Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

Its a bit of a controversial statement, but I’ve come to the conclusion that 98% of bloggers should stop writing, free the internet of boring or irrelevant dribble so that the useful blog posts can shine through.

What makes me say this?  Well I subscribe to 40 or so blogs, and my RSS reader lets me know when they’ve been updated.  Its quite nice to “feel” that there is something new to read - but 98% of the time I’m disappointed.

I think in the last week alone, I’ve seen a handful of new blog entries entitled something like “10 things that bloggers must do”, and “10 things you need to do to become a fulltime blogger”.  Virtually all of the things that bloggers write about are regurgitated.

Having said that there are a few what I’d class as good bloggers who don’t rewrite what someone else has previously written and pass it off as their own.  These people don’t post something just so that they a post in that day.  Each blog entry is informative, but ultimately different - either giving their viewpoints on a controversial subject, or giving advice.  Well done to all those!

Before I get any comments, I know I probably fall into the 98% that I talk about!

Affiliate network AffiliateFuture have released a press release today which states that its launching “consumer friendly tracking” called VeraciTag - which and to quote them:

works by storing anonymous tracking information in the web browser of the user’s computer. Operating in this way means the tags cannot be blocked, as cookies can.

Its apparently available immediately, but looking at the “get links” for several merchants, there doesn’t seem to be any difference in the links that are generated. 

I’m intrigued as to exactly how this new tecnology works and if anyone knows, please leave some comments.

We’ve just had a small earthquake in England - which although wasn’t huge, it was like a big big lorry driving past the side of your house.

It happened a few minutes before 1am on 27th February and there is no mention of it on Sky, BBC News or any other of the online news websites.

There could be complete cities flattened across the UK - but none of these websites have any update.  Perhaps I’m expecting too much for things to reported that quickly online - 15 minutes later I suppose may be a bit quick if they need to validate any reports before it gets published.

I’d say it was about a 3 or 4 on the richter scale and lasted about 5-10 seconds - although it had a few seconds build-up too where I thought a lorry had come to park next to me!

UPDATE: I’ve just seen a site appear on Google which details that the earthquake was a 4.7 and 6 miles underground… The co-ordinates are 53.32N, 0.31W which looks to be near to Lincoln in North-East England…  More info here and map below.  Initial mention has just also appeared on the BBC News website, but remember where you heard it first!

View Larger Map

Some more info can be found on another blog at http://johnleach.co.uk/words/archives/2008/02/27/300/

Interested in knowing what roads or motorways have delays or traffic jams?

Check out Road Traffic Problems which is updated in real-time 24×7 with details of delays or problems on the motorways, A roads and dual carriageways in the UK.

How is it different?  Well its no hastle - simply a list of traffic problems around England and Wales.

For affiliate marketers as well as retailers, Christmas is the most profitable time of year and the money earned in the two months in the run-up to Christmas can often exceed the income for the rest of the year.

But with Christmas soon to be out the way should you sit back and do nothing until autumn next year? 

Think ahead for the other big events where gifts/purchases are made - such as Valentines Day, Mothers Day, Fathers Day or Easter.

I read a few weeks ago about UK based 123 Reg’s DNS server failure for a whole weekend.  The problem started on Friday afternoon and wasn’t fixed until Sunday evening - over 48 hours of downtime.  For those non-technical reading this, DNS servers are key to the internet as they provide the lookup of domain names to IP addresses - which are used to route traffic around the internet.  So www.zarr.com resolves to IP address 87.127.147.50.

Without functioning DNS servers, people typing in www.company.com for websites hosted with 123-Reg would fail - so even websites would be up and running, there wouldn’t be a way of getting to them.  According to a statement from a 123-Reg representative, the problem occurred due to high demand on the servers and then hardware failure.  I think customer’s frustration was exasperated by the fact there was no-one you could contact to get an update.  No phones answered, nor messageboards/forums updated.  Problems happen, but I would have expected a multi-million company such as 123-Reg to have hardware immediately available to replace ones that fail - I’m sure they will from now on though!

For people running websites on those servers that couldn’t be reached, the results were disasterous.  As its now the end of November - well December in about 2 hours - ecommerce sites are getting busier and the last 6-8 weeks of the year are the busiest with sometimes more sales generated than the rest of the year.

