Forgotten about niche found ranking on first page!!!
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
Niche sites, are they harder to rank now?
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.
Calling Affiliate Project, come in, do you read me, over?
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.
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.
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