When we bought this domain back in 2008 we knew there was a USA holiday specialist bon-voyage.co.uk based in Southampton, but we were happy to use the domain as it’s a very different vertical within travel.

Studying the backlinks for bonvoyage.co.uk we discovered that we had incoming links from various sites that were meant for the hyphenated site. Here’s a few examples -

thedibb.co.uk [2002]

cruisecritic.co.uk [2007]

timesonline.co.uk [2008]

mirror.co.uk [2010]

tripideas.co.uk [2011]

novascotia.com [unknown]

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a hyphenated domain is going to have these issues, it’s part of the reason they tend to be much cheaper. If anyone from bon-voyage.co.uk is reading this, you may want to drop a few emails and see if you can get any of the links corrected

Actually, if you are from bon-voyage.co.uk you may also want to check out these pages *cough* -

http://www.bon-voyage.co.uk/page/site_map [3 links]

http://www.bon-voyage.co.uk/destinations/need_help_finding_somewhere [same 3 links]

If you do run a site on a hyphenated domain, short term maybe check the backlinks to the non-hyphenated version and make sure they’ve not picked up any of your links by accident! Long term maybe try and get your hands on the non-hyph version?

Most of the posts you’ll read after a conference concentrate on the sessions and speakers and all that sort of stuff. I’ll add a bunch of links at the bottom of the post if that’s what you’re after. This post is going to take you on a journey, a very different journey. A group of us from just North of North England decided we’d all travel down together by train, with a quick trip to Illegal Jacks in Edinburgh for a BeerSpongeBuritto.

Our party for the trip South was George Currie, Clarke Duncan, David McClelland, Mark Boyd, Andrew Burnett and Ian Daniels. We also enjoyed the company of Fraser Edwards who was just there for the burittos! Missing from this group was Shaun Anderson, who due to work commitments (or the inability to get out of bed that early) was travelling down later. Looking back, this may have been his first mistake.

Having stocked up on some refreshments we boarded the train for Leeds.

A while later I checked in on Shaun to see how his journey was progressing.

Our party train arrived in Leeds at around 4pm and we headed to the Mint Hotel, checked in, and headed down to the bar to join the growing Thinkvis crowd. If you ever wanted to know how good the reputation of  Think Visibility is, this is when I bumped into Justin Parks (from Marbella, Spain) and Branko Rihtman (from Jerusalem, Israel). That’s a long way to come for a little conference in Leeds!

We then headed out for some food at the rather amazing Fazenda, then onto the Alea Casino for the pre-event party. Then this happened -

Having missed his opportunity for a shower earlier, he decided to get cleaned up. After turning on the shower he got a call and opened his laptop for the follow up email, which gave him access to a new search tool. About 20 minutes later he realised something was amiss; the river of water running out of his bathroom, under the door and out into the corridor was his first clue. Towels, dressing gowns, sheets, pillows and duvets just weren’t enough to mop up the overflow, so he did what any fair minded person would do and came to join us all for a drink.

On returning to his hotel room after the Alea event finished, his keycard wouldn’t open his door. A quick trip to reception found the staff expecting his visit, where he haggled a £200 room damage charge down to £100 and got himself a new dry room. Unfortunatley there aren’t any pictures from inside the room, and knowing “it didn’t happen if there aren’t any pictures”, here’s the corridor outside AFTER the staff had cleaned up!

So if you wondered what all the talk of #sinkvis was on Twitter, now you know. Shaun provided entertainment for everyone at Think Vis with his antics and subsequent telling of the tale, including a half-hour session on the Alea roof on Saturday night, where those of us there will long remember and probably never laugh so hard for many a year! I do feel it only fair to defend him a little too, as legendary as this story is, he is one of the cleverest people I’ve met and should be considered a genius within the search industry. Like most geniuses, common sense doesn’t always come in an equal amount. I promised Shaun if I did this post it’d be only fair to give him a nice link – UK SEO.

Anyway, another brilliant event, with great sessions, pic’n'mix, poker and scalectrix. Get yourself to Think Visibility 6 on the 3rd September 2011.

Update: I forgot to give the winner of the poker a nice link, so here you go George – SEO UK

Other Think Vis posts I’ve read:

http://www.stateofsearch.com/think-visibility-5-march-2011-the-one-with-the-panda-pick-n-mix/

http://www.beckynaylor.co.uk/why-i-love-think-visibility.html

http://www.10yetis.co.uk/public-relations/index.php?/archives/1074-10-Yetis-Review-of-ThinkVisibility-Conference-2011-in-Leeds.html

http://www.peterhandley.com/2011/03/meeting-old-friends-for-the-first-time/

http://www.impactmedia.co.uk/blog/search-marketing/think-visibility-part-1-link-building-cro-with-psychology-4741/

http://www.3ac.co.uk/think-visibility-5

http://www.affiliaterich.co.uk/think-visibility-5-march-2011

CCS (Complete Cruise Solutions) is the trade supplier for P&O, Cunard and Princess Cruises. If you want to sell these cruise lines as an agent, you go through CCS who supply you with all you need.

