Woolworths - or Woolies - is a high street brand that I want to like. It's got a long and proud history but in recent years seems to have lost its way and nowhere more so than in its online presence.

An email was sent to affiliates today announcing that Woolworths won't be paying commission on sales of the Nintendo Wii as of tomorrow. The email from Affiliate Window says "Due to stock and customer services issues Woolworths have decided to cease selling Nintendo Wii's through the affiliate channel".

Are they really going to cease selling Wiis through the affiliate channel, or do they mean they will continue selling them to any customer that comes through an affiliate link but they just won't pay affiliate commission?

So why have they done this? The Wii has been incredibly popular so maybe they feel they don't need affiliate sales to sell their allocation. But it would surely be an unpleasant precedent to stop paying commission on items simply because they are popular. I don't know what's behind their decision but it just doesn't sit well with me.

That's not the only problem with Woolworths I'm afraid. Visit their website (direct or through an affiliate link) and you'll find their site plastered with adverts for other companies, like Sky and Expedia. So your affiliate traffic could be generating money for Woolworths which you'll never get the benefit from.

Their problems go on - so many of their products can be found cheaper elsewhere. I checked chart CDs, videogames and toys and had no problem finding the same products on other websites at a better price. Add to that the hefty postage fees that Woolworths charge and you have to wonder if that site is good for anyone at the moment - doesn't seem to be good for affiliates or consumers. I certainly can't see much point in promoting them from an affiliate point of view.

[EDIT 01/05/07]

I suppose it's one of lifes quirks that the day after slating Woolworths and its website, I get some monster sale come through their website (I've got a link to them on a store directory) with a very pleasing commission. Look out merchants - I will soon be slating you and expecting similar results!

Labels: woolworths

The county that I live in - Kent - was hit by an earthquake on Satuday morning. Measuring about 4.3 on the Richter Scale, it most effected Folkestone and wasn't really felt in the part of North Kent in which I live.

A few people had to leave their homes but in reality, there weren't many serious consequences. I was watching Sky News and they were really lapping it up and it seemed like they wanted to it to be more serious than it was. They were appealing for viewers to contribute images from the scene of the quake and I like to be as helpful as I can, so I went into the garden, pushed over the washing line, garden table and chair and then took a photo.

I dutifully emailed it into them and within half an hour it was showing on screen. My lodger things I have too much time on my hands, but I think there's a point to be made about the advent of citizen journalism and user generated content etc - who's bothering to check if it's genuine, or do the mainstream media just mop up the free content being provided to them and use it willy nilly?

Labels: citizen journalism

I meant to blog about this sooner, but I had a busy busy week after I got collared to do some IT support work, which is a massive distraction from my normal activities. Should really learn to say no!

Anyway, the moment has kind of gone - who really wants to talk about the Apprentice anything other than the day after, right? - but for the sake of having an exhaustive episode guide, here's a quick synopsis.

Two teams had to select two photographer from those available and setup a room Hoxton, and get interest parties there for an evening of viewing and buying. The team that made the most money would win.

The teams were:

Kristina (PM) , Tre, Naomi, Paul, Jadine and Ghazal (Stealth)
Natalie (PM), Lohit, Adam, Simon and Katie (Eclipse)

Here's a quick run down of what happened:

• After being PM last week, Ghazal put her invisibility cloack on again
• Paul introduced us to a new phrase, "we've got warm fuzzies about you"
• Tre showed he can actually be quite intelligent and articulate
• Katie continued to be a backstabber and failed to sell anything after getting caught up in the arty side
• Stealth won by taking a harder selling approach than the other team
  
• Natalie took Adam and Lohit into the boardroom and they weren't the reason the team failed.
  
• Natalie got fired.

The winning team went to a health spa to be pampered. The quality of the rewards for the winners doesn't seem to be that amazing I have to say. I'm wondering what we can expect in future episodes: an all expenses paid trip to Bluewater shopping centre? A slap up meal at TGI Fridays?!

Labels: apprentice, review, tv

I've spent a whole tonne of money on Adwords before.

