Everyone and their dog seems to be talking about Facebook at the moment. I set up an account the other week and have an embarrasingly small friends list which I prefer to think as being a reflection on the luddite people I've associated with rather than on me.

But it does seem like this thing is going nuts and it kind of reminds me of when Friend Reunited was taking off and it seemed like there was a genuine rush to get on and find out what school friends have done.

So with any big popular subject, there's got to be a way for web entrepreneuers to cash in. One way might be to register domains for Facebook related topics, such as guides, templates, howtos, FAQs etc and incorporate Adsense etc. No doubt there will be, or is already, eBooks on the subject.

But the more interesting way is probably through developing tools and applications for Facebook, using its own API and developer's platform. Sam Harrelson has already flagged this up as a great opportunity ("Facebook is About to Explode") and it definitely seems exciting. I've had a quick scout round the Developer's site and the API is based around XML over HTTP (REST) which is very easy to work with. There's a PHP5 and Java client library to download, or unofficial client libraries for other technologies such as VB.net, coldfusion and Perl.

As long as you meet their terms of service, you are able to use the Facebook API to create commercial or non-commercial applications on websites or desktop applications and they are fine with your application being monetised. One thing to bear in mind is that you aren't allowed to register domains including the word "face" for use with the FaceBook API.

I'm checking out other people's applications at the moment to get a feel for what's possible and see how people are monetising it, if they are at all yet. I'll be brainstorming ideas over the weekend and seeing what I come up with. My first idea is "List My Friends' Religous Holidays", but I'd hope I can come up with something better than that!

Labels: facebook

The remaining candidates were given the task of selecting products and then selling them live on air, on the Ideal Home Shopping Channel.

Eclipse - Simon, Naomi and Tre - were led by Simon and picked a craft set (which I wont attempt to spell), a foldable wheelchair and a trampoline to sell.

Stealth - Kristina, Katie and Lohit - were led by Kristina and picked ladies' underwear, a chocolate fountain and some mop.

Lohit, Katie and Naomi came across as very competent performers onscreen. Katie, as usual, came up with the best lines as she identified the target consumer as someone called Mavis, who has a ery sad existence and needs the shopping channel for companionship.

Neither team excelled - they both lost thousands of pounds compared to usual earnings in the prime time slots they were given, but Stealth did have a clear edge over Eclipse and were sent off to a Turkish bath as a reward.

Simon made a balls up of everything. When he in the production chair, he was dumb struck and useless. When he was presenting, he was a gaffe-prone fool. Nick didn't mince his words, describing him as "selfish", guilty of "vanity", and accused him of thinking of himself and not the team.

The choice of a wheelchair by Simon raised eyebrows at the time with Tre and Naomi, and also with Sir Alan who we were shown watching and commenting on the shopping channel broadcast from his own office (though I wonder if he really gave real time opinions of if or if he had a recording and a script). He was distinctly unimpressed and threatened to have words with Simon over it. It was presented onscreen by Naomi and Tre, and they managed to sell two. When it got to the boardroom, Sir Alan - despite what he has earlier said about it - had decided it was a good product and gave credit for the sales to Simon for product selection and not Naomi for presenting it well. His conclusions seemed all over the place. The fact that no trampolines were sold meant, according to him. that it was a bad product and didn't suggest to Sir Alan that it was just a good product that Simon was unable to sell. He seemed to be arriving at conclusions that enabled him to allow Simon to stay.

Despite the clear evidence against Simon, Sir Alan obviously likes him and decided to fire Naomi instead, who in fairness should have gone much earlier anyway.

Labels: apprentice, review, tv

I was browsing the Overture Keyword Tool and saw a nice phrase that attracts a good few thousands searches a month.

Did a quick domain search and found a perfect keyword rich domain and knocked up a not too shabby site. I checked my Adsense stats sometime time later and it was already making me money."WTF" was my first reaction.

Did a little bit of digging and turns out the domain has an age of 3 years, and is already linked to and listed on several sites. Some days this job can seem tough. Other days it's so easy it's almost funny!

