Affiliate Project Team Grow
Affiliate Project has been expanding recently and we’re proud to announce that we have been colaborting with another affiliate on a couple of sites. We have been doing quite a bit of work with Stuart in the last few months on a couple of sites which we hope will take all of us forward.
Stuart has come a long way since he started in Affiliate Marketing back in 2009, about the same time as we did. His website design and development skills are top notch. He has massively improved his database skills has brought a lot to the table and is willing to take on any design challenge. Stuart also shares common interests and is also a family man trying to make a better life for him and his family.
It’s been a pleasure working with you Stu and thanks for all your hard work over the last few months.
Affiliate Project Team Delve into the Discount Code Sector
Here in Affiliate Project HQ, we’ve been putting a lot of our time into developing the next best discount code site. Is this the right decision? Well only time will tell. We do think this is a risk to take in a market that is so competitive but could be a risk that will pay off, plus we’ve learned a lot along the way from doing this project. We’ve improved on our website coding skills, how user experience is important and trying to structure the site for the best user experience. We’ve had lots of talks like ‘to reveal or not to reveal’ (codes that is!) and about how else we can make our voucher code site unique or better than any others out there. Some of these ideas are still under development and we’re keeping these to ourselves until we are ready to launch the additional features that our site will offer.
The challenge will be to keep going at it and competing with the likes of MVC and VoucherCodes.co.uk who have big teams behind them. Trying to rank is going to be a challenge and also managing PPC on potentially tens of thousands of keywords which will be a job in itself. Luckily enough there is 3 of us working on this site.
So I bet you Affiliates and other Voucher Code site owners will want to know what the site is called then. Well here is our baby:
SlashPrices.co.uk – Exclusive Discount Codes, Voucher Codes, Offers and Sales. Some of the most popular codes we’ll be promoting are Comet discount codes, Cloggs discount code, Opodo discount code, Dorothy Perkins discount code and Pizza Express vouchers.
Some key features:
- Updated daily with codes and deals from over 500 merchants and climbing, we’ll hopefully list all merchants with voucher codes/offers in time
- Click to reveal, users can see the code by hovering over the reveal box allowing for the click to be tracked
- Dynamic Search so users can start typing and we’ll drop down a list of the merchants
- Neat redirect page so its clear that visitors are being redirected to the merchant to use the code
- Code changes on click so that the user can see instructions on how to use the code
- Automatic expiring codes/offers when they reach there expiry date. The codes are also then turned grey to make it visible that these are no longer valid
- Clear to see if its a code or offer, can sort by All, Codes, or Deals.
- Category search to find all merchants within specific categories
- Similar merchants when no codes are available for any specific merchant
- Restaurant Codes section
- RSS Feed for each Merchant
- Newsletter Signup to receive the best codes and deals each week
- Blog section with money saving tips, often written from personal experience
- Best Price section so people can find the best price on popular products. Anyone can request a deal either on our Facebook page or from a request a deal section soon to come
We’ve also setup twitter so that anyone can follow us here: http://twitter.com/slashprices
Want to become a fan on Facebook then please follow us for the best discounts on our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/SlashPrices.co.uk
We welcome any feedback good or bad, please leave comments below or contact us if you wish
Revisit old sites, You could double your Affiliate earnings!
The team at Affiliate Project (I look like rodders and Paul looks like Delboy) are constantly busy on new projects, but we don’t want to leave our old sites going stale. As we recently noticed that one of ours sites was affected by a site speed problem, we’ve been reviewing our sites structures, meta stuff for on site SEO optimisation as well as google webmaster tools to see where our site is appearing. Google has not long ago updated the webmaster tools and now the search queries gives you a bit more detail, a little bit like Google analytics. This is very useful data as you can see in a quick snapshot where your site has appeared for so many keyword phrases and also see what impressions your site got. It also gives you the CTR (click through rate). Now I’ve been analysing this data and also looking over the search keywords that are fairly low competition and OK search volume and we’ll now work on improving our search ranking for more keywords by writing more content on site and off site and doing more link building on these keywords. The first thing we need to do is work through a list of those keywords and pick those that are easiest to rank. We reckon we could double our traffic and click through rate, therefore doubling our profit with not too much work. Hopefully we’ll be out of our day jobs sooner that we think. This time next year rodders 
Google Ranking affected by site speed
Not so long ago, Google had announced that website speed would be part of their ranking algorithm. We have recently been affected by this with one of our niche sites. We were in 2nd spot on the first page of Google for some time for our 1 keyword niche domain which gets approx 110,000 exact and 368,000 broad searches in April according to Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I’m not sure if the exact search matters too much when its a single keyword domain! Anyway, we noticed that it had dropped from 2nd spot to nowhere to be seen just the other day so we immediately started looking into what could be wrong to have caused the site to drop. Now this can sometimes be a mission to find out as Google doesn’t exactly tell you whats wrong, you have to dig around. So first thing was to check Google Webmaster Tools to see if there was any errors with our website pages – no errors. Then I checked out the diagnostics section in the speed section, noticed that our sites pages were 100% slower than the majority of websites. Not Great!