For my first few businesss ventures, I tried a few loony projects involving a combination of premium rate phone lines, singing competitions and selling topical mousemats (of which I still have 750 in the attic) which I promoted heavily using Adwords and lost a packet.

Since then I've tried PPC campaigns for affiliate marketing and usually broke even or made a loss. I've tried direct to merchant (with Amazon) and going through landing pages and not really made much headway.

So I'm pleased to be able to able to report that a recent project has worked quite nicely over the course of the last 4 weeks.

I picked a merchant with large catalogue of items within its sector, and then built a site around a niche area within that sector and extracted the relevant items from their product feed. Without wanting to be too cryptic, the items I'm pushing are actually not the items that the merchant would probably most like to promote as they sell other competing items that are worth more to them. But there's a demand for the items I'm promoting and I'm making it easier for people to find them rather than being pushed towards the competing items that the merchant would probably sooner they buy. In doing so, I think I'm kind of solving a problem, in that I'm making i easier for consumers to find a specific range without being sidetracked.

Anyways, to the numbers: Spent a little under £200 in Adwords and have made about £450 in sales (and there's a lengthy cookie so the ROI could be greater yet). I'll be looking to see if I can gradually decrease the cost of my average click in Adwords too.

New Vaio

I'm moderately excited that this is the first blog post I've written from my shiney new Sony Vaio which I took delivery off about an hour ago. I had a couple of laptops stolen from my car car last year, so it's nice to be able to get back to a bit of portable computing though my plan to get a 3g datacard has taken a knock since i just realised the laptop doesn't have a PCMCIA slot!

Labels: adwords, google, ppc

I have a couple of clients left over from my IT support days who have established bricks and mortar businesses that also have an online presence. Their websites get a reasonable amount of traffic from local brand recognition, offline advertising etc.

It occurred to me that there was plenty of scope to add additional value to those websites in the way of affiliate schemes promoting other services which would also be of interest to their customers, without having any detrimental affect on the core business of the company.

So I approached one of these companies and we have agreed that I will add related affiliate marketing content, handle & track the revenue and then split it with them on a monthly basis.

The possible risk is that the company might see how it's done and go it alone, cutting me out of the loop but I figure they have their core business and I have mine, and they'll most likely be happy let me carry on doing my thing and they can carry on doing theirs. I think it helps when there's an established relationship and trust is already there, but otherwise a more formal approach may be required to protect work done on their behalf.

But it seems like a nice idea I thought, and I wish I did it earlier. But does anyone already do this? Has this got a name... Affiliate consultant? Business Enhancer? The Cream On Top?

Labels: ideas

I've been planning for as long as I can remember to get my head round Amazon's API.
It was one of my new year's resolutions and I mentioned it again in a post last week.

David Fiske replied in the comments and assured me it was a doddle.

Turns out he was right!

After David's useful encouragement, I spent the latter part of last week getting into it. I had assumed it would be be a complicated development project so fired up my Visual Web Developer (which I save for what I consider *proper coding* tasks) and started off down that road.

Then with a little bit more reading, I discovered that the easier way to work with Amazon's Web Services was using XML over HTTP (known as REST). If you're not familiar with it, it basically means you construct a URL which points at Amazon's Web Services and the parameters in the query string allow you to return data you want which comes back in XML form.

You then need to work with the XML anyway you feel comfortable to display it on your page. I work in .net and the nested XML that was returned didn't bind too easily to .net controls like repeaters and datagrids etc, so I then had to go off on a tangent learning about XSLT which enabled me to control the layout of the XML returned and make it more suitable for how I wish to use it. Once I had "flattened" the XML results and only included info I required, I was able to simply bind them to .net controls.

I'm not entirely sure I went about things the best way, but managed to end up doing exactly what I wanted and getting the Amazon toy section listed on my new site, Toys And Videogames. It was actually really enjoyable to get my teeth into some new technologies and actually learn what feels like a new skill. I'll now be looking at adding Amazon Web Services to more sites so they can be live without me having to update them myself. In my researching, I didn't find any really useful sites that explained fully about this route I've taken, so look out for a walkthrough soon.

