Mark is no stranger to “big ideas” so I caught up with him to find out more – here’s what he has to say!

1. Tell Me A Little About Yourself?

Some would say I am a dreamer, no, literally, the would. I am an entrepreneur who loves coming up with the most crazy random ideas in order to see whether they can be turned into reality. Most people sit at the pub and discuss, ‘what if ideas’. I am the type of guy who discusses them and then risk everything in order to see if I can turn them into reality.

My first ‘big idea’ was a business called Tribewanted.com. I leased a 200 acre island in Fiji which had nothing on it. I built a website that enabled people to sign up and become a ‘virtual tribe members’, online these ‘tribe members’ voted on what they wanted to see happen on the island, what they wanted to build and how they wanted to work with the Fijians, members could then go and visit the island and get involved in building and developing the eco-village. Tribewanted was featured in the media around the world including ‘Good Morning America’, the ‘Today Show’ and ‘The New York Times’, it was even featured on ITV’s ‘This Morning!’ Tribewanted was filmed for 18 months and became a 5 part prime time BBC2 show.

2. What’s The Big British Giveaway All About?

Big British Giveaway is a daily giveaway site. Every single day, in 10 cities, in 2012, businesses will offer a product as a giveaway. In order to enter the giveaway the public have to like the brand on Facebook, Follow the brand on Twitter and engage with the brand all over the web. This means that, for your chosen 24 hour period, an online social army of brand champions will be raising your profile to all their friends, family and followers which will leave a lasting legacy of a positive digital footprint about your brand, online.

3. How Can Retailers/Affiliates Get Involved With ‘Giveaway?

Quite easily, all you have to do is head over to www.bigbritishgiveaway.com, select your city and your chosen day and reserve your giveaway day. Simple. Once you have done this we will send you an email asking you to answer a small number of questions and we will use the answers to create your giveaway day text which you will approve before you go live.

4. What’s In It For Them?

Most businesses are on Facebook or Twitter but they either don’t know what to do with these social media profiles or they find it hard to know how to attract a significant audience. Once a brand reserves their giveaway day we will create a specific campaign designed to the needs of your business – you may want to increase the number of Twitter followers you have, or the number of likes that you have on Facebook, you may even want 100′s of people to send out a tweet with your twitter profile link in it – we can do any of these and more!

On your giveaway day your campaign will go live and your brand will be seen by 1000′s of people across the internet, enabling you to reach potential new clients, attracting new followers to your Twitter and new fans to your Facebook, we can even ask people to enter their email it your email database. The members of the public who like, follow or enter their email address want to because they like your brand and therefore you will have gained a targeted audience who you can promote your products to and turn into customers.

5. What’s The Cost/Catch?

Big British Giveaway is a seriously affordable marketing platform. Day 1 is £1 and prices increase by only £1 per day. So, the 1st January is £1, 2nd January is £2 and the 31st December is £366 which is the most that any business will be able to pay next year.

Furthermore, on your giveaway day, alongside a description of your company and information of the product that you are going to giveaway you will also have the opportunity to offer a discount code. With all the exposure that you are getting on your giveaway day you will be able to maximise this opportunity and turn these eyeballs into customers by offering an incentive of a small discount.

6. What Happens If You Don’t Fill The Calendar On A Given Day?

Big British Giveaway launched in the UK only a matter of weeks ago, the American version launched 2 months ago and already we have sold over 1000 giveaway days. I am confident that with the PR exposure that is about to ramp up, we will sell all giveaway days. Furthermore, the cost of the days are so cost effective that it simply makes sense for business owners to make the most of this opportunity.

7. You’re Launching In USA/Australia/UK at the same time – Isn’t That A Bit Mad?

Yes, it is slightly! We launched in the USA (Big American Giveaway) which went down really well, selling over 1000 days within 2 months. As this success has grown and developed we have had enough interest from business owners and the public in both the UK and Australia (Big Aussie Giveaway) requesting that we launch in each of these countries and so we did. The reality is that I have a great team around me and it is not that much more effort launching in three countries as it is launching in one! Furthermore, whilst we have launched in all 50 states in the USA, we are initially launching in 10 cities in the UK and 4 locations in Australia so we are going to build these two countries slowly but surely. I am confident that we can build a strong, successful platform that we can roll out in a number of countries, well, that is the dream anyway!