This was caused because our site is using our own product database to display the data feeds from several merchants. Now because the site keyword is quite generic there is a massive amount of products to display. This was an older site which was using our old php files which didn’t have pagination so some pages had to wait longer than 1 minute to display all those product images. The solution which we are still working on is to go through all those custom php pages and modify our script to include pagination. This will enable each page to only show say 20 products per page and make the pages load much faster. Something we should have done a while ago.
Now the next challenge will be to convince google to put us back by notifying them that we’ve corrected the problem. Lets see how long it takes to get it back to where it should naturally be.
How to come up with Niche ideas?
How to come up with Niche ideas must be one of those top questions most Affiliate newbies want answering.
Many people will have different ways to find or think about new niche ideas, some will go very targeted and some more generic and work on building on it over time. I guess it boils down to a few things;
Can you make a quick buck from a very targetted popular niche with less time and effort involved?
This comes with its own challenges if you are hoping to rank in google, you will need to do your research here which could take more time than putting the site together. If the niche is too small or you don’t have an interest will it ever rank well if you cannot do the content for the site. Also are the domains for your chosen keywords going to be available.
Can you find a niche that is up and coming such as a pre-release or coming out soon.
1 example I found today was http://www.avatardvd.co.uk, no 1 in google for avatar DVD and has made record sales in the US already selling over 6.7 Million copies so far in only 4 days. I suspect most of these will have been online and pre-orders. Being ahead of the game could make that affiliate site a nice little earner.
Or do you go big and work at a Bigger Site but you may not make you money straight away?
Think you can beat the competition, the big players. Do you have something unique to offer or are you just going to throw up as much content as possible so it ranks and hope you get those clicks through to the merchants.
We here at Affiliate Project are always having meetings and the top topic of discussion is which direction do we take. We’ve only been doing this for over 14 months and have only worked on niche websites. We have learned lots along our journey and brought some good and bad domains, quite a few of our domains are undeveloped because of some of reasons above such as having no interest, too generic, too competitive, not enough time. Try and think outside the box, do your research and try and do something you have an interest in.
How Affiliate Marketing has changed our lifes
Paul and I started Affiliate Marketing just over 1 year ago and we’ve both found that our lives has already started to change. I thought it would be interesting to share this with others and for others to feel free to share their stories on what has changed in their life since taking the move from a typical job into the world of AM.
1. We’re working our butts off every single spare moment we get. We do far more hours work than before. I guess this would be the same for any new start up business. If you want to succeed then you have to put the time and effort in.
2. I get far less sleep. Paul still manages his time better and hits the sack earlier. I’m slightly different as I cannot switch off that easily, plus I have a 6 month old little boy who still likes his milk dream feed.
As we are both still working part time, most of our AM time is in the evenings and with a few odd hours at work. Shh!!!
3. I didn’t use to drink coffee at all. I’m now drinking 2 cups of coffee every day, probably because of the lack of sleep and the fact that Paul and I like to meet a couple of times a day to discuss affiliate project stuff, and the odd dream that one day soon we’ll be out of our day jobs having the meeting on the golf course, where as I think we both know that there will be far more work at that stage. Nice to have these thoughts though.
4. There is so many more rewards and a sense of achievement which motivates us to do more. We do get lots of ups and downs like when we get a google slap or our sites drop in position or the merchants data feeds are just crap, but this only challenges us further to get to the next stage
5. Paul is now keeping the local brewery in business and I’m on first name terms with the lady at my local grocery store. Not sure if this is a good thing or not, but we do tend to drink more beer now.
6. Take aways and convenience foods are becoming a twice weekly event for me because we have limited time with full time jobs, kids to look after and then Affiliate Marketing on Top as well.
7. Our wife’s are getting less attention. I even forgot about our anniversary but it wasn’t the marriage one. It was the anniversary since we got together. That’s what I keep saying though to try and dig myself out of this mess.
8. We both have more ambition, where as before we were clock watching until we could get home and just chill out thinking is this 9-5 job what I’ve got to do for the rest of my working career, feeling stuck in the rat race as changing careers is almost near impossible without having different skills and all that crap that comes with looking for a real job!
9. Everything we buy now is almost always online. I have to look to see if there is a merchant affiliate program and then I’ll even start thinking of new potential niches
10. I’m getting softer as I get older or maybe its the fact that A. I still owe my wife for forgetting her anniversary or B. I know that one day soon I’ll be able to pay for all these extra things. I know this is not a good thing and should live to my earnings rather than more than them and I do try. Trust me my friends know that I’m frugal with my spending!!
