Our new offices are the ground and first floor

Since we started, sunshine has been based in a rented Regus office in Fleet. It was very handy at the time, but we’ve now grown to the point where it didn’t make sense financially. The new office will easily cater for our current office based staff and allow for a lot of expansion too.

First floor

The new offices are right at the centre of Fleet, and most importantly, directly across from a pub with a nice beer garden and just round the corner from Starbucks!

Ground floor

It’ll be a few months until the offices are kitted out and ready for the big move, but it’s nice to finally have some proper roots.

If anyone has previous experience kitting out an office from scratch, we’re open to advice on do’s, don’ts and oh my God no’s.

Oh and kudos to Chris Brown who handled the purchase (which was our 3rd attempt at buying this office) as I’d have lost patience in the whole thing long before now.

This time round I had the pleasure of speaking at one of the sessions, sharing the “Holiday Watchdog Story”. It wasn’t as terrifying as I thought, quite enjoyed it really and hope my audience did too. There’ll be no sharing of the presentation or video online though, you had to be there .

As usual the before and after socialising are part of what makes a good conference and TV was no exception. Having zero alcohol across the weekend was an unusual experience while attending a conference, but I’m happy to report that I still enjoyed myself greatly!

Most of the sessions I saw were excellent, with Judith Lewis probably the best one for most of the audience. Joost just sneaked it for me with a few snippets of info about optimising pages for speed as part of his presentation. Elaine and Dave gave some great insights into the story of AllKids and Childrens Rooms; if this isn’t the type of presentation that’s at a4uexpo I’d have to ask myself why not?

The world of affiliate marketing was better represented at this TV than the first, when the next one rolls around in March 2010 I’d advise you not to miss it!

Well, we have been keeping ourselves busy, here’s a few of the things we’re working on –

sunshine.co.uk

Admin side of sunshine has been revamped to cope with the volumes of sales, customers and staff that we have now. What worked in the beginning hasn’t all scaled properly with our growth, so Alan has been kept busy sorting that out. We also changed some of the technology behind our search system to allow for scalability and spreading the site across more servers too, but again nothing that will show up consumer side really (other than faster searches and an end to small outages due to load).

We’re continually adding destinations and hotels and keeping current information up to date, a never ending job for our content team.

New developments – we’ve bought a few domains to develop into sites, some are in current development, some in hiatus and we’ve even soft launched one of them.

New Domains (all .co.uk)

• airporttransfers
• majorca
• tenerife
• familyholidays

Airport Transfers is soft launched, it was fairly simple as most of the code was already being used on sunshine. Once we’re happy with its full functionality we’ll add more pages and get into some more SEO for it.

Majorca and Tenerife both have holding pages up at the moment, they will be developed over the coming months in a similar fashion to sunshine.

Family Holidays is about 70% done, however it was pushed into development hiatus while we worked on getting AT up and running. Content is still being worked on as I write.

We do have one other new domain/development but I’m keeping it under wraps for now. It’s probably the most exciting for us as it’s something a little bit new in terms of development and channel. It’s also not that hard to find, but I’m still not going to post it here

sunshine.ie

We finally acquired this domain after much wrangling with IEDR. Lots of thanks also to Sinéad Kavanagh (ex AffiliateFuture) for her help in acquiring it. Optimistically we’ll have some sort of site up before next year, but the months are flying past so it may not be that quick!

Golf

A lot of my time at the start of the year was spent on our latest investment / incubation project – www.findthefairways.com – a golf portal. Having spent about a month or so working on site architecture and linking it’s now working its way up the SERPS and producing a promising level of growth in traffic and sales.

sunPress

I’d hoped we might get a major release update done over the summer, but it’s looking more and more like it’ll drop back a few months. There’ll be a post on the sunshine affiliate blog before then to harvest some ideas and comments from users.

Bloody Press

A little gem at the end. In case you missed it, TTG quoted Chris Brown when they weren’t supposed to a few months back and reported our turnover. It wasn’t actually turnover, but since it’s in the public domain you may like to know sunshine.co.uk generated ~£16M of sales in its last trading year, not bad for an ickle online travel start up. What’s the profit on that I hear you say? Heh, no chance.

