Bit late this week. It's a bit hectic right now. Anyway, last week was pretty quiet. Monday I spent all day in bed virtually, as I woke up feeling pretty naff. I had a headache and felt a bit sick (probably from the previous evening's last minute dinner of naff pizza) so after checking on my email I went back to bed, slept a little and caught up with some TV off the freeview recorder. It's nice to have that freedom of not having to go into an office, or to have to phone in sick (and then be made to feel guilty because you're not there doing your job). Since not working in an office I don't tend to get ill as there are no germs flying around the place, which is great and of course quite important when you work for yourself as there's no sick pay available (you can still apply for statutory sick pay with a doctor's sicknote however we're talking about £15 a day max!).

So Tuesday meant I was playing catch up. Luckily I didn't have too much work on anyway so it wasn't anything major. On Wednesday we try to take the afternoon off and actually leave the house, get some fresh air and get a break from being couped up in the same house day and night. We drove over to a local retail park to pick up a few things then on to Costco, a big cash and carry near where we used to live. An hour later and we'd spent a fortune. Still there were a few boxes of wine (at a reduced rate), box of beer, fair bit of fresh meat and fish, and various other things included. After dinner at Dave's old place of work, catching up with some friends who were on shift, we headed up to his sister's to drop off a box of wine (pre-ordered!) and then on home to unpack, rewrap half the purchases into portion sizes and start freezing!

On Thursday it was Dave's niece's 11th birthday, so after work we took a drive over to their house to take one of her birthday presents, a magic set. We're also taking all 3 of them to Chester Zoo in a couple of weeks which will be interesting! Last time we took 2 to Alton Towers we had arguments for half the day! Still, she liked her magic set.

We went out on Saturday in search of a decent local farm shop, or at least somewhere selling some fruit and vegetables. Maybe as it's winter still that it was the wrong time as everywhere we came across was a bit derelict looking. We did find a little horsebox size trailer with a woman selling a few vegetables pretty cheaply, which is good to know. We also found Leasowe lighthouse finally, despite driving past it a few times in the past! Then we took a wander around Liscard, a town a little north of us, about 10 minutes away. We, well I, am trying to get a little more knowledgable about the areas so that when we do come to look at a new house (buying or renting) then I've got more of an idea of which areas are where and what's available there.

This week is a bit hectic as I'm off to Cardiff tomorrow for meetings and a training session at my contract job at the end of the week. So I've not only got that to prepare for but also write a WordPress plugin for someone too. I'll be glad when the end of Friday hits!

Last week I wrote about Promotion of a New Site and also mentioned how one of the best options is to offer an affiliate scheme to allow others to sell your products for you for a commission. Well, now this is even easier to do with the introduction of support for Affiliates over at Secure Delivery, the top digital product delivery service going.nnYou can now allow people to sign up as an affiliate to sell one or more of your products, allowing them to use a 'hop link' like clickbank where they can link to the product's sales page, or you can allow them to just grab the buy buttons and add them to their own site or sales page. This service will only be available to the paid accounts on Secure Delivery but for a limited period they're also available under the free accounts (1 product only) so anyone can give them a try and see how they go.nnFor more information or to sign up, visit Secure Delivery today

I downloaded the Portable Firefox 3 from PortableApps the other day, to run on my external harddrive and see how the new version was going without overwriting my current installation. Before running it I copied my profile over from my current installed Firefox to get my bookmarks, extensions, theme and details copied over. Unfortunately my passwords didn't seem to copy over, but well it is only a test version.

First impressions are great. It's much quicker at rendering pages. I love when you log in to a site it doesn't pop up asking if you want to save the password but instead a bar along the top of the page appears asking instead, leaving the page to continue loading. This allows you to check and see if the page logs in (ie. the user details are correct) before clicking Remember (you may be able to do this on Firefox 2, I've not really tried it though!). I've often saved a username and password several times before I get it right! Another great little feature is that on the page info window you can view all the passwords stored for that particular site/domain. This will come in very handy after the amount of times I've scrolled through my saved passwords, searching for the correct username/password combination for a particular page or site.

At present very few of my extensions work, StumbleUpon, Stylish, Server Spy and that's about all. Even my theme doesn't work with it, but the default theme isn't so bad. They've tidied up the icons along the top a little which looks quite cool. I've also found one client site that has a couple of items in the wrong place, so not sure about their CSS support with Firefox 3, but I'll leave Dave to worry about that when it's officially released (plus it may just be a bug).

The great thing about this at present is that things that stopped working correctly on my installed version such as target _blank pages opening in the same tab as the page I was on, so every external link in Google Reader had to be Ctrl+Clicked, plus my spell checker, are now working again. Probably some extension issue, but it's nice to have a few defaults back, even if it'll just be for a short time until I manage to break them again

There is also a new folder on the bookmarks toolbar, called Smart Bookmarks, which seems to offer a frequently visited list of sites, a list of recently bookmarked sites, and also a recently tagged list. Not sure about the latter and how that works just yet. I've also noticed that I can't seem to manage my bookmarks (unless I'm being totally blonde and missing where to click!).

