Yeah, you didn’t really think I was going to settle down over here in Australia and not come up with some more ridiculously outlandish travel ideas, did you? Tsk, tsk, tsk you really should have known better!

Actually, these plans are not imminent but seeing as we have to get on a plane to go to the UK for our wedding… It’d be a shame not to go and visit a few places while we’re out and about, wouldn’t it?

OK, so here it is… my travel plan so far…

Obviously we are sticking around after the wedding to attend the most excellent A4UExpo - hope to see you all there for a chat and to toast our nuptuals! Before that, we’ll have been on a short honeymoon-ette somewhere Eupropean and warm.

Right after the Expo we’re getting our bahookies on a plane and heading for….

Singapore!

We’ll be jumping off the plane here and rampaging round one of the worlds cleanest and tidiest cities, not forgetting to visit the Raffles Hotel and have one of their fine Singpore Slings. Given our newlywed status I very, very nearly booked us into the Raffles. However the girl inside me who was brought up in a 2 bedroom council house just couldn’t let me do it. I can afford it, I just can’t bring myself to spend that much cash on a hotel room!!

After the hangovers have worn off (come on, I’m not only going to have one - look at the money I saved on the hotel room!) its back in a taxi to the airport where we will fly to Phuket and then jump a ferry to…

Railey Beach!!

Wooo hoo!! I’m absolutely delighted to be revisiting this isolated and chilled out beach. You have to catch a water taxi (aka a Thai man in a dodgy longtail boat) to get there as it’s not reachable by road.

However, we will not be slumming it fear ye not. We will be yumming up a bit of luxury in our hotel room complete with private outdoor spa at Railay Village Resort. Its going to be hard, but I’m going to tough my way through it.

Following on from that we will grab another boat and head for….

Koh Lanta!

We didn’t make it here on our last trip to Thailand, so we have decided to have a bit of a look at it and chill out for a few days. After that, we’ll be getting a ferry to….

Langkawi, Malaysia!

“What the hell” We thought. “Malaysia is right next door to Thailand… we’d be mad to miss the opportunity to sample what it has to offer!”

After this we head on back to Singapore and fly back to Queensland. The end of our fun? Nah! About ten minutes after we get back…

Chris Frost Arrives For His Holidays!!

For anyone who doesn’t know, Chris Frost is the jaded fellow on the far right. As you can see, he doesn’t mind a gin fizz or ten (so we all get along just great!) and we will be spending 2 to 3 weeks showing off the very best of Australia’s East Coast to Chris. We will probably take in Fraser Island and some other tropical gems as well as a trip round every bar in Brisbane! As Chris is a keen diver, himself and Duncan will be making like Charlie’s Angels and getting into their wetsuits for some underwater fun.

Once Chris has headed back to the UK, we will be working for 3 entire weeks. Then we’re off to…

Auckland, New Zealand!!

We will be spending a couple of weeks in this beautiful city catching up with Duncan’s family and swapping travel stories (our wedding has meant an awful lot of European trips for his parents and sisters!). We will be spending Christmas and New Year here before heading for…

New Zealand’s South Island!

We thought we’d better round things off with a bit of a tour of the South Island seeing as we missed it the last time. I’m desperate to see sights such as Milford Sound and the Glaciers.

Then…
It probably will be time to go home, because we will have spent 3 and a half months travelling here and there. We will probably have bought a house just before we leave so it’ll most likely be time to put away the backpacks again and do a bit of DIY.

Until….
2 months later when we get them back out again and go to a wedding in Ireland! Given my extreme talent for turning a simple journey somewhere into an outlandish travel extravaganza… anything could happen here, lol.

Phew… I’m not sure how all this happened, but I reckon its going to be a great start to our married life and of course will produce some rather amazing pictures to show off here.

Hurahh!!

Well, once again I’m delighted to have been put on the shortlist for the Affiliate Blog award at the 2008 Affiliate Marketing Awards.

It’s really fantastic to have had people pay me the huge compliment of giving this blog the nod because they’ve enjoyed reading my random outpourings on here. I am made up, so thanks all!

Affiliate Cinderella Has to Stay At Home…
The only injustice here is that I’m not going to be able to attend the Awards Ceremony on June 5th at the Park Lane Hotel, London. Anyone who knows me well will know that it has long been an ambition of mine to don a designer frock and attend just such a glittering occasion. *sigh* This wannabe glammed up affiliate dolly bird will just have to wait for another time

The other esteemed blog nominees are: -

• Jason Dale (www.onelittleduck.co.uk)
• Kieron Donoghue (www.here.org.uk)
• Lee McCoy (www.leemccoy.co.uk)
• Paul Wheatley (www.mooseontheloose.co.uk)

I read all of these blogs regularly and am delighted to see them up for the big prize. Particularly Jason, who’s often hilarious take on the world of the affiliate (and a fair bit of affiliate politics), is an extremely refreshing read. You got my vote Jason!

