So for the final time here is our plea, Kelly is running to raise money for the Cardiomyopathy Association. Cardiomyopathy, which literally means “heart muscle disease,” is the deterioration of the function of the myocardium (i.e., the actual heart muscle) for any reason. People with cardiomyopathy are often at risk of arrhythmia or sudden cardiac death or both.

Kelly has currently run 20 miles in training, and besides worrying about where the extra 6.5 miles is going to come from on the day, is all but ready to complete the run. We have in the past offered the opportunity to purchase t-shirt advertising on Kelly’s and all of our team’s (who will be there supporting Kelly) t-shirts, we are getting these printed on Saturday 17th April so you still have time to get your logo on her shirt if you wish.

All we are asking is that you sponsor Kelly Frew for her run, any amount you wish, and you claim your space. I’ll also chuck you a fair few links back from this blog as a way of saying thanks. T-shirt advertising and links! What more could you want?

If you are interested please sponsor Kelly here: http://www.justgiving.com/Kelly-Frew and then email me your logo and site details: paul@ozido.com

Again a huge thanks to everybody who has already sponsored Kelly, I’ll report back how the run goes afterwards.

About a week ago I was under the impression that everywhere in the UK had suffered dramatic snow falls, or at least that’s what the news was telling me. So as you do when trains are at their worst I decided to pack up my stuff for the week and head down to Newquay to see what it had to offer in the winter months.

After looking over Newquay Hotels UK I booked my hotel and the above picture was taken from my hotel room window. As you’ll undoubtedly notice, not a single snow flake in sight. The Newquay winds had kept the snow away, but deceivingly so as all the villages and towns surrounding Newquay were covered in the white stuff meaning we were actually snowed in.

13 hours to get there, 11 hours to get back it was a long old journey but it was great fun.

It’s not been a bad year for the GGUK site. We built the site in late November 2008 and have left it virtually untouched until October 2009 when I added a bit of content and built a few links for it to see if it had aged well enough within the mighty G. Some of the content we added got some good results so I decided to push the site further over the last couple of months and have achieved some pretty decent results.

The site generated about £60k revenue for merchants across all networks with an AdWords bill of exactly £82,06 for the last quarter of 2009. Nothing to write home about in comparison with the big players in the industry but for little me, that’s a healthy profit margin.

So with an eye on the natural SERP’s where most of its traffic is generated I can see the site is on the verge of some decent generic rankings, and this is enough to spur me on and make the site one of our main projects for 2010.

Things to come will be personalised gifts category or mini site, we need to firm up the experience days section and get some real content on there and we recently added the gifting community which is starting to take some shape. I’ve a couple of ideas which I’ll reveal more about once we’ve developed them, but all in all, I’m happy with the results for this final quarter given the effort. I predict if we work on the search rankings for most of 2010, this time next year I’ll be reporting 10 times this figure, that’s the aim I’ve set the guys anyway.

If I don’t post again beforehand, Merry Christmas all and a Happy New Year!

Hi there,

let me introduce myself – my name is Taz and I work for a gadget company called RED5. Our company was founded by Jonathan Elvidge who also co-founded the original gadget shop in the UK.

I noticed that you mention the Bladefish Sea Scooter range in one of your posts. We have just received a delivery of both the lower end models and hope to be getting the higher end models soon.

I wondered if you would be interested in putting a link to our page in your post as I notice that IWOOT does not have them in stock as of yet (I believe that we are the first in the UK to get the new models in stock).

You can view our product page here:

http://www.red5.co.uk/Bladefish-pr-826.html

Many thanks, hoping to hear from you,

Tasmin Harney | Customer Services | RED5 Retail Ltd

So on first glance this may not seem to be anything special, but lets look at it closer. Taz hasn’t come to me and said “hey feature all our products and plaster our banners on your site”, she identified a clear opportunity on a specific product page for a mutually beneficial relationship.

It’s also clever on Red5′s part because in the SERP’S for the product name, we sit second to IWOOT, whereas Red5 don’t appear on the first page for the product name, meaning if we did link to them, they’d have an instant presance. What impresses me even further is that it would appear Taz works in customer services, putting shame to many marketing departments out there!

Working at IWOOT for 3 years I obviously know of red5, but I’d be honest enough to say I haven’t featured them on giftsguideuk.com for no other reason than I forgot about them. Revitalizing my interest through such a simple way would certainly get me featuring them more.

