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.
Maternity Swimwear site yo-yoing on Google
We recently had a problem with one of our sites, Maternity Swimwear. After being at number 1 on google for the main search term the site disappeared. Then after a couple of days it came back again, at number 1. Very confusing. We looked and thought we had discovered some penalties and some problems with the robots.txt file and while the site came back it soon disappeared again. We were stumped. It then got a bit stranger whereby the site would be at number 1 in the morning and gone in the afternoon. We researched this, asked some people on forums and then Gary found the answer. Our site was “yo-yoing”. This is the term used to describe a site that behaves in the way our site was.
So what causes it and how did we resolve it. Well the main cause can be too many internal links on the home page. So Google looks at these as over linking and penalises the site. We resolve this by removing some of these as to be honest, without really realising it we did have a lot of the same links to our categories on the home page.
I then setup a page per merchant. There were three reasons for doing this, one to add internal links to these pages, secondly to add more content and pages to our site and thirdly to actually provide a better resource to the customer so they could view all products from a particular merchant.
We changed the footer information to have more text rather than just internal links.
After a few days our site re-appeared again but this time further down the page on the 1st page of Google, about 7th or 8th. While we weren’t at number 1 our site seemed to settle and stopped yo-yoing. then after about a week our site climbed back to number 1, now on organic content rather than the number of internal links on the home page and has stayed in that position for a good while now. So maternity swimwear is back earning again and to be honest earning quite well. We are on track to meet last months earnings even with the site not being on the 1st page for a few days.
New niche site launching – www.maternityunderwear.org.uk
We’ve done quite well for maternity swimwear so we thought as we had the design template and knew the market a bit should we maybe do some more niches in this area. We had a look and have decided to try a site for maternity underwear. We have been busy designing it and while we haven’t applied to all the merchants yet the site is shaping up nicely. It is pretty much ready to launch and we will add more merchants as we apply to them and they reply.
This new site is offering more challenges as we are re-working the way we use datafeeds and pull information out of different tables. More learning for us but that is what we enjoy.
It’s been quite good to have a theme and template there already although it has actually required quite a lot of tweaking to fit the new site. Have a look and let us know what you think. We’ll keep you updated on our progress.
Affiliate Project announces launch of new travel related site
One of our recent Projects Newcastle Airport Parking has been launched. This seems like quite a competitive market to tackle, but with a little bit of effort and lots of good link exchanges we feel we can rank this well.
Why did we choose this as our next project?
We wanted to go for a slightly more competitive site idea to challenge ourselves and also we saw that this could have more earning potential. Our time is limited as we can only spend about 2 hours a day at the moment to work on our projects, so if we can bring in more money then this will help us towards our goals which will be to do this full time.
Our research showed that some of the top ranking sites didn’t have too many back links using Newcastle Airport Parking with the anchor text. So with a bit of work doing content writing, keeping the site up to date and fresh, also trying to get some good links we may be able to rank well.
Newcastle Airport Parking currently gets approx 12,100 exact searches a month according to Google Keyword Tool so if we can get 30-40% of this volume come to our site, then a even a small percentage of those visitors book parking, hotels or lounges, this could be a nice little earner.
This project is targeted towards a service that people will buy mostly online, so I think the conversion rate could be quite good. Generally if people are looking for airport parking, then they are not looking for information so should be looking to book and find the best prices.
Another advantage of doing this type of site compared to a product niche type site is not having to update data feeds. The site uses an search api supplied from the merchant.
As of today Wednesday 5th August, the site ranks on the 16th page. Can we achieve page 1, top 3 position. Only time and effort will tell
Wish us luck 
Maternity Swimwear – back where we belong, #1
Checked Google this morning and Maternity Swimwear is back at number 1 for the non-exact global search term maternity swimwear. Phew. We are well chuffed as it was a bit of a shock to come in yesterday and find it had dropped from the face of the earth, or should I say Google earth.
So what happened. Ok I’ll admit it, it was me! Me and my fat fingers, or fat mouse clicks. Well not all me. I’ll explain. I was updating our database on Wednesday and instead of emptying our product table to re-import the changes I had made, I dropped the table. This was quickly rectified by myself and Gary and we quickly had the database back up and running, probably within 5-10 minutes. However due to a plugin that we installed, wp-cache, the site was cached and wouldn’t update even though we were running SQL queries so we knew the database was fine. This wp-cache meant the site wasn’t updated for a good while and during this time it appears Google crawled the site, received the cached SQL and PHP errors and added entries into our robots.txt file. This then meant Google thought the site was invalid and dropped it.
What did we do to rectify it. Well we searched for reasons why a site can be dropped. We had heard of this before, duplicate content, bad code can be some of the reasons so we did a quick check, no problems there. So we used Google webtools. We then found out the robots.txt had changed and a lot of Disallow entries had been added by Google. So we removed the invalid entries and increased the rate at which google crawls the site in the hope we get back up there. Then this morning we have checked and there we are, number 1 in Google again. We are chuffed as we have worked really hard to get this site to number 1 in the first place so it was a bit of a shock to not find it up there yesterday. However we have learnt from this. Onwards and upwards.
