At Christmas my wife gave up her job working for what was minimum wage in an effort to have a crack at this affiliate marketing lark that I keep banging on about. With the opportunities that are out there we thought it was worth her having a go as if she can replace her income and work the hours she needs to with the added bonus of still being able to pick the kids up from school and have school holidays then we thought it was worth the temporary drop in income while she gets up to speed. Well I have to day I am very proud of the huge effort she has put in. She now created her own websites, can add product feeds and has set herself up a nice portfolio of sites that are both interesting to her and have the potential to earn. The recent addition to the portfolio is her high tops site. I think this site looks great already and she is busy adding more and more content to make it a true resource for those looking for high tops online. Being an avid summer wearer of Converse high tops myself she already has her first customer.

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News has come in that Digital Window has acquired Perfiliate Ltd, based in Newcastle. Perfiliate Ltd operate one of the leading networks called Buy.at and by bringing this on board Digital Window now form Britain’s largest performance based marketing group.

We are excited by this news as we use both these networks and have a good relationship with both. We will be interested to see what happens especially with Affiliate Window’s use of the Darwin profile and Shopwindow.

In other news for us we hainve had a solid February and although not quite as good as January was still our 2nd best month ever despite being shorter than Jan. We now have more sites earning which is great and we are busy improving these sites and getting them ranking. We have a couple of big projects on the go as well which are taking off so we hope for good things from them.

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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.

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I recently discovered this cool new tool called Tynt Insight which basically tracks who is copying your content from your site. This is being used by many big sites to protect their content. The Daily Mail are even using this to reward them for creating the content they get a free link back to their site or the page where the content originated from.

The way this works is you copy a simple bit of javascript code and add this to your website. This javascript simply adds a attribution link to your page where the content was copied from. This has many benefits, some of which includes:

• See what content is being copied, this helps you know what content on your site is interesting and popular with real-time reporting
• More traffic and more page views as you’ll attract other visitors from those links back to your site
• Better Search ranking because you’ll have more referral links to your site
• Improved Content Visibility with a useful auto tweet tool

Apparently some sites are getting over 1000 links back to their site each day.

Have any other Affiliates used Tynt Insight? Feel free to test this out by copying the content of this article and paste this into your blog site

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Now this is an event we would love to attend. The Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas and looks a great event. This three day conference includes an exhibit hall with affiliate merchants, vendors, and networks, as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts. It would be interesting to find out about the American market and meet some US affiliates, networks and merchants. Maybe one year when we have more experience we can take our families out for the break and enjoy this event. If you are going let us know as we would be interested to hear from you. Our aim at the moment is to attend the A4uexpo next year in London. This also looked a great event last year.

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This being our first year as affiliates we may have missed the boat for Christmas sites, but it seems other affiliates are reaping the rewards. Christmas is a great time for affiliates and if you can catch on early to that idea for a site that will have the edge on the leading products for Christmas it can be a rewarding time of year. This is something we will look at more closely for next year. Oh well seems like Santa may not visit these two affiliates, well not this year anyway.

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We’ve just signed up to go to our first affiliate event. It’s being held in London on March 26th. We found out about it on a affiliates4u forum and we look forward to meeting like minded people and others in the industry. We are hoping that we will have our first couple of sites up and running by then, hopefully making some money so we will feel like real affiliates. If you are going as well then let us know and we hope to see you there, if not, why not sign up. Details on affiliates4u which is listed in our blogroll.

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A study carried out by Econsultancy in association with Affiliate Window and backed by Affiliates4U have just released this 2009 Affiliate Census report.

More than 1000 affiliates completed this survey. The report is essential reading for those new to affiliate marketing and even good reading for existing affiliates who may need to improve on how the do things, such as which linking methods is most common and more interesting statistics about how much revenue other affiliates are making for the merchants.

True content was cited as the most important method for affiliate marketing amongst those surveyed. 36% of affiliates chose this as most important category for generating revenue.

Majority of affiliates (46%) are part-time affiliates with 34% being full time. Only 20% are hobbyists.

Credit crunch doesn’t seem to be putting affiliates off as 55% see the economic crisis as an opportunity, 30% see this as a threat to there affiliate business.

Download the report here http://econsultancy.com/reports/affiliate-census and find out more about the average affiliate including average time spent on affiliate marketing, revenue generated, volume and traffic and much more.

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