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.

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?

Lost Army Mates Update

Go take a look on my domaining blog.

lostarmymates.co.uk

We were watching Silent Witness on the telly last night and during the storyline one of the pathologists wanted to track down ex-army soldiers. So, he went to a PC and was shown visiting lostarmymates.co.uk

As I was using my laptop and happened to be looking at some domain name ideas to add to my portfolio, I checked to see if lostarmymates was actually registered. It wasn’t of course (the BBC can’t be seen to promote online services), though it is now!

I quickly registered the domain with namesco; registered a new blogger blog; used the custom domain option to have the blog appear on my new domain name. To do this you need to be able to set the DNS CNAME setting (it really is simple) and whilst they aren’t the cheapest for a .co.uk namesco give you full DNS access whereas someone like fasthosts for example don’t.

Quickly picked a template, added an adsense link unit in the sidebar and added some google analytics code for good measure. One very brief post about finding old mates and away we go.

The morning after …according to adsense the site received 68 page impressions and generated less than a dollar in revenue last night. Analytics indicates 37 visitors, 34 being direct type-ins and a couple of searches for the domain name.

Made a loss of course (to-date) but it’ll be interesting to see how much traffic the site continues to receive. I’ll let you know.

Domaining

Just letting the world know and especially the search engines that I’m starting a new blog over at domainSEM.com with the aim of posting my experiences as a novice domainer. No posts there yet as I write this one other than a hello world type starter post.

There seems to be a fair amount of interest in domaining at the moment and maybe there’s a bit of frothy hype about too. But we’ll have a bash at it and see where we go.

Search Marketing Domaining domainSEM.com

Under Pressure

I’ve been half-heartedly working on a revamp for our personal finance site. And therein lies the problem - I haven’t finished it. Now cardtart has been a great site for us over the last 3 and a half years but the layout is, to put it bluntly, a right old dogs dinner. It was my first attempt at a website and because I managed to rank in the search engines for some popular, personal finance phrases I never dared change the layout. But now, I’m confident enough that I can change the presentation, improve the content and not adversely affect my rankings. Fingers crossed.

The pressure?

I’ve set a self-imposed deadline of 20th December to have a revamped site live. Otherwise I’ll let it drift. I’ve roped in Sarah (my wife and business partner) and my children to add to the pressure by telling them to keep asking me if I’ve been working on it. I’m starting afresh and I think I’ve chosen my design template and I’ll source the graphics over the next couple of days. Then, I’ll have to just get on with it suppose?

Affiliate Marketing cardtart

BrandsJunction.com - Hot Brands. Cool Prices

We’re proud to announce that the latest site in our portfolio, brandsjunction, is live today. We’ve got more development on the go of course but at least it can now sit there and wait to be spidered.

As the domain name suggests the site is all about branded goods. You’ll find quality brands like dualit and gaggia to name just two of what will become many. We’re partnering with amazon UK and implementing their beta astore facility. It’s early days with the astore and whilst it’s not yet perfect, it does offer an easy method of effectively building a self-contained store. I’m looking forward to them improving upon the category and sub-category building/filtering.

With Christmas shopping about to start in earnest we’ll hopefully turnover a few quality products and make a few pennies in referral fees too. With supersaver delivery and very keen pricing, amazon do offer a very good deal on a large number of items - we just now need to whet the appetites of discerning shoppers.

Affiliate Marketing BrandsJunction

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.

Affiliate Marketing Gambling

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

The New PayPal Credit Card

Whilst checking my PayPal account this morning (now there’s a very rare event) I noticed a banner promoting the new PayPal credit card. It immediately caught my attention because I promote a number of similar credit cards at my cardtart site.

I can’t see any real USP with this card. It’s managed by GE Money - a strong brand, but will people care? Yes, it offers 0% introductory rates on purchases and balance transfers (fee applies) for a 6 month period but this offer is easily matched with offerings from the likes of eggcard and morganstanley. Admittedly, the typical APR% is competitive at 12.9% but that’s only of benefit to those account holders who don’t clear their balance at the end of each month - savvy account holders will either pay the balance off or look to transfer it on again.

I like the strap line though… “Online. Offline. Anytime.”

They say that you can fund your PayPal account with the PayPal card but then as far as I’m aware you can add any credit or debit card to your account.

In summary, it’s a useful addition to the credit card market but it is no more competitive than any other offering.

credit cards - paypal - affiliate marketing