Put the 14th and 15th of October 2008 in your diary. If you are involved in affiliate marketing you’ll be at the a4uexpo London.

Mission #10 we’ve got a free Full Affiliate Pass to give away, worth £299 (£199 before the 31st May). To get your hands on the pass and gain entry to our Barbados draw, we want to see search boxes!

Add one of our search boxes to your site and email/comment with the URL. Our search boxes are available here; you can choose your own colour scheme and branded or unbranded.

Mission Ends: 00.01 Thursday 8th May

Mission #9 is another simple one to get you on the way to Barbados. Add an offer banner to your site and email or drop a comment to tell us where it is!

You’ll find our self updating offer banners in our affiliate area, and you can choose a banner to suit your choice of country, resort or just our top offers - with or without flights. These banners are updated every few hours to reflect the best offer we have available for that location, neat huh?

What’s this got to do with chocolate you may ask? Never let it be muttered we don’t listen, and we’re always looking for opportunites to make our missions more attractive! The winner of this mission will win a one year subscription to the Hotel Chocolat Tasting Club aswell as entry to our Barbados prize draw!

Mission Ends: 00.01 Tuesday 6th May

Congratulations! If you’ve completed the site building missions so far, I’m certain you can now consider yourself a travel affiliate. Didn’t hurt a bit, did it? Missions are now open to anyone with a travel site or section, not just those affiliates we’ve assimilated

Mission #8 - Deeplink from a hotel, resort or country themed page to the relevant page on sunshine.co.uk

Pretty simple stuff, just add the deeplink to the url= parameter on your AF tracking url and you’re good to go. Drop me an email or comment below with the page or pages that you’re entering for this one and you could get in the prize draw for our Barbados tickets.

Mission Ends: 00.01 Thursday 1st May

 This mission is open to everyone! Find the cheapest holiday available on sunshine.co.uk for 2 adults for 7 nights and you win it!

We make cheap holidays, it’s what we do. Your mission is to find the cheapest holiday including flights, transfers and hotel and post your best total price in the comments below. Please include your search URL (or email a screenshot) so we can confirm price and availability!

Mission ends at 00.01 Tuesday 29th April.

Gutted you haven’t had time to get involved with the missions? Wish you’d played along from the start? Finally starting to see that sunshine.co.uk is what you were waiting for to get you into travel?

This mission is for you.

Mission #6 - You have until Monday 28th April to catch up with the previous missions and get back in the game. Here’s a quick run down on what you need to do -

• Pick an area of sunshine.co.uk that your new site will be about. A resort or region or country.
• Go register a suitable domain or dust off one you’ve had lying around.
• Get hosting sorted.
• Build your homepage.
• Add two pages of content - hotels or resorts.

 Sorted? Cool.

OK, now you’re probably thinking, “great Chris, I can do that. What’s the prize this week? A nice week in the Canaries? Egypt? Come on..”.

At sunshine.co.uk we do cheap holidays; I’ve always wondered how good can a cheap holiday be where you can stay for £3 per week. We’re not tight-arses though, we’ll happily pay the extra £25 pp to upgrade you and your travelling companion to Bed & Breakfast!

Date of departure for this one is very dependent on departure airport, so I’d say around the first or second week of May. Terms of competition are the same as mission #2 although there’ll be no speedos or meal pictures malarkey, there’s only so much we can ask of you for £3 a week!

Still hanging around? Get busy with your new holiday site!

Mission #2 seemed to go well, and our sources tell us our agent has fully integrated with the other tourists successfully.

Mission #5 - We’re going to do it all again. This time we’re sending out two agents (with back-up) to soak up the travel bug. Again locations are on a strictly need to know basis and missions will embark on 25th or 26th April for seven days.

Double the fun comes with double the work! Double your content is the name of the game.

Country / Region Sites:

• Add two resort pages

Resort Sites:

• Add two hotel pages

Deadline for entry to win this mission is Monday 21st April at 5pm. If you’d like any info on what’s popular in your location, just ask! Two pages is the bare minimum to enter, obviously feel free to do more.

Catch Up

If you still haven’t got around to starting your travel site you can still catch up! Complete missions 1 and 3 and 5 and you’re in the game!

Conditions for the prize are the same as Mission #2 with the slight change that speedo pictures are no longer required. However, to give us all a taste of the culture you will experience, we will require a picture of every meal you have on holiday.

To enter this mission email me your site with completed missions and choice of departure airport(s); you could be flying off next Fri or Sat and also be in with a shot of our Barbados tickets!

It’s all going rather well so far! However the pedants among you will have noticed come Thursday, we’ll only have 3 “winners” so far. With 7 days of the incentive gone by then that’ll leave us 4 short. Have no fear, we have a plan!

It’s time for the bloggers to come to the party. Simply do a blog post about our attempts to relieve ourselves of two tickets to Barbados over the course of a month, and we’ll pick 4 of you at random on Thursday night.

It doesn’t matter if you have an Affiliate Marketing blog, Travel blog or even just a freakin weird blog, as long as you get a post up there!

You could also mention your own entry for mission #1 and mission #3 and get yourself on the incentive trail.

Since Saturday we’ve had airport transfers live on the site. Giving customers the opportunity to purchase their transfers as part of the search and book process. Take up has been impressively high, with over 80% of flight + hotel bookings including transfers in their purchase.

You’ll be pleased to hear that you’ll also earn commission on the transfers at 7% too. We did have a couple of bookings over the weekend where the transfer costs were actually greater than the actual week stay in the hotel!

You’ve chosen a domain that’ll be for your new travel site, and could be going on holiday on Friday for free. Now here comes mission 3.

You have 72 hours to get a homepage up on your new domain. That gives you enough time to get hosting and DNS sorted, and plan the design / layout of your new travel site! Isn’t this exciting!

In case you haven’t clicked yet, by the end of this incentive, even if you don’t win the trip to Barbados you’re going to have a rather useful holidays website! You really want to get involved as there’s many more interesting twists and surprises to come!

To help you out, here’s our list of what your new homepage should include-

• Relevant title and meta tags - related to the country/region/resort you’ve chosen
• Logo - a nice logo goes a long way to adding a professional feel to your site
• Menu - a prominent menu that will be used to link further into your site. If you’ve selected a country for example, the menu will contain resorts of that country (we’ll get to those pages soon!)
• Headline Content - Make it very clear in a paragraph or two what you are offering. Don’t add too much text!
• Images - throw in a couple of images, sell the dream!

 If you do need any help or advice (or clarification of our over-complicated incentive) please do get in touch, we’re here to help! Click on the chat client on the left menu and ask away. Once you’ve completed mission 3, email me at chris.c [at] sunshine.co.uk - this mission will end 3pm-ish 17th April…

So you’d like to build a travel site, but you’re just not inspired. Nothing really tickles your fancy and you just can’t get motivated. We’d like to send you in… undercover.

For seven days you (and your partner or someone you can take at this short notice) will pose as a normal holiday maker, the innocent sun seekers around you unaware of the affiliate marketeer within their ranks. You’ll report back every day, so getting online is a must! By completion of mission you will have fully mastered this holidays malarkey.

Mission is set for the 17th or 18th of April, depending on your preferred departure airport; destination is currently on a need to know basis, however we do advise you take some sun cream and some Euros! Deadline for entry is 5pm Monday the 14th April.

Read on…