Well perhaps not so much singing and very little dancing but it has had a bit of a makeover. If it was a TV programme or movie (Batman, Superman, Spiderman etc) then it would be termed a reboot, so that’s what I’m going to call it… One Little Duck Rebooted.

Blogging about affiliate marketing and online stuff had gotten a bit of struggle. Perhaps it was the curse of the A4UAward? The heavy burden of being the last winner of “Best Affiliate Blog” dragging me down under water like the concrete slippers on a recently acquired international terrorist (allegedly).

Or it could be that I’ve been distracted by many other things. Moving home is now done and to be fair walking by the sea (see below) is far better therapy to the trials and tribulations brought about by doing this online thing than any amount of blogging.

You might have noticed a fair few photos that are new to the blog as well. There’s good reason for that. OLD remains primarily an affiliate marketing/siteowner/grumpy old man blog, but it needed something extra. Something more personable! And so the photos (which won’t be just of ducks) are here to accompany things. It also saves me trying to run another site to put them on.

Boiling things down has actually been a big feature of the last few months. At Loquax we’ve been getting rid of stuff that doesn’t make money and working on things that do. Out went our shopping feed channel. As clever a bit of coding that it was, it just wasn’t good enough to do anything in SEO terms, it wasn’t really competitive enough in user terms and ultimately it failed in finance terms. In fact it was quite “expensive” to have as it played havoc with the server.

In truth, I think we got to it before Kung Fu Google Panda did!

I’ll not miss the shopping feed channel though. Trying to “price compare” everything and anything was an insane task to undertake. Feed quality varies from merchant to merchant and network to network – and at times it’s not great. We still use product feeds, but in a much more basic way and/or limited product niche way.

Top tip – don’t a shopping portal site with millions of products… and don’t run it as part of a competition portal… and don’t run a competition site either. Do something else and you’ll have more chance to earn a living as an affiliate!

In fact, the biggest change over the last few months has been my mindset. The amount of “free work” we do at Loquax is horrendous – that needs to be rebalanced a little (well a bit more than a little).

So what’s been happening affiliate wise?

Not a great deal, everything ticks along as usual as Pandas and recessions come and go. Stuff’s up, stuff’s down, life goes on! Thankfully I’ve finally recovered from judging this year’s A4UAwards.

This is the second year I’ve been a judge and this year was a lot tougher. There were more entries and some of such exceptional standard that it’s painfully evident how the industry has changed. An analogy – we are in affiliate marketing terms simply a scruffy moggy playing with a toy mouse for larks up against Prides of Lions devouring a bunch of dancing Gazelles.

A big congratulations to all those who are shortlisted.

I’ll probably not be at the awards night and I missed Think Visibility in March – so the aim will be to get to an affiliate event later this year. Not attending events doesn’t seemed to have much impact on what we do, but I’ll try and make an effort this year even if it’s just to prove I’ve not moved to a £1million compound away from prying eyes. The Swansea/South Wales affiliates did meet up last month for a bit of bowling, a lot of drinking and even a bit of magic and that was great fun.

WKD Cherry Pop is an alcoholic revelation by the way.

And on that note, it’s time to get on and do something that has a chance of generating revenue.

On the plus side I like the fact the green has now gone and the site has a more stylish look. It also integrates the trendy new Twitter plus a plugin for Flickr photos (at the bottom of the page). This now means I’ll have to keep twittering and also get round to uploading a load more photos to my Flickr account.

The down side (which in itself is a plus side) is that the theme does need a bit of tarting up! First off the 900px picture of a tree on a hill will need to replaced with something duck like (time to look through those photos) and I may look at changing the grey tabs and tables on the right at some point.

I’d have liked UBD to include the Feedburner options that they had in Moneymaker, mainly because they’d tarted it up nicely and it looked better than the rather bland email/rss box currently on the right. Top commentators and recent comments are also missing, and for some reason I can’t get recent comments functioning. Hopefully these are things that can be fixed, but being lazy I’d love to have seen them in place from the start.

I’m not sure whether I’ll reintroduce the tag cloud in this version of OLD, but it’s notable that Cool Theme doesn’t show tags in the posts. I’ve never really been that bothered with tags in all my blogs so am wondering whether they’re of any use? Does anyone know whether they’re that important?

