FreshWebz Web Design & Affiliate Marketing Blog

I recently got leaflets printed for Cashback Shopper and just had them distributed through a local magazine, which is delivered to 10,000 homes in my local area. The leaflets cost approx £170 & the distribution £290, so I’ve calculated that I need 100 people, or 1% of the recipients to sign up to the site, in order to cover my costs.

Although I’ve done some leaflet posting myself over the last year or two, this is the largest scale leafleting I’ve done & it will be interesting to see what results it obtains. I’m really running out of ideas for advertising which doesn’t cost ridiculous amounts of money (ie Adwords), or has little or no results :/

If I don’t cover my costs (again!), then I certainly won’t bother with this again & think I’ll just have to rely on totally cost free methods (???) or not bother at all anymore!

Got this e-mail from Google today:

***Important news regarding your account***

Hello,

We’re writing to let you know that your AdWords account will be upgraded to the new AdWords interface within the next few working days. After that time, you’ll no longer be able to switch back to the previous AdWords interface to manage your campaigns. The new interface doesn’t change how ads run, so bidding, ranking, Quality Score and the rest of ad serving will remain the same after the upgrade.

We think that you’ll like how AdWords has changed to meet your needs. Campaign management is now more efficient, with tools and reports that are easier to find and use. We’ve continued to add features and controls based on advertiser feedback and now the new interface is ready to be used exclusively.

We know that it can often be time-consuming to learn a new interface, so we’ve developed help materials to make it easier for you. To quickly familiarise yourself with what’s changing about campaign management and to watch videos about the new features, visit our new interface website: http://www.google.com/intl/en_GB/adwords/newinterface/

Should you have any questions as you’re getting up to speed, you can also use our full Help Centre (or simply look at the Help box in your account): http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/?hl=en_GB

We hope that you find the new interface easy to learn and we hope that the improvements have a positive impact on your business. As always, thank you for advertising with AdWords!

Yours sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team

So, the fact that I told them I hate it & haven’t seen many people complimenting it for it’s speed or usability, they’re just going ahead anyway. I’m starting to expect this from the Google Empire – marching on its way to world domination!!

What makes a world dominated by Google, any more attractive than one dominated by Microsoft?! There’s no room for the little man & basically you “get what you’re given”! The new interface is going to be imposed on users despite the fact that it’s slow, clunky & for me, unusable!

Along with the ridiculous PPC prices, it’s one more reason to stay off of Adwords!

New & Improved for who? Certainly not me!

Sky have just announced that they’re changing their Broadband Packages, replacing Mid with Everyday & Max with Unlimited (Base remains the same).

They key points of these changes are that the speed of Mid & Max are increasing, from “up to 8Mb” to “up to 10Mb” & from “up to 16Mb” to “up to 20Mb” respectively. However, despite living in London (where you would imagine you will get decent speeds in comparison with rural areas), my line is capable of only 5Mb. So this speed increase will be totally irrelevant. The emphasis on all broadband packages is the term “up to”. If your line doesn’t support it, you will not ever get close to these “up to” speeds.

What IS relevant however, is the change in usage allowance. The new Everyday package has had it’s monthly download cap reduced from 40Gb to just 10Gb. That’s a 75% cut in allowance!! Unlimited is as it states.

With people downloading more & more online content, this is a very clever marketing ploy by Sky (a money making exercise?) – they know that many people will think the extra speed is something good, without realising their lines will not support the higher speeds, but the usage cap WILL affect some users, who will have to switch to the Unlimited package, or start paying extra charges.

What a scam!

I’ve written to Sky to let them know what I think – however, as with all these corporations, it won’t make the slightest difference. Time to start looking around again to see if there’s a better deal out there.

I received an e-mail from Google, telling me about their new search-based keyword tool!

They state “the Search-based Keyword Tool compares the content of your website against actual Google search queries to provide a list of relevant keywords which you don’t currently have in your AdWords campaigns. This new tool can help your business to grow and innovate on your keyword choices by taking the guesswork out of the process. Rather than adding keywords to an ad campaign based on what one thinks a user might search on, this tool enables you to manage your keywords based on what you know users are searching on.”

