Old Fashioned marbles

I received a letter in the post the other day from the marbles affiliate manager. This programme has been around for several years now and we’ve promoted it for several too. The manager in question decided to use traditional mail to get his news across rather than the more typical formats of email and network announcements. It was effective – I read it. Good effort.

The message? In an attempt to improve the conversion performance of the marbles credit card the balance transfer period is being increased to 12 months, starting early October. One of the suggested reasons for a dip in conversion performance is that the credit card market is getting tougher and consumers are “not jumping from one credit card to the next” as much as they used to. So called consumers are named card tarts and back in 2003 we named our first site after them.

Actually, in my opinion, the tart label is somewhat unfair. I do not personally see the economic sense in staying loyal to a personal finances company and one should shop around for the best deal in loans, credit cards, insurance etc. Finance companies adore loyal consumers for one main reason – because loyal consumers are very profitable. You should take note.

Another Junction Gets A Revamp

We’ve owned this site for a good couple of years but never really done anything with it at all. So, in an attempt to at least recoup our domain name and hosting fees we’ve treated it to a bit of a revamp.

Now, we know very little (at the moment) about profitable affiliating with the online casino and poker boys and girls, so the site might get tweaked quite a few times whilst we find our feet. But the basic directory structure of online casinos and playing bingo for example should offer big enough foundations for expansion in the future.

Now waiting for the spiders to visit and update their cache pages.

And The Fastest Growing Online Brand Is?

YouTube. The social, video sharing site is the fastest growing online brand in the UK according to a study from internet research firm Nielsen/NetRatings. The number of people who have visited YouTube at least once in the first seven months of 2006 increased a whopping 478pc to 3.6m (source:telegraph).

Social networking, content sharing, sites such as YouTube are all the rage. Hot on its speeding heels are sites such as flickr, MySpace and bebo. What I find interesting is that most of these sites didn’t even exist 2 years ago. Bebo for example, is currently celebrating only its first birthday but it ranks as one of the most popular sites in the UK – talk about having to plan for dramatic growth.

I’ve got a couple of ideas on the back burner that will see me posting my own content on YouTube – and no, not that sort of content !

Another site that is well worth a visit is last.fm

YouTube Social Networks

Our New Online Wine Offers Site

We’ve recently gone live with our brand new online wine offers site. It’s a pure affiliate site, bringing together the major online UK wine merchants and it highlights the current promotional offers and codes that the merchants are offering new customers.

It’s an idea that we’ve had for a long while so it’s nice to see it up and running. The design template is the same as for our business site and we’ve kept with the junction branding too. This also applies to the associated blog that we’ve started.

Affiliate Marketing – WineJunction – upthejunction – Wine

domjax.com

I came across domjax.com today and I rather like it. It’s a whois domain checker, developed in ajax with a bit speed thrown in for good measure. As well as TLD checking there are links to various tools that SEMs might find useful.

Actually, sometimes it can be a little too eager and can burst in to life before you finish typing in your domain name.

There is a facility to add to a list of domains that you’re interested in and you can enter your email address to have the list immediately emailed to you. You can buy available domains from the small list of providers listed.

In summary, a fast whois checker that I’ll be using regularly.

domains – SEM – domjax