I'm really looking forward to the release of the Nintendo Wii. I loved my SNES years ago, but more recently my hand has been mashed up with RSI, so I can't wait for the Wii's innovative controller.

So to coincide with my enthusiasm for the console, I thought I would knock up a Wii related site to cash in on the interest and pre-orders. I made a basic enough site but had the look and feel of the official Wii site and looked ok, but at the time nobody was offering pre-orders so I didn't finish the site and just left, albeit with a link to it from my homepage so it would get indexed in the meantime.

Imagine my horror when I was going through the server traffic logs earlier on and found that for the past 5 days, the site has been getting massive traffic from Google, seemingly for the phrase "preorder wii". Five whole days of glorious free traffic and I hadn't monetised it at all because there was no affiliate links and I hadn't even put Adsense on it - which is annoying because I use Adsense almost like an ad hoc traffic counter so I would have noticed the traffic if the ads on had been there. To compound my misery, the site seems to have lost its placing because the traffic dried up as of today and isn't showing on the queries that it was getting hits from last week.

I'm sure there's a lesson here - probably something like don't leave a site without adverts on it! Doh!

If you want to see the site in question, which I've belatedly added some monetisation to - Preorder Wii.

I blogged recently about how Pagerank 10's affiliate scripts made it easy for newbie affiliates to get a site up and running with little or no technical expertise.

Another new product that makes an affiliate's life easier is DataFeedFile.

Basically they take care of handling the product data feeds from merchants at major affiliate networks. They host and manage the data and serve it up to your website with you just needing to enter a few lines of code on your page. They've come up with a full suite of searchable product listings and comparisons you can integrate into your page.

What's in it for them?

Every 4th click that comes from your website will go through their own affiliate link rather than yours. So in exchange for their service, you are giving away a quarter of your potential leads.

It seems like a reasonable trade off if you're starting out and don't think you have the aptitude to manage your own data sources, or are just a casual affiliate dipping your toe in the water - but my personal recommendation would be that you try to learn the skills required because if you become a serious affiliate, giving away a quarter of your traffic could be a big deal.

Labels: affiliate tools

I was recently researching the breakdown cover market for my new website, Breakdown Cover, and thought I'd share the info with you about the leading merchants in this sector and what schemes the operate.

The AA
Network: Buy.At
Commission: £20 per sign up
Cookie Period: 28 Days

RAC
Network: Buy.At
Commission: £15 per sign up
Cookie Period: 30 Days

Green Flag
Network: TradeDoubler
Commission: £20 per sign up
Cookie Period: 45 Days

Though personally, I found the best deal was not online at all. I went along to a local bootfair where there's a regular AA presence and signed up for about half their advertised price.

Leaving aside the debate as to whether Web 2.0 is just a meaningless buzzword that does nothing more than describe a bunch of existing technologies or not, it does seem that lots of websites which seemingly come under the 2.0 banner have a common design sensibilities.

I found a cool article about how you can turn a website into a Web 2.0 lookalike website and get the same kind of look.

Check out the full article for a great read, but here's a quick summary of things to do:

• Rounded Shapes
• Shades
• Sans Serif
• Pastell v2.0
• Footers
• Buttons
• Font-Size: Oversized
• Descriptive HTML (XML style)

Labels: web design

I called time on all my Google Adwords campaigns this week. I had so many campaigns going that things were getting seriously out of control.

I've never had much success with PPC advertising. I remember back when it first dawned on me that you could use pay per click to sell products directly from the merchant and not even need your own website. Me and my friend went crazy mopping up keywords for books and DVDs on Amazon. We went chasing keywords that gave great clicks, but the sales conversions were lousy - probably because we weren't thinking enough about the demographics, and that a lot of clicks for Gareth Gates were from people who probably didn't have a credit card nevermind wanted to buy online.

But in the last couple of years, I've just used Adwords as a quick way to generate traffic to new sites, but they willl have to stand on their own two feet for now. Since I turned off Adwords, there's been a small decrease in earnings but since my Adwords outgoings are non existant, this is a case of less being more.

I'm just in the process of moving to a big new house where I will have space for a decent sized office at home, so it was my intention to give up my office in Greenwich, SE London.

