Google Ranking affected by site speed
Not so long ago, Google had announced that website speed would be part of their ranking algorithm. We have recently been affected by this with one of our niche sites. We were in 2nd spot on the first page of Google for some time for our 1 keyword niche domain which gets approx 110,000 exact and 368,000 broad searches in April according to Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I’m not sure if the exact search matters too much when its a single keyword domain! Anyway, we noticed that it had dropped from 2nd spot to nowhere to be seen just the other day so we immediately started looking into what could be wrong to have caused the site to drop. Now this can sometimes be a mission to find out as Google doesn’t exactly tell you whats wrong, you have to dig around. So first thing was to check Google Webmaster Tools to see if there was any errors with our website pages – no errors. Then I checked out the diagnostics section in the speed section, noticed that our sites pages were 100% slower than the majority of websites. Not Great!
This was caused because our site is using our own product database to display the data feeds from several merchants. Now because the site keyword is quite generic there is a massive amount of products to display. This was an older site which was using our old php files which didn’t have pagination so some pages had to wait longer than 1 minute to display all those product images. The solution which we are still working on is to go through all those custom php pages and modify our script to include pagination. This will enable each page to only show say 20 products per page and make the pages load much faster. Something we should have done a while ago.
Now the next challenge will be to convince google to put us back by notifying them that we’ve corrected the problem. Lets see how long it takes to get it back to where it should naturally be.
Affiliate Project now has Page Rank 3
Wahoo, This blog site now has a page rank 3 and 825 page links according to the SEO for Firefox plugin
Considering that we don’t update this blog that often, with both of us having full time jobs, families and our other sites as priorities, its nice to see the page rank climb. We think this is based on a number of factors; a fair amount of unique relevant content, traffic to the site (mostly from A4U), on page SEO and links to our site from varied sources and various different anchor text links.
I’m not sure how accurate this Page Rank checker is and if this is the same as Google Page Rank or not, but its a useful plugin to use when checking out the competition. For us to get to Page Rank 4 I suspect we’ll need a whole load of more good unique relevant content.
We have in the past done some 1 way links from this blog to our niche sites and they have counted towards good link juice from the likes of SEO SpyGlass tool. The main problem with doing this is competition and is it relevant to this blog! oh well if it helps then why not!
How to come up with Niche ideas?
How to come up with Niche ideas must be one of those top questions most Affiliate newbies want answering.
Many people will have different ways to find or think about new niche ideas, some will go very targeted and some more generic and work on building on it over time. I guess it boils down to a few things;
Can you make a quick buck from a very targetted popular niche with less time and effort involved?
This comes with its own challenges if you are hoping to rank in google, you will need to do your research here which could take more time than putting the site together. If the niche is too small or you don’t have an interest will it ever rank well if you cannot do the content for the site. Also are the domains for your chosen keywords going to be available.
Can you find a niche that is up and coming such as a pre-release or coming out soon.
1 example I found today was http://www.avatardvd.co.uk, no 1 in google for avatar DVD and has made record sales in the US already selling over 6.7 Million copies so far in only 4 days. I suspect most of these will have been online and pre-orders. Being ahead of the game could make that affiliate site a nice little earner.
Or do you go big and work at a Bigger Site but you may not make you money straight away?
Think you can beat the competition, the big players. Do you have something unique to offer or are you just going to throw up as much content as possible so it ranks and hope you get those clicks through to the merchants.
We here at Affiliate Project are always having meetings and the top topic of discussion is which direction do we take. We’ve only been doing this for over 14 months and have only worked on niche websites. We have learned lots along our journey and brought some good and bad domains, quite a few of our domains are undeveloped because of some of reasons above such as having no interest, too generic, too competitive, not enough time. Try and think outside the box, do your research and try and do something you have an interest in.
Forgotten about niche found ranking on first page!!!
Affiliate Project and Google have a Love/Hate relationship. Maybe we’ve not figured out the exact formula for ranking sites yet as we’ve had success in some areas but not in others. I’m sure Google keep moving the goal posts too!
