After many months I thought it was about time to add a visitor book to this site (blog!). Please feel free to add your comments about the site, suggestions or any links you think may be of interest. This will help Mad About Madrid offer the best possible information on Madrid to visitors. Simply add your details below, or click on the ‘comments’ button if you’re on the home page. Thanks for your input!

Merry Christmas everyone and have a great New Year!

I will be going to Madrid from the 27th December to 10th January and expect to be able to add much more information to this site. As always, please feel free to email me if you would like any new items/features added to the site.

All the best

Alun John

I have just launched a new website in the last 24 hours called Marketingtom.com. It is specifically designed to give people advice on Internet Marketing, though no doubt it will probably stray into other marketing areas, too.

Wow! I finally got there. It has taken an age for me to finally get domain mapping sorted out. Many thanks to Brenna and the guys at Go Daddy for their patience. I also got help from the people at the TypePad User Group, too – which is a very useful address to know.

Click the link below to see how I managed to map www.madaboutmadrid.com to madrid.blogs.com through Godaddy.

Continue reading →

Here are a list of sites that link to the Mad About Madrid website:

iTravelnet Travel Directory Comprehensive directory for travel related web sites. Destination guides, travel news and travelogues. Book cheap airfares, discount hotels and car hire.

Travelling Spain – an extensive travel guide that covers most of the major Spanish cities and contains many links.

Transitions Abroad was created as the antidote to tourism, a magazine with the specific goal of providing information that would enable travelers to actually meet the people of other countries, to learn about their culture, to speak their language, and to "transition" to a new level of understanding and appreciation for our fascinating world.

Mad About Madrid has been running for around 4 years now and has offered travel advice to hundreds of thousands of visitors (433,229 to date) from all over the world. Most visitors come from the States, closely followed by visitors from Spain, the UK and Ireland. It has now managed to position itself as one of the leading sites for visitors to Spain’s Capital City. It is prominently placed on Google for most Madrid search terms, is regularly referenced on news websites and on weblogs and has hundreds of external links into it.

About Me.
My name is Alun John and, as you may guess from reading my articles, I am very passionate about Madrid. I lived there for eight years, up until I left in 1997, and now live just outside Cardiff, Wales. My wife and her family are from Madrid and that’s how I am able to get out there around 3-4 times a year. We have two children – Jac and Sofía – who are [almost] 5 and 3. For around the past eight years I have worked as an Internet Marketing Consultant and you can find out a little more about this on Marketing Tom, my business website.

More on Mad About Madrid

Here’s something that I wrote way back in 2003 but which has not really changed:

This site is actually a blog, which allows me to add an article, as and when I want. This article can be allocated a category, like Madrid Travel, so that when you click on categories you will find all articles, listed in chronological order, that I have written on that subject. In addition, this blog allows visitors the opportunity to leave comments on practically every article (except this one!!).

Mad About Madrid will aim to give visitors a comprehensive guide to all things associated with Madrid. This will cover getting to Madrid, getting around Madrid, eating, sleeping, visiting and having fun in Madrid. Expect to see information on Madrid’s buildings, walks, parks, sports and excursions from Madrid.  The web site will also attempt to keep visitors up-to-date with the latest events going on in Madrid.

I always check my website statistics to identify what articles interest visitors and am always willing to listen to readers’ suggestions on articles that I should write about.

I must admit that I have tried, with various degrees of success, to monetize the site and most of my revenue comes from Google AdWords and Hotel Booking fees. However, I am always happy to discuss advertising opportunities with businesses. Please feel free to email me on any queries you have on Madrid.

¡Hasta pronto!

Alun

[Updated April 2007]