Well, thats it for us and the UK for a while folks. Tomorrow Duncan and I are taking off for yet more worldwide fun. I detailed our travel plans in a previous post.

We have so much to do in the next 6 or 7 months it’s very nearly overwhelming. Once we’ve done a little bit of travel, we’re off to the Sunshine Coast with a budget of $550,000 AUD to buy ourselves a nice house out there. It is with more than a bit of a backwards glance that we’ll be getting on the plane at Glasgow Airport tomorrow. I’ve had a great time catching up with my friends and buying lots of bridal finery for myself (and some of them!). I’m also going to miss all my fab affiliate pals who I’ve really enjoyed raising the odd jar or ten with at various events.

The downside to the lifestyle Duncan and I have at the moment is the upheaval. I’ve sort of got to the stage where I want to be settled in a nice posh pad of our own (and so’s Dunc!). However, to do this we’ve got to actually get off our bahookies and get something bought.

The other thing that’s causing me a bit of sadness is that my Grandfather passed away on Monday and I’m not going to be able to attend his funeral. The family had hoped it would be today (Thursday) so I could attend. But it wasn’t possible. Why? A GRAVEDIGGERS Strike! Honestly? Do you ever feel like the big man in the sky is getting at you?

And another thing. When does the funeral start tomorrow? Yes, just as my flight is due to take to the air in Glasgow at 1.30pm. I’m not the world’s best in airports / on aeroplanes most of the time, so I would like to take this opportunity to publicly apologise to everyone who has to deal with me tomorrow (specially poor old Dunc). I’m not going to be a happy chappess. Just between you and me, I am somewhat prone to hysterical outbursts at very stressful times. Could be an interesting departure for everyone

However, to end this on a positive note, thanks for reading the blog and I promise to post a bit more once we are away from the UK. I’ve not had a lot of time this month what with various wedding preparations, problems with my two investment properties, and general panic about leaving. I hope I’ve made up for lack of quantity with a little quality, lol.

I’ll be posting lots of pictures from Dubai, I only hope Duncan doesn’t get fed up with me and do a bit of a swap for a nice quiet camel or two.

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Adieu!

I know I talk a lot about WordPress on here… but I really can’t highlight enough just how great I really think it is for affiliates on a budget (or just plain stingy Scottish affiliates like me!).

I wrote my other guide -WordPress 101 – All You Need For An Affiliate Site a while back, and a lot of people found it quite useful.

But what happens when you want a little more complex solution for a broader more in-depth site? It’s off to the web developers, right? Stop right there oh hasty affiliate!!! WordPress is not simply a solution that will create a site based on a chronological “list” of data. You really can do an awful lot with it.

With that in mind, I am going to show you guys a site I have been developing since the start of November. With this site I think I’ve really shown what a cracking job you can do using WordPress, a bit of work, and a little basic HTML / CSS knowledge. Obviously what I am talking about here is not suitable for total beginners, but I genuinely feel that most people can achieve results like this after a relatively small learning curve.

(click image to open site in new window)

So as you all know, I do a lot in lingerie… this is my new SEO friendly lingerie site! It’s absolutely jam packed with unique content which funnels visitors through to a feed based section where all the products I hope to sell are at. As you’ll see, it already has a PR2 and it is already getting around 100uv’s per day despite being brand new.

Gosh Darn Kirsty, that’s awful good. However did you manage that?
Gee thanks guys, I’m happy with it too. Here’s a list of the things we used to make this.

1 ) A Premium Magazine Style WordPress Theme
We bought Brian Gardner’s Revolution Magazine Theme. As you’ll see from my site, the theme is insanely customisable using and comes in 2 or 3 column homepage designs. It costs just $79.99 for a single use. I bought a multiple use package for $249.. and Brian has since kindly reduced the price by $50 just to piss me off! However, for designing such a great theme, he may consider himself forgiven (for now). Cost £125

2. A Bit Of CSS Stylesheet Knowhow
We altered this theme a fair bit, but all we really had to know was some basic to medium stylesheet type stuff and we were able to sit down and completely alter all the colour schemes. If you want to see what some others have done with this same theme, check out Brian’s showcase section here… it really is amazing all the different ways you can customise a well thought out theme. Cost £0.00

