Former darling of the affiliate world and large scale lingerie retailer Figleaves.com was this week sold to NBrown (the company behind  JD Williams) for the sum of £11.5m.  The business was put up for sale back in February for considerably more than the price it achieved this week (or so the Independent said). A bargain. Figleaves has never made a profit but has a good customer base and brand so I imagine that plus stock is what NBrown are paying for.

Frankly My Dear…

Back in the day, a takeover such as this would have had affiliates (including me!) quivering in their boots at the potential changes to the affiliate programme new ownership might bring.  However, new management in 2008 combined with some radical changes which were implemented with disappointing ham fistedness and zero notice meant that a lot of affiliates became disaffected and ceased promotion. It’s changed status in the affiliate world was apparent from the total and utter silence on its sale within the main UK affiliate forum, Affiliates4U.

I am still involved with the programme as I had a whole heap of traffic I couldn’t monetise elsewhere.  I’m glad I did hang in there now because in recent months a new affiliate manager has come onto the scene and has been working to rebuild some bridges, and put affiliate incentives in place.  A good indicator that the powers that be decided affiliates still had a role to play in their business model.  Something that wasn’t at all clear late 2008 and most of 2009.

As an aside, the new chap is making a big effort to push things forward again and the programme seems to be in very good shape thanks to his efforts (just in case you’re interested!).

A Good Synergy?

JD Williams’ cheap and cheerful type business isn’t an immediately obvious bed mate for the rather more sophisticated Figleaves.  However, apparently industry analysts think they could do well together.  Figleaves’ customer base is more mature than your average shopper (probably thanks to their great selection of hard to find items) which allegedly makes it a good fit.

One thing’s for sure – NBrown seems to know how to make a good profit and access to Figleaves 1 million+ website visitors each month provides them a great opportunity.

So What’s The Affiliate Future?

Inevitably there will be lots of changes within Figleaves, so I do wonder if this will impact upon the affiliate programme.  If it’s not loss making I’d hope they’ll only be looking to improve upon it and make it more attractive to affiliates (increasing that vexatious 3 day cookie for example).

Its clear they value the affiliate stream, as they have a programme for JD Williams but here’s hoping they don’t tinker with the payouts in lines with the ones they are currently offering – £8 for new customer sales, £4 where a new customer sale is made on PPC but where affiliates have played a part, 1% of basket value for existing customers.

And if they do… well so be it. I operate on a once bitten twice shy basis and Figleaves’ commissions now form only a small proportion of my business turnover. They used to be a honking great chunk of it – but I learned a valuable lesson about eggs and baskets there!  I imagine that most affiliates still promoting them would be in a similar situation.

I’ll be watching the outcome of this acquisition with interest. It will be fascinating see if JD Williams turns the goose into the golden egg.

P.S. That’ll be my one attempt this year at a Jason-esque headline. It was a toss up between the above and “Is The Figleaves Takeover a Load of Pants??”  I’ll leave it to the duckman and his recently awarded best affiliate marketing blog of 2010  from now on

It’s a topic that’s long been discussed within affiliate marketing – which referrer gets paid commission on sales? Who should be rewarded? Last referrer wins usually means that affiliates who have introduced a customer to a brand or product, only to have them visit another affiliate site before purchasing, lose out.

Yesterday (June 14th) MoreNiche, who specialise in health and diet type products, introduced “split commissions”. This will allow their merchants to reward more than one referrer for sales.

Initially, the new structure is being tested by a single merchant on the network – Proactol.  You can read all about the debate behind which referrer should be rewarded for a sale, and their new commission structures here.

So What’s It All About Andy?

I asked MoreNiche MD Andrew Slack a few questions about the new commissions and what effect they will have.

How did you pitch this to the merchant, i.e. what’s in it for them?!?

Proactol are a very forward thinking merchant and so it was pretty easy, the idea of them being the first ever weight loss merchant to reward first referrers and thus make their campaign more appealing than competitors really excited them.

Not only does this allow them to get more exposure across our network but also as we announce this new feature (for example on your sites) they may also attract new affiliates because they are the first to give it a go.

In a very competitive space, this will allow them to stand out in our network where we have 20-30 different weight loss merchants.

Do you envisage a greater uptake with your other merchants once the new structure is launched? Is there much interest amongst your pool of merchants?

We have already been asked by a number of other merchants to use this split commission feature but we want to monitor how well it works with Proactol before rolling it out to everybody, most merchants are asking about the first & last referrer with the understanding that the last referrer should retain the highest commission.

