Storebuilder Blog

Storebuilder Blog - Cycling to work/Fitness

Whoever said that was an idiot or a madman. Or both!

Back to the regular routine now that we've got the festivities over and done with and racked up 45 minutes on the stairmaster before making the office for 10.

Just before Christmas I put the car in for it's MOT and it failed on a couple of things but mainly the emissions which were way over the legal requirement so I drove it straight to the scrapyard and got £80 for it before getting a taxi home.

Fortunately for me the days of clocking up hundreds of miles every week are long gone and so there's no way I can justify keeping an expensive motor sitting on the drive, especially since I cycle to work most days (when it's not frozen over with ice and snow) so until the day when I can lose 2 or 3k a year in depreciation without thinking about it then I'm going to continue buying cheap.

I can't remember the last time I made a motorway journey and a car is just used for ferrying the lazy teenagers about who can't be arsed to get a job or going to the skip because the bin is full and getting a sack of potatoes fortnightly. I'll go over to my parents in Wales five or six times a year and that's as good as it get's. So I'll be back in the car auction looking for another bargain.

Tomorrow they've got a peugeot 306 cabriolet with only 44k on a W plate in silver that would probably be in my price range (under 1k) so I might wander up and see if I can't spectacularly blow my cash on an absolute dog.

Being temporarily car less and not wanting to risk my racing bike in the snow meant I had to catch the bus this morning as walking in the ice is asking for it. £3.60! £3 fucking 60p to travel three miles return is completely fucking ridiculous. It would cost me less than that in petrol in a freezing cold car. Where's the incentive for people to get on public transport?

It's a joke. All this talk about getting people out of cars and on to public transport is hot air. Last time I used a bus, which was admittedly about two years ago to get to the train station it was £1.20 single so the cost of travel will soon have doubled in just two years. A taxi would cost £4 each way so if there are two of you it makes more sense to do that and go door to door.

Privatising public service utilities was a horrible decision.

So what are we building this year to escape the rat race?

Scratchcards are a good market to go into. Like poker and bingo it's a market that will grow significantly over the next couple of years and I think it's a good market for a beginner to go into.

Slimming products as well are a fantastic market for you. Checkout moreniche for some comprehensive support.

Whatever you decide to do in 2010. DO IT. In 2011 you'll be working from home with a smug grin on your face watching pictures of those poor commuters trapsing up and down the motorway.

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Storebuilder Blog - Football Stuff

Saturday came and we started with a great candidate for goal of the season for Codie Smart who took the ball on the edge of the "D", spun and shot high into the far right top corner giving the keeper absolutely no chance. A moment to live long in the memory. Well done mate! A cracking goal.

From then on the footie weekend just went downhill as in the same game first the referee gave a ghost handball, then the keeper managed to get himself sent off for arguing about it one too many times and to cap it off they scored the penalty and a winner against the 10 remaining men.

A match that Impact FC were controlling and in no danger of losing suddenly turned on it's head. Match report here.

In grassroots football referees have so much more control over players than the petulant prima donnas that play in the top league. It was a poor decision to give the pen but once again the linesman stood like a lemon and he was standing three feet away from me - who could clearly see that it hit an arm that was trying to get out of the way. Ball to hand.

Why don't referees consult before making decisions that can ruin the game?

Sunday came and we started with a gift of a goal from the Arsenal keeper who made a complete hash of trying to punch the ball (was he trying to catch it?) and with Liverpool in complete control of the game, this was looking like a return to the team that finished last season looking so dangerous going forward.  The referee "should" have given a penalty for the foul on Gerrard however Liverpool should have been out of sight by half time - that's more to the point.

At the start of the second half the "defender" managed to gift the gooners an own goal and Liverpool promptly self imploded with the same player failing to mark Arshavin, who hardly had a kick all game, but landed the killer blow with a superbly struck shot.

Liverpool's season just goes from bad to worse and watching the post match analysis I thought poor old Ian St John was going to burst into tears as he sees his club sinking into mid table obscurity.

I think we are starting to get fed up with the "next match is a must win game" rhetoric that keeps being spouted out of Anfield. If this is the best that the first team can do then let some of the youngsters have a shot and bench some of the untouchables. At least we'd see some passion and commitment. This is turning into a non comedic groundhog day.

Storebuilder Blog - Affiliate Marketing

A beautiful day here today and perfect for the morning cycle commute into work.

