Think the affiliate bug is catching – wife develops high tops site
At Christmas my wife gave up her job working for what was minimum wage in an effort to have a crack at this affiliate marketing lark that I keep banging on about. With the opportunities that are out there we thought it was worth her having a go as if she can replace her income and work the hours she needs to with the added bonus of still being able to pick the kids up from school and have school holidays then we thought it was worth the temporary drop in income while she gets up to speed. Well I have to day I am very proud of the huge effort she has put in. She now created her own websites, can add product feeds and has set herself up a nice portfolio of sites that are both interesting to her and have the potential to earn. The recent addition to the portfolio is her high tops site. I think this site looks great already and she is busy adding more and more content to make it a true resource for those looking for high tops online. Being an avid summer wearer of Converse high tops myself she already has her first customer.
Quick Update from Affiliate Project
2011 is full steam ahead with the team at Affiliate Project. We have been busy on various projects still trying to fit this all around our current work/family commitments so its still going to take a bit longer than it would be if we had full time resources but we’re doing well considering.
The month of January was a very good month on the earnings front for us and we had our 2nd highest month yet. Baring at mind some of our bigger sites http://www.slashprices.co.uk is taking a bit longer to rank as its not a keyword domain, but we are getting a lot more traffic and now we’re seeing more sales from the long-tail traffic which is great. We just need to continue the hard work and push along to compete with all the other Voucher Code Sites out there. We have been doing a few external articles like Great Discounts at Comet to see how this is improving things as well as regular link building, changing site structures to bring in more internal link juice and more promotional work like Social Marketing too. Its all very interesting and we’re steadily building up our business.
We’ve also been getting involved in buying up keyword domains which are expiring so that has been interesting too.
Who said Affiliate Marketing was easy, hey but its fun with lots of challenges.
I also had my 1-1 at work today and they asked me what I find interesting about my day Job. Well I was stumped to find an answer. Where as ask me the same question about this Affiliate stuff, he might not have got out the meeting room until the next day.
Also Paul and I are keen to find out when the Next Affiliate Meet-up is going to be, its usually about this time of the year up in London, with the usual free bar to meet like minded folk and talk shop. Keep us informed if anyone knows.
How was August for Affiliate Project Team
Affiliate Project have been improving month on month and August was no exception. We continued to grow our sales figures and our earnings also keep creeping up. So we had a good month overall consider we both had time off too, with Paul spending time with family going camping and watching hot air balloons etc and me celebrating my birthday and a mates stag do. Its good to spend time off the project to try and balance everything.
September has started a little slow for us, not sure about any one else, but this isn’t too much of a surprise to us as some of our sites peak in the summer months. Also schools going back parents and families aren’t spending as much, well that is our thoughts as its certainly the same for us, being parents and all. Roll on Xmas. Speaking of which its only 108 days left until Christmas so hopefully we’ll do well with some of our sites over the festive period. Now do we knock out a Christmas niche site or focus on building up pages and ranking some of our product related niches that would be popular that time of the year. It’s not that long away so worth thinking about it now.
We have also seen some of our other more recent niche sites climb in the ranking and now a few more ranking in no 1 spot on Google for quite a few different search terms which is always nice to see. Hopefully this will help make up for some of the dips in our seasonal niches.
Our UK Deals site is slowly creeping up the ranking and we’re starting to see more regular sales and also ranking on some long tail searches. This will take a lot longer before we start to really compete with the hundreds of other sites, but we have quite a few big things going on which should help. Watch this space!
This month we’ll be exploring PPC adwords for the first time so if anyone has any good tips or articles then feel free to comment below.
Anyway just wanted to quickly update our readers on how we are doing.
Affiliate Marketing Work Life Balance
I’ve recently had some time off and a mates Stag do which was such a laugh seeing some old mates and the stag dressed up as Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Brüno. It was nice time off Affiliate Stuff to clear my head and take a break, but it had me thinking of my family lots because I was missing my little kiddies and my wife. It also made me think about my work life balance.
When I came home to see my daughter getting all teary because I came home (she thought I wasn’t coming back) was so emotional and made me think that I don’t want her to get upset and miss her daddy again, so I’ve made up my mind that I never want to work away from home or work long hours. Now I know Affiliate Marketing can involve a lot of hours but at least at the moment these hours are fitted around family life.
With the A4U expo event in London coming up, I was also thinking would it be good to go, but being away from home for another 3 days and also the expense at £399+vat I think I will give it a miss. I’m sure loads of Affiliates will say its well worth it. I’ve got to think about my family first and my children’s inheritance (thanks theo paphitis for this phrase!)
Affiliate Marketing can get addictive and I’ve seen quite a few Affiliate Blogs and Affiliates on A4U up at all hours but I don’t think it has to be like this. Look at Kirsty and John Lamerton going part time and outsourcing work.
Our goal is still the same and we are getting closer every day to where we want to be, which is earning enough money to cover our current full time incomes but allowing the flexibility to spend more time with the family. We’ll face more challengers along the way I’m sure but its all good.
How was July for the team at Affiliate Project
Time to reflect back on how we did for the month so that we can see what changes we need to make if any, so that we can continue to grow our Affiliate Business.
Overall July was a pretty good month for us seeing an increase in sales, although our overall profit for the month did not increase. It stayed about the same.
The main reasons why our income has not increased is due to the following;
1. Working on a couple of bigger sites, this is taking up time from working on our niches. We find our niches make us money quicker but don’t necessarily make us lots of money quick. Our bigger sites have seen a few sales which is not bad considering they are not ranking properly yet.
2. Our biggest earning merchant has now closed their program. We had a special rate of commission with them as we were sending then a huge amount of sales. Because of this our products that are selling instead through another merchant are only paying out 4% compared to the 10% we were getting. Considering this, we feel we have done OK to keep our income at the same level as the previous month. We have seen approx 20% increase in number of sales and 26% increase in clicks from Google Adsense and 3,500 extra page impressions since the previous month.
3. We haven’t knocked out any more niches. We have some more in the pipeline but its difficult trying to manage our time with full time jobs, families to look after and taking holidays.
John Lammerton has featured out site using ECU in their showcase here. He has also enquired about whether we’d like to develop the plugin further to make this publicly available to all other ECU users. When we get a bit of time, this will be something that we’ll develop and might think about a small charge for this.
So whats the plan for Next month for us? Well try and get our next couple of niches finished then build up some content and linkage for them, whilst still ploughing a lot of time into our bigger sites.
We’ve had talks with a web design company about improving some of the graphics on our bigger sites so that we can improve trust and usability. We’ll be meeting up with them to find out more of what they can do for us. Until now all of the design of our websites has been done by ourselves but we are not from website design or graphics backgrounds so we may need a little help on this side of things. We will update more on this at a later stage.
Onwards and Upwards as they say 
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 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?
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