It is with some trepidation that I hear Google has launched its own affiliate network. Lets forget how many pies Google now has its fingers in, but its “reason to be” is as an unbiased search engine, providing the best search results & experience for its users! The most interesting/worrying statement on the site is: Earn AffiliateVIP status and enjoy exclusive marketing opportunities and greater visibility in the network. So, should I interpret this as “make us money & get pushed up the SERPS”?????!!!!!

Even where PPC is concerned, Google should provide an unbiased platform offering equal opportunities for advertising products & services. Will Google start providing their own affiliates with a “discount” or other advantage over competitors? They way PPC costs have risen for affiliates over the last couple of years has indicated that they’re are not affiliate friendly, but maybe this will all change now they’re running their own network!

About Google Affiliate Network

Performics was founded as the first full-service affiliate network in 1998 and was acquired by DoubleClick in 2004. Today Performics Affiliate operates as Google Affiliate Network and remains committed to delivering affiliate channel growth for advertisers and publishers.

So, I’ve signed up to see what they offer – maybe it will all be American merchants for now, but it will be interesting to see how it develops!

UK Online Charities – I did give quite a bit of thought to whether this was an acceptable site to build, but then I considered why charities have affiliate programmes, the purpose being to attract donations from people who may not have donated previously, or who used to donate & then stopped. If promoting the charities online, without offering any incentive to the user (charities used to appear on cashback websites and there were cases of people setting up a direct debit for £3, getting their £10-15 cashback & then cancelling the direct debit), earns the charity a new donater, then it is morally acceptable to build an affiliate site around it.

I even signed up to the Lottoaid programme myself & still make my regular donation every month ) (Lottoaid is the weekly fundraising lottery of international development charity, ActionAid.)

The initial list of charities added to the site were: Action Against Hunger, ActionAid – Sponsor a Child, ActionAid – Gifts in Action, ActionAid – LottoAid, Age Concern, British Red Cross, Cancer Research UK, Cancer Research UK – Virtual Gifts, Childline, Children in Crisis, CLIC Sargent, Compassion in World Farming, Farm Africa – Presents, Farm Africa – Farm Friends, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Greenpeace, NDCS, NDCS Challenges, NSPCC, Oxfam Unwrapped, PDSA, Plan UK, Practical Presents, Present Aid, RSPB, Shelter, Shelter Build A City campaign, Sight Savers International, The Aspinall Foundation, The Blue Cross, The Childrens Society, The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, Torture Care, Unicef, World Land Trust, World Vision Child Sponsorship, World Vision Alternative Gift Catalogue, WSPA, WWF Adoption & WWF Membership. I also added in a few charity credit cards & also included on the front page, a few click through programmes which generate donations from simply clicking on the links (no commission is paid for these).

I also decided to create this site solely in CSS using a Dreamweaver extension called Eric Meyer’s CSS SCULPTOR™ from Web Assist. Eric Meyer is a renowned CSS master & the extension is very easy to use (apart from the occasional freeze up!). I am actually learning more from using this & playing around with the site afterwards, than I have done by reading books, but if you are interested in learning about CSS, my store has plenty of books/software on all aspects of web design!!

The site is up and running now & has made a few sales….I think it needs more text links as it uses banners at the moment & as people are much more likely to click on a text link than a banner, it may need a little updating soon.

On May 30th Plan UK launches a month long ‘Sponsor a Girl’ online recruitment campaign. The campaign is timed to coincide with the 2008 launch of Plan’s ‘Because I am a Girl’ report.

Bearing mind the fact that the mobile phone market shows no sign of fading away & phones are incorporating more & more features (I don’t include the iPhone in this as I think it’s a typical Apple “style over substance” effort – when it has 3G it might be capable of browsing the Internet properly!!).

For example, my own T-mobile MDA Compact III has a camera, media player, FM radio, uses Internet Explorer for web browsing, runs Windows Mobile 5 & even doubles as a sat-nav!!!! It really is a great piece of kit & does everything the iPhone does & more!