I visited the tool & was presented with a list of over 800 keyphrases, which Google says have been searched for & appear on relevant pages in my site. I decided to pick all the phrases that had a suggested cost per click up to and including £1.00 (246 of them).

I’ve spent the last 4 hours adding the phrases to my AdWords campaign, targeting the landing pages to the ones indicated by the Tool & using the suggested bids. However, as soon as I checked the keywords, all bar one are not displaying due to the bid amount being too low (even though it was the one suggested!). The quality score of the landing pages are also deemed poor, despite them being the ones that sparked off the whole process!

So, thanks Google; for suggesting I use your new tool; only to find that despite following all your suggestions, you STILL don’t display any of my ads unless I bid some ridiculous amount per click! I’ve just basically wasted an entire afternoon on this nonsense & on top of it, the new interface is rubbish! It’s slow, jerky & very frustrating to use.

What on earth is the point in giving me this information, which appears to be totally useless? Their e-mail ended:

“The Search-based Keyword tool actually found 2954 recently-searched keywords related to your site. For each suggested keyword, the tool will also show you:

• The average number of searches per month
• The competitive bidding level for each term
• The estimated bid to appear in the top three ad positions
• The suggested landing page for each keyword

To see all 2954 new keywords and decide which ones to add to your campaigns, go to www.google.com/sktool, sign in to your AdWords account, and enter your website URL. We hope that you find the Search-based Keyword Tool useful in driving even more business to your website through Google AdWords!”

Errrrrr! No it isn’t useful, has wasted my time & has not given me any new (& reasonably priced), keyphrases that I can bid on!

I will definitely not be returning to AdWords any time soon!

I wrote previously about using article submissions to increase the number of backlinks & traffic to your website.

I’ve been submitting my articles manually, to the top 10 article directories, but this process is very drawn out & complicated by the slightly different layouts & entry requirements of each directory. With thousands of directories out there, although submitting to the top 10, 20 or 30 will achieve results, it will be impossible to do many more manual submissions, which will mean you have to write significantly more articles to get more links.

I’ve been looking at the different article submission websites & software for some time & decided now was the time to take the plunge!

I’ve used Submit2Please’s Article Submission Service in the past, but the charges could be considerable if you have a number of articles to publish:

• $49.95 for 100 PR 3 and above Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories & 65 PR 3 Directories)
• $74.95 for 200 PR 2 and above Directories(35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories & 100+ PR 2 Directories)
• $99.95 for 300 Various PR Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories, 100+ PR 2 Directories & 100+ PR 1 & 0 Directories)
• $124.95 for 400 Various PR Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories, 100+ PR 2 Directories & 200+ PR 1 & 0 Directories)

Bearing in mind I currently have 7 articles to submit, this is a bit too much to pay!

So, I started to look around for services or software that promise to submit to a large number of sites at a reasonable cost, whilst making sure that the submissions are valid & not classed as spam by either the directories, or Google.

Apart from the dodgy looking article submission software packages for $37, there seems to be a consensus of opinion around the following:

• iSnare
• Article Marketing Automation
• Article Marketer
• Ultimate Article Wizard
• The Phantom Writers
  

I was drawn to Article Marketers & Ultimate Article Wizard out of these, mainly because The Phantom Writers is another pay per article plan, iSnare seems a bit too cheap (my opinion on cheap services has been clouded by my recent experiences with 1and1 & Tiscali!) & other users have suggested that AMA only gets your articles out to about 30 sites.

I was originally put off UAW as it costs $67 per month & it seems that you have to spend time using it to rewrite your articles using what is known as “spinning”. Content (article) spinning involves taking an original article and using it to generate 10’s or 100’s of new unique versions of the text & these “spun” versions of your article are submitted instead. Each of these new articles presents the same ideas and concepts as the original, but expressed in different ways. Whilst all are readable and grammatically correct, each is different from the others in terms of the words on the page and therefore unique in Googles eyes.

The importance of “spinning” your articles will depend on whether you believe that the backlinks from duplicate articles are being disregarded by Google, when Google’s duplicate content filter is treating the article submissions as duplicate content! If this is the case, then it seems pointless to submit your articles to any more than one site for link purposes, but of course, there is the side issue 0f site traffic that your article could generate. There seems to be some debate as to whether this is the case or not, with some people saying it does & others saying it doesn’t! Here’s the part of Google’s duplicate content policy that seems to say it does!

