New site launched in Furniture sector for A4U competition
Following on from Paul’s post about the launch of his oak furniture site. I was a little slower in launching my site partly because I chose to design the site using a different wordpress theme. My site is called Oak Dining Sets which is designed to be a one stop shop for oak dinging table and chair sets from the top oak furniture retailers. This site is using data feeds to populate the products from different merchants and different networks soon once I get accepted to more merchants programs.
We only entered the Affiliates4u competition here a few days ago so it was pretty quick to get these sites up. Paul had launched his site oak console tables site a day or 2 before mine so he had a head start. His site was soon indexed and ranking on the 4th page, hoping to climb. Mine was launched soon after and got indexed the same night and was sitting on the 1st page of google. I checked this morning and although the site was already indexed and ranking, its now dropped. I checked Google Webmaster Tools and there aren’t any problems but it does show no urls indexed. I’m hoping this will change soon.
I now have to add more merchants products, continue to add content both on-site and off-site and do lots of back links. The good thing about this competition is we get to swap links with other related sites and it also motivates us to get more niche sites done and makes it interesting and not boring.
Paul and I have a wager on who can make the first £50 in commission. The first to acheive this will get a free beer from the other. This again helps motivate us. Goodluck Paul 
We will be updating our progress on here and also on the a4u head to head competition thread.
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.
Google dropped my site again :(
UPDATE: Site back at number 1 as of today 27th Oct 2009, was it something I did?!?!? very strange
Google can be both your best friend and your worst enemy at times. Today it’s the latter. We have a site maternity swimwear which has been ranking at no 1 for well over 2 months now. We had some problems before with the ranking of this site, and what appeared to be a yo-yo effect. We have spent a lot of time trying to make sure the site was developed according to Google’s guidelines.
We haven’t had any recent major changes to the site so this leaves us really confused as what could be causing the issue. The site is being updated on a regular basis for fresh content. My thoughts are its possibly due to either of the following:
- Back links to our site may have dropped, I did notice a couple of hundred back links from 1 site to our site no longer there
- Back links from this site (which has now been removed in an attempt to fix the problem) Maybe these links although all one way aren’t relevant. Obviously this will reduce the number of links but will try to focus on more organic relevant links. I know I have added a link back from this post but couldn’t resist as this will be a PR2 link, so even if it helps initially, at least will get us some more sales until we get more relevant back links.
- Google crawled our site and found 404 pages, possibly due to our Web host (EUKHOST) having problems yet again. We did notice that some of these page URLs had been added to our robots.txt file, thanks for doing this Google.
This is somewhat frustrating when this happens, especially because the site is generating quite a lot of sales. If we were full time and this was happening across several sites, then our earnings could fluctuate and would not be a good business.
Plans for the future going forward is to pick ourselves up and try and establish no 1 position again through more relevant backlinks, maintain updating the content such as offers to the site and also look into dedicated hosting in the near future. Additionally we’ll be looking at developing sites that don’t necessarily rely on SEO such as membership/community sites.
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.
Affiliate Project duo loves Beer!!
Another project for us almost complete – UKBeerFridges.co.uk.
Most of us love our beer and wine and both Paul and myself find that we tend to have more beer now that we are doing Affiliate Marketing part time than before we started in AM. You get home from work, and open the fridge to get a nice cold beer. It helps you chill out and unwind from a fairly hard day at the 9-5 job. Now I’m sure some people will say this is probably going to have a negative impact on the quality of work we do, maybe it does, but it definately helps unwind.
As we both love our beer so much we decided why not do a niche site listing the best buy beer fridge, mini beer fridge, beer fridges. So anyone got a party for xmas, birthday, running out of space in their current fridge or cannot think of a great gift for their partners, then we’d recommend the husky beer fridge. They also do some well cool leather chairs with beer fridges built in.
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.
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
Family Business website facing Google indexing problems
Recently I have developed a website for a family member and after finishing the design, the next stage was to get it indexed into Google. Well we had problems at the first hurdle as the site was taking ages to get indexed even after posting here about it, which usually helps for our other niche sites.
I noticed that the site was indexed when typing in site:domain_name.com but it was only showing the website domain name and no meta description.
After analyzing the site, I came up with the following problems which could explain why it was not showing properly, but this is still unclear as to what the exact cause was.
- Robots.txt file was set to Disallow /
- We set this up while designing the site as didn’t want the pages to be indexed with incorrect content or pages and then have to ask Google to remove certain urls etc.
- We had modified this to Allow / quite early on, but maybe it was taken some time for the google robots to pick up these changes. The robots test showed the correct information - We had some javascript on the main home page, this script was a basic expand and collapse text script so had hidden text but when clicked would display the text. This could have been seen by Google as spamming as we could be hiding keywords. But I’m sure loads of other sites use this and don’t have any indexing problems. Anyway this has been changed now to click through to another page, so no more javascript
- No 301 .htaccess redirect file set-up so that our non canonical domain http://domain was not being redirected to the http://www.domain… etc. This could have been seen as duplicate content across the domain. This has now been set-up.
Well a few days later and more of the pages are being indexed with the description. Still though the home page or root of the site isn’t showing the description and I’ve triple checked the code, its no different than some of the other pages codes.
For those interested the family site is Expand Internationally or http://www.expandinternationally.com
Any comments/suggestions welcomed
-
Sponsors / Adverts
