The ideal website would be one you could create and leave, letting it chug along earning money, not having to go back and update it.

Unfortunately, those sites are pretty mythical.

Even if you take the lazy man’s approach to earning money online,  building websites with affiliate links on them (so that someone else has to fulfil the sales), they still need maintenance.

I have an Online Shopping site that basically lists online shops in Australia.

A lot of the links (apart from shops that I have used and trust), come from two of the main affiliate companies in Australia. I’ll only name my favourite – www.clixgalore.com.au.

This weekend I spent around 4 hours doing spring cleaning, individually going through each link on My Online Shops, double checking that the online shop it linked to, still existed.  I’ve still only done a quarter of the sites, so there are many more hours ahead of me.I was surprised and annoyed at how many shops I had to delete from my directory.

I deleted around 40 shops. About half of those, simply  no longer existed. I assume the global financial crisis hit them badly, and they went out of business. “Factors outside our control” seemed to be the usual excuse. If the URL even still worked.

But around 20 were shops that no longer were listed at the original affiliate company. Many no longer offered an affiliate link, but a surprisingly large number had transferred their affiliate management to good old clixgalore.

Whilst checking the links, I could imagine that the slow speed of the other affiliate company was a factor.  Many times I clicked on a link, and it took ages for the affiliate company to redirect to the online shop. Definitely a deterrent to sales. I had absolutely no sales during November for the slow affiliate company, and a large number for clixgalore.

Apart from maintaining the existing links from the slow affiliate company (simply because they do still have a few good shops there), I will no longer waste my time adding new shops from their lists. On the surface, it seems that their servers aren’t coping, that they sign up shop that can’t last through a downturn, and they send so many emails, that it’s not worth reading them. And so I miss out on the important emails that would have told me which shops or promotions were no longer active.

Long live clixgalore!

gotta say bing is nice is some ways.

it’s shorter to type than google.
and it really loves my old-fashioned hyphenated domain names.

i was playing with my online shopping site – www.myonlineshops.com.au tonight, cos a couple of shops asked if they could be added.
then thought i’d see how it was ranking.

not for the title – myonlineshops. there’s not much competition for a single word like that, so it easily appears at number 1 on google, yahoo and bing.

but i had originally targetted “online shopping australia” – it’s the second half of the title on the home page.

so i went to bing.com to see how it ranks.

oops. i forgot that i had bought online-shopping-australia.com.au a while back, planning to experiment with a shopping comparison engine.
didn’t end up building it – just did an empty drupal install, and left it there, while i went ahead and built myonlineshops – with lots of drupal bells and whistles.

so purely based on the domain name, with one sentence added, it ranks number 4 at bing for a competitive keyword. the page title is still drupal, for goodness sakes.

mind you, even yahoo gives me a page three result for the empty site, so yahoo still has a little domain name slant.

it’s nowhere on google of course – there are no incoming links. Although why not add one: Online Shopping Australia

Also checked my old web design site from years ago. Yep, Bing likes web-design in the name – a nice position 5. I don’t use it anymore – just leave it there for the residual page rank.

And my healthy home business is number one for work from home in australia.

bing, i think i really like you.
even if you remind me of the irish terrier dog down the road, also named bing, with the horribly dribbly chin.

these shameless plugs will really have to stop soon.

lol. or as my kids say: L.

Friday nights are a time to relax. We always have pizza and wine and chocolate.

Usually I pick up bits of shopping during the week, from Woolworths. I buy stuff at lunchtime, then take it home on the bus, along with my heavy laptop and other bags. So I thought I’d experiment with home delivery from Woolworths.

Friday two weeks ago was my first time. I went to the Customer Service desk and asked how to do home delivery. They said to just tell the guy at the checkout.
So I shopped, bought all the bulky, heavy stuff that I usually can’t carry on the bus, and went to the checkout.
It took about 20 minutes, with annoyed customers behind me in the queue, while the checkout guy fumbled with the computer, stickers, and bags. Entering the data on the screen took the longest. Plus the pathetic plastic card that is almost impossible to write on. I shopped at 1pm, and had hoped for the shopping to be delivered by the time the kids got home from school. It didn’t happen until after 5pm, so they didn’t have the snack treats I had planned, but I thought that was just unlucky.

Last Friday I tried again. Again, shopped at 1pm, buying heavy drinks, bulky cereal, and chocolate for dinner. A little slow at the checkout. The checkout guy asked for my name and address again, which was surprising given that they had my customer number and details online, but I gave it to him. Still pretty slow at checkout, but I did warn the people behind me in the queue.
Really hoped it would arrived before 5pm, so the kids could enjoy a snack.

