It might just be me, but when ever I’m out and about wether it be in a pub or a park I always see things through the eyes of an affiliates. For example a while back I came up with the idea of promoting truck rentals rather than car rentals after seeing hired truck drive past, after some minor research it seems that a) the competition is lower (42,000,000 for ‘car rentals’ 2,400,000) for ‘truck rentals’) and b) the commissions are substantialy higher. So I went on a bit of a PPC mission promoting this and made a decent profit.

I find it hard to even go out for a drink without thinking of things from an affiliate marketers prospective and I highly suspect I’m not the only one!

What I’m drinking now - Old Rose Cider

The world series of poker 2008 got underway a few weeks back and the main event is due to start in a few days. The main event winner could become and instant millionaire or add to his/her existing poker bankroll, one thing is for sure the WSOP is always good news for affiliates. In 2003 Chris moneymaker won the main event for a tasty $2,500,000 after getting his place in the main event via a $39 sattelite, this is said to be the catalyst which sparked the online poker boom with millions of poker newbies hoping to be the next moneymaker. Either way affiliates cash in through a number of ways such as creating sites solely for the WSOP (which is heavily televised), general poker affiliates gaining cash players throughout the event, and sports betting affiliates promoting paddy power bookmakers who are offering 100/1 odds on many pros making the final table.

The main event final table has now been moved all the way back to november this year, giving you extra time to cash in. Some ideas to gain extra players include sites dedicated to each table finalist (their are bound to be some unknowns giving you 0 competition) and creating a site dedicated to WSOP final tables. Start creating those sites now, the final table will be aired in just  a few months!

What I’m Drinking now - Vodka/Dr Pepper

As any reader of the af4u forums will known sunshine.co.uk have been running a series of amazing affiliate incentives such as giving away holidays worth in excess of £2,000. The best thing about these incentives is that it’s open to everyone, sunshine.co.uk have created the competition in such a way that you don’t have to send £1′000s in commissions to even be considored, in order to win the latest competition all you have to do is a blog or write about your ideal itineray on any of the sunshine.co.uk’s destinations. IF you don’t have a travel site it’s the ideal time to get started.

I have never worked in the travel industry but decided to give it a shot despite the competition, I have always fancied a trip to india and noticed one of the destinations listed was Goa, a popular beach resort in India. I will post the URL of my site once launched, although I don’t expect to win with all the competition it’s still worth a shot not to mention the possibility of earning descent commissions (sunshione payout 7%).

One of the previous incentives was for affiliates to create a blog or website about any location on the sunshine website, not only was this an incentive for affiliate to get involved in the industry they gave full blown instructions on how to do it! checkout David Friskes excellent post here

Checkout the thread on AF4U or the excellent affiliate resource and blog section of sunshine.co.uk

If only other affiliate programs would take this sort of route more often!

After seeing many fluctuations in google rankings and affiliate marketing results I decided it’s best not to put all my eggs in one basket, as such I am offering web development services which incoporate the following:
PHP/MySQL development
Website Design inc Logo/Banner Design
Link building such as directory submissions, reciprocal linking, article submissions.
On site SEO

Since I have only recently gone freelance I am offering prices from £12/hour.
I started my first website in 1999 and have plenty of experience working on all types of sites.

Please email info@puntersandpints.com for examples of previous work or for a quite.

Firefox 3.0 has just been released after being in Beta. As can be seen on the affiliates4u forums many plugins and extensions aren’t compatible with the latest release.

Firefox 3.0 was released with a massive camapign to become the biggest download event in internet history see http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/ despite the fact that many extensions aren’t yet compatible I have certainly noticed a massive speed increase at some sites (mainly gmail) so it’s certainly a solid start for the latest version of firefox, I just wish that major plugins were compatible before the release!

In one of my earlier blogs I mentioned a tool called ’stats remote’ I came accross this tool a few years back when I first got in to marketing and thought I would give it a review as it has saved me countless hours.

Basiclly Stats Remote is a tool which allows you to check all your affiliate stats from hundreds of diferent programs from adult programs, retail and gambling. It also checks your adwords and yahoo spend which gives you a great overview of your current profit %

I first started using this as I would spend up to an hour a day checking stats (I’m a stats whore) but stats remote combined all my programs in to one easy to use interface (see screenshots below). Another great feature is the support, if you find an affiliate program that is not supported you can shoot them an email and ask them to include it, likewise if you spot a program not functioning properly you can email them from within the program and send them an error report. Once a week they do an update with any new/update programs.

Your stats are automaticlly checked at specific intervals such as every 15 mins/ 2 hours, you can then choose to have a report emailed to the address of your choice . You can even make it play a sound when you make a new sale/commission (hows that for incentive )

None of your login data is stored on the stats remote site (it’s all stored in encrypted files on your PC)

Stats remote costs $29.99 a month with discounts available for longer subscriptions as well as a 3 day trial to see if it works for you. You can use paypal/credit card.

