Affiliate Marketing blog by James Little

I’ve been thinking about starting a new affiliate project for a while now – not really with the aim of making a huge amount of cash out of it (though I can always live in hope), but more because I haven’t built anything new for a while and feel it’s about time to do so – like many others I enjoy the buzz of seeing those earnings come through from a new site for the first time which is reason enough.

So I’ve dug out a domain I purchased a while ago – FreeBingoCards.org.uk.   I’ve found in the past that .org.uk domains have ranked quite well; especially on MSN but it’s obviously a hugely competitive space.

The first stage when I start a new site is generally to brainstorm a few ideas on how I want the site to work, so here goes:

• Data capture will be an important part of the site, including the opt-in process so that I can market to these email addresses with offers in the future.
• After a user has signed up I’ll put together an auto-mail path – so I’ll get creative from a number of bingo sites and send a different email each week.  Gathering the email creative may take a while!
• Need to make a decision on if I use a CMS like Drupal for the site, or just build it in flat HTML… still undecided on this.
• After I’ve put the main template together, I’ll start by reviewing the top 10 bingo merchants based on their Hitwise or Alexa rankings.

The next step is going to be to put together a calendar with some deadlines of when I want each stage of the site finished – I often find that this helps with making sure that I stay on track with the timelines and can plan it around the kids parties and the TV schedule!

I’ll look to do at least one post a week on the blog with an update on this project until it’s live and then keep the updates going once I’ve started the link building and traffic generation.

Suggestions and feedback are always welcome!

As mentioned about a week ago, I finally got around to updating my wordpress installation and rather than go for version 2.6.1 (stable) I decided to go “bleeding edge” and install it straight from Subversion.

I thought it would be a nice idea to write a quick post about some of the new features and include a few screenshots.  I have to say, I’m quite excited about the full released so let’s go straight into what’s new.

As you will see above, the Dashboard has undergone a few changes and is, in my opinion, much improved.  Highlighted in red is “Quickpress”, which allows you to write a post straight from the Dashboard homepage.  There is also an Inbox and whilst this feature is not working yet, it seems to be a mix of trackbacks, comments, announcements and potentially even a way of contacting other wordpress site owners.

Above you will see the new “Install plugin” feature – I know that this can be done via a few plugins already, but it’s awsome to have it straight out of the box and linking in to the Wordpress Extend site – every install I’ve tried so far has worked but I think they need to improve the search tool slightly as I had a few problems finding what I was after.. so much easier than booting up an FTP client!

I was a little disappointed with the speed of the admin interface until I saw this beauty.. Makes the speed in uploading tons faster than in version 2.6.

The media library is a fairly new feature and this is now under “content” – it seems to allow commenting on actual images/videos/files but i’ve not played with this feature too much yet.

A few things have changed in writing a post itself – there is a new settings field that allows you to change some of the display options in the post and you can also make posts “sticky” to appear at the top of your blog, useful for people who use Wordpress as a CMS or for large updates / intro text.  You can now also move the “widgets” around in the write post page, though I’m not sure why you’d really want to do this.

Comment threading (and reply to comments) will be installed as default and you can read about all the other planned changes on the wordpress site.

It’s looking good – whilst I wouldn’t recommend installing it on a live site I’ll probably keep it going on here and update it every week or so to look out for new changes.