Less interest has been placed on incentivising affiliates throughout the chain but I believe this will become more important as we move forward and merchants want to become more competitive.

I personally feel that the first referrer is often more important than the last, these are the affiliates who are introducing the brand for the first time, often losing out to brand bidders or voucher sites for example, with networks becoming more dependent on coupon sites I feel split commissions allow the power to shift (even if it’s just slightly) to the content affiliates who are adding ‘more’ value to the brands themselves.

Any ideas what sort of percentage of sales have more than one referrer?

We ran the numbers for Proactol before pitching it to them and currently 39.46% of all sales have more than 1 referrer in its chain, this is quite high which we believe is down to the lifetime cookies we offer, it was interesting to see sales coming in from over a year ago, with over 15 affiliates in the chain.

Different sectors will vary whether it’s a impulse purchase or a calculated buy, our research shows that weight loss products are more impulse with most people purchasing within a number of days, often on the same day however on average a surfer passes through 1.85 affiliate sites before purchasing proactol and across our network the number is higher at 2.59 sites.

Good News For Affiliates In This Sector
I think the changes that MoreNiche are bringing in are great for affiliates operating in this sector. I was fascinated by the stats Andy gave me on how many affiliate sites people have been referred through before making the decision to buy (probably demonstrates how important it is to think about what people search for at the end of their buying process!). The new system of rewarding multiple referrers may also help a lot of their affiliates tighten up their conversion rates. Having the fact that a significant proportion of your cookies are being overwritten would be a great focus to look at your keyword targeting strategy and try to tighten things up.

The Start Of A Big Change In The Entire Affiliate Sector?

This new structure will certainly make merchants choosing to employ it stand out from the crowd in the competitve sectors MoreNiche are operating in.

However, would it have any application in the wider affiliate world? It’d be nice, but I’m doubtful. Margins are a lot tighter in other areas of online retailing. The cynic in me says we’re a lot more likely to see referral data being used to de-dupe affiliate marketing commissions against a merchant’s other internal marketing streams such as Adwords campaigns, newsletters, and possibly even magazine advertising where there’s a special offer involved.

I’m pleased to see MoreNiche taking this step, and hope it adds value to both their merchants and affiliates.

http://www.moreniche.com/split-commission-technology.php

This week Google confirmed that the much speculated upon Caffeine Update has finished and is here to stay. This new search index has been hot gossip around the interweb for quite some time now. There’s some confusion about what current changes are related to Caffeine and which are down to an unrelated algo adjustment over at Google HQ which has been referred to as the “Mayday” update.

With that in mind, I thought I’d do a bit of a post about what’s happening, who it’s happening to, how its impacted me personally and include a bit of wild conjecture about how affiliates will be affected for entertainment value.

So What Is Google Caffeine?

Fortunately Google saw fit to release a concise diagram which explains it all.

Clearly the forecast for Google searchers is cloudy with a chance of  cyclonic outbursts of random information and images.  Do please use the new index with caution if searching in an enclosed space, or a subject area with sharp edges.

*ahem*

Alternatively it could be that the above indicates that users can now enjoy the following: -

• The new index will be continuously updated, and will deliver fresh content faster than ever.  Delays between the time Google finds new content and includes it in the index have been eradicated.
• Google can now index staggering amounts of data, giving them the ability to add more all singing and dancing features to their search engine offerings.
• Real time web here we come!!

Changes to Longtail Search – Caffeine or Mayday?

• Current site ranking changes being experienced by some webmasters aren’t related to Google caffeine. Apparently they’ve just been rolled out together and current traffic changes are just part of one of the many hundreds of updates the big G makes every year. Well, that’s what Matt Cutts said anyhow.  So caffeine = quicker search, Mayday = quality adjustments.
• The changes are based around a re-assessment of how the best quality pages to rank for long tail searches are determined.
• Until now, the internal pages of many large sites with good authority were ranked well for long tail searches. We’ve all seen these results in the SERPS and greeted them with a wry “Urgh, these guys have such good authority they can put any old shit up and rank for it”.  The changes mean that this authority will now no longer be enough to make Google believe sites are the best quality match to be returned for long tail searches.
• Most likely to be affected are large sites with many internal pages which are buried deep within a site’s structure and which don’t attract much in the way of external links and aren’t terribly well linked to from within the site either. The buzz around internet town is that ecommerce sites are most likely to be affected.
• The pages containing  individual products on ecommerce sites fit the above profile and also often do not contain unique content, and may be populated by descriptions and information from manufacturers databases.  i.e. duplicate content. There have been lots of reports from hard hit merchants verifying this.