3. A Teeny Tiny Bit Of Photoshopping
Duncan created the logos for me in Photoshop. He’s only got basic knowledge in Photoshop, but the site logo only took him ten minutes to actually create, with slightly longer to make some of the buttons. We got the fonts from one of them free font type sites and popped them into our Fonts folder in the C drive so Photoshop could then reference it. Cost £0.00

4. Some Really Cool WordPress Plugins
I pretty much used all the same WordPress plugins I referred to in the WordPress 101 post. I also bought a plugin to manage a newsletter subscription database. This cost me all of $15. I’m not going to link to it as the chap who was selling it didn’t respond to my communications when I could not get it to work. It’s only now working because the tech support guy at Clook was extremely, extremely helpful and told me what the issue was and how to fix it.

I also used a wordpress related posts plugin to help me add additional content to each of the pages I’ve created for the various Lingerie Brands I have featured so far. The one I found works the best for me was Similar Posts, by Rob Marsh. It was certainly the easiest to install and works out related posts based on their entire contents rather than just tags and titles. The idea with this is to constantly be adding fresh content to my various pages, thus keeping Google interested in paying me a wee visit.

I’m having a couple of issues with how this plugin looks on the news articles themselves. I’d really like there to be some kind of command that excludes related posts from being displayed in some categories. But hey… that’s a pretty minor grouse and one I might work out how to get over.

Finally, I found a totally awesome link exchange plugin by Eric Medlin which creates a link submission form for your WordPress blog and which also monitors whether or not people are continuing to reciprocate links and also records the page rank of the page on which your link is being displayed.
Cost £7.50

5. A Little Bit Of Dreamweaver To Make The Brand Profile Page Structure
We created a really basic table in Dreamweaver to format all the images within the lingerie brand profiles without the rich text editor stuffing them up. Again, only ten minutes work and something someone with a basic knowledge of Dreamweaver or simple HTML coding could do very quickly. Cost £0.00

6. Medium Range HTML, Dreamweaver & SQL Skills To Create The Feed Section
We re-created the blog template in static html and created a database driven affiliate feed site with Duncan’s SQL skills. He’s only a basic level competence in this, but he’s managed to put together a nice looking shopping area mirroring the blog design. I don’t think this is entirely necessary. You could also use a free service such as Affilistore if you wanted a feed site, and link to it from your blog navigation. Alternatively, don’t bother with the feed site… I felt it was a good fit for this subject area so have included it. However, linking direct to merchants would be just as effective in many cases.

7. A LOT Of Time Devoted To Content Writing – I’ve written 150 unique articles for this site so far, totalling somewhere in the region of 10,000 – 12,000 words. NB, if anyone even considers copying any of this content… do beware my notorious Scottish temper. I do check regularly and I am evil personified when you get on my bad side.

Despite the domain and site only being weeks old I am seeing good search engine rankings already, which really does show the value of good content. The “Content is King” adage is well worn for a reason. And as John Lamerton has been saying on his blog, Affiliates need to realise good unique content is the way forward. This is something I wholeheartedly agree with. Cost £0.00

Total Cost Of My Nice New Affiliate Site: £132.50, Plus One Hell Of A Lot Of My Time!

There’s still lots for me to do on this site, the brand possibilities are endless. I also want to add images to each of the post excerpts on the home page. Brian Gardiner has a fix for this, but for the life of me I can’t work out how to do it!

*guffaw* *snort* *chortle*

OK, I think I’m OK. Maturity levels are rising *snigger*, oops.

*Deep Breath*

OK, I had a really interesting e-mail today from Grant who is wondering about a campaign where he’s managed to optimise his direct to merchant ads well and is achieving some really good CTR’s. Unfortunately, despite his effort the product isn’t converting for him.

Here’s his question : -

Hi Kirsty

I wonder if you could shed some light on my PPC campaign.

I have been marketing a Clickbank product for about 3 weeks now tweaking the
ads and keywords so that I get a good CTR. I have been linking direct to the
Merchant to see if the product converts. Now being the beginning of the year I
thought a weight loss related product would be in demand.

