We spent a while looking around the internet on various holiday rental sites and eventually we found this little gem on Owners Direct, the house is in Carbis Bay, St. Ives in Cornwall with what only I can describe as a bloody amazing view, I love the sea and this was just perfect, the whole house was amazing too, no expense spared, a great big 60″ TV with Bose surround sound perfect for playing FIFA 12 on the Xbox too!

Here’s a few pictures of the place, most of the time you hope a place will be as good as the pictures, this was in fact better!

I transferred a few domains I’d bought into 1&1, every single one had a ‘domain registration error; next to them in my account, the DNS was still pointing to the previous host, I had requested the DNS was changed to 1&1 upon transfer but this didn’t happen, I reset the DNS to point to 1&1 and waited 48 hours and still it wasn’t pointing to 1&1.

A few emails went back and forward with 1&1 support, basically them telling me to do what I had already done despite me telling them I’d done exactly that in my first email to them, eventually they told me they had to escalate it to another department, I phoned support and asked to speak to that department and was told I could only email them, I emailed them many many times with no reply, that was the last I heard of it, that was in January 2011.

To fix this I basically had to cancel the domains from my contract and request them again, but this involved me having to change the registrar at Nominet as cancelling them made them have no registrar assigned, so £12 just to get them to point to the right place, after I’d already paid the £12 to have them transferred to my name at Nominet in the first place!

Recently I transferred another two domains in to 1&1 and have had the exact same problem, first line support reply stating they can’t see any problem and to send screenshots, so send screenshots showing the error message next to my domain and also a screenshot showing no DNS settings, I mean how bloody thick can they be that they can’t see this? They also tell me to check the whois records of a .org.uk at Internic?!

So basically after me asking them if they actually read my emails they have escalated it to the non existent department, whom I don’t expect to get back to me anytime this century so I’m left again with having to pay another £12 just to be able to use my domains, I’m thinking of sending them an invoice for these £12′s that keep adding up and then issuing county court papers when they don’t pay them!

So I suppose this is a post to ask for recommendations on hosting providers, with over 200 domains it’s a process I’m not looking forward to doing though.

Back in November I received an email from the Mirror newspaper about advertising one of my sites in an 8 page Christmas Gift Guide (gifts for him section) they were going to be running, this supplement was to go in the Mirror newspaper on 25th November and then online for 3 weeks from 29th November, the online part was the bit that excited me most, I wasn’t expecting to get much traffic from the published article but from past experience of having a site featured on the Mirror website and the traffic it generated I did think it would be worthwhile.

So, the 25th November came, I popped to the shop to get my copy of the Mirror to see my site featured in all it’s glory except there was no Christmas Gift Guide in it, I fired off an email to my contact asking where it was, I got a reply the next day telling me it was in on the 26th instead, I’d found this out by buying the paper anyway, the Ad looked great, I did get a little bit of traffic from this but nothing to write home about at all, which was fine as it was still the online part I was most interested in.

On the Mirror home page there is a 145×145 image that says “Gift Guide – Check out our Christmas present ideas” this is where, naively, I expected the Christmas guide to appear online, Monday 29th November came and excitedly I go to their website to see what it looks like and click ‘that’ gift link and there’s nothing new on that page, especially nothing to do with the 8 page guide that appeared in the paper.

I left it a couple of days expecting it to appear before emailing asking why it wasn’t on the site, I was then sent a link to it, it was tucked deep within the site where no one would ever find it because the link was ‘advice/christmas/gift-guide/for-him/’ so you’d expect to see a link to it from ‘advice/christmas/gift-guide/’, but no there was no such link to it on that page or anywhere else at all, I pointed this out and then some links were added to that page, I asked a few people to see if they could find the page and no-one could, you’d have to actually be given the link to even see the page. I was told the value was in the online part as the money goes towards running the print guide, I felt it was a waste of time being online as there was no chance of anyone just stumbling across it.

By this time I’d pretty much passed caring and put it down to experience and naively expecting a Christmas gift guide to be linked to from the homepage, I received an email saying they were running a small ad box in the newspaper every day to make people aware of the gift guide, then another email saying they were running a big 300×300 ad box on the homepage pointing to the gift guide, great that’s something I thought, except that ad box online only lasted about 8 hours!