I just got lucky in that instance, but to do the same thing in a more organised way, you might have a look at Deleted Domains which is a site my friend just recommended to me.

aStore provides aNice Suprise

Amazon's aStore is a nice little tool and I've incorporated it into a few sites, but I must have been a bit slow on the uptake because I've only just realised it can actually rank quite nicely on it's own. I guess because I've integrated it into a few sites using IFRAME I didn't think of it as a site in its own right, but I just noticed they do actually list in the SERPs. And one of mine ranks one for the keyword phrase which is the title of the aStore page. Unfortuntely it's not a phrase many people use so I've reoptimised the page titles with something a bit more search worthy and look forward to seeing where lands when its indexed again.

Labels: adsense, domain names

We got the customary shots of the candidates waking up. Presumably the camera crew actually go in first, wake them up and say "right, we're going to film you waking up". Simon rose from his slumber and said "morning" to Tre. Tre replied simply, "Wanker", like some kind of obscene alarm clock.

The candidates were ordered to meet Sir Alan in Greenwich to hear details of their next task. They stood in front of the Cutty Sark which was a nice reminder of how she looked before she was ravaged by fire. The Cutty Sark had been used to import tea, and Sir Alan explained this was task would be about about selling imported goods to the retail trade. Each team would listen to pitches from a trade rep from a variety of countries, and then select the one with most marketable products and then try to get orders.

Tre was put in charge of leading Eclipse (Lohit, Simon & Jadine), whilst Katie was appointed manager of Stealth (Kristina and Naomi).

Stealth chose to work with Canadian imports and Eclipse went with Sweden, which seemed like a sound choice when you consider the popularity of Swedish furniture. It was an eclectic range of products including a children's toy wheatie, dehumidifyer and a "rug in a box" which almost sounds like a reply to the song that Justin Timberlake performed on Saturday Night Live.

It seemed that what would be key to this task was arranging the face to face meeting with retail buyers, but the girls didn't arrange any appointments in advance and Eclipse only managed to get one, which seemed to be down to lack of manpower (with Jadine being too homesick to work) and a bad list of contacts culled from the net by Simon. With a lack of appointments arranged, the teams ended up turning up on doorsteps and cold calling disinterested staff with one person fuming at Naomi, "We dont have a manager or a buyer, get off my line you silly woman".

When the teams did manage to get face-time with the right people, they all seemed to sell well, but if there was a flaw in the task - probably for both - it was in getting into companies in the first place. At one point Simon and Tre were walking up and down Islington's Upper St trying to doorstep owners. I was hoping a satisfied customer from week one - also in Upper St - may approach them and ask for a coffee, which Jadine had memorably branded with the eclipse shape.

The single biggest sale probably went to Jadine and Lohit with when they sold 5 high end designer dehumidifiers but it wasn't enough to beat Stealth who trounced them.

Katie and the girls went off for a reward in Selfridges, whilst Tre kept Lohit and Jadine back in the boardroom to face the boss. Tre and Lohit fought their corners well and articulately, but Jadine seemed resigned to her fate, and she was sent packing in emotional scenes and the sadness seemed to be felt by all, as Jadine had said she had wanted to win to help get a better life for her daughter. Sir Alan simply concluded he was looking for a more finished product and she still needed to learn 0 which slightly misses the point that this is The Apprentice and not just The Employee.

Labels: apprentice, review, tv

I've mentioned this before - last year sometime - but thought it was worth revisiting.

BT Openzone operate internet hotspots at public places and venues around the country. They run an inhouse affiliate program that lets you link to their air time e-vouchers and earn 10% from each sale.

The terms and conditions make plain that payment will be direct into your bank account, once the minimum of £50 has been reached.

I've been linking to BT Openzone from my Wifi Hotspot Directory for sometime, and seen a steady stream of sales over that time. So far so good, right? The problem is, I've never been paid. I called the support number on the website and the staff had never heard of it, and I had to spell a long URL over the phone to direct them to a page on their own website to show them what it was. Emails to the support address either bounce back or are ignored. A question on the A4u forum last year got no replies. It seems I'm in some parallel dimension where I'm the only person that's promoting this thing and the only person that's heard of it.

