I really enjoy the fact that I can make a living out of creating websites, from knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, only 4 years ago. I vividly remember starting out and scouring the net for information to help me along, and the long dry first year where making any reasonable amount of cash seemed unlikely.
I was fortunate to spend time in thecompanyofothers (virtually) who were making a living doing this stuff and still do. If it wasn’t for those long through-the-night chat sessions on the old A4U ezboard I don’t doubt I’d have given in after a few months. Whenever I find myself in conversation with anyone starting down this road I always try and pass on the message that it doesn’t happen immediately, but with a lot of hard work you can make your living from affiliate marketing.
To this end I’m going to do what most people who blog about Affiliate Marketing don’t do and ”show you the good stuff”, a financial history of one of our sites, that started off very small and has grown to become a very nice earner. Read the rest of this entry »
April 25, 2007 at 13:52
· Filed under Misc, Marketing
We were invited to a Travel Marketing Event hosted by Affiliate Future in London last week. As we hadn’t got all us HW’ers together for a while we thought it was the perfect excuse!
December 11, 2006 at 19:40
· Filed under Misc, Marketing
Love this! Commonly referred to as our “other national drink”, Irn-Bru have been producing humorous TV adverts for years. They’ve outdone themselves this year with a cheeky remake of the classic Christmas film “The Snowman“.
This time of year is bonanza time for internet retailers, the online Christmas rush is in full swing. Every other day someone claims “today” is the biggest day for buying online, and no doubt before December the 25th there’ll be reports about the demise of the High Street. I’m not especially gifted that I can see into the future, it’s just what happens every year.
Believe it or not, this is our slowest time of the year. No one is really that interested in travel, too busy shopping and getting ready for the big day. For us things kick off around the first working Monday after New Year. People get back to work facing the certainty it’s only 350-odd days ’til next Christmas and get to thinking about booking a nice holiday somewhere warm. Or going on a diet. Or taking out a loan.
Usually a marketing tool generally overlooked by UK shoppers, this year the discount voucher is making waves amongst many top brands in the run up to the biggest spending weeks of the year.
It started with Threshers giving a South African wine company a 40% off voucher to distribute amongst their employees, families and friends. They posted the voucher on their website, and it went “viral”, with the BBC reporting the voucher had been downloaded over 800,000 times. Read the rest of this entry »
Two Sunday papers carried stories about hotel review sites last weekend, reporting their shock and horror that it is possible to add a review for a hotel you’ve never been to and even hotel owners post reviews of their own hotels!
You can imagine how shocked we were, why hadn’t it ever been pointed out before! What would the great British public think if they found out? HW Headquarters was awash with a wave of cynicism and suspicion.
Since we let Jon off the leash and let him loose as our Press Relations type person, it’s been pretty cool to watch. If like me you’ve had absolutely no dealings with the press, you really are missing a great opportunity to promote your site. Journalists are hungry for stories! Sure, being a journo sounds like an interesting job, but like any job they have to meet the demands of the person higher up the food chain. Feed them a reasonably interesting story and they’ll bite your hand off.
Came across this last night while reading a few blogs. It caught my interest as it could be applied to our site, and like the best of ideas it all just seems like common sense when you read it.
“The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.” Rohit Bhargava
