affiliate Window is a UK based network, with a great range of merchants available, including (at the time of writing) Vodafone, John Lewis, TM Lewin, Prezzybox, Halfords, Toys ‘R’ Us, Hamleys, Dixons, PC World, Currys, Robert Dyas, Travelodge, Heal’s and loads more great, well known brands. If you’re not sure which merchant to work with, Affiliate Window produces a performance index so you can chart improvements, or otherwise, of merchants and see their EPCs.

For the technically minded, the ShopWindow API allows you to tap into the merchant product database and show products on your website. If that’s a little beyond you, make use of easy-to-setup widgets instead.Product feeds are also downloadable as CSV and XML format files.

Payments are available bi-monthly and the affiliate’s user interface makes it easy to pull up your stats. Generating links, and deep links in particular, can be cumbersome and click intensive however.

Other cool stuff from Affiliate Window include emails from the network with embedded tracking links and a downloadable “desktop notifier” which sits in your systems tray and pops up with a ker-ching when a sale comes through, as well as reports on important information and updates from the network.

Affiliate Window is based in London and is a top notch network for any affiliate who is driving UK traffic.

Find out more visiting the website of Affiliate Window

What do you think of Affiliate Window? Why not leave a comment…