Labels: amazon, web services, xml, xslt

Glengarry Glen Ross is one of my favourite movies, and this is my favourite scene.

"A man don't walk on the lot lest he wants to buy"

Sir Alan met the candidates in Hamleys to give them details of their next task, but not before rejigging the teams and appointing project managers himself.

Paul and Tre moved to Stealth, to be led by Ghazal. Nathalie and Sophie are moved to Eclipse, to be led by Adam.

Ghazal had up this point been quite anonymous and looked less than pleased to be made the project manager with a team including big characters like Tre and Jadine, although she unconvincingly said to camera that she wasn't intimidated by anything. Anything except a sales pitch to Pets@Home, is what she obviously meant.

The task was to design and make a confectionary product, and then sell it at London Zoo. In Eclipse, Adam immediately laid down the law by telling them they were going with an animal theme because it was obvious. There were a few raised eyebrows from Katie - a serial underminer - but honestly, it seemed like a logical theme.

Eclipse's production seemed to go well with over 500 lollies made - some chocolate, some orange flavoured. Things were more problematic for Stealth where they struggled to get a production line going, wasted time in making their chocolate and forgot to get sticks which meant sending Tre and Kristina on a hunt to find them. Tre's negotiating tactic of suggesting that the wholesaler sell the sticks on a "less VAT basis" didn't get very far, unsuprisingly. Stealth finished production with 100 bags of fudge and 110 lollies - less than the 300 they had planned for.

Eclipse got to the Zoo to find out a bouncy castle was going up in their planned selling lcoation. Adam picked a new location that was remarkable out of the way and said it was "a covenient place not in the walkway". It may have been convenient if you wanted to sleep for the day but if you're intention was to sell stuff, a location closer to a walkway may have been better still. A fact that was not lost on Simon, who pushed for a relocation.

Some market research from the Zoo reported back To Eclipse that a natural or organic sweet would be popular, but this was ruled out for cost reasons, but that didn't stop Natalie overruling the project manager and labelling their orange lolly as "Natural Orange" rather than "Tiger Orange" as he had ordered. A blunder which meant that every one of them had to have the word "natural" crossed out. Lohit tried selling one with the catchy pitch "it's not a natural product", which horrified one mother. Lohit came back strong from that blip though to be a model salesman and was probably the star of the show. His technique was held up as an example to the others by Adam.

Adam's a salesman by trade, but instead of selling, he stayed in a lion suit for hours that scared children and also allowed him to "observe" the team.

Stealth sold out of their products in the afternoon, whilst Eclipse engaged in frantic afternoon price cuts followed eventually by giving them away. They later met up in the boardroom to hear the results. Eclipse made £983.80 and Stealth made £994, meaning Ghazal's team had won by about £10. I was especially impressed with Ghazal's team because we were told they made 100 bags of fudge - selling at £3 each - and 110 lollies - selling at £2.50. They sold out so you might imagine they made a total £575 but actually they raised £994. For her next trick, Ghazal will be walking across water and feeding the five thousand.

Sir Alan was less than impressed with the "not natural" Orange lolly, calling it "child vomit in araldite" and "sick on a stick". Adam kept Sophie backin the the boardroom with him, and also Natalie who seemingly tried to lie her way out of the labelling farce much to Sir Alan's displeasure. Sir Alan was also not pleased with Adam for not selling enough and spending too long in a lion suit, and was taken aback when Sophie revealed a morale stance about selling over priced lollies to harrassed mums.

Sir Alan carried on his teasing tactics from last week. Previously, the words "for that reason.." were a sure sign that someone was about to get fired. This year it's "for that reason.... you've got a lot to learn" before moving on to someone else. He decided that Sophie's morals were too naive and she should stick to science, so it was the quantum physicist that got the cab ride home.

Labels: apprentice, review, tv

Sometimes emails come through or announcements are made from merchants or networks that really make me raise an eyebrow and wonder if this is really how professionals should be acting.

A few weeks ago, mobile phone network 3 seemingly extracted email addresses of their affiliates through Buy.at, and advised them directly that they will shortly be leaving Buy.at and give info on how to sign up to them directly.