I keep the links up because they seem to convert well, and are about the best fitting merchant for my site. And also I, perhaps naively, place some faith in the BT brand and believe that ultimately this will get sorted.

So, this is an appeal for information. Does anyone know anything about the BT Openzone program? Have you seen other webmasters promoting them? Have you seen any BT Openzone staff acting suspiciously? Keep 'em peeled.

The other point to be made is that this is basically a good performing program but this division of BT does not seem to have the skills or resources to properly run it, so affiliate networks should be pitching for the business.

Labels: affiliate marketing, bt openzone

So, I had a rant on Friday after I downloaded an updated product feed and its column headers had been changed, which broke my site - just as I was about to go out.

I got my site all fixed up now and it didn't take long. I'm not an affiliate that begrudges doing work to keep things ticking over. I see this as a job, and in any job, "stuff" happens and you have to do work in order to maintain a steady ship. I have no complaints about that.

But I do have a complaint about people acting in a stupid way which needlessly causes issues when a little bit of thought and planning could have avoided any problems. I can only think that the merchant involved doesn't actually understand how a product feed is typically used, and therefore doesn't understand the impact of making changes willy nilly to column headers.

If you use a product feed as a datasource, then the column headers are your fieldnames. And if they change, your code doesn't work. Understanding the impact of system changes and communicating them effectively in advance to interested parties should be essential to anyone running an affiliate program.

I don't want to labour a point, but it puts me in mind of that famous quote from Geoffrey Howe: "It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain"

Labels: affiliate marketing

Just about to go out and thought I'd update the product feed on the site which has been the subject of my recent posts about my PPC activities.

Downloaded the file, uploaded to site, refreshed page - error, page could not be compiled. The merchant has decided to change one of the column headers in the product feed which has completely broke my site and now I have to sod about fixing it or roll back to the only other data feed for them which is 5 weeks old.

It almost makes me want to cry. Sometimes it seems like I'm trying to get sales despite the merchant, not with their help!

Sir Alan told the teams that their task was to create a branding campaign for a pair of trainers. The clue in the brief was the instruction to come up with an advert that "sells kit, not wins the Montrose award for advertising tossers". Sir Alan likes rather straight forward advertising. They would have to come up with a 30 second TV ad and a bill board poster.

Sir Alan appointed Ghazal as team leader following her plea at the end of the last episode. Her team (Stealth) included Katie, Kristina and Naomi. Jadine was charged with leading Tre, Lohit and Simon as team Eclipse.

Eclipse decided on a brand called simply, "Street", with a campaign targetting street culture, and the "bump and grind" generation, as Tre put it. Margaret Mountford asked for clarification and Jadine amusingly told her that it was to do with dance "like the twist or the tango". Jadine seems to have quietened down and I was disappointed she didn't resume he Eclipse branding obsession from the early episodes and try to name the shoes after the team.

Stealth's brainstorming came up with the name "Jam", and the theme "image is everything". Katie wasn't impressed with that and pressured Ghazal into switching to "music is everything", which caused divisions in the team although not I'm not sure why as each idea seemed as vague and useless as the other.

Eclipse did a poor job of hiring performers for their campaign, with Jadine failing to specify that their talent needed to be able to dance too. Simon stepped up to his plate with his street dancing, and also did the vocals with some kind of awful, cringeworthy take on Gil Scott Heron's, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised with a rallying call to "Reclaim The street". Eugh. Tre was concerned at how the team's antics were harming his reputation, with a complaint to camera that "Its discrediting me now", as if his reputation had somehow remained unharmed during the past seven weeks. He also seemed slightly envious of Simon's starring role, with the cutting remark "there's a fine line between good fancers and totally shite bollocks dancers"

The teams had to present their ideas to he advertising agency, CHI. Katie's presentation was full of flannel about a boy called Jay, who typified their target market. Jadine's presentation seemed horrible, with an odd, stilted delivery in the poshest voice she could muster. I imagine she was reciting "the rain in spain falls mainly in the plain" during the journey to the agency.

