I run a dating website that requires a bit of an overhaul but gets a regular trickle of new sign ups. One of the challenges in running this, and in running any site which allows member interaction, is in dealing with spammers who usually want to deposit a large amount of money into another members account. For the past couple of years, I've had spammers join up on a near daily basis.

Something I have noticed though, is that the spammers I get on my site make themselves immediately obvious by picking names which only spammers seem to use use nowadays. So I know now that if I get any new members with the names in the list below, I can be pretty sure they are up to no good.

• Gloria
• Glory
• Rita
• Marina
• Sharon
• Joy
• Janet
• Lillian
• Any names including the words "God", "Lord" (when did God become a spammer?), "Love" or "Honest"

They might as well just call their account name spammer! I suppose if they had any sense they would research popular names in the UK and realise that the limited selection of names they use stand out like sore thumb and make my job in deleting their accounts rather easy!

Labels: spammers

There's a whole load of affiliate blogs out there, and luckily there's a few tools to help keep track of them.

Bumpzee is really a fantastic new site from Scott Jangro, which has been going for a few weeks now and I meant to mention it before now. It allows you to get a great overview of a big selection of affiliate related blogs, and incorporates social networking elements and the ability to "bump" or "dump" postings in a digg style. This has quickly become my first choice affiliate marketing resource. Bumpzee is one to watch because other communities could be added later, so this could grow and grow.

Keith Bond has just launched Internet Marketing Blogs UK, which pulls together all the UK blogs, and he intends it to cover not just affiliate marketing but the whole realm of internet marketing, including subjects like SEO.

And I shoudn't forget MashedBlogs.com which was probably the first site I saw which was aggregating the affiliate marketing blogs and has been a useful provider of traffic to my own blog.

Labels: affiliate tools, blogs

Looking for information on Windows Vista from PC World? Click here

With the imminent release fo Microsoft Vista, I thought I better get my skates on and get some banners up for it on some of my websites.

PC World on TradeDoubler seemed a reasonable merchant to use and I checked the creative, and they had a cool Vista banner with a countdown clock to the release which I thought looked good, so I put it up a computer related site, as seen in the screenshow below.



Then I hovered my mouse over the banner and noticed that the pointer didn't change, like it does for a link. I tried clicking it and nothing happened at all. Odd, i thought. So I went back into TradeDoubler and got the iframe method of the same link, but still, the same problem. This PCW banner (160x300) can't be clicked on. Maybe it's me, I thought - but I've tried from multiple PCs and various browsers.

OK, innocent mistake on their part, I guess. But.... why have they got a nice easy, type-in friendly url listed on the banner - "www.pcworld.co.uk/vista". When have you seen an affiliate banner put a url on it like that? And is it just a coincidence that they have it on a banner you can't click on? Call me cynical, but something about that stinks. Obviously I'm now swiftly looking for a replacement merchant.

Labels: affiliate marketing, pc world

Following on from my post the other day about accidentally printing my advert on the back of an envelope, my mind started racing and I considered the possibility of scaling this up to create a new ad network, finding advertisers willing to subsidise the cost of envelopes for businesses willing to post those envelopes - with the advertiser's message on the back - and create a new advertising channel. Businesses get free envelopes and advertisers get their message to potential new clients.

I spent a bit of time the other night putting together a site to make this vision of adsense-style ads on the back of an envelope seem more real, and FreeEnvelopes.co.uk was born.

I often find that when brainstorming around midnight, absolutely anything seems possible. And then later, in the cold light of day, the same ideas suddenly sound nuts and a complete waste of a previous night's work. Certain practicalities dawned on me such as it would be almost impossible to track and people might just bin their free envelopes or stick return labels over the ads. Also when I first put an envelope with a cellophane window through my laserjet and saw how crumpled it came out, I realized my kit wouldn't be up to the job. Also, mention anything "free" and you're likely to bombarded with the professional freebie hunters.

So, I'm still undecided about this one and am considering several options:

1) Approach companies to pilot test the idea
2) Leave it as a mock site and promote it as an idea thats perpetually "coming soon", with a few ads and affiliate links on it.
3) Take it down and forget all about this madness.
4) See if Yahoo! will buy it off me for loads of money

Number 2's looking the most likely at the moment.

