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 the company of others (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 »

Everyone who runs a website had to start somewhere, begging and scrounging for links as best you can. The tried and tested formula of emailing sites telling them “I really liked your site and found it very useful…” hoping your hit rate might grab a few link exchanges with sites higher up the PR chain.

Eventually, all going well and a few years later, you end up being the one getting these requests and it does get a bit annoying after a while, but as I said we’ve all been there.

So, today I encountered a new method from a certain “Online Marketing Agency” and thought I’d share it. Rather than the usual pleasantries and over the top compliments, it was more of a demand.

Hi,

Can you tell me how i can go about placing a link on your holiday watchdog forum at the footer of the page for one of our holiday web sites?

Regards

xxxx

I’m guessing they are working along the lines that although we have a fairly well SEO’d site we don’t actually know what the hell we’re doing and we’ll just stick up links because we will believe they have a right to them. I had to IM Chris just to make sure he was there and it wasn’t a kidnap demand.

So it’s still early morning and I’ve only had one cup of coffee, so feeling slightly abused I replied:

Hi xxxx,

1) Download an FTP client, Cute FTP being my preferred option.

2) Find out our login and passwords

3) Edit the page footer script to include your new link

4) Upload changes via ftp client

Voila!

Probably unprofessional? Yea, but no more so than the original contact. I’m keen to see new methods webmasters / agencies are employing to gain some link love, but please don’t automatically assume the people you’re sending these emails to are stupid.

Went along to the first ever Barcamp Scotland yesterday with Alan, Clarke and Fraser. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but it was an interesting experience.

The general concept is that it’s all very informal and everyone participates to some degree. On arrival we wrote our names on bits of paper along with 3 words to “tag” ourselves. This was then cellotaped to our chests leading to the usual conference chest-gazing at strangers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well it’s Friday afternoon and our airport lounges site is up and running and ready to face the public. Or almost…

You may recognise the site theme! Read the rest of this entry »

It’s all in the title really. We’ve got a new site we’re working on based on Airport Lounges with a great deal of help from Max Bush at Vivid Lime. It’s a fairly niche area, but having experienced BA Terraces at Heathrow last week, I felt enthused!

The site has “soft launched” today, meaning it’s now live with about 90% of the front-end coding done (go on Happy!), very little content (erm, hurry up me) and a dodgy logo (go on Chris!) and we’re not linking to it yet. Ideally it’ll be ready to rock by Friday.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blog tagged, that is. I’ve been tagged by Dan and Pete. Since I haven’t posted for a while, this seems like an easy way to slip back into it.

Rules of Blog Tagging - I have to tell you 5 things about me you wouldn’t already know, and tag 5 other people.

Things about me:

1. When I was 11 years old my mother took me to the doctor as she was worried I was too thin. No, really!
2. My RL nickname is Baloo, given to me by one of my rugby mates because of a similar walking style I’m told.
3. I have broken my nose seven times. Or rather had it broken by other people usually.
4. I can drink a Bacardi Breezer in under 3 seconds on a good day!
5. My Great Grandfather was awarded the Freedom of the City of Glasgow for his part in the Boer War. My Grandfather was a POW in WWII for over 18 months. My father quite sensibly became a plumber.

People I Tag:

Don’t really know any of these people, but I do read their blogs!

Darren, Kevin, Jason & Graham

These two are random, just for the hell of it -

John, John.

I’m a big fan of mod_rewrite, Apache’s URL Rewriting Engine. It allows us to hide the inner workings of our websites, to present a page’s URL as an extra description in SERPs, and just looks more professional. When I first used it, the great advantage was the Seach Engine bots found it much easier to navigate a website without falling over several ampersands in our URL’s. Now that advantage has mostly been overtaken by the ability of the bots.

A lesson I learned shortly after implementing mod_rewrite in one of our sites was the danger of relying solely on mod_rewrite to interpret your URL’s. Herein lies the lesson…

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

In early 2004 I added a few of our sites to the Yahoo Directory, paying around $200 per listing if I remember correctly. To do this I created a Yahoo email account, which I didn’t really use for anything else. 

So around a year later, the listings were due for renewal. As I hadn’t checked the Yahoo email account (or the backup) the renewal dates passed me by. The credit card on account was no longer valid, so no payment was taken. About 2 months after this I actually remembered that these payments were overdue. I contacted Yahoo billing department, to update my credit card details and hopefully make the payments belatedly. 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.

Read the rest of this entry »