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 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!

It’s nearly been a month since I blogged on here, mainly due to the amount of web design work I am doing.

One project is for a home security company, www.guardedhomes.co.uk, offering ipCCTV, gates, railings, shutters, safe rooms & the like, another new(ish) recruitment firm, as well as 3 home page mock-ups for another well-established recruitment company, not to mention a local escort agency!!!! On top of that, I’ve had a few other enquiries & just never seem to have the time for blogging at the moment. When I actually get paid for some of this work will be interesting though O

I’ve not been able to do much work on Cashback Shopper, or My Travel Extras recently & absolutely NONE on Love Your Pets or UK Shopping Spree & really want to redesign My Travel Extras to be less cluttered & more Web 2.0, but will have to wait for a quiet spell I guess. Once I get paid, I want to promote my dating sites a bit more I recently bought a number of new domains, but guess they will also have to go on the back burner for now: cheapcarhirealicante.com, webtraveloffers.com, travelcheapinfo.com, cheapsmallbusinessbroadband.co.uk, scifigoodies.co.uk, findmegaydates.co.uk, findmelesbiandates.co.uk, plus I wanted to try to resurrect easylolly.com for some sort of financial site.

On top of this Ei42 have just launched in the US, so I’ve been link building for www.cashbackshoppers.biz, in the hope that I can get some more interest in this, but think this is going to need some articles and forum postings to get anywhere…..I did start writing to schools asking them to consider joining as a way to raise funds for their school, but haven’t had the time to carry on.

Maybe I have my fingers in too many pies & am spreading myself a bit too thin, but we’ll see.

I had a bid in an auction for the domain webtraveloffers.com, but the auction ended whilst my system was still going through one of it’s interminable Vista upgrade attempts! I assumed that I would have lost the auction at the last minute, but amazingly, I got it, for the minimum bid price of $69!

Now I have to decide what to do with it lol. As mentioned before, I want to tie it in with My Travel Extras & link between the two sites somehow, offering travel offers from one, followed by holiday extras from the other. I think it could be a big job, but using Datafeedr may help to get it going.

Was half way through writing this blog when my Internet went off!!!! I’ve decided to dump Tiscali (another post about that experience to follow soon) & get Sky+HD  )  & it was obviously switched whilst I was typing….all is back on now & now it’s time to get going…..

It’s been a hectic time, changing my web host, my OS, my ISP, digital TV supplier etc. I’m hoping things have all settled down now & I can find some new motivation to kick on!!

I’m considering setting up a travel site, probably using datafeedr, to complement My Travel Extras. I’ve already purchased travelcheapinfo.com but am also in 2 auctions for clearsea.com & webtraveloffers.com.

Clear Sea sounds more evocative & is the most expensive at the moment, but web travel offers seems more appropriate for what I’m going to be selling????  The auctions only have another day to run, so we’ll see which one comes through!!

Following the nightmare that were my attempts to transfer my hosting from 1and1 to Heart & the subsequent efforts to transfer them back again (because of unforseen costs), I had started to have problems with 1and1 over my price comparison site, UK Shopping Spree, which had previously been running for months without any issues! All of a sudden, it was supposedly taking ALL the resources of the shared server I was on & I was told the only options were fix the site, or have a dedicated server (from £69.99 per month!). As 1and1 don’t allow access to the error logs for shared server customers, it was going to be a bit of a job to fix the problem within the month demanded.

At this point, I’d had enough & as my .com domains were still hosted at Heart (& I had already paid them for hosting as well) I decided to jump in with both feet & become a hosting reseller as well! Although some of my sites have been offline for about a week (not great), I think I’ve finally got things back to normal (a few tweaks and adjustments are still needed) & most of the sites are back as they were before, albeit a bit out of date /  The ones of greatest concern were the membership sites, but hopefully this won’t cause any problems (fingers crossed).

The Heart reseller plan is only £29.99 a month & the features offered are pretty comprehensive, with one step installation of WordPress & Joomla! available, a limitless number of databases & stacks of other tools & utilities that will make it easier for me to offer a much more comprehensive web building service, as well as the web hosting itself.

I do have a couple of web design jobs lined up now, so I don’t really have time to get to grips with all the options for configuring the online version of the web hosting at the moment, but have added my cheap web hosting plans to the FreshWebz site as well as information on buying domain names through FreshWebz. As soon as I get the sites built for my clients, I can get to work on the automated hosting platform.

I blogged previously about the nightmare that happened when I tried to switch my hosting from 1and1 to Heart and that I switched it back because of the additional cost of hosting more than one domain with Heart.

The nightmare has continued however, as the transfers I asked to be cancelled have not been & now I have my domains registered in 2 different places & can’t get them back yet because of the 60 day rule re registrar changes – AAAAAAGH!

On top of this, despite increasing my package to the Business PRo account, I’ve just received the following e-mail from the abuse department:

Recently we have noticed that your web site(s) is consuming a disproportionate amount of server resources (including memory and/or CPU time). Because of this, we have had to move your account off of the shared hosting server to an auxiliary server. We now request that you consider purchasing a Managed or other Dedicated Server in order to continue hosting with 1&1 Internet.