I don't have any issue with them starting an independent program or leaving Buy.at if that's what their contract allows, but to hear this directly from 3 and not via Buy.at seemed questionable to say the least. Should 3 really be emailing Buy.at affiliates and asking them to join their in-house scheme? As it happens, Buy.at still haven't confirmed 3 are leaving and are actively promoting new 3 deals, so I'd assume they may be trying to persuade them to stay but they may already have lost affiliates to the in-house scheme.

More recently, it's been announced on Affiliate Window that Heal's - one of my favourite shops, by the way - has "exclusively" launched on their platform.

That puzzled me because I'm already an affiliate of Heal's on TradeDoubler, and I've had no communication to say that this program is ending. Awin even ask TD affiliates to email them directly for info on changing TD links to Awin ones. Until I hear otherwise from TradeDoubler (unless I've missed an email announcing it?), I consider the Heal's to be a live program and find it odd that another network is calling it an Exclusive and offering to help me change links.

Not massive issues really but small things that make me question the level of professionalism - especially in communications with affiliates - in affiliate marketing.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate network

It was one of my new years resolutions to finally get to grips with Amazon's web services, and I've managed to put it off until now but it's looking increasingly like something I'm going to have to learn - here's why:

I had a toy site with a spammy type domain name that was highly listed on MSN.co.uk for the search term "toys". Unfortunately it was removed from MSN's listings shortly before last Christmas which was more than a tad disappointing.

So I resolved to come back with a stronger, toy related domain, which was more brandable and less spammy looking. The success I had with US links on my Wii Preorder site last year using Toys R Us and Walmart convinced me that I wanted a brand I could develop UK and US sites for. So I did some brainstorming and and came up with ToysAndVideoGames.com and ToysAndVideoGames.co.uk.

I've got a working UK site up and running with its first few sales coming through the door. I've used the product feed from Toys 'R' Us UK (via Affiliate Window) to build the site and imagined I would do something similar on the US site . But I hit a roadblock when I discovered that to use a "merchandiser" product feed from Linkshare, I'd need to cough up $250 first which I'm not prepared to do (you can get round this by having 50 sales in previous month but I don't have that). Also, I've seen the Toys R Us product feed and commission change (down to 3%) get thoroughly slated on the AbestWeb forum so have decided not to go ahead with that option.

So I now need to find an alternative and Amazon's toy section seems like the best way to go as far as I can tell, for sheer product range and brand recognition etc, although not being too familiar with the US market, I'd love to know if there's an alternative I should be considering. I've put an Amazon aStore up as a stop gap measure but really want to set about creating a large site which will have many indexable pages.

One piece of good news is that it turns out the .com was registered previously and the domain actually has an age of nearly 6 years, so I'm hoping that may help me avoid the sandbox and quickly build some quality rankings on Google.

The other tool apart from Amazon's API I will be using, and I think it's an essential resource for this project, is a "child". My nephew can give me great insights into what toys are hot and I'm still greatly impressed from the time he instantly spotted that a Pokemon Game Boy game I had bought at a boot sale was a fake.

Labels: amazon, new site

Cast your eyes round the blogosphere and people generally love Text-Link-Ads.com. It's an easy way for an advertiser to get their text link placed on some pretty decent sites, and it's a pretty easy way for site owners to add a new revenue stream to their sites.

I was thinking about adding some text link ads to his website so added it on to their inventory system. Then you need to add some code to your site to make the adverts appear, should an advertiser pick your site. They have a selection of web technologies from to generate the right code for your website, including ASP, ASP.net, PHP, Coldfusion, Wordpress, Blogger and more.

To use a Blogger blog, you need to be on the new Blogger system that was recently phased in. But in addition to that, you can't be using a heavily customised template because you lose the ability in Blogger to add Blogger widgets like the RSS widget, which is needed for the Text-Link-Ads.com system to work.

So in my case, it's a lot more difficult to become a publisher. There may be some workarounds but they involve a bit of messing about and maybe getting the web host to treat .html files as .php files.

