Happy New Year and Back to Affiliate Marketing
Happy New Year from the team at Affiliate Project. We hope all those Affiliates, Merchants and Networks that follow us and those that we work with every success for 2011. My New Years Resolution is to try and be more positive and try and stress less. Its going to be challenging one to say the least with still having almost 3 jobs (part time this AM mallarky and part time or should I say full time with this crappy office job, then full time dad and husband come 3:45pm when I get home). So if you hear me being negative on this blog (except the comment above about my day job) or on the A4U forum then please do let me know and remind me of my new years resolution, its one that I don’t want to break unlike the other ones, stop drinking during the week – now I have full intentions to cut back, but deep down I know this isn’t going to happen so I’m just not going to commit to that one!!
This is the first post of 2011 on this Blog, which has seen a bit of neglect over the last 6 months or so because we’ve been well busy working on our bigger sites. Our little friend Google seems to be neglecting our big sites by penalising them. They were starting to rank well and get quite a lot of uniques each month. We were seeing a nice upwards trend on our stats graphs and the sales increasing along with the traffic.
2011 will hopefully be our year to leave the day jobs. It’s almost about 2 years since we’ve started and we are a little gutted that we didn’t achieve what we wanted to by now, we’re still keen on doing Affiliate Marketing and building up our business.
We have some good projects coming up which has also been a steep learning curve but ones that will hopefully help with our future projects.
Paul managed to get his wife involved and give up her part time day job, she now runs her own sites and she seems to have got the hang of things pretty quickly. One of her sites is Maternity Belt, something quite targeted and not to big, small enough to get her teeth into things. Not long after that my wife was looking for work and struggling to find a job to fit around the children and our family time, so she also has decided to test the waters and started her own niche site with a little bit of help from myself. Her niche is also in the Maternity clothing sector and sell Maternity Coats from all UK Maternity Shops all from one place. Both sites are data feed driven. This site is still work in progress but already had a sale on new years day 
. We already have a few Maternity Sites so the authority from our existing sites should hopefully help the new ones rank. Good luck to the wives, no doubt they will over take us lol.
So its about February time when the Affiliate Networks organize an Affiliate Meetup in London. No sign of any events yet, but we are looking out for them. If you do go to the events and want to meet up for a chat then please do let us know. We’re happy to meet others in the industry and share stories and ideas.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Just a quick post update to wish all you Affiliates, Merchants and Networks that have been following us, or that we have worked with. The past year has been challenging trying to grow our business. We’ve invested a lot of time, well over 6 months of the year with some bigger sites which are starting to pay off, so we’re hoping to continue growing those in 2011. We now promote over 1000 of UK merchants on most of the major affiliate networks.
We look forward to working with many more merchants, more affiliates to partner with and achieving our results of going full time.
That just leaves me to say have a cracking Christmas and New Year. Best of luck to all you businesses out there and bring on the competition 
Next update on our Blog will be in 2011 and some exciting new projects we plan to launch!
Hit a stumbling block in Affiliate Marketing
confused.com
As most Affiliates will know Affiliate Marketing like any job can be a love hate relationship. In fact most other jobs its just ‘well it pays the bills’. I don’t know about you readers, but I’ve certainly got a lot more to give and get out of life. After all you spend most of your life at work so why not do something you enjoy and get something out of.
So why am I writing this post. Today is one of those low days so I want to pick myself up by getting it off my chest. Some of our earnings have dipped a bit and our bigger voucher codes sites are taking a while to rank for long-tail. We have put a lot of effort into regular posting and will continue to do so. It’s just sometimes its hard to see the reward for the time and effort put in.
The picture above was supposed to be of a man being pulled in several directions like in a tug of war, do this…no do that…no not that this, oh what about that!!! but I couldn’t find a suitable image. I have been feeling like I’m pulled in so many directions with so much to take on with every day tasks. I know some might say outsource it but we need every penny we can save up from the business to leave our day jobs.
Since we started in Affiliate Marketing, there has been a lot of changes and challenges and this will continue with Google. It does highlight how much these niche websites and even voucher codes sites rely on search engines. Building up a loyal member base would be a way to combat any possible traffic dips caused because of some algorithm change as at least you’d still have your regular followers/subscribers. Something we’re working on building up on our Codes sites in the next few weeks.
Will keep you updated on any progress. I actually feel a little better for writing this down now
Affiliates Getting banned from Google Adwords
I was reading on the Affiliates4U forum last night about Affiliates getting banned by Google when using Adwords. Google give them too many reasons and they find themselves out of business as they were almost 100% reliant on PPC. Now until recently we have been almost 100% focused on SEO as its the way we learnt how to get traffic to our sites using Keyword domains and linking using correct Anchor keyword links. We’ve recently started looking into PPC on our bigger sites whilst we wait for our sites to climb in SERPS organically as these sites aren’t keyword domains so they are taking a lot longer to rank.
