You may remember last year, just before Christmas, I had a bunch of Adwords vouchers to give away. I now have a big bundle of £30 vouchers to give away. So if you’re interested, fill out the form below, or if you know someone who may be interested, send them my way. These vouchers are for new accounts only and they must be less than 14 days old.

Within a very short period of time, I’d had a number of companies interested in the advertising deal and by the evening of the 27th, I had secured a deal with the very kind lot at Affiliate Window/buy.at. I was able to negotiate the offer down to just 5 years exclusive advertising (and 10 years in total) in exchange for a brand spanking new iPad.

Therefore, without much further ado, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome Affiliate Window and buy.at as my new super duper blog sponsors! If you are unfamiliar with either network, then I recommend you take a moment to visit their sites. They are the #1 and #2 affiliate networks in the UK, especially in terms of the calibre of merchants they have on board.

Thanks again to Lisa Chaikin and the rest of the team for helping push this deal through. I am in love with my iPad!

I then had a conversation with Dan Martin, of BusinessZone.co.uk over a pint. Dan pointed out that LastMinute.com have something called “Top Secret Hotels”, which were basically generally very nice hotels at pretty dang low prices. So, next time I was planning a trip to London, I fired up the Last Minute site and searched for hotels in London, and then narrowed my search to “Top Secret Hotels Only” to bring up a list of about 20 mystery hotels. In case you havent worked out what a top secret hotel is, its basically when you book a hotel based solely on a title, description, star rating and a rough idea of the location. You do not know the name of the hotel, or even the chain which it belongs to (if any). This process may seem a little risky, as you could get a pretty crap hotel, but fear not, there is a site which reveals what the hotels are before you book!

Your Secret Hotel provides a list of hotels which are in the top secret list on LastMinute and “reveals” them for you, so that you can find out what you’re booking before you book. They also have a submit a hotel page, allowing you to inform them of the true identity of a top secret hotel if they do not already have it on their site.

So, to cut a long story short, I managed to get a very nice 4* hotel in Shepherds Bush for under £100 and the next time I’m going down to London, I have managed to bag 3 nights at a 5* hotel for just £294. Had I booked through the hotel’s website, I would have been charged just under £500! I should also point out at the time of me going down, a travellodge for 3 nights was coming in at over £300. Good deal huh?

So, if you are travelling to London (or anywhere actually, they seem to have most cities covered on LastMinute) and dont want to pay over the odds for your room, give LastMinute.com and YourSecretHotel.co.uk a look.

Enjoy!

I was lucky enough to get my hands on an iPad earlier this week (blog post coming very shortly explaining how I managed to get it for free!) and so naturally had to get my hands on a case to keep my new gadget safe (I’m a little bit clumsy!). I initially bought one of the official Apple cases…

It looks alright, but after spending 24 hours with it I realised it wasnt really what I was after. This appears to be created more for functionality, as in you can make the iPad stand horizontally or vertically, I guess for if you’re wanting to watch something on it without holding it. I decided I’d try and find something a little more stylish that did a better job at protecting the ipad, rather than simply making it easier to stand on its own. The Apple case doesnt really do much to convince me that it’d keep my iPad safe if I were to drop it.

So, after a bit of research, I came across a company in London called Knomo Bags. I fell in love with pretty much everything they have immediately! With a price tag of £54.99, their iPad Slim Sleeve was a little pricier than I was hoping to pay, but with it being made from real leather, and it looking damn swish, I decided to take a punt and ordered it in brown.

The case arrived this morning and I’m so impressed with it I have to share it with you lot. If you have an iPad you must get your hands on one of these. Knomo obviously give a lot of attention to detail. This case comes in a very nice brown leather finish and also has a velvet material on the inside, I guess to make sure your iPad feels loved at all times! With such a snug fit, you might think it’d be a little tricky to remove the iPad, but Knomo obviously had their common sense hat on while designing this product and included a pull tab that slides your iPad out an inch or so, allowing you to grab it with ease.

It is well worth £54.99 and I’ve now got my eyes on a Laptop Bag and potentially a suitcase aswell! Although their stuff is quite expensive, in this case (pun very much intended!), you get what you pay for.

Voodoo Rooms turned out to be a nice place to grab a few pre-dinner drinks and for everyone to get to know each other (quite a few of us had met before, however there were a few new faces) and Grand Cru provided top notch nachos (only reason I wanted to go! we used to go after work in my Bright Grey days), some questionable service, but generally a nice place to neck some ciders and have a chat!

