FreshWebz Web Design & Affiliate Marketing Blog

Facebook is officially the most-visited website in the US this week, according to Experian Hitwise, knocking Google off of the top spot – where it has been since 2007.

http://tech.uk.msn.com/news/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=152595476

Interestingly, the last site to nab the number one spot from Google was MySpace back in 2007. Facebook will be hoping that this isn’t an ominous sign of things to come. Personally I don’t think so; I never liked My Space – it was always such a mess, but Facebook seems to have the right amount of order & organisation in its structure, whilst allowing people to still do whatever they want with it.

I currently have an ad for Cashback Shopper running on Facebook, targeting the UK only, but will definitely be using it to promote the American version of Cashback Shopper when it launches!

Digital Window Acquires Buy.at

Perhaps better known to affiliate marketeers as Affiliate Window, Digital Window has purchased buy.at from AOL Inc. Digital Window themselves sold a majority stake of their company in 2009, to the German-based media group Axel Springer AG and the Swiss-based communications group Publigroupe S.A. who also own Berlin’s Zanox AG, continental Europe’s largest performance-based online marketing network.

Do AOL ever hang on to anything they buy?! lolol. They only bought buy.at in 2008!!!

I’d like to offer my congratulations to Digital Window, although it is tinged with a bit of Cadbury style sadness, for although Digital Window say they are now the UK’s largest affiliate marketing network, they are actually mainly owned by German-based media group Axel Springer AG and the Swiss-based communications group Publigroupe S.A.

It seems a shame we can’t keep any businesses British owned :/

I recently relaunched http://www.easyonlinediscountcodes.com and did some SEO work on it. Within just a month or two, it has managed to reach 20th place in Google for the search term “online discount codes“, which has approx 8,000 searches per month & about 50,000,000 results to compete with on google.co.uk!!

There may be further developments with this site, so hopefully the content will become even more comprehensive & improve the rankings still further!

It just goes to show that there is definitely something strange going on with Cashback Shopper, as this site still fails to rank in Google, despite being optimised more than some of the sites that are actually in the top 10! It’s very annoying & my resolution for 2010 is to find out why.

Having set up The Green Directory & been happy with how easy it was to set up my first datafeedr affiliate store, I decided to take the plunge & set up my 5 store account!! My Travel Extras has been doing quite well recently & I want that site to focus on the Travel Extras side (through its blog), rather than on theatre tickets etc.

This means setting up two separate websites for the ticket sales & travel offers, which until now have been running on My Travel Extras & “diluting” the Travel Extras content considerably!

Unfortunately, the initial excitement of setting up these two new sites has been tempered somewhat, by the discovery that 95% of the travel companies (the majority of which are on Affiliate Future) don’t seem to have product feeds, whilst I have been rejected by Ticketmaster which is obviously a major blow (although I have appealed through buy.at)! It’s just frustrating that I can’t be sure about the travel & ticket sites, because I want to rework My Travel Extras………..it’s a chicken & egg scenario!!!

The moral of this seems to be; ensure that the merchants offer datafeeds BEFORE deciding on the theme of any new site! However, should either of these two sites have to bite the dust, I shall use my spare datafeedr capacity to build something else – I still haven’t done anything with cheapsmallbusinessbroadband.co.uk or cheapalicantecarhire.co.uk!!!!

Also have to build the datafeedr travel accessories store for My Travel Extras AND the scifigoodies site, so still plenty to do in the meantime!!!

I’ve finally got round to setting up the web hosting site for FreshWebz.

Although I offered cheap web hosting through the main web design site, Heart allows you to offer web hosting services through their online payments system, Hostpay.

However, every other time I’ve looked at setting it up, it just seemed to be too complicated, or not working properly…………this time though, I decided I HAD to get it working & spent the last 2 days pulling it apart & putting the pieces back together.

Suddenly, it all seemed to click into place (as these things often do) and my web hosting site is finally working!!

I’m offering basic web hosting from £1.49 per month, although the two main packages (Starter & SOHO) cost £2.49 & £4.49 per month respectively. However, I think these prices are still damn good value.

The reason I was so keen to get it up & running was so that I could offer web hosting without having to be as hands on. The Hostpay system allows people to register domain names & set up their hosting without any intervention from me, just like one of the mainstream companies & offering all the same extras & features that Heart Internet offer themselves.