If you believe that each time you submit your article you need to use a different title, different summary, different resource box, and different article body, then perhaps the extra cost of UAW is worth it. However, I’ve also found a free spinner system called Jetspinner that I’m signing up to, which will hopefully allow me to carry out this process for nothing. Then I can create dozens of versions of my articles & submit them to all the directories instead!

Jetspinner also advertises its own article submission service called Jet Submitter (which also costs $67 per month), but as I’ve already signed up with Article Marketer for 3 months use (cost $79.95), I’m going to have to use it for now. If I’m not happy with it, I may switch to Jet Submitter & use their combined tools, but I’ll use this time to submit as many articles as possible, on all of the topics covered by my affiliate websites & see if it makes any difference to their links & rankings!

I recently wrote about my problems with tiscali customer service, followed by 1and1 and this problem rumbles on:

I was interested to read a web page on someone else’s battles with 1and1 http://www.simonjones.info/1and1internet/, which appear to be similar to my own!

It appears that 1and1 have a POLICY of not bothering to reply to their customers as my e-mail to complaints@1and1.co.uk has also been ignored. I am now sending them a letter by normal post, in an attempt to stir them into some response! The irony is that I am quite happy to pay them any amount owed; all I want is an itemised bill showing what it is I am being asked to pay for!!!

My letter is shown below & is pretty self-explanatory:

I’m writing in connection with the appalling customer service I have (not) received from you.

I originally contacted your billing team after receiving a letter from a debt collection agency (Arvato Finance), for an amount that I had no knowledge of owing.

Since this initial letter, I have repeatedly asked for an itemised statement of account, so that I understand what it is I am paying for.

I asked for my account to be closed on 8th February 2009 after being a customer of yours for a number of years, because I was having more & more trouble with my account; domains were being suspended for too much traffic & I was told I had to have a dedicated server! I was also being told I was spamming people using the newsletter tool (which I wasn’t) & in the end, I felt it better to move all my domains to a new web host (where I have had NO problems).

Although I was closing the account, I did not expect complete access to be withdrawn immediately, as the cancellation page said that the contract would be ended on 22nd February. As a result, I was unable to access my mailing lists & lost all records relating to who was still subscribed etc. Despite asking your support teams if I could have access to the account, just to download the addresses held in my newsletter tool & to check the final balance, I was told it was not possible because the account was closed. That was it; no other help or information was offered! One of your customer service team did ask what I meant by “accessing my mailing list details”, I replied, but never got any response!

As far as I was aware, my payments were being made by direct debit throughout the whole of the time I was a customer, so I therefore had no idea of whether there was a balance due & never received a closing statement of account. I wrote a number of times asking for an itemised bill to be sent to me, but the only response I got was an e-mail telling me that I owed £187.03. I don’t know of any other business that just tells people they owe an amount & expect them to pay it, without sending a final statement/bill, so I again, requested this to be sent to me.

The next thing I know, a letter demanding £178.59 (plus £15 costs) arrives from Arvato! Naturally, I queried this, as the amount is different from what I was previously told & to be honest, I expected a reply from you with an account, not a threatening demand for payment with costs.

Since then, I have repeatedly asked for an itemised account, explaining what the charges are in respect of, which I would then be happy to pay. I am not prepared to just hand over nearly £200 (bearing in mind the actual amount quoted has changed 3 times without any explanation), not knowing what the charges are for.

I was originally receiving responses to my e-mails from Idil Ahmed, which were usually one line answers, totally unhelpful & completely ignored my requests for a broken down, itemised account, as well as my requests for the matter to be dealt with by a manager, or someone else who COULD provide what I believe I am entitled to receive, BEFORE involving a debt collection agency!

All the e-mails to Arvato were answered simply saying that I should query the balance with you, although one stated that you had told them my account was not closed, even though it was! I have been quoted three different figures & you tell your debt collectors that my account is not closed – hardly competent!

