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
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.
Free links to your site when people cut and paste your content using Tynt Insight
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
Google dropped my site again :(
UPDATE: Site back at number 1 as of today 27th Oct 2009, was it something I did?!?!? very strange
Google can be both your best friend and your worst enemy at times. Today it’s the latter. We have a site maternity swimwear which has been ranking at no 1 for well over 2 months now. We had some problems before with the ranking of this site, and what appeared to be a yo-yo effect. We have spent a lot of time trying to make sure the site was developed according to Google’s guidelines.
We haven’t had any recent major changes to the site so this leaves us really confused as what could be causing the issue. The site is being updated on a regular basis for fresh content. My thoughts are its possibly due to either of the following:
- Back links to our site may have dropped, I did notice a couple of hundred back links from 1 site to our site no longer there
- Back links from this site (which has now been removed in an attempt to fix the problem) Maybe these links although all one way aren’t relevant. Obviously this will reduce the number of links but will try to focus on more organic relevant links. I know I have added a link back from this post but couldn’t resist as this will be a PR2 link, so even if it helps initially, at least will get us some more sales until we get more relevant back links.
- Google crawled our site and found 404 pages, possibly due to our Web host (EUKHOST) having problems yet again. We did notice that some of these page URLs had been added to our robots.txt file, thanks for doing this Google.
This is somewhat frustrating when this happens, especially because the site is generating quite a lot of sales. If we were full time and this was happening across several sites, then our earnings could fluctuate and would not be a good business.
Plans for the future going forward is to pick ourselves up and try and establish no 1 position again through more relevant backlinks, maintain updating the content such as offers to the site and also look into dedicated hosting in the near future. Additionally we’ll be looking at developing sites that don’t necessarily rely on SEO such as membership/community sites.
A4U Expo been and gone, Affiliate Project Duo Gutted we couldn’t attend
Myself and Paul really wanted to attend our first big affiliate event. The event of the year in the world of Affiliate Marketing. The A4U Expo.
We’ve heard a lot about how important the event can be as there is so much information and tips many newbie affiliates and even old timers learn and take something valuable from the event, and you’d hope so given that the cost of the event is around £300.
Unfortunately I couldn’t make the commitment due to my wife being heavily pregnant and about to drop any day now, and my Affiliate Partner in crime wasn’t able to get the time off work. However we will hopefully be able to attend the A4U Expo in London as full timers next year.
If anyone did go let us know what it was like, the top 3 things they got out of it. Also like to hear how smashed you got
Another Project niche site launched – Ladiespjs.co.uk
Paul beat me to the post with launching his new niche clothing related site sleepwear.org.uk. A nice one word keyword domain which we hope to do quite well with. We have decided to continue with some clothes related sites as they have been providing a regular little earner and its nice to see those alerts every day when we get our clicks convert into commission.
So Paul and I decided to take another site each and aim to launch them within a week. So my site is ladiespjs.co.uk, another nice domain name, however gets less searches according to Google Webmaster Tools. This site like our other sites basically lists all ladies pyjamas, ladies nighties and ladies dressing gowns from the leading retailers online under 1 site. We’ve found this works well and seems to convert well for us more importantly.
We’ve used a template for the design, same logo design and also similar mysql statements to pull out the products we want. We have now created the databases and feeds so that they are easier to automate.
We researched the competition and think we should be able to rank well for these sites. Like most of our sites, we’ve managed to get on the first page, if not in the top 3 positions of google. So Niche sites can provide a nice supplemented income providing you research them well and configure your site design and meta tags correctly.
We’ll update this blog with more info on how we are doing with these 2 new niche sites, how they are ranking in Google and more importantly, and more importantly are they making us more money and generating more sales to our regular merchants.
Affiliate Project duo loves Beer!!
Another project for us almost complete – UKBeerFridges.co.uk.
Most of us love our beer and wine and both Paul and myself find that we tend to have more beer now that we are doing Affiliate Marketing part time than before we started in AM. You get home from work, and open the fridge to get a nice cold beer. It helps you chill out and unwind from a fairly hard day at the 9-5 job. Now I’m sure some people will say this is probably going to have a negative impact on the quality of work we do, maybe it does, but it definately helps unwind.
As we both love our beer so much we decided why not do a niche site listing the best buy beer fridge, mini beer fridge, beer fridges. So anyone got a party for xmas, birthday, running out of space in their current fridge or cannot think of a great gift for their partners, then we’d recommend the husky beer fridge. They also do some well cool leather chairs with beer fridges built in.
Search Engine Optimization – Backlinks and Link Building Guide by Affiliate Project
We have followed the below guide and have had huge success in Search Engine Optimization. We hope this helps others rank well.
Introduction to Backlinks and Link Building
Backlinks and Link Building is a very important factor for ranking well in search engines. The search engines robots scan all indexed sites billions of times a day.
