Affiliate Project UK joined Technorati Blog community
Day 1 and we are ranked at number 4,758,080. After only 5 minutes, our blog site is joined to this community and I can already see some of our latest posts. Hopefully with more blogging to our site and automatic updates of our posts, we can improve our ranking, and hopefully this will help drive more traffic to our site.
Automatic updates of your sites blog posts can be updated to Technorati through the update services of your wordpress writing settings. Add in http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping to the update services.
Feel free to join our blog at Technorait.com.
Affiliate Project UK – Top on Google – Ranked number 1
Day 9 for Affiliate Project and we are ranked number 1 in Google search engine for both the entire web search and for uk search. This is for the broad keyword search affiliate project. We are really happy with the results. According to Google Adwords Tool we can hopefully expect to get approx 5,400 hits per month on those keywords searches, providing we stay at the top and people decide our site is interesting enough to want to click through to.
Here is proof:
What is a blog and what’s all the craze about blogging?
- What is a Blog
A Blog is a chronologically ordered series of Web site updates, much like a diary.
A blog can be many things, a diary, a review site, a photo gallery and even a marketing tool.
Blogs are good at generating high search engine rankings. This is because your content is fresh and current. This is key for any blog site that wants to attract new visits and retain existing bloggers. Search engines give a priority to web pages that have been updated recently or has new content on the keywords being searched. A better search engine ranking means more visitors, therefore more readers and comments. This could provide a popular blog site or a review site to come back to time and time again.
There are millions of blog sites around the world and according Wikipedia, the main blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs as of December 2007.
Many people use blog sites to document changes in their life, this can be useful to share these personal details with others, like friends or family that you may not see that often.
An example site is Gizmondo.com, basically a gadget guide that brings out the nerds in many of us!!
- What is a Blogger
A blogger is the person or people who are writing the blog posts or a user that responds to the blog post/s.
- What is blogging
Blogging is a way of sharing thoughts and ideas with others. It makes the internet a better place.
Blogging and social network sites are the craze at the moment, even celebrities use these sites as a community to network with others. Businesses also use blogging to promote and build their business.
Heard about twitter, a free micro-blogging site that allows people to stay connected in real-time. Users can display updates to their network of friends via text-based posts via the Twitter website, RSS feeds, SMS text messages or through applications such as Facebook, Feedalizr, TwitterMobile, Tweetie, Twinkle and a few more.
Twitter had over 5 million visitors in September 2008 and could be a good network tool for Affiliate Marketers.
According to The Guardian there are many celebrities that are using Twitter, as this is a very popular way to communicate with your friends.
Blog sites can also make money, especially if it’s a popular invaluable resource.
The most common way to earn money from your site is from advertising. Google Adsense is a popular way to include ads to your web page. These ads can be matched to your blog content and therefore be of interest to your readers. Basically you get paid a refferal fee each time a visitor clicks on an of these ads.
Another way to make money from your blog would be from affiliate links. An example would be, a blogger is blogging about website design. He can look for popular website design software, templates, themes or anything related to website design and try and locate an affiliate program that might offer a reward (referral fee) for generating and referring business to the end merchant, so effectively the merchant sells more and the affiliate makes a commission for generating more business. Win win all-round.
Companies (merchants) have Marketing departments and they tend to have quite large marketing budgets and they may see this as a great way to drum up interest in their products and services. They use this marketing model to build up their business or promote their products. Most often they use an Affiliate network and pay only on performance, so its a risk free marketing.
A blog site provides a good means for the Customers to see others people using, commenting or reviewing products or services.
For anyone new to blogging, I would definately recommend reading the following books – Blogging for dummies and ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income.
High profile celebrities using twitter social networking site
I heard the other day on the radio about High profile celebrities using twitter, a micro-blog site used to stay in touch with peoples day to day updates, whether it be there thoughts or something they’ve done during the day. Basically another social network site like Facebook and Myspace but more about blogging and what are you doing…
As a newbie to affiliate marketing, I’m constantly thinking about ways to improve our affiliate project site and build it up to be a useful resource for other affiliate newbies and affiliate marketers. I’ve stumbled upon other affiliate blog sites that have twitter and digg this links on their posts, so wanted to learn more about it as I can see this as a useful resource for networking.
I’m currently reading Blogging for Dummies and will research this more. Once I have a better understanding I will post more up on the social networking and blogging categories on this site. Check back here for more in the next few days.
Blogging for Dummies
This book provides a useful resource for all kinds of bloggers, whether you’re blogging about a hobby or a someone doing it for a business. Blogging For Dummies, 2nd Edition gives you all the basics so you can get a good start. And if you’ve been around the blog a few times and want to advance to the next level, Blogging For Dummies, 2nd Edition even takes a look at podcasting and videoblogging.