So How Does This Affect Affiliates?

I can only speak for my own sites with any sort of surety, but I seem to have fallen heir to a lot of long tail traffic since the start of May.  For example, my mens underwear site has had a 25% increase in traffic and my lingerie site is enjoying a boost of 30%. Some of this is attributable to swimwear and holiday season, but I’m definately seeing a sudden glut of longtail traffic and an increase in the number of search phrases referring traffic to my sites. Happy days for me (touch wood!)

I’d have thought I might fall victim to the “isolated page with poor linkage” syndrome with many of my blog posts, particularly on Lingerie Brands which has had terrible linkage between blog post pages up until about 10 days ago when I finally got the site sorted with a pagination plugin. However, it seems that the unique content on these pages combined with the internal cross linkage from related posts has been enough to give Google a good “quality signal” about my content.

And It’s Really All About The Signals Baby…

I have read nothing about affiliate sites being affected, but I imagine there are a few that could fall victim to the current changes. Sites heavily reliant upon feeds and not adding value through the addition of unique and compelling content could very well be affected.  Perhaps voucher code and offer sites that pull in and publish feed based content without any alteration could see a reduction in Google’s willingness to rank their pages well. If you auto generate content, it may well be search engine brown trouser time.  And of course, there’ll be the usual outbreak of innocent bystanders who have done absolutely nothing wrong, just to add the appropriate levels of confusion to the mix

Feed affiliates and those using automated methods to build sites could be on a sticky wicket with this, but I think a lot of affiliates could use these changes to their advantage. If you’re prepared to put in the time and effort to create a well structured, content rich, and unique site you’ll have a much better chance now of getting valuable long tail traffic to your site that was previously being hoovered up by large sites you were unable to compete with.

It’s going to be a bit like dating I reckon.  If you can give the right quality signals with your website’s “body language”, there’s every chance Google will hook you up with a red hot love match in the form of some beautiful traffic.

Further Reading

Google Confirms Mayday Update Impacts Longtail -  from Searchengineland.

Webmasterworld Disaster Thread – lots of people chat about how their sites have been affected.

Google Sends the Long Tail Screaming for May-Day by Kieran Flanagan

Official Google Blog on caffeine update

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been going through an exercise to outsource tasks that take up a large amount of my time but could be done cost effectively by someone else.  The process itself began falteringly about a year ago and has recently come to full fruition.

As things have gathered pace with project “Just Let It Go Kirsty” I’ve recently read, digested, and implemented some of the principles in…

Four Hour Work Week – The Outsourcer’s Bible

The Four Hour Work Week was written by the inspirational (and hilarious) Tim Ferriss.  The sections of his book about outsourcing life were very pertinent and helped me realise that outsourcing should be about ridding myself of just about anything I don’t really enjoy doing if I can afford to do it.  The biggest benefit for me in reading this book was realising that my time has a value, and that I should not treat it as a “free” resource.

I loved the mindset I found in this book – there were so many “oh my god, he’s so right I just never thought of it that way before” moments.

From protecting your personal time, to focusing on the 20% of your work that brings in 80% of your income – the book was jammed with inspiration.  I know lots of my affiliate colleagues have read this book – but if you haven’t yet taken a look at it I do recommend it.  Tim has a highly entertaining and easy to read writing style, so not your average hard to digest business book.

What A Difference A Year Makes..

Since I last posted on this topic a month ago, I’ve spent a lot of time putting the systems in place I spoke about in my last post.    The result on my workload has been absolutely transformational.  I’ve gone from struggling to progress to knowing things are zipping along with me only being involved a supervisory capacity.  In the last 3 weeks this has been particularly valuable as I’ve not felt able to do anything more than give affiliate marketing a cursory glance after the recent loss of my grandmother.

The situation, although very sad for me, has really shown the benefit of the process.  It’s meant I’ve been able to take as much time out as I’ve wanted without worrying about the business losing momentum. That concern is often a huge source of stress for me generally for various different reasons – and the knowledge that I’ve finally kicked it to the kerb is very rewarding.

