Hi,

On the 06th December a visitor to your website clicked on an Affiliate URL
for a Merchant who has closed its Affiliate Program with Paid On Results.

The visitor was shown our Expired Links page, and given several other
related Merchants they may be interested in. This visitor followed one of
our related links and went onto make a purchase with Find Me A Gift.

Normally the commission due would just be added to your account, however
in this case you are currently not an Affiliate of Find Me A Gift. In
order for us to pass the commission onto you we first need you to join the
Find Me A Gift Affiliate Program

You can do this as normal though your Affiliate Control Panel, once you
have joined and been approved for this Merchant we will add the commission
due to you into your account.

If you have any questions please let us know.

Best Wishes,

Paid On Results Support Team.

Great use of technology to do something to reach a good outcome from an expired link. When the other options are sending the visitor through anyway or landing them on error page actually putting a solution in place that allows me to earn and another merchant to make the sale is fantastic.

An Affiliate Needs More Than Commission

Fraser’s blog here was one of the first I read before carving out a career in affiliate marketing. My first dealings with the industry were purely voyeurism.

I would watch in wonder, sixteen tabs up during my lunch break, trying to understand how such a simple business model could provide such a fundamentally different work environment to my 9-5.

Three years on and my position is reversed. I now shoot off my own advice as a blogger and full-time affiliate.

I get to hear many questions from newbies trying to break in to the industry. The curiosity has grown, and grown. It seems everybody wants a piece of the affiliate marketing pie. But what about those who have been around the block for several years and have felt their love affair with the industry begin to wear off?

I think every affiliate, sooner or later, has to hit the wall.

When the thrill of earning ‘easy money’ wears off – at least, that’s what it’s called by my friends and family – the real challenge of staying motivated kicks in.

Being a middleman is a tough gig. How do you stay motivated without the pride of customers thanking you, or without the credit for driving a company to the next level? We are invisible, and with no attachment to what we sell other than the numbers on the cheques we receive.

I’ve battled for many months to conquer the overwhelming feeling of indifference. Truth be told, once the novelty of making good money wears off, it’s pretty tough to be satisfied – unless you’re working on projects that inspire something greater than financial security.

Clearly, an affiliate needs more than just commission to stay motivated.

It’s hard to get out of bed to work on a website if that website is only ever destined to satisfy a disconnected algorithm in Google’s underbelly. How do you motivate yourself to rank for products that, all commission aside, you barely give a rat’s arse about?

I think this is a problem many affiliate marketers face. They simply fall out of love with their projects. They don’t truly believe in them in the way that a driven entrepreneur should.

It’s one of the reasons so few of our projects ever come to fruition. If we don’t enjoy working on them, we can find plenty of reasons not to work on them. I know I can.

I believe I’ve created the world’s most emphatic repertoire of excuses to justify my own lackadaisical attitude to the websites I don’t like working on. Just last night the dog ate my FTP password.

Indifference, lack of passion, lack of excitement… call it whatever you want. We all need to engage in projects where there’s more than just a financial incentive, but something that gets us out of bed too.

And so, the number one piece of advice I give to new affiliates is pretty simple.

If you wouldn’t do exactly what you’re proposing for the reward of $0, then you probably shouldn’t do it at all. It’s passion and the desire to see projects through to their conclusion that separates the rich from the poor in our business. Do yourself a favour and work on something that gets you out of bed, or you’ll find yourself wishing you were back there long before lunch.

Finch

A couple of weeks back I went along to WordUp Edinburgh which was an informal one day conference about WordPress. Organised by WPScotland it was a good day to see what everyone else is doing with WordPress. Talks ranged from WordPress in large companies through to voluntary organisations with a mixture of presentation and discussion.

I can’t add much to the many good reports about the conference already written but thought I would note some of the many plugins that were suggested throughout the day.

In no particular order….

For Theme Development and Testing

• Log Deprecated Notices
• Debogger
• Theme Check

For Other Stuff….

