Affiliate Marketing Work Life Balance
I’ve recently had some time off and a mates Stag do which was such a laugh seeing some old mates and the stag dressed up as Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Brüno. It was nice time off Affiliate Stuff to clear my head and take a break, but it had me thinking of my family lots because I was missing my little kiddies and my wife. It also made me think about my work life balance.
When I came home to see my daughter getting all teary because I came home (she thought I wasn’t coming back) was so emotional and made me think that I don’t want her to get upset and miss her daddy again, so I’ve made up my mind that I never want to work away from home or work long hours. Now I know Affiliate Marketing can involve a lot of hours but at least at the moment these hours are fitted around family life.
With the A4U expo event in London coming up, I was also thinking would it be good to go, but being away from home for another 3 days and also the expense at £399+vat I think I will give it a miss. I’m sure loads of Affiliates will say its well worth it. I’ve got to think about my family first and my children’s inheritance (thanks theo paphitis for this phrase!)
Affiliate Marketing can get addictive and I’ve seen quite a few Affiliate Blogs and Affiliates on A4U up at all hours but I don’t think it has to be like this. Look at Kirsty and John Lamerton going part time and outsourcing work.
Our goal is still the same and we are getting closer every day to where we want to be, which is earning enough money to cover our current full time incomes but allowing the flexibility to spend more time with the family. We’ll face more challengers along the way I’m sure but its all good.
Circus skills would be useful for Affiliate Marketing
We’ve been revisiting some old niches recently and have realized they have gotten a bit out of date, feeds need re-doing as products have disappeared and new products are available, some merchants have been removed and some merchants have moved networks. So why the title of this post. Well it struck me that there would be some circus skills which would come in very hand in affiliate marketing. Namely juggling and plate spinning. We have been quite busy on our big sites so our niches may have been a little neglected. Therefore we are going to spend a bit of time updating them as they are our main bread winners at the moment. All our own fault for maybe having too many plates to spin but hey who wants a nice easy life as an affiliate marketeer!
We are working on ways to make our life easier. We have been working on ways to auto update our feeds so that say for example over every weekend the feeds are updated via scripts and just need checking to make sure products appear ok. This is work in progress and testing will be starting very soon, in fact maybe later today. We have it working on one of our bigger niches so just a matter of porting across to all sites. Right off to book that circus skills course. You never know if life in affiliate marketing gets too tough the skills learnt might mean a career in the circus might be a decent alternative.
How was July for the team at Affiliate Project
Time to reflect back on how we did for the month so that we can see what changes we need to make if any, so that we can continue to grow our Affiliate Business.
Overall July was a pretty good month for us seeing an increase in sales, although our overall profit for the month did not increase. It stayed about the same.
The main reasons why our income has not increased is due to the following;
1. Working on a couple of bigger sites, this is taking up time from working on our niches. We find our niches make us money quicker but don’t necessarily make us lots of money quick. Our bigger sites have seen a few sales which is not bad considering they are not ranking properly yet.
2. Our biggest earning merchant has now closed their program. We had a special rate of commission with them as we were sending then a huge amount of sales. Because of this our products that are selling instead through another merchant are only paying out 4% compared to the 10% we were getting. Considering this, we feel we have done OK to keep our income at the same level as the previous month. We have seen approx 20% increase in number of sales and 26% increase in clicks from Google Adsense and 3,500 extra page impressions since the previous month.
3. We haven’t knocked out any more niches. We have some more in the pipeline but its difficult trying to manage our time with full time jobs, families to look after and taking holidays.
John Lammerton has featured out site using ECU in their showcase here. He has also enquired about whether we’d like to develop the plugin further to make this publicly available to all other ECU users. When we get a bit of time, this will be something that we’ll develop and might think about a small charge for this.
So whats the plan for Next month for us? Well try and get our next couple of niches finished then build up some content and linkage for them, whilst still ploughing a lot of time into our bigger sites.
We’ve had talks with a web design company about improving some of the graphics on our bigger sites so that we can improve trust and usability. We’ll be meeting up with them to find out more of what they can do for us. Until now all of the design of our websites has been done by ourselves but we are not from website design or graphics backgrounds so we may need a little help on this side of things. We will update more on this at a later stage.
Onwards and Upwards as they say 
New team member for Affiliate Project
Affiliate Project are proud to announce a new member of our team. My wife, Debbie has been helping us out for about a month now. Our wives know how keen we are to do this full time and are helping in any way they can. Debbie is very good with words and writing up content, coming from a marketing background, so has agreed to help us keep our sites up to date with new fresh content. She is working hard adding more articles to our site and also taken over banner ad management leaving us to focus on design updates and potential new projects.