Hopefully the low costs will attract plenty of customers!

I’ve decided to take the plunge & set up my first datafeedr affiliate store, on The Green Directory, bringing together the product feeds of many eco-stores & fair trade suppliers. I’m still fine-tuning the exact settings but the whole process was pretty straightforward, the only issue so far being that as per usual with merchant datafeeds, sometimes the actual data is incorrect. For example, I’ve noticed that Adili have a lot of products in their feed, with a price of £0.00!  I’ve written to them, but who knows how long it could take to be corrected.

Datafeedr is a system which enables you to create & embed an affiliate store into your WordPress blog WITHOUT touching any clunky datafeed files, learning a programming language or hiring expensive programmers. I found the actual datafeedr shop “factory” very easy to use & enquiries have been answered within 24 hours on the support forum, which is an excellent response time. There are excellent video tutorials to help you through using the factory, integrating your shop into your Wordpress blog & more.

I’m just looking into the Drip Feature which enables you to automatically post products to your blog, something that I’ve tried to do manually with my other sites. However, I also plan to add my own posts as well, rather than rely on the system, but it’s a great idea for those times when you might just be too busy with other things to post as much as you should. Just need to get it configured properly.

The one store I’ve set up initially costs $27 per month, but once this store is set up & functioning, I may upgrade to the next plan, which allows the creation of up to 5 different stores. I really want to use it on My Travel Extras to offer a decent travel accessories store, to set up the seperate ticket sales websites, for which I bought the domains www.buyeventtickets.co.uk, www.buyeventickets.co.uk, www.cheapeventtickets.co.uk & www.cheapeventickets.co.uk & to get www.webtraveloffers.com & www.scifigoodies.co.uk domains up & running. The five site plan costs $47, so hopefully, I can get enough sales to cover the costs!

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 Google’s 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’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.

I’ve decided to switch supplier for my mobile phone offers website despite actually making a couple of sales through it at the start of the year.

The site appeared to be not working properly for some time; it had lost the custom text & meta-tags that I had added to the site & no responses were forthcoming when I wrote to the support team. As a result, I wasn’t sure that the site was even functioning properly & I decided to leave it whilst I worked on other projects. Going through the posts on the A4U forum, it seems a number of other people have had the same problems with non-payment & no replies to their enquiries.

I decided to send mobileshop.com an invoice for the outstanding monies & have received a reply from their accounts team to say that the money will be paid. So anyone with money due to them from this program might want to send their invoice to lisa.hartley@valuecomparison.co.uk. Value Comparison seems to be converting previously retail sites into comparison sites & would be a company I would like to deal with, if they actually answered any e-mails, or replied to postings on A4U!!

I have a broadband comparison domain that I would like to use & the laptop comparison site would also be useful, but if the company ignores its affiliates, what is the point? To be fair, my enquiries up to now have been with mobileshop.com, so maybe contact with Value Comparison directly will have a better response. Will let you know!

In the meantime, Mobiles4Me has now switched to the e2save affiliate program & I am now promoting the site again, through link building for now & possibly with a blog soon.

I’ve got the Alexa Sparky ranking add-on installed in Firefox & obviously, the displayed figure is the only one you notice on a day to day basis. However, since my Cashback Shopper ranking started plummeting day by day (following on from the Google Vince update), from 205,000 at its peak, to around 460,000 & falling now; although my rankings for Cashback Shopper seem to have recovered & stabilised a bit recently, the ranking is still falling, so I decided to look into the figures a little more.

My attention was drawn to the following:

Cashbackshopper.co.uk users come from these countries:

• 77.3% United Kingdom
• 1.5% France
• 21.5% OTHER

and:

Cashbackshopper.co.uk traffic rank in other countries:

• 602,105 France
• 25,967 United Kingdom

This was very interesting – as my overall ranking is falling, my UK traffic rank seems to be rising! The last time I looked, it was over 28,000 & now is 25,967. Bearing in mind the fact that Cashback Shopper is a site for UK residents only, I can only assume that despite the displayed figure falling, the fact that my UK traffic rank is rising can only be a GOOD thing! My site is the 25,967th most visited site in the UK?

Perhaps I’m interpreting this wrong, but would be interested to know if anyone else has a view on this, or perhaps knows for sure whether this is the case or not?!