I opted for this product www.nomanboobs.com this is my domain but with the
redirect to the merchant. I managed to get the following CTR with my 3 ad
groups:

1. Man Boobs – Rid: CTR = 10.58%, Clicks 98, Avg Pos 2.4, Sales None
2. Man Boobs – How CTR = 15.92%, Clicks 61, Avg Pos 2.3 Sales None
3. Man Boobs – Lose CTR = 5.71%, Clicks 24, Avg Pos 3, Sales None

Now the above Keywords were targeted as per the Ad groups ie Rid, How & Lose.
Would you say the Sales page is poor quality or my approach is lacking.

I had another campaign running that targeted Chest Fat with the same stats but
no sales.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Love the Blog

Grant

Hi Grant,

Well, first off congratulations on being able to optimise your ads to get such excellent CTR’s. You have obviously done a great job with your optimisation. I don’t think I’d advise relying on this kind of URL redirect in Adwords as a long term strategy, as they’ll probably catch up with you in the end. However, that’s not really the issue here!

If I’m reading your e-mail correctly, I think you were bidding on terms such as “lose man boobs”. I don’t think there has been anything wrong with what you have done. If you were getting any conversions at all, but couldn’t make them pay I might be inclined to advise you to try and find some more niche search terms in your area and try to get them at a lower CPC.

However, I really think what this is down to is the merchant landing page you are sending your traffic to. First of all, pages like this really turn people off. They are so 1999! Secondly, place yourself in the position of the unfortunate soul who needs rid of his manboobs. Just how far down a page full of ugly text and exclaimation marks would you scroll to find out what you needed to do about it? Obviously consumers want information, but there’s definately sales overkill at play.

I think the merchant page is really awful, and I’m not surprised you haven’t had any conversions. Usually, I might encourage you to send a few more clicks to give your new campaign time to “bed in”. For this merchant though, I tend to feel that these kind of offers will probably suffer from such dreadful conversion rates that you’d be best to cut your losses and look for something else.

Next Steps To A New Merchant

Firstly, don’t be too disheartened… at least you’ve perfected your ad optimisation skills.

I think they key to finding something to promote is to look at something you might buy personally. Sit down and and have a bit of an internet brainstorming session and write down a list of products that appeal to you. Things that work well are obviously higher value items, and perhaps things you can’t buy from too many retailers.

I wrote another Ask Kirsty article a while back that you might find useful… How To Find Your First Affiliate Niche

Also, I’ve no experience with them myself, but I’ve read a few rumblings about Clickbank not being suitable for newbies. The link is there, I’ll let you make your own mind up.

You’re on the right lines… so the best of luck to you!

Well, I’m sitting in my office here at Affiliate Stuff towers gazing out of the window at 12.20pm on an absolutely miserable Scottish day. The heating is up full pelt, and I am sat in my favourite pair of pyjamas (the blue ones with yellow stars on) and my big fluffy red dressing gown (yep, you’ve guessed it… there are stars on it!).

There really is no finer feeling than watching all the normal folks struggle on past the window in the cold on a day like this. People with “real” jobs, not ones living in affiliate fantasyland like I seem to be!

I think the only thing that could make me feel better would be if I were able to buy some nice personalised affiliate jim jams. I’ve been keeping an eye out for personalised adult pyjamas for years. I’d dearly love a set of flannel jim jams for winter and a cotton set for summer emblazoned with this…

In my opinion, there’s no better way to spend a day than in your jim jams. The fact that I also get to make a topping income and travel (alas not in my jim jams), makes my days spent in my favourite mode of attire just perfect!!

Right… so on what planet does it take 22 days to answer a perfectly reasonable question from an affiliate? And then you wonder why affiliates get so pissed off with your impersonal tattle and shoddy treatment they are forced to resort to poetry to get back at you?

So my CJ balance has had over $4000 locked for several months. Wondering why, I dropped them a line on January 1st. The support thread is below, my first question is at the bottom.

Balance $4000 for Several Months
Discussion Thread
Customer (BlueIndian .) 01/22/2008 01:26 AM
May I please have a response?

Customer (BlueIndian .) 01/16/2008 01:44 PM
Hello. I am still awaiting a response on this query please?

