Welcome to the Day Trip Media website, featuring news on my latest web projects and wider opinions on affiliate and search marketing, SEO, website design and running an online business. If you'd like to find out more about Day Trip Media, take a look at the about page. You can see examples of my web site work here and photography here. If you need to contact me, use this form.
Big Banner Gripe. Literally...
If you've been following this still fairly new blog, you'll have spotted I tend to be a bit of a moaner. Well, not wanting to buck that trend, I thought I would quickly turn my sights onto another thing about working with affiliate programmes that really ticks me off, this time to do with the actual creatives they supply. Today my gripe is about big banners, or more precisely, the lack of them.
Now, I'm a massive fan of the leaderboard (728x90) and use it on most of my sites in a prominent, above-the-fold sort of position. It's a great way of both attracting the eye of a potential clickee and also giving your site some 'by association' joint branding.
I like to serve my banners via my OpenX ad server, as this allows me to do all sorts of things like geo-target and rotate the banners as users travel through the site. I know many are 'banner blind' but I find that if you can get the right sort of relevant offer/banner, and given its position on the page it can get some good click through rates and conversions. As a result, I like to have a good selection of banners that I can add to each new leaderboard zone I set up, to try and combat this banner blindness.
So, the last few weeks I've been setting up my new upgraded BANS sites, and one thing I've done with them is add extra affiliate partners to the pages. I've also added my favoured leaderboard slot in its usual top of the page position. I've gone off to get a range of banners to add to OpenX to rotate in the position, and what do I find. Loads of them don't supply banners in theses sizes. It's been true in my bingo work as well, a number of sites don't supply 728x90 banners as standard, and frankly, by doing so, they're all shooting themselves in the foot and losing out on some prime real estate on my sites.
Here's a couple of quick examples on some recent sites, and I'm not including eBay as affiliate partners, these are the extras above the eBay focused sites.
- Cheap Caravan Hire - 5 affiliate partners - 2 with 728 banners (Park Resorts and Butlins), 3 with no 728 Banners (Haven Holidays, Late Rooms, Park Holidays)
- Vintage And Custom Guitars - 4 affiliate partners - 1 with 728 banners (Guitar Centre), 3 without 728 banners (Guitar Trader, Musician's Friend, Instrument Pro)
And the list goes on. In bingo for example, the St Minver affiliate network now has 14 bingo sites on its programme, of which only 3 or 4 supply 728 banners as standard. I'm constantly finding myself frustrated at the lack of quality content at affiliate partners. Sure you can ask for custom built ones, but that just makes unnecessary work on my behalf, and becomes a pain to keep up with it all.
As a busy affiliate, I want an easy life, these things should be there as default. I don't want to have to waste time chasing up account managers and stuff to sort this now pretty standard banner size out for me. All these programmes have 468x60 banners as standard. All of them. Now, how hard is it to scale these banners up for the producers of them (with all the source files to hand) at the time of making the 468 banners? Please people in charge of the creatives, take a few extra seconds to add this size, then you can have my top slot and all those extra eyeballs for very little effort. It's a real no-brainer.
New And Dodgy Bingo Affiliate Promotion Technique
I'm sure what I'm about to mention could be applied to any number of affiliate programmes, not just bingo, and in applied, I mean by braver people than me. Why brave? Well, partially because it involves breaking copyright laws. Ok, so I'm checking a video feed on one of my sites to see the latest bingo videos, when I spot one for Madonna and Justin Timberlake. Slightly surprised, I visit this video to see what's going on. It's quite a clever little trick when you stop and think about it, let me explain.
Find a video that's going to be insanely popular, put you're branding on it and get it out on YouTube. Notice the prominent link on the right side? Here's a grab below.
Ok, marketing stuff on YouTube is far from new, I realise this, but to be honest, I've never seen it being done like this with bingo. Now, obviously Madge and Timb have nothing to do with bingo, but the idea is you get enough eyeballs, some will filter through and sign-up. So far the video I've featured has had less than 300 hits, but others by the same poster have had in excess of 30,000 and 20,000 hits.