It’s being reported that they are about to drop agent’s commission levels from 15% to 5% to stop “heavy discounting”, where some agents are allegedly giving away 10% discounts, sometimes more. OK, it’s a silly reason to cover up a commission cut, but that’s not the reason for the rant.

In an article this morning on TTG (Travel Trade Gazette) they asked a few agents and CCS themselves for comments on this. As you’d expect CCS toe the party line, saying it offers a bright new future, yada yada. Cruise agents aren’t all that happy, who would be when your commission just got slashed?

I get that, it’s not nice when someone tampers with your long standing business model. But perhaps some cruise agents need to take a good long look at themselves if they agree with the opinion of this un-named agent -

Another agent said it could lead to a change in clientele for P&O, Princess and Cunard: “CCS will get the quantity, but not the quality.”

So apparently this agent’s main cause for concern is that the commission changes will change the “quality” of passengers/customers who book cruises. Therein lies the reason for this rant. As a customer facing business, that seems a pretty 19th Century attitude, no? He’s happy to offer cruise deals to his customers, as long as they are the right “quality”. Unbelievable.

</rant>

So here’s some advice. Stop being a travel blogger and start being a holiday blogger.

A good number of the travel bloggers I’m aware of are mostly damn good writers, who bring the tastes, smells, sights and pleasure of their trips onto their blog with ease. Treating their readers to a second hand experience that often escapes the traditional (paid and paid-for) travel writer.

Drop the “travel” and embrace the “holiday”. The rules of making money on the interwebs are fairly straightforward, the bigger your audience the higher the payout. While that roadside cafe you spent an enjoyable afternoon just outside Bangkok makes for a great post, it is a limited audience you’re writing for. That awesome little family-run coffee shop you found in a back street of Warsaw, amazing post but again where’s your audience? Embrace the mainstream, go looking for a bigger audience to share your talent with.

If you’re already shaking your head and tut-tuting, bear with me. You don’t fancy writing about Benidorm? Ask yourself why, chances are you’ve never been and are basing your prejudices on those traditional travel writers and the even more sensationalist TV series makers. How about Tenerife? Brits, beer and full-English breakfasts? No, really, don’t think there’s anything there that’s going to raise your interest? Based on? Have a read at Andy Montgomery’s posts, our Tenerife writer, on a few of these resorts you’ve likely never heard of. Did you even know there are pyramids on the island?

So here’s my point. Try writing for a bigger audience, it’s not a question of ethics, snobbery or whatever else you think might be stopping you. If you monetise your site via banner advertising or Adsense even, more traffic = more £££. These destinations are popular for a reason, look past the stereotypes and you could write your beautiful words for an information hungry readership who want to know more beyond the holiday brochure. You might even enjoy the holiday. Holiday, not “trip”, see what I did there?

Convinced yet? Ready to hang up your Berghaus backpack? Here’s another reason to consider writing for the mainstream holiday audience. More of an audience brings with it more companies looking to service these holidaymakers. More companies involved means more opportunities for you to work with these companies and earn. That’s a fairly simplified view, but it’s true.

We (sunshine.co.uk) currently use the services of well-known bloggers Karen Bryan and Andy Hayes. Both great writers with a wealth of travel experience. Karen recently took a “trip” to Malaga, showing there’s more to the area than most people realise. She’s also off to Gran Canaria early next year too.

I look forward to your comments.

We’ve been acquiring geo domains for sunshine.co.uk for a year or so now, I’d like to say we’re finished buying but as many of you know it’s a highly addictive (and expensive) past-time, as well as being a great investment.

The geos are being launched as sub-brands of sunshine.co.uk, the main hook being we use local writers who actually live in the area, assuring a level of knowledge hard to find elsewhere. To that end, this post is partly a job advert for any of the domains we don’t have writers for yet and also a handy list to monitor the progress of our geo domains.

If you’re a writer / blogger based in one of the areas we’re looking for, please get in touch via comments form below. The “job description” is well explained by Andy on the Tenerife homepage. I’ll keep the list up to date as and when we find new experts!

If you’re a domainer who owns a geo domain that you think we’d be interested in feel free to get in touch too.

Big thanks to Rick at Gadget Glamour for making my iPad skin dreams come true!

Sinclair ZX Spectrum skin here.

The pics were taken on my iPhone 3G (as you can see in half the pics with the reflection) so it doesn’t really do the skin full justice, but I’m loving it.

