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 had a bid in an auction for the domain webtraveloffers.com, but the auction ended whilst my system was still going through one of it’s interminable Vista upgrade attempts! I assumed that I would have lost the auction at the last minute, but amazingly, I got it, for the minimum bid price of $69!

Now I have to decide what to do with it lol. As mentioned before, I want to tie it in with My Travel Extras & link between the two sites somehow, offering travel offers from one, followed by holiday extras from the other. I think it could be a big job, but using Datafeedr may help to get it going.

Was half way through writing this blog when my Internet went off!!!! I’ve decided to dump Tiscali (another post about that experience to follow soon) & get Sky+HD  )  & it was obviously switched whilst I was typing….all is back on now & now it’s time to get going…..

It’s been a hectic time, changing my web host, my OS, my ISP, digital TV supplier etc. I’m hoping things have all settled down now & I can find some new motivation to kick on!!

I’m considering setting up a travel site, probably using datafeedr, to complement My Travel Extras. I’ve already purchased travelcheapinfo.com but am also in 2 auctions for clearsea.com & webtraveloffers.com.

Clear Sea sounds more evocative & is the most expensive at the moment, but web travel offers seems more appropriate for what I’m going to be selling????  The auctions only have another day to run, so we’ll see which one comes through!!

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!