But I can't quite say goodbye to it. I don't need it, but it's a great resource to have and it's in an excellent location.

So I'm looking for an informal office share. I've advertised in the usual places and had a few responses, but someone else with an interest in affiliate marketing would be great. I'm only there about 2 days a week so you'd have a decent size office (150sq ft) to yourself for a lot of time.

So if you'd fancy some office space for £50 a week with 8mb broadband included, send me an email.

Labels: office

My affection for Dragons' Den was shaken by the news report that 13 of the 19 deals in the episodes shown have not gone ahead, but looking at my incoming traffic, people are interested in the show so I'll do my review of episode 8.

Rob Law was first up in the Den and wanted £100,000 for 10% of his "ride on luggage and travel for little people" called Trunki. Theo, who may be touting himself for work as a crash test dummy, managed to prove that if a grown man applies enough force to a plastic hook, it might break. This put some of the other Dragons off and Peter Jones told Rob that his business was worthless. Whilst I wouldn't doubt Peter's business acumen, if a business has a marketable brand, a decent product and 20,000 sales under its belt - is calling it worthless fair?

Next up was an inventor who had created a gearbox capable of a 1000:1 ratio, and a suggested application which was a domestic wind turbine. When discussing the market for this, he said he expected all houses to have these in the future. Peter Jones looked incredulous and and again proved his skill for missing the point, by criticising the appearance of the turbine and the idea that everyone would have this product on their house. Actually the point being made I thought was that in the future, we would all need this type of device , which is probably true because of the cost and security of energy supply. The aesthetics of the propellor as it stands as a prototype here today in 2006 are largely irrelevant to that. Theo and Richard had some encouraging words for the inventor.

SmartChartz was a product from Abiola Ajayi-obe. She was brutally honest in admitting that she had had problems with her kids and even cosidered going back to work to escape them before coming up with this system for incentivising and rewarding good behaviour. The Dragons like the product but didn't like her attitude or her valuation so she left the Den with nothing.

CoinMetrics was interesting idea for a wireless device that could sit in side any slot machine and produce real time statistics based on coins in and coins out. The pitch was excellent and the Dragons were all impressed. I would have been interested to know what the security on these devices was like because wireless security can often be broken if you have the determination and time to do so, and the data these things would be transmitting would be commercially sensitive I imagine. Maybe the subject came up but was edited out or maybe the Dragons didn't ask. Eventually they won invetsment of £200,000 for 25% of their company, split between Deborah and Theo. It was nice to see Duncan make his usual valuation using the quick calculation that whatever the amount asked for, that must be worth 50% of the company.

As this series ends, it's hard not to look back and say it has become slightly farcical. The Dragons have enjoyed their roles too much and played up to it as pantomime characters and seem to want to be the next Simon Cowell. It's interesting that Peter Jones' own personal website uses the .tv top level domain suffix.

I assume there will be a next series and it will probably be more of the same since it does well in the ratings, but really the BBC should think about refreshing the Dragons line up. From the current crop, I would only keep Richard Farleigh who was an excellent addition this year.

Let me preface this post by saying I think Google Adsense is an excellent service. It was my first foray into making money online and it's been a great, reliable income stream ever since. I recommend it as a tool to anyone thinking of monetising web content.

I was thinking the other day about how I could promote the new Google Pack which I mentioned in a previous post and had an idea for a domain name, and a sub domain name which together would make a very SEO friendly website name.

I was pretty sure that having a Google trademark in a domain name would be a serious no-no, but wasn't sure about the possibility of using it in a sub domain name or sub folder name so contacted Adsense support for guidance. I've heard stories about accounts being closed so like to get guidance from them if I'm at all unsure about anything.

I was a little shocked to get a reply saying that actually using any Google Trademark in any part of the URL was against the rules for publishers. This is actually a massive limitation on what publishers can do, and it only takes a few seconds of searching to find plenty of sites, often well known ones, which are in breach of this.

Say you wanted to review Google Picasa on your website. It's a great product and you might end your review with an Adsense referral unit for Picasa or an advert unit. So far so good. And you might want to call your new page, "review-of-google-picasa.htm". Wrong! Because any part of the URL that features Google branding is against the rules for publishers.