We think she has done an amazing job so far and really added value to our sites. Not only is she adding content she is also getting our arses in gear by creating us task lists when she notices how things can be improved or if any data feeds are out of date. The jury is still out on whether this is a good or bad thing as our task list only ever seems to grow, even when we tick tasks off. No seriously it is a good thing as it’s great to have someone constantly reviewing our sites and making sure they are kept up to date and keeping us on the ball with our older sites.
Affiliate Project Team Grow
Affiliate Project has been expanding recently and we’re proud to announce that we have been colaborting with another affiliate on a couple of sites. We have been doing quite a bit of work with Stuart in the last few months on a couple of sites which we hope will take all of us forward.
Stuart has come a long way since he started in Affiliate Marketing back in 2009, about the same time as we did. His website design and development skills are top notch. He has massively improved his database skills has brought a lot to the table and is willing to take on any design challenge. Stuart also shares common interests and is also a family man trying to make a better life for him and his family.
It’s been a pleasure working with you Stu and thanks for all your hard work over the last few months.
New quick niche launched in between working hard at our big site
Another quick niche done. Who’d of thought I’d be writing about pregnancy pillows! I know that any affiliate worth their salt will tell you to make sure you are creating sites in an area of interest. So why would we, two males create a site about pregnancy pillows. Well there are a couple of reasons for this. One we think it could be a niche we could rank for but two we actually do have first hand experience in them. When my wife was expecting our first child she saw these and said she needed one, me being a typical bloke thought really, aren’t they a bit of a waste and a gimmick to get you to buy more pregnancy related stuff. How wrong was I.
My wife duly went ahead and bought a pregnancy pillow and I hold my hands up and admit it was one of the best purchases made while she was pregnant. It helped make sure she got a half decent nights sleep, which in turn meant she was a little less grumpy during the day, which meant I got less stick as well. Don’t worry the wife has read this post before I posted it and agreed with every word so I will not get a kick up the backside for saying that.
They are also useful for breast feeding and helping babies learn to sit up so I have to admit that actually these pregnancy pillows are indeed worth the money, hence why I feel we can create a site on them with some knowledge on the matter. So there you go, our pregnancy pillow site is launched and will have more and more merchants added to it over time. Let’s hope we see a bit of a return and top up our full time pot.
Affiliate Project Team Delve into the Discount Code Sector
Here in Affiliate Project HQ, we’ve been putting a lot of our time into developing the next best discount code site. Is this the right decision? Well only time will tell. We do think this is a risk to take in a market that is so competitive but could be a risk that will pay off, plus we’ve learned a lot along the way from doing this project. We’ve improved on our website coding skills, how user experience is important and trying to structure the site for the best user experience. We’ve had lots of talks like ‘to reveal or not to reveal’ (codes that is!) and about how else we can make our voucher code site unique or better than any others out there. Some of these ideas are still under development and we’re keeping these to ourselves until we are ready to launch the additional features that our site will offer.
The challenge will be to keep going at it and competing with the likes of MVC and VoucherCodes.co.uk who have big teams behind them. Trying to rank is going to be a challenge and also managing PPC on potentially tens of thousands of keywords which will be a job in itself. Luckily enough there is 3 of us working on this site.
So I bet you Affiliates and other Voucher Code site owners will want to know what the site is called then. Well here is our baby:
SlashPrices.co.uk – Exclusive Discount Codes, Voucher Codes, Offers and Sales. Some of the most popular codes we’ll be promoting are Comet discount codes, Cloggs discount code, Opodo discount code, Dorothy Perkins discount code and Pizza Express vouchers.
Some key features:
- Updated daily with codes and deals from over 500 merchants and climbing, we’ll hopefully list all merchants with voucher codes/offers in time
- Click to reveal, users can see the code by hovering over the reveal box allowing for the click to be tracked
- Dynamic Search so users can start typing and we’ll drop down a list of the merchants
- Neat redirect page so its clear that visitors are being redirected to the merchant to use the code
- Code changes on click so that the user can see instructions on how to use the code
- Automatic expiring codes/offers when they reach there expiry date. The codes are also then turned grey to make it visible that these are no longer valid
- Clear to see if its a code or offer, can sort by All, Codes, or Deals.
