Andy’s Blog

Well not strictly true . Having decided to refocus my career and arranging my degree course affiliate marketing has taken a back seat(which is a real shame as I love it). I never really earned huge ammounts from affiliate marketing but I did always earn enough to cover the hosting and domain costs and have a bit of cash to treat myself.

Working in education as a Teaching Assistant gives me a magical time of year called ‘Summer Holidays’, a time with no work yay, but due to the nature of my work Im on claims so no money either booo. So I sat at the beginning of the holidays and tried to decide what I wanted to do with my time, a few fishing trips with my daughter, play some games, help the wife with her childminding and generally relax until the chaos of september comes around.

As i’m sat ther trying to decide I get an email informing me that a domain needed renewing, a domain I registered with the view to expanding my affiliate empire but in realty they just sat there with half a website doing nothing, £6,09 wasted? ask the domain collectors/dealers out there and they’d probably say not. So this email arrives and gets me thinking about how to recoup that cost, its a fairly niche domains so selling it on probably wasn’t viable 6 quid isn’t a lot but it made me slightly cross with myself for wasting money.

There was nothing else for it I had to finish what I started, so  I dusted off my wordpress plugins and started developing, within a couple of days I had the site I wanted running, I pop up some related banners and start rewriting the content. As a matter of course I began to check the affiliate stats for the tracking ID  I added to the banners and after just 1 day a few clicks where coming in, traffic was hitting the site already So I checked the stats and low and behold a tricle of traffic for the past 3 months had been hitting the site, keywords extracted from the rough content were bringing in visitors and like a numpty none of it had any affiliate links, several months of wasted traffic, doh! suffices to say, the content has been renewed and the sites well on the way and after 3 days the earnings are £9.87 covered the domain renewal, a bit more and I’ll break even.

So the moral of the story? 1 finish what you start, 2,keep an eye on the stats and monitize 3 take the time to go fishing

now onwards and upwards next sites well on the way

I have several hosting accounts across different providers(can’t afford dedicated servers yet). The good thing about having a standard hosting/reseller account is the security is handled by the hosting company.

This doesn’t mean that your totally safe, One of the most basic security errors we can make is with ftp Passwords.

The temptation is to have a master ftp account which has access to all domains and as such can make alterations to any pages within that hosting account.

This is the easiest option, but not the safest.

When creating an ftp account you should have the option of restricting an ftp account to a folder on your hosting. I would do this for each of your domains, create a different Username/password combination for each domain and restrict them to that folder.

In the event that someone does manage to get into your ftp then they can only access that one folder limiting the damage and the repair work you will have to do.

It’s saved me a lot of trouble when one of my ftp accounts was accessed.

I would also do similar with Databases create a new user for each database rather than a master account to control them all.

And last but not least, your paying a lot of money to yout hosting company, if you have any problems, get in touch make them work for their money.

Hopefully this book(if you have the right traffic and sites)could be a good affiliate earner.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Collector's Edition

I have to say I am a big fan of the Harry Potter Books and Films (i’m a big kid at heart). I read the first book and put off reading the others until they were all released, I then proceeded to read them all back to back.

If you have read the books then no doubt you will have heard of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard”. Hermione Granger is given a copy by Dumbledore to help defeat Voldemort.

There were 7 handwritten copies of the book origionally released but fans are not to be disheartened as they will now be releasing the reprinted book to the general public.

British charity the Children’s High Level Group (CHLG), which was founded by Rowling and Baroness Emma Nicholson to help vulnerable children across Europe, will publish three editions of the book.

 Amazon wil be publishing a limited edition copy of the book for £50 ($100)

Tucked in its own case disguised as a wizarding textbook found in the Hogwarts library, the Collector’s Edition includes a handwritten version of J.K. Rowling’s new introduction, as well as 10 additional illustrations not found in the Standard Edition or the original. Opening the case reveals a velvet bag embroidered with J.K. Rowling’s signature, in which sits the piece de resistance: your very own copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, complete with metal skull, corners, and clasp; replica gemstones; and emerald ribbon.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Collector’s Edition (Offered Exclusively by Amazon)

There is also a standard edition for £3.99

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Standard Edition

Pre-orders are been taken now for the books and with a release date just before christmas then hopefully we should see some good commisions.