In attendance were Fraser Edwards, Elaine and Dave Forth, Clarke Duncan, Jonathan Cannovan, Geoff IdleBull (not his actual second name, but its works!), Khalid Al-Khames (sometimes referred to as Ethan), Dom Hodgson, Fiona Robertson, Chris Cathcart, Tommy (Mr. Glasgow.com) and myself! It was a great night (which I named #ScotAff10 on Twitter, which went down well with the group), and I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with people with similar interests to my own. I’m keen to get something similar arranged for later on this year. So if you’d be interested in coming to ScotAff10.2 leave a comment and when we get round to organising it you’ll be the first to know! Maybe arrange #XmasScotAff10!

Here are a few pics from the night…

(Elaine, Dave, Fraser and Chris)

(Tommy and Fiona)

(Geoff, Dom and Clarke)

(Johnathan and Khalid)

(A few drinks later at Grand Cru!)

(and finally, Clarke took a photo of me tweeting all the pics!)

Thanks for everyone who made the effort to come along, I think you’ll agree it was a great night and we should definitely do it again sometime soon?

Theres two things worth noting in this image. The top ppc results are now surrounded by a nice pinkish colour. As someone who likes a bit of PPC, I’m loving this as I’m sure it’ll help increase click through rates. Secondly, the top result is indeed a credit card comparison by Google! Good luck taking that number one slot from them.

So, is this the beginning of the end for affiliate marketing, or have we nothing to worry about?

So, you want to know exactly how many searches a term gets every month, week or day? Well, a simple technique I use shows you exactly that. I’m not suggesting this technique is in any way new, or innovative. It’s a simple technique that many newbies may not have heard of, so I figured it is worth sharing.

Whenever I am researching a niche to try and identify whether it will be profitable or not, the first thing I do is punch the keyword (and as many variations as I can think of) into the Google Keyword Tool. If this shows a nice high number of exact matches per month, I then use this trick to identify how many searches there are in reality. All I do is setup an adwords campaign for the exact match keyword, and setup an ad that I know wont get clicked due to irrelevancy. It’s a good idea to have a seperate account to do this, as Google won’t be keen on you if you do this regularly, so you don’t want this method tainting your regular campaigns. To make the ad irrelevant, I tend to just put something about me (it’s ALL about me haha)! For example, I was recently researching a fishing niche (not my usual tipple, but if its profitable, I’m there!) and put up the following ad…

Not all that interesting is it? Well, that’s the point! I had the ad on page one 100% of the time for the chosen keyword for a week, and received 0 clicks. So for a grand total of £0.00 I managed to find out exactly how many searches the term receives over a week. Obviously you’d have to take seasonal issues into account, and whether the product is more popular at certain times of the month, but this gives you a great idea of how popular the term is, with real data that you’ve gathered yourself. Needless to say, the term received a hell of a lot less searches than the Google Keyword Tool suggested, but I’m still going to rock with the niche, cause theres zero competition!

A few weeks back, I accidentally dropped my Logitech Harmony One Universal Remote Control from the side of my bed to the wooden floor below, and unfortunately the screen took the brunt of the fall and the LCD display was internally cracked. The remote was still working, with the touch screen working fine. The only issue was, I couldn’t see what I was pressing! So, the remote was rendered useless… insert sad face here.

People who know me well, know I’m not all that lucky when it comes to electronics. I’m lucky in that I have some cool gadgets, but unlucky in that they always seem to break (I’m not clumsy, its just down to luck, honest!). My contents insurance company soon found out how unlucky I am, and decided not to offer me a renewal, so I wasn’t able to simply claim the remote back on my insurance. However, this is where the magic happened. So, I phoned up Logitech Customer Support on 0800 032 64 33 (they’re dedicated Harmony Remote support number) to tell them of my issue, in an attempt to find out the cost of repair. I had struggled to find anyone online to repair the phone, so figured I’d go direct to Logitech. Turns out, they made the remotes to be unrepairable, as in they cannot be opened with ease. Logitech, then kindly asked me for a few details, and told me they’d send me a brand spanking new remote control for free (yes free!). All I had to do was send them a photo of my broken screen to prove it was bust, and they sent out a new one.

To me, this is phenomenal customer service. Logitech could easily have told me where to go, after all, it was me who dropped it! Instead, they were happy to provide me with a new remote, which they could have sold for in excess of £100 (sure it costs them a fraction of that to make, but still, I’m impressed!).

