David Fiske Affiliate marketing & web development musings from Fiske Towers

Sunshine.co.uk are offering a 'free' holiday (free flights, free airport transfers and free accommodation) to a very lucky winner. There's talk of a Sunshine baseball cap and a t-shirt for the winner to take on holiday!

The holiday is an opportunity for you to familiarise yourself with a particular place and either extend or create fresh unique content to help promote Sunshine and help rank better in the search engines. When it comes to holiday's, there is nothing better than actual photos and video clips.

I'm entering a separate website but I just wanted to show you how easy it is to set up a travel website using tools from Sunshine.co.uk and Price Tapestry.
 
Step 1) Grab a Domain Name and Some Webspace

I use a reseller account so web space is not an issue. If you are just starting out, you are probably better off with someone like Supanames who can offer a domain and webspace until you grow enough to warrant reseller hosting.

I had a domain sitting around gathering dust so I changed the DNS record and pointed it to my webspace. I'm using Fun 4 Less Cheap Holidays for this project.

Step 2) Install Price Tapestry

If you don't own a copy, for £140 you can grab yourself Price Tapestry, which includes Magic Parser, a handy XML, RSS and CSV parsing script.

if you already own a copy, install it on your server. You'll need a PHP server with a MySQL database. Remember to delete the setup files once you have installed the script.

When you've installed it, you'll be presented with this:



Step 3) Sort Out The Admin Side

This is nice and simple, though you'll need to follow all of these steps.

1. Secure the administration folder using your web host's tools.
2. Visit the Sunshine.co.uk affiliate area and download an Excel version of 'all hotels' (remember to 'save target as').
3. Open this up, go to the ssdata tab and save the page as a CSV file.
4. Upload this CSV file to your feeds folder
5. Sign up for Affiliate Future or log in if you are already a member. Sign up for the Sunshine.co.uk program (under Travel) and grab your unique affiliate tracking link. You just need the basic text link that ends "&url=".
6. Log into your admin panel and register the feed. Use these values:
   • Feed format: csv|44|1|0
   • Merchant Name: Sunshine
   • Product name: AccomName
   • Product Description: Stars (No description is supplied but a star rating is better than nothing)
   • Image URL: Picture
   • Buy URL: Url
   • Price: AccomId (it's not a price as price is not supplied but it is a numeric value which we need for this field)
   • Category: Country
   • Brand: Sunshine
7. Register the feed, then click on filters and add these filters:
   • Text before URL: Your Sunshine affiliate link
   • Text before description: "This hotel has been given a rating of "
   • Text after description: " out of 5!"
8. Import the feed and you're done! My site now has 7579 hotels hence at least 7579 web pages devoted to Sunshine.

Step 4) Featured Hotels

Add a few featured hotels (4, 6 or 8) which will appear on the home page. Choose either hotels in a particular region or choose the one's with the best looking pictures. Pictures with sandy beaches and clear blue water do it for me. Here's what mine looked like:



Step 5) Make It Look Pretty

I won't beat around the bush, many of you will know I sell templates for Price Tapestry so the first port of call would be there. I've uploaded a template specifically for the Sunshine datafeed which you may find handy. It's currently £29.99 if you are interested in a ready-built template. Here's what it looks like:



Alternatively, build your own template or leave it as is. You may prefer to leave it looking bare or you may prefer to splash about with your paints!

Tips to remember:

• The price is a hotel reference number so you'll need to hide that.
• We put the Country as the category so you can create hard coded links to these pages if you need to
• Other data feeds are available from Sunshine so you may wish to have a play around with them

Step 6) Add some unique content

Unique content will set your site apart so consider writing reviews of areas. There's space on the home page to write about a particular destination or you can create static pages and fill them with juicy fresh unique content.

Step 7) Remember to enter the competition!

You can do this at any point but remember to visit the Sunshine.co.uk competition page and enter the competition. You'd be a fool not to.

Interesting Points

Setting up the domain took 24 hours due to DNS changes. Setting up Price Tapestry took 10 minutes, registering the feed took 5 minutes and the template installation took less than 5 minutes. In 20 minutes, I have created a fully functioning website. Adding a few banner ads will take 5 minutes and I'm done. In under 30 minutes, you could have entered the competition.

The site described above is Fun 4 Less Cheap Holidays