One of my grandaughters was 4 on Christmas Eve - and she's a delighful, clever, funny little soul - hope yours is the same

All change this year

Recruit an in-house developer to convert the main affiliate site to a retail site, and create more retail sites within the same niche.
Expand the existing retail site to include kids furniture and outdoor play.
Make more use of Odesk etc  to take over the mundane day to day routines
Create more exact-match domains in the affiliate arena.
Create our own range of kids bedding for wholesale.
Shuffle existing staff to maximise strengths and take all the SEO and Social stuff in house.
Patent and ensure I've got the intellectual property rights to the designs of a new jewellery range  that I need to launch(super excited about this)
Do all this by mid year so I can go back to 'playing' with affy sites and dreamweaver.

oh, and
cut down on working hours to spend more time travelling and with my grandchildren.
and not grow old

well that was far more entertaining than trudging through tons of Odesk responses - and, surprisingly enough, funnier - cheers.

I'd change the 7 Days to something like - 7 Easy Steps - more time friendly, especially for those who are looking last minute!!  and defo have a video in prime position.

Finally throwing in the towel with the main affiliate site and transforming it into a retail site, with the emphasis on drop shipping from our own, successful, existing retail site and some of my current Affiliate partners.

The site was initially set up in such a way that adding a shopping cart, should be a natural extension and not really disrupt the functionality.

I know MyDeco are also going down this route - anyone else?

I'm expecting that removing the affiliate links and installing a shopping cart should give me a natural boost - but will it result in getting all those top positions back?

Interesting times ahead ..

mmm - been thinking about this myself as the site does lend itself to this - but could it have a negative effect as well? I'm always being told to 'leave the bleedin' thing alone' :0

I'm pretty certain I've aggravated the situation by compiling all these extra pages (knee jerk reaction to the US Pandemic!) and the few visitors I am getting are not clicking through to the merchants sites - bit of a bugger when you're an affiliate site!
Going back to basics.

6 things.

that visitors rarely buy the product they originally click to visit the merchant's site - but often buy something else (I, really, already knew this)

that I shouldn't have produced secondary product pages containing all the essential information - no reason to visit the merchant's site

Google sees such pages as thin, duplicate content

I don't need Pandas to screw over my site - I'm quite capable of doing that myself

I'm a certifiable, blithering idiot.

You're never too old to learn - just takes more time

Man Plans - God/Fate laughs

oh dear - can't make March 5th as the best conference in the fair city of Leeds is on that date - http://www.thinkvisibility.com/ - can't miss that Mr Hodgeson would be very annoyed

Doug, you do keep banging on about Vegas - you're as bad as some other folk I know 

The lovely NE coast, just east of Miseryborough -  Redcar, although in my defence I'm originally a true Yorkshire lass from Leeds - shame about the football last night, but, hey ho, look what happened last year when we beat Man Utd - and travels not a problem - as long as it's not down in the nether regions of Wales or the South East.

it's a distinct possibility

I've recently gone with Clook and am seriously impressed with their customer service. I automatically asked about their premium servers and the nice gentleman suggested I'd be fine with one of their less expensive ones - which I have been.

Yet, our merchant business suffered serious downtime because of Rackspace,  because the 'mirror' server was dead for a whole year - and we didn't find out until the main server upped and died as well - cost us a packet and totally screwed up our automatic stock control - nightmare

Name's Elaine and been around a long, long time -  sufficient to say since I bought the kids a ZX81 - but only doing t'internet stuff since 2000 ish.
I'm totally fascinated and awed (is that a word?) with SEO, but glad I didn't go down that route, 'cos I've not done too bad with affiliate marketing and I'm a black belt in CCP (click, copy, paste) and knowing when to outsource the big stuff
I think I'm one of the few affiliates who've entered the on-line merchant arena (if you're an affiliate you know what sells!!)  and, with the help of my 3 kids (how's that for forward planning) have quite a successful second business.
Certainly recognize a few names and have interacted with one or two and I'm looking forward to learning more stuff, being baffled and being entertained.