My first website Befuddle.co.uk is moving. I started work on creating Befuddle in 1999 when my ISP freenetname gave me some free web space to create a single home page.

Well that was some home page!

I don’t know when Blogs were created but when my site launched in February 2000, it was essentially a web log of my drunken tales.

I got a few mates to contribute and then people started to email in their own drunken stories.

Within weeks of the site launching I was in national and regional newspapers. It helped that the website was selected as a “Yahoo! Pick of the Week.”

Then when Britney Spears was filmed drunk at the age of 18, I thought the pictures of the drunken celebrity would sit well with my site, that was totally based on drunken humour.

Traffic escalated with the pictures and so it wasn’t long before I was searching for more pics of celebrities out on the town.

I also realised that I had a niche as there was little in the way of competition. There were adult sites that were charging subscriptions but I just thought I’d post them up for free. After all, they weren’t my pictures in the first place.

Befuddle became tagged as the “Home of Drunk Celebs.”

Then there was Paris Hilton. I was the number one listing for the search term “Paris Hilton” on the day her first home made movie was spreading across the Internet.

I had 125,000 daily visitors and I then got introduced to affiliate marketing and selling text links. I was charging a small fortune for a single text link to advertisers, who in turn were making money selling the Paris video. I made some cash and some Befuddle pages had a PR of 6 at the time. I had to make money though as in those days, bandwidth was costing me £100 a day just to keep my site alive.

It didn’t last too long. Google did an algorithm update and thousands of sites appeared.

Then Befuddle got neglected for several years, whilst I concentrated on some affiliate only shopping portals and blogs.

But still after a few years without updates, it was still attracting thousands of daily visitors to its hundreds of celebrity pages.

In 2007, Google presented a malware warning to the site and I could have closed it down then. That would have been the easiest solution.

However, the brand and traffic are still strong. The home page still has a PR of 5, so I didn’t want it to just die off.

The site is all built in HTML and development coding has moved on. So it is time to move it from its host to one with a PHP server and with large space and bandwidth allowance. Servage is perfect for that.

The original terms of service from freenetname were well and truly broken. I think you were only supposed to have a 35K page but nobody ever got in touch.

So today the site is down as it’s moving home. If it arrives on the other side of its DNS journey safely, then I’ll look at ripping it up and trying something new during 2008.

It has potential. I had some very good late night conversations at a4uexpo on how it could be developed.

Before you go, if you do a search for “drunk celebs” on Google …

… I have the top 9 links!

My best performing merchant ever is leaving the Commission Junction network this month.

I started promoting JD Williams from 2nd October 2006. It is no coincidence that my Shop Codes traffic and commissions subsequently grew exponentially from this time.

Promoting the JD Williams brand, which is an umbrella network of approximately 25 mail order catalogue sites, was a masterstroke, with its combination of new customer discounts and free gift promotional codes.

JD Williams split those brands across two affiliate networks, CJ and DGM. They include websites such as Simply Be, Crazy Clearance, VivaLaDiva, Christmas Gifts Direct, Autumn Clearance, PremierMan, House of Bath, Summer Clearance, …

With budget restraints JD Williams have now had to consolidate their affiliate programs down to one network. It’s not been reported which, if any, will transfer over. Assuming DGM will remain their one network.

I found an email I sent just 6 weeks after signing-up, dated 17th November 2006, to the then affiliate manager. It began:

“My promotion of JD Williams this Christmas on both the CJ network and DGM has been very successful this November.

“I have generated £14,800 sales on the CJ network with a further £9,134 on the DGM network, totalling £24,000.”

Now, looking back, that is remarkable. I have to stress all of these sales were from organic SEO traffic and not Pay-Per-Click. I know because my site was appearing as the number one result for key search phrases.

In fact my initial email was to ask if I could brand bid on PPC because I knew if I were to lose that good organic ranking, I’d lose nice commissions overnight. We didn’t follow that up as the sales continued right up to Christmas.

In the first 5 months of promoting JD Williams, I generated £95,000 worth of sales on the CJ network alone. With that I surpassed a JD Williams set target and in early 2007 received a £1,250 cash bonus as a performance incentive.

2007 and this Christmas was just as strong.

JD Williams on CJ, you shall be missed. This will leave a big big hole in my CJ statistics. There are only a couple of merchants exclusively on that network now that are still worth promoting.

Inspired by Chris Frost’s post detailing total sales revenue for 2006 and 2007 I thought I’d take a financial look back at 2007 myself.

Whilst I’m not going to list the individual network totals I can tell you that I generated £1.25million worth of sales for the hundreds of merchants I promote.

Chris generated £1.8m worth of sales, which I think is a fantastic achievement for both of us. All the more remarkable as we both hold full-time jobs, as well as working hard on improving our affiliate earnings year-on-year.

I know I’ve done well last year by winning merchants incentives competitions.

But it is now getting harder to get rich. There is the increased competition from new and existing affiliates, fuelled with new targets to reach by blog posts that inspire.

There is also the ongoing battle to maintain high commissions so that we’re not just fighting over pennies.

Three networks stand out for me in 2007. They may not hold the highest turnover but they are improving more rapidly than the other networks. The basis of the improvement is improved communication.

WEBGAINS

I started working closely with these towards the end of 2006 and they provide the widest collection of Exclusive voucher codes.

AFFILIATE WINDOW

They must have had a power meeting early last year because all of a sudden all their affiliate managers were getting in touch and pushing codes my way.

LINKSHARE

New kid on the UK block and I’m gradually switching all my merchants onto this network.

The network that I’m going to force myself to do more business on is Affiliate Future. They’ve just started communicating with me by sending me a list of valid discount codes. It is the details like this, that really matter.

I want my site to improve by approximately 400% this year. That’s a sales target of £5m and roughly £250,000 commission.

Will I make it? Not currently. I’ve got five other things to sort. Oh, make that six things to sort first.