Remember to switch over to bbc 1 tonight at 9pm for what promises to be another fantastic episode of the appprentice. Last weeks episode followed the teams as they attempted to run a busy pub kitchen for a night each choosing a special theme, the girls glided to the victory despite the boys making more (but ultimately spending more)

This weeks episode sees the team opening a photography business in a busy shopping centre as they try and attract random shoppers to get their photos done.

What I’m drinking now - “Olde English Cider”

This might be useful for a few of you. This is a list of tools that I have found usefull when doing affiliate marketing.

StatsRemote
This piece of software allows you to check your stats on literally hundreds of programs. Many people spend way to much time during the day on logging in to sites and checking sales and signups etc, statsremote automaticly gathers your stats and shows the amount of clicks/sales day by day. It can also workout how much your spending each day on google adwords etc. It costs $29.95 a month but you can get a 3 day free trial and they offer discount on longer pre-paid options.
http://www.statsremote.com

Digital Point Keywords tool
Keep track of your search engine positions can be time consuming and tedious. This tool makes it a lot easier to keep track of an unlimited amount of keywords and URL. It will check up to the first 200 results on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Once you are all setup you simply login to your account and click ‘check all’ and the script will then run through all the keywords and track their positions on the search engines. You can then view your positions and how they change over time as well as create a graph showing the fluctuation of your positions.
http://digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords

Roboform
A very usefull tool which does two things.
1) Keeps track of all your usernames and logins for all sites. It will also log you in to the sites at a click of a button
2) Automaticlly fills in forms with your details. IF your like me and can’t stand filling in form after form, roboform will automaticlly match your details to the form details on which ever site your visiting.
The software acts like a toolbar on top of your browser (similar to google toolbar etc) to give you quick access to whichever sites you wish to access.
You do have to pay to get the most out of this software but it is very cheap.
http://www.roboform.com

Nameboy
Finding a descent and memorable domain now-a-days is getting harder and harder, nameboy is a type of search engine which seeks out the best domain names which are available using your keywords. It can sometimes pull up some very good domain which are still avaiable. Well worth a bookmark!
http://www.nameboy.com

FireFTP
FireFTP is an FTP application that utilises tabbed browsing in firefox. Instead of having to run a separate application you can now use a fully functional FTP client from within firefox!
http://fireftp.mozdev.org/

Blogs and forums
Yes, this may be an obvious one, but forums and blogs gives users an invaluable amount of information for free. If you are looking to promote a new niche that you aren’t 100% familiar with you can get an incredible amount of highly useful info from related forums, a research tool full of your target users which is 100% free!!!

Please bookmark this page it will be updated, also feel free to comment with more tools and usefull sites

Last nights episode of ‘The Apprentice’ was as entertaining as ever. The challenge was to start a laundry business frin scratch and the team to make the most money wins.

The girls team started of terribly trying to sell hotel laundry washing at £4.99 a piece, they did absolutely no research and just guessed a price. The look of shock on the hotel managers face was priceless. The boys team however done their research and found it cost something more like 40p a piece and ended up agreeing to do 1000 pieces for £200 as opposed to the girls who wanted almost £5,000!

The girls later went on to mix up most of the laundry garments when returning them only to then beg people for tips!

Needless to say the boys won. Another great episode!

The UIGEA hearing which could determine the future of online gambling transaction in the USA is underway. Watch it live here.

This obviously affect all online gaming affiliates as well as players and is well worth watching.

After checking my stats at some random affiliate site it occured to me just how little information there is.

The online gaming industry is obviously a huge market worth billions so why can’t some affiliate programs invest in some decent stat report systems. The biggest offender in my opinion are sites like Vegas Affiliates (although it’s a very good program) the stats are displayed day by day showing how much commission you have generated and how many clicks sent, this is all well and good but it doesn’t offer much insight in to the sort of traffic you are sending. Casino Rewards on the other hand show information about all the players including Age, Country, Games Played etc this is incredibly usefull info which allows you to further target your audience. I don’t think it’s to much to ask for an affiliate program to include the follow:
Day by day stats of traffic sent.
The refering URL of every sale so you know which of your pages actually work.
Data about your players such as the sort of game they are playing.
Custom campaigns, much like showing the refering URL it’s very useful to find out where your active customer come from.

Other things I believe a good affiliate program needs.
Specific Payment Dates - This is certainly more specific weithin the online gaming industry. Payment dates are all over the place especially for the previously mentioned Vegas Affiliates. Programs on the retail side of things often give specific dates that you can expect payments (i.e. affiliate winow)
Multiple Payment Methods - This isn’t to much of a concern as most programs now offer bank transfer. But sites simply offering a cheque option often leads to extra charges (thanks to hsbc) as well as a very long delay if the cheque is in $USD and I’m converting to £GBP
Fast support.  Anything over 24 hours to respond to an email is just to long. Also how hard is it to have telephone support??

What I’m drinking now - Pint of icey cold stella

As per usual on the 1st April all hell breaks loose as various websites try and fool their readers.

A couple of favourites today are:
The BMW ad which automaticlly shocks dog that attempt to urinate on your car.
BBC and theur flying penguins News Clip
News in the mirror about greyhound racing on ice (I wish this was real)

Some not so good pranks would be on johnchow.com, although I have respect for anyone making money in affiliate marketing and someone who is also good at SEO, he linked to a page which hijacks your browser plays a music videos and makes it impossible to close, as a firefox users the only way to close it was to CTRL+ALT+DEL therefore loosing all my work in other tabs

What I’m drinking now, orange - Bit to early for beer still.