- Category search to find all merchants within specific categories
- Similar merchants when no codes are available for any specific merchant
- Restaurant Codes section
- RSS Feed for each Merchant
- Newsletter Signup to receive the best codes and deals each week
- Blog section with money saving tips, often written from personal experience
- Best Price section so people can find the best price on popular products. Anyone can request a deal either on our Facebook page or from a request a deal section soon to come
We’ve also setup twitter so that anyone can follow us here: http://twitter.com/slashprices
Want to become a fan on Facebook then please follow us for the best discounts on our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/SlashPrices.co.uk
We welcome any feedback good or bad, please leave comments below or contact us if you wish
Amazon Associates Program Review
We here at Affiliate Project have been using Amazon’s Affiliate Programme since we started out in Affiliate Marketing. It has done us OK from a mixture of sectors, but I’m sure we’ve been missing out loads on referral fees which we believe should be paid to us for promoting them. As with most people, the frustration with Amazon is their 1 day cookie length. This may be OK for smaller items which don’t require a lot of thinking about like books, Cd’s etc OR if you are targeting the long tail keywords where the Customer is at the end of the buying chain, then you shouldn’t notice too many sales leaked. But when you promote more expensive products then you will most likely miss out on the sale due to the 1 day cookie length.
One thing that is good about Amazon is that they have such a strong brand and their products are generally the cheapest. This is where they hold you by your balls as you almost have to promote them if you are offering any sort of comparison site. Or do you!!!
Another Annoyance with Amazon is they now only appear to have 1 performance model for Affiliates. This is a capped performance. So for example if you sale a product at £300 and the default commission is 5% then you will only get £7 when you are due more than double that, £15. We recently have had several items sell at that price and are missing out on sales and our commission rate is generally going down. We also just sold an item worth £1500 and only got £7, this should have been £75 so our commission rate for that item dropped to 0.5%. Hardly worth the effort promoting it.
Again for smaller items the performance model offers increased commissions if you sale more items, but you do have to sell lots to get that commission increased to anything significant. Maybe this is the way there business is focused on bulk buying items like books.
Now I have both shopped with Amazon and worked with Amazon as an Affiliate promoting their products and I will now do my best NOT to promote their products and to promote other merchants products instead. It doesn’t inspire us to promote them as a merchant if they are not willing to help the smaller affiliates out there.
Revisit old sites, You could double your Affiliate earnings!
The team at Affiliate Project (I look like rodders and Paul looks like Delboy) are constantly busy on new projects, but we don’t want to leave our old sites going stale. As we recently noticed that one of ours sites was affected by a site speed problem, we’ve been reviewing our sites structures, meta stuff for on site SEO optimisation as well as google webmaster tools to see where our site is appearing. Google has not long ago updated the webmaster tools and now the search queries gives you a bit more detail, a little bit like Google analytics. This is very useful data as you can see in a quick snapshot where your site has appeared for so many keyword phrases and also see what impressions your site got. It also gives you the CTR (click through rate). Now I’ve been analysing this data and also looking over the search keywords that are fairly low competition and OK search volume and we’ll now work on improving our search ranking for more keywords by writing more content on site and off site and doing more link building on these keywords. The first thing we need to do is work through a list of those keywords and pick those that are easiest to rank. We reckon we could double our traffic and click through rate, therefore doubling our profit with not too much work. Hopefully we’ll be out of our day jobs sooner that we think. This time next year rodders
Back Order Domains
Recently Affiliate Project team has been working on building up our niche websites to increase our ‘leaving the day job pot’ as well as working on developing a couple of projects. 1 of our bigger projects is currently taking up a lot of our time as its a massive competitive market. Probably not the best idea for Affiliates that haven’t been doing AM for that long (almost 1 and half years now), but there is now 3 of us contributing so hoping to compete. It’s a challenge for sure. Anyway we have also been waiting for a premium domain to drop for another bigger project we wanted to work on and not so long ago it had dropped but we missed out to some other chump! We hope they fail with that domain lol. Only kidding, the best man or woman beat us to it and grabbed that domain on Backorder.co.uk before we could. We have placed a back order on 2 sites domainmonster.com and caught.co.uk but obviously wasn’t as quick as the backorder.co.uk guys.
We won’t reveal the domain, well not just yet as it might give away too much information about a bigger project we were thinking of working on as it will be mostly affiliates reading this and thinking oh great idea (or maybe they won’t) then we’ll have more competition.
If anyone has had any success with certain back order domains then we’d like to hear about it, but I guess you wouldn’t necessarily want to share this with us. Oh well worth asking.
We have some other big projects in the pipeline so stay tuned to hear when we announce the go live for some big things ahead for Affiliate Project team.
-
Sponsors / Adverts