What about if you were writing a blog and had Adsense on your page. If you mention any Google product in your blog post title, the blog software will mostly likely use the post title to generate a search engine friendly URL. Google's own blog software, Blogger.com, does exactly this. So if you mention a Google trademark in the title of a post, Google's own system design will be putting you in breach of their Adsense rules.

This seems like a very restrictive clause in their programme policies, and to be honest I can't see how they could enforce it without losing swathes of publishers, but I thought I would try to bring this to the attention of anyone wanting to ensure they stay on the right side of Google's rules.

The real solution though is for Google to think again about this policy which doesn't seem fair on publishers and content creators

Labels: adsense, google

Commission Junction gets a bit of stick for not making product feeds as easily available as other networks such as Affiliate Window and Buy.At.

But could they turn around affiliate opinion with their launch of web services and their own API?

We are pleased to announce the launch of Commission Junction's Web Services. These services have been tested in beta for the past several months and because of their success are now being made available to a wider audience.

Web Services are made for tech-savvy publishers who are looking to increase their ability to promote their advertisers and shape their network environment. With Web Services, you can create innovative applications to extend the power of your affiliate program through enhanced Product Catalogue functionality and advertiser searches. Use Web Services to connect directly to Commission Junction's technology and create custom applications to access the specific data that matters most to your visitors.

This is the first in a series of Web Services releases and includes the following Application Programming Interfaces (APIs):

• Product Catalogue Access – This API offers real-time access to the Product Catalogue database. Using it, you can find a product or group of products to display on your site since the API enables keyword searches as well as item specific searches by UPC, manufacturer, model number, advertiser, SKU and more.
  
• Link Search Functionality – Publishers can use this API to search for links through a SOAP interface using a set of parameters to return link results that include information like their relationship status and link code that can be used to capture publisher referrals. In addition, you can find the perfect link for display on your site using search options that are very similar to those available via the CJ Account Manager™, including searching by link type and size, advertiser, language and other link attributes.
  
• Advertiser Search Functionality – This API allows publishers to search for advertisers through a SOAP interface using a set of parameters to return advertiser results that include information such as their relationship status and program terms with the advertiser.

As part of this launch, we are also unveiling our new Web Services developer site, located at http://webservices.cj.com. This site contains helpful news, resources, sample code and forums. Use this site to get information on how to use Web Services and share your best practices.

Use Web Services to boost your revenue and develop applications today! Let the innovation begin!

Labels: affiliate network, affiliate tools, commission junction

Google has added the Google Pack to its Adsense Referral Units for publishers worldwide. It's been a part of Adsense for a while, but wasn't available in the UK until recently.

What's in the pack?

• Google Earth
• Google Desktop
• Google Toolbar
• Mozilla Firefox
• Picasa
• Norton Anti Virus Special Edition
• Ad-Aware
• Adobe Reader 7

The payout for a successful referral is up to $2.00

With the Firefox referrals, the referral only counts if it is a new install. I'm not sure if the Google pack includes a similar caveat though I think that would perhaps be a little unfair as there's a reasonable chance a user might already have one or more of these utilities. Seems a decent set of tools to get going on a new PC though.

Labels: adsense, google

Well, my post on the last episode of Dragons' Den provoked a few comments and garnered some nice search traffic, and I'm a real whore for hits, so here goes with my opinion of tonight's episode of Dragons' Den.

First up in the Den was a Google Consultant who had devised a system called StoryCode to create a "fingerprint" for a book by asking a reader to answer a series of detailed questions. The fingerprint could then be used to find other books to recommend. It was a confident pitch and the system seemed like a good idea. The thing that I didn't understand was what incentive there was a reader to fill in a 40 question survey on the book they've just read. It might be ok for the first couple of times, like doing a YouGov poll online, but I can imagine it becoming a bit tedious thereafter.

The Dragons' weren't impressed. Looking at the Dragons, they are obviously successful, intelligent people but I wonder how cultured they actually are and I wondered if some of them took against this idea and the man because the notion of an enjoying a good book (and Rich Dad Poor Dad doesn't count) might be alien to them. I saw Theo Pathitis on Newsnight once in a discussion about education, and his view was that schools should you teach solely what you need to know to get on in life and business and had no regard for the idea of learning for the love of learning. Certainly Deborah Meaden shot him down as soon as he asked if she read books and declared herself out. The others soon followed, not before suggesting that a deal with Foyles was an irrelevance and that everyone involved in the company should work for free.