Customer (BlueIndian .) 01/09/2008 05:04 AM
OK, I was aware of the wealth of nations situation. However, at the time when the situation arose my balance dropped by the sum in question.

Can you confirm that you guys added this balance back on as locked transactions?

Many thanks,

Kirsty

Response (AGorska) 01/09/2008 03:41 AM
Hi Kristy,

Thank you for your email. I’ve checked your account and it shows that your locked and unpaid commission is related to Wealth of Nations advertiser who is no longer with CJ.

We certainly understand the inconvenience this may have caused you. We do took steps to contact advertisers about these issues and, in this case we have to deactivate their account.

Unfortunately Commission Junction cannot pay publishers until the necessary funds are deposited and we indicate this specifically in the Publisher Service Agreement that you agreed to when you signed up for your Commission Junction account:

PSA Section 3(e) states: “CJ shall have no obligation to make payment of any Payouts for which CJ has not received payment from the relevant Advertiser of all monies due to CJ (including for all Payouts owed by such Advertiser to all of such Advertiser’s Publishers).”

We’ve tried to retrieve payment from this advertiser (they own us our commission and publishers’ commission) but because the Wealth of Nations became a bankrupt and they went into liquidation we are not able to enforce these charges.
We are really sorry about this situation but we cannot prevent this as it is risk involved in each business.

Sincerely,
Commission Junction Client Support

Customer (BlueIndian .) 01/01/2008 05:56 AM
Hello.

I’ve had $4,044.49 sitting in my account balance for several months. Its locked transactions and I can’t see from the reporting what they relate to. Can you please clarify what this is?

Many thanks.

Apart from a few points in that e-mail which me and my affiliate associates would argue about (yes, you could do something about it CJ). I’m merely wanting reassurance they haven’t made any errors with my account. How long should it take? 22 days? I think not!!!!!

I know you have my e-mail CJ, you’ve a support system in place that means you can’t help but have it. So why no response. It’s not hard. It’s also the answer to why I will never promote any new CJ merchants. Ever since that first sorry story I’ve had no faith in your ability to support your affiliate business partners.

And that is why you are the weakest link…

Goodbye!

Well then, the time of our departure from the UK on the next big stage of our seemingly-permanent jolly around the world is imminent. We’re furiously dashing around trying to tie up those loose ends with the wedding that my mother would be sure to raise merry hell over if she got lumped with them. Bridezilla is now receeding into the background. I feel I wasn’t too bad, but you’d really have to ask Duncan just what it’s like being my intended. As some will have worked out, I can be frighteningly single minded once I get a project going!

And so we’ve now moved on to the difficult decision of where we are going on honeymoon. Can you guess where it is? Vegas? Barbados perhaps? No… it’s somewhere a little closer to home. Duncan and I have talked it through and we’re both absolutely desperate to go to this place. Can’t guess? Here’s a wee clue…….

Um.. yes, that’s right. We’re going to A4U Expo 2008!! Our wedding is on 20th of September and this years event is on the 14th & 15th of October, so rather than take right off for a luxury honeymoon we have decided to postpone our honeymoon in order to attend the affiliate shindig of the year.

We had such a good time at last year’s gig and genuinely got huge amounts of great info, that we just can’t stand to miss this years do for the sake of a couple of weeks (we needed to stay on a wee bit to pack up our furniture anyhow).

Are we mad? Most definately not! However, I already had a chat with Matt Wood at the Buy.at Christmas Cracker back in November and I did drop some rather heavy hints regarding the possibilities of me getting a wee free ticket. He was quite well on (we all were by that stage!), but I’ll be holding him to the reply he gave me

So… this years pre-event party will be doubling up as Duncan and I’s Affiliate Wedding Reception. What I’m wondering is, should I wear my wedding dress to it? Any excuse to get two days wear out of my darling satin number… ha ha!!

Can’t wait to see everyone there, and we will most definately be booking into the Honeymoon Suite on the boat this year.

You can pre-register your interest in seeing the happy couple, oops I mean attending the Expo Here

It’s a while since I’ve done an “Ask Kirsty” as a lot of questions I’ve been getting have been re-covering old ground. However, I had an interesting query a few days ago from Lee who has just found his first profitable niche which he has created through SEO. Here’s his question: -

Hi Kirsty!

