Affiliate Marketing Blog

I have just done a round up of my several hundred domains to see what they are acheiving search engine wise and I have been pleasantly suprised, especially in the mobile sector. I recently started well just before Christmas on shifting my traffic from 95% ppc 5% seo to around 50/50.

I have opted for adding some well written content, tinkered with copy as well as aquired links through exchanges and primarily through premium placements on related sites. In the past I have achieved number 1 rankings for search terms in the telecom industry (around 3-4 years ago). I am happy to say the sites are still rocking out at the top off google and yahoo however if you read up on many of the seo blogs on the net they suggest that there has been a shift from on page SEO to buying up any link that looks remotely like it might pump up your popularity. I have to disagree.

After working and talking with many so called SEO experts and affiliates most agree with me that on page seo is still very important anything from perfect ad copy, titles and header tags to cross linking between pages as well as a good structure. One of the main factors that have affected my rankings recently is the age of the site. If the site has been around for all of 5 minutes is often natural to see google tinkering with where it should go in the index although frustrating for people like myself who tend to start up 600 projects a week this does not matter as by the time I get round to building the ultimate site based on a particular niche my domain has matured like a fine wine.

Recently Kirsty from Affiliate stuff has written about the pitfalls of affiliate marketing when starting out and I have to say for the main I agree, I do think that having several projects on the go at a time is fine as long as you manage to get them up eventually. The affiliate mind has to be open to all new possible ways of making money online and by shutting yourself into one project at a time someone else may fill the gap you intended to. Just last week I saw a domain I liked available but instead of buying immediately I just put the idea to one side and 4 days after I found it it had been registered however I only found this out on Friday evening and have since bought up 60+ domains about similar niches so that is me busy for the next month or so.

Very late 2008 my brother Darren suggested that to make our new year of poker more interesting that we would have a bankroll challenge. The challenge has a few simple rules and no real prize other than support and motivation and the bragging rights for the whole of 2010.

The Rules

• Starting bankroll of £100
• Allowed any number of poker rooms and bonus amounts
• NO reloading
• If you bust out thats it game over and the other brother gets bragging rights
• Post regluar updates about progress on our blogs and uk poker talk

I have choosen to put all my eggs in one basket with my old mate mr betfred. I have probably broken even on that site with my constant blackjack / roulette dabblings but I feel its the site I have the best advantage on when playing properly.

Meanwhile my bro has put his eggs all over the place which is not good especially if you go on tilt although he is more disciplined than me. We shall see and watch this space!

Hi Folks and a Happy new year to all!

Every affiliate marketing blog has a long list of resolutions. I have:

- Focus more!

- Don’t buy domains at 3am thinking of ways to make a bundle of cash only to realise in the cold light of day that they were a waste.

- Work less but spend the time I do work actually working instead of checking on things that which for the past 6 months haven’t changed.

- Switch to a 50/50 split on SEO to PPC as things are getting pricey and google is the only one getting richer from it.

- Focus on 3 or 4 specific sites and once they are at a managable level move onto new ideas

- Keep better statistics and track trends and seasons better

This year I also plan to keep this blog updated alot more often as well as visit more networking events to communicate my ideas and bounce off other like minded people as my girlfriend is getting tired of the constant “what do you think of this?” I also plan on finding a way to switch off from work as although its inevitable working from home that work / normal life is a bit blurred I have been known to drop guitar hero for no good reason just to check on the empire molehill.

I have a collection of over several hundred domains now and normally I get them indexed in around 1-3 days time. However after purchasing a dropped domain I have been waiting for months and months for it to get indexed and after switching hosts and trying everything told to me on various forums it has worked..hurrah!

The only problem is it is not dominating the search results just yet. I shall have to get generating content and building links in the coming weeks.

The main point of this post is not to give up on google as it will work its magic in time

I have always had a problem like most affiliate marketers with checking stats morning noon and night, on the laptop, the mobile and any other way I can get my fix. I have noticed some days I spend more time checking my stats than doing anything else.

I put this down to several reasons:

1/ Working in a constantly changing market - Mobiles

2/ Having limited amounts of campaigns running at once

3/ Focusing alot of my emphasis on PPC

The point I am trying to get at is that when not checking my stats I tend to be able to get a site live pretty pronto and use many of the same approaches on each niche I go into and so it can be a quick process meaning I can weed out junk ideas quicker and ultimately find my next big money maker faster. The only thing stopping me is my inability to just check the stats once or twice a day.

Tips on how to overcome excessive checking of stats:

> Make a too do list
> Remember..If you made money yesterday and the day before that then what are you panicing about?
> Generate so many Ideas and sites that you don’t have time to keep checking each aff networks stats
> Move your emphasis from PPC to Seo as there is nothing like burning through a few hundred pounds on a new campaign - You won’t be able to stop checking adwords.
> Pick times of the day to check eg: once in the morning to see its all A -OK! Once or twice in the afternoon and if your a night owl like me once before bed to check its all fine.

My other recommendation is Aff meter - A brilliant tool to put all the stats in one place which is ideal. However me running on many smaller in house affiliate programmes this software doesn’t incorporate them…still its a great time saver and you can get it to update when you like.

The tips above may not be great..but meh..I am still addicted but I would rather be addicted to something that will make cash than be dependant on alcohol or drugs. I may trade my phone in for something simple so checking on the move will be a thing of the past.

I know 3 posts in one night I must be bored..and I am. I have tried direct linking for the first time yesterday and so far I am £50 down and feeling I should have taken time to build a landing site. I have always done landing pages or sites in the past but thought..this merchant allows direct linking, has a decnt conversion rate why not have a go.