That’s about all there is for now, not entirely sure it’s interesting to you but at least you know we haven’t disappeared.

I arrived very early at the venue having arrived via the Sleeper and settled down with the delegate pack, mentally marking down which speakers I thought would provide value.

First up was Dennis Turner, Chief Economist at HSBC and I can’t say I was looking forward to a “State of the Nation” speech at that time of the morning. I couldn’t have been more wrong, he was highly entertaining and informative, providing great insight into the current recession but taking the sensationalism out of it all. While he gave indications as to when he thinks the current recession will end he did warn that the effects of personal credit will take a long time to solve.

The other highlights for me were 

• Joel Brandon-Bravo (Frommer’s Unlimited)
• Brian Sharples (HomeAway)
• Graham Cooke (Google)

The panel discussions didn’t really do much for me, with very little audience participation in the Q&A’s, possibly due to time constraints (and that panelists often rambled on for an age )

Overall the speakers that did tick my boxes made the ticket price worthwhile, and I’d recommend next year’s event wholeheartedly. 

After the event we had a couple of hours with a free bar provided by those very nice people at Tripadvisor, then people just seemed to drift away. I’ve often found the greatest value from any conference is in the socialising/networking before and after, it would have been nice to have something more structured for after the event to encourage more attendees to stick around.

We ended up in the hotel bar with Graham Donoghue (Travelsupermarket.com), Gregg Brockway (TripIt), Juha Huttenen (TripSay), Giles Parnwell (Affiliate Future) and Sandra Moore (Tripadvisor). The few hours spent here chatting over a few drinks was as useful and interesting as any other part of the event, if not more so.

Lastly, kudos to Kevin and the team for embracing Twitter at the event, with TV screens around the hall streaming the feed as well as it appearing on the main stage occasionally too. This was used a few times to ask questions of the panels, would be nice to see that used even more next year (You can follow @travolution on twitter too for some great travel and online insights, and some questionable music selections).

If you’re involved in affiliate marketing, the goto place is the afilliates4u forum. One of the busiest threads of late involved Frank Paul (smingle) giving advice on domains and SEO for newbies and old hands alike. Frank has been involved with affiliate marketing for over 4 years, and this week just launched his new site underwear.co.uk after many months of development.

Frank bought underwear in Dec 2008 for an undisclosed sum (a respectable 5 figure sum I believe!), recognising the potential of the domain as a “niche killer”. With a plethora of underwear merchants to choose from, the site currently has over 10,000 products listed, with another 10,000 or more still to go on.

From a niche killer point of view, the site was already ranking in the first couple of pages of Google for it’s main terms with the holding page in place. Now the full site is up and running, Frank is confident the site’s rise through the SERPS will continue. At the moment the site is sitting around #5 for “underwear” and ranking well for terms like women’s underwear, men’s underwear and ladies underwear. 

The current holder of the #1 ranking for underwear is figleaves.com. Much maligned in the affiliate world due to recent changes in their affiliate programme, how will they feel about the possibility of losing their ranking? Doesn’t this mean affiliate marketing is costing figleaves traffic and sales? Well, not really, their brand now appears on 2 of the top 10 sites, so they get more coverage. Of course I’m sure they’d like to hold onto #1 all the same! 

Of the other nine sites in the top 10 results, three are included on underwear.co.uk giving them an advantage over the other six. From the consumers point of view, they get a comprehensive site listing products from lots of retailers and high street brands. Win Win Win!

Incidentally, Frank’s first sale was a commission from figleaves.com of £3.48 only 2 hours after the site went live. I’d wish him luck but I don’t think he’s going to need it! He isn’t done either, with bra.co.uk and knickers.co.uk the next projects on his list!

Arrived in Leeds, spent 40 minutes arguing with my Sat Nav about one-way streets in Leeds while looking for the Light car park. While checking-in there was an almighty clatter behind me, turned round to see Dom (@thehodge) trying very hard not to piss himself as Al Carlton (@AlCarlton) had just walked into a glass table at shin height. It sounded bloody sore and I’m sure when he sobers up he’ll find some rather nice bruising .