8. What’s Your Top Tip For Start Ups?

Never fear failure. I have this belief that, in houses across the UK, there are latent future business leaders who will could make world changing products if only they were not afraid of failure. If a business is launched that does not work out, learn from the experience and come up with a new idea, use your experience to improve the next idea and keep going until you create the business that breaks through, if you keep going long enough, you will succeed.

A big thanks to Mark for taking part in the interview! 2012 promises to be a busy year for Mark and I’ll be watching with interest, from a competition point of view and business point of view, how the Big Giveaway sites develop.

To find out more head on over to Big British Giveaway.

However, there was also an element of curiosity! What has Bannatyne got to say and just how many mistakes have I (and Loquax) made over the years.

The book is pretty easy to read and the advice offered is mixed up with anecdotes from Duncan’s own business experiences , contestants on Dragon’s Den and recent business events.

Apparently Duncan started his entreprenuerial career in ice cream and now has a few fitness clubs. You’d never know this reading the book as he hardly mentions them (i’m kidding btw). This isn’t totally a bad thing as the information is relevant and mostly interesting.

For online entreprenuers the good news is that Bannatyne does occasionally mention things like SEO, Facebook and Twitter. One thing that frustrates me a little about The Apprentice is that “online” doesn’t seem to play a part in things. I’d just love a team to get themselves on Facebook or Twitter and try and flog stuff for Lord Sugar!

So what are the mistakes?

Many of the mistakes are basically just common sense things, or things many people overlook until it’s a bit too late. For example, is it a good business idea, profit vs turnover, staff, customers, location, thinking the market will never change etc.

Each mistake is described in a few pages – as I say many are common sense, but it’d be a surprise if one or two didn’t resonate with the entreprenurial focused reader.

The one mistake mentioned in the book that resonates most for me is hiding behind the desk – something we’ve pretty much done for the lifetime of Loquax. Relationships are very important now in affiliate marketing – probably more so than ever – but somehow we’ve got away without having to do too much “out the office” work.

The Extrapolation Trap is another one of the errors that stood out. I remember clearly chatting with affiliates back in 2004/5 about how we’d all set up 100s of sites, each site would earn ££s and we’d be able to sit back and watch them top the SERPS. If only we’d known just how much harder work running a site is now compared to then!

Another mistake we’re probably guilty of is “build it and they will come” – in many ways we got lucky with Loquax as we did build and they did turn up. And thankfully people still keep on coming. However, other sites have never ever had that – and we’ve rarely got out of first gear to attract them. Ooops!

Mind you, in the book it’s also a mistake to grow your business too big – and subsconciously we’ve always been wary of the overall Loquax business getting bigger than we can actually manage.

On the plus side, therefore, there’s a few of Bannatyne’s mistakes we’ve avoided – often without knowing we’ve avoided them. That kind of underlines the fact that many of the mistakes are purely down to not applying common sense.

All in all I’d say that the book is useful as a reminder of how things can go wrong and where they can go wrong. It’s not going to turn you into a top entreprenuer or propel your business into higher echelons, but there’s some good pointers to ponder upon.

If you do decide to buy it then the first mistake you’ll make is paying full price for it – an astonishing £13.99 RRP. Get it on Amazon for just £7.03.

Competitor Reviews Loquax – Oh Dear!

Kicking things off was a review of Loquax by a competitor. Just quickly, we list competitions on various sites around the web – from blogs to brands – and it’s free to use. The competitor (MyComps from Oxfordshire Press) does something similar but on a smaller scale and they charge for their service.

Naturally they’d prefer to get people to pay them for their service and so they “reviewed” Loquax in what I can only describe as an attempt to undermine our brand. In my opinion they’re trying to discredit us without actually knowing how we work. The “review” is badly structured and contains unsubstantiated claims! On one hand it’s quite funny and flattering that a competitor is that desperate, on the other it’s pretty annoying.

Obviously a competitor standing on your toes, especially your trademark’s toes, isn’t something to be taken lightly, and so legal advice has been sought. The problem with legal stuff is that it can cost a lot of money just to make people act reasonably – and there’s no guarantee of success anyway.

A full explanation can be found on the Loquax Blog – MyComps Reviews Loquax – What They Do & Don’t Tell You!.

Can You Remove That Backlink Please?

Whilst we’ve been trying to get a competitor to remove underhand content about Loquax, another site has been asking us to make some changes. It’s not our content that’s the problem though!

On our bingo news area of Loquax we had an article that quoted another bingo portal. We linked to the site with the site name as anchor text. Now I don’t understand SEO, but it was a surprise to get an email from an SEO consultancy saying that as their client had received a Google penalty they needed all backlinks to be removed.