Now, the more enterprising affiliates out there would be rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of that sort of traffic, but stop for a second and think about it. This poster is using copyrighted material that I'm 99.9% sure doesn't belong to him to push his affiliate site. How well does that sit with the likes of Mecca Bingo who are having their brand promoted in this mendacious fashion? If it was me, I would be less than impressed.
Ok, so there's little likelihood of the guy getting caught out, unless some bright spark looks at his whois information (oops) and it's in fact actually correct whois information, but given the music industry's recent attack on the copyright theft industry, it's quite possible the affiliate could land themselves in legal trouble. There are ways this technique could be applied with out the copyright infringement element and others are already utilising such methods.
Legal issues aside, it would also be interesting to see how well this technique converted for the affiliate. We've all tried advertising alongside non-relevant content, and whilst you may get lots of eyeballs, conversion rates generally tend to be very poor. To me it's akin to using the content network on Adsense or advertising on Facebook or something similar. Unless you're hitting the audience in the right place with the right intent, you're not going to see the rewards on the same level. That's in my experience at least, but maybe I'm just doing it wrong...
I Got Scammed... Again
Oh boy, I always thought I was pretty good when it came to looking after security. Always telling folks about phishing, keeping virus protection updated, not answering letters to people wanting to move money, don't get caught out on eBay, fake domain invoices, etcetera. Whilst I may have had my eyes open to online and related fraud, I've not really looked at business related fraud in the past, but today I got myself a good old fashioned wake up call, and I'm preparing myself for an ongoing battle with the scammers.
My security leanings were all well and good for the online world, but back here in running my business world, it seems I've been targeted by some rogue publishers. The scam is this, they phone you up (being a new business) and give you a load of spiel on they're bringing out a charity / police / fire service / wedding planning magazine. Which ever niche they go for, they tell you it's going out to local business and would you like an ad as they don't yet have someone in your sector to go in the mag. So on and so forth. They calls keep coming, and even though you've said no, they try to make out you've agreed to it. Maybe they ring up after a couple of months of making the first call, maybe they tell you someone else in the business said yes, whatever, the patter's designed to bludgeon you into submission.
I'd already fallen for it once, and placed an ad (costing £150) in some local police magazine that was going out to businesses locally. I don't need to advertise like that, but I thought 'what the hell,' a bit of brand recognition won't hurt, there may be other similar businesses out there who see it and maybe want to meet, trade ideas, etcetera. To be honest there was also a bit of vanity involved as well on my part, thinking it nice to see the business in print. So, fed up with the wave of calls I'd gotten I caved and said yes. They sent out the artwork, I paid up. I was none the wiser.
Today I got a call from a company I think are called Millennium Media. I say think, because the accent of the heavy caller is Scouse, and a bit difficult to follow at the speed he talks. He says we spoke a couple of months back and I agreed an ad. Now, I cast my mind back and recall the conversation back in February, and I also recall saying I wasn't interested at the time as I had just taken an ad out in another magazine. At the time I thought nothing of it as I thought I'd stood my ground and said no. After placing the first ad, I said to myself that was something I would never do again.
So this call I get today, the guy (John Anderson and Amberton) is telling me they are ready to send out the artwork for my approval for the ad in the Crime Stoppers magazine. I tell him I'm not interested. He brings up a password I gave him last time we spoke - Spam Tin. I recall making it up on the spot when I spoke to him last as a bit of a piss take. If I can recall correctly, he said if I can contact you again, we'll set up a password. It certainly wasn't in relation to placing an order, but he tries telling me it was. Having none of this, he hangs up telling me he'll call back.
So I'm very wound up at this point and get searching and quickly find out what's going on here. It's not a pretty scene, there are hundred of people out there who've fallen foul of this. There are lots of different outfits trying the scam, one of the most covered is a company called Vardis. Worse, it seems I can expect more to come including threats of legal action for the money for the advert I didn't place, harassment over the phone and more sneaky behaviour. The idea is that people will roll over at the threat of legal action and court appearances, but that's all they are, threats.
From what I've read, the debt collection agency that starts sending out the threatening mail is the same as the company that runs the ads. I can't find an example of anyone having been taken to court as frankly, the company don't have a leg to stand on. That said they try to bully their victims into compliance with jargon and underhand tactics.