• Custom Post Type UI – Making life easier for creating Custom Post types.
• Widget Logic – choose when you want your widgets to appear.
• Image Widget – Uploading images to widgets.
• Chimpexpress – Use existing content from your WordPress site to populate your latest Mailchimp newsletter.
• Mailpress – Similar to the above plugin but without using Mailchimp. Probably only suitable for smaller mailing lists.
• WP Help – Create help information as part of the WordPress dashboard. Ideal for handing over a site to a less experienced editor.
• EasyBlogging – Ideal interface for a new user by hiding away all the complicated stuff!
• Rolescoper – Better control over user roles for multi author blogs.
• Zend Gdata – Clever stuff this one. Allows you to link to data stored in Google Docs. I was shown this for linking rota data in a Google Docs Spreadsheet to the Adelaide Place Baptist Church website and I think it also has much wider potential use.
• ManageWP – This is the worker plugin for the main service at ManageWP. Recommended by both Wordskill & Canary Dwarf. Should make life easier for managing a number of different WP installs. I’m going to explore this one a bit further soon.

I’m sure there were many more plugins suggested as solutions to specific questions but that’s all I managed to scribble down over the course of the day

15th March 2001

Earned my first ever commission via DatingDirect on Tradedoubler.

It all started here when I was amazed to earn money this way. Previously I had been running a small web development business but I was always just selling time so if I went on holiday or couldn’t find work etc then I didn’t earn.

Back then I remember getting my advice from alt.www.affiliate, an old Tradedoubler Yahoo Group which I think was started by Andrew Girdwood and of course the very early versions of Affiliates4u when it was on ezboard and still well worth a look for a trip down memory lane. Like when we all got excited about the launch of Google Adsense

Over the next couple of years my business started to shift away from having clients and doing web development and more into full time affiliate marketing and I seem to have been there since.

June 2003

I organised “The Limo Club” where a bunch of affiliates got together and hired a limo to go round London and try to meet all the major networks in one day.

As well as being a great day out it was a series of useful meetings and also a chance to put some pressure on the spyware issues of the day.

The following day was an affiliate get2gether at the Kensington Roof Gardens. This event was a big step up from the previous pub based events but no one could have imagined the a4uexpo in the future.

My Sites

Over this time I had expanded with a few different sites but my most successful was FullSteamAhead which is now a shadow of it’s former glory. It was a general shopping directory, list everything, datafeed & more site. I can’t track it down now but the Alexa graph showed a steady ascent with loads of traffic followed by a cliff drop on the graph when Google kicked me out. I think it just ended up being too successful and the overuse of datafeeds meant I ranked for every random product that was going. Lesson learned and time to move on.

Around this time I seemed to be doing well for Euroffice, Dabs, Figleaves & ASOS but the fields I worked in changed so much over the years. For example I’ve had a good few years of doing well from gift experiences with buyagift and also a good spell of ranking number 1 for ‘ghd hair straighteners’ which was nice. These things come and go for example I don’t think there will be an old timer in the industry that doesn’t remember jumping on the Britannia DVD Club program when it launched on buy.at

When I look back I know I should have worked harder in one field to dominate and built a brand but instead I’ve always jumped about a bit getting tempted by the next new project to work on and moving into a different field.

For a spell I did well from adsense alongside the affiliate stuff as many people did but over time my sites and interests changed again. On my best Adsense day I sent 1,457 clicks earning a couple of hundred pounds at which point I probably put my feet up for a few months and paid the price again Yesterday I earned £2.10

Spyware

Around 2004, 2005 spyware was really at it’s peak and the affiliates of a4u did a great job of working together to get some regulation in place by the networks. I remember taking an old laptop, getting it infected and recording just what was going on. Slowly the networks adopted some rules against this and to date I don’t think it’s as much of a problem here as it is in the US.

2006 The Podcast Years

In June of 2006 I started recording podcasts with various people in the industry. To date I think I’ve recorded 34 podcasts but haven’t added to them in the last couple of years. It was a fun way to learn and share more about the industry but the time involved just became a bit too much and had to give way to real work that had a financial return. I enjoyed speaking to everyone involved but a few of the more popular ones in terms of comments were Doug Scott for some straight talking, Kieron Donoghue about how he got started & a group discussion on discount codes. Here’s one from 2007 that’s topical now.

