My brother goes down to the South West for his holidays and usually brings something like Chilli Chocolate back. Next time, I'm going to ask him to bring me back some creative juice, straight from the farm where it's pressed... I think it could help with my websites!

Labels: video

Nice to see a couple of new features on Amazon Associates. Firstly, there's a slightly new look. Nothing too major but a slightly more polished feel. Then, when you go to make a product link, it kindly tells you the top 10 products in a given category, which you can easily switch to another. This makes it nice and quick to pick up links for their bestselling products.

Ok, so far so good, but nothing too radical. But then go ahead and visit Amazon's website itself and you'll see you have a new "site stripe" at the top of the page which gives you two very cool function - "link to this page" and "add to aStore". Both of which will make creating links very much quicker.

It would be really nice if they could sort out the reporting as a priority though. I think I have read before that at the moment, they run some end of day batch job which calculates the affiliate reporting, but to me this gives a sense of detachment as it's so much cooler to be able to see on other programs and networks the money you are making in near real time.

Did I miss anything else that's new in the Amazon Associates makeover?

Labels: amazon

Do you ever find yourself launching a new website, and anxiously checking your affiliate stats to see what sales have come through. And yes, you see can see a new pending commission showing in your network control panel. And your hopes raise as you think your new site's first sale has occured, thus validating your hopes and expectations behind the site and proving to yourself that it *really* was a good idea after all.

But you click through to see where the sale came from, and it wasn't from your new site at all but from some crummy, unsexy old site that you don't care about any more. And there's that slightly perverse feeling of disappointment that the money you just made was the wrong type of commission.

These are gloomy days for the banking industry, and probably for the rest of us in the very near future too with a deep and long recession likely to be imminent. But whilst at the moment banks are in troubled times and increasingly reluctant to lend, once upon a time there was a bank on the high street that liked to say "Yes!". That bank was TSB, and I stumbled upon some of their old adverts on Youtube, and they are hilariously cheesy.




Well, as the banking system faces apocalypse, it's nice to look back on those old adverts and smile. What next for the banks, and our trust in them? Who knows, but I just registered a domain for cash safes which I think is going to be a growth market!

I was recently looking for some accommodation for a short trip to the North West, and was browsing hotel rooms and couldn't help but notice that serviced apartments were being displayed as prominently as the hotel rooms and they looked great. Loads of privacy and space, great specification and all for about the same price as a hotel room. When put side by side, a serviced apartment seemed to be more attractive than a hotel room.

One of my (worst) habits is that when I buy a product for the first time, or try something new, or go some place I've not been before, I start to think about what angles there are for creating a website about it.

So with a new interest in serviced apartments, I noticed that servicedapartments.co.uk and servicedapartment.co.uk were up for sale. I made an offer, a counter offer came back quickly and after a couple more messages back and forth, a sale was agreed.

Actually servicedapartments.co.uk was the only domain I wanted, but the scale of the investment was such that I had to protect it from someone else buying the non plural form and challenging me for the top position which I think the domain will get in due course. So I decided to bite the bullet and buy both the domains. Just for good measure, I found that servicedapartment.com was available elsewhere and added that to my bourgeoning serviced apartment portfolio as well.

There was a bit of trust on both sides, so we dispensed with the need for a broker and then proceeded to a successful transaction. Twelve hours after the initial enquiry, the domains were in my name and my bank balance significantly lighter.

So now, I have some premium domains in the serviced apartment sector, and have done a preliminary site and am still evaluating merchants. I am also looking for in-context link swaps, so if you have any hotel/travel/self catering related sites and would like to swap links, please do get in touch.