Affiliate Project gets better at SQL
This affiliate business is a steep learning curve and this is great. We are not afraid of learning. During our 6 month journey so far we have learnt many things a few of which are Web Design, SEO and pulling data feeds but one of area we are recently really improving our knowledge in is SQL.
With the sites that we are currently doing we are mainly using product feeds and we often get these from different merchants and each merchant has their own way of doing their feeds. So we are getting better and better and pulling the right data out of these feeds and manipulating it in the way we need to to make sure our sites are displaying the best selection of products and the right products for the pages the customers are looking at. This involves using quite complex SELECT statements with a variety of arguments, joining table outputs together and then getting results on the joined information.
Both Gary and I have found this really interesting. SQL is a great tool and thinking it through in your mind and on paper about how to get the correct information out of a database and into tables and displayed on the web page is both an interesting and challenging task.
Google Docs – a useful tool for us
If you regularly read this blog you will know there are two of us on this project. We write lots and lots of documentation that we need to both access as at the moment we use Google Docs to do this. This is a great tool as we can both access and change documents at the same time, and even msg each other while we are doing so through google docs. What tools do you other affiliates use to store and share your documentation? Would be interested to know if there are better ways of doing this but for now Google Docs is great for our needs as remote affiliates.
Maternity Swimwear site yo-yoing on Google
We recently had a problem with one of our sites, Maternity Swimwear. After being at number 1 on google for the main search term the site disappeared. Then after a couple of days it came back again, at number 1. Very confusing. We looked and thought we had discovered some penalties and some problems with the robots.txt file and while the site came back it soon disappeared again. We were stumped. It then got a bit stranger whereby the site would be at number 1 in the morning and gone in the afternoon. We researched this, asked some people on forums and then Gary found the answer. Our site was “yo-yoing”. This is the term used to describe a site that behaves in the way our site was.
So what causes it and how did we resolve it. Well the main cause can be too many internal links on the home page. So Google looks at these as over linking and penalises the site. We resolve this by removing some of these as to be honest, without really realising it we did have a lot of the same links to our categories on the home page.
I then setup a page per merchant. There were three reasons for doing this, one to add internal links to these pages, secondly to add more content and pages to our site and thirdly to actually provide a better resource to the customer so they could view all products from a particular merchant.
We changed the footer information to have more text rather than just internal links.
After a few days our site re-appeared again but this time further down the page on the 1st page of Google, about 7th or 8th. While we weren’t at number 1 our site seemed to settle and stopped yo-yoing. then after about a week our site climbed back to number 1, now on organic content rather than the number of internal links on the home page and has stayed in that position for a good while now. So maternity swimwear is back earning again and to be honest earning quite well. We are on track to meet last months earnings even with the site not being on the 1st page for a few days.
New niche site launching – www.maternityunderwear.org.uk
We’ve done quite well for maternity swimwear so we thought as we had the design template and knew the market a bit should we maybe do some more niches in this area. We had a look and have decided to try a site for maternity underwear. We have been busy designing it and while we haven’t applied to all the merchants yet the site is shaping up nicely. It is pretty much ready to launch and we will add more merchants as we apply to them and they reply.
This new site is offering more challenges as we are re-working the way we use datafeeds and pull information out of different tables. More learning for us but that is what we enjoy.
It’s been quite good to have a theme and template there already although it has actually required quite a lot of tweaking to fit the new site. Have a look and let us know what you think. We’ll keep you updated on our progress.
Affiliate Project provides advice and assistance to Affiliate newbie
Being an Affiliate for almost 6 months now, do we qualify to help other newbies?
Well we’ve learned so much in that short space of time and its all fresh in our minds, so we think we can offer a certain amount of advice from what we have learned along our journey.
Our newbie in Question is Simon, a former colleague who is also technically savvy so didn’t really need a lot of explaining to tell him how things worked.
He has decided for his first niche site – Kettlebells. An up and coming trend in the fitness industry. This niche is maybe slightly more competitive than some might think especially for someone just starting out. Targeting only 1 keyword for the product itself as well as some long tail keywords for specific products, this will be a challenge, but one which could be a worthwhile investment.
Lets look at the competition:
There are approx 40,800 search results on Google with Kettlebells in the title.
1st and 2nd spot is taken up by 2 sites with strong keyword usage, with the keyword in the title, description meta tags and the domain name.
No 1 spot is kettlebells.co.uk and has a great domain name for that keyword. It has approx 700 backlinks and is approx 6 years old so may be hard to beat that position.
As part of our journey and interest in Affiliate marketing, we want to be successful and become SEO experts. Helping Simon and hopefully getting his site to the top 3 on Google will prove how much we’ve learnt and how much we may still have to learn.
Good luck Simon on you adventure.
Affiliate Project announces launch of new travel related site
One of our recent Projects Newcastle Airport Parking has been launched. This seems like quite a competitive market to tackle, but with a little bit of effort and lots of good link exchanges we feel we can rank this well.
Why did we choose this as our next project?
We wanted to go for a slightly more competitive site idea to challenge ourselves and also we saw that this could have more earning potential. Our time is limited as we can only spend about 2 hours a day at the moment to work on our projects, so if we can bring in more money then this will help us towards our goals which will be to do this full time.
Our research showed that some of the top ranking sites didn’t have too many back links using Newcastle Airport Parking with the anchor text. So with a bit of work doing content writing, keeping the site up to date and fresh, also trying to get some good links we may be able to rank well.
Newcastle Airport Parking currently gets approx 12,100 exact searches a month according to Google Keyword Tool so if we can get 30-40% of this volume come to our site, then a even a small percentage of those visitors book parking, hotels or lounges, this could be a nice little earner.
This project is targeted towards a service that people will buy mostly online, so I think the conversion rate could be quite good. Generally if people are looking for airport parking, then they are not looking for information so should be looking to book and find the best prices.
Another advantage of doing this type of site compared to a product niche type site is not having to update data feeds. The site uses an search api supplied from the merchant.
As of today Wednesday 5th August, the site ranks on the 16th page. Can we achieve page 1, top 3 position. Only time and effort will tell
Wish us luck 
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