The only downside I have come accross is some of the revenue displayed is not 100% accurate, for example some programs I have logged in to and it’s display diferent data to what stats remote is showing, but a quick email to their support should get it sorted by the next update.

Currently Stats Remote is only supported on windows systems but Linux and Max versions are in development and should be released soon.

All in all this is well worth subscribing to if you’re a stats junkie, especially as it costs from as little as £15 per month (or 3 days free)

www.statsremote.com

After 11 fantastic episodes of The Apprentice it finally came to an end last night with a great final task.

The task started of with the 4 contestants being spilt in to two teams, and as usual with the final episode they call back all the old contestants to join and hopefully create a bit of tension.
The candidates were then told they had to create a mens fragrance, create a presenation and launch it in front of some professionals all within a very tight time frame, much better than last series task of designing a building!
As usual there was the usual bickering between the team members, mainly just one member trying to get in to arguments.

The final product was: one team came up with a very unique product (a small bottle inside a large bottle) which was congratuled by industry leaders, the other products involved gambling and a pretty average looking bottle. Needless to say the gambling team won :-s , and two candidates were head to head in the board room (loud mouth Claire Young and young Lee McQueen)

After a bit of debate Lee went on to win and become the youngest ever apprentice, well done to him!
It was also great begining of the show to see Alan Sugar having laughs with the contestants (and to see him actually laugh!)

I have quite a few sites which promote the same merchant, some of them are quite old and have static HTML pages. I got an email from a merchant saying they are changing their linking code as of right now (thanks for the notice) and as such all my links on hundreds of pages are now invalid and require me to do a lot of tedious modifying of pages, or  a mass search and replace (which rarely works 100%)

A redirect script basiclly allows you to send traffic to yoursite.com/redirect.php?id=1 instead of direct to the merchant, a database will contain all your links with a link ID, when a user visits your redirect script, the database will lookup the URL and redirect you to the merchant based on the URL in the database. This means if a merchant changes the linking code at any time, all you have to do is modify the URL in your database, saving you loads of hassle.

As such I have decided to work on my own script (after not coding for quite a while :-s ) it will allow me to add new URLS and even view stats on how many people clicked on each link per day, where they came from etc. Eventually I hope to release it as a free product once it becomes good enough.

Stay tuned

A couple of weeks back I was thinking of laucnhing a campaign to promote business class only airline ’silverjet’ however a few back news was released that they failed to get much needed funding of around £12.7 million and today they have ceased all operations as of immediately.

Luckily I got out before I started although it wasn’t really a good idea to get involved anyway since Maxjet and Eos have rescently gone leaving no budget business class airlines flying at these prices.

Silverjet offered tickets at a 1/3rd the prices of it’s competitors (about £1,000 for a business class flight from london to Dubai)

Since it has suspended operations Virgin have announced heavily discounted flights for customers who have booked flights with silverjet (so any affiliates promoting silverjet get your Virgin Atlantic links up now )

Just read the following article, basiclly online gambling has been completely legalised in South Africa, a nation which reportedly gambles more than any other. If only the USA would follow suit!

Online gambling to be regulated and licensed in South Africa

Starting the week off in positive vein comes the news that the South African Parliament has at last approved a new Internet gambling law to strictly regulate and licence operators. The approved bill will now go to President Thabo Mbeki for signing into law.

A memorandum attached to the National Gambling Amendment Bill said the interactive gambling industry in Africa’s biggest economy was currently unregulated and “generally plagued” by crime. “This situation has resulted in a considerable loss of revenue to the national fiscus and compromises the country’s reputation as a responsible global citizen,” a spokesman said.

Reporting on the passage of the bill, Reuters said that it addresses the negative socio-economic effects associated with gambling and deals specifically with issues of problem gambling, player protection, licensing, taxation and advertising. Other media reports suggest that the legislation allows both Internet and cellphone gambling, as well as limited advertising for e-interactive gambling as approved by the Ministry of Trade and Industry, but this has not yet been confirmed.

In terms of the law every online player must be registered with a properly licensed interactive gambling provider who has been reviewed and approved, and affidavits will be required to ensure players who register are older than 18 years.

“The purpose of this Act is to ensure that all gambling activities are conducted responsibly, fairly and honestly to protect minors and other vulnerable persons from the negative effects of gambling,” a government statement said. Measures to obviate prolem or underage gambling include electronic monitoring systems.

Once signed by the President, the new law will be policed by South Africa’s National Gambling Board.

The National Gambling Amendment Bill has had a long and difficult passage through legislators despite an exhaustive study of the global Internet gambling industry commissioned by the government some years ago (see previous InfoPowa reports). The Bill has been the subject of heated and frequent debate before the Trade and Industry Portfolio Committee until it was finally agreed in the National Assembly that licensing and regulation was a better course than prohibition.