The algorithms compute how many links and the value of those links back to each site. Google will rank your site well if you have backlinks from quality and relevant sites back to your site. They will determine the authority of those sites and the link back to your site.
In simple terms, you will rank well if you have a lot of quality Web sites that link to your site for those keywords based on anchor text links.
Anchor text links is the text you link the address to. So an example is when you see Click here, this is the text but it will be associated to a web address.
Check out the Competition
The first step to building links back to your website is to research the competition and how they are ranking well. Find your keywords that you want to target, see who are listed in the top 3 spots and then evaluate their backlinks using the seo tools below.
Because search engines value the quality of those incoming links, you should then go through the competitions links and try and partner with the same websites.
SEO Tools to Check the Competition
I’d recommend looking for an SEO tool that will check what backlinks the competition has. We have used SEO Spyglass from link-assistant.com. This software is a paid for software but well worth the money. Starting from around $99. You can also use the free version but it does have some limitations. Still the free version can be very useful in finding how many backlinks, the quality of those links via link popularity, anchor text keywords used, number in links, age of site and much more.
Another free tool is Yahoos Site Explorer. This is a very fast tool but is very basic, however it will give you a good idea if its going to be easy or difficult to rank well against your competition. For example if you enter a competitors website and run the search, you could potentially find that they have thousands of links back to their site. This could take a very long time to gain that amount of links unless you are paying for links.
Google does also have a tool, again very basic but it doesn’t seem as up to date as Yahoo. This is simply run by typing link: url of website in the search box.
Another great tool is the SEO for firefox by Aaron Wall from SEObook.com. This firefox plugin will allow you to see in your search results quite detailed information about each result which includes pagerank, age, incoming links and loads more.
Link Partners
Once you have analyzed the competition, you will be able to check out the potential link partners and evaluate the quality of those links. The age of the domain of the potential link partner is an important factor. Google will treat an older domain with a higher priority than a domain that has only been registered recently.
Try and acquire links from domains with .edu and .gov top level domain extensions. Search engines know that these education and government sites are much less likely to link to a low quality site. Also the web was started as a research and education resource so these sites will most likely have been around the longest.
Focus on links from pages that already rank well. If a page has a page rank of 0 or 1 then its likely to be a fairly new page. Additionaly try and get your link placed on a page with has unique and relevant content.
Try and think ‘Quality and not Quantity‘ when link building.
If you have 10 Quality links and 100 low quality links you are likely to rank better, depending on the value of each link. Follow this tip and it will hopefully save time when trying to do any link building campaigns.
Web Directories
Another method of link building is to get one way links from Web Directories. There are many of them out there and some are free and some are paid for directories.
A Web Directory is just a site which is a large page link database categorised.
Some useful Web directories are:
Yahoo – Not free, but could be a worthwhile link
DMOZ – aka Open Directory Project is one of the oldest directories on the Web, you can submit your site for free.
BOTW – aka Best of the Web, another very old site, been around since 1994. This is free for 60 days but after this time will cost you a small fee but could be well worth it
Try and focus on Web Directories that have been around for years and have a good PageRank.
Article Sites
The preferred method of link building over Web Directories is by submitting articles to Article sites. This will allow you to write the content so that its related to the specific theme of your site.
Some useful Article Sites are:
Ezinearticles.com – been around since 1999
Goarticles.com – been around since 2001
ArticleBase.com – not been around as long, since 2005, but has a good ranking
Blogs and Forums
Get networking with communities such as blogs and forums as these often allow you to post a link back to your site.
You can find related blogs by using Googles blogsearch http://blogsearch.google.com.
Another useful tool from Google is the Google alerts. you can set-up alerts for certain keywords and get results e-mailed to you. This is great for being ahead of the game and you can either make articles or post of forums/blogs with some of the results found. This is great for targetting someone either writing content about that theme based on the keywords or possibly even posting a question about where to buy a product that you might offer.
Try and make sure when you post comments onto blogs or forums to make them useful otherwise your link may not be added.
One Way Links
Search Engines value one way links very highly especially if the one way link comes from a authority site and that the link is relevant to your site.
You can contant Webmasters directly asking for a link. This can be time consuming without much response as it will take time out of their day to review your site to see if they would like to add your link. They may even request a link back, but it would be preferred if you can get a one way link.
If you can be sincere when you ask for the link, maybe comment on there site or an article they have done, or even if you spot a mistake on the site, then you are building some trust.
There are many ways you can try and obtain one way links. If you are offering help for someone, such as free advice. You will see here a thread on Affiliates4u forum where this example has paid off – help and advice for newbies who need a kick up the backside in 2009.
If anyone has any other methods or recommendations that could help other affiliates, please comment below.
If anyone would like to offer a backlink or add our site to their blogroll to say thanks for this post, then it would be greatly appreciated.
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