Affiliate Project have been improving month on month and August was no exception. We continued to grow our sales figures and our earnings also keep creeping up. So we had a good month overall consider we both had time off too, with Paul spending time with family going camping and watching hot air balloons etc and me celebrating my birthday and a mates stag do. Its good to spend time off the project to try and balance everything.

September has started a little slow for us, not sure about any one else, but this isn’t too much of a surprise to us as some of our sites peak in the summer months. Also schools going back parents and families aren’t spending as much, well that is our thoughts as its certainly the same for us, being parents and all. Roll on Xmas. Speaking of which its only 108 days left until Christmas so hopefully we’ll do well with some of our sites over the festive period. Now do we knock out a Christmas niche site or focus on building up pages and ranking some of our product related niches that would be popular that time of the year. It’s not that long away so worth thinking about it now.

We have also seen some of our other more recent niche sites climb in the ranking and now a few more ranking in no 1 spot on Google for quite a few different search terms which is always nice to see. Hopefully this will help make up for some of the dips in our seasonal niches.

Our UK Deals site is slowly creeping up the ranking and we’re starting to see more regular sales and also ranking on some long tail searches. This will take a lot longer before we start to really compete with the hundreds of other sites, but we have quite a few big things going on which should help. Watch this space!

This month we’ll be exploring PPC adwords for the first time so if anyone has any good tips or articles then feel free to comment below.

Anyway just wanted to quickly update our readers on how we are doing.

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I’ve recently had some time off and a mates Stag do which was such a laugh seeing some old mates and the stag dressed up as Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Brüno. It was nice time off Affiliate Stuff to clear my head and take a break, but it had me thinking of my family lots because I was missing my little kiddies and my wife. It also made me think about my work life balance.

When I came home to see my daughter getting all teary because I came home (she thought I wasn’t coming back) was so emotional and made me think that I don’t want her to get upset and miss her daddy again, so I’ve made up my mind that I never want to work away from home or work long hours. Now I know Affiliate Marketing can involve a lot of hours but at least at the moment these hours are fitted around family life.

With the A4U expo event in London coming up, I was also thinking would it be good to go, but being away from home for another 3 days and also the expense at £399+vat I think I will give it a miss. I’m sure loads of Affiliates will say its well worth it. I’ve got to think about my family first and my children’s inheritance (thanks theo paphitis for this phrase!)

Affiliate Marketing can get addictive and I’ve seen quite a few Affiliate Blogs and Affiliates on A4U up at all hours but I don’t think it has to be like this. Look at Kirsty and John Lamerton going part time and outsourcing work.

Our goal is still the same and we are getting closer every day to where we want to be, which is earning enough money to cover our current full time incomes but allowing the flexibility to spend more time with the family. We’ll face more challengers along the way I’m sure but its all good.

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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.

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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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Affiliate Project are proud to announce a new member of our team. My wife, Debbie has been helping us out for about a month now. Our wives know how keen we are to do this full time and are helping in any way they can. Debbie is very good with words and writing up content, coming from a marketing background, so has agreed to help us keep our sites up to date with new fresh content. She is working hard adding more articles to our site and also taken over banner ad management leaving us to focus on design updates and potential new projects.

We think she has done an amazing job so far and really added value to our sites. Not only is she adding content she is also getting our arses in gear by creating us task lists when she notices how things can be improved or if any data feeds are out of date. The jury is still out on whether this is a good or bad thing as our task list only ever seems to grow, even when we tick tasks off. No seriously it is a good thing as it’s great to have someone constantly reviewing our sites and making sure they are kept up to date and keeping us on the ball with our older sites.

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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.

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Another quick niche done. Who’d of thought I’d be writing about pregnancy pillows! I know that any affiliate worth their salt will tell you to make sure you are creating sites in an area of interest. So why would we, two males create a site about pregnancy pillows. Well there are a couple of reasons for this. One we think it could be a niche we could rank for but two we actually do have first hand experience in them. When my wife was expecting our first child she saw these and said she needed one, me being a typical bloke thought really, aren’t they a bit of a waste and a gimmick to get you to buy more pregnancy related stuff. How wrong was I.

My wife duly went ahead and bought a pregnancy pillow and I hold my hands up and admit it was one of the best purchases made while she was pregnant. It helped make sure she got a half decent nights sleep, which in turn meant she was a little less grumpy during the day, which meant I got less stick as well. Don’t worry the wife has read this post before I posted it and agreed with every word so I will not get a kick up the backside for saying that.