The teams met in the boardroom to find out who had won. Sir Alan wasn't over impressed with either, but he blasted Stealth's effort, saying he didn't know what was being sold and asking where the branding was. Katie gave every impression of thinking Sir Alan was a bit of a simpleton, asking "didn't you see it in the final frame?... No?" It seemed more obvious than ever at that point that Katie thinks she's a little bit above the job that's on offer - and maybe she's right?

Katie is well known now for the stinging soundbite, usually wishing some cruel physical demise on her oppponents. This week she didn't disappoint, with her thoughts on Kristina, telling the camera she's like to see Kristina fired and "more physically that just in the boardroom scenario".

Ghazal kept Naomi and Katie in the boardroom with her, and put up a sprited performance, but her performance on the task itself was so transparently weak that Sir Alan had no choice but to tell her she was fired.

Labels: apprentice, review, tv

My latest PPC adventure started with almost instant success. Then I blogged last week about my concerns over how things were going when the month started off with a very prolonged dry spell. My worries coincided with a makeover on the merchant site which did spook me into considering calling it a day and I did actually pause my Adwords campaign for a few hours. I looked to the comment section for advice on how best to go forward.

Duncan Popham wrote:

Hold your nerve! The data isn't in anyway big enough to draw conclusions

KirstyM said:

I'd say hold on... if its been working before it will work again.

JC replied:

it looks like you should give it a little while longer

The advice of the respondants was sound, and after I reactived my campaign a few more sales came through at the end of last week and more over the weekend which put me back in profit.

Not the level of profit I was seeing last month, but certainly enough to reassure me that the program is at least tracking OK and it's taught me not to pick out arbitary time periods like 10 days here and there to prove or disprove success, but to let this carry on for the rest of the month at least and take a more considered view of how things have done. I would normally have been more patient but I think it was the fact the merchant had a new site which made me nervous as to well it was working.

So I'd like to thank those who replied with their advice and I'll post up the figures at the end of the month to show how it did.

Labels: ppc

HMV and Play.com both offer pretty decent value. Using offshore operations, they can give great prices and they include delivery in display prices which I think is always an attractive proposition. So how do you choose between them when deciding who to work with.

Well, I went with HMV on a video games site because their CSV product feed was a manageable size. When I say manageable, I mean I could open it in Excel. Yes, like most users, I'm still using a version that has a row limit of 65,000. Play.com's product feed was simply too big for me to work with using the tools I choose to use.

But now HMV's product feed has gone to over 120,000 rows which makes my job harder. I would be peeved at this, but almost at the same time, Play.com took the sensible decision to break their feed up into several feeds based on categories and now I can easily get a nice 2000 row product feed of computer games.

So the lesson for merchants? Where possible, provide usable product feeds to your affiliates. Don't make their job needlessly difficult. If you do, they may just work with someone else. For merchants that have inescapably large product feeds, I'd actually like to see more of them offering web services, but I guess that's another post....

Labels: product feeds

Last month I wrote about the success I was having with a PPC campaign. The return on investment was healthy and everything seemed great - I was at last tasting PPC success.

And then something changed.

All of a sudden, I was just was not seeing the conversions anymore. I noticed that the merchant had made substantial changes to their site. I contacted the affiliate manager and the account manager at the network to see if other affiliates were experiencing any drop in conversions. The account manager at the network didn't reply (don't you love that?). The affiliate manager at the merchant was more responsive and said he was about to engage in some split testing to see which pages worked best.

His results are in and it turns out the new pages perform "well" and in fact, marginally better than the old style.

