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We’ve been revisiting some old niches recently and have realized they have gotten a bit out of date, feeds need re-doing as products have disappeared and new products are available, some merchants have been removed and some merchants have moved networks.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 
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