I’ve been reading your blog for some time. You’re doing a great job. I
had a question or two, which I hope you will answer.
I’m new to Internet Marketing. I’ve only been at this for a few
months. After several attempts, which failed, I have finally found a niche and
created a website that is profitable. I modeled it on your perfume website you
created with a WordPress blog.

I’m selling a high-end Amazon product, and since December 1, I’ve made
$120. That’s not much to you, I’m sure, but to me it’s a big victory.

Here’s my dilemma. I’ve done no paid advertising for my website, only
ezine articles and web 2.0 type sites. (Digg, for instance.) I’ve still got
some article and social bookmarking type marketing to do on this site, but once
I’ve completed that round of marketing, so to speak, I’m not sure what
direction to take.

Right now, with the visitor value I have, I’m not sure that PPC
advertising (sending them to my site, not Amazon) would make me any money.

On the other hand, now that I’ve got all the details figured out about my
niche site, I could make about twenty more of these in short order.
I would appreciate any advice, direction, thoughts, etc. you might have
about this.

Thanks so much!
Lee

Hi Lee,

Well, first off… congratulations in finding your first profitable affiliate niche. I’m very glad I was able to play a small part in your success. $120 is a good effort in that time frame, you are most definately to be congratulated!

Transferring SEO success to PPC can be a bit of a thorny issue. The key is whether or not you can push traffic through your landing page at a CPC that will give you a decent profit margin. You haven’t mentioned which sector you are in or what your conversion rates are like… so I’ll just give you a general guide. So here it is! Sit back, relax and prepare yourself for my SEO to PPC success step by step guide!!

1 ) Identify What Search Terms People Have Been Using To Find Your Site
A good first port of call in working out how a PPC campaign might work for you is to find out what search terms people have been using when they arrived on your site. Most web hosts provide this service these days either free or for a small fee. If your host does not do this, then another option given you are using a blog based site would be to sign up for My Blog Log and use their paid stats package (I think it’s $25 per year). It’s quite easy to use, I’ve got it for a couple of my sites and I find it adequate to give basic referrer information. However, more comprehensive packages can give really useful information about how visitors behave on your site (but that’s one for another tutorial!!).

Once you have found your search terms I’d then use these to create a more comprehensive keyword list using a tool such as Google Adword’s Keyword Suggestion Tool, there’s a great keyword video tutorial I posted about the other day that’ll show you exactly how that works and which also has some handy tips on analysis for PPC.

Remember, your current sales are only based on what you have been able to rank for so far. By increasing your site visibility using targeted PPC you might just be able to significantly increase your $120 profit.

2 ) What Is Your Current Site Conversion Rate?
Take a look at your current site conversion rate as this will give you an idea as to how well your PPC traffic might convert. The only proviso I would place on this is that a low conversion rate might not necessarily mean PPC will not work for you. As I mentioned above… your conversion rate will be based only on the terms you are ranking for. If you discover these are not entirely relevant to the product you’ve been pushing then you could seen a higher conversion rate using highly relevant PPC traffic. Similarly, if you have good conversion rates then you will know the kind of search terms you are ranking for are highly relevant and that you can base your PPC spend on current conversion rates with a reasonable amount of confidence.

For the benefit of those of you who don’t know how to calculate a site’s conversion to sale, here’s a handy dandy wee formula: -

Number of Sales / Number Site visitors x 100 = Conversion Rate (so if you had 8 sales and 150 visitors your conversion rate would be 5.33%)

A couple of tips: – When following step one you may discover there is a completely irrelevant term generating traffic. If this is the case, you could subtract the traffic the term has generated to get a more accurate idea of your PPC conversion rate.

Also, do not base your conversion rate on the traffic that got through to your merchant. Base it upon the traffic that went to your site in the first place. This will factor in traffic leakage (i.e. those who came to your site and left without visiting your merchant) to your analysis of how you might run a PPC campaign profitably.

