TD Christmas Party

Tradedoubler’s “Christmas” (it’s not even Halloween yet) took place on Thursday at the Namco Station. Now it’s a long way from Swansea to London for one night of free drinks but after last year’s dodgems this is a “must do” affiliate meeting. A few beers + drunk affiliates + dodgems = carnage and mayhem!

An excellent night – so thanks TD, although apart from Nick Roveta and Lars who was handing out tokens for the dodgems I wasn’t sure if anyone else from the company was there?

DGMPro Update

Shock of the week came via a phone call from DGM. “Would I be interviewed about DGMPro and discuss problems etc etc”… for half an hour of my time I’d get the reward of £50. Now on one hand having made it quite clear what I think of the system one could argue that it would be a case of “money where your mouth is”. It did cross my mind, but then so did the fact that my earnings from this network have plummeted in the last couple of months and it’s going to take more than £50 to redress the balance. For the record, no I’m not being interviewed.

Train Station Tips

When waiting for a train it’s always a good idea to check which platform the train departs from. Don’t assume the Paddington to Swansea train always leaves platform 1! Otherwise you could find yourself running to Platform 5 with a couple of minutes to spare!

More Ducking Madness

Our Loquax Duck Holiday pictures keep coming in… it’s slowed down a little but the little yellow plastic ducks have still reached some interesting destinations. All the pictures are on Flickr and latest destinations include Australia, Las Vegas, Hong Kong, Corfu and The Grand Canyon….

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Just spent the weekend in Dublin and had a good time visiting the city for the first time. It was a 5 star break as Jury’s upgraded us from Croke Park to the The Berkeley Court due to a booking problem. Things looked bleak though as the first room we had came equipped with free generator just outside the window, but after complaining at 1.30 in the morning we ended up upgraded to a 4 poster bed executive suite. And the price was 69 Euros a night, which was a bit of a bargain!

Dublin was great – although I still cannot stand the taste of Guinness! Jude loved it though (and the food, and the Irish coffees, and the food some more… oh and a bit more Guinness not forgetting the Jameson’s Whiskey). Did all the usual tourist stuff and then ended up on the last night on the Dublin Ghost Bus tour (on a bus, going round Dublin in the cold and wet being shown graveyards and haunted steps!).

It was good to get away for a few days and take a break from affiliate marketing and websites. Next week is the Tradedoubler Christmas party (yes the TD Christmas party is in October) and then after that it’ll be a case of keeping things ticking over and up to date as the festive shopping takes off.

I have made a subconcious decision to ease my workload, much of which is self inflicted (reading forums, checking stats, looking at logs, writing blogs….. d’oh). Jude will still tell me I work too hard, but at least I’m subconciously doing less!

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Last week was one of those week’s workwise where you just wish you’d stopped in bed and not bothered to get up! The start of the week started off with a virus scare. Some useful tips learnt from this are (1) keep your internet security updates up to date and valid and (2) it is not good giving users viruses via your webpages. Several security password changes later and thankfully a quite reasonable audience meant that damage was limited.

The biggest worry was more “what could have happened” as opposed to “what did happen”, but it’s important to learn from near disasters. Also, we’ve finally invested in third party back ups rather than rely on ourselves to get it done. (and some of you reading this will think why haven’t they done that before and others will think hmmm I better get that sorted).

If that wasn’t exciting enough a couple of our domains suffered the Google filter experience. The cause is something many are speculating over at Webmasterworld and despite having read through several posts it’s not really clear what’s going on, why it’s going on, and if it’s yet over.

Rather than waste time worrying about the changes time was used to look at the areas affected. Firstly a bug meant that duplicate content could be an issue. Whilst the bug had been fixed so it couldn’t reoccur, the old pages could still exist and in Google they still exist. Therefore any tweaks Google are doing is based on old content. To combat this the offending pages have been recoded to generate updated pages that are not indexable. In theory this should remove them from the index.

The above bug was the common denominator in two sections – a third section exists that has already suffered the same fate – this will be recoded this week with new content.

In another domain area though the bug did not exist, but duplicate content could have played a part. However, the other factor is backfill – e.g if a user searches for X Televisions through shopping feeds and there are none a PPC backfill is shown instead. Similarly if they search for Y Televisions through shopping feeds and there are none the same PPC backfill is included. In essence these could be duplicated pages.

From the discussions it does seem that it’s not just the pages involved that are penalised, but the rest of the pages in that domain. This is obviously worrying as overnight, like many on WMW, search engine traffic could disappear. How long for is anyone’s guess, but it does highlight the frailty of an internet business if it’s short term dependence relies on one factor. I don’t know if the changes we’ve made will get the filtered domains back. What happens next is something that no one really knows.

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Ok, who in their right mind sends affiliates a carrot in the post? Either someone has a warped sense of humour or a recent David Brent style marketing meeting down the local and after several pints and numerous crap ideas finally resulted in a “let’s send them carrots… but don’t tell em who it’s from – a kind of vegetable valentine”. Genius!

The carrot has ended up at my business partner’s address though, which means I sadly cannot share with you this wonderful gift in photo form. My business partner was most amused and tomorrow is hoping for a potato and perhaps some green beans – by the end of next week she’ll have the basis for a small stew!

Already in the cooking pot though (did you like that link or what) are affiliate favorites DGM. Their share price toppled by 33% after the company said profits to December will fall significantly below expectations (Citywire). I don’t really understand share prices and how these things work, but as I understand it this is based on other factors other than the much maligned DGMPro system. Whether DGM can bounce back from this remains to be seen, but the next few days of trading could be interesting to watch.

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Finally recoved after a couple of days in London! Amazing how tiring a couple of days of networking and drinking can be (well mainly drinking). The event was well attended by a number of merchants, affiliates and networks and the organisers Matt and Helen did an exceptional job in keeping everything running smoothly – well done guys. The venues were fantastic, the food excellent and it was a lot of fun. Oh, plus there was a bit of work done too. Business wise it was good to chat to a few merchants (more than I initially thought) and networks. The only frustration was not knowing who was attending (or who was meant to be attending) so that they could be seeked out for a chat. Not to worry, there’s always another time!

Big thanks to Buyagift as I won their raffle prize – a stunt school day! This will be an interesting (and hopefully exciting) day. Jude won a bottle of champagne from Tote, narrowly missing out on a La-z-boy Chair. Not being one to complain, but (and speaking purely from a competitions point of view rather than a bitter partner who so desperately needed a La-z-Boy Chair) first out the hat usually wins the main prize ;o)!!! Anyway the champagne was lovely and contributed to the day’s alcohol intake very nicely.

As ever it was good to meet up with the usual suspects for a chat and a few too many drinks. Jude was suprisingly good and for once managed to retain her alcohol consumption. Could Cardinal Chunder be retiring?

Other Odds & Ends

Worst Refereeing Display Ever – Derby v Southampton
Best Hotel Room with Microwave Oven – Shaftsbury Kensington
Liar Liar – Paul from Shopper UK and his Remoted Controlled Boat!
Too Complicated – Music Downloads from Tesco
Petrol Shortage in Sunderland – Kieron is back home.

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