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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As a treat to ourselves and to help us be more mobile with affiliate marketing we have both bought iphones. We have had them about 2 months now and they have been a great asset, checking things like google reader, accounts, email and all this from the comfort of the local pub We both wanted iphones anyway and this project was a useful excuse to get them.

As a result of checking our site on the iphones we have now installed onto our theme the iphone plugin making this site easy to read and much more accessible on the iphone.  Here is a screen grab (very sexy feature on the iphone) of our site on an iphone.

iphone capture

The plugin we have used is the WPtouch plugin. So all you iphone users, have a look and let us know what you think.

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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!

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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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We have been doing quite well at our range of maternity wear sites, maternity swimwear, maternity nightwear and maternity underwear. So we decided to branch out a bit and try something a bit bigger within clothing. So we have now launched sleepwear.org.uk a site which offers a one stop shop for all sleepwear be it womens sleepwear, mens sleepwear or childrens sleepwear. This has involved us being more creative with our SQL scripting which has been challenging to say the least. Still the site is now out there and we hope it performs well.

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Recently we designed a new site, Maternity Underwear and this was ready really quickly, probably our quickest site design to date. So it was rather frustrating when Google just wasn’t indexing it. Initially we thought it might be the fact that the robots.txt file had incorrectly disallowed access to everything but this was changed and still almost 1 month later the site was being indexed despite it being complete, good content and starting to be linked. Then Gary found that in the new Wordpress and option had changed. Under the Privacy settings the default now appears to be to block search engines and allow normal visitors only. We changed this and about a week later it is starting to be indexed. Hopefully given a bit more time the site will be fully indexed and start to climb and the hard work will pay off. Has anyone else noticed this  option change?

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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.

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Affiliate Project recently received a comment on this post – Niche site launched using data feeds and decided to create this post to help any other affiliates with displaying product data feeds.

We initially struggled to get product data feeds working. We found it hard to find how to get this to work, so thought we would document this on our blog and this could also help other affiliates.

There was 3 basic steps to get the data feeds to be displayed on the page.

Before you do this, you will need to download your data feeds and then create a new database using phpmyadmin (often from cpanel tools). Create the field names as per your datafeed or merchants datafeed.

1st step:

Create a php page template. So in the php file you will specify template name, pull in the header and title, then when you login to wordpress and add a new page, you can specify this new page template (your_template_name).

EXAMPLE:
<?php
/*
Template Name: your_template_name
*/
?>

<?php

2nd step:

Put the php code that has the mysql statements that query the database which holds the datafeed

EXAMPLE:
// Connect to Database
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","database_name","database_password");
if (!$con)
{
die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}

// Select the data from table_name
$result = mysql_query("SELECT field_a, field_b, field_c, field_d, field_e FROM table_name WHERE field_f='category_name'");


3rd Step:

Display the data from the database in table format, then loop the products. After that close the connection and display the sidebar and the footer

EXAMPLE:
// Display the table
echo "<table border='0' cellspacing='16'>";

// Disconnect from Database
mysql_close($con);
?>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar() ?>
<?php get_footer() ?>


You can style the output how you wish with css styling.

w3schools.com is a great resource for website coding such as html / php / mysql.

Hope this helps other affiliates.

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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.

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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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