Which leaves me at a loss to work out why things have taken a nosedive for me. Consider this:

May 1 - May 10
216 click throughs (to the merchant site from mine), 1 sale

April 21 - April 30
177 click throughs, 4 sales

April 11 - April 20
198 click throughs, 4 sales

Now maybe these samples aren't big enough to draw any firm conclusions from. Maybe I need to hold my nerve and hope things come good. But I've gone from a healthy profit last month to only recouping 50% of my ad spend so far this month. Ordinarily I'd say, ok wait and see, a few more sales would change it all back round, but looking at the past 10 days in the context of the previous 20 to that, makes me nervous about how this is going.

So... what do you think, dear reader? Hang tight and see what happens? Call it a day? Switch to another merchant and see how they fare (although this one has a great CPA at the moment which I'd hate missing out on...).

Labels: adwords, affiliate marketing, ppc

Has it really been five days since I last posted to my blog? Having to transfer some sites and databases to new hosts turned into a major project (not to mention headache inducing and RSI aggravating ordeal too) over the weekend and early part of this week, but it was technically rewarding as I took the opportunity to recode the pages and created my own set of web services, which is great because I'll now be able to easily use the back end data in some new and interesting ways across other sites.

Anyways, here's a roundup of things that have happened since I last posted:

Toys Site: I talked about my new toy site a while back and how I had incorporated Amazon's Web Services into it. No real work done on it all since then, other than a few links to get it indexed and am pleased to see the first trickle of sales come in. Always satisfying to see the first evidence that a site actually "works" as an affiliate vehicle.

Adsense: Adsense income has gone up on sites that I moved to a new host (in the US). That has to be pure coincidence though.... surely!?

PPC: I enjoyed some cool PPC success last month. Unfortunately this month, I'm just not seeing anything it. Conversion rate has plummeted. Seems to have coincided with the merchant making significant changes to their site. It's heart breaking to see a winning formula tinkered with and end up with a such a reversal of fortunes.

Most of my online activities are to do with making money online.
But what's as important as that and almost as rewarding, is saving money online.

When I was starting out, I made plenty of bad decisions with hosting and registrations, which were very bad value for money compared to deals I'm now aware of. For instance, it took me a very long time to get round to getting a reseller account for hosting, and I have all these old individual one-domain packages still live. As they gradually all come up for renewal, I'm cancelling the packages and transferring them to my new host and reseller package.

So if there's a lesson I've learned, it's that controlling spending and keeping as close an eye on outgoings is as important as watching the income. I guess it should have been obvious always, but I used to expect every new site to be the next FriendsReunited.com and wasn't overly concerned about a few quid here and there, and maybe I'm now more realistic.

Labels: saving money

Over at ABestWeb, they have an interesting section on the forum where users post up results of test purchases to report if they tracked. Seems like a good idea to me, so I thought I post a simple message reporting on if a sale was recorded when I buy something through an affiliate link.

Here's my first:

Merchant: The Link
Network: TradeDoubler*
Product: TomTom One GB
Click Recorded: Yes
Sale Recorded: NO

*Moving to Affiliate Window with other DGSi brands.

Labels: purchase report

Sir Alan delivered a video message to the candidates telling them they would be taking the best of English produce to a market in France to sell to French "people". You could tell he wanted to say "nutters" - his hallmark phrase for the consumer - but stuck with "people" in the interests of entente cordiale. He appointed Lohit and Paul as team leaders, with Tre, Simon, Jadine and Naomi on Lohit's team, and Adam, Kristina, Katie and Ghazal on Paul's team.

Lohit's team - Eclipse - settled on an English Breakfast theme, buying up smoked salmon, English tea and jams. It seemed like Simon was a real asset to the team with a flair for the French language and some good input on product selection based on his knowledge of the French.

After picking up some sausages from a farm shop at a prison, Paul's team - Stealth - went down to Makro - popular cash and carry wholesalers - and stocked up on cheese. Kristina rightly picked up on it being slightly ludicrous to goto Charlton's finest cash and carry to bulk buy cheese to try and sell to a nation of cheese connosieurs. Paul's luck also failed him when he and Adam picked up their signage from an obviously displeased printer in Maidstone, who wanted a large lump of their budget for a glossy banner which transpired to be a poorly worded translation.