The decision to move your account was made by the system administrators in order to improve the quality of service for the rest of our clients on the shared server from which you were previously hosted. The resources consumed by your account threatened the ability of that server to capably operate as as a shared host, so it was required that your account be moved in order to mitigate server load. Though we could move your site back to the original shared hosting server, it is not recommended. Your account activity has demonstrated that your site deserves its own server to better suit its performance needs.

Please visit 1and1.com to review the server products we offer. You will have one (1) month to make a decision and migrate your account over to a
1&1 server or another host provider. You can choose to return your account back to the shared server, provided that you take steps to reduce the load generated by your websites. If the account has to be moved off the shared server system again you will only have the option of purchasing a dedicated server account to continue hosting with 1&1 Internet.

I have no idea what is causing this demand on resources & have asked them to give me more information than this! With managed servers costing a minimum of £70 a month, it looks like I have no choice but to either shut down whatever service is eating up these resources, or once again, move everything over to Heart & sign up to the Reseller plan.

I’m sick and tired of all this messing about & it’s just one problem after another…..I’m seriously considering giving this up & going to college to study a diploma in animal care!!!!

UPDATE

It appears the problem is with www.ukshoppingspree.com – something about the shop window client is causing the drain on processor time, which has been mentioned already on the shop window forum. Hopefully there will be a fix forthcoming from Affiliate Window!

There’s been a lot going on recently including a new blog for My Travel Extras, transferring the travel related posts from this blog; a change of web host (followed by changing straight back again!) & trying to get some more web design business.

First of all the change of web host! I decided that I should move my sites to a hosting company with its servers based in the UK as Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of Google and Stay There suggests that Google.co.uk gives higher importance in the UK rankings to websites where the server is based in the UK. As I use 1and1 & their servers appear as being in Germany, this may be harming my .co.uk domains.

I chose Heart Internet as they offered web hosting at the same price, but with 100 mySQL databases as opposed to the 2 I have with 1and1. I transferred all my domains over to Heart, the .co.uk being free & the .com costing £5 each. Unfortunately, it was only when I had a number of the .co.uk domains transferred, that I realised that I was unable to apply more than one domain to the hosting account unless I paid a “domain mapping” charge of £20pa for each other domain!

With around 30 domains, there was no way it was worth doing that, so the only alternative was a reseller account, whereby I would also be selling web hosting! As this cost a minimum of £25 per month, with no guarantee of selling any hosting, I couldn’t consider doing this & was gutted that I’d spent loads transferring the domains over & now would end up paying through the nose for something I didn’t really need.

I have to say that this domain mapping was not something mentioned anywhere on the hosting section of the Heart site & now I will be very cautious about it if I ever consider changing my hosting again!!! It was only by going through the support database, that I found any reference to it!

I decided to bite the bullet, take the loss & transfer my domains back to 1and1 /  Luckily however, the .com transfers had not been completed and so they could be cancelled & the charges refunded. Because Heart also offers a 30 day money back guarantee, I got my hosting costs back too <phew>. I would like to say thanks to the support team at Heart Internet though, who responded to my enquiries within minutes & were very helpful in sorting this problem out, even though they were losing a customer. Excellent customer service – if only Tiscali could be like this, but that’s another story!

I decided to also set up a separate blog for My Travel Extras, removing all the travel related posts from this one. Whether it makes a difference or not I’m not sure, but I presume that travel related content on the travel site would be viewed better by Google, than travel related posts on a web design domain. Fingers crossed this may help bring some visitors to My Travel Extras which has not been setting the world on fire recently and may even benefit the Freshwebz rankings too!

A while back I bought the domain cashbackshopper.co.uk for my cashback internet shopping site, which offers cash to members who buy products online from our wide range of retailers.

I had looked for the cashbackshopper.com address but found it was already owned by another company, but not in use. There are a number of companies out there that bought hundreds, if not thousands of domains & then sell them on, or wait for them to become valuable/desirable & therefore worth a lot of money!

I wrote to the company & as is the norm in these cases, months went by with no response. I decided it wasn’t worth pursuing as it would make little difference to my UK site.

However, out of the blue, the company contacted me & said they would be willing to sell the domain for $3000 (£1500). Apparently, an American cashback site had offered to buy it & I suspected they were trying to start a bidding war. Interestingly they told me that eDealsUK were planning to launch an American version of their site, with the possibility of a white label offering to follow! This made a big difference as a .com domain would be very useful for a US market & I didn’t want to have to think up some other name, bearing in mind it was likely to already be owned by someone else anyway!

I contacted eDealsUK to confirm what I’d been told & then started negotiations. Amazingly, there was no bidding war & I finally got the cashbackshopper.com domain for £1000 ($2000). I was worried at first, about spending such a lot of money on a name, but was re-assured by a couple of the posters on the Affiliates4U forum, that they felt I’d got a good deal )

So, I now have the cashbackshopper.co.uk domain for the UK market & cashbackshopper.com for the US site when it launches. No definate date yet, but the good thing about having the brand is that they can be linked so that if a user visits from the “wrong” country, they can be redirected to the right site!