Like many affiliates I enjoy a love hate relationship with Google, and during the bad times I simply see it as an occupational hazard and get on working my way through the slump.

Presently I am enjoying a particularly bad patch, not only have a few sites been hit but as a double whammy some of my long term ppc has been given a quality score slap, but like I said I’ll get over it in time.

One thing that has annoyed me though is that my Charity Voucher Codes website Vouchers UK, has been given a slap and moved down from pretty high on page one of Google to the bottom of page 14 for the term Vouchers UK, don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect any special treatment just because half the revenue the site makes goes to charity it just gets my goat that I am not able to raise as much for worthy causes as I would like to.

Anyway writing about the slap has had the desired effect and now I have got the frustration out of my system I can put it behind me and work on getting the site back up to being an also ran in the discount voucher world rather than a non runner.

While on the subject of charity though are you aware of the Existem AM Summer BBQ Charity Raffle in aid of the local RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) please support them in anyway you can, attend the BBQ, give a prize or at the very least buy a ticket.

I’ve added a few new blogs to the mix at Internet Marketing Blogs over the past couple of weeks, thought it prudent to share them with you just in case you want to add them to your own rss reader instead.

Darrell Freeman’s Internet Marketing Blog

One Man Went To Mow (by Peter Anderson)

Connect – Digital Marketing Expertise from iCrossing

I’ll Shut Up Now

Blue Chip Vacations Affiliate Blog

Hardcloud Affiliates Blog

fwitter – not facebook or twitter just Frank Pauls ramblings

If you like what  IMB has to offer please follow on Twitter too at @AffiliateBlogs you may just catch something you have missed.

For a long time now it has been wise to treat any stats provided by Alexa with a pinch of salt therefore I don’t visit very often however I was there the other day and noticed for the first time the Clickstream tab and was mildly surprised and intrigued by what it revealed:

Upstream Sites

Percent of total visits to keithbond.co.uk preceded by a visit to the upstream site.

• 24.17% easycontentunits.com
• 15.83% google.co.uk
• 12.50% affiliates4u.com
• 10.83% twitter.com
• 9.17% affiliatewindow.com
• 6.67% facebook.com
• 5.83% google.com
• 5.83% internetmarketingblogs.co.uk
• 4.17% webgains.com
• 2.50% here.org.uk

Downstream Sites

Percent of total visits to keithbond.co.uk followed by a visit to the downstream site.

• 23.85% affiliates4u.com
• 15.60% google.co.uk
• 14.68% easycontentunits.com
• 14.68% twitter.com
• 11.01% affiliatewindow.com
• 5.50% google.com
• 3.67% amazon.co.uk
• 2.75% discountcodes365.co.uk
• 2.75% here.org.uk
• 2.75% webaffiliate.co.uk

Interesting that 24% of my traffic (according to Alexa) comes via Easy Content Units, obviously due to the two wordpress plugins I developed which can be used with them, more suprising is that 10% of traffic comes from Twitter.

Not quite sure how the downstream is calculated but I suspect it is a combination of both click throughs and browser bookmarks, the bottom stat caught my eye

• 2.75% webaffiliate.co.uk

as 2.78% of the Webaffiliate upstream comes from this site (cheers Chris for the mutual support).

The accuracy of these statistics is open to question but it did give me a geeky half hour while I played with them.

DarwinAW is the latest enigma to hit Affiliate Marketing it is the secret brainchild of Affiliate Window and is referenced on their website here in addition to having a twitter account @darwinAW plus hash tags #darwinAW and a facebook page.

Here is my halfassed theory on what it is all about:

DarwinAW was a UK affiliate marketing network that in 2009 realised and presented compelling evidence that all forms of affiliate marketing have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process called natural selection.

The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the affiliate community, while this theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the industry, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory.

In modified form, DarwinAW’s discovery is the unifying theory of the whole of marketing on the internet, providing logical explanation for the diversity of different methods of revenue generation.

This post owes a lot to Charles Darwin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

No doubt all will be revealed in the fullness of time.

Friday was a good post day I received a couple of bottles of wine from my good friend and affiliate podcaster extraordinaire Fraser Edwards.

Fraser has recently acquired the websites www.redwine.co.uk and www.whitewine.co.uk in order to get the word out rather than mess about with business cards he decided to get a few bottles of Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc printed up instead and distribute them throughout the internet community.

So far I have enjoyed the Merlot here is my short review.

The dominant features of this wine are black cherry, blackberry, a trace of vanilla and just a hint of nutmeg, all in a well structured wine with soft tannins. It is the ideal type of wine to age, because it has a great deal of character plus satisfactory structure for lengthy development over time. You could if you wanted drink it directly with food, or lay it down for a few years to mature.

Actually those tasting notes are complete bollocks partly made up and partly plagiarism, while some of it may be true and it was an excellent bottle of red I’m no wine connoisseur more Ozzy Osborne than Oz Clarke in my drinking habits.

Incidentally Fraser is currently running a competition where you can win a case of wine this closes at the end of July 2009, look on the sites for more details or follow @whiteandred on twitter and re-tweet to enter.