This has got me totally perplexed!

It was a free link, not asked for, relevant, in context – in fact everything I’d have thought Google would have liked. Good for us and good for the site we’re linking to?

The SEO company doing the asking couldn’t explain their request – they just said it was a serious situation and needed it done. Sometimes it’s easier to be co-operative, so the links been removed. It’d have been nice to have an idea of why it was so important though.

I’d have thought having a relevant link on an on-topic site would be worth keeping. I’d also have thought that the SEO company would have been better off sorting out the penalty (and why the penalty happened)?

Perhaps someone who’s clever in SEO can shed some light?

Like Kieron I was quite stunned to see what essentially is 4 gaming affiliate sites obtain £200,000 based on little more than a few wild stats about online bingo players and some impressive projections on revenue in the next 3 years (they expect a £3million profit in year 3).

I have come across Gaming Alerts whilst running the 3 bingo sites we have, including Prize Bingo, plus the 3 bingo white labels we also own (e.g. Prize Bingo). Never in a million years would I have thought that their business would be currently worth over £650,000 (based on the 30% investment made by Theo). A close look at their sites (Casino Alert, Bingo Alert, Bookies Alert and Poker Alert) and apart from the download, which many observers rightly suggest perhaps isn’t that great, there’s not a lot there that can’t be put together fairly rapidly! The sites are well designed, but 117 registered members in a forum doesn’t suggest that they’ve made much effort to develop a community prior to this funding.

If you look at the bigger players in the casino and bingo arena (e.g. Which Bingo) then they, this morning, must be rubbing their hands at their own potential valuations. (Of course a business is only worth as much as someone is prepared to pay for it).

There are better bingo, casino, poker and bookmaker sites out there! Is £200,000 going to be enough to take on those players? By appearing on the show the service will get some interest, but probably only from entrepreneurs who are now going to go “wow, gaming online seems big business, let’s have a slice of that” and that’s going to possibly impact the market with a bundle of me too services.

On top of that, you have to remember that Google is now quite restrictive about gambling PPC, so the SEO market has become very competitive for gaming related terms (and who knows what they’re bring in next!). Most certainly some of our gaming placements have been pushed downwards in recent months, not because of affiliate/portal sites, but because of the casino and bingo sites now pushing their way upwards.

No one can take it away from Gaming Alerts that they’ve done well. Not only have they been able to promote their business in the den, but they secured the funding that they wanted.

It does look like they’re already spending that money on PPC though…

… it will be interesting to see how things progress.

Here’s an example for Halo 3 Tricks: The Movie!

The loading in is sometimes slow, and you may need to click the white expanse under the advert to activate the video. This might just be a minor bug or “just me”, but it’s not going to be that good a service if the video start image doesn’t appear. The good news is though, once the video is up and running then the ads kick in and you then earn per click. You can see revenue earnt for each video in the reporting – so you can gauge which videos work best for your site.

Shame they don’t have a referral program! But, it’s a clever advertising option – whether it can earn lots of revenue for your site remains to be seen. Plus how will video makers feel if their content is being used to promote other advertising? Those issues aside, it’s a clever way to integrate some advertising into video embedding.

Thanks to NMA!

.. and best of all it’s free. Yes these guys are going to tell me everything I need to know for nothing!

Yeah… right!

As far as I can see it’s simply a vehicle to try and flog their ecommerce software, which is currently $2800 – 50% discount if you attend a conference plus $225 hosting fees and is not mentioned at all in the letter, to people who think they’re getting a good deal.

It most certainly will take a lot more than 90 minutes to become a proficient user of of eBay, Yahoo, Google and MSN to generate revenue for your business – and anyone who thinks otherwise is seriously deluded and probably deserves to pay stupid dollars for these kind of products.

So the best place for it….

It’s a good initiative and more people should try working from home, at least if only for a couple of days a week. Obviously this is going to be difficult for some professions – I’d not be too keen if a surgeon for example decided that as it was Friday he or she was going to do their work from home…. anyway I digress – what about those of who already work from home? After all, a lot of affiliates’ work many hours at home (some have proper offices though).

What should home working affiliates do on 18th May?

Perhaps there should be a “National Go And Work In An Office” day as an alternative forcing affiliates to get up at a proper time, wear proper work clothes, have a structured day of work, finish at a proper time, eat lunch at a proper time (with reet proper gravy for you Bisto lovers), and miss the afternoon episode of Jeremy Kyle!

Doesn’t sound like fun though does it!