One such tactic involves sending you the proofs of the artwork by registered mail, so you have to sign for it. Then they say because you've signed for it you've agreed a contract. I've also read reports of them faking acceptance tapes to try and convince you that you have a legal contract with them, or that it can be used as evidence in court. From what I've read that's nonsense as well, the OFT says a tape like that doesn't prove a contract is in place without the written contract.
Finding all this out has made me realise that the first ad I placed was a mistake. I doubt the magazine has ever seen the light of day. I don't think I can expect to see a copy as I was told.
As for this new attempt on my bank balance, this is my battle plan and what I'm expecting, I've informed the wife to be on alert. Any registered mail that looks like it could be from them will not be signed for. Any further calls will be ignored and finished promptly. Any threats will be ignored, especially written threats about filling court proceedings etc. Any correspondence that should arrive unregistered will be replied to in no uncertain terms about a cancellation. I've started a log of events and will also try and figure out how to record calls should I get another one. Going by what I've read, I should expect another one. If it escalates I will contact the police, OFT and Trading Standards. From what I've read, all three of these bodies are well aware of this sort of shady practice.
I feel a lot better now. I felt really stupid earlier, and angry at my stupidity. The more I recall the phone call I got today, the more I can see that they were fishing for stuff to use against me. But now I've read up on this and learnt what's going on, I'm feeling prepared and ready for them to make the next move. It should be fun if nothing else. Here's some of the stuff I've read up on today that you might find useful if you find yourself here in the same situation.- Blagger.com - Comments by users taken in by the scam.
- A thread at the UK Business forum about the scam.
- Daily Mirror article on the scammers.
So why am I bringing this up in public - on my business website of all places? Well, maybe it might save someone else falling for the same rip-off. It's also cathartic, I've spent most of the afternoon angry with myself and also a bit peeved I wasn't awake to what goes on. If I can save someone else those feelings then all the better. And it's not just this advertising scam, I've got a feeling I'll see more of this. I've already had a non-invoice for a branded stationary along with a sample. I'm pretty sure it's all coming from the same scummy underbelly of business praying on business. Sigh, I can tell you now, I won't fall for it again.
Narrow Escapes - Sites And Ideas I Let Drop
I have to admit to being a serial website maker. I get ideas and bounce from one thing to the next. I'm not sure why I've worked that way, I think it comes from my background in Fine Art, the idea being you're always working on a number of new 'creations' at a time.
Unfortunately, for the first few years of working on web sites, my ideas around monetising them were pretty crude. I've been running affiliate links (with little success) since around 2000. The first money I made was at the original MP3.com site as a musician, but that didn't last as a business model. Then I tried Amazon links and some complete crap I put on my sites like banner exchanges, simply because I didn't know any better - given the way my sites were, they didn't earn me much.
Then came AdSense, and for a good few years AdSense was for me the key to my financial success. My notion was that I would make sites until I created one that drove so much traffic that the sheer volume of AdSense clicks would pay my way. I didn't really change from this model of working until I was thrown into my self-employment and needed to do something that made me more than a couple of pound a day.
So, I got a lot smarter with the sorts of sites I was making and moved away from AdSense as the primary income for them, concentrating much more on affiliate focused sites. It's all been a big learning curve, I don't naturally consider myself a retail driven sort of person, which explains why until recently, many of my sites were more non-niche and slightly esoteric.
It's a good job I was able to change the way I worked and immerse myself in affiliate marketing rather than AdSense. I had concentrated on more AdSense (and arbitrage) sites the first few months of my working self employed, and as a result my business came close to failing. At one point I'd sold most of my record collection to fund myself, and was within a few days of returning to work for the BBC in a less than ideal role.
Luckily I saw the potential in the way I had been working exploring Adwords and bingo niches that quickly made returns, so I took the chance, turned the job down and carried on with my business with increasing levels of success. Now I'm trying to concentrate on a much more niche focused ideal, as well as continuing to develop existing sites and keep them ticking over.
I thought it would be fun to look at some of the domains I've recently let drop, and the ideas that never quite happened. These sites and ideas had AdSense as their main monetary element, with the potential for additional affiliate links and stuff. A couple are sites that still exist but will never really be developed, and I'll give a quick insight into the ideas behind each one, and the pitfalls, problems encountered.