Recent Years

I got married in 2004 and then in 2007 my daughter was born and my business week changed completely. Very much like John Lamerton’s recent post I’ve been kind of part time since then. I don’t really work outside of Monday-Friday 10-5 and spend a heap more time with my daughter including regular half days here and there. In the early days I would regularly have been working at 2 or 3am but it just doesn’t fit with life now! Leaving the world of affiliate marketing and entering the world of mother & toddler groups has been a good change and my wife and daughter always come first for me.

2008 saw me get along to my first a4uexpo and it was amazing to see the change in the industry. It’s great to see the growth and the recognition that the industry gets and to have things on a professional footing but I confess I do miss the atmosphere in years gone by. No one would ever dream of sharing this kind of information in a post like this these days. What’s changed? I’m not sure I guess it’s inevitable as things grow that it can’t have that small team feeling where we all know we’re doing something new.

Now I’m working on a number of hopefully good quality content sites and slowly trying to build brands around them. I’ve learned that I can’t have all my eggs in one basket and I can’t keep starting new things. I don’t have as many working hours so I need to be careful with how I spend them and accept I can’t do everything. I’ve accepted that I don’t need to earn millions but I’d rather enjoy life. Like Kirsty I want to be a Pretty Good Affiliate and don’t wish I was ‘Super’. Slow and steady is the way forward even if it is a little dull these days!

Sorry for the self indulgent trip down memory lane but if you’ve read this far you must have some memories to add in the comments about the last ten years or so

Three and a half years after sending this visitor to Buyagift I’ve just made £7.76

The affiliate program is on Affiliate Window and I interviewed Graham Keen from Buyagift around the same time as I sent that first click

A quick note to thank Gone Digging for the wine I received recently. It’s great to see the personalised bottles for real and in the boxes it does make for a great gift.

The Gone Digging affiliate program is on Webgains and they are also running a competition at the moment to win yourself some personalised wine. You can follow Jim Kinloch on twitter for more info about how to win.

It’s also nice that I can write two articles about this gift including one over at my wine site about personalised wine gifts

Thanks also to Nadeem at Azam Marketing for sorting this out.

Currently eBay pay out a CPA on new users and a percentage of revenue from sellers fees but from 1st September they are going to switch to a new concept which they have called Quality Click Pricing. As the most simple level this is a switch to CPC payouts which may seem like a strange step at first but the CPC payment is going to be based on the quality of the traffic and vary for each publisher on a daily basis.

The quality algorithm is based on both the short term and long term value of the click to eBay with various elements deciding an EPC on a daily basis. For example sales completed closer to the click time would be valued higher as there is more direct evidence that the click contributed to the sale. In some ways this is an attempt to vary the ‘last click wins’ approach that is currently in place with most affiliate programs and to help content affiliates and others who produce quality sites. Since eBay can tell what a click from a specific affiliate is normally worth to them then it’s a creative way to pay appropriately.

Julia said that the motivation for this change was to see their good affiliates rewarded with higher payouts and their bad affiliates to earn less as an incentive to improve. eBay believe that some of their smaller affiliates are providing some of their best quality traffic and so this allows them to invest in growing that side of the network. During the beta test they also found that it encouraged some affiliates to work on improving their traffic either through developing their own sites or looking at their traffic sources.

More info is available on the eBay blog including the official press release.

From my point of view it seems a bold move and I hope it’s one that works out well. It’s nice to see a creative approach to solving a problem and they seem to have avoided the Adsense approach which leaves you without a clue about why some clicks earned so much more than others. I’d be really keen to hear in the comments any other opinions or from people active on the eBay Partner Network about how you think the change will affect you.

As a side note we also discussed that eBay doesn’t seem to be talked about much in the UK affiliate marketing community and I wasn’t totally sure of the reasons behind this. Are many of you active on the eBay network? Given that eBay.co.uk’s unique audience was over 17m in June this year it seems we are all buying and selling there but not talking about the affiliate program!

Leo Fogarty sent me over some questions via email which I did my best to answer for his blog. Head over there and have a read if that’s of interest.

The Books Direct entry was based around the alternative to brand name bidding that Paul Wheatley and I worked on last year.