Shortly after a group of 16 TV’ers met in the hotel bar before heading out for a meal. I’ve been going to affiliate events for quite a few years now, so it was kind of weird walking into a crowd and having to introduce myself. Thankfully everyone was very friendly and we were soon joined by Dave and Elaine so I was no longer the only dirty affiliate there! While hanging around here I first met Shaun Anderson (@Hobo_Web) a fellow Scot (who took about 5 minutes to work out I’m Scottish too) and an SEO, for some reason we hit it off straight away, possibly due to our shared nicotine habits.

We headed off to Wagamama’s as evidenced here – then onto the pre-conf venue, the Hog’s Head.

 

At the pub I talked some shit to Dave Naylor (@davenaylor) and Elaine (apologies to both!) , then met a few other TV’ers who’d turned up. For some reason I’m always surprised how many Scots are involved in t’interweb so it was great to meet up with Andrew (@andrewburnett) and Wiebke Burnett (@wiieb), Paul Steven (@NorthSouthMedia) and his business partner James (@ttsjames). Along with Shaun and our adopted Irish cousin, Alastair McDermott (@AMcDermott) we had a great few hours of chatting and drinking an awful lot. When the Hog’s Head closed, Shaun, Alastair and myself continued partying ’til the wee hours and none of us were entirely sure which particular “wee hour” we called it a night. All I can say was it was a legendary night out! OK, Wiebke isn’t a usual Scottish name, she is in fact German and Andrew is also half-Swiss,  but we were still the “Scottish” group!

So the day of the event, hmmm, well, I arrived just as Guy Redwood (@eyetracking) was giving his talk and I was still in the sobering-up process. I’m a bit gutted at missing some of the earlier speakers, hopefully I’ll catch Tim Nash, Chris Garrett (@chrisgarrett) and Al Carlton at the next event. 

Dave Naylor’s talk was really entertaining as well as being pretty informative, it was quite a relaxed structure with people piping up questions as he went along. Loads of good info that makes you think you never want to cross a good SEO (especially one with £15k to play with:) ). 

Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) was the next session I went to, where he gave a great session on Reputation Management. A lot of it is fairly common-sense SEO and pulled in a few new ideas, but he put it together in a really interesting  and vibrant presentation, even for a certain audience member who was suffering the hangover from hell. Tom also takes the “Irony of the Day” award; while throwing around a few analogies in his presentation, the one that stuck with everyone was the Emergency Reputation Management technique of changing your name, suggesting a $50 Thai bride would do the trick. Thereafter he was known as the “Thai-Bride guy”.

After the afternoon break (where almost everyone else went for a swift pint), Patrick Altoft (@patrickaltoft) gave a talk on link building, pointing out where most people go wrong and breaking down links into three seperate categories. It was again really interesting and it was probably the session that struck most with me. I read somewhere today that it was Patrick’s first presentation, if so I’d never have guessed as he looked like he’d being doing it for years. Really good stuff.

Last up was Kieron (@kierondonoghue) who gave a great presentation on Affiliate Marketing, demonstrating a few examples of PPC and SEO that generated sales for him including some screen shots of commission stats that were for the eyes of attendees only. If you weren’t at this one make sure you’re at the next one! Kieron also finished his presentation with a few slides on affiliate success stories, with Elaine and Dave up first, then Holiday Watchdog which was very flattering. Telling everyone at the conference that I was buying the beers, not so good

After the event I headed back to the hotel for a quick nap, then off to dinner with Andrew and Weibke joining the affiliate mob of Kieron, Ray (@befuddle), Elaine, Dave and myself. Lovely Thai meal, although I’m sure we all ate far too much!

Back to the Hog’s Head where numbers had thinned since the end of the event and we spent a few hours chatting and drinking again (I was nursing a pint of Guinness for a very long time). Kieron sloped off very early too, but we’ll forgive him as his presentation was very good and he’s getting on a bit (Happy Birthday mate!). Around midnight we split into two groups, us sensible TV’ers heading back to the Radisson for a few quiet ones and the braver souls continuing the partying in Tiger Tiger.

So back to the hen-party infested hotel bar we squeezed into a corner at the back, and enjoyed another few hours of great chat. I once again failed in my quest as usual last man standing, but the thought of the next morning’s drive was enough to keep me sensible and I went off to bed around 3am.

