One thing can be said for a day like Friday is that it certainly motivates me when I’m starting to feel a bit jaded with all the work with no return. I’ve decided to finish off a project that I had the idea for 2 years ago!

It’s called “Hotels for Concerts” and is essentially an extension of Gig Lovers – it’ll be providing concert go-ers with a simple way to find hotels near to venues with price comparison and filtering options on price, distance away from the venue etc.

It’s halfway there with not a lot to do. I’ve just got to organise the feeds a bit better. Hoping it can be up and running within a couple of weeks even if some features are disabled for now – it’ll be worth it to gauge Google’s opinion on it

Set a new record on Friday on Gig Lovers earning £47 by the end of the day. Incidentally it surpasses last month’s total for the site (£41). Pretty good going!

I’m under no illusion that every day will be like Friday – I got a bit “lucky” with search engine placements on ticket selling day..

Although it does mean I’ll have to re-evaluate the monthly targets for the site. I had set a target of £75 but now I’ll be wanting £100 .

Since Friday the site has only made £2  – got to love Ticketmaster’s 25p a commission pay-outs!

I can’t believe it’s March already – that’s a quarter of the year gone by so quickly.

February was my best month so far after a pretty pathetic January but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I had a look at how the bigger sites do things and made a lot of changes to the way links to merchants were presented on pages. That seems to have done wonders.

Concert listings site: A total of £41 in ticket commissions. Hardly any at all until the second half of the month after I made the changes I mentioned above. Already made a good start this month and confident of beating it in March.

Other Projects: £95

Total: £136.33

Outlook for March

As I wrote in my ‘Trying Micro Niches’ post, March is the month when the products become available. At the moment a couple of merchants are now listing the products and the price comparison tool is to be uploaded this week. The way this pans out should be quite interesting and I’ll keep you updated.

It’s good to finally see some money rolling in from two of the newer affiliate networks I’ve integrated over the past week or two:  AffiliateWindow and Zanox.

I’ve been promoting the Viagogo program with Zanox and the Seatwave program with Affiliate Window and made the first sales today totalling – giving a comission of  £30 (three sales)  - which isn’t bad at all… for the first day of earning.

I don’t expect that sort of revenue every day to begin with, it’s been a lucky day although it’s quite close to my target of £50 a day through the site.

I’ll be posting earnings for February at the start of March.

I tend to find it quite interesting to see how quickly a new operating system or browser is picked up by users.

I remember Vista being a slow take up – so I thought I’d see if I was right about that whilst also checking the progress of Windows 7 in the market.

I’ll be using two of my sites (both over 500 unique visits a day in non-tech areas) for the ‘tests’.

Launch Dates:

Windows Vista was launched on the 30th January 2007.

Windows 7 was launched on the 22nd October 2009.

Windows Vista usage for week 4 months after launch. (7th February 2007)

Windows 7 usage for week 4 months after launch (22nd January 2009)

After looking for inspiration for my next project I’ve decided to go down a different route and try something new.

I found a type of product – a good seller with an affordable but high cost – and set out search for domain names for the product codes. I know people do this as GW Keyword tool tells me this… and I do it myself.

Guess what? Every single item was taken, both .co.uk and .org.uk, so I thought I’d see if I if the manufacturer had a mailing for new products when I found the 2010 models had just been announced.

I registered 13 domain names for the different product codes (Not covering all of them – about 30%). Some will perform better than others but it will be interesting to see how well they do as this is my first attempt at these type of sites.

The first of the sites is up already and took me about an hour to from registration to live – obviously the time will increase when I add the price comparison features but that will be universal to all the sites and it should be quite simple selling just the one product.

The products aren’t released until around March so I have plenty of time to fill the domains with content – hopefully they’ll be a success.

A new year is a time when we often set ourselves goals and targets.  I’ve one main goal and that’s to DO rather than think.

I think I waste a lot of time looking into possible future projects, checking domain names and thinking about solutions. The thing is I have a lot of all ideas already – I don’t need anymore!  This year the goal is to materialise some of these ideas.

I’ve also realised I need to be more organised in tracking and monthly target setting, which I started doing in November ‘09 with the Gig Lovers ticket tracking.

Although the targets so far have been really low I’ve surpassed all of them so far. I don’t think I’ll be able to reach the January target as I’m a bit behind with the launch of my new site (was aiming for December launch) and I may choose to lower the targets slightly if I miss a couple.

Happy New Year – 2010 is here and so returns my blog.

This is just a holding post really – I’ll be getting in to more detail about things at a later date, hopefully before February.

I’ll list some of the things I’ll be talking about:

• Web development & SEO
• Affiliate marketing
• My websites
• Film

Clearly, I’ve decided on a name change – this is more personal and easier to remember – and in my first post tell you what caused all my sites to disappear!

On with the work…