Media Scum
The plan had been shortly after leaving my last job, I would start a Holy Moly style bitch and gossip site about the media in Wales focusing on its ongoing ineptness, lack of vision, wasting of public money, etcetera. It was going to feature a lot of user generated content alongside my own stories. I never got around to it, and I'm glad I didn't, probably would have cost me money in legal fees in the long run and I doubt there would have been much interest either. Domain's just dropped, so if you fancy doing something with it yourself, feel free.
Chav News
Another in my long line of Chav related sites. It would have aggregated new stories featuring famous Chavs and their escapades. However, like in the real world, Chavs don't make a lot of money, they ain't got much to spend online either. AdSense would have been the most viable money maker for the site, that and pay as you go mobile offers. Domain dropped ages ago should you be bothered.
Moanr And Lazybloggr
More AdSense nonsense, this time the idea was to get people to write blogs for me. Be it moaning web 2.0 style with moanr.com or playing at blogging without actually having a blog with lazybloggr.com. Both sites took only a couple of days to set up, then failed to capture mine or anyone else's imagination and have since been dumped. Kind domain parkers have since taken of moanr.com, and will no doubt soon also take care of Lazybloggr.com to make a few pence more than I ever did with them.
P2P Lawyers
A quiz and arbitrage site hybrid that aimed to get lots of high value AdSense clicks on the back of a fun viral quiz aimed at file sharers. It's still live until I can be arsed to arrange to sell it.
JunkTrove
I had it in my mind that I could do something fun along the lines of turning my waste products into online AdSense gold. Basically I was going to put together a site of all my junk, years of old email, stuff I've thrown out, stuff I've sold on eBay. Logistically it would have been a nightmare, and luckily I never did any more with it, although I do quite fancy one day turning it into a blog about interesting junk. A lot easier to manage, I'd still be cutting and pasting email now if I'd have gone with it, though I do have a local visual junk trove that one day may see the light of webspace.
PAS-78
PAS 78 was a web usability guideline document put out by some government body a couple of years back. I felt quite chuffed at picking up the uk and com domains of the hyphenated version of its title, but to stingy to pay the £30 for document to read it and put a related site online. It would have bored me to tears, just like renewing them both would have done. I think both are available if someone more worthy than me wants to do something with the domains.
I Am Robot
Another AdSense site, the idea had been to see how many Myspace users would befriend someone who was claiming to be a robot joining them for spam purposes. I also stuck in some early landing page / Adwords stuff on a robot theme that fell flat on its arse. I got 300+ friends with my swanky robot adder software in a week, and then they put a load of restrictions on the amount of friend requests you could put out in a day. Just as well, Myspace traffic sucks.
Your Space My Friend
Carrying on with brief and ultimately pointless flirtation with MySpace is this hopefully non-copyright infringing site. Never one to do things the easy way, I eschewed the quick route to a MySpace resources site of just buying a ready made one, I set out to hand build one of my own, with all my own graphics, hand made by me. Time consuming, pointless and still live (just about) it's set to remind me never to waste time on this sort of crap. Yes it's plastered in AdSense, but do the ads pay anything more than a penny or two a click? What do you think?
Tips For Info
This was first an arbitrage site, then it was going to be an all singing and dancing affiliate offer site, then it was a back up bingo landing page thing for bending the rules on Adwords, then it was a chore and now it's waiting for someone else to have a better idea than me. Not a bad little domain name if you want it - I don't think tipsfor.info is registered any more.
Dumped.us
A great domain I picked up with the idea of adding subdomains for humorous effect, as in he.dumped.us, they.dumped.us, ibm.dumped.us etcetera. Not quite sure what I was going to do with it, but I'm sure it would have taken ages to do and made me no money. I think I gave the domain away for next to nothing as some rule change about owning .us domains freaked me out enough to not want to keep it.
The Problem With A Lot Of These Is...
Looking back at the list, a lot of these came from me being diverted from my main goals. I'd often see something a bit shady at a website and try something out or get the idea to try them out. A lot of these sites which didn't make it, as well as many others that I still have online don't really do anything for me other than serve to remind me of a couple of things. Firstly, I'm prone to being easily distracted and making a site as the result of some whim. Secondly they remind me of what not to do in future.