Here is an extract from the Books Direct email about awarding the prize money.

So there were a total of thirty tickets in the draw and the final prize pool totaled £17,331.86. Sarah Day – the Online Marketing Manager for Books Direct presented a company update to the attending affiliates followed by a short open discussion. Some interesting suggestions on how to improve the Books Direct programme were raised and we will be looking at how best to implement these in the very near future.

Finally, after months of anticipation the time came to pick the two winners. Helen Smith, Head of Online and Creative at Books Direct performed the honour and the first name to be pulled from the draw was easyfundraising.org.uk. Unable to attend the day we were able to contact Jonathan Scott on the phone later in the afternoon to share the good news. The second winning ticket that was pulled out belonged to Richard Gibson from Freebiejeebies.co.uk. Richard was in attendance and needless to say utterly delighted at the result!

So congratulations to both easyfundrasing.org.uk and Freebiejeebies.co.uk, both win a staggering £8,665.93 each!

It was good to try something a little different and hopefully it’s worked well for the Books Direct affiliate program as a whole.

I recognised most of the obvious gifts but I’ll need to do some research about the benefits of Manuka Honey before I give it a try!

The program is available on Webgains with a healthy 20% commission.

I think I also got a bit fed up with complaining about the same old things that don’t change and it doesn’t seem as much fun to write about the affiliate marketing industry anymore so I thought I should probably try to write more about what I’ve actually been doing.

I’ve chosen to take some work again from a couple of old web development clients which really keeps things interesting. Just working on the same things each day and not getting out the office is a bit dull at times so it’s always good to keep up with a few different businesses.

I’ve also started a couple of new sites in field that I’m really interested in but don’t yet know too much about – wine! I’ve always enjoyed an occasional glass but I’ve never known what I was drinking or why I liked it so I thought it was time to find out and develop some sites along the way. This led me to starting a site about White Wine and one about Red Wine.

I’ve been using WordPress and the Thesis theme for these sites. Thesis is more of a framework to build on than the usual style of designed theme but it makes all the updates easy and is a great starting point. Definitely Recommended

There are seperate surveys for UK and US affiliates but you can find all the details over on the Econsultancy blog

Question #1 – Who Do You Host With?

Al	“For my US targeted sites like Coolest Gadgets I host with ASmallOrange, PowerVPS, BlueHost and a few other resellers. For my UK sites I use Clook.”
Shawn	“RackSpace. I’ve had dedicated servers with many different hosts, and RackSpace is the best. They’re more expensive than some other companies, but they live up to their claim of “fanatical support.” Their staff is incredibly fast, responsive and helpful.”
Scott	“We host at a number of places, tests that have accumulated over the years, but the one that we do the most with is LiquidWeb. We have several dedicated servers there running on a private network with load balancing. I’ve also been experimenting with several of the VPS/Cloud providers out there, Mosso, Slicehost, GoGrid, and Linode. I think we’re settling on Linode for fast deployment of servers. Hopefully this solution will help us scale better than we have been able to in the past.”

Question #2 – What are the most important features in choosing a web host for you as an affiliate marketer?

Al	"Uptime and speed of response of support, ideally being able to contact them 24/7 via IM or phone."
Shawn	"Reputation of the host, uptime, customer service and technical support."
Scott	"For us, the single most important feature is the ability to customize the server. We do a lot with custom code and need to be able to install apache modules, compile PHP, add in libraries and compile third party code. This is another reason we’re shifting away from Cpanel servers as we find we’re working around Cpanel more and more with the stuff we do."

Question #3 – You’ve probably had your share of bad and good hosting experiences. Do you have any tips for new affiliates looking for a hosting company?

Al	“Don’t rely on just your host for backups, do your own as well. If a host accidentally deletes all your data; get them to restore from a backup and move to another host BEFORE telling them exactly what you think of their crappy service”
Shawn	"Ask around on affiliate forums on which companies others are using. And don’t bargain hunt – I did that in the past and wound up with a company that only kept a one-day backup of my files. The long and short is that I was operating a forum and it was hacked (I didn’t keep an archive of the files locally), and the host didn’t respond to me within 24 hours of the hacking. They simply wouldn’t answer my calls or emails for an entire business day. During that time, their system overwrote my backup with the hacked version and I lost two years of content."
Scott	“You can save a lot of money by buying a year or two of hosting instead of monthly. Read the small print, but typically you’ll get refunded for what you don’t use, even if you buy in advance.”