Labels: ideas

Wow, what was happening yesterday? Traffic to nearly all my sites down, click rates were down and the clicks that did come in made only a bit more than diddly squat. It was actually the worst day on Adsense I can ever remember.

January still on course to be a very good month despite that blip, but what a seriously depressing day yesterday was for Adsense.

Labels: adsense, google

A new online revenue stream will be opening up for lots of people soon, with the news that YouTube founder, Chad Hurley, has confirmed they are working on a plan to pay people who submit videos.

Hurley has told the BBC that his team are working on a plan to "reward creativity" - I can't wait to see what the come up with.

Check out the BBC story

This is going to be great and mean people who make great, popular digital content - like the Chad Vader vids, for example - can get financially rewarded for it.

I did actually make my own YouTube debut recently, when my hand was seen operating a a Kensington Wifi Finder Plus for a review I did on my wireless hotspot site. I''m not expecting to be rewarded too heavily, but I suppose it could be a suprise hit with hand fetishists.

Labels: news, youtube

I was just working on an advert which I'm placing in a magazine in March. I've had mixed success with print advertising before but thought I'd give this one a go since I got the ad space pretty cheap.

The ad is only small - about 4cm by 6cm - and I wanted to print it and see how it looked on the page. So I press the print button and wait for it come out, not realising that I thrown an envelope into the paper tray when I opened the post this morning. So the printer pulled the envelope and printed my little ad on the back by mistake. It was a completely random act but I have to say, it looks brilliant.

It came out just the right size and this immediately seems like a perfect way to get little adverts for websites out there in circulation. There's no real cost attached and not much effort - just print a little text ad on a bundle of envelopes and use them as and when required.



I don't have to send too many letters by post but I'll certainly be looking ways I can add value to my envelopes in future!

Labels: ideas, marketing

It's always great when a merchant operates a discount code so you can promote them to your users with that extra angle of "use this code to get your discount" etc.

But my much preferred method of discount codes is the one available on Regnow.com for all the software available to buy through their merchants.

Say the commission on a piece of software is 40%. That 40% is yours to do with whatever you like. If you want to login and create a 20% discount code to offer your users, that's up to you. Heck, if you're feeling charitable you could give the whole commission amount back as a discount. You put your own characters into the discount code generated to make it "fit" the site you're promoting it from. And there's loads of useful option: offer the discount on an entire range from a merchant, or just one item. Or even make it available if they buy another item at full price.

It's really a useful system and one of the reasons I really like using Regnow (aff link)

Labels: affiliate network, affiliate tools, regnow

I like to do all my coding and am pretty useful in VB.net. I get by OK with it but I've always marvelled at some of the cool stuff available to PHP developers - especially mod rewrite which lets you take a dynamically generated and make it look like static content by rewriting the URL for example converting ...products.php?category=adult-toys&product=rabbit into something more palatable such as ...products/adult-toys/rabbit/

I looked into it a bit and couldn't find any decent ways of doing this is .Net and the only options I could see involved making changes to IIS on the server which is not really an option on shared hosting package.

So, since I couldn't do what I wanted to do, I set about looking for a workaround and decided that if I couldn't find a way to generate the pages I wanted on the fly, I would just come up with a way to generate the actual static pages and upload.

And then a new project was born: "EssEeeO: SEO Made Simple". I got to work and created a little application which works a little bit like mail merge. It connects up to your CSV product feed, you enter your code and design the output path you want and hit the button. Very quickly you can have thousands of pages created with search engine friendly file names.



Obviously it's not as elegant as database driven site and takes time to upload all the pages again. But it has some advantages which didn't occur to me until I had done it - you don't need to pay additionally for database hosting and it's easy to go in and edit individual pages if there's special offer or promotion.

Now, this isn't a unique idea. I searched around and found products that did pretty much the same thing, but was surprised to see costs of around $100. I've reached a point with the application where the core functionality is all there. I actually use it myself regularly so it's already been worthwhile in doing it. But now I'm wondering whether to make a final push and add the necessary to gloss to make this a product I could make available to others - either by selling it or giving it as freeware. I'd love to have a digital product to sell and let affiliates promote it for me, but also freeware is a great way of getting links and traffic. And I shouldn't forget that a previous freeware app I did called What Process? has done brilliantly well for me, especially since the BBC featured it.