It seems to me that the one option missing from TLA's list of web technologies is good old hand coded HTML

I update my site frequently so would have no trouble putting ads up within a reasonable Service Level Agreement timescale, and presumably some kind of bots could be used to automatically detect that the link was in place.

If there was option for me as a publisher to place the adverts by hand on my site, then that's whole load of extra site owners that could take part and add revenue to their sites.

[EDIT]

Ok, it turned out there an option in my hosting control panel to very easily treat .htm files as .php files and therefore implement the Text Link Ads system. I still think think there's an argument for allowing links to be added by hand though.

Labels: advertising, text link ads

Episode 3 started with a pointless recap of episodes 1 AND 2! I hate recaps at the best of times but to recap both previous episodes is mad. At this rate, by the end of the series the whole hour will be taken up with recaps and they'll just have to cut straight to the boardroom for the firing.

With the recaps out of the way, we joined the candidates in the house as they relaxed on a night off. Most of them were in pretty funky summer-wear and I wasn't sure for a moment if I was watching Shipwrecked or The Apprentice.

Their evening was interrupted when Sir Alan came knocking. He told the teams he was going to give them £200 for them to do pretty much what they wanted with. Their task was to come up with a one day service business and see who could get the biggest return.

Tre was elected as project manager for the remaining boys in Eclipse, now joined by Katie.
Naomi was chosen, reluctantly, as project manager for Stealth, which Jadine rejoined.

Both teams were to operate their businesses in Richmond - one of the most affluent parts of the UK. Stealth decided to setup a face painting business for kids, despite it being a weekday during term time. They initially got a trickle of kids but then struggled to find any more punters. Gerri was tasked with "location", but it seemed like a hard challenge because where is the right location for a face painting business when all the kids are at school?

They attempted to position themselves near a school as the kids left but were too late to get any business. But even if they had got their earlier, I'd have thought most mums on the school run would just want to get home and not hang around for face painting.

Eclipse decided to run a gardening business, with half the team (Lohit, Paul and Katie) asked to go door to door and find the jobs, and then send the crack team of gardeners over to get the job done. They initially struggled to find the jobs in a well-to-do residential area where the gardens were well kept, but then did eventually get some work for the boys, although seemingly underquoted on price considering the labour required.

Nick Hewer stood watching the guys gardening like a senior probation officer overseeing a group of young offenders. He looked rightly concerned when Simon hovered underneath Tre who was up a ladder, trimming a hedge with a chain saw. When the World's Angriest Man has a chain saw in his hands, you really don't want to be standing under him. Though it has to be said he was calm at this point, and seemed quite effective. It was later in the day the more familiar, foul mouthed Tre returned when Paul and Katie decided to spend their time trying to line up DJing jobs at Richmond pubs, despite his instructions not to.

As night fell, both teams were allowed to change business activity. The boys decided to do singograms - although Tre's promised beat-boxing never materialised or was never shown - and the girls decided to do Kissograms. The kissograms idea seemed to be pushed by Kristina Grimes - a name that sounds like it came from the pen of Roald Dahl - and team leader Naomi bowed to it despite earlier likening it to prostitution. Their actions were pretty grisly as a motley crue of men were kissed, squeezed and hugged in exchange for a few quid.

The teams met in the boardroom to discover that the girls had made £65 profit during the day and the boys had made £189 - almost doubling the seed money, as Tre quickly pointed out.

Team leader Naomi kept Gerri back to face Sir Alan - citing location as being one reason for failure - and also Jadine for her apparent disruptiveness.

Sir Alan went through them listing their faults as he saw them, and it's obvious he has really mastered the art of the tease.

"And Jadine...."

OMG - He's gonna fire Jadine!!

"For that reason, Naomi...."

Naomi's gonna get fired - yay!!

And then he goes and spoils it all by saying Gerri, you're fired. He decided she had failed one too many times on location (remembering episode one) and she didn't seem to fight for her position. It seemed to me that the business itself (face painting) was flawed, and finding a location was nigh on impossible. So Naomi deserved to be sacked for that alone, and I was amazed he didn't make more of the kissogram farce.

Sir Alan - this week you got it wrong. Tre's stock went up, and Naomi's went down.

