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 blogged previously about the failure of my short breaks white label site to make any sales, whilst it was integrated into the main My Travel Extras site.

As a result, I set up the site as a standalone short breaks mini-site & have just set a PPC campaign on Google, using only 3 or 4 (or even more), exact match keyphrases. I’ve created 4 different ad variations & limited my bids to £0.50 so that I’m not spending too much per click. With this budget, Google predicts at an average CPC of £0.37 – £0.49, these keywords could potentially generate 36 – 69 clicks per day (which would cost £20 – £40).

I think this is plenty for now, assuming a few sales come from these clicks(!), but I will be fine tuning the campaign as I go & see if these figures improve. If Superbreak make sales, then using an identical copy of their site & directing relevant traffic MUST generate sales, musn’t it?!!!!!

Time will tell!

Despite advertising the page through PPC, I have still made no sales from my Superbreak white label site & this is starting to annoy me! The site is a direct copy of the Superbreak online hotel directory for UK and European hotel bookings & they do ok, so why no sales?!

I’m wondering if it was because the site was embedded in an iframe on the My Travel Extras site & this may have looked a bit strange to new visitors. The bounce rate from the site was over 53%, which is not so good so as a result, I’ve decided to try an experiment & promote the site as a standalone mini-site, rather than part of the main one. I’ve set up a subdomain http://shortbreaks.mytravelextras.co.uk & will be able to build links to this site instead, which still shows my branding, but looks a little tidier.

The subdomain uses a frame redirect to display the site as this allows me to avoid the superbreak name appearing anywhere in the URL & I’m going try to submit this subdomain to directories & market it using specific products rather than generic terms such as short breaks, city breaks etc.

Fingers crossed it might actually make a sale or two before Christmas! /

I originally sourced my car hire search from Affiliate Future as it seemed pretty comprehensive at the time. However, reading a thread on the Affiliates4U forum, it was suggested that I try CarTrawler™, offering as it does, real-time access to pricing, availability and booking from over 450 car hire suppliers, at 17,000 locations in 134 countries! CarTrawler™ is a next generation global car rental distribution system, now serving over 95 international airlines and over 1,500 online partners & is the leading provider of online reservations technology to the global car rental market.

I signed up to the affiliate programme & was pleased to be accepted. Implementation of the search tool was very straightforward & the form itself is customisable in terms of design & colour scheme. There is also the option to produce the search form in 16 different languages & I have utilised this option to create a car hire search in seven other languages for now – Czech, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portugese & Spanish. It was important to ensure that the Robots meta tag was set to no index & no follow for these pages, as the rest of the content is still identical (debating whether to have it translated!!) & this would be penalised by the search engines!

I was very pleased to get two bookings through the Car Trawler tool in the first week, when I had received none through the previous form….I plan to start a PPC campaign on car hire in the next couple of weeks, hoping that targeting various long tail phrases will pick up some bookings missed by the major players!

I’m sure everyone knows about the phenomenon that is Facebook! Now one of the worlds most visited websites, it seems that everyone & his dog is facebooking, poking, posting & answering incredibly pointless quizzes! Does anyone in Britain’s offices NOT have a minimised window open for a sneaky look when the boss isn’t around?!

So, when Facebook started taking ads, it seemed only sensible to consider this as a new advertising arena for affiliate marketeers. I originally set up a couple of ads for Cashback Shopper, but these were rejected by Facebook for contravening their terms & conditions / It would appear that because my cashback site contains a section on Gambling sites, it cannot be advertised, presumably due to the Americans laws on internet gambling!!!! Don’t get me started on how ridiculous I think that is!

However, I decided to leave the Facebook ads for a while but placed a few yesterday relating to My Travel Extras.

Facebook ads let you target the ad to a users interests, so I decided to create a separate ad for each product on the site. For example, Theatre Tickets targets “people age 18 and older in the United Kingdom who like Billy Elliot, Buddy Holly, Dirty Dancing, Going To The Theatre, Grease, Hairspray, High School Musical, Les Miserables, The Lion King, London, Lord Of The Rings, Musical Theater, Musical Theatre, Musicals, Nights Out, Oliver, Oliver Twist, Phantom Of The Opera, Restaurants, The Sound Of Music, Theater, Theatre, or Wicked.”

Facebook’s ad creation system is VERY picky about punctuation & proper use of capitals & symbols, so a few mistakes led to repeated rejections & a lot of frustration! However, once you are familiar with what you can & can’t do, it was pretty straightforward to create ads for Theatre Tickets, Car Hire, Theme Park Breaks, London Theatre Breaks, Airport Parking, Airport Hotels, Airport Lounges & Short Breaks.

Initial assessment of the stats shows that click through rates are pretty low compared to what you would be aiming for from Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, so the jury is still out. The best result so far is from Airport Lounges, with 0.12% click throughs! I’ll give the ads a week to see if they are worth continuing with.

In between the 2 cashback sites, I was trying to find another project that I could design an affiliate website for. I decided on the Travel Extras market & built My Travel Extras, which initially offered Airport Parking, Airport Hotels, Airport Lounges, Theatre Breaks, Theme Park Breaks, Car Hire & Travel Insurance.

The search tools that I used on the site were provided by Holiday Extras, the market leaders in UK airport parking and airport hotel packages. The only other tool used was for car hire, which was provided by Affiliate Future.

Our search tools offer:

• airport parking at 24 UK airports & there are a variety of options available when choosing parking at the airport.
• we offer airport hotels at ALL 25 UK airports, from 2 – 5 star with & without parking and transfers to the airport are available to book on-line.
• pre-book airport lounges at 18 UK airports; executive lounges are great value for money, coming with a best price guarantee.
• choose a West End theatre break to suit you, from the theatre production on a night or afternoon of your choice, a 3 or 4* hotel for your overnight stay & loads of optional extras.
• stay overnight at a top hotel and receive entry to the UK theme park of your choice and all at unbeatable prices.
• compare a large selection of competitive car rental rates from the top car rental companies, in 9,000 locations & 134 countries worldwide and book directly with them. Deals from the following rental firms are included: Alamo, Advantage, Budget, Dollar Rent A Car, Europcar, Hertz, National, Sixt and Thrifty.
• enter the insurance requirements in the booking engine, making sure you enter the location of your trip, the dates you wish to have cover for and who will be included on the policy. A quote page will load after a few seconds wait, then simply select the best policy for you and enter your payment details!

In addition to the search tools listed, I provided directories listing most of the other main suppliers of these products in the UK.