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