Everybody Love’s Raymond … or at least, everybody is talking about Raymond.

I’m back on the blogging trail and Kieron picked up on the fact that my site has gone up in Google for the term ‘discount codes’ whilst his had gone down the positions.

Well what goes up must come down and I’ll write my ‘Google Pushes Down ShopCodes’ piece in the near future, once I’ve got more data to collect.

12.5% of my traffic is now arriving from the three keyword phrases “voucher codes”, “discount codes” and “promotional codes”.

Now while this means that one eighth of my traffic is pretty much full of people who are not looking for particular merchants, it also means that my direct to merchant traffic is in theory down 12.5%. In fact it is much worse than that. Where I’ve gained in the generics, I’ve subsequently dipped in the long-tail.

Of my last 20 Google referrals, only 3 went direct to an internal page and the rest hit my home page. So it puts more pressure on my home page to work harder and I’d imagine the bounce rate of my home page to increase.

When this has happened in the past, it can take anything from 2 days, 5 days or 14 days before traffic returns to its previous high level.

As it nears towards the end of day one on this current Google algorythm change, traffic is down 55% on the previous day and commission accordingly.

The good news though is that the commission earned today is still a lot higher than my full-time job daily rate.

The other blessing is that I am totally relaxed about the change as I’ve got 2,600 unread emails to work through. That’s an awful lot of free content to use at my disposal.

BEDROOM ANTICS

Next up is John who spotted that I’m not attending the A4UAwards. He’s wrote a great post about his experiences of the highs and lows of running a business.

Black-tie dinners are not my thing and I even turned down attending one to celebrate my 10 years at Orange last year. This week I celebrate my eleventh year. I started my first real job just when Tony Blair became Prime Minister.

If I wasn’t going on holiday the first week of June, I’d have taken up Jackpotjoy’s offer of a seat at their table and started panicking about how to hire a suit. If anybody is after attending, maybe you can charm Jasper?

I will feel that I’m missing out on something though as I like my drinking and love freebies.

IF CARLSBERG DID AFFILIATE MARKETING …

Which brings me nicely onto the last person today to mention me. Ross from Affiliate Window announced that I was a winner of the Carlsberg Draught Master.

I was hoping to win another merchant incentive before Father’s Day to give my dad [Also called Raymond] a different present. However, this is too good to give away and I look forward to our 4 days of Summer, where I can quench my thirst in style.

Carlsberg Export is my favourite premium strength lager too despite the best efforts of Heineken to brainwash me last year during my first affiliate event.

Cheers Kieron, John and Ross!