A big thank you to Shawn, Al & Scott for contributing. This guest post is by Toni Allen from Who Is Hosting This, who have just added hosting reviews and hosting coupons to the popular webmaster tool.

Alison, Cheryl and the rest of the team have been working hard to improve things at CJ UK as the podcast with Alison also shows. Amongst others Doug and Nadeem seem to enjoying dealing with CJ again too.

Overall it’s good to see one of the older networks moving forward again and taking positive steps.

p.s. The other thing I learned yesterday is that ostrich is really tasty

If you are in the Edinburgh area or if you want to make the trip then I’m organising an informal Christmas drinks event this Thursday – more details and free registration on the eventbrite page.

More details in this thread on a4u or the same on acorndomains.

The competition kicked off at 9am in Edinburgh yesterday and so during the morning I thought I would follow events and see how quickly he was found but in the end no-one apart from the social media whirlwind that is Mike Coulter managed to catch up with him.

With that in mind I thought it was time to hit the road so accompanied by my wife and one year old daughter we drove into town, abandoned the car and took off up the High Street in search of his last known position. I think we managed to get ahead of liveguy and ended up on the castle esplanade where all the staff & stewards were wearing liveguy style bright read coats just to confuse the issue.

By this point I was getting help from Kieron by SMS along with Twitter support from davelaw00 , weblivz, ewarwoowar and michellepen so thanks to you all for the advice!

We started to wander back down the High Street and suddenly spotted him standing on the corner so I ended up sprinting down the road to greet him with “You’re liveguy and I’m a Vodafone winner”. After a bit of hesitation liveguy confirmed I was a winner but only because the morning netbook had not been claimed by Mike so it was carried over.

The afternoon netbook had been claimed five mins earlier by Jay from Freak Marketing author of a really interesting facebook app called Get Them In so that’s worth a look too.

We had to hang around for another ten minutes or so to sign a model release form! We filled in the paper work and then headed home. The only slight down side was that we now have to wait for up to a month to actually get the netbook sent out It would have been more exciting to go home with it there and then but that’s just a minor issue.

All in all it was great to meet liveguy and leave a winner and it’s a great promotion and demonstration of the capabilities of the Vodafone Netbook. It was also good to meet Stylist Brighton from Shiny Media who was also on the trail of liveguy and here is her video from the day. I arrive near the end!

Check out the liveguy website and see if liveguy is visiting your home city as it could be well worth getting out there to look for him!

I then had some time to take in the exhibition and hang around at the Existem-AM stand which seemed to be where you could find the affiliates throughout the conference!

Next session was about PR by 10yetis and once again it was an excellent presentation with some great tips. I was surprised to hear that free newspaper The Metro is consider the most influential newspaper.

From there I moved on to the presentation by Nora from Sedo which was interesting as I’ve been getting more into domaining recently. The number of cases studies of businesses which have rebranded just to match a generic domain was pretty amazing.

Finally I made it along to the Super Affiliates session which was both entertaining and inspiring. In some ways it wasn’t so much about learning new information (apart from Shak’s story which was new to me!) but about being inspired about what is actually possible.

The second night party was really enjoyable although the private Sky party did mean things were a bit disjointed which was a shame. Maybe that’s just because I didn’t get in but it did mean I couldn’t catch up with those who were behind the closed doors!

All in all it was a fantastic couple of days and a job well done by all at Existem.

I had an early start but got down to London in time for the intro by Matthew Wood from Existem and the keynote by Michael Nutley from NMA then the full programme started at 11am.

I went to the WordPress SEO session by Joost de Valk which was excellent and packed full of useful tips. I think I probably need to set aside a couple of days to install about 20 plugins now though! The most useful tip that I took away was to look at hardcoding certain parts of the wordpress theme like the blog title instead of causing another database query for something that never changes. Load time has always been the one area of WordPress I’ve been disappointed with so I’m hoping that making these changes will help.