Normally it's not much fun commuting in the winter but today is one of those exceptions and it looks like it might hold for the rest of this week. I hope so because the football pitches around here have been waterlogged and last Saturday was a close call.

This weekend we are up against Telford Juniors. Well when I say "we", of course I actually mean my eldest stepson who played his first game for impact united last saturday.

My days of playing football are long gone. Although if I keep up this cycling malarkey you never know I might make a comeback on the local green with the 10 year olds

And what a ruckus it was! Two sendings off, parents screaming at the opposing manager and all the usual stuff you get at grassroots football! Can't wait for Saturday to come again!

Go Impact! Promotion to the west midlands regional is a distinct possibility.

Whilst we are on the subject AFC Telford are starting to show the sort of form that could yet see them promoted from the Blue Square North. Congrats on another great away win last night. With the stadium we have here in Telford we should be playing league two football and not languishing in the BSN.

Anyway, you didn't come all this way to hear me yabber on about footie stuff did you?

Another soft goal again last night and Liverpool are really making a pigs ear of this season. I tried to get tickets for the boxing day game against wolves but no joy. Probably just as well the way they are playing.

Let's get on topic shall we?

So what possible reason could you have for not wanting to hide your affiliate links?

In the gaming industry the software used for affiliate tracking is in most cases very advanced. Way ahead of most other industries with the notable exception of several health companies at the forefront of slimming pills and men's health products.

The way that most affiliates work is lazy. If you are one of the many affiliates that just sticks with the default tracker (hands up you know who you are ) then you are missing the opportunity to do some serious tracking and fathom out exactly what is working on your site.

Let's take the casino site for example which we built back in the summer and is now just about ready for some serious promotional work.

Let's look at the main display:

What we are looking for here is to give the surfer maximum opportunity to click a link and lay down a cookie on their PC. This is why we give them two extra links in the review table as well as the "review" link. The other two links take them directly to the download software page.

What we need to know is which links are being clicked on. What is the surfer attracted to and why?

By utilising a number of different trackers we can assign a different tracking ID to each link so that when we come to run our affiliate stat report we can see which links are getting the most clicks.

As well as setting up these individual trackers we can also assign separate trackers to the review page:

Both the website address and the link at the footer of the review have separate tracking ID's so that we can see which link is drawing the most clicks.

This means that for just this one affiliate we have a total of five tracking ID's plus a separate one for the banner so that we can see how effective this is as well.

Now, if you simply redirect all of these links through a php script like /goto/index.php and lump everything through this script then it makes it nice and neat but you are not learning as much as you should from the click through's.

In the beginning of a sites life you need to learn what is working and what isn't as fast as possible because it's the key to making money from your site. Worrying about whether someone is going to try getting around your affiliate link is one of those things that you shouldn't be worrying about here.

Back in the day I used to go to great lengths to hide affiliate links but these days the value of what you learn by implementing proper tracking far outweighs the tiny amount of business you lose by trying to cover everything up.

Not to mention the amount of time it takes to do all of your hiding.

I'll agree that in some cases it might be prudent to hide an affiliate link and as you progress through your affiliate career you might develop your own in house system for handling all of your links - but for those starting out in affiliate marketing you should make full use of the full range of tracking systems available to you.

Storebuilder Blog - Site Building

Friday again already! The calendar is whizzing by these days.

In 2003/4 I used to have a pretty busy forum here on Storebuilder. In those days the site was built in PHP Nuke and whilst it did a job of sorts, it was so vulnerable security wise that eventually I closed the forum down as it became over run with spam.

Fast forward to 2009 and now we have a secure CMS in Joomla but no forum to run with it. If you want to run a forum alongside a joomla installation then you have the nightmare of dual login's and all that it entails.

There is an integrated forum that has started to be developed for Joomla but when I tried it on a poker site about six months ago it was still in it's infancy and had a lot of work still needed to get it up to scratch.

I've been meaning to get a forum up and running again for ages and so when I discovered that rockettheme had produced a bridge to PHPBB3 I was keen to give it a shot.

The result is pretty impressive stuff and I think the forum looks great. It looks way better than the standard PHPBB3 skin and moulds in beautifully with the site.

So now we have the best open source CMS system in Joomla combined with the best open source forum in PHPB33 and it's open for business.

Now that I've seen how well it works I'll be opening up a forum on sixhanded.com

The rockettheme subscription is cheap as chips for any affiliate marketer and with the added plus that they also do wordpress themes it's definitley worth subscribing. I highly recommend them.