Elite screenshots made possible by video below

We’ve worked with them for over seven years, as affiliates then merchants. We’ve seen them grow from the plucky underdog, to the biggest Travel network in the UK market. Maz Darvish was probably the first person to recognise the value in what we were doing with Holiday Watchdog, and helped us a great deal getting more travel companies into Affiliate Marketing.

Recently, it’s fair to say things haven’t being going well. Issues with payments to affiliates is the one thing a network can’t afford to let happen. As a network, there are two things you have to get absolutely right. Tracking and payments. That’s it, everything else is an “extra”.

I’m led to believe the payments issues of late aren’t actually a financial problem, but mostly technical issues leading to payment runs not being completed.

In our own dealings with AF of late, technical support/development just isn’t there. I know they lost a lot of key development staff after the buy-out, some of whom are probably irreplaceable. However, it seems that there hasn’t been much effort to fill this gaping void in the development area, as evident by the payment issues.

So, to Progressive Digital Media, the current owners of Affiliate Future. Please, please work very hard to reinstate AF to it’s place in the top tier of UK affiliate networks. A damaged reputation in this industry takes a long long time to get back, ask anyone who used DGM in the early 2000′s. Invest in the technical development of AF, as it’s badly letting down some of the best network staff in our industry.

Take James Little, one of the best relationship builders in the UK AM scene, but seemingly has to spend his days currently sticking his fingers in the dam that is the a4u forum.

I fear some relationships may have been ruined for good, a few of our largest affiliates were very keen for us to take our programme elsewhere, part of the reason for our recent launch with Paid On Results. Once you lose an affiliate’s trust it is desperately hard to get it back.

I’m not going to tell you how to run your business, I just want to point out these issues and hope it spurs some action.

However…

if I were you, I’d get someone on the first train out of London, get up to Glasgow and speak to Paid On Results, who have by far the best tracking and payment systems in the UK.

From a very concerned friend,

Chris

Here’s the specs -

Firm Knowledge of:

• PHP
• MYSQL
• JavaScript
• XML
• JSON

The following would also be advantageous:

• *nix enviroment experience
• A degree in something computery
• real world experience
• revision control experience
• ability to operate with 4 hours sleep per day

Applicants should provide examples of current and previous projects.

You’d initially be working in the Cheshire area, to be assimilated,  then working remotely from wherever you like.

Salary will be commensurate with your ninja level (more than you’re getting just now).

To apply, contact me. How? You work it out…

As you may have seen, our latest site tenerife.co.uk was launched publicly with a very nice article on tnooz.

Almost a year after acquiring the domain and about 8 months since we started working on it, it’s always a great feeling when a site goes “out there”.

As explained in the tnooz article, the aim of the site is to provide more in the way of information for our visitors than the price-orientated sunshine.co.uk site, while leveraging the domain to rank well in the search engines.

Acquiring the domain

Early 2009 I was having a chat with Frank Paul about buying some holiday related domains to re-invest some of our profits from the previous year. As a man with all the right contacts, he very quickly arranged a deal with the then owner of tenerife.co.uk and majorca.co.uk, two of our biggest destinations.

How much you ask? Each was a substantial five figure sum is all I have to say on the matter!

Holding page and logo

As there was no content on the domain, we quickly had Caboodle Design knock us up a logo (similar to the sunshine format) and added a holding page. Not the prettiest, but it did the job.

Expert

Last July I started the hunt for an “expert” on Tenerife. Here’s how you advertise for such positions in the current social media age -

and here’s how you apply for said position -

After a bit of internet research, I jumped onto Amazon and ordered Andrea’s [Andy's] book, but was already convinced she would fit the bill and more from reading her blogs.

Within a few weeks we had a plan of action and I even met up with Andy for a chat while on holiday in Tenerife in the October.

Logo Concepts

Michelle at Caboodle Design was tasked with creating logo concepts for tenerife.co.uk, and as usual she produced some great logos. We’d already been down this path with majorca.co.uk but we wanted something that was specific to Tenerife.

Extending the brand

After a few weeks trying to decide which logo / colour scheme to go for, we had a brainwave. KISS! We decided to have all the Geo sites match the main sunshine brand, much easier in terms of design and development (we’d just acquired tunisia.co.uk that week), and importantly getting the brand in front of our visitors whichever site they visit.

Having spent a few weeks going back and forward with Michelle over the Tenerife concepts, she was very understanding when we told her we weren’t going to use any of them, she promptly made us the logo above!

Design & Development

The search and booking process is entirely taken from sunshine, so all the site needed was the front-end content pages designed and developed. Or so we thought.