But it could well be that this isn't really of much use to anyone else, so there's no point spending much more dev time on it. So really I'm after feedback to help me decide whether to give this project the final push to get it full complete. If you can ever imagine finding a use for this application, feel free to let me know.

Labels: affiliate tools, EssEeeo

It's been well commented upon in the blogosphere that Google has revised its Adsense program policies.

I was just reading through them and one thing jumped off at the page on me.

Publishers participating in the AdSense program:

• May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks

I think it would be fair to say that my recent experiment including a "post it note" style image as a background could be construed as a graphical gimmick to attract user attention.... so not only did the post it ads not manage to muster any improvements, they may well earn a ban from Adsense. Conclusion: don't do it.

Labels: adsense, google

I posted back in July about the size of large product feed files and asked how best to manage them. I had just downloaded a CSV file containing the Woolworths product feed which contained over 100,000 rows. My default application for opening and managing CSV files is Microsoft Excel, which has a row limit of about 64,000.

So for those large files, it was necessary to change my normal routines and try other methods to open and manipulate the date. The way I did it was to import the CSV into an Access database. It was workable but not the way I like to do what I wanted to do.

So I was pleased to find out that in the latest version of Microsoft Excel (known as Excel 2007 or Excel 12), the row limit has at last been increased - to a whopping 1million rows. The 64k limit has been there, like, forever, so this development is long overdue and means handling large files should be a lot simpler.

Other features in the new Excel include:

• New Interface and menu system
• Improved ability to render charts and sheets in a web browser using Excel Services
• New XML based file format - creating smaller files and offering improvements in data recovery.

Find out more about Excel 2007.

Labels: affiliate tools, excel

Just a mini update on my little foray into adult affiliate programmes, because I want to chart the project's every step on the blog.

I just received the OK today from a couple of the sites I'm affiliating with to go ahead and select any images I want from the site and use them as the basis of affiliate links. They had already made a number of banners available but I wanted to just grab images from the site and include them in my blog postings.

So I got the all clear and I can move forward with it: my plan is to get plenty of postings on it, and then add a discrete link to it from a well indexed site and see magic happen.

Labels: adult site project

OK, well my headline says shock increase but I think everyone expects these press releases announcing huge increases in the numbers of people doing their Christmas shopping online.

That aside, and onto the story itself: The IMRG (Interactive Media in Retail Group) has released figures showing that there was a huge 54% increase in the 10 weeks leading up to Christmas compared to the same period 2005.

British consumers spent £7.66 billion online in the ten-week run-up to Christmas 2006 - between 16 October and 24 December - 54% (53.8%) more than the £5 (£4.98) billion spent online during the same period in 2005, and more than double the £3.33 billion recorded in the approach to Christmas 2004, the IMRG Index reveals. (source)

I don't think this kind of growth is unexpected and for obvious reasons - more people using the internet, more people who use the internet being prepared to buy online etc - but I guess this can only be great news for affiliate marketers and I guess many of them had a brilliant festive season.

Personally my Christmas was good, but not great and the fact my top ranking sites for "bikes" and "toys" disappeared from the MSN index really put the kibosh on things. But I won't keep mentioning it, because I'm really not bitter. Really.

Labels: affiliate marketing, christmas, online shopping, press release

Buy.at launched its redesigned management area back in December and has been running it alongside the older interface. The previous management pages were obviously primitive and frankly didn't look very good, but to be honest, I've carried on using it rather than the new one because I'm a creature of habit. But I was reading that when we do things differently from our routine, we create new neural pathways in our brain, and I'm all for that, so today I checked out Buy.at Management Area Version 3.



First of, you have to say it looks great. It has a nice clean design with plenty of use of white space and it just looks modern and a vast improvement.

Upon logging in, the first thing you see is your monthly overview which you can change to other time periods using the drop down. Personally I'd prefer it to default to an overview of the day's activity rather than the month - or at least give me the option as to which I want as my default.

Drilling down into the reports, I clicked on my sales total. It listed the transactions made but didn't tell me the URL referrer, which I think is pretty useful to know. When I click into the clicks total, it does tell me the URL referrer so the info is there but doesn't seem to be displayed in the sales reports. Drill down further into the clicks and it shows you at a glance which banners and adverts people clicked on which is handy.