I named this post too good / too bad, because there was no happy ending. Having whipped an email back saying yep, if you have an affiliate program let me have the details andI’ll get a link up for you, Taz replied telling me her colleague would be in touch, and one week later, still no contact from said colleague.

This is canny marketing at its best and I wish more affiliate managers would look for genuine opportunities like this, even if Red5 only did half the job it’s a good start guys, just follow up the opportunities your creating for yourself or surely it’s wasted effort?

My name is Aleksandr, founder of comparethemeerkat.com.

Recently I searches the Googles for my website and I finds comparehtemaaarrrrket.com. Needings cheap car insurance I get ze quote for ze insurance and I buys! Zen this morning I receives an email from comparehtemaaarrrrket.com saying:

Aleksandr, you saved on home insurance, try us for car insurance too!

But waits! I’ve never once in my lifes azked comparehtemaaarrrrket.com for ze home insurances quote? How can they mixes me up so much?

I just boughts the car insurance and as a customer i’ms not feelings ze valued. Me thinks they need new computer-ma-bob to fixes this!

Simples!

Said employee (Craig) decided that my post was negative to the Findel brand (which wasn’t my intention at all) and made two very long responses to my post in the comments section. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but what were the consequences of doing so?

Up until the responses were made in the comments section (a good two weeks) this blog had attracted 2 visitors through the search engines with either “findel” or “kitbag” in in the searched for keywords.  Since the dialogue in the comments section this blog has received over 600 visits from the search engines with either “findel” or “kitbag” in the searched for keywords.

There were 46 keyword variations driving traffic, some of which had only been achieved because of the extra content that was added in the comments section.

So lets re-look at the scenario. A Findel employee comes across a blog post which they feel is negative to the brand. In deciding to respond publicly they have unwittingly made the blog post more visible to the world (due to search engine algorithms) and attracted more visitors through their comments.

If they’d have said nothing at all very few people other than the 2 people who had visited the site through the search engines previously would have seen it…

I show this example not to mock Findel or Craig, but really because I think it’s a learning point that all brands should take on board. Protecting your brand is obviously important, but knowing when to respond to feedback in the public eye and when something is dead should be managed and advised by your PR experts, they’d have known this blog was too small to worry about.

Sometimes saying nothing at all can be the better solution…

The email was an affiliate email along with some banners and an affiliate link with my ID inserted into it all ready for me to put up on a site. At the time I didn’t think much about it other than “Michael Jackson’s dead?” and headed off to the news sites to find out more.

Today though as I’m going through my email inbox, I come across the email again and look at it in a bit more detail. The banners play.com have provided simply say “Michael Jackson 1958 – 2009″, infact here ya go you can have a look yourself:

It really leads me to the question, was this too soon?

Within 24 hours of the news Play.com (and many, many, many other merchants for that fact) we’re looking to profiteer from the mans death and encouraging their affiliate partners to become a part of it with ready made creatives .

Now I see both sides of this. From a commercial point of view there’s money to be made and Michael Jackson isn’t sitting at the top of the album charts due to lack of consumer demand, so all Play.com were doing was fulfilling this demand. Infact In Apple’s iTunes download charts, Jackson albums are topping the chart in 13 different countries including the UK, where his albums took all of the top six places with Number Ones at No 1.

But why does the email I received from Play.com make me feel so uneasy then?

Please stop the muppet merchants from suspending me for not promoting them,
It’s not that I have no love for their brand,
It’s not that we’re not working to the same cause they are,
Frankly it’s beginning to get out of hand.

We sign up to programmes with an intention to promote them,
And we’re sorry it takes time to develop our sites,
If they provided the resources we needed,
We’ll promote them with all our might.

There are many reasons that our stats will say no sales,
It doesn’t mean we’re showing them no love,
But when we receive the email saying goodbye from their programme,
It’s not nice to have been given the shove.

Someone once said “it’s all about the relationships”,
It’s all about the communication,
But kicking me off for no reason,
It’s hardly going to leave me with dedication.

“Fewer affiliates makes our programmes easier to manage”,
It’s not an excuse that we accept,
Treating me with a little courtesy when I’ve gone to the trouble of joining you,
Is the very least that I expect.

So before they hit the “your suspended button”,
Please ask them to think just for me,
Is there more to this affiliate than in their stats?
Maybe I should email them and see….

Amen

I’ll shut up now…