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.

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.”

David’s Development Blog - http://www.davidfiske.co.uk/wordpress-sunpress-exchange.html

WordPress Plugin Directory - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sunpress-exchange/

Congratulations again to David and many thanks to everyone who took the time to enter!

Place no’1

Step up your Caribbean or Barbados promotions…

Here at Sunshine, we fully appreciate that our affiliates are effectively an extension of us (well kind of)…. Therefore, we also appreciate that you guys need to understand the products you are promoting, in order to be able to do it well and educate your customers into purchasing the right holiday for them… This falls nicely within the criteria for place no’1! Details as follows: 

“The affiliate with the best Barbados and/or Caribbean promotion on their site, wins!” Simple… 

You can be as inventive or reserved as you like, so long as you demonstrate the ability to optimise your site/page, and the willingness to educate your customers on Sunshine’s Caribbean and/or Barbados offering. You will be surprised how much you will pick up yourself on this little fact finding mission! 

We have all the landing pages available for your use, full destination and hotel lists (so you know what’s on sale in the Caribbean and Barbados) and banners to support your activity… Go to Affiliates – sunshine.co.uk to access. 

When your page is complete, please contact us with your affiliate ID and site/page URL – to be entered into the competition. Entries to be sent to affiliates@sunshine.co.uk

Place no’2

Calling all Sunpress users… (Or people considering using Sunpress)… 

Sunshine would like to dedicate this incentive to you…. Each time you deliver a sale, from a Sunpress site, you will be entered into a prize draw. 1 sale = 1 entry. Again – all very simple! 

If you don’t know what Sunpress is, and would like to find out more – go to Affiliates – sunshine.co.uk where you can pick up all the info you need and download the plug in. 

Place no’3

…Is the simplest of all simple incentives!

Not into all the “fancy stuff”… fair enough! This incentive is especially for you. Every time you deliver a sale on sunshine.co.uk, through which ever affiliate marketing technique you desire (obviously sticking within the programme rules – and THE LAW), you will be entered into a draw. 1 sale = 1 entry! The winner will be picked at random on 30th April 

Place no’4 

Spread the love… 

OK, so were good and we know were good – but does everyone know this…? Possibly not! 

Therefore this place goes out to our army of sunshine soldiers… Do you have a blog, a slight obsession with Twitter or just like to post random comments on other people’s blogs (hmmm)… 

We would like you to help us educate the affiliate world on the wonderfulness of the Sunshine.co.uk affiliate programme. This place will be awarded to the affiliate with the best referral blog! Simple! 

Once you have the copy up, links in and are ready to submit – give us a shout. We will assess all submissions at the end of the incentive period and the best one wins. Please send entries to affiliates@sunshine.co.uk 

Please direct all traffic from the blog to Affiliates – sunshine.co.uk 

Place no’ 5

Goes to the affiliate who brings in the most cash….! 

Now you may think that this one isn’t for you… possibly worried about going head to head with the bigger sites, driving more volume…. Well, do not fear! 

Its not all about the amount of bookings you know, it can also be about the “type” of booking – i.e., where its going to, type of board basis, amount of passengers etc etc. All of these little things add up! 

You could easily be in with a chance of winning, by simply promoting the Long Haul destinations (Caribbean to name one geo area), Medium Haul destinations (Egypt, Morocco etc), All Inclusive holidays, Luxury 4&5* holidays and family holidays (more passengers) – all of which have higher booking values and here’s the thing – these type of holidays are also massively in demand! You can even go down the “Euro busting holiday’s route”… 

Again – full details of properties are available here Affiliates – sunshine.co.uk , along with banners (including Family holiday’s and All Inclusive banners), with links to Family holiday and All Inclusive landing pages. 

The affiliate with the highest amount of collective revenue at the end of the promo – Wins! 

Place no’6 

…Is dedicated to the affiliate who makes the best effort to improve. 

So this isn’t about the amount of bookings or revenue you deliver, this is about narrowing down your activity, channelling your customers to the most relevant place on sunshine.co.uk and improving your conversion. 

