This morning an old lady said she’d say pray for me. What a nice gesture I thought until I creepily wondered if she knew something I didn’t.

I was late for work and was about to dash into my taxi waiting outside (not quite at the chauffeur driven lifestyle just yet) when a woman with two crutches asked if I was going in a certain direction.

I said to her I was and I offered her a place in the taxi. Just two minutes later she was gone and she said she’d pray for me.

Since my interview by Kirsty that was well received in the affiliate community, I’ve had an extra 13 subscribers to my blog.

Any increase is good but that is an unlucky number. Was it a sign?

At AffiliateStuff.co.uk I explained how my business was doing well and gave insight on my imminent plans and longer term aspirations.

I also said that Google like to keep me on my toes. Well less than 24 hours after that post, the mighty search engine has dropped my angelic site from its search result pages with a big bang.

Yes, you’ll still find Shop Codes with its site links, if you search for ‘shop codes’ but perform a search for ‘voucher codes’ and you won’t find my site in the first 666 results.

So dear old lady. Hope your dentist appointment went well.

Let us pray!

Disclaimer: Ray does not insinuate that other affiliates will be hit with the alliterative ‘Curse of Kirsty’ but does recommend you do a good deed today to avoid bad karma.

I had a lot of time for Thomson Holidays. The high street travel retailer has jumped into the Top 10 of Hitwise’s Quarterly Hot Shops List.

Meanwhile their affiliate scheme has been Cold for six months.

In November I received a personal email from Peter Norwood saying that they will no longer be giving out exclusive discount codes to affiliates.

“I obviously hope you can continue to promote Thomson but appreciate we’re moving away from your model somewhat!”

That’s all fair Peter but what you didn’t actually go on to say was that you were reducing commissions to £5 without notification.

You did reply to a post on the A4uforum on 11th November:

“Yes we’ve made a decision to reduce what we pay to cashback and voucher code sites, we’re doing this during November and December and will reassess ahead of the January peak in bookings.

Apologies for the email not going out yet.”

It’s now March and I and other affiliates are still waiting for that first email!

As a voucher code site owner that hasn’t promoted your brand with the use of a voucher code since 31st October 2007, why should I receive less commission than someone who runs a blog?

During 2007 I received over £1,000 commission from promoting Thomson Holidays with an Exclusive code. Now I would have to generate 200 sales to receive that amount.

For a £2,516.38 sale where I once made £50.33 commission, I now only receive £5. That’s less than one tenth of what I once received. How can you justify that?

I made a sale of £2,750 just yesterday. So that is approximately 0.18% commission.

Sadly for me Thomson Holidays is my fourth most visited merchants page. Like some other affiliates I may have to look at other methods of monetising this popular page.