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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2011 is full steam ahead with the team at Affiliate Project. We have been busy on various projects still trying to fit this all around our current work/family commitments so its still going to take a bit longer than it would be if we had full time resources but we’re doing well considering.

The month of January was a very good month on the earnings front for us and we had our 2nd highest month yet. Baring at mind some of our bigger sites http://www.slashprices.co.uk is taking a bit longer to rank as its not a keyword domain, but we are getting a lot more traffic and now we’re seeing more sales from the long-tail traffic which is great. We just need to continue the hard work and push along to compete with all the other Voucher Code Sites out there. We have been doing a few external articles like Great Discounts at Comet to see how this is improving things as well as regular link building, changing site structures to bring in more internal link juice and more promotional work like Social Marketing too. Its all very interesting and we’re steadily building up our business.

We’ve also been getting involved in buying up keyword domains which are expiring so that has been interesting too.

Who said Affiliate Marketing was easy, hey but its fun with lots of challenges.

I also had my 1-1 at work today and they asked me what I find interesting about my day Job. Well I was stumped to find an answer. Where as ask me the same question about this Affiliate stuff, he might not have got out the meeting room until the next day.

Also Paul and I are keen to find out when the Next Affiliate Meet-up is going to be, its usually about this time of the year up in London, with  the usual free bar to meet like minded folk and talk shop. Keep us informed if anyone knows.

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As most Affiliates will know Affiliate Marketing like any job can be a love hate relationship. In fact most other jobs its just ‘well it pays the bills’. I don’t know about you readers, but I’ve certainly got a lot more to give and get out of life. After all you spend most of your life at work so why not do something you enjoy and get something out of.

So why am I writing this post. Today is one of those low days so I want to pick myself up by getting it off my chest. Some of our earnings have dipped a bit and our bigger voucher codes sites are taking a while to rank for long-tail. We have put a lot of effort into regular posting and will continue to do so. It’s just sometimes its hard to see the reward for the time and effort put in.

The picture above was supposed to be of a man being pulled in several directions  like in a tug of war, do this…no do that…no not that this, oh what about that!!! but I couldn’t find a suitable image. I have been feeling like I’m pulled in so many directions with so much to take on with every day tasks. I know some might say outsource it but we need every penny we can save up from the business to leave our day jobs.

Since we started in Affiliate Marketing, there has been a lot of changes and challenges and this will continue with Google. It does highlight how much these niche websites and even voucher codes sites rely on search engines. Building up a loyal member base would be a way to combat any possible traffic dips caused because of some algorithm change as at least you’d still have your regular followers/subscribers. Something we’re working on building up on our Codes sites in the next few weeks.

Will keep you updated on any progress. I actually feel a little better for writing this down now

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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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