3 ) How To Work Out How Much To Pay Per Click?
Right. The next stage is to work out how much to pay per click based on the data you have about conversions plus data you will also have regarding the EPC (Earnings Per Click) of your current site. Basically, you need to work out the EPC you have been achieving on your SEO campaign. To do this, use the following handy dandy formula: -

Total Commission \ Total Clicks = EPC So, if your site got 500 clicks and this turned into £100 commission your site EPC would be 20p

Working out what you want to / need to pay per click will then depend on the competitiveness of your niche. Simply set up a PPC campaign and make your max CPC what your computations using the above methods suggest will work for your profit margins. As a newbie I’d suggest you don’t follow all the advice of these chaps who tell you to “bid high” first then reduce your CPC’s to maximise your positions. Yeah, this does work but your cash is precious at this time and that kind of advice is easy to give out when you know what you are doing and don’t mind the odd loss. That kind of advice could potentially wipe out newly found profit if used by the uninitiated! You can always up your bids a bit once your confidence in the campaign has grown.

4 ) Will Google Adwords Think Your Landing Page Has Sufficient Quality?

Ooohhh, and this is the stinger! I won’t attempt to answer this one here (my fingers would drop off with all the typing). Instead, I shall direct you to a guide that Kieron of UKOffer wrote: – How To Build A Page That Won’t Get Banned – With Examples

If all that sounds like too much work, try Yahoo or MSN…. they have improved a lot and I know Yahoo gives away a free £50 voucher to new account signups (not sure about offers currently available elsewhere).

5 ) Recording Which Terms Are Converting For Your PPC Campaign

Make sure that you have a method in place for recording which of your PPC search terms are converting to sales. That way, you can weed out the non performers and concentrate your efforts around money-bearing search term areas. It’s important you have some form of tracking in place before you switch on a campaign.

Finally, don’t forget to set your daily budget with your PPC provider. I was recently saved from a very costly incident by my daily budget on my Adwords account. I ONLY lost £230 instead of several thousand after a broadmatching incident I hadn’t anticipated. You have been warned!!

Good luck!!

P.S. If you haven’t already done so, give my Adwords For Beginners Tutorial a read through.

*edit* Just had a very, very pertinent point made in the comments, so I’m replicating it at the bottom of the post for all you chaps who don’t read comments on blogs.

1. Joe Connor Says:
January 11th, 2008 at 3:45 pm e

Good stuff Kirsty,
It’s also worth mentioning that it takes time to develop a profitable and efficient adwords campaign why is why many people give up thinking they can’t make a profit.
When I start a new campaign I accept that I’m going to be paying to learn on the job and it can take literally years to weed out all the dross with negative matching and Google is very adept at sliding around the edges of negative matches – there’s no negative broad matching option.
Go easy out there in PPC land.

Well, it’s time to get back to work folks… and what better way to start your new year than by getting organised with your keyword strategy?

A nice chap called Ian Fernando dropped me a wee line recently to see if I might be interested in taking a look at a tool he had created to help work out which keywords are converting within your PPC campaigns. He’s created this tool with newbies in mind, but I reckon a lot of people would find his excel-based solution useful.

Whilst I was fiddling around on his site I found another great video tutorial in which he explains how he uses Google’s Keyword Research Tool to identify potential keywords and then uses excel to analyse them to work out which search terms are likely to deliver traffic at a reasonable CPC.

They say you learn something new every day… and I must say I liked how he was using the Google data. I’m a bit more of a seat of the pants gal myself (but then you sort of get a “feel” for keywords after a few years!). I think this tutorial is an excellent look at how to get your keyword strategy organised.

Once you’ve gotten your keywords into a nice PPC campaign, you’ll be needing to analyse them to see how your precious PPC spend has fared. Ian has come up trumps again with this great video tutorial on how to work out which keywords are bringing in the bling: -

Even better, Ian has uploaded his great spreadsheet to Google Docs so that you can log on in there, have a good old fiddle about with it and chat with other users (possibly the man himself as well) about how to use it.

Well, here I am sat sitting here in my affiliate jimmy jams contemplating yet another year that has simply flown past. Kieron , Ray and Nadeem (in Two Parts) have already published fine overviews of their year. I could reflect in the same organised way they have… but to be honest 2007 was an absolute blur and much of it involved me visiting some of the most exciting places in the world.