So all in all a complete waste of time, I’m sure I’m not the only one from that guide who feels that way, I could’ve wasted that money on an IPad instead, the Mirror website is just a mass of adverts these days, one to avoid.

The main reasons seem to be thin affiliate/bridge page/whatever sites, which fair enough not many can argue about, but I don’t really see why Google feel the need to do this, if I wanted to advertise a thin affiliate site in a national newspaper or on the TV then I could (as long as I had the funds), Google could just let people fight amongst themselves whilst paying them a lot of money to appear in their sponsored listings.

I wouldn’t mind if I could just go to another search engine and use PPC, well I could, but it doesn’t have the same effect as Google, where I’d spend £100+ on Google adwords for that site I pay less than £2 a month on Bing, Google is ‘the internet’ to most users, people say if Google keep doing this advertisers will find somewhere else, but is that going to make a difference as it’s the ‘users’ that will still be ‘using’ Google for their search, they are the ones who would need to go elsewhere for Google to sit up and take notice.

Since my adwords account was banned I actually make more money, I’ve had to focus more on SEO so in a way I actually find it a blessing, but now when I’ve got a site that I know would do good with the help of adwords I can’t as I have no account, banned forever, I’m actually quite concerned about what else Google may do to affiliate sites, especially within the natural listings.

If I want to search for something in Google I will just go straight ahead and type the keyword(s) and click enter, and I still will now, I don’t have time to stop and see what Google might suggest for me and I’m sure it will be the same for millions of other people, I’m also sure if they are doing a search they know exactly what they want to look for so will just go ahead and type the search phrase they want and by the time they look up from their keyboard’s Google will have suggestions matching exactly what they have just typed.

It doesn’t seem to have had any effect on where my sites are ranking for their respective keywords either, personally I find it more annoying than helpful, and that’s with my user hat on.

But, also saying that, when searching for some of my keywords, for example my Mens Polo Shirts site, it shows up in the results after just getting as far as mens p, so that could help me get the people who look up after every letter they type to visit the site, you never know, those searching for mens perm might want a polo shirt too

A few months back I had a cull of domains because I just had too many and thought i’d never get sites done on them all, so I sold a few and just trashed the ones I knew wouldn’t actually make any decent amount of money, I registered some that had around 50k local exacts but the products only cost a few pounds so the commission generated from the sales would have been peanuts and been very uninspiring.

Anyway back to the cull, I managed to get down to around 130 domains, but today I now sit at 174, more than I’ve ever owned! I need to stop now, I think i’ve got enough to be getting on with, when I actually think about how many domains I have to develop I think I’m going to have a panic attack

Anyone else the same?

I will certainly be trying to increase sales to Red Letter Days so as to move up a tier to gain an even better prize!

Luckily I like everything that’s in it

Red Letter Days Christmas Incentive Sweetie prize

As I’m sure with most affiliates I spend so much time in front of the PC, which as well as working on affiliate sites I get distracted by looking for new sites to make and then realising I have enough to get on with, so distraction probably plays a big part of why I sit in front of a PC for so long.

Life as an affiliate

I’ve promoted buyagift since I first started in affiliate marketing, and it’s things like this that makes me continue to promote them, and now I have my own blog I can thank them publicly

Now to find a longer straw!

Sometimes i’m after content to be written a bit quicker, I can be impatient at times, so I took a look over at digitalpoint for some content writers, advertising for people with a good grasp of English, I’d get plenty of messages from people willing to do the job and the rates were silly, so I gave some a go.

Now there’s a big difference between understanding English and writing in English it seems, they can write English words but cannot make it flow in English very well, “The hat he wears is blue. The blue hat can be worn on the head”, the sctructure of their writing seems to be a lot of sentences put together to form some content.

There are also some very good writers on digitalpoint, I think it just takes a bit of trial and error to find the good ones, but given the choice of paying $4/100 words(ok) over £15/500 words(perfect) I’d rather pay more every time.