Blog revamp for wishlist news

As a mini-project a few hours were spent playing with the mr moto template on blogger to recreate the likeness of the mywishwand website. Hitherto the blog looked very unbranded but now the style is inkeeping with the generic site design and the mywishwand twitter style.

Some useful tips to get you started on this sort of exercise can be found on various affiliate marketing type sites...

There are also tips here for adding google analytics and various pimp-my-blog techniques.

Online shopping for busy parents

Since the last round of development updates, MyWishWand is now easier to use, and works by letting you create and share gift wishlists - normally by parents for children.

We are currently building up the adwords campaign to target specific landing pages so that visitors can navigate quickly to what they're looking for.

If you're stuck for gift ideas there's now a wider selection of lists for events such as baby showers and christenings. The gift-finder tool is another way you can find the "perfect gift" – based on the recipients age, gender and interests.

Members now get access to money-saving offers from retailers including Graham and Greene, Early Learning Centre, Boden, John Lewis, Waterstones, etc.

The celebrity approvals so far have come from Jools Oliver and Mr & Mrs Johnny Vaughan and there have been write ups in Daily Candy Kids, Country & Town House magazine, Junior and Practical Parenting as well as YummyMummyJobs.

Birthday gift ideas

Jumbo PageRank bonus at New Year boosted the gifts ideas and wish lists, or MyWishWand's, status to PR3 from 0.

This should mean the site will now start to draw more attractive traffic and some Callisti SEO recommendations were carried out by Osborne Brook developers so looking forward to better news this year.

MyWishWand on Wordpress

There is now a dedicated Wordpress blog keeping abreast of updates to the MyWishWand wishlist and gift ideas for the family website.

When links aren't allowed

One of the irritations of building links is affiliate based wholesalers.

There is a mini-blog for MyWishWand, the gift wishlist site with virtual shopping mall and gift ideas tool but we've been frustrated in our attempts for the wholesalers and retailers to provide a link to the website even though it is a portal to their products.

You will often find that these companies will have a one-way link policy so they benefit from all traffic driven to them by external affiliate partners without reciprocating.

MyWishWand on Squidoo

Squidoo allows users to create a 'lens' on a subject that is of interest and has become one of the top 300 US sites with over 700, 000 users.

There is an updateable entry on MyWishWand that provides a review of the services of the Gift Wishlist site. This is part of Callisti's ongoing provision of web 2.0 and review services.

Christmas presents nightmare

A handy tool for getting gift ideas for your Christmas present list can be found at mywishwand. Enter the age of the recipient, their gender and their personality characteristics and go!