Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

A big thank you to everyone I’ve met or worked with for a great 2006.   And a bit thank you to Jess for the gift voucher and Fraser for the wine.

So it seems that Fishboy, aka Paul Wright, has Blog Tagged me. Apparently this is where you have to write 5 things about yourself on your blog and tag another 5 people, kind of like those bloody annoying emails that I seem to get. Anyhow, here’s my attempt.

5 Things you didn’t know about me.

1) I have a warped career path; after quitting college my first real job was as a temp for office angels, where I would be somewhere different every few days. Tempting could be fun, or very very shit. Two examples:
a. One temp job I was asked (with one other person) to spend a week clearing our a basement at an office, there was not much to do and most of the day was spend playing about on the internet.
b. Another job entailed travelling all the way to East Ham (about 2 hrs on the train) to work for a lift engineering company, filing documents. Four days of filing documents can really mess up your brain.

2) I once went though a €œblagging€ stage, where I pretended to own a popular reviews website. I managed to get myself an interview with my favourite band at the time (3 Doors Down), a number of pre-release books/music/films/cinema screenings, and a few gig passes.

3) I once won a competition titled €œMr Muscle Man€. People that have met me will wonder how this happened, so a little bit of background. The competition was at a resort in Estartit. It was a kids competition, I was about 5. Everyone else that entered was between 9-14. I walked the wrong way around the stage and almost fell over. I got the €œcute€ or €œsympathy€ vote. The prize was a frisby and sweets and it’s one of my proudest achievements

4) I always seem to injure myself when I go on holiday. Here’s a few examples:
a. When I was around 8 years old I fell of a Death Slide outside a grocery store on the South Coast. To date it is the only time I have managed to knock myself out.
b. When I was around 14, on holiday with family in Portugal, I attempted to go fishing on a little jetty by the sea. I managed to slip over on the jetty and land flat on my back - it hurt a lot and I had to go to a local hospital for checkups - I ended up lying in a corridor with dead bodies while my parents were filling out some forms - I wondered how long the others had been waiting there.
c. A year later at another resort I was pushed into the swimming pool by another holiday maker trying to have a laugh. I tripped and broke my leg on the way in and had to come home early.

5) I learnt all about how the female mind works by talking to girls via Compuserve chat rooms when I was around 13 years old. I once even recorded a video of me and another geeky friend chatting away and sent it in the post to a girl I’d been talking to - I received one back too, which was fun.

6) (I know there isn’t meant to be a point six, but I’ve done it anyway). I once appeared on Nickelodeon TV and was gunged live on air. A male schoolmate of mine did a Karaoke track entitled: Girls just wanna have fun. I don’t know who came off worse when we got back to school on the Monday.

I’m tagging the following: Dan Morley, Alan (Happy), Chris Heilmann, Lee McCoy, Bobbie Johnson

I had some good news today.   A few months ago I read a thisismoney article which stated that banks have been breaking the law for a number of years by charging penalty fees to their customers.    You know the ones; going overdrawn, having a bounced cheque or a problem with a failed direct debit.   Anyhow, the crux of the matter is that banks can only charge back to the customer the amount that it actually costs them to process these payment problems - around £3 for a bounced cheque, for example - not £50.So I went though all of my First Direct statements over the past few years and found around £700 worth of charges on my current account - I wrote a letter (you can find templates of these online) asking for the charges to be refunded and giving them 14 days in which to respond.

Today I heard back - they said that they had refunded £140 back in August 2005 (I still need to check this) but they were willing to pay back £530 to us.   It’s not the full amount, but if the £140 is correct then it’s near enough and all that is left is for a form to be signed and sent back accepting this refund and it will be credit before the new year (and will be going on paying off some of our debts, I suspect).

I’ve since told someone at work about this who has asked if I can do the same process for him and if successful he will give me 25% of the amount reclaimed.    This seems like quite a good business opportunity so if anyone else is interested in the same offer let me know!

I’ve recently bookmarked the following sites:

• Yoono -  Not sure on this one yet. It let’s you share your bookmark folders and suggest relative sites when browsing the web - seeing real time recommendations.    Could come in handy for marketing.
• Twitter - Twitter lets you type and share with other users what you are doing.  So I would write “I am updated my blog” if I was twittering at the same time.  It’s quite addictive and you can add widgets to your site (see right panel).
• MyChores - My wife and I are often arguing about housework, so this little site could come in handy.  Intergrates into Twitter too, which is nice.

Other than that it’s a quiet week so far - saving all my energy for Thursday, when I will be speaking at the Bullet Business Bingo conference in the day before heading off to Soho for the Affiliate Future Xmas Party.