In many cases I've made a rod for my back with the mish mash of sites I have out there not really doing much. At some point I'm going to need to consolidate and weed out all the crap. The crap still makes money though, all be it a few pounds of AdSense revenues every month. I'm trying to concentrate on building quality in existing brands and sites I own. But every so often I still get the urge to do something silly and time consuming. Maybe next time that urge comes on me I can come back here to remind myself not too.
Cheap Caravans Site Upgraded And Relaunched
As a part of the ongoing eBay partner network upgrade, I've finally got my new and improved caravan site uploaded and running. There were some heart attacks along the way, like when the hosting company decided to make my account extra secure without telling me and render the BANS CMS inoperable. But that aside, I'm quite pleased with the work done as it's pretty much trebled the size of the original site and added a lot more focused affiliate click-through opportunities as well as fresh, self updating content.
I decided the new domain I'd bought for the site (and to help quality score issues when I got a new Google Adwords account set up) would be more search engine friendly than the old one, so I've put a permanent redirect on the old domain to the new one. Hopefully the newly found rankings and page rank the old site had picked up will transfer in time to the new domain. And if it doesn't thanks to it's new domain and improved content, Adwords likes the site again.
All this and no mention of the domain, well, here it is - Cheap Caravan Holidays And Hire. Ok, so it's not the best looking site out there, but it does what it says on the tin, and so far the old one has made some nice sales to swell the coffers. I'm hoping this new incarnation will improve on that vastly. I was quiet pleased as I've pretty much got to grips with templates for the CMS, and of course, I can use them again for other projects. The old version of the site was very table heavy, but I've been able to do this version table free. It's almost done, I've just got a few more Adwords campaigns to set up for it to tide it over the next few months.
Next up, I will be working on upgrading a smaller site of mine about vintage guitars, but as of yet I can't decide whether to stick it on a new domain or to just shut the site down for a day and do a complete overhaul and upgrade that way. I should probably get a new domain, as Adwords fell out of love with the site previously, and I wouldn't want that to happen again with my shiny new site.
Some Things That P*** Me Off About Gaming Webmasters
One thing I've learnt the last couple of years working in the online gambling and gaming industry is it can be a pretty seedy place. I was spoilt working at the BBC, I realise this. No commercial concerns, an inclusive culture that embraced the internet and working to a certain level of editorial accurateness and balance. I've carried a lot of that ethos into what I do know, but as I've found in time, there's very few out there who'd concern themselves with such things in the furtherance of their own personal agendas.
Away from the warm and comfy world of public service web site and content creation, it's a cut throat world. The area is rife with dirty tricks, shady techniques and questionable practices, and coming up against them on a daily basis both serves to anger me and further entrench my view that I should avoid such techniques in my own day to day work. Here's some of the things that really succeed in hacking me off when it comes to gaming and gambling related websites, and an explanation of why they piss me off.
The main focus of these techniques is to try and massage the search engines and gain preferentially rankings in the results for highly lucrative gambling related terms. I'm assuming a certain level of understanding of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with this post, but if you don't consider yourself interested in SEO, it's worth a read as it will help raise your awareness levels.
It's also worth noting that not only are these things annoying to me as a webmaster, they are also annoying to me as a web user. I think many out there not only like to underestimate the visitor, they do it on purpose. A lot of the things that I've listed also create real usability issues and frustrations that in the end could be counter-productive to what you aim to achieve, which should always be the trust and respect of your visitor.
Content Splogs And Link Building Reviews
I'm increasingly seeing splogs (spammy blogs) around the web, with really obscure domain names and posts on everything from bingo to pay day loans and viagra. Obviously some people out there are picking up expired domains with some backlinks and PR and putting auto-generated / scraped content on them. What's worse is I've seen a number of big bingo companies (let alone affiliates) using these sort of blogs to gain backlinks with paid for reviews. I'm naming no names, but you know who you are.
Content Usage With Backlinks Stripped Or Omitted
Oh, now this one really pisses me off. Now, I do like to get backlinks, I do want my sites to rank well after all. Given the difficulty of getting quality links for gambling related sites on authority sites, I will sometimes put a press release out about a new section or video or whatever. The aim is that someone will pick it up and supply quality backlinks for your trouble.
