Nintendo 3DS
Long time since I’ve posted as been pretty hectic with affiliate stuff and living life. Enjoying it though! I’ve been looking at the new Nintendo 3Ds and it’s options and man it looks to have some great options. My kids all got DSi’s for Christmas and like most parents when the kids are in bed I have a go and have been very impressed. I only have a go to free up some of the options for them so they can get further in the games you understand, yeah right! Looking at the new Nintendo 3Ds it will bring even more functionality to the handheld console market and these gizmo’s aren’t just gaming machines anymore. As well as 3D gaming it will offer a 3D camera, internet capability and other goodies. If you are looking for one then make sure you have a look at the Nintendo 3Ds specs and check out the best price here as well. If you get one let us know what you think.
Happy New Year and Back to Affiliate Marketing
Happy New Year from the team at Affiliate Project. We hope all those Affiliates, Merchants and Networks that follow us and those that we work with every success for 2011. My New Years Resolution is to try and be more positive and try and stress less. Its going to be challenging one to say the least with still having almost 3 jobs (part time this AM mallarky and part time or should I say full time with this crappy office job, then full time dad and husband come 3:45pm when I get home). So if you hear me being negative on this blog (except the comment above about my day job) or on the A4U forum then please do let me know and remind me of my new years resolution, its one that I don’t want to break unlike the other ones, stop drinking during the week – now I have full intentions to cut back, but deep down I know this isn’t going to happen so I’m just not going to commit to that one!!
This is the first post of 2011 on this Blog, which has seen a bit of neglect over the last 6 months or so because we’ve been well busy working on our bigger sites. Our little friend Google seems to be neglecting our big sites by penalising them. They were starting to rank well and get quite a lot of uniques each month. We were seeing a nice upwards trend on our stats graphs and the sales increasing along with the traffic.
2011 will hopefully be our year to leave the day jobs. It’s almost about 2 years since we’ve started and we are a little gutted that we didn’t achieve what we wanted to by now, we’re still keen on doing Affiliate Marketing and building up our business.
We have some good projects coming up which has also been a steep learning curve but ones that will hopefully help with our future projects.
Paul managed to get his wife involved and give up her part time day job, she now runs her own sites and she seems to have got the hang of things pretty quickly. One of her sites is Maternity Belt, something quite targeted and not to big, small enough to get her teeth into things. Not long after that my wife was looking for work and struggling to find a job to fit around the children and our family time, so she also has decided to test the waters and started her own niche site with a little bit of help from myself. Her niche is also in the Maternity clothing sector and sell Maternity Coats from all UK Maternity Shops all from one place. Both sites are data feed driven. This site is still work in progress but already had a sale on new years day 
. We already have a few Maternity Sites so the authority from our existing sites should hopefully help the new ones rank. Good luck to the wives, no doubt they will over take us lol.
So its about February time when the Affiliate Networks organize an Affiliate Meetup in London. No sign of any events yet, but we are looking out for them. If you do go to the events and want to meet up for a chat then please do let us know. We’re happy to meet others in the industry and share stories and ideas.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Just a quick post update to wish all you Affiliates, Merchants and Networks that have been following us, or that we have worked with. The past year has been challenging trying to grow our business. We’ve invested a lot of time, well over 6 months of the year with some bigger sites which are starting to pay off, so we’re hoping to continue growing those in 2011. We now promote over 1000 of UK merchants on most of the major affiliate networks.
We look forward to working with many more merchants, more affiliates to partner with and achieving our results of going full time.
That just leaves me to say have a cracking Christmas and New Year. Best of luck to all you businesses out there and bring on the competition 
Next update on our Blog will be in 2011 and some exciting new projects we plan to launch!
Gutted Missed the A4U event again
The Team at Affiliate Project have been very busy trying to multitask on many projects including our big voucher code site as well as making sure our niches are up to date and trying to maximize on these to bring in more money. Because of project time constraints we couldn’t afford to take the time off to attend the Affiliate Event of the year. Plus its a big outlay for us part affiliates. Maybe one day we’ll go there. I think we may have said last year that we would do our best to attend this years one, but its very difficult for us with full time jobs and families plus doing AM part time.
We sure would have certainly drank a lot and hopefully also learned a lot of Affiliate Marketing. In fact we probably would have got a name for ourselves!
Just to quickly update you. We are still full steam ahead with our big site SlashPrices.co.uk and this is increasing traffic all the time. Its climbing Alexa ranking and we’re seeing a few more voucher code sales. We’ve also started with experimenting with a bit of PPC to bring in a bit more traffic. We know its going to take a while to compete with the big boys. Hopefully we’ll be up there with the top 5 Voucher code sites one day soon.
I’m guessing a lot of other Affiliates are now working on promoting their winter and xmas themed sites for the festive period. We have a couple of sites we’re trying to increase long tail traffic for so hoping for a nice Christmas bonus.
We’re both still really enjoying our Online adventure, even know it has ups and downs.
Anyway back to doing more and more content now for us
Updated Premium Press Voucher Codes
Here are the NEW PremiumPress coupon codes for Oct 2010.
ShopperPress,DirectoryPress, CouponPress, RealtorPress and Classifieds Theme
Coupon Code: “HAPPYBIRTHDAY”
Description: 30% discount off the original price.
Valid for all of October
Enjoy!
CouponPress Discount Code for Wordpress Code Site
CouponPress turns any Wordpress blog into a professional coupon code or voucher code website with lots of coupon site features, in minutes! Includes 20+ coupon website designs, unlimited installations, lifetime free support and upgrades!
SEE BELOW FOR DISCOUNT COUPON CODES
As we are running our own Voucher Code Site and noticed a couple of sites out there using CouponPress. We spent several months developing SlashPrices.co.uk to get all the features, the design how we wanted it, but could we have saved all this hard work with a pre-designed wordpress theme that comes with all or most of the features we wanted for the cost of a little over a couple of man hours. So we have decided to purchase this to use on one of our other sites to see how it does. We’ve seen some of the showcase sites doing well. It can be integrated with Icodes too which is great as its basically a fully blown voucher code site automated. The only thing it will need is some extra unique content and a good amount of promotion.
CouponPress Discount Code
PremiumPress currently have a discount code for a massive 30% off
OFFER: 30% OFF any of the premium press themes
CODE: BABYBOY
EXPIRES: 30th September 2010
Click here to download the CouponPress theme
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.
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