Labels: apprentice, review, tv

As has been widely reported, Tim O'Reilly has come up with a draft code of conduct for bloggers, which includes points such as :

• Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
• Label your tolerance level for abusive comments..
• Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
• Ignore the trolls.
• Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
• If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
• Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.

I don't have any particular disagreement with any of the points made. But rather the exercise itself seems absurd.

Does a blog represent a significantly different entity from other websites that it requires some special code of conduct? To my mind, no. The idea that because something is labelled a blog, then you might suddenly decide to apply a code of conduct to it seems bizarre to me.

I don't know the web will develop. But I know that things change. When I first got online, IRC and Usenet were cool places to hang out. They seemed to become less popular and everyone was using web forums. Before I knew it everyone had their own blog and now maybe things are shifting again with some people spending more time twittering than blogging. The way we use the web, express ourselves and interact with others seems to be something that's always changing.

So it seems to me that a code of conduct for blogging is pretty irrelevant, unenforceable and almost certainly a waste of time. By all means have some best practice recommendations that maybe a new blogger can get in a welcome email (in the same way that netiquette has always existed), but a code of conduct that presumably people should sign up to, and adhere to else risk losing their "bloggers' badge" and be cast into the underworld of rogue bloggers with their profanity and anonymous comments sounds like a real non starter.

Labels: blogs, code of conduct

Right, before I start this review of the second episode of the Apprentice, I think it's quite important that I take off my jacket.

That's better.

The teams met Sir Alan at the London Eye to be told details of their second task: to come up with a doggy product that "nutters" would buy. I quickly imagined Sir Alan walking into his R&D department and ordering them to come up with a hybrid phone/email/spectrum emulator that some nutters would buy. Back at the Eye, teams were told they would have to pitch their idea to three retailers - Pets@Home, Harrods and some small boutique - and whatever team could generate the most money in orders would win.

Team Stealth - having chosen Katie as their PM - started their "ideation" (yuk!!) session with ideas such as a dog operated fan and a nappy for dogs.

Eclipse - led by Rory - were first sat down and told that the team leader goes "f*cking crazy" for discipline, and then proceeded to tell them he wouldn't tolerate swearing. Rory was already sounding pretty ridiculous by this point, but then insisted that the team remove their jackets before doing any brainstorming. Maybe when there's a film crew there you suddenly lose sense of how ludicrous you sound?

Eclipse seemed to struggle to come up with any ideas too. It seemed to me that both teams were starting their brainstorming from a blank page. My own observation was that it might be better to look at existing products already being sold and try to enhance one of them with a new twist or innovation rather than trying to come up with brand new ideas out of thin air. But hey, I'm not one of top 16 business prospects in the UK, so they must know what they're doing, right?

Stealth were going with the idea of rucksacks for dogs and then from under the radar switched to some kind of dog wardrobe, that the guy from Harrods pointed out looked like a cheap kitchen cabinet.

Rory wasn't happy with any of the ideas his team had come up with, so unleashed his own vision: a dog walker's utility strap that would have various pockets for doggie accessories. This got Jadine's branding juices flowing. Last week she wanted to put Eclipse shapes on the coffee and this week she wanted to put "clips" on the "eclipse belt" - get it?

Some of the other team wanted to go with a dog blanket, but Rory went against them. It was edited to suggest he made the wrong choice, with the help of a focus group who turned their nose up at a utility belt but loved the idea of a blanket. It seemed to me they were just comfortable with what seemed more familiar. You could have said, "how about a piece of white, rigid calcium covered in fleshy meat and we'll call it a 'meat bone' for dogs and they'd have gone f*cking crazy for it. But the task was to come up a with a new product and I think Rory was right to say - as he did later in the boardroom - that Sir Alan might have "eaten him alive" if all they came up with was a dog blanket.

We saw very brief snippets of the pitches. Lohit and Adam seemed to be doing a good job for Eclipse, and then we witnessed an awful car crash moment as Ghazal choked during her pitch to Pets@Home, before handing over to someone else. One of those moments where you have to cover your face and watch between the gaps in your fingers.