However, gambling webmasters are a pretty selfish bunch. They like to use your content, or your press release, or even report on your press release to make content for their site. But will they provide a link back for it? Will they flip, because if they do that, they might just give your site a little boost above theirs in the rankings. Don't worry that users may want to follow up or find it interesting, linking out is a bad, bad thing.
There are some sites out there who will also say what site they got their 'story' from, even going as far to name it or print the URL, but link to it? No! Some pretty big online bingo sites do this routinely. It's my belief that actually, this practice could cost you rankings rather than actually improve them. Why, well, Google looks at things like outgoing links, and if it sees your site has no external links to anything else in the field, what's to say they don't flag it as a sign of a lack of quality?
Content Theft That Isn't Content Theft
This one is a bit more difficult to prove, but it's a common problem for sites that thrive on creating their own voice and standpoint. What I mean is that sites will take a topic, or standpoint, or viewpoint that you've taken, and emulate it on their own site. They don't so much copy the content you've written, but copy the general editorial standpoint and spin their own content from that standpoint. I suppose it's flattering in a way, but annoying none the less.
Posts That You Can't Comment On
I've already said that most gambling related webmasters are a fairly selfish bunch, and this is no better illustrated by the number of gaming blogs that don't feature comments from their users. Worse still, they give the option of allowing users to make posts whilst never letting them go live. I've seen it on hundreds of blogs in the field, some from big companies that should know better.
Why does this one piss me off so much? Well, being the pedantic sort of chap I am, if I see an inaccuracy, or just want to comment and add my own opinion on a post I will do it (at great personal time expenditure.) Nothing gets my goat up more than submitting a lengthy comment to a blog only to never see it published. I could point to several major sites in the field that allow comments to be posted but don't actually have any user comments on any of their posts, but I won't.
Review Sites That Don't Publish Bad Reviews
I've also tested this out on some sites that claim to take user reviews of online bingo sites. I've submitted a range of reviews from good to bad, and guess which ones didn't see the light of day? That's right, reviews saying 0 out of 5, poor site, etc. Why? Well, if you're searching for a review on a site and end up on an affiliate site, are you more likely to click on their affiliate link to the said site if it's surrounded by bad reviews? I think not. This takes us neatly on to this next point.
It's All Good
I see this one all the time, you'll see a list of mini-reviews of online bingo sites, and they all have five or four stars next to them. All of them. Without fail. It tells me this:
We've Never Actually Visited These Sites
But we're more than happy to recommend them to you to go try. Some of the sites I've played at have been horrendous. When I've reviewed them I've gone into this in detail, and marked sites down to really low ratings as a result. The surprising thing is, people will still go and play at the sites even if you give them a bad write-up. One site I described as a polished turd has continued to get lots of traffic from my less than favourable review, and I've at least been able to sleep easy knowing I'm not misleading everyone.
But, as well as being a selfish bunch, many gaming webmasters are lazy as well. They'd sooner take the review copy provided by the actual online bingo site itself. Can you imagine such things? Would you think such a review would be balanced, accurate and less than positive? Of course not and guess what, many web users are pretty clever and able to figure out when a review isn't a review - so why waste everyone's time?
We're The Best Because We Say So
Oh, now this one really, really gets me hot under the collar. Sites that proclaim themselves 'The Best' or 'The Biggest' or the 'Most Popular.' You've seen it, you land on a three page affiliate spam site with a page full of colourful reviews, less than accurate information and a cut and pasted article on bingo from Wikipedia. And there it is, in the opening sentence or emblazoned across the banner, those very same epithets 'The Best' or 'The Biggest' etcetera, and are they? Not in the slightest, but if you tell everyone you are, they may just believe you.
And it's not just the little sites that do this, there are quite a few gaming providers that believe people fall for such flannel and do such things, when in fact they're anything but. I would never call any of my sites biggest or best, it's not up to me to decide. I'd like to think that they are, but then the wise and rational person in me says, 'they're not really, they could be so much bigger and better than they are,' and I end up all feeling like I've deluded myself.