I went to the bonus lunchtime session held by sunshine.co.uk where they released their sunpress plugin which looks pretty impressive and will be a great starting point for a WordPress travel site.

Next session I went to was the Extreme SEO session which was fairly lively and in between the chaos there were some great tips. Lots of chat about taking out your competitors with negative SEO rather than improving your own site though which was slightly disturbing! The dominate subject was link building and it does seem to show that as long as you take care of some basic on page SEO issues the main thing you should be worrying about is links.

The final session of the day was the Affiliate State of the Nation panel which I moderated. It seemed to go pretty well and there was some good discussion about issues facing the industry. Most interesting for me was the issues about affiliates either wanting to grow large businesses or keep it as a lifestyle business. Thanks to Kieron for speaking up on that point of view. I was also amused to be sitting on the stage watching Shane Robinson fall asleep in the second row.

It was great at the end of that session to bump in to Pete Sipple from Frequencycast which is a podcast I have been listening to for some time and which I would highly recommend.

Finally the night finished with a cruise on the Silver Sturgeon which made for a great end to the day.

It’s a great looking site too and now that I have bought a Wii to go with the Wii Fit I’ll be staying signed up to keep an eye on the best prices for games.

Making Money From Big Brother

Rachel Rice became the unlikely winner of the ninth series of Big Brother on Friday night after surviving 93 days cooped up in the house and seeing off 20 other contestants.

Mindless drivel? Absolutely. Not interested in the slightest? Well, as an affiliate marketer you should be because it is very easy to cash in on Big Brother and indeed other reality television shows.

By creating simple blogs about the contestants on these shows you can pull in thousands of unique visitors every day for free and make money from affiliate marketing, all for relatively little work.

There, I thought that would grab your attention.

Which Contestants to Blog About

Big Brother contestants have an extremely short shelf-life and often fall off the radar as soon as they leave the house. This is especially true of the male contestants and is it any wonder they form “relationships” with the female’s on the show to prolong their time in the spotlight upon their exit?

With this in mind and to maximise your earnings from the effort you put into maintaining the blogs, it is recommended you create blogs for just the younger “sexy” female contestants. They tend to do photoshoots for the lads mags and go on to release DVDs, calendars, or even attempt a pop career; products which can all be promoted as an affiliate later down the line.

However, first of all you need to create your blog and establish it at the top of the search engines. Here is a step-by-step guide on how you can make easy affiliate profits from Big Brother.

1. Register an Appropriate Domain Name

Since you will be creating a blog for a single contestant, it is imperative you register a domain name which includes both their first name and surname.

This is because you should view their name as a “new” keyword and there will be very little competition in Google. The night Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace was introduced to the show two years ago, there were only three competing web pages for the keyword “Aisleyne” – today there are almost half a million!

Including both names in the domain will help a lot in terms of search engine optimisation but you should also include something like “fan” or “unofficial” after their name so you do not run into any legal problems in the future.

2. Set Up the Blog

From a SEO and time perspective, WordPress is the easiest method to set up a professional looking blog which can be optimised for the search engines easily. Plus, Google loves blogs which are created with WordPress.

Find an appropriate theme from one of the many free WordPress theme directories online, upload it and you are ready to start blogging!

3. Adding Content

While you want to keep the website updated regularly, to attract new visitors and links from forums, other blogs etc, you don’t want to spend too much time maintaining your blog, especially if you have more than one.

Therefore, the easiest way to update the blog with new content is to trawl Youtube for new video clips featuring the contestant in question. There are several hardcore Big Brother fans who systematically upload video clips within hours of the highlights and eviction shows ending so you will not be short of blog material!

You should also accompany each video clip with a short editorial or opinion piece to add in keywords and optimise each blog post further for the search engines.

4. Making Money

Your new blog will rank within a matter of days for the contestant’s name and while it is easy to draw thousands of unique visitors to your blog every day, making money from that traffic is a little more tricky.

By far the easiest way to make money from the traffic is Google Adsense and at the height of my own success with Big Brother, I was making around £1,000 per month across about five blogs.