Next up was Rachel with some kind of buggy for the garden which could be used for transporting tools and heavy items around the garden. Although the company was in debt, she had been able to prove sales and had some big orders on the horizon. The Dragons were puzzled as to why she was in the den, as a bank would lend funds once she had the orders. Come on Dragons, why would someone with a great product come on a hit TV show and get national exposure? Probably the same reason most of the dragons are on it - self promotion. Asking her why she was in the Den was like Mrs Merton asking Debbie McGee, "What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?". The product was called the Garden Gopher workstation and its own website here.

David Daniels showed the Dragons his "ball on a spring" which could be used to practice cricket shots. Putting aside the novely of an American having an interest or knowledge in cricket, it did seem even to me to be of limited value considering there seemed to be no way to adjust the height or position of the ball. The funniest moment came at the end when David suddenly suggested he had orders. Richard Farleigh asked him if he had orders. There followed an awkward silence and a questionable "Yes", which was more like the type of awkward comedy Ricky Gervais specialises in, who coincidentally followed this episode with his new series of Extras (which I am not reviewing because that really would be stretching the bounds of this blog too far). David left the den empty handed.

The final pitch in the den was Peter who had developed a seat belt height adjuster. All the Dragons seemed to like the idea but thought Peter probably needed a lot of their time rather than just the money. It seemed like a genuinely good product and Peter managed score £100,000 worth of investment from Duncan and Peter Jones for 50% of his company. I can't help but notice that Duncan seems to value most investments at 50% of the company, whatever it is and however much is asked for, and he only ever wants to go halves thus requiring the input of another Dragon - the business equivalent of splitting the bill I guess. When's he going to breakout and make an investment on his own (and hat shops in Croydon don't count).

I think the biggest single investment ever was probably the £200,000 (or was it more?) in series one that Peter Jones invested in a new unisex lifestyle magazine called Wonderland, which unfortunately is also the name of a notorious paedophile ring. It was pitched as an uber exclusve publication for the coolest men and women. I was therefore ticked to see it for sale for 50p on the floor at a boot sale in Surrey a few months ago.

You know you're thinking too much about affiliate marketing when your sole contribution to any conversation is "Oh, I've got a website about that... "

OK, so this isn't new news. In fact, its verging on old news. But I didn't mention it at the time so thought I'd throw it in now anyway.

Affiliate Window has changed its name to Digital Window, "due to the launch of new products and services", apparently. I'm not sure if their range of new services will extend as far as dealing with existing support tickets and answering emails, but we can only hope so, eh.

Labels: affiliate network, affiliate window

The Dragon's Den is one my favourite shows on TV.

I have a few issues about it that annoy me. The way the Dragons stay seated whilst the pitcher stands - is this a business program or the headmaster's office? Also the fact that the pitchers have to walk up a flight of stairs before they pitch. In that kind of stressful situation, controlling your breathing is key and to make people walk up stairs first puts them at an immediate disadvantage and its hardly suprising many people go on to loose their breath and wording, and generally make a mess of the pitch.

That said, it is a brilliant program and unmissable TV.

This week there was a guy on there who was pitching a pub poker league. We were told by the voiceover that he has "secured a deal" which meant that he could get a percentage of the "rake" created by online poker players who signed up through his site. Ok, so he's an affiliate. But that wording - "secured a deal" really made me chuckle as it elevated his achievement from signing up with some merchant through a website to sounding like he had gone in and negotiated something special. It was a great spin on affiliate marketing. Next time I explain one of my sites I think i'll borrow that line - "I've secured a deal with Marks and Spencer to sell their product range through my site", "I've managed to secure a deal which gives my site full access to hotel booking systems around the world". Yes, I rather like that!

The other thing that tickled me was the way Duncan Bannantyne's eyes nearly popped out of his head when the pitcher said he owned the .co.uk and the .com for his rather random company name. They really were easily impressed.

Carping aside, it seems like a reasonable business idea and he got the investment and I hope it works out for him.