This morning expecting my account to be flooded with around £200 based on my maths..shock horror..nothing! Not a bean. I checked again..nothing. I know £50 is not alot of money but I managed to burn through that in around an hour and a half so thank goodness I kept my meager £50 budget.

I understand you are reading this thinking..this guy is one grumpy bastard but I am posting to give you a taster of what I have been doing this week and I shall update this post in the next week once I have refined my new direct linking campaigns and I shall give you some tips on what and what not to do!

I am a week or so into my experiment to see if small commissions with great conversion rates are the way forward. I am approximately £25 in profit from sales and $15 better off from google adsense…you may think that is pretty poor, however this is on 1 website that has been paid off from this one week it is a brand new site and is currently ranking rather high for some great keywords.

Of course I am not going to tell you exactly what the site is as I work hard to keep myself ahead of the game..one thing I will tell you is adwords does let you bid extremely low if you are very direct with your advertising and are not direct linking.

This new site has the potential to make around £600 a month which is brilliant as it seemed like promoting competitions / freebie / survey / email submit offers was done to death.

I would suggest although promoting low commission offers can be simple money making I would reccommend sticking to higher commissions with less sales needed as if you get your sums wrong or your landing page isn’t perfect you will no doubt end up losing money. If you want to start affiliate marketing and you are looking to start promoting low commission offers remember to check:

Make sure there is enough search traffic / interest in what your offering

Try and focus on an angle to promote your offers and if using ppc on google stick to long tail keywords that are quite relevant. Remember if you are targeting a ringtone / crush offer you want cheap click anything traffic..it does not have to be as targetted as selling say mobile phones or products that require money to be spent.

Make sure you judge your conversion rate correctly think of what a realistic rate is as I over estimated the probable conversion rate at the beginning of the week and had to cut costs dramatically.

Start small  - It may be tempting to spend lots on the site loads on the promotion but take your time and use ppc to judge how successful the campaign will be and increase your budget slowly as you track your campaign. Remember if the search volume / interest is not there you will struggle.

I will be updating this further as the week goes on and I will also be explaining on the best ways to track your campaign and what affiliate programmes to use and why.

As some readers may know my brother and I play poker on a variety of online poker sites. We also review them honestly (unlike many chump change money grabbing poker affiliates) and up until around 10 minutes ago Virgin Poker had a great score.

On a review of:

gameplay - Excellent
Players - Excellent
Bonuses - Rather good

Here is where it goes down hill:

Customer service - Shockingly Bad
Deposit / Withdraw - From rather simple to OMG why?
Ability to screw over player - Brilliant

I shall start my rant now, I have just logged into my poker account after having to validate a new way of depositing and withdrawing of which it forces you to switch to your currency and then put back onto the site in euros. This would not be a problem however in doing so the system short changed me. I thought…o well its a one off.

Tonight I sat down signed in and..hold on a second I now have to put money back into the poker site from my “virgin games” account - So wait a second the £ against the euro is collapsing slowly and so now I put what was 165euros into my account (why i don’t know) and it appears as 164.95 euros so I have lost 5 cents..woop de do dars..my point is that as the euro now gets stronger against the pound why shouldn’t I be allowed to keep my “euros” in my account instead of having to get it back in pounds to put back in euros a few cents lighter each time. I make poker sites alot of money so why shouldn’t if i effectively buy euros on virgin can’t I get the advantage of the currency situation.

Its not the fact of the matter that the pounds, euros and dollars go up and down its the fact there is now alot more messing around when all I want to do is play poker. I rang the virgin customer support number to express my feelings about there new make over which seemed to make my playing experience alot more long winded. When I got through I noticed that the person on the other end didn’t give a monkeys about the fact that there simple system had been down most of the evening and I was unable to deposit withdraw or play poker without loading 600 virgin poker internet windows.

I told them that once I got my money they would be losing a customer..it is at this point you expect them to really care why..but the woman did not care and even had music on in the background making it even harder for me to find out why virgin poker had gone so far down hill in so little time.

O well I shall see if any other boss media poker site has kept the nice webdollar system they once used as the site to play on is a dream.

Until recently I have normally targetted offers and affiliate programmes that offer commissions of £15+ just because it is often hard to get low cost traffic even on freebie or low commission offers. I understand that they convert alot better but I prefer to get 2 or 3 sales than lots of 50p’s its just the way I am..however with many sectors getting increasingly hard to make a profit due to loads of new affiliates jumping on the bandwagon I have decided to try 3 or 4 offers over the next few months (in between Christmas promotion and some of my non affiliate ideas).

The plan is to target lower commission with the view of testing with ppc with a view to build up natural traffic in due course. I am not an SEO expert by any means but I have had some success with content based sites and I have decided to see if I can’t level out PPC / SEO.

Plus I would rather spend time than money on things as my google/yahoo spend seems to be increasing at a massive rate which although means I am making more I am still waiting up to 3 months for some commissions.

I have decided to concentrate on some clickbank and affiliate window based offers solely for the quick payout at once every 2 weeks

I shall report back in a week or two with some stats to show you how well I am doing through facebook ads / longtail keywords on google and if I can some how get

I have been rather ill over that last few days and so I haven’t had much time or va va voom to post anything useful other than me whinging about man flu and so I thought I wouldn’t bother.

What do other inspiring affiliates do when they are ill? Some people are lucky in that things can coast on auto pilot but some just refuse to stop working no matter how bad it gets, what type of affiliate marketer are you?