I’m sure we could probably go on more and I’m sure in the next year we’ll have a load more to add.
We still wouldn’t want to be doing anything else right now. There is some exciting times ahead for us with a massive site we’ve been working on with another Affiliate we’ve partnered up with. More on this will be announced nearer the time.
How has Affiliate Marketing changed you?
Update on our Affiliate adventure
We thought we would just give our readers a quick update on our progress and what we’ve been doing the last few weeks as we didn’t want our readers thinking we’d given up on Affiliate Marketing. We’d not been able to update this Affiliate blog as much as we like because our main focus has been on developing more niche sites and a couple of bigger sites.
Well its been crazy for us the last few weeks, well in fact since the new year we have been on the go every spare hour we can get. Still we are working part time and hoping to achieve our goal by this time next year and be able to afford to live off our Affiliate earnings to cover our current 9-5 salaries. I would say we are just about on target for achieving this goal. We have seen an increase pretty much every month except for february which was slightly down from January, but that was expected with the January sales.
We have probably about 4-5 more niches which we are promoting and trying to get ranking. We have a new deals site we’ve started along with another Affiliate Stuart Smale as we’ve worked with him in the past. The site is starting to take shape and Stuart has done some great coding. We will give out the domain name when its ready and will be looking for feedback. This will be a good expirement as its very competitive and is a big risk. We suspect we’ll need to use PPC initially. We also have a couple of other bigger niche domains which we will build over the next couple of months too.
In addition to building new niches we’ve been trying to plan our day so that we do mainly content and promotion type work during the day time when we can. Obviously this can be tricky with normal work to do so that we don’t lose our existing jobs. Then in the evenings we do design of the sites and get the new niche sites developed and hopefully looking good. This will also involve getting the data-feeds working using PHP and MYSQL.
Anyway not much juicy stuff to report right now, will try and keep it updated with more juicy stuff in the next coming weeks.
Highs and Lows of Affiliate Marketing
Here at Affiliate Project we seem to have come to a bit of a crossroads. We are doing really well at the moment, January was our best month so far commission wise which is great for us and puts us on a great high, however both Gary and myself realize we need to start taking this project to the next level. So while our niche sites are great and are fulfilling their potential we know that to do this full time as a successful business and to get to our aim of leaving our current jobs and pursuing our dream we need bigger sites.
To be honest this is where the low is coming in at the moment. We are struggling a bit. Each day we sit down and think where are we going and what can we do. We can carry on with creating niche after niche which sure will add to the overall value however the big affiliates all say you need a bigger site. I think this is the stage at which a lot of affiliates might give up. Not us though. We know we can do this, we know it will take hard work and we know it will take time. So hopefully now after a good chat and with some focus we can progress towards our goal of becoming full time affiliates. If you have any advice for us we’d love to hear it.
We try and write this blog from the heart. We know this industry isn’t a quick win or a chance for an easy income. We know it takes hard work and dedication and we have put in so much effort over the last year that we know we can make it a success. Hopefully in a years time we can look back on this point as a turning point to becoming full time affiliate marketers.
On the positive we are attending the Affiliate meet up in London on Thursday up in Canary Wharf. We attended this shortly after we started a year ago and as newbies we didn’t really know what to expect. A year down the line we are looking forward to meeting up with the networks we have been using, meeting some merchants to see if we can promote their products and meeting up with some fellow affiliates to talk shop. Oh and of course not forgetting the free food and drink and the chance for Gary and I to enjoy a rare night off. We are not expecting much work to be done on Friday!
Welcome to 2010. Hoping for good things from Affiliate Project
Well the clock has ticked over to a new year. Wow where did 2009 go? We have come on leaps and bounds since we started this project back in February 2009. We are looking forward to writing an update on our first anniversary of the project at the beginning of February so we will write more on our thoughts on our first year then.
Meanwhile just thought we’d wish everyone a happy New Year and share a few of our aims for 2010 and our year ahead. We are going to keep going with some more niches to increase our income and hopefully bring us further along the road towards our goal of going full time. We also realize we can’t go full time on niches alone so have a couple of ideas up our sleeves for some bigger sites. So we will be working on these as well.
We are looking forward to meeting more and more affiliates and are already forming some great partnerships and friendships within the industry so we look forward to meeting more people and making some more contacts. We also hope to meet some of you readers in the flesh and maybe share a beer or two over the coming year as its nice to put a face to a name. We are looking at attending an affiliate event in February in London so hope to meet some of you there. We are also looking to attend the A4u expo in London in the Autumn as this will also help us and enable us to see how far we have come since we first started out.
We also hope to expand our skills, which to be honest we are doing all the time. We may look at exploring PPC and some other areas we haven’t yet explored. So while there will be a fuller post on our achievements in the past year in February we hope this will let you know some of our plans.
All the best for 2010. May it bring you all you want.
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
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