There are loads of ways to do this. If you are promoting a specific hotel, send the customer to that hotel and if you are promoting a resort, again – send them to that resort.. Deep linking is the single most effective way of improving your conversion – and we have all the resource to help you do that. Again – go to Affiliates – sunshine.co.uk and grab whatever you need. 

In order to calculate the “most improved affiliate”, we will compare your conversion rates from the period of the incentive (13th March – 30th April 09) to your conversion rates for the same period in January and February. 

And that’s it! 6 places, 6 incentives and 6 chances to win! You are not restricted to the amount of incentives you go for, but you can only win one place! 

We are more than happy to help you with your promotions, so if you need advise, a steer in the right direction – or just want feedback on how you are doing, please feel free to give us or our account manager at AF (Vicki) a shout.

Sunshine: affiliates@sunshine.co.uk 
AffiliateFuture: Victoria.mcquillan@affiliatefuture.co.uk 

Important note to all: 
Please remember when lifting resource material from Affiliates – sunshine.co.uk to add your Affiliate Future tracking script! 

Terms and conditions: 
All incentives kick off on Friday 13th March and finish on 30th April 2009. 

If you are working on an incentive where submission of a blog page or site promotion is required, you MUST send details of said blog/promotion to us by midnight on 30th April.
All entries will then be assessed and winners determined. 

For the prize draw entries, bookings will be drawn at random on 1st May2009 and winners notified shortly after. Don’t forget – 1 sale = 1 entry! 

Winning affiliates must be in possession of a full British passport, and be able to make own travel arrangements to the departure airport in the UK. 

1 place per affiliate.

(Big thanks to Vicki @ Affiliate Future for doing all the hard work putting this together!)

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!

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!

Congratulations to TradeDoubler / DELL for taking the award!

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

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?

Another thing to do is install a caching plugin. Depending on your needs you can either go with WP-Cache or WP-SuperCache, though I must warn you that the last one has a few known issues with other plugins.

Admin tricks

Another thing that becomes annoying when you’re working with WordPress for a while is how the menu works, though 2.7 improves on that. Until then though, Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu is a plugin you can’t afford to miss. Remove Max Width is another plugin to remove a post 2.5 admin annoyance: it removes the max-width from the admin pages, making them use the maximum available screen size. Also one you can probably ditch when 2.7 comes out.

Another thing you might find yourself doing a lot is reordering pages. If you do, pageMash is for you, it’s the best plugin I’ve seen so far to rearrange those pages and make your site structure sane again.

If you allow comments, you’ll soon start hating the WordPress comment mails too, and will want something cleaner. Clean Notifications does just that: clean up those emails.

Housekeeping

Another thing that is very important if you’re serious about your site is to do proper house keeping. 404 Notifier will tell you, through e-mail or RSS, when one of your pages has gone missing, or someone linked to a misspelling of a URL.

If you do that, you can immediately create a redirect using Redirection, and prevent people from seeing that probably wonderful 404 page you’ve made.

Oh wait, you haven’t customized your 404 page? Do it now. Go to 404.php in your theme, and make sure it actually helps people who didn’t find what they were looking for.

Another thing to do is to make absolutely sure you stay up to date all the time. I use Wordpress Automatic Upgrade for it at the moment, but it seems that WordPress 2.7 has it’s own built in automatic upgrade system. Let’s see if that works!

Branding

Now you’ve got all that figured out, be sure to work on one of the most important things in marketing: branding. Start with making sure you have a cool, nice looking logo, if you’re not good at creating those yourself (and chances are you’re not), get one made at 99designs, for instance.

Once you’ve gotten yourself a good logo, make sure you have a favicon to match. It might not look that important, but that favicon is what your users will see next to their bookmarks, remember that!

You should also consider adding your logo to your feeds and to make it available for iPhone users, to do that, you’ll have to use a plugin of mine called blog icons.

Make money

Now, be honest, have you fixed all the above and all the stuff in my previous post? Yes? Time to make money. And, to start optimising. Keep looking at your site’s stats and see where you can improve things!