Kirsty’s Outsourcing Honour Roll

I’m really feeling good about all the things I no longer have to worry about and spend time on. So here’s my “Things I Don’t Have To Do Any More Honour Roll”

Personal

• Household cleaning – this may well be my favourite I’ve always hated domestic chores. Time saved – 12 hours per month. Plus another 3 or 4 moaning about it / not looking forward to doing it
• “Boring” gardening – getting out into the wilds of my QLD bush block is one of my pleasures, but  the boring stuff such as lawn mowing, lopping, pruning, and carting palm fronds to the tip… I hate doing it, and I hate nagging Duncan to help me to do it. Time saved – 2 hours per month, and Duncan doesn’t get berated for letting our front lawn get embarrassingly long any more so a real benefit to our marriage!

Total Personal Time Saved: 14 Hours

That’s enough time for Duncan and I to have two fun days out together instead of doing tedious chores as soon as our leisure time swings around each week.

Business

• Content Writing – Time Saved 35 hours per month
• Content Posting – Time saved 40 hours per month
• Link Building – Time saved 8 hours per month

Total Business Time Saved: 83 hours

Time saved is one factor, but I’ve not considered the concept of time gained before now.  Content Now do way more work on link building than I or anyone else could achieve in the 8 hours or so a month I previously spent struggling away – so the net benefit to the business is actually greater than before.  Similarly, I’ve ramped up the amount of content being written by engaging two different writers to work for me. Writer number two (who also happens to be my mother!!!!) is adding a further 20 hours or so of writing time to the business that wasn’t there before.

And This Means…

Duncan and I have a standard working week of 4 x 6 hour days equating to 104 hours work in the average month.  Recent efforts have removed 41.5 hours from that total for each of us.

Our new working week to get the same amount done? (more actually!)  2.5 days

At the moment we are still going to work 4 days a week and use the extra time to sort out all the things that we had fallen behind with and want to get sorted.  For example, Lingerie Brands has been long overdue a re-design and is now sporting an improved look, and has had a lot of the inefficiencies it’s suffered from for ages weeded from it’s structure.  The result is that already we’re seeing increased indexing and traffic thanks to us finally sorting out an issue with permalinks that was stopping pagination plugins from working.

But Don’t Worry Tim… The Mini Retirement’s Still On

We will indeed be cutting back our working hours to 2.5 days a week, or most likely 2 days one week and 3 the next, as soon as we have caught up with all of the tasks we need to perform to get our sites ship shape once more.

We will then be taking a series of Mini Retirements just like Mr Ferriss suggests (I’d always called these breaks we take skiving but that’s definately a more glam description!).

First up, we are taking 2.5 months off from September to Mid November.  We will be exploring our area of the Australian East Coast with some visitors during September, followed by a 6 week jolly to Europe (with South East Asian hols on the way there and back). After 2 entire weeks of work we will once more abandon our computers for another month of Australian R&R with some friends, culminating in a Sydney new year spectacular.

And you guys thought I’d got boring recently, didn’t ya?  

Disconnection.  It’s a common feeling amongst people who have emigrated when they leave their old life behind, but in my case it’s doubly odd because I’m not only several thousand miles away but am still trying to “be involved”.

Sadly I don’t feel like I’ve been succeeding recently.  This failure (real or imagined!) doesn’t really affect my day to day work, but it’s increasingly making me feel far removed from the day to day goings on with “affiliate world”.

Where’d Everyone Go??!

I don’t get to see much of what goes on with my UK affiliate chums on Twitter and Facebook due to the time difference, and sadly things over at the A4Uforum aren’t what they used to be in terms of a good old chit chat with other well seasoned affiliates.

What that translates into is that I rarely seem to be up to date with industry goings on (I probably am broadly, it just doesn’t feel like it!!), and I’m really suffering from a lack of ability to discuss things with my peers about the day to day running of an affiliate business.  Networking and parties aren’t just about getting pissed (honest) they also provide an invaluable opportunity to let off a bit of steam and get a few new tips and insights.

Solutions?

Maybe it’s just all part of moving to Australia.  There’s not such a big affiliate scene here, although I have been lucky enough to meet some really nice affiliates on the Sunshine Coast which does keep me sane.  A very negative part of me says the solution is to just remove myself from the UK “scene” and accept I’m too far away to really participate – but I’m fairly certain my sense of disconnection would quickly be replaced by a real feeling of loss.

I guess it must just come down to the same sense I get when I’m missing my friends.  After a while, immigrants like me start to form new social circles and feel all nice and secure again.  Forming a comprehensive network of affiliate contacts complete with racy and exciting social scene??  Not so simple.