News Sections That Don't Feature News
A number of sites have news sections that are anything but. I consider my news sections more blogs than official news, I only ever really react to stories I see in the wider press and I freely admit this limitation at the sites involved. That said, I see a number of sites featuring regularly in the Google News results that don't actually carry any news, they merely report on stories already featured in the wider press with little or no extra value.
Some never link out to other content and some do little better than regurgitate winners news from the likes of The National Bingo Game, with no additional value added content to merit them. It's understandable that a lot of us will be writing about the same events and news stories on our sites and their are times I'm guilty of doing the same, but my hope is that some of my personality and interest in the game comes out in my posts. Others seem content just to report on stuff that isn't really important or relevant, merely as a means of bulking out their content.
Sites Fronted By Fake Females / Fictional Characters
It's worth remembering that many sites about bingo in particular are run by men, yet seem to have some mystical female front person with an exotic sounding name or cartoon like character picture as their spokesperson. I wonder why that is and more importantly how many of them do you actually believe have an actual real woman behind them? Personally, I think it's fake, it's not necessary and frankly insulting to your users, like many of the things I've highlighted here today.
I've put my name to everything I've done at my websites as I believe it helps establish a relationship with my visitors. I wish some others out there would be that transparent about what they're doing. It can only help to increase trust in the long run.
And Finally...
Wow, you still here? That went on way longer than I was intending, but it cheers me up to get it off my chest. You might be wondering what my goal is for complaining about this stuff. In the end, it's because I believe if you don't mention it, no one will realise it's a problem. There's also an element of frustrated web user that wants a voice. I spend a lot of time visiting these sites and at times, my blood pressure goes through the roof at the rot I see.
For me I'd rather see the space filled with 10 or 20 quality sites about the game than a 1000 rubbish sites that don't add any value other than lining affiliates pockets. There are very few sites out there that I think offer great content around gaming, and that's a real downer. Like most things in life (TV for instance) this low grade filler makes it difficult to spot the real gems in the big bubble of stuff out there. Personally, I find that real shame and hope that one day things get better.
Easy Way To Change Editor Kit Javascript To Update It For The Ebay Partner Network
I set about updating my editor kit javascript snippets on one site today, ready for the end of the month switch off of the eBay affiliate programme at Commission Junction. Rather unhelpfully the documentation at the eBay Partners site simply suggests that the best way to update your tracking codes is to completely generate a new code at the Editor Kit.
That's all well and good if you've only used one or two of the things, but I must have 40 or 50 of them on different sites. I've got some sites with one on each page, each with unique searches and customisations. It's not going to be practical to try and do each one again. Luckily the code for the new javascript is 90% the same as the old CJ javascript. So, being a lazy type I sat down to figure out some nice and easy find and replaces, just to edit the parts of the code that need fixing.
If you're looking for a quick fix you can run these find and replaces on a site wide basis using something like Dreamweaver or Textpad, without them messing with the rest of the formatting, custom ids and search terms in the sniplet. Nice and quick and easy. I sat down and compared the new output with the old, and these are the changes that need to be made. They shouldn't interfere with other code on your site, but just have a think about what you got on there just in case there are similar terms.
These worked for the javascript for both the UK and the USA generated sniplets. I haven't looked at anything else as I don't have any others set up myself.
- Find: encode=ISO-8859-1
Replace with: encode=UTF-8
I'm not sure if this can be changed to suit your site, so I'm sticking with it for now. - Find: &prvd=1
Replace with: &prvd=9
I think this is the number for parameter for the provider - where 1 was for Commission Junction. - Find: &track=*******
******* is your old CJ PID number, a seven digit number that you entered when you set up the sniplet.
Replace with: &toolid=10004&track=**********
********** is your new eBay partner campaign number - a 10 digit figure you get from your ebay partner control panel. Note the &toolid= parameter as well - this is completely new to the sniplet and luckily sits next to the tracking ID so you change them both in one go.
I did a quick search earlier and couldn't find this info on making these edits to the sniplet. Hopefully that will save a few people wading through the forms at the Editor Kit page at ebay. When you copy and paste to do your find and replaces, make sure you don't copy spaces at either end of the terms.
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