So downtime of 48 hours can cost money.  A very good blog that I read called Self-Made Minds is run by two UK based lads who detail what they are doing to make serious money online - not through running ecommerce sites, but through affiliate marketing.  Al is current hitting the $1000 barrier each day through Google Adsense (with other incomes streams too), so profit wise he could have lost out on $2000+.  Some relatively modest websites that Zarr have developed and host are turning over £5000-£7500 per day and making 40%+ profit on those sales each day

My dad has always said that if something looks to good to be true, it probably is.  So with 123-Reg’s hosting at a few pounds a day, you get what you pay for - well thats just my opinion anyway.

If you are looking to host a web, the advice I would pass on is:

1. ask for customer testiimonials, or speak to their existing customers as their experiences and comments could sway you.

2. ask about uptime % or availability.  If they guarantee 100%, then they are lying!

3. Ask what methods are available for you as a customer to speak to someone technical who can help you if you get a problem.  If they say its purely email support, then that should ring an alarm bell - are you too important to speak to?

Good luck!

Good domain names are quite hard to get these days as most dictionary words have been taken and finding a name to match your business or idea can be quite hard.  You can of course try registering a domain and keep trying until you find a domain name that hasn’t been taken.

Alternatively there are several auction sites that auction existing domain names to the highest bidder and I noticed today that Christmas.co.uk is on sale for £12,000 - and I suspect the bidding will go much higher. 

That may seem like a lot of money, but over the last few months, records have been broken in the .UK domain world with fly.co.uk selling for about £85,000 and recycle.co.uk sold for £150,000.

For Christmas.co.uk, I’d guess its too late this year to get anything worthwhile revenue from it - although I’m sure a PPC campaign could do quite well if the content of the site could be generated quickly enough.

But baring in mind that the new owner could then have 9 months after this christmas to perfect their site, put on a lot of content or products to sell, or link through to affiliate programmes - next christmas they could make some serious money and could make back their investment easily within the first year.  From that point onwards it could be a real money generator.

If only I had £12,000 to spare, I’d be queuing up to buy it…

If you’ve bought anything online or surfed the web, you’ve probably come across Affiliate Marketing in some form, but you may not have realised it.

Affiliate marketing is where a merchant (eg. a retailer) rewards an affiliate for a customer, lead, visitor or sale thats been generated through their efforts.  For those of you in the UK, if you’ve seen or heard of the financial comparison website called MoneySupermarket.com, then that website is based around affiliate marketing.

While browsing or comparing credit cards, mortgages, insurance or any of the other products on that website, when you click through to the bank or financial body providing that particular service, MoneySupermarket.com get effectively a commission from you doing that.  If for example, you complete an application for a credit card, MoneySupermarket.com get something in the region of £30 or more.  As they generate so much leads, I would expect they can demand higher affiliate commissions - probably closer to £50 or more per lead.

There is very big money to be made from affiliate marketing from the affiliate’s perspective.  One blog that I regulary read since discovering it earlier this year is Keiron Donoghue’s blog.  Keiron has been running several successful websites for a long time (well back to the early part of this decade) and uses PPC marketing to generate traffic to his websites which then convert to affiliate sales.  There is one page that stands out on one of his sites and that talks about how he got to where he is - which is probably one of the most successful affiliate markers and PPC’s in the UK.

Keiron generates his income from a variety of successful websites which he regulary updates (by hand too it seems).  I can definately recommend his blog for something to stirr your enthusiasm.

I did a post a few months ago about how quickly search engines pickup new websites - you can read the post here.

The WarmLegs.co.uk site was picked up by robots within 3 1/2 hours which really surprised me - and by picked up I mean they visited all of the 3 pages on the site - not just the home page.

The site didn’t appear in the Google database using the site:warmlegs.co.uk syntax until about 48 hours later, but still quite a quick response.

I’ve just done something similar with A Really Good Read.com, but that hasn’t been picked up as quickly as WarmLegs.co.uk did.  However, it was only 12 hours ago, so there is still time!

However, the A Really Good Read.com is something different that I’m trying.  You may have heard the term “Content is king” meaning that building a website with decent content will get you ranked well.  Its obviously not that easy as regular updates, structure of site, how well its SEO’d etc are just some of the many factors that can affect your ranking.

Zarr issued a press release yesterday about the spam filtering service we offer to various businesses around the UK.

Within a few hours, I got a phone call from Touch FM Radio that cover most of the Midlands.  I did a short interview with them, they recorded it and played some extracts this morning.

I’ve had two phone calls today from people who’ve recognised it as being me.  Haven’t got a clue what they’ve said, but nice that PR does seem to work!