Getting hold of banners and creatives is easily done. I wanted to download some product feeds and this was easily achieved too, with the product feed page telling me how many items there are in the feed and the age of the feed. The feed could be downloaded, as before I think, in CSV, XML, Pipe Delimited and Simple CSV.

I grabbed some banners and subjected to them the accessibility test, which I did on most of the UK networks recently. Unfortunately the banner code created still doesn't use the alt attribute on the image, failing one of the most basic accessibility tests.

I took a look at Buy.at's introduction to the interface and these are the new features then say the new management area benefits from:

Faster reporting and data extraction
Increased access to more relevant data and statistics
Customisable and saveable reports
Improved account analysis functions
Printable and downloadable reports
Sub accounts
Web services
Intuitive navigation
Easy to use help function

So, what can I say in summary: It definitely looks better and I believe it is better. It hasn't blown me away in terms of function but I want to find out more about he web services and I want some better information about the referring url which led to the click which led to the sale - but that may well be there and I might have just overlooked it. Having had a play, I'll be sticking with it and ignoring version 2 from now on.

P.S. I hope once they have fully migrated to v 3.0, the login page won't do that annoying thing in Firefox of saying "you have been logged out" when I login into the site, making me log in twice unless I specifically remember to log out when I leave the site.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate network, buy.at

Whilst browsing the UK's top political blogging websites - like Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale's Diary - it's hard not to notice the ads they have for an interesting new(ish) ad agency called MessageSpace. MessageSpace was formed, it seems, specifically to monetise the UK political blogging scene by offering a unique proposition: the chance for advertisers to have their message seen by leading opinion formers. Virtually the whole political class - from the journalists right up to the top of government - read these blogs routinely which is quite a selling point.

This service seems to be tapping into an interesting niche and probably does a lot better for the bloggers than having Adsense units would do. I ran a political related blog once and the Adsense clicks were next to worthless.

From an affiliate point of view, I'm not sure if this presents any opportunities and I suspect that it isn't cheap to place ads with the sales pitch mainly being aimed at lobbyists, campaigners and non profit groups. I advertised directly on Dale's diary once and didn't manage to find the right product to capture any sales conversions. Looking back, maybe a West Wing DVD set would have done the trick!?

Definitely an interesting attempt at monetising the blogs though and I wish them all the best with that, though I can't help but think a service more accessible to smaller advertisers and maybe more akin to Adsense with text adverts would work better than a standard banner service.

Labels: messagespace, political

I blogged last week about how I was trying out a new tactic: putting Adsense ads on a post it note style background. I was running the ads across a couple of sites, and after being live for very close to a week, I thought I'd review how they performed.

The results are, unfortunately, disappointing dull. The ads didn't deliver any particularly noteworthy percentage increase at all. Looking at the specific channel data and comparing days from last week with the same days during the week before, some days CTRs were up slightly, some days down slightly, some days about the same. Certainly there was no consistent and clear increase.

I'll keep running them for a bit because I think they happen to look nice on the page, but they didn't deliver the kind of results I had hoped for.

Labels: adsense, experiment, google

I blogged yesterday about a new project where I wanted to get myself a tiny piece of the adult entertainment action. I started researching web hosting and was particularly impressed with XXX Web Hosting.

But then I realised that the site I have in mind is going to be adult themed but I'm not actually intending to host adult content.

The format my project will take is a blog on a particular niche interest. There''ll be general postings about the subject to emulate some interest in it, and also I've signed up with several porn site affiliate schemes through ccbill. Considering how widely ccbill seems to be used, I'm suprised at primitive nature of their interface. I'll be checking the content provider sites to find models that are lated to the niche and then profiling them and linking to them with the affiliate links, as I think this seems to be a tried and tested format.

Next step is to create the blog and start posting, and maybe backdate a few to give it a more aged look. I think I will use blogger for the project. I've checked their terms and I can't see any problem - although I did skim though - but I almost can't believe I can do this for free!