We do have many sites ranking on the front page for the domain keywords and some are ranking for many keywords, but these are sites that we’ve worked on promoting more. So it is true when Affiliate Peeps say content is king.
Today we noticed a niche that was started about 1 month ago but never finished because of other priorities, and its now ranking on the first page. There is hardly any content, some pages were returning 404s, we’d never done any back links about this site and all on page SEO was turned off. So with about 100 words and a few products on the front page it was ranking based on only a few things; keywords in the domain name, good use of Heading tags, and a tiny bit of relevant content.
Now we did pick this niche because we researched the competition and found the ranking sites didn’t have much to them, wrong use of on page SEO or targeting different keywords. Plus hardly any back links.
For now with little time to spare to work on the site, we’ve put up a few products, some banners, affiliate links and some google ads so that a dormant site that is ranking for approx 15000 exact searches can be monetised a wee bit. Well that is the idea anyway.
We’ve also enabled the All-in-one-SEO plugin for wordpress, Google XML sitemap, submitted to google with the sitemap to see if this helps it climb. Lets hope these changes don’t make the site drop. If it does, it would be bloody typical of our Love/Hate relationship with Google. And it make us think twice about using all that meta stuff! Maybe organic way is the best. Only time will tell
Niche sites, are they harder to rank now?
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.
How Affiliate Marketing has changed our lifes
Paul and I started Affiliate Marketing just over 1 year ago and we’ve both found that our lives has already started to change. I thought it would be interesting to share this with others and for others to feel free to share their stories on what has changed in their life since taking the move from a typical job into the world of AM.
1. We’re working our butts off every single spare moment we get. We do far more hours work than before. I guess this would be the same for any new start up business. If you want to succeed then you have to put the time and effort in.
2. I get far less sleep. Paul still manages his time better and hits the sack earlier. I’m slightly different as I cannot switch off that easily, plus I have a 6 month old little boy who still likes his milk dream feed.
As we are both still working part time, most of our AM time is in the evenings and with a few odd hours at work. Shh!!!
3. I didn’t use to drink coffee at all. I’m now drinking 2 cups of coffee every day, probably because of the lack of sleep and the fact that Paul and I like to meet a couple of times a day to discuss affiliate project stuff, and the odd dream that one day soon we’ll be out of our day jobs having the meeting on the golf course, where as I think we both know that there will be far more work at that stage. Nice to have these thoughts though.
4. There is so many more rewards and a sense of achievement which motivates us to do more. We do get lots of ups and downs like when we get a google slap or our sites drop in position or the merchants data feeds are just crap, but this only challenges us further to get to the next stage
5. Paul is now keeping the local brewery in business and I’m on first name terms with the lady at my local grocery store. Not sure if this is a good thing or not, but we do tend to drink more beer now.
6. Take aways and convenience foods are becoming a twice weekly event for me because we have limited time with full time jobs, kids to look after and then Affiliate Marketing on Top as well.
7. Our wife’s are getting less attention. I even forgot about our anniversary but it wasn’t the marriage one. It was the anniversary since we got together. That’s what I keep saying though to try and dig myself out of this mess.
8. We both have more ambition, where as before we were clock watching until we could get home and just chill out thinking is this 9-5 job what I’ve got to do for the rest of my working career, feeling stuck in the rat race as changing careers is almost near impossible without having different skills and all that crap that comes with looking for a real job!
9. Everything we buy now is almost always online. I have to look to see if there is a merchant affiliate program and then I’ll even start thinking of new potential niches
10. I’m getting softer as I get older or maybe its the fact that A. I still owe my wife for forgetting her anniversary or B. I know that one day soon I’ll be able to pay for all these extra things. I know this is not a good thing and should live to my earnings rather than more than them and I do try. Trust me my friends know that I’m frugal with my spending!!
I’m sure we could probably go on more and I’m sure in the next year we’ll have a load more to add.
We still wouldn’t want to be doing anything else right now. There is some exciting times ahead for us with a massive site we’ve been working on with another Affiliate we’ve partnered up with. More on this will be announced nearer the time.
How has Affiliate Marketing changed you?
