Thanks Ladbrokes

Nope, I haven’t just had a winner at the 3.30 at Kempton but I have received a rather nice chocolately gift today from Ladbrokes Casino! We’ve been promoting Ladbrokes Casino for about a year or so on our gambling site.
As a result of Ladbrokes Christmas Cracker promotion we received a massive Hotel Chocolat festive cracker that’s packed full with chocolates. Looks like it’s a proper cracker too and the kids can’t wait to see if it goes bang. I’ll post a photo or two on our very new chocolates blog soon.

Just A FeedFlare Test

I’m just testing feedburners feedflare. I should see some links at the end of this post in google reader if it’s working correctly.

Thanks!

A quick thanks to OMG for the welcome gift that arrived via Virgin Wines – one of the quality merchants we promote on our wine offers site.

Cheers!

OpenId: How To Create An Account

If like me you’ve migrated from blogger to wordpress and you comment upon posts on other peoples blogger blogs, you’ll have seen the new openid authentication that blogger now supports.

Now it all seemed a little obscure to me but this very useful post manages to keep it all simple. It works too.

Video Games: A Big Fat Affiliate Niche

The BBC technology news feed reports that UK consumers have spent a record-breaking £1.52bn on titles in 2007, up 25% on last year and with two weeks of sales yet to be counted – that’s a lot of sales revenue. A whopping £30.4m a week in fact on average with the Christmas run up seeing much higher figures. I don’t know what the split is between high street and online sales – that’d be an interesting statistic.

With more than 78m titles sold that’s an average unit selling price of about £19.50 (about £16.60 without the VAT). Now, say you partner with amazon and you’re on the 7% tier that gives average commission of £1.16 per title. Use direct links successfully and you’ll earn up-to 10% giving £1.66.

Having shifted more than a few copies of specific game titles myself in the last month or so I’m fairly convinced it’s a profitable niche for affiliates. I know the consoles sell like hot cakes (and that stacks of merchants choose not to pay much, if any, commission on them) but the games market is way bigger than I’d imagined.

Now this might not be news to you but as someone who doesn’t play video games at all I’ve previously not been too interested in promoting them aggressively. With the likes of the Nintendo DS Lite being cleverly targeted at the mass market with the likes of this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUgemPGvUuo[/youtube]

there should be a few niches within the big video game niche to target. Publish a smart wordpress blog, find your USP and give it a go.

Any tips for a virgin video game affiliate will be gratefully received and worthy of a mention!

Why Doesnt Feedburner Use Google Blog Pinging?

I’ve just been managing my feeds in feedburner and noticed that in the publicize / pingshot bit there’s an option to ping google blog search. Now that seems like an okay kind of thing to do to me. If the default is to ping technorati, bloglines, yahoo and newsgator why isn’t google a default? Seems strange given that google now own feedburner.

Anyone know why this is or why it might not be a good idea to ping google blog search?

Is Google’s Knol A Wiki Basher?

Google has announced that they are trialling a new free tool, currently called knol with the aim to

encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.

It’s only open by invitation at the moment by the way.

To me, this smacks of an attempt to produce their own (adsensed of course) version of the all ranking wikipedia. Actually, there’ll be optional revenue sharing…

At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

So whilst I wait for it to open to the public at large I’m going to draft a few insightful articles on offset mortgages, unsecured personal loans and fully comp car insurance!

As articles can include links to additional information I wonder if nofollow will be used? You’ll recall of course that wikipedia introduced nofollow on their outbound links earlier this year, denying webmasters of some decent strength link juice.

I bet this vacuum reseller in The Netherlands has seen a surge in traffic over the last 24 hours!

My First Wirral Map

I’m just messing about with google mymaps and here is my first map. It appears that any urls entered in your profile or on your place makers are followed – so that’s a minor benefit I guess. I’ll probably try creating another one with photos, maybe to describe one of my circuits on my running blog.

For my local Wirral sites I’ll be creating various maps with photos, covering things like churches, shops, pubs, local landmarks etc.

Website Playgrounds

Several months ago I came up with the idea for a blog containing embedded youtube (+ others) videos related to search marketing, SEO, website design and the like. I hosted it on blogger, added a few posts and then simply forgot about it.

But as I fancied having a wordpress playground and I’ve recently seen some useful videos I thought I’d kill two birds with the one stone. So, I’ve gone back to my seo videos idea, deleted the blogger version and hosted it on wordpress at seovids.net instead. It’s content light just right now but I’ll be adding new videos next week. I’ll no doubt monetise it too at some point, though I’m not intending it to be much of a revenue earner – I’d much rather learn some new seo stuff!

It’ll be useful as my (admittedly public) wordpress playground where I can mess about with new themes, plugins and the like. I already have a similar playground for static websites where I sometimes develop out new (or major revamp) sites and when I’m happy I just simply edit/replace the html with the true domain name and host on the proper site. If you block all spiders in the test site’s robots.txt you can mess about with your hush-hush ideas without the engines (or anyone else) finding them.

If you’re aware of any decent SEO related videos, themes, plugins, etc then please do visit seovids.net and use the contact form or leave a comment.

Do you have any website playground tips to share?

Dragons Den Gifts

It’s been a good week for presents!

Not only did we receive a google gift but we we’re lucky enough to receive not one, but two signed DVDs from Rachel Elnaugh, who ran a little promotion on her blog. Rachel, who used to be a dragon (as it were!) regularly posts on her blog and if you’re a Dragons Den fan then you’ll probably enjoy her blog too. I listed other Dragons Den blogs here.

(no, the Prince cd in the background isn’t signed!)

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