Whilst I'm talking about Dragon's Den, there was another business idea on there for some golf caddy battery charger for the car. The rationale behind it was that at the moment you can only charge them at home which was mildy inconvenient and there device let you do it without taking the battery in and out of the house. Forgive my ignorance, but aren't there devices which plug into the car lighter to give you effectively a mains plug you can plug anything into anyway, so it seemed quite pointless to me and I was suprised anyone wanted to invest in it.

Hyphens are often sneered at for domain names. A hyphen-less domain name is worth much more, they say. People get confused it by it, they tell us. Is it a dash, a hyphen or a minus sign - or all of them.

Personally I've never had a problem with the hyphen. It seems to work well for SEO purposes and my most popular site uses one in its URL - www.what-process.com. I could understand the arguments against it though and tend to think that if I have an idea for a site that harbour massive ambitions for, I would steer clear of the hyphen.

So I was a little bit suprised when I a heard an advert on the radio (LBC) for one of the most prestigious brand names about and yes, they used a hyphen. Mercedes Benz - surely a very brand conscious company - are promoting the website www.mercedes-benz.co.uk with the ad pronouncing it "mercedes hyphen benz dot co dot uk". I think domain owners all over the world can be a bit a little bit prouder of their URLs today, thanks to Mercedes.

Labels: domain names

I mentioned on the blog a few weeks ago about PageRank10's new service where they provide a script for an affiliate website ready to go. All you need to do is select a script for the merchant and network you want to use, and then download the csv and whack it all online.

It seemed a nice idea and my friend purchased a couple of scripts. She put the sites up, linked to them and then left them to get indexed. I'm actually very suprised that she has already had her first sale. I launched a site in the same market at around the same time and am waiting for its first sale.

In a way, I'm kind of reluctant to use a method which is so accessible to anyone as it almost takes the skill and mystery out of it, but ultimately, I'll go with whatever works so might have to the scripts a try.

Labels: affiliate tools

Yes, it's called Toys R Us.

Toys R Us has launched on Affiliate Window (oops, I mean Digital Window) with a limited number of slots available for affiliates whilst they dip their toe into the affiliate market.

Toys R Us has actually been on Affiliate Window for a while as a closed program. One of their staff did mention it to me in a phonecall a few months ago, but then my followup emails to her on the subject were blanked. Nice. Now it's available on the open interface, I'll apply and see how I get on though on the basis of not hearing back before, I won't hold out too much hope.

Toys R Us was previously aligned with Amazon - in the States at least - for their onlince presence, until they had a high profile split a few months back.

Not opening letters is one of my worst habits. I can usually guess which are the ones worth opening, and bills and junk usually remain unopened at the foot of my stairs. I'm afraid this bad habit has crept into my emails too, and I ignored quite a few messages from GoDaddy telling me a domain was about to expire.

Then I was checking my Google stats last week and noticed that my site with the highest amount of traffic, What-Process.com, as received next to no traffic in the previous 24 hours. That's a bit odd I thought. So I visited the website and felt sick to the stomach when I saw a GoDaddy parking page and a large notice saying that the domain name had expired.

I quickly renewed it and things were back up and running within the hour, but it filled me with dread to know that my best site had been inaccessible for a day and thousands of visitors got that message saying the domain had expired. Hopefully that's taught me a lesson!

I said in my recent post on domain suffixes that I quite like the ".info" TLD, used by this website you're on and others that I have recently setup.

On a similar theme, Sedo - the domains people - have done a write up on the growth of .info domains and predicts they will overtake .org and .net by 2010.

A Quiet but Strong Rival to the .COM

Labels: domain names

Affilate stuff has taken a backseat last couple of days whilst I've been getting addicted to eBaying. I cottoned onto a large retail chain selling a few items at a fraction of the price they can sell for on eBay so have been rushing around trying to snap up all I can.

In the last few days I have been to the following town centres:

• Bexleyheath
• Chatham
• Crayford
  
• Dartford
• Eltham
  
• Gravesend
• Gillingham
• Orpington
  
• Sittingbourne
• Sidcup
• Sheerness
• Welling
• Woolwich

It's been kind of fun and can be profitable, but utimately a distraction from my normal activities so I'm looking forward to getting back to making websites ASAP.