Happy New Year! We’ve got an update on our affiliate programme -

Low Deposits For January

We’re offering customers the chance to book their hotels for only £10 per person deposit. This has been great for conversions with a lot of our customers taking up this offer.

To make the offer viable for affiliate traffic, we’ve had to introduce a 2nd Tier payment system. Where a customer from an affiliate opts for the low deposit, you’ll see a payment of £0.01 appear in your reporting, with the full commissionable amount also shown. The full commission will be paid once the customer pays their full balance, 12 weeks before their travel date. (We’re working with AF to see if we can also report the date of expected payment)

Where a customer chooses to pay the full amount on booking, or isn’t eligible for a deposit booking, you’ll still see your commission paid in the normal way.

We realise this will appear unsuitable for some affiliates, but with the improved conversion we’re seeing, we’re confident this is a win for everyone.

New banners promoting the low deposits are being uploaded to our programme page on Affiliate Future and our own Affiliate Resource.

Finally, we’re pleased to announce the winner of our competition which featured on Joost’s yoast.com. We had a bounty of entries and after much debating we asked two of the entrants to go back and make their plug-ins a finished article.

Our final winner is David Fiske, who developed sunPress Exchange – a very clever plug-in to take sunshine’s RSS feeds and give you the ability to convert the prices to GBP/EUR/USD, and present it in a cool widget that you can theme to your own design.

David apparently isn’t an Apple fanboy, so he’s opted for Amazon gift vouchers instead! David is recently married and intends to spend the vouchers on the stuff that was missing from their Wedding Gift List!

In David’s own words – “My original idea was to create a widget to parse Sunshine RSS feeds. A simple idea but nothing special. After searching the web, I noticed an interest in sunPress from overseas affiliates.  I refined this idea to not only parse RSS feeds but to convert the currencies into Euros or US Dollars. The result is an RSS parsing plugin that can display accurate and up-to-date prices in British Pounds, Euros and US Dollars. Any Sunshine RSS feed can be used and each blog post can have a different feed specified, each displayed in a sexy looking box underneath each post.”

Read on…

We’re delighted to announce this years Barbados incentive, run in conjunction with Affiliate Future. This year we’re giving six affiliates the chance to win a place on the infamous Barbados affiliate trip.

Read on…

This one is for the coders / developers / designers among you. Create an add-on, theme or plugin to work with sunPress and submit it to Joost and you could win a MacBook Air.

You’ll find full details over at yoast.com along with many more tips on WordPress, plugins and SEO.

If you’re currently using sunPress and would like to comment on anything you think it needs or would make it work better, shout out now and someone may develop it for you!

As last order dates go whizzing by for Christmas deliveries, spare a thought for those people who still haven’t organised all their pressies for their beloved. Having been one of those people (let’s just be honest and call them men) who leaves things until the very last minute, here’s a little help from us at sunshine.co.uk –  a get out of Xmas jail free card.

Book a holiday! With no delivery required, instant gratification (and downloadable vouchers to give on Xmas day) it’s the perfect last minute present. No rush down to the high street on Christmas Eve looking at all the empty shelves, remembering that you promised yourself last year you wouldn’t leave it this late again!

If you’re still getting Christmas shoppers hitting your site and nowhere to send them, point them in our direction and we’ll save their bacon!

Announced today, we received a “Highly Commended” in the Innovation in Affiliate Marketing category for sunPress. 

Congratulations to TradeDoubler / DELL for taking the award!

You can view all the winners on the e-consultancy site here.

In his second guest post, Joost de Valk guides you through getting the best out of WordPress for you and your traffic.

Now that my previous post has helped you optimise your sunPress installation, this post will help you to make your life and that of your visitors easier.

Speed optimisation

WordPress, although it’s in my humble opinion the best CMS in the world, is far from fast when loaded with plugins. One of the best things you can do to start with is optimise the header.php, though this does require a bit of coding skills, and if you upgrade to a newer version of the theme you’d probably have to do this again.

What you should do though, is replace all the occurrences of get_bloginfo(wpurl) etc with the real complete URL to those files. Why would you want WordPress to do a database call to know where your stylesheet is, for instance, when you know perfectly well yourself where this file is?

Read on…

To help you on your way with using sunPress, we asked Joost de Valk (yoast.com, orangevalley.nl) to provide some expert guidance. Below is the first of two guest blog posts by Joost, this first one dealing with additional plugins you should add to get the best out of sunPress in the search engines.

Chris Clarkson and myself met at A4UExpo, where some of you might have heard me speak about WordPress optimisation. Chris was very enthusiastic about their release of sunPress and wanted to show it to me. While I’m not very easily impressed, as I’ve seen a lot of WordPress related stuff, sunPress was well thought out and pretty well implemented, and I could do nothing but compliment Chris and his team for their outstanding efforts.

After that though, the team of sunshine.co.uk and myself have been working on improving the sunPress themes even more, resulting in the new release that just came out. After that falls upon me the humble task to tell you how to further optimise your sunPress installation.

Read on…

On Thursday evening we attended the Interactive Media and Advertising Awards bash, as Affiliate Future had been shortlisted for “Best Use of Affiliate Marketing” with the Launch of sunshine.co.uk as their entry.

I’m delighted to say we won; surprised and shocked on the night, especially when we saw we were up against Talk Talk and Play.com.

You can see the entry here.

Big thanks to Affiliate Future for entering us and especially big thanks to Ruth from Orchid PR who pulled the entry together.

A big pat on the back to all our affiliates, as no affiliates = no awards!