Labels: adult hosting, adult site project

A friend was telling me about someone he knew that had some porn related domain which was really quite niche, and yet a whole stack of traffic purely from people typing in the domain name. I guess it's obvious really that adult sites have the potential for lots of traffic because it's clearly a very popular subject online.l

I did dabble once before when I setup a directory of dogging spots in the UK. I had premium rate phone lines alongside it and it ticked over nicely, but I always fearful that one day it would get me in some hot water, or some nut case sex attacker would use it as a means to find victims. So in the end, I closed it down and it does kind of ok through Sedo parking but nothing spectacular, and it's gradually decreasing in traffic/value.

So at the present time, I have no real active interests in the adult website market, but I suppose it would be foolish to ignore the potential thats there.

So for a new project, I will investigate setting up an adult site, finding the right hosting, look at how I can get traffic to it, get some good affiliate links and see if I can make some money with it. I'll chart my progress on here along the way.

Labels: adult site project

I joined up with Scott Jangro's excellent Affiliate Blog List this week, and immediately found a very useful post telling me that the new season of The Apprentice had started in the US.

Being in the UK, I obviously can't watch it legally. They recently showed US Apprentice Season 3 here, so I guess it will be a couple of years before we catch up with Season 6 in LA, and I'm fine with that. Really.

So, since I can't watch it, here's some comments from my US TV correspondent, Dan Lowed:

The Donald has moved to LA for this latest season of the Apprentice, and the episode opened with some of the cheesiest scenes I've ever witnessed - DT turning up his new house to be greeted by adoring wife and baby. And whilst it was cheesy, it was also brilliant. What a life that guy has!

We were introduced to the 18 contestants and the weak link in the chain was immediately identified by his first line to Donald being "Can I use the bathroom?". Martin blotted his copybook right there and the rest of his appearances in the show were accompanies by the comedy background music which tells you not to take the guy seriously.

In previous seasons, we've suspected that some of Donald's boardroom scenes were redubbed later. But in season 6, the fakery has gone even further with Trump yelling out of his office window at the contestants in a scene which looked so much like it was inserted well after the event.

There's a couple of new twists this season - the losing team has to camp in a tent whilst the winning team stays ina luxury mansion. Also, the winning team leader remains team leader until their team loses and also has the honour of joining Donald in the boardroom to assist him in deciding who should be fired.

The boardroom finale was a heated face off between Frank - losing team leader - and Martin. I thought they may keep Martin as a comedy foil for a few episodes, but it seemed he was just too annoying to keep around and it was a case of "Martin, you're fired".

Thanks Dan!

Labels: apprentice, donald trump, tv

A comment from Keith Bond earlier on, made me think about the Firefox extensions I use. I don't think they're a particularly imaginative selection and probably everyone already has them, but here's what I use:

Google Page Rank Status
I keep reading that Google PR means less and less, but I still like to see it on any site I visit and I still wish mine were all higher - can't break out past a 4 at the moment! PR Lightweight, I am.

Skype Extension for Firefox
Ever since I bought SkypeOut credits and a SkypeIn number, I've really got into Skype and this great add on is really cool for identifying phone numbers in web pages and turning them into Skype links.

Web Developer
I love this toolbar. The thing I mostly use it for is to outline table cells and divs when I'm looking at a website and want to understand the layout and how its been put together.

And after a few hours of use, Keith's recommendation of the Adsense Notifier has quickly become an essential tool.

I'm probably missing out on other cool ones, so if there's any others you really benefit from, I'd love to know.

Labels: firefox

I bought a great domain name a few years ago which was perfect for an IT support type business. I had recently started an IT Support business of my own under a different name and didn't fancy rebranding so soon just to use the cool domain name. So I tried a few web site ideas and nothing really took off so in the end I thought I'll try selling it. I put it on eBay and sold it for £250.

The buyer very promptly paid me the money and I sent him the Nominet forms for him to complete. In the mean time, I was happy to point the domain at his naming servers so he could begin using them. I waited for the forms to come back, sent a few reminders and still nothing came.

Six months or so later, he contacted me and asked if we could do the transfer. Again, I requested the forms from Nominet, posted them to him and waited. Again, nothing came back.

In the mean time, the domain was up for renewal and I didn't want to be responsible for him losing it, so I renewed the domain. Many more months passed and eventually he emailed me again. Apologised for not sorting it before and asked to try again.

