1 year on in Affiliate Marketing for Affiliate Project – How are we doing?

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Gary · Posted in Affiliate News

Affiliate Project will be soon celebrating their 1 year anniversary as being part time affiliates and the main goal for the following year is to become full time affiliates by 2011.

Seen as the kind networks will be hosting a London meet-up on Feb 11th, we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to have a drink or two to celebrate along with other affiliates, merchants and networks, and hopefully meet some of the people we’ve been working with in the past year.

We have come a long way since we first started back in February 2009, but don’t get us wrong, we’ve also got a lot more to learn and achieve. There have been many challenges and obstacles but we’ve taken them head on and learnt a lot from our mistakes.

To try and give other Affiliate Newbies an idea or maybe a realisation of whats involved in Affiliate Marketing then see below what we had to learn and some of the challenges we faced:

1. Finding a niche for a product that:-
A. Someone would buy online.
B. Is the keyword in the domain name targeted/specific to what people are looking to buy or is it too generic, then maybe the search volume for that keyword is people just browsing at this stage. Trying to understand at what stage in the buying cycle the keyword terms are targeted for.
C. Is the search volume high enough for the niche site to be worth the effort. If the search volume is not high enough then it may not bring in enough to cover the cost of your time and effort, although money can still be made from these lower searched for keywords if they are highly targeted and/or the commission is good, like in travel sales!
D. Is the competition for your chosen keywords easy to crack. This is a whole other challenge in itself, I like to call SEO analysis.
Things to check with the competitors sites are:
- page back-links & internal linking (we use seo for FireFox plugin, site explorer from yahoo and seo spyglass to name a few tools to help analyze the back-links)
- are those links using the keywords as anchor text
- is the site quite old and therefore favoured by Google
- are those quality links back to that site
- check the meta tags in the source code (right click and view source) of the competitors site using the keywords that you are targeting
- does the title and URL of that site contain your chosen keywords
- how much content that is related to your keywords does that site have

2. Is that niche domain available to buy in a TLD (Top Level Domain) such as .com .co.uk or even .org.uk

3. Building the niche site and ranking on those keywords in the domain is a great idea and can work very well, but like most newbies we had to learn how to develop/design the site, how to structure the site, what content was going to go on the site and how this will appear to your online shoppers. Basically will it convert into a sale.

We have found Wordpress to be great for our niche sites, its free and easy to learn. We’ve actually probably learnt more in the last year about a lot of aspects of Affiliate Marketing than any job we’ve done in the past. We now know quite a bit of html/php/css/mysql and how to customize wordpress themes and plugins.

4. Getting the site to rank well in Google even though we think we’ve done our research. This isn’t always as easy as just popping a site out there. You will need to continue to keep the site updated, make sure the site is content rich, and promote the site as much as possible.

5. Hosting the website has also been another obstacle. We’ve been using shared hosting from EUKHost and although they are very good, our sites have been down probably once a month due to the shared hosting. We’ve even noticed that when this has happened our sites have had the yo yo effect in google so we lost top position for a few days on several occasions.

5. Monitoring and analyzing your websites. It is always good to understand where your traffic is coming from, but also analyze when your site has problems, so use google webmaster tools to check for any problems with pages not found etc.

So what is in the pipeline for Affiliate Project

Well our main goal is leave our day jobs and go full time, so although niche sites do work well and are great for an extra £100-300 a month they can still take a lot of effort and time. Its not as easy as just knocking 100 niche sites out there. Although we will still develop more niches. We’re also going to work on a fewer big sites we’ve got going at the moment. For our next big site, we’ve actually been working closely with another affiliate and details of this will be revealed at a later date.

We will be exploring the use of PPC as want to try and have a mix of SEO & PPC. This will be useful for when sites are not ranking well organically, especially at the beginning. But also for helping to try to get more highly targeted traffic. Currently we’ve only being doing 100% SEO so are hoping we can improve our earnings and learn about PPC and the way it can be used.

Did you also start out when smingle launched his famous most popular thread of A4U? If so then we’d like to hear your story from the last year. Also be good to network with more affiliates and share experiences.