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.

Today at 18:36 was when Cashback Shopper received its 11,000th member. Although sales have fallen off somewhat (probably due to the usual January hangover & current economic situation), I’m still hopeful that the site will still keep growing & that Cashback Shopper USA will take off as well.

At 19:08:32 on 17th November 2008, my cashback website received its 10,000th member!!! This was achieved in less than a year, as the first membership was registered on 22nd November 2007!

Mind you, there was a lot of hard work & plenty of advertising expense! I’ve even been leafleting shopping centre car parks in an attempt to entice shoppers from the stores to the internet, with the promise of free money!

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the age of the site will come into play as time goes by – Google gives great emphasis to sites of a certain age & this helps improve natural rankings.

The continued exposure of the site & recommendations from existing members should continue to recruit new members, but there is also a lot of competition out there /

Hopefully the costs of advertising will be less than the revenue from the site in the long term & I’m still hoping to be able to get the cashbackshopper.com domain up & running in the US at some point.

The latest Alexa ranking chart has been published by Cashback News & I was very pleased to see Cashback Shopper reach the dizzy heights of 14th place (although it looks like a slight error means I’m really 15th)!! Bearing in mind there are now 124 cashback sites in the chart, I certainly believe I must be doing something right!

Although the top 4 are like the Big 4 Premier League clubs & always seem to be in the same spot, overtaking Free Fivers was a real high point for me as they”ve been running for years & claim to have over 231000 members!!

I just hope I can keep the momentum going….here are the top 20 sites:

1. Quidco 19,166
2. Rpoints 77,337
3. Top Cashback 77,558 – ↑1
4. GreasyPalm 84,226 – ↓1
5. MutualPoints 103,947
6. eDeals UK 105,981 – ↑1
7. Paypal Offers 108,107 – ↑13
8. wepromiseto.co.uk 139,736 – ↑11
9. Give or Take 149,208 – ↓3
10. Cashback Kings 187,600
11. froggybank 191,141 – ↓3
12. NHScashback 206,077 – ↑9
13. Comparison Plus 238,505 – ↑2
14. Cashback Shopper 244,859 – ↑12
15. MoneyBackMadness 238,770 – ↓6
16. RupizCompare 272,581 – ↓3
17. CashbackToYou 289,869 – ↑14
18. Free Fivers 299,035 – ↓6
19. Linemypocket 302,300 – ↓5
20. eCashBack 352,290 – ↓4

WIN £50! We are offering a CASH prize of £50 to one of our members & all you have to do to enter is refer your friends!

The Cashback Shopper membership has been growing & to celebrate, we have decided to offer a cash prize to one of our lucky members. All you have to do is refer friends & you will receive one entry into the draw for each friend who joins. Get as many friends/colleagues/complete strangers as possible to join & get loads of entries!!!

At the end of October, we will hold a draw from all the valid entries & one lucky recipient will receive £50 in CASH! No DVD’s, no vouchers, just cold hard cash )

Don’t forget that you earn £5 for every member you refer anyway, so it’s a win-win situation!!!

You can find your personal referral code here – if you choose to send e-mails to friends or post a link on your blog, don’t forget to use your referral code or we won’t know whose referrals they are!!!

Good luck!!!

Matt Cutts recently announced on his blog that Google would be updating the Page Rank toolbar with its latest ranking changes (although these changes have been active for about 3 months before getting to us).

Despite varying opinions on the importance or validity of Page Rank, it’s nice to see that Cashback Shopper & FreshWebz have both risen to PR3!

Also, after dropping a few places (over 98,000) on the Alexa ranking, to 498,959 at the end of June, Cashback Shopper has pulled back up to 468,108 as of today. This is still the highest placed white label site in the Cashback News chart!

