We would love to go to Affiliate Summit in Vegas!
Now this is an event we would love to attend. The Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas and looks a great event. This three day conference includes an exhibit hall with affiliate merchants, vendors, and networks, as well as multiple tracks of educational sessions covering the latest trends and information from affiliate marketing experts. It would be interesting to find out about the American market and meet some US affiliates, networks and merchants. Maybe one year when we have more experience we can take our families out for the break and enjoy this event. If you are going let us know as we would be interested to hear from you. Our aim at the moment is to attend the A4uexpo next year in London. This also looked a great event last year.
Christmas is coming, Affiliates are getting fat
This being our first year as affiliates we may have missed the boat for Christmas sites, but it seems other affiliates are reaping the rewards. Christmas is a great time for affiliates and if you can catch on early to that idea for a site that will have the edge on the leading products for Christmas it can be a rewarding time of year. This is something we will look at more closely for next year. Oh well seems like Santa may not visit these two affiliates, well not this year anyway.
Product feeds – the good, the bad and the ugly
For those that have been following our progress will notice that we have a lot of sites that feature product feeds from the merchants through the affiliate networks. Getting to grips with some of these product feeds has been hard work. Some merchants products feeds are quite frankly almost unusable. That is the categories, the product descriptions, products being listed more than once are but a few of the pitfalls requiring very carefully crafted SQL statements to manipulate and pull out only those products which are relevant.
So I would like to highlight a merchant who has got their product feed spot on and is the best product feed I have worked with in my long (ok fairly short) affiliate career so far. My award for the best product feed so far goes to Jokers Masquerade who we use for our womens fancy dress site. They have their product feed setup perfectly. The merchant categories are superbly done enabling us to use fairly simple SQL select statements to pull the right information out of our database. The descriptions are great so hats off to them. We look forward to continuing to work with them and add a great range of products to our fancy dress site.
Jokers Masquerade are available through AffiliateWindow.
New member of the affiliate project team – congratulations to Gary on the birth of his baby son
Affiliate Project is pleased to announce that Gary and his wife have had a baby boy, Joshua Harry. Joshua was 6lb 13 and the family are doing well. Congratulations Gary. I look forward to meeting the wee fella and to celebrating his arrival with a beer or three.
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.
A4U Expo been and gone, Affiliate Project Duo Gutted we couldn’t attend
Myself and Paul really wanted to attend our first big affiliate event. The event of the year in the world of Affiliate Marketing. The A4U Expo.
We’ve heard a lot about how important the event can be as there is so much information and tips many newbie affiliates and even old timers learn and take something valuable from the event, and you’d hope so given that the cost of the event is around £300.
Unfortunately I couldn’t make the commitment due to my wife being heavily pregnant and about to drop any day now, and my Affiliate Partner in crime wasn’t able to get the time off work. However we will hopefully be able to attend the A4U Expo in London as full timers next year.
If anyone did go let us know what it was like, the top 3 things they got out of it. Also like to hear how smashed you got 
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 launch new site, sleepwear UK
We have been doing quite well at our range of maternity wear sites, maternity swimwear, maternity nightwear and maternity underwear. So we decided to branch out a bit and try something a bit bigger within clothing. So we have now launched sleepwear.org.uk a site which offers a one stop shop for all sleepwear be it womens sleepwear, mens sleepwear or childrens sleepwear. This has involved us being more creative with our SQL scripting which has been challenging to say the least. Still the site is now out there and we hope it performs well.
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.
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