Answers on a postcard guys

Hey guys, I’ve been tinkering with the Scheduled Post Shift timestamp plugin for the last few weeks so thought’d I’d share it on here.

This plugin will take the timestamp of your oldest post and make it look like your latest post.  I was a little concerned about this plugin (I was a little concerned Google might take umbrage at such tactics) so I tested it on two older sites of mine that have bags of content but have been sadly neglected for the past year or so.

Both sites had an upturn in traffic, one around 15% the other around 30%.  I’ve been running the plugin on one of them for around 3 months and no signs of anything other than positive effects.

If any of you guys try it out do please let me know how you went with it as my two sites aren’t really enough of a sample to definitively say this plugin has a positive effect.

Happy blogging

Been a while since I’ve had a good “Ask Kirsty” through, this one is an oldie… but a goodie. It’s the old and still painful niche selection problem!

Hi Kirsty,

I need some advice. Im new to affiliate marketing and have been reading as much as i can for the past few months. While reading, there have been 2 things that seem to be repeated quite often, 1) pick a subject you enjoy and have a passion for and 2)just do it.

So, keeping inline with the ‘just do it’ statement, i started searching for a niche/product to promote early on but i didnt really think about picking a topic that i enjoyed. I thought that once i saw the money coming in then that would motivate me anyway.

So i found a kitchen appliance product that didn’t have a lot of competition and got about 27k local exact search (according to Google keyword tool) ad went about creating the site. Im a web developer/designer career wise so enjoyed the site creation, but now im stuck. I need to write content for it, but i have no interest in this product and find it so mind numbingly boring that i can’t bring myself to do it everyday. When i do write content for the site (reviews for each product) i find myself writing the same thing over and over again for each product. its basically the same thing from different manufacturers! i cant afford to hire content writers so the sites come to a halt.

So, i guess i realised the hard way why its important to pick a topic that you enjoy, at least until you get enough experience and maybe make some money.

But here’s my problem. Everything that i have any interest in is so heavily saturated and overly competitive that i don’t think i can compete and it wont be worth the time and effort to get so little reward. For example, i enjoy playing video games, but thats to broad a market and very competitive anyway. i could dig deeper and go for sub sections of the games market to target a niche, but these niches don’t really get any searches so again, its not really worth the time or the effort.

Do you have a tips or ideas of where i can go from here?

Well, Abbid I can immediately pick up on more than one common mistake that you have made in all of this. Clearly you’ve already learned the hard way about needing to be interested in what you are promoting, so we’ll skip that one! So the areas you need to look at again are: -

• Basing your niche selection purely upon what the Google Keyword tool tells you. It’s great to give you a rough idea, but it often over and under estimates actual traffic you might get from your search terms.  Bear in mind that the data you are seeing has been collated on an automatic basis. Whilst it is a good way to investigate possible traffic bearing areas, I think it is important to also realise that it is often innaccurate.
• Basing your niche selection around a single keyword – it sounds to me like you are subscribing to the “exact match domain” school of affiliate marketing.  Whilst this particular bit of advice has been floating around for a while and has been very useful I think it is a mistake to accept it as gospel, and the thinking of it as a formula to succeed is a woeful over simplification. Remember that on any domain, you will not only get traffic relating to your main search term but on many related search terms if you take the time to put up decent content.  I have a single product domain which Google reckons has 880 monthly searches. I get 2,000 visits per month to it because I’m not only ranking for that term but many other related terms thanks to my decent content.
• Thinking you need an exact match domain – You don’t. Yes, try to get something attractive looking with at least one important keyword in it – but don’t let it be a rod for your back. This mistake wasn’t obvious from your question, I’m just guessing. However a lot of people reading this probably let exact match domain availability rule their progress too much, so I’ve included it
• Letting your pre-conceptions build a wall against progress – You’ve only been involved in affiliate marketing for a short time, but already you have a very rigid notion of what you “have” to do to find your niche. Whilst any bit of useful advice you get in this game should be heeded, do not treat it like gospel. First of all, are you absolutely SURE there’s no search volume around the small and targeted niches you have been thinking of?  If they are interconnected I’d consider doing a site to house say 5 or 6 of these, approach one at a time and add others when ready.  Secondly, how can you know that areas are over saturated without actually trying?  On each and every over saturated niche I’ve ever entered I’ve quickly realised I’m one of the only people knocking about who is prepared to spend time producing quality, unique content.  Choose a small area and don’t take on the big boys, but don’t be put off by a little competition either.