All I want is a closing account statement/invoice, which shows how much I am being charged & what the charges relate to. I do not see why this should be such a problem to provide, but it seems to be beyond the abilities of Mr Ahmed, which is why I asked for the case to be passed to his manager.

However, all I was given was your complaints@1and1.co.uk e-mail address, which I wrote to on 8th May. I have NEVER received any reply from this address & today received a further e-mail from Arvato, which stated:

“I have received information back from 1&1, stating that the account was cancelled on the 22nd February 2009. However your invoices were raised in January and beginning of February, therefore as stated in 1&1 terms and conditions the account an acount has to be cancelled 14 days prior to an invoice being raised, therefore the full balance of £193.59 is due.”

IS the balance of £178.59 up to the period 22/02/09? Even though I could not access my account, all my records & mailing list from 8th February, I am EXPECTED to pay up to 22nd February? I understand if I had to give you 14 days notice of cancellation, but why then was my account closed from 8th February? It made things very inconvenient for me & I had to pay a couple of hundred pounds to re-clean my mailing list, because you wouldn’t let me access them.

All I have been asking for is an itemised statement for my records, showing the charges & what period they are for. However, you seem completely incapable or unwilling to provide this! I now think the reason you can’t is that you messed up by closing my account too early & now can’t produce an accurate bill!!!!

As a former debt recovery manager, I would not have expected any customer to pay an amount which they had not been sent a bill for and I would be able to produce a copy of that bill should they query it, or state it had not been received. I believe this is simply good practice & do not understand why your staff, or your billing system, is unable to do this.

I can provide copies of all the e-mails that have been going back & forth for the last 4 months & would be perfectly prepared to provide them to a court, should you deem it necessary to go that far! I do hope that this will not be necessary & you can provide me with a closing account, which will show that I am being charged legitimate charges for hosting services that I am liable for. Upon receipt, I will make immediate payment!

I have said this constantly throughout the last 3-4 months, but it seems that your customer services people have a set routine of answers & cannot deviate from these in any way! Usually, they just stop replying & as stated previously, I have not received ANY response from you following my e-mail to your complaints address! However, having viewed other people’s similar problems on the internet, it appears that it is your POLICY to just ignore your customers, if any enquiry is slightly out of the ordinary!

I hope you will now be able to deal with this complaint, provide a closing, itemised statement, which I will then pay. I do not really want this to go any further, in what is really a very simple request, which you seem unable or unwilling to meet. However, I am prepared to stand my ground & will not be bullied into paying you amounts of money that you (for all I know) have plucked out of thin air!

I look forward to your response (finally) to this complaint.

To quote Simon Jones (see his web page): “1AND1 INTERNET IS A CHEAP WEB HOSTING COMPANY, BUT AS WITH MANY CHEAP THINGS, IF YOU USE THEM YOU’LL FIND OUT SOONER OR LATER THAT THEY ARE IN FACT… RUBBISH!” Amazingly enough, this is also my view on Tiscali!!!

I’ve started working on writing more articles & getting them submitted to various directories. This is a time consuming process, but appears to be one of the few effective methods of getting decent, quality links pointing to my sites.

Although this whole writing process doesn’t come naturally to me, it’s surprising how quickly I’m now reaching my 500+ word target each time. But 500+ words in themselves are not enough; ensuring that the article contains combinations of the keywords & keyphrases you want to target is vital, as this content then shows that your site is relevant to those searched for keyphrases.

But are article submissions worth the time & effort? Once registered with an article directory, manual submissions take around 10 to 15 minutes on average to login, format and submit properly. Obviously, the writing of the article is a separate issue & can take a couple of hours to research and write. However, once the article is written, it can be re-submitted to a number of directories, withi only minor adjustments.

The more directories you submit your articles to, the more exposure they will receive & more links will be detected by the search engines, but you will need to make at least 10 submissions to get a reasonable exposure for your articles, adding up to a couple of hours per article!

To make the most of my time I have to make sure that the article directories I am submitting to, are able to bring me as many visitors and backlinks as possible. I am going to try to do at least 10 manual submissions for each article, so it’s important to choose those directories wisely. The only two ratings easily available to web users to judge the quality of websites and web pages are its Alexa Rating and Google PageRank. Both are not conclusive and often do not reflect the true authority or traffic of a page. But since there is nothing better, I will stick to these two figures when deciding if a directory is worth submitting to. Of course, one must not forget the power of themed sites. If you have a choice between a general directory and a directory focusing on the article topic; it’s better to choose the latter.