So its the same routine for a third time. I get the forms, do my bit, send them to him and wait for them to be returned. And true to form, he still can't pull his finger out and he still hasn't ever returned the signed forms and confirmation letter to me.

Last attempt was about 6 months ago. So the upshot is, the guy won the auction on eBay - probably two years ago now - and paid up, but I am still the owner of the domain. By this point, I'm kinda annoyed with the guy for wasting my time and would be semi reluctant to ever request the forms from Nominet again. I harbour this dark thought that I still own the domain name and it's probably worth more than he paid for it, so why shouldn't I just send him his money back and say sorry, I'm keeping it.

But then again, he has been using it for two years and maybe I should put aside the idea it's mine and respect it's his now in principle and the fact its in my name still is just an admin anomaly.

What would you do?

Labels: domain names, ethics

I saw a post the other day (sorry, can't remember where) asking how often people checked their Adsense stats, and it's a question I've seen before on various forums.

I'm unashamed to say, I check them continuously. It's probably the first thing I do when get to the PC in the morning, and the last thing I do when I quit for the day. And in between those two points, I check them often. Like more than several times an hour.

Sometimes I'll be on the Adsense stats page and I'll instinctively click it again in my bookmarks, despite the fact I'm already looking at it.

Sometimes if I suspect the stats are lagging even a bit, I'll sign in from a different browser. Or sign in from a different PC. Or I'll do a custom report and switch from Today to This Month or vica versa in the belief that it's holding back on me and not showing me everything it knows (it works, too!).

I suppose this Adsense addiction could be construed as a waste of time and I could be creating content. But seeing the money coming in is the spur I need to go make some more content.

Also I have various benchmarks that I look for throughout the day. I know what I expect to have earnt through Adsense at pretty much every hour of the working day, so I like to check up and make sure I'm on target and where I expect to be for that time of day. If things are going well by noon, I might have a particularly extravagant sandwich when I get lunch.

And whilst I do use various traffic instruments, like AWstats, Google Analytics or even just plain IIS log reading, Adsense still serves as a pretty useful ad hoc page impression counter so it gives me a nice general overview of how my sites are performing traffic wise which is useful to keep an eye on.

All that talking about checking my Adsense stats has made me want to, well, check my Adsense stats!

Labels: adsense, google

When I moved into my new house recently, the previous occupant left some furniture behind which was of a pretty good standard but not what I wanted, so I replaced it and moved the old stuff to the garage. I put an ad up on Gumtree.com and received a pretty prompt email offering to buy the items from me. Furniture sold, job done.

But since then, I have received lots more emails from people asking if it's still available, and I've courteously replied telling them unfortunately not. Before hitting the send button on the last one, it occured to me I might as well bung an affiliate link in the footer of the email I sent back.

And then it struck me that this could be a great way of promoting websites to new people. You could post up fake for sale messages all day across all the main classified sites, and just send polite "sorry" notices to the respondents but with your URL of choice in the bottom. To take it to the logical conclusion, since you know what item the person is wanting to buy, you could be ready and waiting with affiliate links in context and send back a targetted advert.

Now I'm sure this isn't an original thought and probably it already goes on but it's something I've only just thought about. The more I think about it, the better it gets, but there's only one problem: it is at its heart, fundamentally dishonest and not very ethical. It's a bit like spam, but only in reply to an email. So I guess you could call it On Demand Spam. Or Spam On Request?

So on a scale of 1-10, how unethical do you think this is? Interested to know what others think.

Labels: affiliate marketing, email, ethics, gumtree

Respected industry figure, Keith Budden, made a useful post to the a4u forum alerting other affiliates to new rules for businesses which requires them to put the same company information on their websites that they currently have to put on "business letters".

From Companies House website:

On all of its business letters, order forms or any of the company’s web sites*, the company must show in legible lettering –

• its place of registration
• registered number
• its registered office address
• and if it is being wound up, that fact,

If you run a lot of websites, as many affiliates do, the prospect of having to edit every website to have that information, and then re-edit each website should that information change in the future, was not a pleasant one.