Eclipse did seem to manage a decent day of sales, successfully selling to shoppers and local businesses. Each week we are introduced to a new skill from Tre, and in this task he showed us he could "bullsh*t in any language". Apart from some squabbling between Jadine and Simon (which Tre put down to it being that "time of the month"), the team functioned well together.

Stealth's day was beset with problems, caused in large part by their inability to cook sausages and hand out samples. Paul had spurned proper cooking apparatus in favour of a makeshift cooker, created out of food tins and a candle. This 'Boy's Own' solution wasn't up to scratch and really dented their selling potential. When Kristina finally arranged the use of a local kitchen to cook some samples, they did manage to start selling sausages.

Paul decided to take matters into hand and wandered into a "Euro Kebab" to sell his pork sausages. Euro Kebab was a Muslim owned Kebab shop selling Hallal meat and this happened to be in the middle of Ramadam. If he had pulled it off, Sir Alan would have had to just quit and hand the whole business over to an obvious genius. Predictably, that's not what happened and Paul and Katie quickly made for the exit. All things considered, the shopkeepers reaction was remarkably restrained.

After a day's trading, the teams returned to the UK. They assembled in the board room to find out how they had did, although I'd have thought that as each team would most likely have an idea of how well they done, and presumably do talk to each other in the house in which they all stay, so the results can't be that much of a surprise to them? That aside, Lohit's team made a profit of over £400. Paul's team made a loss of over £100.

Paul took Adam and Kristina into the board. Adam, for his cock-up over the signage and Kristina for being a snake in the grass was Katie put it. This was only ever going to go one way, and after a bit of theatrics to suggest Adam was also in the firing line, Sir Alan rounded on Paul, called him a "shambles" and sent him packing.

(Lovers of continuity errors will have noted the brown/tan shoes Paul wore as he left the boardroom, and the black shoes as he got in the cab!)

I mentioned at the start of the series that I do happen to know Lohit and it was great to see him at last feature properly in an episode, and he did a great job of leading the team. He's starting to look like a proper contender to me. Simon has also done a great job, and I can them two along with Tre and Kristina making up the final four. That's my prediction anyway - what do you think?

Labels: apprentice, review, tv

Just been checking the Awstats for this blog and am pleased to see that the number of unique visitors is up again. The puzzling thing is the visitor is total is up by about 1/7 but the bandwidth used has quadrupled. That's something I'll need to look into I guess - maybe it was down to my blog redesign or maybe someone's hot-linking to some images.

Top referrers this month were my A4U Forum profile page (wow, that one post I made last month must have gone down well!), Bumpzee and Keith's Internet Marketing Blogs site.

Most search engine traffic came from Google - obviously, I guess - and there was plenty of Apprentice related search terms in there. People do love The Apprentice (me included!)

Here's some choice search terms that brought people here last month:

• reggae reggae sauce recipes
• podcast monetise
• google adsense referrals beta
• using product feeds tradedoubler
• open a csv file that has 200000 rows
• wii rsi friendly
• simon ambrose running for the phone apprentice
• where was margaret mountford born
• naomi lay video porn or sex or homemade

Labels: awstats, blogs

Well, it's the start of a new month so it must be time for a quick recap on how this particular online marketer did in the previous month.

Adsense earnings were a little down on the month previous but remain really rather good. They've been roughly at around the same level for quite some time which is satisfactory but I'd live to move this forward. It still pains me when I see the Channel list and notice that sites that did make plenty now hardly feature. Resurrecting once successful sites remains on my to-do list.

Affiliate income through natural traffic was a little disappointing last month. The month started well - with Expedia on TD being a good performer - but then sales stagnated towards the end of the month.

For some reason email notifications of sales from OneNetwork have stopped (for me, at least) so I thought I was having a dismal month on there but after logging in, saw that actually it was a very good month for software sales.

Affiliate income through PPC was very pleasing as I mentioned in a post the other day. I finished the whole month with an ad spend for the campaign concerned of £310 and a commission total of £581. After many PPC failures, I'm certainly happy with those numbers.

Labels: earnings