Thanks for the comments. We attended the Affiliate Window meetup in London on Thursday and that was useful in we now know where we need to be. Your idea of a bigger maternity site is interesting and one we have thought of. We now have a couple of ideas in the pipeline and are working hard on those to get a bigger site out there while progressing with our niche sites.

Regarding eukhost our webhosting seems to be going ok. Like all shared hosting there can be problems if things need to be restarted on the server but that is the same with all shared hosting packages. Generally we have had good service from them and the times we have had to use their support they have been very good.

Hope that helps.

Paul

Cheers

I’ve just read your blog from the start, a very interesting read and it’s good to see your efforts are paying off.

I would have thought natural progression would be a large site covering everything maternity, maybe even transferring your current swimwear and underwear sites then 301′ing the old domains onto the new domain.

Large sites are great because as they keep growing with age, content and backlinks, picking up different keyphrases becomes easier and easier.

I saw an example sometime last year where an established car leasing site was having a ‘debate’ with a car magazine. The leasing site ended the debate by outranking the magazine for their own company name and domain name. It was all done in fun but shows the power that a large established website has to control the rankings.

Anyway, good luck with your future in AM

You did an excellent job negotiating commissions which points to a definite turning point for you and what I can say from experience is that whenever you work for yourself, you experience extremes of highs and lows that are not restricted to AM, but the good thing is that tomorrow could be a high extreme. I appreciate its not always possible to see this through the low days, but when you look back over your achievements in the last 12 months and measure your progress, you’re doing great.

Visualise where you’ll be in another 12 months and maybe then you’ll be ready to go full time.

I’ll be following your progress!

What I wanted to try and say is that Gary and my aims are to do this full time. At the moment we are employed full time but our jobs are not giving us much satisfaction. We would love to do affiliate marketing full time as we really enjoy it. We are in quite well paid jobs so to leave those jobs we have to replace those earnings with affiliate marketing earnings while trying to do that part time. Sometimes it just feels like we are a long way from achieving that goal. We do earn a good amount, but not enough to go full time, quite far off in fact. We are probably too hard on ourselves. We are doing great in terms of newbies to the industry. We probably want to get to the next level too quickly.

Basically we have a goal of what we want to achieve. At the moment we are working very hard to achieve that goal. We know we will get there. It will take time, Sometimes I think we just have to realize that and not be too hard on ourselves. As I said our ramblings are written from the heart. Sometimes life is great. Sometimes life can be tough. In our current jobs you can have really hard stressful days and I guess this showed in yesterdays post. After I posted I actually had a very productive day and felt like I added a lot of value so at the end of the day I actually felt great again. We are increasing month on month which for any business is great and what you want.

Those days make you want to do this more and more and there comes the pressure. All our own pressure. Our families are great, they are behind us all the way and keep saying to us it will take time. Deep down we know that, but we want to take it to the next level to be able to do it full time.

Thankfully there are two of us so if one of us is having a bad time the other picks us up. Hope I didn’t come across all doom and gloom. It depends on what your goals are really. Ours are to support both of us doing this full time. On the brightside its almost Thursday and almost time for a few free beers and a night out for Affiliate Project. Onwards and upwards.

Its very difficult for someone like me who currently fluctuates between a few hundred pound a month in affiliate earnings to understand what you think is your turning point.

For me, I’d be happy to reach a few thousand pounds a month. I’ve set myself a target for this year to drive £400,000 of revenue to my merchants and get an avge commission of around 7%.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that its very hard to relate to your post without knowing what kind of earnings you feel is insufficient.

I mean, if you increase your earnings every month for the next 12 months would that still not be enough? When you say ‘big affiliates’, what are you talking about…£100,000 a year? More?

If you’re currently making 50 grand then its quite depressing for us working hard to make less than half of that at the bottom end…The other option of course to takeit to the next level is to put all of your earnings back into the business and employ someone to take it to the next level for you?

Cheers
Gary

Good idea and thanks for sharing. Glad you liked the post and it seems to have helped quite a few people out there.

Cheers
Gary

I was worried about having to edit lots of pages if i ever wanted to change the layout at all. So I’ve done a bit of tinkering, and rather than hard-coding the sql query in to the page template and having a template for each page, I’ve created a new custom field for pages in Wordpress, called sql-query, to store the sql in. You can then retrieve the query from the wordpress database to put in to your script as follows:-

Replace this:-

// 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’”);

With:-

// Select the data from table_name
$result = mysql_query(get_post_meta($post->ID, “sql_query”, true));

Adding a custom field to a wordpress page is really easy… if you edit a page, under the main html editor for the content, there’s a section called Custom Fields. Just enter ’sql-query’ in the Name box, and enter your sql query in to the value. Press Add and that’s it. The next time you want to add the custom field to a page, you don’t need to type the name in, just select it from the drop down box instead. Simples!

This means I now only need 1 template and can create as many pages as I like from that page, but still with a different selection of products from the datafeed – it’s great if i ever need to change the layout of the page – only one template to edit!

Taking it a bit further, I was a bit conscious about having duplicate content on my page as it would be purely data from the datafeed which will no doubt be shown on thousands of affiliates’ sites worldwide.

So I then went about putting the original page content back in to the template, so that I can add text to the page as you would with any normal wordpress page.

The code you need to enter in to your template will be slightly different depending on your theme, but it should start something like this:-

You can put it in the template wherever you like – before the feed or after the feed – up to you. But if you then write perhaps 200-300 words about that page, it should give Google the unique content it likes to see.

This post really helped me, so I hope this helps others!

Tom

I am really fascinated with the use of datafeeds and I spent several hours the other day trying to get a 50mb .csv file imported into a MySQL database with no success. I’ve tried BigDump but even it was having problems. Anyway, don’t want to get off topic.

Gary, have you considered installing the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin? I wish to stay in the loop.