I spoke to Companies House yesterday to get clarification on this. The point they made is that this is about transparency and making the information about which company operates a particular website clear and accessible to the user. The way in which you do that is up to you. So I posed the question - If a website states which company owns it, and that company name is a link back to the parent company website which has all the required information clearly on it, is that sufficient? The answer was yes, that would be sufficient. Luckily, I do that already on nearly all my sites, so I think I'm already in compliance with the new rules.

Labels: affiliate, companies house, websites

I thought I would write a follow up review of ITV1's Fortune, despite nearly losing the will to live at about half way through. I'm not sure if it was the hideous "contestants" or the awful, inconsistent approach from the panellists but this was terrible. But also terribly compelling and I managed to keep watching.

I suppose the standout entrant was the little boy who had been "diagnosed" as "exceptionally bright". I had a natural empathy with him because I've long suspected I suffer from extreme intelligentsia but it hasn't been spotted by the medical profession yet. He wanted 38k to pay for him to goto college. But it turned out he had just written his first book about a young wizard with OCD - prompting Lord Archer to make the funny observation, "It's often to best to start out autobiographical" - which actually sounds like a hilarous premise for a book. Think Harry Potter-cum-Monk. So if the book is any good, publish it and use the money to pay for the college. And if it's no good, then it wasn't really much of an achievement so stop bragging about it!

Also, the more I hear them not mention how wealthy Kanye King is, whilst specifically telling us how much the others are worth, the more curious it makes me about how much she is worth and what qualifies her for a position on the "fortune five".

So more oddball entertainment but nothing much learned. What looks more promising is the forthcoming Tycoon, which was trailed during one of the ad breaks starring another escapee from the Dragons' Den, Peter Jones, where he promises to invest in great new business ideas with his own money.

Labels: fortune, itv1, reviews

Google is always saying to play with the position and colours of your adverts to see if you can improve click through rates. I've seen a couple of sites which have used background images to create effects around Adsense images to really draw the readers attention to them.

I thought I would give it a go and a created an image looking vaguely like a post it note. I've made that the background image for a DIV and put the Adsense code on to create a rather nice looking effect. See from the picture on the right how it looks different from a plain Adsense unit I used previously. I double checked Google's recently policiy clarification about Adsense and images and think this is all quite safe. I'll report back on if it proves successful.

Labels: adsense, experiment, google

Just noticed on Amazon there there's a new book coming soon called "Affiliate Millions: Make a Fortune Using Search Marketing on Google and Beyond".

Here's the sypnosis: Google, Amazon.com, and eBay are among the best-known e-commerce Web sites. Millions of people around the world visit and use them every day. But the fact that individuals can generate income by placing affiliate ads for these and other sites is not well known. This book talks about this area.

I took a look at the publisher's site to see if it would be possible to a get a review copy, but it said not to bother unless you're a member of the bona fide press. Whatever that is.

The book's out in April so I guess I'll order it myself and see what it's like when it's out. Here's some affiliate links of my own in case you want to preorder it too!

Amazon.co.uk: Affiliate Millions
Amazon.com: Affiliate Millions

Labels: affiliate marketing, amazon, new book

Ok, tales of funny or inappropriate adverts for eBay on Google Adwords are nothing new. Presumably they have some automated systems in place which gives rise to the occasional comedic advert appearing. But this advert for battered women appeared on my problem Exchange site today and must be up as one of the most inappropriate eBay ads yet!!?

Labels: ebay, inappropriate adverts, light relief

I blogged over the last couple of days about how I had grabbed top position for a great search term on one of my websites.

There's some immediate, obvious advantages to this such as more traffic. But another benefit which is now becoming clear is that it opens doors for you in other ways.

For a while now I had been wanting to start reviewing gadgets related to the subject matter of this specific site and emailed a couple of companies asking for evaluation kit but the reaction was lukewarm generally. With my current ranking, I felt much more confident about approaching the PR firm of another manufacturer yesterday and telling them I have the top ranked site on Google (for the moment!) for a related term and can they send me stuff to review.

Bright and early this morning, the postman brought me a parcel from the PR company with the requested kit inside.

Now, it might be that this particularly company would have sent me the item to review before, but I can't help but think that the position my site is at in Google demonstrated that mine was a site worth doing business with and worth sending review to, which in turn let me create more original content and therefore continue to improve the site and make it the genuinely useful site I hanker after.

