Digital Window acquire Perfiliate Ltd and other affiliate news
News has come in that Digital Window has acquired Perfiliate Ltd, based in Newcastle. Perfiliate Ltd operate one of the leading networks called Buy.at and by bringing this on board Digital Window now form Britain’s largest performance based marketing group.
We are excited by this news as we use both these networks and have a good relationship with both. We will be interested to see what happens especially with Affiliate Window’s use of the Darwin profile and Shopwindow.
In other news for us we hainve had a solid February and although not quite as good as January was still our 2nd best month ever despite being shorter than Jan. We now have more sites earning which is great and we are busy improving these sites and getting them ranking. We have a couple of big projects on the go as well which are taking off so we hope for good things from them.
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 enter new site as part of A4u competition
You may have seen our twitter post the other day regarding a competition between myself (Paul) and Gary. We like our little competitions as it helps keeps us focused on getting new sites out there. Gary found a post on A4u regarding a friendly competition they were running and this inspired us to join in and also run a competition between myself and Gary for a free beer to whoever makes £50 commission first.
Basically the competition on A4u is to create a site selling Oak furniture and see who can make the most commission. The first reading will be after 3 months then a reading will be taken each month after that. Have a look at the A4u post here. By joining in this competition we hope to expose ourselves (not literally) to other affiliates and to compare how we are doing with our design and our ability to create good sites. We hope to be able to link up with new people and this will help at future events to network and meet people we have only had dealings with over the internet.
So we came up with two domains, picked one each and set about the design. I took a site which is a one stop resource for Oak Console Tables. My site is now launched and is in the competition. It has launched pretty quickly as my design has been based on a theme that I am really familiar with so the site didn’t take too long to put up. So it is now up and running and we await the results. Lets hope we do well in the A4u competition but more importantly that I win the beer from Gary!
November was a good month for Affiliate Project
Affiliate Project are climbing the ladder to success albeit fairly slowly, but we’ve seen another increase on our month on month earnings. We’ve also seen a big increase on the number of sales. We had approx 200 sales for November. This works out at approx 6-7 sales a day the majority of this has come from our site which is sitting nicely at number 1. Additionally this number 1 site has had a decline in the search volume and traffic to the site has slightly dropped, but our other sites hovering on the front page of Google have been chipping into our escape from the 9-5 pot!!
We are not sure whether this increase in sales has been because of the time of the year, we don’t think our niche sites are that seasonal, in fact our number 1 niche site is more seasonal as its targeted towards more summer holiday type of item. The search volume for this has declined by about 2-3 times and this will pick up in the next few months. We hope to see an increase in the sales early part of next year from this site.
We also are working on promoting our other sites to get them ranking higher and will finish off another couple of niche sites for December, so we can hopefully continue to improve month on month.
How was your November in Affiliate Marketing?
Christmas is coming, Affiliates are getting fat
This being our first year as affiliates we may have missed the boat for Christmas sites, but it seems other affiliates are reaping the rewards. Christmas is a great time for affiliates and if you can catch on early to that idea for a site that will have the edge on the leading products for Christmas it can be a rewarding time of year. This is something we will look at more closely for next year. Oh well seems like Santa may not visit these two affiliates, well not this year anyway.
Product feeds – the good, the bad and the ugly
For those that have been following our progress will notice that we have a lot of sites that feature product feeds from the merchants through the affiliate networks. Getting to grips with some of these product feeds has been hard work. Some merchants products feeds are quite frankly almost unusable. That is the categories, the product descriptions, products being listed more than once are but a few of the pitfalls requiring very carefully crafted SQL statements to manipulate and pull out only those products which are relevant.
So I would like to highlight a merchant who has got their product feed spot on and is the best product feed I have worked with in my long (ok fairly short) affiliate career so far. My award for the best product feed so far goes to Jokers Masquerade who we use for our womens fancy dress site. They have their product feed setup perfectly. The merchant categories are superbly done enabling us to use fairly simple SQL select statements to pull the right information out of our database. The descriptions are great so hats off to them. We look forward to continuing to work with them and add a great range of products to our fancy dress site.
Jokers Masquerade are available through AffiliateWindow.
New member of the affiliate project team – congratulations to Gary on the birth of his baby son
Affiliate Project is pleased to announce that Gary and his wife have had a baby boy, Joshua Harry. Joshua was 6lb 13 and the family are doing well. Congratulations Gary. I look forward to meeting the wee fella and to celebrating his arrival with a beer or three.
Another Niche Project Site Launched Womens Fancy Dress Site
We have launched yet another clothes related niche site called womensfancydress.org.uk a product feed driven site which lists all womens fancy dress themed costumes with easy to use categories such as search by decade, tv and film, sexy and seasonal outfits and we’ll be adding much more as and when we get more merchants products.
Hopefully we’ll get the site ranking soon in time for those Christmas parties. Womens Fancy Dress on google gets approx 49,500 exact searches per month, the competition shouldn’t be too much as the top site doesn’t have Womens Fancy Dress in the domain name of the description meta tag. Additionally this site only has 7 backlinks. We can also try and target women’s fancy dress with the ‘ in the keyword, which also gets 18,100 exact searches. This volume may go down as its quite popular for this time of the year.
So if any female affiliates out there are going to a Fancy Dress party and need some Fancy Dress Ideas, please visit out site. We also welcome any feedback you may have.
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.
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