The current Top 10 article directories (by Alexa Ranking and with a Page Rank of around 5/6) are shown below & these are my starting point for any article submissions:

1. ezinearticles.com
2. ArticlesBase.com
3. buzzle.com
4. helium.com
5. webpronews.com
6. goarticles.com
7. searchwarp.com
8. articledashboard.com
9. articlealley.com
10. articlesnatch.com

However, there are some restrictions placed on articles by these directories; for example, buzzle.com insists that their articles are unique & not reproduced on any other directory, so you will have to write a different article just for this site. Some, such as ArticlesBase.com may apply “nofollow” to the article links, so you won’t benefit from an inbound link.

EzineArticles.com and Buzzle.com can bring you a lot of traffic, GoArticles.com brings you backlinks, and ArticlesFactory.com PageRank. You can even earn money from your articles by publishing them on Helium!

If you don’t have the time, or are not able to write articles by yourself, there are many content providers and ghost writers who can provide articles & then other services that submit them to the directories for you. I have used some of these services myself in the past, but I think the old adage of “you get what you pay for” applies, as I have not been impressed with the cheaper offerings I have seen so far!

I am considering using some more expensive services in the near future, but the cost does vary wildly; from $5 per article (for very poor offerings), to the most recent quote I had of £100 per article!! I think something inbetween will be more in my league & will blog about any that I find particularly useful/value for money.

Cashback Shopper has just received its 12,000th member!! )

I’m really pleased to have reached this milestone, but don’t want to rest on my laurels as there are still millions of people out there that shop online & yet have never heard of cashback!

The difficulty is getting that message out to people! Until now, I’ve been focussing on the terms cashback, cash back, money back etc. but after a discussion with an SEO company, think I might change tack slightly and work on bringing peoples attention to cashback, by targeting those that are searching for related terms, but NOT cashback itself.

Things like discount shopping, money saving offers & discount codes ALL relate to getting money off your online shopping, yet aren’t people specifically searching for cashback & therefore may not be aware of cashback shopping sites at all!

Unfortunately, these phrases are even more competitive online, so how effective it will be remains to be seen. I’m looking into the article submission side of online promotion & I’m also considering some offline promotion.

I got a call from an nPower Business salesman recently, offering to switch to their electricity supply, as I work from home!

I hesitated because they were quoting a price with a standing charge, which I haven’t been paying for a couple of years. However, the salesman told me he would credit my account with £100, which would cover most of the charge for the year. As a result I signed up!

The next call I got was another salesman, saying the direct debit details had been rejected; this might be because the original salesman had written them down wrong! I corrected the details but then got a bill for the first months supply, addressed to the wrong town & postcode /

Despite twice going to their online account management system & asking them to correct the details, it took a direct e-mail to actually get the address corrected & confirmation that a direct debit had been set up at last.

The reason for this blog post & warning, is that I am now told that I was supposed to receive a £100 holiday voucher, rather than money credited to my account! It seems that the nPower Business salesmen will say anything to get a sale, even things that aren’t necessarily true, in traditional dodgy salesman style!

NOTE! I am now told that this is a “payment holiday voucher” for £100, which I can cash in during my years contract. It’s better, but what a strange way of going about it ????

I’ve finally got round to setting up my gay dating website, for which I’ve had the domain name for months! Using the “Find Me” moniker/brand, I today launched Find Me Gay Dates. I also have Find Me Lesbian Dates to set up, but there don’t seem to be many new members joining the database, so I’m not going to rush it.

But in a mad flurry of dating action(!), I also set up Find Me Mature Singles, which is a dating site for older singles (aged 46+). I picked this age as there are a number of sites for over 40’s or over 50’s, but I think 46 is more representative of a true “middle age” )  Oh, what the hell, I just wanted to be different lol. The actual age range of members on this site is 46-80 & the mature singles market seems to be quite popular at the moment, se we’ll see if this site does better than Find Me Dates which starts from 18.