It’s got to be something to celebrate, even if Yahoo only makes up a tiny fraction of the search market nowadays – something like 4% in the UK according to an article in Web User magazine. But what the hell, Top Spot is still Top Spot )

Cashback Shopper has just achieved the number 1 position for all the following keyphrases on Yahoo:

• shop cashback
• shopping cashback shopping
• shopper cashback
• shops cashback
• uk cash back
• cash rewards site
• extra cashback
• free cashback
• cash-back directory
• get cashback
• uk shopping cashback
• uk cashback shopping pays cash
• cashbackshopper
• cashback shopper
• earn cash back rewards
• cash back uk
• cash back shop
• cash back directory

and is in the top 10 results for 19 other keyphrases!!!!

It’s taken 9 months of constant promotion, blogging, marketing, seo etc. but it’s a nice feeling when the results are so visible. Will keep working at phrases that aren’t doing so well & the key objective is to start making a bigger dent in the Google SERPS!

The best Google positions currently achieved are:

cash rewards site 7
cashback shopper 1
cashback shopping 3
cashback shopping site 7
cashback site 3
cashback uk 9
earn cashback 5
extra cashback 4
shopper cashback 1
site cashback 4
uk cashback 2
uk cashback shopping 2

with 17 other phrases appearing in the next 2 pages of results.

MSN is a strange creature; I have about 13 top ten positions, but only 2 other phrases in the next 2 pages and a dozen or so ways down in the top 100! But with a only 3% of the search market, it doesn’t really matter anyway.

So, the aim now is to find the most searched phrases (& those with the highest KEI) from all these on Google & give them a real push to try & get them to the top!! With lots of FREE traffic up for grabs, this is the most important task for any affiliate marketer!

A while back I bought the domain cashbackshopper.co.uk for my cashback internet shopping site, which offers cash to members who buy products online from our wide range of retailers.

I had looked for the cashbackshopper.com address but found it was already owned by another company, but not in use. There are a number of companies out there that bought hundreds, if not thousands of domains & then sell them on, or wait for them to become valuable/desirable & therefore worth a lot of money!

I wrote to the company & as is the norm in these cases, months went by with no response. I decided it wasn’t worth pursuing as it would make little difference to my UK site.

However, out of the blue, the company contacted me & said they would be willing to sell the domain for $3000 (£1500). Apparently, an American cashback site had offered to buy it & I suspected they were trying to start a bidding war. Interestingly they told me that eDealsUK were planning to launch an American version of their site, with the possibility of a white label offering to follow! This made a big difference as a .com domain would be very useful for a US market & I didn’t want to have to think up some other name, bearing in mind it was likely to already be owned by someone else anyway!

I contacted eDealsUK to confirm what I’d been told & then started negotiations. Amazingly, there was no bidding war & I finally got the cashbackshopper.com domain for £1000 ($2000). I was worried at first, about spending such a lot of money on a name, but was re-assured by a couple of the posters on the Affiliates4U forum, that they felt I’d got a good deal )

So, I now have the cashbackshopper.co.uk domain for the UK market & cashbackshopper.com for the US site when it launches. No definate date yet, but the good thing about having the brand is that they can be linked so that if a user visits from the “wrong” country, they can be redirected to the right site!

Following my long & ultimately disappointing experience of building a cashback site, I was browsing through the posts on the Affiliates4U forum & noticed a posting by Nadeem Azam, offering a “white label cashback site”, with a 60% revenue share for life! The white label was being offered by eDealsUK, who had been running their own highly successful cashback site for a number of years & was offering this with no set up fee or charges, other than a 40% revenue share. In short, they only benefit by helping you to do well ) There’s loads of information about their scheme at http://www.cashbackpartners.com

I contacted Nadeem & set the wheels in motion. Choosing a domain name was a challenging proposition as I assumed that anything with the word cashback in it would be used, or at the very least, be owned by a company that would expect a considerable amount of money for it. However, after trying a few “far too clever” options, I tried cashback shopper & found it was available as a .co.uk domain, for just £2.99 per year! Naturally I snapped it up as having keywords in the domain name is excellent for SEO purposes.

The site itself was set up very quickly by eDealsUK & was set up to point to cashbackshopper.co.uk. Then the real work began!!!!

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!!!