Tips and Ideas

I want to be a little more helpful than picking holes in your reasoning, so here’s where I’d go from your current situation.

• Game controller site?  Any other accessories people might buy that you’re an expert on? Most gaming consoles seem to have a plethora of add ons. If I was doing a site like that I’d create a comprehensive section covering each console brand and review main products. Then I’d also create a section for each major use or type of controller i.e. “flight simulator game controllers”  At first glance, there are an awful lot of authority sites in that area… but as I said before, put out some quality content and you will get traffic. Large authority sites are often unable to break out of a set “mould” in their content and structure. If you personalise your approach to how you would shop for these things yourself, I’m betting you’d get traffic.
• Sit down and list absolutely everthing that you’d enjoy shopping for online, and use one of them. Over simplified advice? Yeah, definately but it does sort of come back to the “just do it” phrase you alluded to at the start of this question. You will have to start somewhere, and even if it turns out not to have been the right place, you will learn something you can feed into your next attempt.
• Do not get disheartened if what you try first does not work. You absolutely must try again. Affiliate marketing is not an easy thing to master, there will be false starts and you have to get over them to succeed. Acknowledge that at the start and you have a good chance of winning!!

I think I’ll leave it there… plenty to digest as the post approaches 1200 words!

Good luck

As a few of you guys might know I’ve had a bit of a sad situation recently. My much loved grandmother got very sick and passed away.

I did think a lot about whether I should make a post about it on here,  but hey… I bet there’s a lot of you who have lost people you love who’ve thought “I just wish more people knew how awesome they were.”   So that’s what I’m doing. This isn’t a drone about how I’m feeling (I’ll spare you that), it’s all about her.

My Supergran, Eve.

If grandmothers were like sticks of rock, mine would have had “You go gal” written inside and the wrapper would advertise “free cuddles with every bite”.  She was always first to dance at any party, and one of the last to leave. Optimism and kindness were her watchwords. She was from that generation who came through WW2 with Dunkirk spirit by the bucketload, never complained about what she didn’t have, and could create just about anything from not very much at all.

I could gush on like that for hours, but I think people are best described by what they have done…

Where’s The Midwife?

Back in the “Olden Days” babies weren’t born in hospitals.  The miracle of birth happened at home and the midwife would come with a nice cannister of gas and air, and some words of encouragement.

Through the local telegraph, Gran heard that one of her neighbours had gone into labour.  “I’ll just pop round there and see how she’s getting on” she thought (as you do).  Upon arriving at the door she was greeted by a very, very white faced husband.

“QUICK, get in here!!”

The midwife was, for some reason, nowhere in sight and things were um… progressing alarmingly. Bear in mind that in those days a husbands place was firmly elsewhere when children were being born, so he quickly grabbed my grandmother as a drowning man might grasp a lifering and ushered her through to where the action was at.  Without too much fuss (well, that’s how she told it many decades later!), my grandmother duly delivered their son.

A few minutes afterwards the midwife turned up clutching her gas and air cylinder and remarked,

“Och, it looks like youse are doing fine. I’ll away then.”

And away she went.

And every time my grandmother saw that boy for the next 50 years she’d say “Awww… look at the size of ye!  And to think I delivered you.”

How could he forget?

Mum, Where Did That Pram Come From?

One Christmas Gran was at the town square at the annual carol service. Her cohorts informed her one of her friends had been taken into hospital, leaving her husband to look after their young baby.  In those days the most a man knew about a child was that they brought in the dough to feed them, and someone else looked after them and their ablutions.

“Oh dearie me” Said Gran in no small amount of horror. “He’ll never be able to look after that baby. He hasn’t a clue!”

So off she toddled round to her friends house and told her (very relieved) husband that she’d look after the baby until she was all better.  My Mother told me she went out to the Christmas Carols, and simply returned with a pram, announcing they had a new lodger as she pushed it into the livingroom.  The baby stayed for around 6 weeks.

In total my Grandmother had 7 children of her own between when she got married and her early 40′s. At this point she probably already had 4 or 5 children of her own in her very small 3 bedroom house. She might have been limited on space, but her kind heart really knew no bounds.

Good God Gran, Why Were You Topless Sunbathing?

