I’ve added a ‘Top 20 Incentives’ chart to my Shop Codes home page that rewards merchants that have either sent me a free gift or are currently offering an incentive promotion to drive more sales.

For those merchants that have sent me a gift in recent days and months, this is my way of saying thankyou. I’m hoping it will also encourage other merchants to send things to my postal address.

My most recent gift received was a bottle of champagne from The Sunday Times Wine Club for “generating the highest sales increase” in the last week of September.

I was also one of ‘top ten affiliates in September’ for PhysioRoom.com and so they’re sending me the PC game ‘Football Manager 2007′.

Getting Personal are sending me a personalised 2008 calendar so that I can see the quality. I’ve opted for ‘The Apprentice’ one and look forward to displaying it.

The section is also of benefit to the customer as behind every link is a discount code or promotion of some kind. So I feel the small section is of benefit to the customer, merchant and myself.

It is a Top 20 chart and it will be filled with the merchants offering the best affiliate incentives and those sending me gifts. The customer doesn’t have to know any different as their ‘Incentives’ are the discounts available.

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.

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.