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.

In the last few days, I’ve set up 5 Tweet accounts, focusing on My Travel Extras, Cashback Shopper, Freshwebz, Love Your Pets & UK Shopping Spree. I’m going to follow relevant Tweets through each of these accounts and add blog entries from the relevant blogs. How does this help promote a website? Other than bringing your site to the attention of other people, I’m not sure, but it doesn’t take much to add posts, so we’ll see!