The author’s advice in the Dummies series is aimed at getting you up and running as quickly as possible. The book explains what blogs are and what they are not. It also explains the different types of blogs, and how and why they are different from websites. The good thing is that the author looks at all the options and draws up comparison charts which show the features, cost, and options offered by various providers and software programs. This includes popular features such as the ability to display adverts and upload photos. It also gives tips on blogging and how to get the most out of your blog.
Google Adsense – A first attempt
We have been accepted to Google Adsense and here is our first post using them. What do you think? Please let us know your feedback. Do they work? Do they look ok? We will continue to play around with the code and positioning to see how they look in various formats so feedback is appreciated.
Google Adsense – How to make money from your blog site
As well as blogging our progress we also want to use this blog to try out various tools which we can then use in our future websites. One of the tools we have tried out is the Amazon affiliate program and an article will be appearing on this soon.
Another tool we are trying out is Google AdSense. AdSense is run by Google. Website owners can sign up for AdSense to enable text, image, and video advertisements on their websites. The advertisements are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. So if someone visits your site and clicks on a Google AdSense advertisement the website owner will receive an amount based on the cost per click.
We have applied for the account and are awaiting verification from Google. This will enable us to see if Google AdSense is right for this site, how it works, how we position the ads and the relevance of the ads related to the posts we add. As soon as we receive the go ahead from Google we will try adding some ads and see how they look. Once they appear please let us know what you think.
Where to next for Affiliate Project…
This site is now up and running and becoming more and more established. We will be adding posts and more content as our project progresses so please keep coming back to see how we are getting on.
So, what are the next steps to progress the project? Well now we have this blog to track the project and document our progression in affiliate marketing we now want to create some web sites targeting some niche markets to start earning from affiliate marketing.
We have come up with our first web site idea and over the next few weeks will be busy working to get that up and running. Watch this space….
How we have used Wordpress so far
We researched about how to create our blog and the best package to use. We came up with Wordpress. I had been following other people’s personal blogs which were written using Wordpress and I liked the feel of them. Looking into Wordpress further it seemed that its ease of use suited web design beginners like us to create a blog fairly easily using a good standard of tools.
So we then looked at using and installing Wordpress. The installation was straight forward with a good step by step guide on the Wordpress website which can be found here
Wordpress comes with a nice dashboard which really makes designing and managing the website straight forward.
We had a look at some themes and decided on the layout we wanted. We wanted a 3 column layout. We had a look at lots of themes that we could customize to suit our blog. We came across the Revolution website which has lots of great themes to use at a great price.
As well as the main blog theme two components of Wordpress have increased the speed at which were able to get our blog up and running and to have the look we wanted. Firstly plugins have been very useful to add functionality to our website with ease. They can be used to do almost anything you can imagine with Wordpress. Many people have designed and written plugins for Wordpress. Some plugins we have used are the Popular Posts plugin and the SEO plugin both of which aid the website development to do what we want it to easier and to make is better content wise. To have a look at some plugins available to Wordpress click here
Secondly we have used widgets. Widgets are standard sets of code to create items you can put in your WordPress blog’s sidebar without needing the knowledge on how to edit a web page. Initially we were trying to modify php code to do things like add Categories and other sections to the sidebar but with widgets they give you the code to do this and through the widgets dashboard option you can modify them to appear how you want without having to modify code. Again for a beginner this is a very useful tool.
In time we hope to create some “How to …” guides such as “How to install”, “How to use plugins” so please keep coming back for updates.
Affiliate Project UK Lauch Day – Ranked #1
We decided the site is about ready to index into Google’s search engine. We still need to add more content to the site.
A few hours later and we are in position number 5 for both affiliate project (broad match) and “affiliate project” (exact match) searches on the web out of a total 11,700,000. Our Site is also number 1 out of 197,000 pages from the UK. We are really impressed with the results, especially as this was our first website with no web design experience between us.
I think this is helped by a few factors;
- Our domain name is very strong for those chosen keywords searched.
- We have installed one of the most popular wordpress plugins called All in One SEO Pack. We customised the SEO plugin options with some strong keywords and a strong description.
- Research from reading Search Enginer Optimization: An hour a day helped decide on popular keywords and lots of tips on Search Engine Optimization. See our Recommended Reads for more books we’d strongly suggest you read.
- We tried to focus on strong keywords, based on Google’s Adword keyword Tool.
According to Google Adwords Keyword Tool, the broad match for affiliate project shows an approximate average monthly number of search queries of 5,400 per month.
The exact match for this keyword in quotes “affiliate project” shows only 91 searches per month.
We will monitor our Website statistics to see how many visitors and traffic we get to our site over the next few weeks and report back on our findings.
We hope to improve our ranking to get to the number 1 spot and hopefully maintain top 5 position with a mixture of more site optimization, additional appealing content and perhaps lots of blogging or networking on related sites.
Please note, at this stage we haven’t even used Google Adsense ads to our site. This was purely site content and SEO.
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