A few years ago I went to visit my gran, with my then boyfriend in tow. She’d just returned from a lovely holiday with my Aunt and Uncle – she loved the sun so was looking very brown and happy.  She was in the kitchen fussing around and called through “My holiday snaps are on my side table – take a wee look”

I dutifuly went through all the usual nice pictures people take on holiday. The apartment, group pictures at character filled restaurants, Georgious the waiter (my what a laugh he was etc etc etc. My boyfriend knew the family well so was also looking at the pictures with interest.

There were lots of pictures of the beach which I spooled through until to my horror, there was one of my Grandmother laughing away and sunbathing TOPLESS!!

“Arrghhh… Gran!!” I squealed, recoiling in horror. “What the hell’s this?!?!”

“What’s what?” She said, emerging from the kitchen looking genuinely puzzled.

“You’ve got your boobs out on the beach, were you at the topless sunbathing???”

“Ah…” she said, “No no, I took my bra and top off and draped my t-shirt over them to protect my modesty. That auntie of yours bloody whipped it aff me and took a picture. The minx.”

“I see.” I said, somewhat mollified by her unruffled reaction.  “Umm…. did you not think to remove that one?”

She just giggled a bit, treated us to a mischevious look, and wandered off back into the kitchen, leaving myself and the boyfriend to regard each other in uncomfortable silence. We didn’t look at the rest. Just in case.

And Finally…

Thanks dear Gran for everything you’ve given me. The little dimples that appear when I smile (I always saw them mirrored in your face), my creative streak, my strong sense of empathy.  But most of all, thanks for my sense of fun and the delight I take in dancing the night away. All of these gifts have come from you and I will always carry them with me.

I use them often and in the same way that I think of you – with love, joy, and laughter.

A few times recently I’ve awoken to discover that one of my main sites, Lingerie Brands, has been down for several hours thanks to a corrupted .htaccess file. After taking a bit of advice I changed the permissions on my file to make sure it could not be written to.  A week or two of uninterrupted traffic and I relaxed thinking all was well again.

Imagine my horror this morning though when I awoke and discovered a mail from my friend Lee telling me the site had been down all day.  I logged into my FTP account and sure enough, the .htaccess file had been altered – again. The addition of a single “s” after all the wordpress stuff had knocked my entire site over.

So Who’s Been Dicking Around With My Damned Site??!!!

Well, as it transpires my issue is all thanks to a technology improvement at Clook.  One of their support chaps informed me that

“We’ve recently changed the PHP setup slightly which makes scripts like WordPress, Joomla etc. run better as it gives them better permissions on the files. However it looks like your wordpress installation is now able to write to the .htaccess and its writing to it incorrectly”

At this point I was relatively unconcerned, after all wouldn’t Clook be able to sort this issue out for me by pushing their magic techie type buttons just like they always do?

Ummm… Apparently Not!

I was then asked if any of my plugins controlled the .htaccess file (there’s nothing I use that directly says it alters it) so I suggested one which dealt with redirects which was only on LB and one other low traffic site and therefore could be the culprit. Clook responded with

“I would definitely check into that first plugin, especially since it’s only installed on the one site. Since it does manage redirections, it could very well be the culprit. Please let us know what you find.”

I was unable to work out from the code if anything in there might be the villan of this piece but then I’m no programmer, so given that their new setup is clearly causing issues in some scenarios I felt certain they’d want to confirm or deny if that particular plugin could be causing the issue so they could perhaps gain insight for future situations.  They were certainly interested enough to ask me to tell them about it.

Alas, “Unfortunately such coding issues are beyond our scope of support.”

Ah. OK then. I suppose they have to draw the line somewhere.

So It’s All Down To A Process of Elimination

Basically, this issue is likely to be down to a plugin performing wicked deeds somewhere. So all that Clook can suggest is a process of elimination. I switch off plugins I think might be causing the issue and wait to see if it happens again.

I find this sort of situation immensely frustrating.  I can’t find out what is causing it because I have to wait for it to happen again (if my plugin purge doesn’t fix it), and I can’t stop it from happening again because of the new and improved write access.  Perplexed I asked Clook if their new setup was changing file permissions and they told me that in fact

“Our changes don’t make it so that WordPress can modify the permissions on a file, but rather so that it can modify necessary files without you first having to change permissions.

This is noticeable when you try to make changes to a theme. Before the upgrade, you would have to individually modify the permissions on any files (header, footer, etc) before you could make changes to them, then you’d have to change the permissions back. Now that is not necessary.”

Well That’s Quite Good Isn’t It?