They are also useful for breast feeding and helping babies learn to sit up so I have to admit that actually these pregnancy pillows are indeed worth the money, hence why I feel we can create a site on them with some knowledge on the matter. So there you go, our pregnancy pillow site is launched and will have more and more merchants added to it over time. Let’s hope we see a bit of a return and top up our full time pot.

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Affiliate Project and Google have a Love/Hate relationship. Maybe we’ve not figured out the exact formula for ranking sites yet as we’ve had success in some areas but not in others. I’m sure Google keep moving the goal posts too!

We do have many sites ranking on the front page for the domain keywords and some are ranking for many keywords, but these are sites that we’ve worked on promoting more. So it is true when Affiliate Peeps say content is king.

Today we noticed a niche that was started about 1 month ago but never finished because of other priorities, and its now ranking on the first page. There is hardly any content, some pages were returning 404s, we’d never done any back links about this site and all on page SEO was turned off. So with about 100 words and a few products on the front page it was ranking based on only a few things; keywords in the domain name, good use of Heading tags, and a tiny bit of relevant content.

Now we did pick this niche because we researched the competition and found the ranking sites didn’t have much to them, wrong use of on page SEO or targeting different keywords. Plus hardly any back links.

For now with little time to spare to work on the site, we’ve put up a few products, some banners, affiliate links and some google ads so that a dormant site that is ranking for approx 15000 exact searches can be monetised a wee bit. Well that is the idea anyway.

We’ve also enabled the All-in-one-SEO plugin for wordpress, Google XML sitemap, submitted to google with the sitemap to see if this helps it climb. Lets hope these changes don’t make the site drop. If it does, it would be bloody typical of our Love/Hate relationship with Google. And it make us think twice about using all that meta stuff! Maybe organic way is the best. Only time will tell

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We have setup a couple of quick niches recently. The reason for doing this was we spotted an area where we may be able to rank quickly and also keyword domains were available. Now I know people don’t like giving away their domains but we like to be honest here and therefore would like to make a couple of points we have noticed about them. The sites are for Batman Fancy Dress and Plus Size Swimwear. Now what we have noticed is that these sites have been hard to rank. We looked at the competition and thought we should be able to rank quite easily on Google on the keywords for these domains however after launching them it appears this isn’t the case. So has google changed something or are we seeing that actually thinner sites are going to be even harder to rank for these days.

It also highlights the need to be able to make sites in which you have an interest or can write content about easily as this is one of the key’s to ranking well. We know that content makes for good sites we are just surprised about these sites not ranking when there are sites ranking higher with less content. Oh well keep plugging away. These were just two small domains we knocked out in a day each to see if there was some potential with them. We know niches aren’t the whole way to go and are busy developing a mixture of sites.

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Have you missed us? Well we admit its been a long time since we last posted and you would think that with one key to affiliate marketing being content, content we really should be posting more often. We know, we know, however the problem is we have been doing content, content, content just for our niche sites and our big site so therefore these have been taking up a lot of our time. Plus we don’t want to just keep posting the same stuff over and over just to update the blog. We want to try and give you stuff you are interested in reading.

So with that in mind here is an update on how we are doing. We had a great month in March, our best every in fact. We hope this continues into April and so far it has been a good start to the month. Maybe not as good as March but then with people away for Easter this may pick up again soon. We have been working on a few niche sites and have really plough a lot of our efforts into our big site, a project with another affiliate. This is going great at the moment and we are working hard to put as much content up on this site as we can and get it looking great before we launch it.

We have also brought some new hosting. Our current domains have been on shared hosting while we get to grips with this affiliate marketing lark and while this has been ok so far we have noticed our resources are being stretched and our sites are sometimes down through no fault of our own. Therefore we have brought some VPS hosting. For those that don’t know this is Virtual Private Server hosting which means we have a dedicated virtual machine which we can control fully, take up and down when we want and won’t get affected as much by other sites on the server not related to ours. We hope to put some new sites on this as well as maybe migrating our bigger niches over once we have fully tested this. This is an intermediate step for us between shared hosting and dedicated server hosting which again we may explore further down the affiliate route.

Both Gary and I have had some time off over the Easter to spend with the family’s and with the recent change in weather I had my first BBQ of the season last night and I know Gary was planning one last week so lets hope the glorious weather continues.

Ok so this isn’t the best update but just thought I’d let you know we are still here, we are still working hard and we are progressing towards our goal. Onwards and upwards.

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