I’m pleased to announce that Cutlery Drawer has now gone live and is open for business!

I registered the .co.uk variant of the name back in April 2009 and initially the site was a wordpress blog that included a few partner links. I subsequently managed to dropcatch the .com for around $70 by using snapnames. I’ve also managed to register the associated twitter and facebook names too, so that’s handy for future branding purposes.

There’s still stacks to do with the store – additional payment gateway options, a nice logo and better slider graphics for instance – but it’s great to see a project that’s made me think quite a few times open for business. New products will be added to the store each month and I’ll be aiming to try out a few related product lines too.

Feel free to take a look at cutlerydrawer.co.uk and drop me a line if you’ve got any comments/tips.

Schools haven’t even closed for the summer holidays and yet affiliates are already thinking about Christmas. In order to give themselves enough of a window of opportunity many affiliates and the merchants they partner with are starting to work on their Christmas sites. It’s an area that we’ve not previously had a dedicated site for but we acquired a generic domain name and so our novelty gifts blog is just starting off.

Although the main target will be Christmas gift sales (and we’re watching just how many days until Christmas carefully) the site can be general enough for year round gift ideas. It’s no secret that it’s a saturated market and competition will be high but we’ll see what we can do – maybe a concerted blogging effort will help? The aim is to add a few gift ideas to the site every other day in an attempt to build up a reasonable amount of gift ideas.

We’ve been working on a website design project for Hardacres – a family run Liverpool funeral directors – and it’s not too far off completion now. An unusual project in some ways as you feel as though you need to refrain from using an upbeat, salesy approach. Hopefully, between us, we’ve got the general tone of the site about right.

The site has been developed using wordpress – our preferred content management system (CMS). Whilst this gives the option of including a blog, in this case the client will not immediately be publishing one. Much of the content came from a hardcopy brochure that was scanned in using some OCR software and then pasted into the CMS.

If you’d like a similar website designed for your business please feel free to get in touch.

Just a quick update to say that we’ve added some more domains to our portfolio.

• cutlery drawer – for kitchen cutlery and gadgets
• black labrador – look out for Archie, our new dog
• podcast – covering the latest podcast releases
• rose wine – a site all about pink plonk!

If you have any partnership ideas for any other the above sites, please do get in touch.

Along with our interest in buying domains, we’re interested in buying established websites. If you are selling a website that is preferably:

• at least a few months old
• does not rely on PPC traffic
• has available visitor stats
• has available revenue stats
• a .co.uk domain

..then do get in touch. On the other hand, we’re not interested in:

• 3 week old, made for Adsense sites
• anything to do with pills that make you thinner, bigger, happier, etc
• ebook sales
• gambling
• dating
• adult interest
• and such like

We would consider websites that generate income via the amazon associates programme but not astores. We are also interested in UK centric hyperlocal sites.

If you’re also interested in domain name and website dealing yourself then I can recommend that you also read:

• Scott Jones at Self Made Minds; Scott provides some really informative information about buying and selling domain names
• Richard Kershaw at Quality Nonsense; Richard provides his new mailing list called We Buy Websites and is also interested in hearing from people looking to sell websites.
• Elliot Silver in New York also discusses buying, selling and developing both niche and city geo domains.

On the day that Bigmouthmedia launch their inaugural B.A.B.E. award (with a jolly decent £1,000 prize!) I’ve been thinking if twitter has taken over from blogging?

Now, whilst I detest myspace, don’t use facebook because of all those daft games it seems to have, I think twitter (my profile – feel free to follow me) is a really simple, effective marketing tool. I follow people who I think offer some useful tweets and search.twitter.com (via RSS feeds) is just great for finding content for my emerging hyperlocal sites.

There could be valid reasons why affiliates/seo’ers/domainers aren’t blogging so much:

• nothing much to say recently
• no point in repeating what many others are saying
• too busy working on other projects/revenue generation in this tougher economic climate
• apathy
• 140 character tweets force you to be concise ..and therefore it’s quicker

I follow a few affiliates, not all by any means as you can only read so much. Now I’ve not done any research at all but my gut feel is that affiliate blog posting is slowly playing second fiddle to tweeting.

It could just be the people that I like to read and more generally blogging is still going strong – what do you think?