So I can encapsulate my year thus. I ran my affiliate business at the same time as travelling the world. During my 2007 tax year I achieved a 400% increase in turnover working 3 days a week and visited Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand for a total of 10 and-a-half glorious months before heading home on a 6 week jolly via Fiji, Hawaii, San Francisco, Las Vegas, The Grand Canyon, and finally New York.

My highlights from the trip would have to be: –
Railey Beach in Thailand, a spookily beautiful place with towering limestone cliffs surrounding it. I also met up with an old friend from uni there and we spent a quality week with him. It was just like when we were young and irresponsible again!

Wai U Tapu Thermal Park – Rotorua NZ – I’ve always been fascinated by volcanoes and their wily ways. I felt just like David Attenborough!

Spending my 30th birthday drinking Bollinger in a spa bath looking out over a tropical rain forest in Australia… Nuff said

Seeing a piece of art with a hefty price tag that absolutely took my breath away in Katherine, Australia and being able to say “What the hell, I’m having that!” without thinking of it. Actually, I wish I’d taken a picture of the gallery owners face when two scabby looking young backpacker types wandered in and spent $4,300 without blinking. Now THAT was a work of art folks!

Sailing around the islands of Fiji on a beautiful old boat, visiting all the famous film locations where they filmed movies such as “Castaway” and “Blue Lagoon”, sipping Fijian beer and generally making remarks such as “wow” and “this is the life, isn’t it?”

That’s me in the green dress!

Driving out to the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon when we were visiting Vegas. Truly amazing places I never thought in a million years that a wee lassie fae Colmonell in Ayrshire would ever get to visit!

Is this a God Dam?

Visting the Empire State Building in New York… and also getting to be very rude to New Yorkers. Those people really know how to let you know their feelings on any issue (which generally seems to be that you’re an idiot and must do things their way). However, they forget they learnt it all from their Scottish / Irish roots so I had a great time abusing everyone right back… from casual street hustlers to tour guides, bellhops, taxi drivers, and finally innocent passers by, everyone in New York caught it in the neck from a short, irate Scottish girl. I think they secretly enjoyed it

I’ve no idea how Duncan managed to take this picture… there were about 2,000 other people in that foyer!

Finally, the best bit of this year has been getting home and doing 3 months solid work at the job I truly love. I have had so many ideas when we have been away and so little time to develop them. It’s a real pleasure to now be able to work on them and really strengthen my revenue streams. I already know what I’m doing in 2008… I hope y’all have made your plans to make the best of what is likely to be a challenging year for the industry.

Bring it on I say. My resolution? To be innovative, keep ahead of the game, and to represent the affiliate industry as a good example of professionalism and ethics. I hope we can all do the same this year.

Thanks to everyone who’s subscribed and read my blog this year. It’s always a real pleasure talking to you all!

Happy New Year!!!

Oh, I’ve also realised I’m getting married this year. AARRGGGHHH!!!!!!!

I must thank the chaps at Affiliate Window for their excellent Christmas Coins competition. To win one of 455 prizes on 8 different levels, you had to login at 3pm on Christmas Day and scramble with all the other affiliates desperate for a prize in order to get something from the affiliate santa.

I wasn’t expecting much, “I’ll probably get a mousemat after sitting here like a nana on Christmas Day” I grumbled to Duncan as I sat furiously refreshing Awin’s Christmas tree page waiting for them to release the pressies. To My delight, I scored an ace Ipod Nano which had been donated by 24 Studio

Here’s what my winning screen looked like: -

(Click for bigger image…)

I’d like to thank Awin for putting on such a great Christmas promotion that really gave all affiliates a fair chance to win. There were a huge number of really great prizes. My mate Ray also got an Ipod Nano (we were sitting talking on MSN whilst furiously refreshing our screens and both got the same thing!). Other people won things like LCD screen TV’s (I REALLY didn’t want to win another one of those), mountain bikes, Tom Toms, Mobile Phones, Chocolate Hampers, Champagne, Board Games, A Free Website, and many more great prizes.

I think this has been really successful and hope they repeat it next year. It was absolutely the most exciting bit of Christmas for me this year. Well done, and thanks to Studio 24 for donating my prize!!