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’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.