Pronet Hosting – “Insane” Offer
Pronet Hosting have an insane (their words) offer this month. Starting now.
Pay just US$25 for ANY hosting plan for a whole year… (dedicated servers excluded). That means you can save almost $600 if you take their highest plan the reseller 3.
So you can sign up to any of the pronet plans and pay only $25. No domain is included but then I think it’s best to keep your domains and hosting in separate places anyway.
Some of Pronet Hosting Features :
- Fantastico Deluxe – One click install of wordpress, drupal, phpBB forum
- 30 day money back guarantee
- cpanel control panel
- PHP 5
Check it out this offer at PronetHosting.net There is no promotion code. The discounts are automatically applied at checkout. The hosting packages included in the $25 deal are:
- Linux Shared Hosting
- Windows Shared Hosting
- Linux Reseller Hosting
- Windows Reseller Hosting
There are no contracts so you can cancel whenever you want.
Hotel Rooms for £1 a night.
Maybe useful for anyone attending the a4uexpo in London, 13-14 October 2009?
Well worth a try perhaps.
The 4* Strand Palace Hotel is having it’s hundred year birthday this year and to celebrate they are selling 100 rooms for 100 pence for a night. Breakfast included. To be in with a chance you have to fill in a form on their website with the date you want to stay (10 October – 28 Feb). Winners will be notified after the draw closes on 1st October.
The Strand Palace Hotel scheme is at Affiliate Window and they run regular incentives.
Get a free usability test for your site
I’ve just watched a video of one of my sites being expertly reviewed and found it very useful.
When you get bogged down in a site there is always the possibility that you will miss things that might harm your usability and therefore conversion rate. That’s why it’s always good to get a fresh pair of eyes to test drive your site.
Hop over to www.usabilitytest.com and, if you are reading this in time, you can avail yourself of a free usabiltiy test of your website. The handy thing is that it’s a video review so you can easily pause it and resume it / refer to it later.
You can also invite your own testers – friends, colleagues or family to help to test your website from a real user perspective using free screen recording software that automatically uploads videos to the website.
Monetise your most visited pages
Quick & Simple Tip:
I was chatting to a group of travel bloggers last week and a lot of them found this tip useful.
1) If not already, start analysing your site. Google analytics is very useful and free.
2) Find out your most popular pages from organic search. You might be surprised which ones they are, could be in some unloved corner of your site!.
3) Make sure these pages are either monetised, lead into other well monetised pages or have some other benefit for you such as encouraging your users to subscribe to your email or RSS feed.
Affiliate Window Firefox Plugin
Been doing a lot of blog posts on some travel niche areas recently and have found the deep link builder firefox plugin from Affiliate Window to be an invaluable time saver.
To build a deep link there is no need to login to the affiliate window website, one click does it all. Once you have the free plugin installed, when you are on the web page that you want to deep link to you simply have to click the aw logo on your toolbar and you get a pop up with the deep link ready to implement. From the popup you can choose whether you want to have html or just the url to paste, you can also add a click reference and if using the html option you can choose your anchor text and if you want to open in a new window.
A real time saver, and makes it much more likely that I will be implementing text links from Affiliate Window than any other network. The only thing I have seen close to this is when I get an email from a merchant /network with deeplinks ready to use with my affiliate id already apended. Love it.
More info at AffiliateWindow Or go straight to Mozilla to install
Tip for learning affiliate marketing
- See what merchants and what types of offers convert well. Remembering though, that the context of a deal hunting site is different to most sites you (I) will probably develop.
- Refine my text to encourage click throughs. Including an image helps for example as does helping the reader as much as possible – spoon feed them the info they will want.
- See what affiliate schemes were available and have an idea how much % they pay.
- Get feedback on offers, because people can reply in the forums, e.g. if they have found a cheaper way to get the product or service.
- Earn some money.
UK affiliate marketing networks
The affiliate networks I have joined so far
Affiliate Future - Feature RIU, Jet2, Virgin Atlantic, Monarch, Sunshine, LowCostHolidays and many more. so clearly very strong on travel. They also have some integrated tools so you can have a holiday search box on your site which searches through a variety of different holiday websites to increase your chances of getting a conversion.
AffiliateWindow – I was a bit put off by the £5 joining fee but you get that added to your account so it’s not really a fee if you do some business with them. Plenty of travel companies here including British Airways, National Express, BAA parking and lonely planet (books)
Commission Junction – Run an affiliate scheme with many of the TUI Travel brands including Thomson and Portland, CJ also have affiliate programmes with bmi and lastminute.com
LinkShare -Big in the states but fairly new to the UK. They have so far signed up niche operator Intrepid Travel, as well as Radisson Edwardian
Paid On Results – Not so strong on travel but plenty of other e-tailers and have recently added Barcelo Hotels affliate programme. Nice and clean control panel and I also like that they email you a daily summary of activity on your account. Also their site is a good learning resource with pages like this glossary.
