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 blogged previously about the disappointing level of sales through Cashback Shopper in December & wondered if it was just my own site that was experiencing this problem!

However, a recent newsletter from Ei42 seems to indicate that this has been a problem experienced by many online retailers.

They state:

A few members have asked about the volume of sales achieved over the festive period and on the general economic climate in which we are trading. I think without a doubt online sales have been affected and that we have not achieved the volume of sales that we may have expected when we were looking into our crystal ball back in June. The reality is that shops in the high street have had to slash prices in order to sell the stock that they had on the shelves. As a result many of us that would have loved to buy more online and get goods delivered to our door were seduced into buying in the high street stores, and who can blame anyone for that.

Out of the negative of reduced sales comes the huge positive of ‘Increased opportunity’. Unfortunately many people are facing a reduced income in 2009 for a variety of reasons and circumstances. Whilst we would not profess to be able to offer an instant solution to anyone’s financial problems, the reality is that even in the hardest of times we all still have to buy things. Ei42 offers the opportunity to buy many things with a small rebate attached and the opportunity to build a business alongside whatever else you do.

So, with more high street stores expected to go into administration in the next month or two, the opportunity to make extra money, or build a second income will take on even more importance to hard pressed people!

Well, I did say I would blog about the downs of affiliate marketing too, so here goes!

What happened to all the Christmas sales?!!! I don’t mean sales in shops, desperate to attract people to them before they all go bust (goodbye Woolies & MFI), but the online sales I was expecting through Cashback Shopper. Transactions had been steadily rising as the membership grew, so I put extra effort (& money) into PPC to try & attract as many new members as possible for the Christmas rush.

But new memberships have dropped to a trickle & the amounts spent have also fallen as we get closer & closer to Christmas! I can only imagine that people have decided that because of the discounts offered in stores, it’s better to go & buy direct than online!! Perhaps this is affecting everyone, or is it just on my site that transactions have been disappointing?!

At the moment, all I can do is get through Christmas & hope things pick up again in the new year. But now there are bigger (national) companies starting up their own cashback sites & I’ve spent everything I can on getting my site where it is & can’t afford to spend any more.

January is a peak time for travel, but I don’t have the budget to push my travel extras site any more & to be honest, I may even have to consider getting a day job again   (   Or, at the very least put the affiliate marketing on the back foot & try to get more small business web design work……

Rather than post all the online shopping offers & deals for UK Shopping Spree here, I decided to set up a separate blog for the site, once again using WordPress.

This can be found on the UK Shopping Spree domain & gives me a THIRD blog to keep up to date O alongside this one & the Cashback Shopper blog – are there enough hours in the day?!!!