While I am a bit gutted I missed some really good sessions, I made some really good friends while in Leeds, and the “legendary” pre-conf night was worth it. It was refreshing to be at an event where almost everyone was “new” to me, and I really enjoyed it. Dom, when you sober up mate, it was a great event, I can see it getting much bigger in the future, but don’t make it too big please!

Last thing, my post title… Paul Steven’s business partner James isn’t really into the web stuff, so when Paul was trying to convince him to come along, James remarked it’d be full of fat SEO’s wearing glasses. I was happy to correct him and let him know my eyesight is pretty near perfect!

In keeping with such emails they also provided a few figures on their reach of audience -

Play Radio UK is the largest group of internet only radio stations in Europe and offers listeners a totally interactive experience. Our 971,927.50 UK listeners choose to listen to one or more of our expanding choice of radio stations whilst they surfing the internet. This is your opportunity to reach these potential customers whilst they are already on-line 

OK, now look closely.

Nine hundred and seventy one thousand, nine hundred and twenty seven. And a half! Seriously?

Anyways, what to do with my new found wealth? I had a look around the sports section and decided I’d have a bet on next weekends Six Nations fixtures, just to make it that little bit more interesting. Rather than bet sensibly and try and turn my £48.63 into £61 by backing the favourites, I decided to go for the long shot. 

My Bets –

1. France v Scotland (Backing  Scotland @ 9.5)
2. Wales v England (Backing  England @ 4.41)
3. Italy v Ireland (Backing  Italy @ 7.22)

I put on 3 x doubles at £12.00 each - 

then used the change on the 1 x treble!

Total Backer’s Stake: £48.63

Your total potential win: £5478.55

Obviously the chances are slim, but it’ll have me chewing my nails if the treble is still on by Sunday!

Shift forward a year and pretty much it was still the same, save the odd search through boxes for a stapler, envelopes etc.

I had finally ordered a new PC as my old faithful DELL was making strange grinding noises regularly and trying to run GTalk on it was like communicating with someone en-route to Saturn. 

So at the weekend I picked up my new PC from Happy (who’d ordered all the bits and stuck it all together). I decided to finally gut out /un-box my office/study on Monday to celebrate the arrival of new PC, otherwise it just wouldn’t fit!

Here’s the new set up! It’s very tempting to try some gaming, but I’m trying my best to avoid!

Still need to sort out all the wiring, but it’s a much nicer workspace now. Having the three monitors makes a huge difference, with everything easily viewable in an instant.

Centre screen is whatever I’m currently working on; left screen is both my Gmail accounts (one in Chrome, the other in Firefox) and FTP client is usually there too; right screen is all my other “comms” – Gtalk, Messenger, TweetDeck, RSS Feeder.

The white boxes under the monitors – router on the left, Time Capsule on the right.

My old DELL is now the media server for the house, running iTunes for our AppleTV. More on that another time!

For the geeks, here’s the new PC details -

• Kingston 4GB (2×2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 HyperX Memory Non-ECC CL5 – Qty: 1
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Socket AM2 2.7GHz Energy Efficient L2 1MB (2×512KB) Retail Boxed Processor – Qty: 1
• Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 Socket AM2 Nvidia MCP55P PCI-E 8 Channel audio ATX Motherboard – Qty: 1
• Samsung HD753LJ 750GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm *32MB Cache* – OEM – Qty: 1
• Antec Sonata III Piano Black Quiet Mid Tower Case – With 500W EarthWatts PSU – Qty: 1
• XFX 9800GT XXX Edition 512MB DDR3 Dual DVI HDTV Out PCI-E Graphics Card – Qty: 2
• Sony DRU-190A 20X DVD±RW DL & DVD-RAM IDE internal – Retail With Multi Bezel & Nero – Qty: 1
• Samsung SM2243BW 22″ TFT Monitor 1680x 8000:1 300cd/m2 5ms Response H/Adjust VGA/DVI Silver 3 Years On-Site Warranty – Qty: 3
• Microsoft Wireless Laser Desktop 7000 – USB – Qty: 1
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate w/SP1 – Complete package – 1 PC – DVD – English International – Qty: 1

all from ebuyer.com

Karen and Carps!

Thanks to all who applied and look forward to seeing you both there.