The referral stuff should be active, for Play.com and Amazon.co.uk at least. Unless the word filters are broken again, but I don't think they are.

With the Adsense stuff, I'm thinking it would help just to boost the income a little bit. I've seen a few sites go under just trying to survive on donations, and with Beehive becoming more and more popular I wouldn't want this place to start costing anyone (you) lots of money, especially if we start using oodles of bandwidth a month.

If you're worried about people being turned away by the presence of adverts we can always add a little foot note to them explaining how they'll disappear after you register sort of thing.

Xen linked something the other day that didn't have the referral bit on it, and I'm sure I've seen other similar situations.


I'm wondering about you specifying the .co.uk for Amazon there though?

Test...

http://www.amazon.com/Eclipse-Building-Commercial-Quality-Plug-Ins/dp/0321228472


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eclipse-Building-Commercial-Quality-Plug-Ins/dp/0321228472

Neither have it in the preview...

As for the AdSense / hosting costs...

 

How much data transfer do we have? - I remember it being something huge like 500GB a month, and we'd have to have quite a lot more visits to reach that (I'd be surprised if we're even near 10% of that at the moment.)

 

I think pushing the affiliate stuff is more likely to boost income than AdSense - how many people actually follow AdSense vs affiliate links?

On checking the Amazon one had been switched from PREG to 'Match All' some where along the line, so you're right it wasn't working, but it is now. And yes, amazon.co.uk is what it's written to match. Is that right or does our affiliatee code work with Amazon.com as well?

As for Adsense vs. affiliate links, well you and Milko have the stats so I couldn't compare them to any Adsense stats, not that we have any Adsense stats anyway.

The only way I can see us pushing the affiliate links beyond how we do them at the moment would be to start listing them at the bottom of every page or trawl Amazon and Play.com for product names to match in posts that we then turn into affiliate links, but I'm not sure how easy that would be. Would certainly be easy if the two sites had feeds of their products.

I'd be inclined to think that we can do both without too much hassle. suitably sized AdSense adverts at the top of the thread list and message pane for Guests and Affiliate text only links at the bottom for all users.

Are you able to check that?

It doesn't as far as I know. I'll check when I get the moneys info.

If it is only .co.uk, based on the very quick test I did earlier, we might be able to simply switch .com addresses over - it used to be before they used different IDs, but it appears that they've unified that now.


As for stats... well nothing to compare against, but here are some anyway. :)
In the past 12 months, we've had:
336 clicks, 250 unique visitors, 27 sales.



Easy peasy lemon squeezy. :)

At least for Amazon, who do web services which can avoid the trawling - maybe we can add a button to the post screen "find amazon product" that does all the magic and returns a suitable link.

There's stuff within TradeDoubler related to product feed / product databases, but I'm not currently awake enough to figure out exactly what's what.

I always buy everything from Amazon through the drop down link at the top, don't tell me it's not been working properly?

The drop down link is fine.

This is for adding the referral id to Amazon links within posts.

Ah, that's alright then B-)

I landed once on an obscure forum, and every 3 posts was one line of small dark text in the field BG with a hyperlink to something mentioned in the last 3 posts. Was deadly accurate, with some great web links. Think it was a gardening forum, when I was looking for obscure recipes.

Think you'll be wanting to reopen that ticket (or open a new one).

Our Plesk License has expired. Again.

This time it's gone completely, well Plesk is still there and I can login but I now can't use anything, it just goes to the purchase license page, even when logging in as root.

Seeing as we've just paid out for another year in advance the least you'd expect is for them to give us another year long Plesk License.

Grrr! I want to thump the idiots.


I've re-opened the previous ticket, will let you know when they reply.

Well, initial response is nice and prompt:

Oh, can you see what they can do about upgrading us / moving to a new server as well?

 

Upgrading Apache, MySQL and PHP at least would be nice, but a whole new server that someone actually supports would be better. Something less archaic than Redhat 3AS, which not even Redhat support anymore it seems.

Matt, monthly, our sites average a couple thousand live body visitors, non bots or crawlers, the adsense haven't netted anything yet. We don't put them in the member areas, like forums, member pages, etc., just on main site pages. We get more from member donations.

 

We've been looking into some affiliate programs to use instead. Mostly credit cards, web hosting companies, financial institutions, insurance, damaged credit lending, gambling sites, and a few pay sites. These seem to be among the better payers.

 

We've also been checking the local area for businesses that might be interested in being sponsors, possibly for a banner in the rotations we run on the main sites.

 

If you like, I can send you a copy of the rotater. It's easy to set up and manage, and runs on php pages. If you want to use it on a html page, then you have to iframe it. Let me know if you want the rotater.

 

Also, we're sending you a little thank you for all the help you've been giving us at hof. You've been a true sweety. Thank you.
DP

We're kicking some money Matt's way this week, but if you send me the paypal information, CFN can send something in next week to help out.

 

It'll also give me some time to check with the other owners and staff members and see if they can kick anything in too.

 

I know I get a payment this week, so I can kick in at least 25 American. I don't know what that translates to at your end, never did understand that stuff, but it might get you a little closer. If the other owners and staff kick in, Beehive will get more.

 

How does that sound to you?

 

DP

Fantabulous!

 

You guys do a lot of kicking, hope you don't get sore feet!

What Ant said. :)


I've just sent you the relevant PM.

Regarding the RHEL3/5 stuff, they've replied with this:



(As you probably know, Centos is almost identical to RHEL, just with the trademarked stuff stripped out.)


On a side matter, I looked at the original post (to compare prices) and the currencies have all gone funny.