Through a lens, blotchily.

I've been commissioned to write a piece for Scuba Magazine about Montrose SAC's club trip to Northern Ireland later this year.  To get the best quality underwater photos I'll need an wide-angled lens (there's a lot of stuff in the water that causes blotches in the photos, called "back-scatter"; with a wide-angled lens you can get in closer to the subject and therefore reduce the amount of water between you and it, thus reducing back-scatter.)

So I've been trying to locate a wide-angle lens I can use with my Intova underwater camera set-up. (If you're not yet into underwater photography, it's important to know that cameras typically have to go inside a watertight housing, onto which you screw accessories like lenses and lights; the cameras - apart from a few very expensive ones, perhaps - aren't themselves watertight.  Each type of camera has its own housing, so you have to get the right one for your camera.)  

I know Intova make a lens that you can fit and remove during a dive.  I know who imports it into this country - but they don't sell direct to the public, so I've been trawling the internet to find a retailer.

Intova IC12 camera
(photos courtesy of
Intova's website)

The same, in its
underwater housing.

According to the importer's website the nearest agency is Aberdeen Watersports, so I checked their website: no mention of any lenses.  Same for the agencies in Burntisland, Edinburgh and Glasgow - in fact most of them didn't even mention Intova. 

So I searched e-Bay, where I eventually found a lens after trying 2-3 different keyword phrases ("scuba diving cameras", "underwater cameras", that sort of thing).  But all it said by way of identification was "46mm thread".  As I have no idea what size thread my housing has that wasn't very helpful.  Intova make several housings.  Which one does this lens fit?  At around £130 a pop I'm not going to buy one on spec.

Why are retailers so coy about their products?  If you're writing for/to consumers you can't expect them all to be experts on everything they want to buy.  I know I need the lens that fits my specific housing and I know which housing I've got.  I haven't a clue what the thread size is, and I doubt there's any mention of it in the handbook as that only covers the camera iself.  Why can't they say "fits xyz housing(s)" or something really simple like that?

It's all very well saying "come and visit our shop" but their shop's in Liverpool and I'm between Dundee and Aberdeen.  That's not exactly a 10-minute jaunt; the diesel would double the price of the lens.  And while I'm sure it's a lovely shop, full of all sorts of delightful bits and bobs that I never knew I didn't need, I'm not going to waste the better part of two days getting there and back.

Thank heavens for email.  With a bit of luck I'll get replies from 5 separate retailers saying "we've got just the thing for you, and it'll only cost £100 all in".  A girl can dream...

BloggingForProfitToday, or how not to set up an affiliate website

This internet marketing lark's not as straightforward as everyone tells you. The new website is nearly finished, but setting up a Pay Per Click ad through Google Adwords was another palaver! Apologies to any technical types reading this - I'm definitely not good on the techy language (nor the techy stuff, as you'll see...).

The website is http://www.bloggingforprofittoday.com/ - or that's the one I registered. Reasonably straightforward, you might think - says what it means and all that. But because it's hosted by Microsoft Home Office Live, its URL as far as Google Adwords are concerned is http://greatcopy.web.officelive.com/default.aspx (the official home page of the site). That won't attract the eye of the passing human looking for info on how to blog for profit; I wanted to get the word "blog" in there somehow.

But Google "disapproved" it because I put http://www.bloggingforprofittoday.com/ (my official domain name, you may remember) as the visible URL in the ad. They disapprove of non-matching URLs: the one in the ad has to match the "official" one. Not that they say so anywhere on the site - I had a spirited exchange of emails with their help desk before I discovered what the hitch was.



To solve the problem I changed the page you reach from the ad (the landing page) to the one with the main info on it, http://greatcopy.web.officelive.com/Bloggingforprofit.aspx, rather than the default home page. So far, so good.


As anyone who's ever seen a Google Adwords ad knows, there are three lines of ad text and the fourth line is the URL the viewer sees. You haven't much space for that fourth line, and http://greatcopy.web.officelive.com/Bloggingforprofit.aspx doesn't fit it. It does, however, go in the URL box (a fifth box when you're setting up the ad; you don't see it when you're browsing). So I got round the problem by altering the visible URL to greatcopy.web.officelive.com/Blog, which was allowed - and there the ad is, proud as punch, on the right hand side of the first page when you Google "blogging for profit".


When you click on it you even get taken to the right page, which is a major plus. If you click on http://www.bloggingforprofittoday.com/ you get taken to the default home page, which now has an article on it. I don't suppose that matters - the article may give the reader enough info to make a decision about whether they want to blog for profit or not, depending on the reader; and of course they can navigate to all the other pages on the site from the article - but it's not ideal.


It's been an interesting learning curve, and definitely not the most effective way to go about affiliate marketing! But at least I know one really good way not to do it next time... And the clicks are beginning to come in, so who knows - I may start to see some profit for my efforts soon. That would be good.