We have said this many times before but this is all a learning curve. In hindsight maybe it was good for us to experience this as it improves our skills in this business. We had to diagnose what had happened and put in place corrective steps to get it back. It only took our site down for 1 day. Not bad if you have many sites, but when you are starting and only have a few niches it can make you panic. Ok it can make me panic but then I am a worrier. Good job Gary is the calm collective one. I just run around screaming.
Balancing home, family, work and the Affiliate Project
After Gary’s great post about how he spends his day I am going to do the same so you can get another perspective on how a part time affiliate spends their day. This is how most week days are spent at the moment. It is a busy day, fitting in a full time job, spending time with the family (which is my favourite part of the day) and putting in some quality hours for affiliate project work. Like Gary I have a young family and that is the most important thing for me.
06.00 – Alarm goes off and I try and see if I can get at least 2 snoozes in before getting up and getting ready for work and sneaking out of the house trying not to wake anyone else up.
06.20 – Pickup lunch made the night before, running kit and laptop and head for work.
06:45 – Arrive at work, grab a shower and get ready to start the working day in my full time job at 7am.
07:00 – Start work on full time job and work through to lunchtime taking the occasional break.
13:00 – Break for a lunchtime run and shower. Usually run between 4.5 and 6 miles. I like to keep fit as well and this does help the concentration levels so run most weekdays.
14:00 – Return from lunchtime run and continue work.
15:30 – Leave work and have 25 minute drive home.
16:00 – Walk in the door to be greeted by my wonderful family. Time to catch up on what they have been doing for the day and relax and spend time with them, have dinner and then think about bed time for the kids.
18:30 – My wife and I take it in turns to bath the kids, read them stories and put them to bed. One night it will be my turn to do my 2 boys (twins), the next it will be my turn to do my daughter.
19:30 – Finish bed time routine, now time to clear up the house and make lunches for the next day for myself and my daughter who is at school. I normally clear up while my wife makes lunches.
20:30 – Start-up Laptop and carry on with Affiliate projects. This normally involves checking emails, site design and content writing. Try not to get too distracted with the T.V. that will be on. Try to focus on good quality work rather than checking accounts and other blog posts too much.
22.30 – 23:00 – Shutdown for the night and try and have half hour to chill out. Normally try and read a book but usually only manage a few pages before falling asleep to get some well earned rest.
This is my routine for most weekdays, although there is room for the odd night out and I also spend some evenings away from the project with my wife, maybe having a takeaway or just chilling out. I actually really enjoy the affiliate work and with a long term goal to work towards don’t mind putting in the hours. I also try and have a couple of nights off a week.
Relaunch of niche site after facing problems with potential domain Trademark Infringement
Recently we had received legal notice about one of our niche sites from the prominent company, stating that we needed to relinquish the use and rights to the web site domain because the domain name and the use of the domain keywords was similar to the prominent company.
We didn’t realise that we had done anything wrong as we had checked the trademark and it wasn’t registered as a trademark for the domain name we were using. However we decided it was best to de-register the domain name as we now understand the problem. Our domain name could have been seen to be confusing to the public into thinking the trademark holder is somehow affiliated with our web site.
So rather than forget about the niche site altogether and loose out on any earnings, we’ve decided to re-launch the site but this time using a domain name that doesn’t Infringe on any trademark. Our new site is called UK Vibration Plates or www.ukvibrationplates.co.uk. The previous site was using domain keywords Powerplates which had become quite a generic term when searching for vibration fitness machines.
The funny thing was that we weren’t selling any of the Power Plate products, possibly due to the price as most of our sales were coming from the lower priced models such as the Body Sculpture BM1500 for just over £130, and the Horizon Treo V109 and Horizon Treo V209 slightly more expensive but still a bargin and all very popular machines according to Amazon’s sales ranks.
We hope that this site will do better for us now we have a more commonly used keywords in our domain name, although the competition may be stronger. The challenge is on
Affiliate Project dabbles in Dreamweaver to help family business
Recently Affiliate Project was approached by a family member asking for help with starting up a business adventure. They had seen and heard about our success with a few of our niche sites and how we have managed to get the sites listed in the top ranks on google in little time and sought our help to design, develop and SEO the site.
As we have only really had experience with using Wordpress to get our sites out there, it wasn’t straight forward to design the site as the requirements although basic weren’t really suited for Wordpress. Rather than hack a Wordpress theme to suit our needs, we decided to build the layout and style this from scratch using css and code with html with the help of Dreamweaver.
The site for any one interested to see our work is www.expandinternationally.com. Its basically a business website that is aimed towards companies that are looking to export services internationally. In this current market businesses are looking to cut costs and doing business overseas is one way business can save money. However its not that straight forward for companies and that is where Expand Internationally can help with over 100 years experience in doing business internationally.
Our challenge is going to be a little harder as we’re not trying to SEO a niche site. This is a business site and we need to try and understand the market and the target audience, but we love a challenge and this is what we’re in the Affiliate Marketing business for.
Hopefully the site will get up in the rankings so we can prove to the family that we are keen in doing Affiliate Marketing full time.
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