Calling Affiliate Project, come in, do you read me, over?
Have you missed us? Well we admit its been a long time since we last posted and you would think that with one key to affiliate marketing being content, content we really should be posting more often. We know, we know, however the problem is we have been doing content, content, content just for our niche sites and our big site so therefore these have been taking up a lot of our time. Plus we don’t want to just keep posting the same stuff over and over just to update the blog. We want to try and give you stuff you are interested in reading.
So with that in mind here is an update on how we are doing. We had a great month in March, our best every in fact. We hope this continues into April and so far it has been a good start to the month. Maybe not as good as March but then with people away for Easter this may pick up again soon. We have been working on a few niche sites and have really plough a lot of our efforts into our big site, a project with another affiliate. This is going great at the moment and we are working hard to put as much content up on this site as we can and get it looking great before we launch it.
We have also brought some new hosting. Our current domains have been on shared hosting while we get to grips with this affiliate marketing lark and while this has been ok so far we have noticed our resources are being stretched and our sites are sometimes down through no fault of our own. Therefore we have brought some VPS hosting. For those that don’t know this is Virtual Private Server hosting which means we have a dedicated virtual machine which we can control fully, take up and down when we want and won’t get affected as much by other sites on the server not related to ours. We hope to put some new sites on this as well as maybe migrating our bigger niches over once we have fully tested this. This is an intermediate step for us between shared hosting and dedicated server hosting which again we may explore further down the affiliate route.
Both Gary and I have had some time off over the Easter to spend with the family’s and with the recent change in weather I had my first BBQ of the season last night and I know Gary was planning one last week so lets hope the glorious weather continues.
Ok so this isn’t the best update but just thought I’d let you know we are still here, we are still working hard and we are progressing towards our goal. Onwards and upwards.
Update on our Affiliate adventure
We thought we would just give our readers a quick update on our progress and what we’ve been doing the last few weeks as we didn’t want our readers thinking we’d given up on Affiliate Marketing. We’d not been able to update this Affiliate blog as much as we like because our main focus has been on developing more niche sites and a couple of bigger sites.
Well its been crazy for us the last few weeks, well in fact since the new year we have been on the go every spare hour we can get. Still we are working part time and hoping to achieve our goal by this time next year and be able to afford to live off our Affiliate earnings to cover our current 9-5 salaries. I would say we are just about on target for achieving this goal. We have seen an increase pretty much every month except for february which was slightly down from January, but that was expected with the January sales.
We have probably about 4-5 more niches which we are promoting and trying to get ranking. We have a new deals site we’ve started along with another Affiliate Stuart Smale as we’ve worked with him in the past. The site is starting to take shape and Stuart has done some great coding. We will give out the domain name when its ready and will be looking for feedback. This will be a good expirement as its very competitive and is a big risk. We suspect we’ll need to use PPC initially. We also have a couple of other bigger niche domains which we will build over the next couple of months too.
In addition to building new niches we’ve been trying to plan our day so that we do mainly content and promotion type work during the day time when we can. Obviously this can be tricky with normal work to do so that we don’t lose our existing jobs. Then in the evenings we do design of the sites and get the new niche sites developed and hopefully looking good. This will also involve getting the data-feeds working using PHP and MYSQL.
Anyway not much juicy stuff to report right now, will try and keep it updated with more juicy stuff in the next coming weeks.
Digital Window acquire Perfiliate Ltd and other affiliate news
News has come in that Digital Window has acquired Perfiliate Ltd, based in Newcastle. Perfiliate Ltd operate one of the leading networks called Buy.at and by bringing this on board Digital Window now form Britain’s largest performance based marketing group.
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.
Highs and Lows of Affiliate Marketing
Here at Affiliate Project we seem to have come to a bit of a crossroads. We are doing really well at the moment, January was our best month so far commission wise which is great for us and puts us on a great high, however both Gary and myself realize we need to start taking this project to the next level. So while our niche sites are great and are fulfilling their potential we know that to do this full time as a successful business and to get to our aim of leaving our current jobs and pursuing our dream we need bigger sites.
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!
-
Sponsors / Adverts