I got home at 530pm. No shopping. Gave them a bit more time.
Rang Woolworths at 6pm. They said it was on the way. I gave them my name and address again.

8:45pm. No shopping. Where’s our chocolate and drinks for the pizza? Pretty pathetic.
Rang Woolworths – they said they were waiting for me to ring, as the only details they had were “Christine”.
Had no idea that I’d rung at 6pm – the customer service girl had proved inept.
They tracked down the delivery guy, who had ended up taking my groceries home. They said he would deliver by 9am Saturday.
At least we will have cereal for breakfast.

Saturday, 9:45am. No shoppping.
Rang Woolworths. Hm, can’t contact delivery guy. Even his wife can’t reach him. Has he run off with my shopping? It must be desperation.

Saturday 10:15. The shopping finally arrives. Shall we trust shopping that has been at someone else’s place overnight?

Woolworths failure points:
1. Customer service should setup the account, rather than take 20 minutes at checkout.
2. Cheap plastic cards with customer number written in pen on plastic surface.
3. Hopelessly slow computer system to setup account.
4. A week later, even with a customer number, it still takes 10 minutes to checkout. Do the staff need training guys?
5. Despite giving my name and address at checkout, they still can’t enter it into the system. Even after having delivered it the week before.
6. They load it onto a delivery truck without having a delivery address.
7. Customer service doesn’t write down my address and phone, even when a problem is known to exist.
8. Allowing a delivery person to take personal shopping home.

Do I give them another chance, or just go straight to Coles from now on.

If only my brother-in-law wasn’t senior management, and his three kids all working at Woolies……

I finally have my new site about online shopping in Australia ready. It’s called MyOnlineShops.

It’s a replacement for the shopping site that I lost last year, when the domain renewal email went to an old address I wasn’t using any more. Someone quickly grabbed it, as it had a great ranking at Yahoo, and solid PR, and then offered to sell it back to me for $800. No thanks. I did the work for that once, so he won’t get any profit from me. And it no longer ranks anywhere useful.

MyOnlineShops was completely created with Drupal, an open source Content Management System. I didn’t have to do any code at all – it is pure core Drupal, a large number of contributor modules, and CSS. OK, maybe 10 minutes of html for the page layout, moving a few things around from the default layout.

I obviously have a thing about My…. websites. This is my third, after MyDogSpace and MyDogSite.

The reason for calling it MyOnlineShops, is that it lets me (and free members), create my own list of favourites, have my own shopping blog, my own profile, and make my own reviews and comments on shops I’ve used.

I’m still busily adding more online Australian shops, but feel welcome to suggest any missing ones through the contact form on the site.

I seem to have lost my two most profitable domains this week.

I logged in this week to check that links were working, and found someone else’s strange site there! My sites were christmas.best-australian.com and best-australian.com – and as you can imagine, there starts to be a lot of Christmas and online shopping traffic at this time of year.

I had put a lot of effort into getting my Christmas site ranking well – it was position three at Google for “Christmas Australia” all year, and had even been position 1 for a long time last year.

So I looked at the registration details – and it no longer had me as the owner. However it was unusual looking – my original registration date of 2003 was still there, but it had been updated in November, which is obviously when the new person’s site was loaded.

I had registered the domain through my host, so i contacted them. But they were just a reseller for Godaddy, and suggested that I contact them. So I lodged a support claim to both Godaddy, and WildWestDomains, the new registrar, who is actually a kind of sister site to Godaddy. No news yet.

I did a bit more research, and yes the expiry date on my credit card was out of date – even though funds were available, and the card number hadn’t changed.

But I did not receive any warnings that my domain was about to be transferred to someone else.

The (wry) twist is that I had just rebuilt a new more improved Christmas site at a new domain – Christmas Australia. But I had been planning to use this as a case study on transferring sites – using 301 redirects etc. Well I can’t do that now. But I do have all the details on my old incoming links, and you can bet I will be contacting them and asking them to link to my new site.

It may be too late to rank well this Christmas.

But it has taught me a few lessons. Centralise domain registrations, so you don’t have lots of email addresses to check. Hide your domain registration, so you don’t get spammed to death. Lock all your domains. And use captcha’s to stop automated robots from spamming your addresses.

I was in the process of doing all this anyway. But I wasn’t quite fast enough. Wish me luck in my new domains.