What it highlighted to me is how much we rely on Google. They could change both SEO and PPC tomorrow if they really wanted. I doubt they will change there model too much but they are always changing the benchmarks for SEO, that’s for sure.
It also highlighted to me, how much Google don’t like Affiliates, well maybe not all affiliates but at least the ones that aren’t really adding value to their search engine. Ultimately all Google want is to provide the best results to the visitor in as quick a time as possible. What they don’t want is to provide search results where the visitors have to go through loops to get to the end site which is providing the service/product/resource or whatever it is.
Will Google start to take into account your site bounce rate, or are they already doing this. We have noticed they already take your site speed into account. I think the golden rule is to not put all your eggs in one basket and to think of your website or websites as a business. In doing this you will want to make sure your website is adding value to the consumer even if it is an Affiliate site. An example could be a review site, a price comparison site or even voucher codes sites. They add value right
How does a Website rank in SERPS – PageRank, Alexa or Other?
Whilst researching competition websites SEO, I will use the seobook.com toolbar for firefox as well as a few other tools every day. They give you quite a few results from several sources which include Site Links, Directory Listing, Social Media Listings and Site Info such as Page Rank and Traffic Info, which has been very useful to see how much effort needs to go into a site or page SEO to get it to rank. Now obviously there is a lot more research and work involved such as the quality of those linking to your competitors sites and not just the quantity.
What I see a lot is Affiliates talking a lot about Page Rank and to be honest I still use it to gauge how well optimized a website is. But I take the Page Rank with a pinch of salt now. For example this site has a Page Rank 3 yet last time I checked isn’t in the top 1 million websites in Alexa ranking 
. Now I’m pretty sure I know why this is. We have hardly posted on our forum in the last few weeks/months, we certainly don’t post here every day or even every week just for the sake of it. We simply use this as a blog to follow our journey in Affiliate Marketing. It’s a document store of stuff we’ve learned along the way if you like! Another reason we don’t blog that often here is that we’re so much more involved in developing our sites that make us the money. I suspect that if we blogged several times a day on this site our traffic rank would improve, our Alexa rank would jump right up and so would our visitors as we’d be appearing more in SERPS. However this is not to say this theory would work, just my theory, but I would say that it would have to be good quality unique content that was attracting visitors/views.
So to summarize my theory, Your website will climb in SERPS providing its updated with regular unique content as much as possible. Try and also gain regular related links to build up some authority. Don’t worry too much about your Page Rank or Alexa Rank, just use them as a guide.
To use Kirsty and Phil’s program (Location, Location, Location), AM is CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT & LINKS, LINKS, LINK
Gutted Missed the A4U event again
The Team at Affiliate Project have been very busy trying to multitask on many projects including our big voucher code site as well as making sure our niches are up to date and trying to maximize on these to bring in more money. Because of project time constraints we couldn’t afford to take the time off to attend the Affiliate Event of the year. Plus its a big outlay for us part affiliates. Maybe one day we’ll go there. I think we may have said last year that we would do our best to attend this years one, but its very difficult for us with full time jobs and families plus doing AM part time.
We sure would have certainly drank a lot and hopefully also learned a lot of Affiliate Marketing. In fact we probably would have got a name for ourselves!
Just to quickly update you. We are still full steam ahead with our big site SlashPrices.co.uk and this is increasing traffic all the time. Its climbing Alexa ranking and we’re seeing a few more voucher code sales. We’ve also started with experimenting with a bit of PPC to bring in a bit more traffic. We know its going to take a while to compete with the big boys. Hopefully we’ll be up there with the top 5 Voucher code sites one day soon.
I’m guessing a lot of other Affiliates are now working on promoting their winter and xmas themed sites for the festive period. We have a couple of sites we’re trying to increase long tail traffic for so hoping for a nice Christmas bonus.
We’re both still really enjoying our Online adventure, even know it has ups and downs.
Anyway back to doing more and more content now for us
Updated Premium Press Voucher Codes
Here are the NEW PremiumPress coupon codes for Oct 2010.
ShopperPress,DirectoryPress, CouponPress, RealtorPress and Classifieds Theme
Coupon Code: “HAPPYBIRTHDAY”
Description: 30% discount off the original price.
Valid for all of October
Enjoy!
CouponPress Discount Code for Wordpress Code Site
CouponPress turns any Wordpress blog into a professional coupon code or voucher code website with lots of coupon site features, in minutes! Includes 20+ coupon website designs, unlimited installations, lifetime free support and upgrades!