Tradedoubler -Strong on travel. Tradedoubler run affiliate schemes with lots of big travel industry players including BA, Thomas Cook, First Choice, Kelkoo, and KLM.
Webgains – Nice control panel makes it easy to switch between multiple websites you may run but keep it all under one account. Travel businesses with affiliate schemes at Webgains include Hotel Connect, Carrentals and also GoAmerica.
Things you should have to hand when you join the affiliate networks:
1) Website details – normally site must be up and running, doesn’t have to be “finished” though.
2) Your bank details – sort code & account number.
Social Bookmark buttons on blogger
Tutorial
I wanted to add social bookmarking buttons to my blog, not that I ever use them myself but a lot of other blogs have them so it’s worth a go.
First lets look at what Social bookmarking is / what social bookmarking buttons are. They come from the phenomenem of social networking such as facebook and myspace and also the web communities such as digg and stumbledupon which go a step further and allow users to vote for their favourite articles. Have a look at the bottom of a post on the Win a Holiday blog and you will see the share icon that I have installed. If you click on it or even hover over it you will get options from all the popular social network sites to add it to your profile.
How do I add the social bookmark buttons to my blog ?
This was fairly quick and easy to do. One of the great things with this is it works retro-actively so all the old posts feature the social bookmarking buttons. The provider I have chosen is free and also provides some stats so you can see if the buttons are effective.
1) Go to addthis.com
2) Click Register and make up a username and password
3) Click on “get your button code”
4) Select the type of button you want (sharing or boomkarking), tell it “blog”, then platform “blogger”, press the button to get the code.
5) Login to your blogger dashboard and the blog you want to add the bookmarking to.
- Select Layout then click Edit HTML
- Click the Expand Widget Templates tickbox
- Copy and paste the code from AddThis into the template, right after the ” div class=’post-footer’ ” tag [if you are on firefox, use CTRL+F to find this]
- Click Save Template
- Check what has happened.
Final thought.
It’s worth checking you have the “Email this article to a friend” option selected in your blogger dashboard too. People might prefer to send your articles to someone they know specifically will be interested in it. This will have a much higher conversion than the social bookmarking.
Custom blogger domain using 1and1
I wrote this tutorial while changing http://free-holidays.blogspot.com to http://winholiday.co.uk . This will be easier for people to type in / remember, I am also hoping this will look more professional, get a better search engine rank and better help me target a UK audience.
The great thing is that blogger still host the blog for free, so that’s one less thing to worry about.
“Your DNS-Settings have been saved, your domain will be updated accordingly“
6) Now you’re back at the Domain Overview screen, check the tickbox next to your domain name again, click destination from the horizontal menu then select edit destination from the dropdown.
7) Select Destination Type = select Forward Your Domain
Forwarding Destination = your domain name, so e.g. I put http://winholiday.co.uk
Forwarding Type = HTTP redirect
Press OK, you should get a success message and then press to go to overview.
8) Choose New from the horizontal menu then select Create subdomain from the dropdown. You come to a screen called New Subdomain. In the box just put www (not www.) and select the domain you are dealing with, then press create.
9) You should be back at the Overview screen and you should be able to see the new subdomain and the status is probably “Applying”. Go and make a cup of tea.
Next it’s over to blogger, but it’s best to wait until you see the status of the subdomain in the 1&1 control panel change to “Ready”. This can take a couple of hours.
How to setup a blogger blog with your own domain name
1) Log in to your blogger dashboard.
2) Choose the blog you want the custom domain to be used on.
3) Click on Settings
4) Click on Publishing, click to switch to custom domain and then switch to advanced settings under the bit where they offer to sell you a domain.
5) Put your domain name in the box, so in my example I enter “winholiday.co.uk”
6) Complete the word verification box and then “save settings”.
7) Try out your new custome domain blog.
Any problems with this post a comment and I will try and help you out.
More detailed info on the blogger process is here
Affiliate Marketing Tutorials
Tutorials to help you get started in Affiliate Marketing
I’ve written these tutorials :
1) As myself a relative beginner, this way I hope I write in a way that other beginners will find useful.
2) With an emphasis on affiliate marketing for travel industry products and services.
Here are what I have published so far. I will edit this page as I add more. If there is anything you would be keen for me to look into then just leave a comment at the bottom on this article and I will do my best to help you out.
Getting Started
Registering your travel website domain name.
Why online travel is so competitive and you should find a niche.
Google UK Keyword checker tool.
Domains
Tips on what to think about when buying a domain name:
Registering domain name – tips and considerations.
It’s best to have an idea of how many people are searching for your domain name keywords:
Google Adwords tool – keyword checker.
If you buy a domain “second hand”:
How to transfer a .co.uk domain to 1&1 and deal with the nominet transfer.
When you have your domain and blog and want to:
Give your blogger / blogspot blog a custom domain name (URL)
If you no longer want your domain (and can’t sell it!)
How to cancel auto renewal of a domain at 1&1.
Websites / Blogs
How to add social bookmarking buttons to Blogger