Finally, they've also improved the drop down on the address bar. It lists both the page title and URL, and as you type in your address it not only lists the recently visited addresses that match that, but also any from your bookmarks too (don't ask why I would type in an address if it's in my bookmarks, I just do!).

So all in all, looking good, and can't wait for the release of Firefox 3

The sun's still shining, the weather is a little chilly. This is how winter should be! Or is this really just our British summer come soon? It's been another beautiful week of sunshine, except for Thursday. It's just annoying having to stay indoors and do that work stuff!

Monday we decided to go for an evening out, dinner and a movie. I have a rewards card from one of our supermarkets where you get points for shopping with them plus a few other shops. These points can be redeemed to get money off your shopping however now I can also redeem them for cinema tickets (at a better offer – 1000 points gets £5 back or a free cinema ticket worth £6.50). So the cinema was free. We went to see I Am Legend with Will Smith. Have to say, it was quite a good film but very jumpy. I held onto Dave for most of the film! However it was nice to have an evening out, and some Haagen Daas Belgian Chocolate icecream too

On Wednesday we took a break from work and took the afternoon off to take a drive out to a local (ish) farm shop. I'm still getting to know the area in which we're living in so it was nice to drive a few new roads. The farm shop itself was okay but a little expensive, however it was all organic. We then headed down to the beach for a bit of fresh air, caught sight of a house with a lighthouse attached to it (and Dave's decided that's what he now wants!), and stood in the lovely sun for a little while. Then we drove up to another beach to catch the glorious sunset (see the photo above) and then grab some lovely fresh fish and chips for dinner. A gorgeous day, although all of the sea air tired me out! I really do love living so close to the beach

I've mentioned before about before the launch of a new site, what about once you've set the site live and are then looking for your first flurry of visitors? These days, first port of call is getting the site index in the search engines. Usually a link to the site from an already indexed site does the trick. If your site is quite complex then it may be a good idea to create an XML Sitemap and submit that to the search engines too. Don't forget your own visitors though. A standard sitemap is a must for any site that goes more than one link deep from the front page, or has more than about 10 pages.nnThe next step is social media. StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us are my two favourites. StumbleUpon will get you a fair bit of instant traffic (depending on the subject this can be maybe 100 visitors up to 1000), but it will also continue to send a few visitors every once in a while. Delicious can also work well if the right tags are used and all it takes is one bookmark to potentially get a few more visitors through as I've mentioned in the past. This is where you get cheeky and ask online contacts to help you out too. Providing you're happy to give the same help back when it's needed, then it doesn't cost anyone nnBlogging is a great method of marketing, especially if you have a reasonable amount of visitors and feed subscribers. Although make sure you're not pushing a new product or site to them too often, else you'll find your regular visitors will stop visiting so often. I recently used this method to announce the launch of DIY covers, my latest product selling site. In turn a couple of fellow bloggers have mentioned my post on their site which I'm indeed greatful for. Asking fellow bloggers for reviews or mentions of your new product is also a good way to get some traffic. If you offer a cut down version of the product in return, or a free version depending on its worth, and just ask for an honest review, then you can potentially get a lot of traffic and potential buyers from sources you would never get to otherwise. Some bloggers may require a fee for their time, or an incentive to do the review, such as an affiliate option (see further down).nnForums are also a great place to target, especially if you're already known within the 'community' and again, you don't mention a new product every other day. Some forums may get more reaction that others, again it depends on the type of product, the audience there, and if they are not the type to buy then perhaps what else they can do. On the forums that I regularly use, I posted about DIY Covers but also asked for stumbles off anyone who fancied it. A little additional exposure for free is great, again, be prepared to return the same favour one day.nnWe then have advertising. Paying for advertising can be risky business as you need to be sure you'll get your return on investment (ROI). A lot of the pay per click advertising options are usually quite good as you can control who the advert is shown to, targeting the right people, and you only pay per visitor. For my latest site I've used WordLinx, run by an acquaintance, where I've built up around 1000 visitors worth of credit. I cannot control who I target on this, if you upgrade you can control which continents you target, however for this product I didn't need that option. WordLinx is another way of getting a sudden rush of traffic, hopefully converting to a couple of sales or even a bookmark of the site for potential future sales. For a niche site, such as another product site I run which sells Tattoo flashes, this requires a lot more targeting than I can get on WordLinx, and this is where a PPC campaign with one of the search engines would be more suitable. Often, if you search around, you can find an offer of a free voucher which could equate to a few thousand visitors if you can work it out right.nnFinally, one of the best advertising methods a site can use is an affiliate system (in my opinion!). First off you're getting other people to advertise for you, for free. You only pay out if that affiliate makes a sale, a sale that you may not have got otherwise, so whilst you've had to pay out, you're still making some money, and some is better than nothing. There are plenty of affiliate services out there, or you can quite easily code this up yourself if you have the know-how. This is something I've not tried yet from a seller's point of view, but as an affiliate I know that this can be a great way of earning some easy cash.nnI've used a few of these methods on my latest business – DIY Covers so far, with a few more jobs to do for it. Response has been good and, well I've just had to up the bandwidth limit on the site, so visitors are quite high too!nnWhat other methods of promotion are there to try?