Quite a good, convenient change for most Clook users (they did say most people were very happy when I casually mentioned how I personally thought it was shit!).  Also, it probably prevents the odd scenario where forgetful people change the permissions to “Yeah baby overwrite me!” and then forget to change them back, subsequently resulting in website hackage and general unhappiness all round.

It’ll also make the whole WordPress setup / customisation process easier.

Do I Like It?

Frankly no, I don’t like it one little bit. I hate the fact that I have handed control of my .htaccess files in particular to WordPress which can sometimes behave in unexpected and unstable ways thanks to its “aggregate” nature, which often results in conflicts.  I don’t like that I now have an issue on a rather large site that I can exert no control over whatsoever. Honestly, I feel like an ancient occupant of  Troy who has just wheeled in a rather attractive and unexpected garden ornament that’s just convieniently big enough to hold an entire murderous army and retired to bed for the evening. It’s only a matter of time!

It just seems nonsensical that I know where the issue comes from, how it can be stopped, and I simply can’t protect my file from it.

Ah Well, I Needed To Sort Out Uptime Monitoring Anyway

One reason this has been so damaging is that it’s tending to happen when I’m asleep here in Australia. This means the site has been down for an entire UK workday twice now, and I think there have been 2 or 3 other shorter outages which I’ve caught before too much damage was done.  Lingerie Brands has gotten to a size where it probably should be monitored, so at least this situation means I’ll stop procrastinating and get it all sorted out.  It will mean I’ll probably get woken up at some ungodly hour of the morning if (when) it happens again and will be incredibly grumpy the next time I contact Clook about it.

I did enquire if they might consider adding an opt out sort of system but was told they’ve applied it over all servers for consistency. If I want a customised setup I’ll need to pay for one.

Would I Still Recommend Clook?

Hmmm… I do still really rate their service. Despite me being severely pissed off about this issue I was still very impressed with their support which was prompt, curteous, and as helpful as they could be within the constraints of their role.  However, I am deeply uncomfortable about not being able to prevent files I want protecting being overwritten. It just doesn’t feel right and I feel as if my control over my sites has been compromised.

Still, I certainly won’t be moving my site elsewhere so the fact I’m prepared to work through this issue rather than jumping ship must mean I still love them really. Only time will tell if continuing to use them is sustainable.

Now… Who Owes me a Favour?

I’m off to find some technically able type to look at the code of my suspect plugin to see if it is indeed the culprit. I certainly hope so, there’s nothing else I’m using that should be dicking about with the .htaccess file, but it’s always so hard to tell with WordPress!

In honour of the fact I know a number of UK affiliates will have been “networking to the max” at the Buy.at Speakeasy last night I have decided to help out all those poor delicate souls by publishing my very own cleansing hangover cure.

This should help rehydrate, calm those churny tummies, and make all the affiliates who have partied just a wee bit too hard at the free bar feel a little bit better again!

Kirsty’s Affiliate Hangover Remedy

Ingredients (based on using a 2 mug tea infuser):-

Half a Lemon

Half a Lime

1 – 2 tsp of freshly sliced ginger.

Boiling water.

Optional: 2 Hedex Extra to serve.

Instructions: -

• Chop lemon into 3 or 4 slices whilst attempting to stay upright. Wonder why the knife sounds so damned loud. Place lemon into teapot.
• Repeat with lime, and try to ignore the flashbacks from the evening before. Do so with only one eye open if it helps you aim the knife more effectively.
• Add your chopped ginger.
• Pour boiling water into the pot, leave to infuse for 5 minutes. Use the time to ponder if those last 5 rounds of Sambuccas really were the hilariously good idea they seemed.
• Serve in the drinking vessel of your choice.
• Repeat recipe until you feel human again.

My recommended method of intake is to have 2 mugs of this, let it rest in the tummy for 5 to 10 minutes, and then complete the hangover cure with a monster bacon sarnie with lashings of sauce. Allow bacon to do its stuff, before treating your poor punished body to some more cleansing tea for dessert.

This recipe will also work if you use a mug to infuse your ingredients and can also be used in non affiliate hangover situations. These include, colds, flu, tummy upsets, and when you’re just feeling golly gosh darned sluggish and under the weather. A great detox that’ll leave you feeling lovely inside and out

Now don’t say I never try to do anything to enhance your health and wellbeing. This blog is also about the affiliate mind and soul don’t you know. Well, either that or I’m burning time instead of working again. You decide!!