Last year I experimented with several affiliate programmes and made a few hundred dollars per month from Adult Friend Finder. However, I didn’t make a single affiliate sale for the adult videos featuring either Imogen Thomas or Lea Walker when I blogged about them both two years ago. Needless to say, Adsense was swiftly reintroduced on both counts.

Two areas which are worthwhile pursuing are official DVDs and calendars featuring the contestants. Four years on DVDs featuring Sam Heuston and a joint-effort from Shell and Vanessa are still selling well on Amazon while Chanelle Hayes from last year’s show is releasing a second calendar for 2009, proving some Big Brother contestants are capable of providing a long-term income for affiliate marketers.

Conclusion

Creating simple, search engine optimises blogs about Big Brother contestants are an easy way to make some money during the show’s run and also for the longer term if the contestant’s are successful enough.

In my opinion, it is an ideal way for a budding affiliate marketer to cut their teeth in the industry because these blogs are guaranteed to attract a lot of traffic and make some money. You are unlikely to get rich by blogging about Big Brother, but there is the potential to make a decent passive income. Who knows, if a contestant becomes successful enough after the show ends, you my be able to sell your content-filled, Google ranking website for a sizeable amount!

David Walker is the director of Affiliate Dragon, a company which provides marketing services and a place where you can find a web business for sale.

Give me a shout if I haven’t added your blog yet or go ahead and add it yourself.

I’ll only accept UK based quality affiliate marketing related blogs but I’m sure there are loads out there that I still need to include

Update – Location changed to http://affiliateblog.co.uk/topblogs/

After messing around for ages I couldn’t get Technorati rankings to work so I had to move this back to affiliatemarketingblogs.co.uk

The well respected Free UK Stuff affiliate site operates on a best practice policy for email. Basically if the user signs up and requests offers and can prove that it really is their email account then they will be sent the offers they have requested.

However in what appears to be a thinly veiled advert for McAfee the BBC have run such a poorly researched piece that in the video they even include the user completing the double opt-in process on Free UK Stuff and then they call the messages which they requested spam! Then they continue to allege that email addresses are sold to less reputable companies down the line.

I strongly suggest that someone even slightly technically competent gets involved in their technology stories in the future before they make any more blunders like this one.

More on the story from site owner Clarke Duncan.

I’ve watched a few episodes of BizPod TV now and it’s definitely interesting viewing for small business owners. One of the people behind the show is podcaster Alex Bellinger of SmallBizPod which I have previously recommended for adding to your ipod.

With all that in mind what are the main questions you would like answered regarding discount vouchers in affiliate marketing? This can be from your point of view as an affiliate, merchant or network. It looks like we’ll have 4 or 5 experienced voucher code affiliates on the call so I hope you can get the benefit of getting your questions answered.

One of my larger merchants that I sent almost £500,000 of sales to this year hasn’t even sent me a happy Christmas email and again it’s strange how that changes the way I feel about working with them next year. It’s also interesting that my adwords spend didn’t manage to earn me a Christmas present from Google this year although I’ve had something in previous years.

Anyway, on to the Thank You’s!

• Thanks to Graham & everyone at Buyagift for the 6 bottles of Bollinger – unfortunately there are only 5 left
• Thanks to Clarke & all at Paid On Results for the very fancy bottle of Jack Daniels
• Thanks to Matthew & the folks at Existem for the bottle of Veuve Clicquot Champagne
• Thanks to Sarah at Books Direct for a fantastic pile of holiday reading! I really love books so this was a great gift.
• Thanks to All at Affilinet for the lovely hamper.

So it’s time now to think about finishing up for Christmas and I’m about to head out on my work Christmas lunch. That’s right my company secretary (& wife!) are heading out for turkey and all the trimmings!

Happy Christmas to everyone and best wishes for 2008

Anna arrived this morning at 10:48am – three weeks early but looking great and doing well

Prezzybox Christmas Plans

They’ve got WordPress widgets, video widgets, content units, gift wizards, nice banners, customised landing pages, discount vouchers, best sellers and then best of all a huge competition with lots of different prize categories so that there is something for everyone.

Wow!

Sign up to the Prezzybox program over at Paid On Results or have a listen to Zak on the podcast.