Shop Codes visitors arrive from 96 different countries. So as well as promoting those in Great Britain I’ve trialled diversifying into other lucrative markets.

85% of merchants that have an affiliate promotional code expiring on or before 30th September have not announced a replacement code for October.

Some merchants are particularly good at running several discount code promotions at the same time. There are some that do overlapping promotions with different end dates. For a discount code site like mine that means that merchant is always featured.

For those 39 merchants that have a code expiring on the last day of the month, why haven’t you already announced next months promotional code? Devoted to Sport and Historic Newspapers have already sent out details of their 10% discount code starting 1st October.

By leaving it until your existing code has already expired, you run the risk of losing your placement on key promotional pages. I’ve had lots of visitors on my site searching for Debenhams codes but that was sadly during the two week window that there wasn’t any code to promote.

After this weekend I’ll be doing mild or no updates to my Shop Codes site for two weeks. I’m taking my laptop with me on my Hong Kong holiday but only to deal with emergencies and I’ve had plenty of them this September.

This week I have pro-actively emailed over 20 merchants and affiliate managers for extensions to my existing Exclusive codes. That has proved very successful with 17 already extending the code either by one month, to the end of the year and some are now even valid well into 2008.

So merchants, if you’re saving sending out your promotional emails and codes until October. Just send it now and I can continue to promote you. You can always send another in a weeks time.

Personally I’d like to see merchants providing rolling codes so that I can provide a seamless service. i.e. at the start of the month announce a code that lasts four weeks and then mid-month, provide another code that lasts four weeks.

Some merchants are providing the mid-month codes as I can testify with this busy week. However, they’re sticking to the non-imaginative expiry date of 30th/31st of the month.

My thanks go to those 17 merchants. These are the ones I’ll be pushing on my Shop Codes home page, while I take a break and shoppers will be searching for discounts.

50 friends, colleagues and Internet marketeers have joined the ‘Save Befuddle’ group on Facebook. The group was created as a morale boosting exercise as my site Befuddle hit its lowest ever patch. I needed quick solutions and support to save my site within a self-imposed 10-day deadline.

As reported on Facebook, this blog and Affiliates4u, Befuddle had been punished by Google for distributing Malware. A search in Google for say “Victoria Beckham drunk”, returned “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!”

Traffic has nose dived. Google organic was sending me approximately 1,000 unique visitors a day and now it’s just a handful.

The site is still receiving a few hundred visitors each day, down from just short of 2,000 visitors.

Not knowing where the problem came from I removed all US based third party advertising and counters. This left the pages looking terribly ugly so I deleted all celebrity pages. This drastic course of action also meant I didn’t have to single handedly have to manually check each one. Some celebrities had 100 pages in their own sections.

I’ve posted up some new drunk celebs pages in a different directory and used the opportunity to display larger size images along with some YouTube clips to make the site more sticky.

I’ve also added Google AdSense to the pages so that not all revenue is lost. AdSense is generating about $6 a day with the current levels of traffic, which is a lot more than the flashing advertising ever did.

On Sunday I submitted my site for review at StopBadware.org where the site is currently in the process of being reviewed.

Thanks for the support here, on Affiliates4u and Facebook.

Befuddle will be saved and will come out stronger.

On 16th April I started a thread on the affiliates4u site about the launch of Google checkout and how sales weren’t being tracked. The post included my signature which had a link to my Shop Codes site.

Later in the day ‘Qui Gon Jinn’ a moderator of the site moved the post to the ‘Affiliate Marketing – Moderators Choice’ section. As a result, the post was featured on the home page of the popular site.

It was a hot topic that got heated at times and the thread was viewed by members and guests over 2,300 times.

While the debate was in full flow, I stepped back, as I noticed another pressing matter – my site traffic was increasing exponentially. For more than a week, the site’s influential homepage was linking directly to my own.

I know this had a positive influence on how Google then looked at my site. Here’s a screengrab of how my traffic grew.

It’s no coincidence. I’ve mentioned in my own blog that May 2007 was a record month for my site and I have not looked back since.

Qui Gon Jinn, aka Moose, I’ll get you a drink if I have the time to attend an affiliates get together.

Meanwhile, if you write subtle page signatures, you never know what results it may bring.