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.

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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!

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Seen as the kind networks will be hosting a London meet-up on Feb 11th, we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to have a drink or two to celebrate along with other affiliates, merchants and networks, and hopefully meet some of the people we’ve been working with in the past year.

We have come a long way since we first started back in February 2009, but don’t get us wrong, we’ve also got a lot more to learn and achieve. There have been many challenges and obstacles but we’ve taken them head on and learnt a lot from our mistakes.

To try and give other Affiliate Newbies an idea or maybe a realisation of whats involved in Affiliate Marketing then see below what we had to learn and some of the challenges we faced:

1. Finding a niche for a product that:-
A. Someone would buy online.
B. Is the keyword in the domain name targeted/specific to what people are looking to buy or is it too generic, then maybe the search volume for that keyword is people just browsing at this stage. Trying to understand at what stage in the buying cycle the keyword terms are targeted for.
C. Is the search volume high enough for the niche site to be worth the effort. If the search volume is not high enough then it may not bring in enough to cover the cost of your time and effort, although money can still be made from these lower searched for keywords if they are highly targeted and/or the commission is good, like in travel sales!
D. Is the competition for your chosen keywords easy to crack. This is a whole other challenge in itself, I like to call SEO analysis.
Things to check with the competitors sites are:
- page back-links & internal linking (we use seo for FireFox plugin, site explorer from yahoo and seo spyglass to name a few tools to help analyze the back-links)
- are those links using the keywords as anchor text
- is the site quite old and therefore favoured by Google
- are those quality links back to that site
- check the meta tags in the source code (right click and view source) of the competitors site using the keywords that you are targeting
- does the title and URL of that site contain your chosen keywords
- how much content that is related to your keywords does that site have

2. Is that niche domain available to buy in a TLD (Top Level Domain) such as .com .co.uk or even .org.uk

3. Building the niche site and ranking on those keywords in the domain is a great idea and can work very well, but like most newbies we had to learn how to develop/design the site, how to structure the site, what content was going to go on the site and how this will appear to your online shoppers. Basically will it convert into a sale.

We have found Wordpress to be great for our niche sites, its free and easy to learn. We’ve actually probably learnt more in the last year about a lot of aspects of Affiliate Marketing than any job we’ve done in the past.  We now know quite a bit of html/php/css/mysql and how to customize wordpress themes and plugins.

4. Getting the site to rank well in Google even though we think we’ve done our research. This isn’t always as easy as just popping a site out there. You will need to continue to keep the site updated, make sure the site is content rich, and promote the site as much as possible.

5. Hosting the website has also been another obstacle. We’ve been using shared hosting from EUKHost and although they are very good, our sites have been down probably once a month due to the shared hosting. We’ve even noticed that when this has happened our sites have had the yo yo effect in google so we lost top position for a few days on several occasions.

5. Monitoring and analyzing your websites. It is always good to understand where your traffic is coming from, but also analyze when your site has problems, so use google webmaster tools to check for any problems with pages not found etc.

So what is in the pipeline for Affiliate Project

Well our main goal is leave our day jobs and go full time, so although niche sites  do work well and are great for an extra £100-300 a month they can still take a lot of effort and time. Its not as easy as just knocking 100 niche sites out there. Although we will still develop more niches. We’re also going to work on a fewer big sites we’ve got going at the moment. For our next big site, we’ve actually been working closely with another affiliate and details of this will be revealed at a later date.

We will be exploring the use of PPC as want to try and have a mix of SEO & PPC. This will be useful for when sites are  not ranking well organically, especially at the beginning. But also for helping to try to get more highly targeted traffic. Currently we’ve only being doing 100% SEO so are hoping we can improve our earnings and learn about PPC and the way it can be used.

Did you also start out when smingle launched his famous most popular thread of A4U? If so then we’d like to hear your story from the last year. Also be good to network with more affiliates and share experiences.

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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.

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Between us we’ve also improved my original php script to include some nice new features such as adding in a clickref to help track which products are most popular. Also adding into the script, how to pull in the merchant logos as these aren’t in the datafeeds supplied by the merchants. I was very impressed with how quickly Stuart has come on since he didn’t have this knowledge until recently. In fact Stuart has also spent quite a bit of time looking into pagination and also auto updating his feeds, something on our task list. Stuart has kindly shared these ideas and the code with us so this has been very helpful.

We have made a good contact and look forward to working with Stuart more in the near future.  We’ve now added him to our MSN Affiliate Friends and been in regular contact over the last few weeks sharing ideas and opinions. This just goes to show what a good industry Affiliate Marketing can be, you could have friends who are effectively your competition but still share and discuss ideas and help each other out every now and again.

I would also like to mention some of the work Stuart has done on his niche sites. He certainly has a couple of good niches with some high search volumes and I think its only a matter of time and a bit of hard work and he’ll be seeing the rewards for those sites. The first site is children’s shoes and something that people may think will these sell online. Well I think there will be a percentage of people shopping online for most things you wouldn’t usually buy because you can get them cheaper and also use voucher codes. We recently did this with our little girl because we already had her feet measured up, then new the size and went searching online.

Another site Stuart has done and now using the product data feeds with his own database is Larder Fridge which is a really nice simple design, so very easy to use. He’s using pagination as some pages have a lot of products. I do think Stuart has a good eye for design.

Thanks Stuart for getting in contact with us and we hope to see you grow and succeed in Affiliate Marketing. Good luck mate

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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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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.

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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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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?

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The way this works is you copy a simple bit of javascript code and add this to your website. This javascript simply adds a attribution link to your page where the content was copied from. This has many benefits, some of which includes:

• See what content is being copied, this helps you know what content on your site is interesting and popular with real-time reporting
• More traffic and more page views as you’ll attract other visitors from those links back to your site
• Better Search ranking because you’ll have more referral links to your site
• Improved Content Visibility with a useful auto tweet tool

Apparently some sites are getting over 1000 links back to their site each day.

Have any other Affiliates used Tynt Insight? Feel free to test this out by copying the content of this article and paste this into your blog site

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