You Can Vote For Your Best Affiliate Blog Choice Here (and all the other awards also!). I’m not sure it’s entirely fair that Kieron only gets to hold last years title for 8 months - but hey, there’s every chance that won’t matter if he wins again!

Good Luck To All Nominees!

P.S. - Might I point out that once again Duncan hasn’t bothered his bahookie voting for me, despite being an A4U member. Still, not to worry. He can think about that when he’s sleeping on the couch this evening

Oh, you gotta love affiliate marketing sometimes. So the new Adwords rules went live on Monday and I was on alert for the search landscape to change. Nothing happened. Spin forward 24 hours, and as the new ads begin to show on big name brands such as Next and Currys… I give my Adwords account repeated checks for unexpected clicks from long forgotten adgroups. It was all fine.

“Phew.” I thought. “My long-term bad habit of always deleting the contents of old adgroups but leaving the ads up in case I later decide to promote the merchant another way is OK - I’ve not missed anything!”

With a happy heart and secure that all was well, I wandered off and spent a rare night having quality time with Duncan (as opposed to obsessing over affiliate-world).

Happy Happy Joy Joy…
Imagine my sheer delight at the whimsical nature of Adwords when I awoke from my repose this morning and logged into my “A-OK” Adwords account and saw these two beautiful lines in a campaign that only usually has a spend of around £35 a day in total.

Yep. That’s right, a couple of old ads from before the dawn of time which had been prohibited due to trademark issues, suddenly lept into life, and buggered right off with my cash. The top one doesn’t even have an effing affiliate programme any more.

Of course, this is my own fault for being incautious, I had absolutely no idea those ads were there. I can’t even remember putting them into my account. I bet I wasn’t the only one getting a shock when I logged into my PPC account today!

My only consolation is that my adgroup budget saved me from losing any more than a couple of hundred quid… but it did put a wee bit of a hole in yesterdays profits.

Its a bit like Christmas in reverse is this. Google coming down your account chimney and leaving you a present to find in the morning. Except Father Google Christmas doesn’t leave you a nice present, he leaves you a big bill for something you didn’t want.

AARRGGGHHH!!!!!!!

Just as a follow up to my last post, after I’d went on and on about how you should write copy for SEO a few people came back to me and said “But I can’t write at all? What’ll I Do? Should I Give Up on Affiliate Marketing If SEO Copy Is So Important?”

There Is Another Way…
For the last week I’ve been getting Duncan to help me out with copy. He has never been able to express himself in the written format as he has some quite serious issues with managing to get it all to “make sense” on paper. However, Duncan is a very articulate person in terms of being able to discuss things verbally. Given that I’m currently completely stacked out with mountains of copy waiting to be written, and don’t need much in terms of the technical work and graphics Dunc usually does for me, we decided something had to be done!

We’d heard mixed reports about speaking software (the stuff that writes down what you say), but decided… “what the hell, we’ll give it a go!”

So We Took The Plunge And…

We tried Dragon Naturally Speaking - And although it’s far from perfect (I was going to do a tally of how many times Duncan has said the word “F*ck” as a result of trying to train it to understand him but totally lost count!). It has given him the ability to come up with articles that are nicely structured and only need a small amount of editing to remove a small number of “funnies” that the software seems to put in there.

It has gotten better all the time mind you, so we’re expecting that he will get quicker and quicker using it as the software “gets used” to the way he speaks.

Phew…
It’s a huge relief to have him contributing in this way as the need for content surrounding every new brand and merchant was becoming a bit of a bottleneck in our operation, despite us having the help of one or two people with some copy. It’s one of the reasons I’m not able to blog as much at the moment, and I’m really, really missing writing in this blog as it helps me wind down in the evenings. Hopefully Dunc’s new role as a copywriter will help me get back to posting more often.

The Verdict - It’s Worth A Go If You’re Having Bother…
All in all, I have to say if you can talk about something but you have bother writing about it, you can probably use this software as a way to create your own copy. At £110, it’s not cheap but then you’d use that amount for 2 or 3 articles from a copywriter.

We bought our copy from Amazon.co.uk for £110 which was £40 off the RRP (nb, that’s not an affiliate link!)

Duncan Says….
That he feels the system resources the product description says you require are actually underestimated. This software is quite resource heavy and we had to upgrade the RAM in his computer to make it work properly. Therefore he thinks you’d need at least a 2 GHZ processor and at least 1000MB RAM to actually make the software function as it was intended.

If you use this software, let us know how you get on. Like I say, it’s not perfect but its really helped us out!