The teams met in the board room where Nick and Margaret delivered the results. Eclipse gained orders from Harrods and the boutique in Greenwich, but got none from the large chain, Pets@Home. Stealth only got orders from Pets@Home - despite Ghazal's very abridged pitch - but the size of the order was such that they easily won.

In the boardroom Ifti - who only revealed after the task that he had a degree in product design - said he has been unable to perform on this task because he was missing his family. Sir Alan appreciated his honest, and then fired him. And in a shock twist, he announced he was still going to fire someone else. It was between a tongue tied Rory and a fired up Tre. Sir Alan decided Rory was a complete disaster and had to go.

Throughout the task, Tre was his usual charming himself (ie not very charming at all), with his constant back chat and complete lack of respect for the team leader, telling him "you're nothing to me". Even after Rory was fired, Tre didn't acknowledge him and made no attempt to shake hands. He seems to have a very short termist approach - only concerned with getting through the task and not too bothered that ultimately he comes across as rude and obnoxious and not someone you'd want to have work for you or even do business with.

By the end of episode 2, it seems clear that the programme makers are enjoying the friction that a character like Tre brings and focussing heavily on him whilst the contribution of other candidates isn't getting a look in, which is a shame but maybe that's how you make a hit TV show?

Labels: apprentice, review, tv

I blogged a couple of months ago about about a project in the world of adult entertainment that I wanted to do. It took the form of a blog around a niche area.

Unfortunately the project never really went anywhere. My heart just wasn't in it. I managed a couple of posts but it was too lame and I just couldn't bring it to completion. I showed it to a friend and he didn't even realize it was an adult site.

I'm not sure why I couldn't garner the enthusiasm to really put some effort in. It seems like there's a tonne of money to be made from that area, which usually excites me, but I just couldn't get into it.

So the project is at an end.

My friend is in the process of having a full on porn site developed, so I'll be interested to see how she gets on with that and I guess I'll think again about it if she's on the beach in a few months running a porn empire from the laptop.

Labels: adult site project

A very nice start to April thanks to some unexpected good luck.

I was promoting some products on an independent affiliate program a while ago, but things didn't really take off so I took the site down and forgot all about it. I was also promoting it from one other site and so as far as I know that one active text link remained to the merchant site with my referral id in it and I thought no more of it.

I've not had a sale on this program for a long time, and when I was getting sales on it, they were were and far between. And then, as if by magic, I get notified by email of 6 sales in the last couple of days.

I logged into the control panel for the program and checked out the referral stats - somehow my affiliate URL has ranked in 2nd place on Yahoo!, just below the merchant itself, for the main key phrase relevant to the products being sold.

It was a complete shock to me, so I can't take any credit for it and who knows how long it will last for, but it's a very nice way to start the month.

I'll probably throw up some more links to it and try to prop it up where it is.

Labels: affiliate marketing, independent, web promotion

I had to post off my VAT Return, and the prepaid envelope was lost. So I had to put it in a fresh envelope and luckily had one stamp left. It just happened to be a particularly inappropriate stamp for how I feel when paying Tax.

Labels: light relief, tax

Adsense in March can be summed up in three words. Best. Month. Ever. Not by a huge amount, but definitely a new high.

So that's great and I am happy, except well over half was from one site and I really want to see my Adsense earnings diversify further because I hate to be reliant on one site.

Affiliate sales were healthy across all networks, and probably also close to being best I've had.

Amazon Associate performance was sluggish in March, with a slight fillip towards the end when someone bought 11 copies of the same book - I can only imagine it was a teacher or professor.

Another welcome boost this month was that some direct advertisers I have on a site decided to renew and in fact lengthen their advertising with my site, which is a little vote of confidence in the site concerned.

So, really an excellent month on all fronts and with the recent decision to work from home which saw my outgoings plummet, things are really motoring.

Will April bring me down to earth with a bump? Or see even greater success?
I'm looking forward to finding out!

Labels: adsense, affiliate marketing, earnings

The EU has a history of coming out with mad policies, such as banning curved bananas, but it may be on the cusp of an announcement that is not just mad, but dangerous to web publishers.