Labels: marketing, reviews, search engines, web promotion

I'm sure when Amazon launched its rather cool aStore feature, you could only have one aStore linked to your associate ID.

Just noticed you can now have 100 aStores per Associate ID.

Happy Days!

Labels: affiliate tools, amazon

MSN's search engine has always been a friend of mine. Whilst Google was a tough nut to crack, MSN was easier to optimise for I found. The traffic was lower than an equivalent position in Google, but it was enough to make it a worthwhile strategy.

So I loved MSN and accepted that Google wasn't being kind to me. But so far in 2007, things have changed around in dramatic fashion.

I noticed a few months ago that I had lost some good positions on MSN for sites I had about bikes and toys, which was particularly disappointing with Xmas approaching. I've looked into a bit further and found that at least 3 of my sites have now vanished from the MSN index altogether. I'll follow their advice for getting sites reincluded, but it seems my luck with MSN came to an abrupt halt.

But as one door closes, another one opens. I noticed the other day that one of my sites was now #1 for a generic technology search term I had been chasing for quite a while. I just noticed today that another site of mine has managed exactly the same thing and is now also enjoying top status in the UK results for an excellent search term. It actually feels great to have seen these sites gradually move up the rankings to where they are rather than have some overnight success which might have felt more precarious.

I always knew me and Google were destined for a beautiful friendship - it just took the big G a bit longer to realise than I had hoped!

I actually have a theory that once you get to the top spot, it's easier to stay there too, for this reason: Have you ever had to quickly compile a list of links related to a subject? It might be a subject you don't know much about so you may not have any knowledge of specific sites to recommend. And being in a hurry and maybe a tad lazy, you just search for that subject and figure that the top sites must be there for a reason and just use them for your links. So I'm thinking that you can expect new incoming links just by virtue of already being #1, and those new incoming links could help cement your position there.

Labels: affiliate marketing, google, msn, search engines, seo, serps

I only just noticed that Amazon.co.uk was running a blog about its Associates program. Doesn't seem to have been running too long - first post was in November - and I only just spotted it in the side menu when logged in to Amazon.

Seems a useful read though, and worth keeping an eye on.

Amazon Associates Blog

Labels: amazon, blogs

I'm a big fan of Dragon's Den, and reviewed most of the last series on this blog. So I was keen to see Fortune on ITV1 after I saw it trailed with Duncan Bannantyne, and assumed it was ITV's version of Dragon's Den. And it is to some extent, but without any hint of being to do with business. This is simply individuals or groups coming up with their begging bowl and asking the panel of millionaires if they have can have some money.

The Millionaires are Duncan Bannantyne, Jacqueline Gold from Ann Summers*, Simon Jordan (owner of Crystal Palace), Lord Archer and Kanya King, who organises the MOBO awards. I was interested to note that the voice over on the trailer stated the total wealth of all the panellists except for Kanya King.

If the show is one half Dragon's Den, the other half is X Factor, as the format borrows heavily from the X-Factor auditions - a few worthies (like the boy for the cancer charity) and a few village idiots we can have a laugh at.

Best moments were Duncan Bannantyne's face when Simon Jordan questioned the wisdom of accepting "a Bannantyne cheque" and the way the educational rapper was hastened off stage after he said he wasn't like most rappers because he was white, well spoken, loved his mum, didn't do crack and didn't shoot people.

Summary: Not what I was hoping for, but a quite funny freak show with some touching moments.

* I used to get a satisfying conversion rate from Ann Summers on TD. Can't get a sale for love nor money now, despite links being in the same place on the same site and there being an increase in overall traffic to the site!

Labels: itv1

In my little list of New Year's Resolutions, I missed off very important one. And that is my resolution to create at least one site this year that will tap into the US market. I knocked up a little Nintendo Wii site before Xmas that made a nice little amount through affiliate sales at Toys R US (US) and Walmart. The conversions on UK merchants were terrible, the point of being non-existant.

So having had a taste, I certainly want to do more with US affiliate marketing this year.

And this year is off to a good start with decent affiliate sales, good Adsense and a site of mine today moving to #1 on Google for the key words I was after. Hope 2007 is going to be as like this everyday!

Labels: new year resolutions