All in all I’m so far really pleased with the change from Moneymaker to Cool Theme. Unique Blog Designs offer a multi-use licence for Cool Theme for just $77 and if you’re able to do a bit of your own coding and tarting up then it’s a superb basis for a good looking premium style blog without paying premium prices.

Cool Theme Verdict – cool, naturally!

New Year always means resolutions and decisions about what to do over the coming 12 months so what’s to come in 2009?

I had actually considered giving up writing on this blog as one resolution – not during a cold and delirious moment during last night, but just as a general reflection of affiliate things in 2008 over recent weeks. Good news for some (and bad news for others) is that’s not going to happen as (1) writing a blog is cheaper than paying for therapy and (2) OLD is still the best affiliate blog featuring a duck in it’s title and my reader would be disappointed!

However I do intend to be more selective with my online and offline affiliate activities. At least that’s the initial plan – and there’s good reason for this!

Firstly it’s a time issue – over the last week when forums and other social systems have been quieter than usual I’ve managed to get so much more done. There’s no distractions, no discussions to follow, no arguments to have and it means I get stuff sorted out. It’s brilliant!

So resolution one is to not spend all day checking forums and/or getting involved with arguments (the two should go hand in hand) – in other words “focus”. Part of this is also based on the fact that having an opinion (or indeed daring to speak out) isn’t always a welcome attribute for forums, so resolution two will be that this blog will be only place I’ll vent my thoughts!

Time is also an issue with events – and we’ve been assessing cost vs time vs value! Last year alone we ended up in London 3 times during September – all good fun – but not always cost and business effective, especially when travelling from Swansea. With affiliate events we also have found ourselves biased to A4U organised shindigs and often we opt for them (mainly because we know they’re good) over others.

Whilst you could say “go to them all” – there’s still our own work to do – and whilst I’d recommend affiliates make as much effort to get to events, what is right and good for one isn’t always right and good for another. For example, networks aren’t our major revenue streams so attending events aimed at meeting them and their merchants is always that useful. Resolution three therefore is “be sensibly selective”!

So that’s the plan, but knowing how most resolutions go it won’t be long before all three are broken!

Anyway Happy New Year to everyone – hopefully 2009 will be a good one!

Merry Christmas!

The RSS/Newsfeed for the site has also been sorted out, for some reason there was an atom.xml file linked in and it was out of date. Getting that sorted might mean a few more visitors now!

Finally, the old image at the top has been replaced by One Little Duck sat by Pwlldu (said Pulth-dee and apparently it means Black Pool)!

All proceeds go to Macmillan! Follow the link and there’s an option to donate via Paypal. You don’t need to have a Paypal account to make a donation, however if you prefer to not use Paypal then drop myself or Jude an email.

The above picture was taken at last year’s event. Spot the duck!

Thanks To: Kieron at UKOffer, Graeme at POR, Fraser, Catherine

Along the walk though we did pass a farm and Jude for some unknown reason spotted this pig, who has since been dubbed the world’s luckiest! “Take a picture, take a picture” she shouted… “it’ll make a great blog post”… so here’s the lucky fella!

I’ve also taken the plunge and added a few Google Ads as well. This theme isn’t really set up for adverts as the main area was set as 430px – but a bit of editting and a graphic resizing soon sorted that out.  

Some of our users have been with us since the beginning, which is quite incredible, but in amongst the ‘congratulations’ were things like “here’s to the next 8″ and even “next 88″! I don’t know if we’ll do a next 1, let alone a next 8, but that philosophy in this business is not a bad one – most certainly it has guided us this far and kept our feet firmly on the ground. 

To tie in wonderfully with the number 8, Asda have launched a budget Valentine card for tightfisted skinflint romeos – it costs just 8p! According to The BBC “The card was launched after 30% of 2,000 people surveyed by Flora called Valentine’s Day too commercial”.

I guess if a bloke offered that to his missus on Feb 14th he might end up single and having to use his tightfistedness in an altogether different way – provided he still could. Just for the record I’ve not bought Jude this card – I got her card from Tesco instead.