An intriguing email has been received here at Monetise This concerning an imminent policy directive from the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding.

It has been suggested to me by a staffer within the Commission that an announcement will come this week - probably before Thursday - which will rule Adsense out of order and incompatible with existing EU directives on website accessibility.

A working group put together by the Commissioner are thought to have studied the usability impact of the Javascript based Adsense - invisible to most text based screen readers - and determined that differently abled web users are at a "significant disadvantage" by missing out on the products and services which are integrated "as content" into publisher sites.

My source who has seen the report says it cites the case of a partially sighted man in Austria who has not had a girlfriend in 17 months. The report's authors have been able to prove that the man would have been able to get a girlfriend had he been able to access several "e-books" on the subject that were made available to web users who could view Adsense adverts.

If it happens, this shock ruling will surely have massive ramifications for web publishers in Europe.

**Edit: That was my attempt at an April Fools by the way!!**

Labels: adsense, web accessibility

Was just checking my Awstats for the blog and was pleased to see the number of unique visitors to the blog up by over 30% on the previous month.

I guess I have been helped this recently by talking about Dragons' Den, which is a popular show and usually generates traffic as people search for the stuff they saw on there. Also been getting plenty of hits from Bumpzee which is great.
Publish
Seeing the keyphrases that bring people to the site is always fascinating to me, so here's a selection of March's search terms:

• Mummymits
• postit adsense background
• remove tradedoubler ads javascript firefox
• hand fetishists
• dragons den peter jones wife
• donald trump anthony borelli
• toys best seller christmas predictor
• tradedoubler where is my commissions
• www.what do women do to annoy men search

Labels: blogs

Experienced affiliate marketers can probably skip this one. This is my basic guide to using product feeds which aimed at entry level affiliates who want to know about the tools available to them.

What Are Product Feeds?

Product feeds, or data feeds, are a great tool for affiliate marketers building websites and wanting to incorporate product information into them.

Many merchants will export their product information into a text based format such as CSV or XML. These are called product feeds or data feeds and are usually available through your affiliate network.

What's In A Product Feed?

These files will usually contain at least the following pieces of information:

• Product Code/ID
• Product Name
• Product Description
• Price
• Image URL
• Affiliate URL

With this information, you can quickly build large sites full of great product data.
Excel is commonly used to open and view CSV files. Excel could traditionally only handle files with 64,000 rows, but the latest version can handle about a million rows, which means you can even work with large product feeds like the one from Play.com which is about 250,000 rows in size.

What Can I Do with A Product Feed?

You can use the data feed file as a data source itself and have your web pages read directly from it, or import it into a database server like MS SQL or mySQL. I have recently started to just use CSVs as data-sources if they are not too big, and only bother importing them into a database server if they are large or will be getting a lot of hits.

I define "large" for this purpose as being about 1000 rows. Anything more than that and you may possibly be putting a performance hit on the server as it reads the text file every-time your web page is requested. If it's for a site I don't expect to get high traffic, I may be more relaxed about using slightly larger CSV files.

As well as creating dynamic pages, you could also use an off-line application to generate static web pages based on the information in a product feed. I started work on an application like that, but have yet got round to finishing it as there are probably better solutions out there.

How Often Do Product Feeds Get Updated?

This varies between merchants and you're best of checking with them. Popular mobile phone merchants may refresh their data feeds many times a day. Other types of merchant may not need to update a file for months. If you are having to update a product feed frequently, you can look at automating the process in a batch file by getting a direct download link from the affiliate network and using a tool like wget

Why use Product Feeds?

Product feeds enable you to quickly build large sites full of product information. This is great for white label style sites or price comparison, or generally just adding affiliate content to your site.

Anything to be careful of when using product feeds?

If all affiliates are using the same product feeds, then there's a risk of too many people duplicating the same content and being penalised by search engines. Be creative in choosing what information to use and balance it with text of your own or even consider functions to replace certain words with alternatives to create web content that is unique - for instance, replacing "great" with "excellent".

Conclusion: Product feeds represent a convenient and accessible way for affiliates to incorporate useful merchant information into their own websites.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools, beginners, product feeds