Affiliate Project work with Affiliate Newbie on niche sites
Recently we got a message from Stuart Smale (Smale Media) asking for some help on setting up his product data feeds into his niche websites using PHP and MYSQL. He found us through our How to pull product datafeeds using PHP and MySQL and display into your Webpage post. Since helping Stuart with some basic guidance,he has gone on and very quickly figured out how to do this and now has this running on his site instead of using EasyContentUnits, which although is an great tool to use, isn’t that great for SEO because the free version uses javascript which search engines cannot index.
Between us we’ve also improved my original php script to include some nice new features such as adding in a clickref to help track which products are most popular. Also adding into the script, how to pull in the merchant logos as these aren’t in the datafeeds supplied by the merchants. I was very impressed with how quickly Stuart has come on since he didn’t have this knowledge until recently. In fact Stuart has also spent quite a bit of time looking into pagination and also auto updating his feeds, something on our task list. Stuart has kindly shared these ideas and the code with us so this has been very helpful.
We have made a good contact and look forward to working with Stuart more in the near future. We’ve now added him to our MSN Affiliate Friends and been in regular contact over the last few weeks sharing ideas and opinions. This just goes to show what a good industry Affiliate Marketing can be, you could have friends who are effectively your competition but still share and discuss ideas and help each other out every now and again.
I would also like to mention some of the work Stuart has done on his niche sites. He certainly has a couple of good niches with some high search volumes and I think its only a matter of time and a bit of hard work and he’ll be seeing the rewards for those sites. The first site is children’s shoes and something that people may think will these sell online. Well I think there will be a percentage of people shopping online for most things you wouldn’t usually buy because you can get them cheaper and also use voucher codes. We recently did this with our little girl because we already had her feet measured up, then new the size and went searching online.
Another site Stuart has done and now using the product data feeds with his own database is Larder Fridge which is a really nice simple design, so very easy to use. He’s using pagination as some pages have a lot of products. I do think Stuart has a good eye for design.
Thanks Stuart for getting in contact with us and we hope to see you grow and succeed in Affiliate Marketing. Good luck mate
Affiliate Project keeping up with the times, now available on iphone
As a treat to ourselves and to help us be more mobile with affiliate marketing we have both bought iphones. We have had them about 2 months now and they have been a great asset, checking things like google reader, accounts, email and all this from the comfort of the local pub 
We both wanted iphones anyway and this project was a useful excuse to get them.
As a result of checking our site on the iphones we have now installed onto our theme the iphone plugin making this site easy to read and much more accessible on the iphone. Here is a screen grab (very sexy feature on the iphone) of our site on an iphone.
iphone capture
The plugin we have used is the WPtouch plugin. So all you iphone users, have a look and let us know what you think.
New site launched in Furniture sector for A4U competition
Following on from Paul’s post about the launch of his oak furniture site. I was a little slower in launching my site partly because I chose to design the site using a different wordpress theme. My site is called Oak Dining Sets which is designed to be a one stop shop for oak dinging table and chair sets from the top oak furniture retailers. This site is using data feeds to populate the products from different merchants and different networks soon once I get accepted to more merchants programs.
We only entered the Affiliates4u competition here a few days ago so it was pretty quick to get these sites up. Paul had launched his site oak console tables site a day or 2 before mine so he had a head start. His site was soon indexed and ranking on the 4th page, hoping to climb. Mine was launched soon after and got indexed the same night and was sitting on the 1st page of google. I checked this morning and although the site was already indexed and ranking, its now dropped. I checked Google Webmaster Tools and there aren’t any problems but it does show no urls indexed. I’m hoping this will change soon.
I now have to add more merchants products, continue to add content both on-site and off-site and do lots of back links. The good thing about this competition is we get to swap links with other related sites and it also motivates us to get more niche sites done and makes it interesting and not boring.
Paul and I have a wager on who can make the first £50 in commission. The first to acheive this will get a free beer from the other. This again helps motivate us. Goodluck Paul
We will be updating our progress on here and also on the a4u head to head competition thread.
Affiliate Project enter new site as part of A4u competition
You may have seen our twitter post the other day regarding a competition between myself (Paul) and Gary. We like our little competitions as it helps keeps us focused on getting new sites out there. Gary found a post on A4u regarding a friendly competition they were running and this inspired us to join in and also run a competition between myself and Gary for a free beer to whoever makes £50 commission first.
Basically the competition on A4u is to create a site selling Oak furniture and see who can make the most commission. The first reading will be after 3 months then a reading will be taken each month after that. Have a look at the A4u post here. By joining in this competition we hope to expose ourselves (not literally) to other affiliates and to compare how we are doing with our design and our ability to create good sites. We hope to be able to link up with new people and this will help at future events to network and meet people we have only had dealings with over the internet.
So we came up with two domains, picked one each and set about the design. I took a site which is a one stop resource for Oak Console Tables. My site is now launched and is in the competition. It has launched pretty quickly as my design has been based on a theme that I am really familiar with so the site didn’t take too long to put up. So it is now up and running and we await the results. Lets hope we do well in the A4u competition but more importantly that I win the beer from Gary!
November was a good month for Affiliate Project
Affiliate Project are climbing the ladder to success albeit fairly slowly, but we’ve seen another increase on our month on month earnings. We’ve also seen a big increase on the number of sales. We had approx 200 sales for November. This works out at approx 6-7 sales a day the majority of this has come from our site which is sitting nicely at number 1. Additionally this number 1 site has had a decline in the search volume and traffic to the site has slightly dropped, but our other sites hovering on the front page of Google have been chipping into our escape from the 9-5 pot!!
We are not sure whether this increase in sales has been because of the time of the year, we don’t think our niche sites are that seasonal, in fact our number 1 niche site is more seasonal as its targeted towards more summer holiday type of item. The search volume for this has declined by about 2-3 times and this will pick up in the next few months. We hope to see an increase in the sales early part of next year from this site.
We also are working on promoting our other sites to get them ranking higher and will finish off another couple of niche sites for December, so we can hopefully continue to improve month on month.
How was your November in Affiliate Marketing?
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