Anyway, rant over ) back to the point lol. I was interested in setting up a mobile phone site as there are apparently now 7 mobile phones for every person in the UK, but the pace of development shows no sign of slowing down, as the phone companies have to keep coming up with new ideas in order to convince us to buy new handsets. *

I came across the FonetasticMobile affiliate programme run by MobileShop.com, which looks really slick & clean, but the thing that sold it to me was the Deal Finder feature! This allows you to choose a particular handset, or manufacturer, pick which features the phone MUST have, to then choose the number of free minutes and/or free texts you want & your monthly budget, whether you would prefer a particular network and the option to include free gifts. Then the system searches through all the retailers until it finds matching deals & displays them to you!

So, as a lover of anything like this, that sorts through all the options & offers you exactly what you are looking for, I was hooked on this programme but as usual, the search was on for a domain name….something to do with mobile phones, not already in use or been bought….not an easy job! However, thinking about existing brands turned me towards Phones4U…..& a quick search revealed that Mobiles4Me was available, so this is what I went for.

A little bit of design on a banner & logo & www.mobiles4me.co.uk was ready for action!! We have thousands of pay monthly and pay as you go mobile phone deals listed, along with the latest mobile broadband offers. If you’re looking for the best prices, the latest handsets, easy to use search results, thousands of Mobile Phone Deals, Cheap Mobile Phones Offers & where the whole mobile phone market is available at your finger tips, all on one site – then Mobiles4Me is the place to choose your new mobile phone deal!

*If like me, you feel a little bit guilty that there are so many mobile phones for every person in the UK, then I would suggest using a company like Envirofone to get rid of any old handsets you don’t want. Envirofone is the UK’s number 1 online mobile phone recycling site & have paid out over £4 million to their users and thousands of pounds more are paid out every week. It’s free to use, pays you cash for your old mobile and helps the environment.

A few years ago, I discovered a cashback website which offered to pay money back to me every time I bought products/services online, usually a percentage of the cost, but occasionally a lump sum payment for certain transactions. I signed up to the site, bought a few things, including my car insurance & was very pleased to receive a cheque for the amount I’d earnt.

This got me wondering how they did this, so I basically picked apart the source code of the site, contacted the affiliate networks that provided the links & sale reporting & decided to build my own cashback site!!

The whole process took about 2 years from start to finish (with plenty of mistakes along the way), but by the end of it, I actually had my own cashback website!!! Back then, there couldn’t have been more than a dozen other cashback sites & I was sure that this was going to be a great success & lead to me becoming very rich! Lolol!

Things started off OK, I was getting new members & they were actually buying things! I was earning commission, which I then paid to members as cashback. Unfortunately, the payment system I set up was not automated in any way, so I had to manually enter payments into the account, as well as update all the retailer links, add special offers, discount codes & check all payments for fraud.

I ended up working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, just to keep up with the administration of the site, was spending a fortune on buying e-mail addresses from co-reg companies (most of which turned out to be junk) & trying to deal with all the fraudsters that were signing up to the site.

Eventually, I had to abandon the site, as I just couldn’t carry on working so much whilst making absolutely nothing; in fact I was actually losing money because the network paid me commission, which I paid to my members & then the transactions were reversed & I was expected to pay them back!

Having given up on the idea of running a cashback site, I turned my attention elsewhere, but was still gutted that all that work appeared to be for nothing (

That was until eDealsUK announced that they would be offering a white label of their own successful cashback website & Cashback Shopper was born!!!

This is where I plan to write about experiences (both good & bad) with web design & affiliate marketing & maybe even some completely unrelated things that either please or annoy me!

With entries covering both the worlds of web design & affiliate marketing, hopefully there will be something to interest to somebody out there & if any of my mistakes (and there have been a few!) help someone to avoid similar ones, then my job will be done )