Working with our local expert Andy, we quickly realised (well, she pointed it out) that most sites don’t accurately reflect the location and breakdown of resorts and hotels in Tenerife, generally lumping everything into “catch all” resorts like Costa Adeje. Since we wanted the site to be “right”, we had to develop a whole new level within the site’s architecture compared to sunshine.co.uk . Fun.

Here’s an example – Costa Adeje has all the hotels and “mini-resorts” contained within, like El Duque and Fanabe which also have their own page with the hotels in their locale.

As you can also see from these pages, one of the USP’s of the site is the side-by-side descriptions, contrasting the typical Travel Agent blurb with Andy’s rather honest descriptions.

Content

With the front-end starting to take shape, we concentrated the efforts of our Content Team on Tenerife, making sure we had every possible accommodation from all of our suppliers, checking all the current information we had was up to date and writing descriptions for the hotels and resorts.

Jack

Our resort level pages seemed a bit bare. We wanted to add some pictures but the only images we had were of hotels. As luck would have it, Andy’s husband and co-author Jack is also a damn good photographer.

He was tasked with visiting every resort and mini-resort we had and taking some nice pics! The results look great on the site and you can really see how good they are here.

Launch

Tenerife.co.uk actually “opened” about 3 weeks ago, but we kept it quiet while we did some final testing and let the search engines have a rummage through the site.

With the article published on tnooz marking our “coming out” party, we can now concentrate on marketing the site and picking up some links and traffic (yes you cynics, that’s part of the reason for this spectacularly long blog post).

Today saw the release of a consumer and a trade PR from 10 Yetis, our Public Relations Agency, and they are currently negotiating a nice little PR spot to do with an upcoming event.

Hat Tips

Many, many people have been involved in this project in one way or another, be they paid or otherwise

• Frank Paul
• Caboodle Design
• Andrea & Jack Montgomery
• Stephen Pavlovich
• All the sunshine people involved, you know who you are!
• Kevin May @ tnooz.com for being very patient!

Cheers one and all!

That’s All

I hope you found some or any of that interesting, it’s been a strange development project as we switched from working on majorca.co.uk to tenerife.co.uk about half way through the year.

We’ve also been busy re-developing sunshine.co.uk, which made it harder work to develop the other sites in tandem due to frequent changes. This probably accounts for the length of time involved in this site build, as it often played second fiddle to it’s big brother.

Comments/ feedback / questions very welcomed!

I was at the Affiliate Doctors panel at last years London a4uExpo and was hugely impressed by one of the sites the panel reviewed.

I spoke to Greg Findley (@gregfindley) at the time and he’s since taken on board the recommendations of the panel, continuing to develop DVD Box Sets (dvdboxsets.co.uk) into a great example of a price comparison site. I sent Greg a few vague questions to get an idea of his journey which I hope you’ll find interesting too!

Background?

I started as a freelance designer in 2008 after completing a graphic design degree, and always had an interest in running my own website projects.

I first found out about affiliate marketing through a friend who sent me a link for the Amazon store script, Associate-O-Matic, I used this script to start my first site, selling video games. I quickly learnt that Google wasn’t a fan of the duplicated content AOM sites, so started teaching myself about PPC, and was fortunate enough to have picked a good niche at the time.

On the back of my affiliate earnings I got the opportunity to go travelling in 2009 to New Zealand & Australia, which was an amazing experience heightened by the fact I was working remotely as an affiliate on a MacBook, on the other side of the World.

Inspiration?

After searching for a boxset for a birthday present I’d noticed there was a big difference in prices between the online retailers, so I figured there was a good opportunity for a price comparison site with independent reviews; DVD Box Sets was created.

How long did it take from idea to launch, what was the hardest part?

It took around 3 weeks to get the site up & running in it’s current format, I got lots of great ideas from the Affiliate Doctors panel at the A4U Expo last year, so set about a new site design/build following that.

I worked with a PHP developer who I knew from my freelance work, and we set about creating a new custom back-end to include all the features the site needed. I’m constantly tweaking the site and getting new bits of code added, I think it’s always going to be a work in progress!

The hardest part has been getting Google to like the site, off-site SEO is definitely my weakest point, so that’s something I’m currently working hard to try and develop.

How is it doing now?

The site’s been doing quite well, I think I’m still in the red as I spent a lot on getting the code/features how I wanted them, but hopefully it won’t be too long before I break even on the site. Another good thing about the code is that I was able to create the sister site BluRayBoxSets.co.uk with relative ease.

Anything else?

One other thing I’d like to add is the helpful advice I’ve received from reading Keiron’s Blog, and e-mails/twitter with Kirsty (Affiliate Stuff) and Fraser (Affiliate Blog)

Thanks to Greg for taking the time to reply to my questions! Pop along and have a look at DVD Box Sets, I’m sure Greg would appreciate any more feedback!