Listening to Radio1 at some point in the past I seem to remember a “What Rocked, What Sucked” feature - where a listening will say What Rocked and What Sucked about their weekend.

So, my choice for this weekend is:

What Rocked

• Getting an email saying the new dedicated server is up and running (within just two days).
• Qmailrocks - A fantastic website/tutorial which goes over a step by step guide to installing Qmail (a linux mail server) with SpamAssassin and Clam AntiVirus. I did a different tutorial at first, which went a bit “tits up” but after removing the previous install this one was perfect.
• OpenDNS - A new find after my DNS servers were updating at the speed of a tortuous - changed over to OpenDNS and it fixed the problem, they also have a built-in anti-phishing which is pretty neat.

What Sucked

• HeartInternet - I’ll rant about this another time.
• Having the remails of man flu
• Spending many hours in Linux hell
• Spending an evening when my kids were at their grandparents tidying the house

All in all quite a productive weekend.

The Monkey (well, ok, it’s an ape) in the photo above may look cute. But I warn you, it’s wild and dangerous.

When I was last in Gibraltar (about a month ago) this savage beast decided to try and attack me. Some may say that it is because you should not try and stroke wild monkey’s. Others will say it’s because I’m an easy target. Whatever it is, beware folks.

I was out for lunch today with a friend of mine who has recently started a site called UK Poker Buddies

It’s completely free to sign up and there is no advertising on the site - a good resource for offline poker players.

…but it’s been a over a year since my last post. I’d pretty much forgotten about it until I very randomly met with my old MD from Field & Trek. He mentioned that he looked at the site every now and again, so I decided it was about time that I got around to updating it.

I work for an iGaming firm called St. Minver these days as an Affiliate Manager for their Bingo & Casino sites.

Family wise Kieran has just had his 4th Birthday and Jacob is now around 18 months old. Lindsey still manages to put up with me somehow.

Fantastic news - the upgraded GP32 is soon to be out! Named the GP2X it has some fantastic features and an SDK so that people can start developing straight away - It’s less than �150 as well.

I remember buying the original GP32 about 4/5 years ago - it was way ahead of anything else at the time, meaning you could use emulators on a handheld - I was admired around the town with my little handheld playing the original Sensible Soccer!

If I had some spare cash I would be buying one of these - I hope it’s as good as the original (doesn’t seem like it’s got built-in wireless though, which is bad).

Almost forgot the link!

I hate being on the wrong side of someone, I really do, however it seems to of happened yet again.

Someone I considered a friend was asking if anyone was able to put something on ebay for her. I responded (as a jest) that I would put it on for half the profit received. This person accepted and thanked me, but in reality I was just going to give her the full money minus the ebay/paypal/postage fees.

The auction finished last week, and I spent all of my lunch hour last Wednesday in the post office queuing to send the parcel off. I was busy all day on Thursday but first thing in Friday morning I logged into the even reliable paypal and requested that the money in my paypal account be sent to my normal bank account, allowing me to give the money to my friend.

Anyhow – not long after I had submitted the request to paypal I was asked by her if I had the money yet – she knew I had sent the parcel and I can only assume thought that these things are a lot quicker than they are. I informed her at the time that the money was being sent from paypal to my account and I would be able to give her the cash next week. I told her it could take up to a week but is generally about 3 working days.

Yesterday, first thing in the morning I was asked again if I had the money yet. I explained (again) that I was still waiting for it to hit my account but on the day it comes though she would be paid the money she is owed from the sale. This friend then starts to tell me how pissed off she is and to be honest it was all quite upsetting. I’m an emotional person anyhow, so after being told how much I’ve pissed someone off (when it still seems to me I’ve done nothing wrong) and how this friend will never ask me for a favour again, I had to take a walk round the block, nearly in tears, just to sort out my head.

I offered an alternative – I told her how to setup a paypal account (which would only take 5 minutes tops), and said I could send her across the money via that method. I was told that she had no time for this. I even printed off a sheet of paper with the transaction confirmation which said how long it can take, but without reading it she threw it in the bin and shouted that she didn’t “need printouts” like this as she “didn’t have the time”.

It’s now a day later – I’m surprised that I haven’t yet again been asked if the money has arrived yet, but I’m still feeling shit over it. I don’t think I’ll bother offering favours to people again when they can be so ungrateful. The only thing I could have done is said at the time that I was only joking with the half the profits thing (which is £11 incidentally), but even after I told this friend that I would be giving her the full money she was still in an arse of a mood with me.

Answers on a postcard if you can work out how to resolve this!