So, how do we go about setting up the page so that the user must become a fan/like it before they can view the content? Well, just follow these simple steps…

1. Setup the Facebook Page
If you have not already got a page setup, simply goto Facebook.com/Pages and hit the “Create Page” button. I’d suggest taking some time to consider the best name for the page, because once its chosen, you cannot change it at a later date (I’ve found this out the hard way, gaining hundreds of fans for a page, then realising I’d have been better off with a different name!). Once you’ve chosen the best name, do the usual stuff, such as adding a nice juicy image and adding a welcome spiel to the page.

2. Add Static FBML Application
Facebook Markup Language (FBML) is basically a language very similar to HTML, but for, you guessed it… Facebook! It allows you to do all sorts of funky things on additional tabs for your Facebook page and a great example of how it could be used is the BUCS page. In order to use FBML on your page, I’d suggest installing the Static FBML app. To do this, either search for “static fbml” on facebook, or go straight to the app page here. Then just select “Add to my page” below the app’s logo and choose the page you’d like to add it to. Now, browse back to your page, and you’ll see that a tab called “Boxes” has appeared. What I tend to do is hit the “+” button to the right of that and select”FBML” from the dropdown list.

Once you’ve added the application, you can remove all the tabs you don’t really need. I remove all of them (apart from the info tab as that’s not removable). To remove a tab, select it, then select the pencil next to the title, then select “Delete Tab”

3. Spruce up the FBML Tab
First things first, you want to rename the tab to something relevant. To do this, goto the page’s wall (or homepage I guess) and select “Edit Page” under the page’s image. Then scroll down to find the FBML tab, and click “Edit”.

You will then be confronted with two fields; the tab’s title and the actual FBML. Rename the tab by simply changing the title. Now you can get onto the actual FBML’ing that makes your content hidden. What I tend to do is create a quick blurb explaining why the user wants to become a fan/like the page, it could be that they receive a discount for my service, or it could be that they simply get access to the funniest image in the history of the internet, whatever your reason is, make it clear at this stage. So begin the FBMl with the quick blurb (this content will be visible to everyone). Follow this by telling the visitor that they must hit “Like” to view the content. You then need to use the <fb:visible-to-connection> tag to hide any content you wish hidden. Below is an image of a very simple example of how it could be done.

4. Make it the default tab
The final step is to make the tab the default tab. To do this, browse to the page’s wall and hit “Settings”, then just choose your new tab as the page’s default tab. Now whenever a non-fan visits your page they will see this tab first, prompting them to “Like” the page.

So, if you have a Facebook Page for your website or business, why not have a think about how you could increase your fan numbers by hiding some content? In the run up to the grand national, I created around 30 locally targeted pages (such as “You know you live in Aberdeen when…”) and managed to achieve just shy of 900,000 fans, I then promoted various Bookmaker deals to these fans and did very well in terms of commission! Good Luck with your pages, and I’d love to hear if this tip helped increase your fan numbers.

Recently, I found myself (as I quite often do) having an afternoon chat with experienced affiliate, Frank Paul, about our sites and what we’ve got going on at the moment. Next thing I know I’m striking a deal to buy a Lay Betting website. However, I wasn’t offering cash. Those of you who know Frank, know he doesn’t need the money, so a monetary offer was off the table. However, Frank does have a strange facination with Coca Cola. So we sealed the deal. 240 cans of Cola for the domain name LayBetting.org.uk and the site which was on it at the time. The site was receiving a nice amount of traffic from people looking for lay betting strategies and tips, so it was a no brainer for me. The Cola cost me around £55 from Tescos, including delivery direct to Frank’s door. I would need just 2 or 3 signups to the likes of Betfair or BetDaq in order to make my money back. Unfortunately for Frank (but fortunately for his kids, as he only allows them to drink Diet Coke), Tescos thought it would be ok to delivery 9 creates instead of 10, and only 4 crates of full fat coke, rather than 10!

Anyway, since taking control of the site, I’ve added a new wordpress theme, but as you can see I’m yet to add the content. Once the site has content, and a little bit of TLC I am confident I can make the site earn mid to high £xxx per month. However, as is the site’s made a whopping £20 commission, with one sign up to Betdaq, which I’m actually quite happy with considering the lack of content. I won’t retire just yet though!