Many thanks to Joost for taking the time to put together these great blog posts. You can keep up to date with Joost at his blog, yoast.com where you’ll find many other plug-ins and more great stuff!

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.

The travel sector will, even in these times of economic turmoil, remain a very competitive one. Especially as more people move out of paid search and into organic search optimisation, because they think they can cut costs that way. Because of this heavy competition, you can’t really afford to do anything wrong.

The combination of WordPress and the sunPress plugin and themes provide you with a great chance of competing in this sector nonetheless, as you don’t have to worry about stuff like template optimisation, as that’s been done for you. It now falls upon you to follow the steps below and optimise your WordPress, and after that, there’s just one job left: writing unique and great content, teasing descriptions and well optimised and even more teasing titles.

Plugins for optimisation

Those of you who’ve attended my session at A4UExpo will not read many a new thing here, but I do encourage you to implement all of it. We’ll work our way down from top to bottom through a page.

Titles and descriptions

Titles are the single most important variable in optimising a site for the search engines. First make sure the tag in your header.php that outputs the title is written like this:

<title><?php wp_title('') ?></title>

Now you’ve got full control over your title, you can install the HeadSpace2 plugin. This plugin will take care of your titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords. Install it, and in the settings of the plugin, set how you want each post or page title to look. On a hotel page, the structure of your title should be something like this:

XYZ Hotel Benidorm – Hotels Benidorm – TravelIsFun

Most importantly, the hotel name has to be the first term in the title. If you’ve got a category page for Hotels in Benidorm, the first part of your title should be: Hotels Benidorm, and nothing else.

You can also use HeadSpace to write your meta descriptions and you should make sure that you do this for each and every page you create. If you do it while you’re writing the content, it’s only a small effort, and it can have huge gains. As writing meta description is an art in itself, I’d like to refer you to SEOmoz to read up on it a bit more.

You can also use the HeadSpace plugin to insert your tracking script for for instance Google Analytics, Mint and services like Crazy Egg. I would highly recommend trying a tool like Crazy Egg to see where your users click, and to try and improve your pages for better conversion.

Other meta tags

There are loads of other meta tags and most of them are bullshit, tags like revisit-after and friends are remnants of a long time ago, and are probably best forgotten about. There is an exception to the rule. All the three big search engines now have webmaster tools that can give you very valuable data to work with:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Live Search Webmaster Center
• Yahoo! Site Explorer

For all three of them, one of the ways of authenticating yourself as the owner of the site is by placing a meta tag with a certain value in the <head> section of your homepage. To make it even easier, my own robots meta plugin allows you to just enter those three keys in the admin of your WordPress install and it will automatically add them to the head section of just your front page.

You can also, at a later stage, use this plugin to disable certain taxonomies on your blog, should you decide not to use those, and to noindex (aka: prevent the search engines from indexing) your blogs search results.

Breadcrumbs

You can’t really make a travel website without going several levels deep, to make it easier for both users and search engines to spider such a site, you should create breadcrumbs. These usually look something like this:

Home » Hotels Benidorm » XYZ Hotel Benidorm

There are several plugins that can help you do this in a very simple way, the two I think are most suited are Breadcrumbs XT and my own Yoast Breadcrumbs.

Paging

By default themes show an “« older entries” link only, and this causes very old entries to disappear from the index. While this might work very well for your blog as it makes sure that old offers disappear automatically, but it won’t work for your pages, as you’ve spend a lot of time writing that unique content, haven’t you?

So you should a plugin like WP Page Numbers to make sure that the paging on your blog is done with nice links like this:

XML Sitemaps

To make sure your content is spidered as fast as it should be, you should be using XML sitemaps. As of WordPress 2.7, to be released somewhere in the coming weeks, these will be included by default. If you’re using an older version of WordPress, you’ll need to install the XML Sitemaps plugin.

It’s default settings aren’t too shabby, but you should make sure it can actually write to the sitemap.xml or the sitemap.xml.gz file.

Conclusion

Implemented all of the above? Then you should be ready to rock in the search engines. The only thing that remains is writing awesome content, and (probably the hardest part) gathering links. I can only wish you the best of luck in doing that!

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!