SEE BELOW FOR DISCOUNT COUPON CODES
As we are running our own Voucher Code Site and noticed a couple of sites out there using CouponPress. We spent several months developing SlashPrices.co.uk to get all the features, the design how we wanted it, but could we have saved all this hard work with a pre-designed wordpress theme that comes with all or most of the features we wanted for the cost of a little over a couple of man hours. So we have decided to purchase this to use on one of our other sites to see how it does. We’ve seen some of the showcase sites doing well. It can be integrated with Icodes too which is great as its basically a fully blown voucher code site automated. The only thing it will need is some extra unique content and a good amount of promotion.
CouponPress Discount Code
PremiumPress currently have a discount code for a massive 30% off
OFFER: 30% OFF any of the premium press themes
CODE: BABYBOY
EXPIRES: 30th September 2010
Click here to download the CouponPress theme
Welcome Google Instant Search
Google has just released Google Instant Search. What does this mean? Well you may have already noticed it. When you start typing, instantly you will see results without having to click the Search Button. Lazy yes but Google have to be staying ahead of its game with other search engines. I reckon they just want to have the best of everything and fair play to them. This will basically save visitors to their search engine even more time as you will now be able to see results quicker than before.
Here is Google Instant Search in Action:
Does Google Instant Search affect SEO?
Google has answered this question already on Instant search and specifically says that nothing will change with the actual search results displayed. Now because Google uses auto-complete technology when you start typing it will give suggestions, so Good SEOs may want to adapt to these changes so that they are ranking for other search keywords similar to what their visitors might be searching for.
You may start to see higher impressions as people use Instant Search as you will naturally start appearing in peoples searches. You will be able to see this in Google Webmaster Tools or any other decent website Analytics.
Google has just published an explanation of how impressions will be counted with Google Instant:
- the traditional count method – when your site is displayed in search results after a completed search
- if the user begins to search and then clicks any link on the search results page, including an ad or “related search” suggestion
- if the user stops typing and the search results appear for at least three seconds
For me I don’t think it will change the way I see results, yes they might be a bit faster but ultimately if I want to search for something then I will either type in all the word or words or auto-complete before I see the results I want. Only time will tell though and I’m sure I will find interesting stuff having a play with it. Like for example it doesn’t work with rude or adult content keywords I’m sure many of you will now be typing this into google as we speak! Some novices out there may still need to look at the keyboard when they type. Some people might not even go to Google directly but use a Toolbar of some sort so may not notice this.
How are my PPC ads affected with Google Instance Search?
Google says ads are now being shown for predicted queries, and the ads will change as searchers continue to type.
Google continues to explain that ad impressions will only count in three situations (much like the organic impressions listed above):
- the user clicks anywhere on the page after beginning to type a search query
- the user chooses one of the predicted queries from Google Instant
- the user stops typing and search results are shown for at least three seconds
Be good to hear other Affiliates opinions on this. I’ve already noticed that Kevin Wood from Affiliates4u has put his point of view on Google Instant here
Also see this thread to find more affiliates discussing this
Calculate Uptime and Downtime Table
I was recently on some Exchange 2010 training at work which was pretty boring but whilst I was on the course and thinking of Affiliate Marketing and the project one thing caught my attention, so I woke up and noticed a section about high availability and downtime. So I decided to do a table below showing the downtime as it was quite surprising how much downtime you could expect from your service providers or web hosting companies. Because all Affiliates will be hosting their websites and have looked at Web hosting at many points in their Affiliate business, I thought it would be useful to highlight this and recommend people consider this element when choosing their hosting package or provider. I mean I thought 99% was pretty good and our sites were going to be up pretty much all the time, well not according to this. Shocking really!!
Calculate How much downtime using the table below
| Uptime | Downtime per month | Downtime per year |
|---|---|---|
| 100% | 0m | 0m |
| 99.999% | 0.4m | 5m |
| 99.99% | 4m | 52m |
| 99.9% | 43m | 8h46m |
| 99.8% | 1h26m | 17h31m |
| 99.7% | 2h10m | 1d2h17m |
| 99.6% | 2h53m | 1d11h2m |
| 99.5% | 3h36m | 1d19h48m |
| 99.4% | 4h19m | 2d4h34m |
| 99.3% | 5h2m | 2d13h19m |
| 99.2% | 5h46m | 2d22h5m |
| 99.1% | 6h29m | 3d6h50m |
| 99.0% | 7h12m | 3d15h36m |
Note: Many service providers do not count downtime caused by planned maintenance into their uptime numbers.
Can you afford to lose this amount of downtime for your websites? Our web hosting with EUKhost is currently 99.5% for both packages. So we’re currently looking at approx 2days per year downtime. I don’t think you should look for anything under 99.0% and this is why I stopped at this level in the table. If you are looking for 100% uptime then most Web hosting companies should offer this, but you might need to opt for Business Hosting solutions or dedicated servers.
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