As another post in my series about my Google Ranking Monitoring Software. Over the last week or so I have extended this to include Alexa Ranking, Yahoo Back Links and Google Back links, I will be posting a new version very soon. However this work has got me thinking about how you monitor and judge the success of your site.

I guess the simple answer is the success of the site is reflected in how much it earns, however I like to look deeper than this. There is of course the age old methods of number of unique visitors, page views and how long each user was on your site, however I think that there are now other was in which, if not judge the success of a site, monitor its performance especially in the success of SEO.

As indicated above my software now monitors Google Page Rank and back links, Alexa rank and Yahoo Rank. I plan to add other search engine rank monitoring into the software such as MSN, Altavista and others, but also something that is of critical importance these days rankings and link backs on social networking sites.

This may present too much information at too finer a detail, however this is proving to be a little experiment for me. With this level of detail I am hoping to see effort I am putting in to a site on building its social networking presence for example. I am hoping that these efforts will be reflected in the results of my SEO monitoring software.

Eventually I would like to see if there is indeed a correlation between increases in these various results and the sites performance in its number of visitors and income. I would like to get to the situation where I can graph these results and prove either way if the efforts are worthwhile. My instinct tells me that yes, the effort will pay off right through the chain, in terms of increasing rankings right through to increased revenue.

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As regular readers will be aware I have my fingers in allot of pies in terms of my affiliate work. For some time now I have been selling photographs (photography is one of my hobbies) on several stock photography sites. The sales of these bumble along bringing in a little bit of cash.

The affiliate side of this comes from referring other photographers to these services. Yesterday I logged into one of my accounts, which due to the recent birth of my first child I have not logged into for several months, and to my surprise I was greeted to a balance of over $600.

A small proportion of this was from selling my own photographs but the rest was from referred members, indeed one particular member who has sold over 300 images in 2 months.

Okay I am not about to retire on $600 but this is as the song says ‘Money for Nothing’ and what is more I will continue to earn from these reffered members as their portfolios grow and their sales continue.

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Following on from my post about consistency in your link back strategy which was a brief post looking at what URL you give you when asking for a link to your site, and suggesting that the best thing it to be consistent.

Our discussions have moved on and have highlighted an error, perhaps a fundamental error I am making with this very site.

When I originally installed wordpress way back in those early days of learning Linux hosting etc, I installed wordpress in a folder. Therefore as you will see from the address bar, the blog is actually located at http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com/wp/ I then redirect traffic with Apache from http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com to the /wp directory.

Although I still maintain that I am correct in giving out just the domain name as the address and being consistent in what I give out i.e. http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com and not http://earningfromaffiliates.com etc. I am probably suffering from Google not liking the fact that this is redirected to the /wp/ directory.

I am now in a quandary, do I change this and thus breaking any links that are linking directly to a post? Can I write something into Apache to catch these old addresses and route them to the post without the /wp/ folder? indeed will this have any affect what so ever and is it worth the effort?

I think I will ponder this for a little while and do some research to find what others think. If you have any opinion please do post a comment.

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I have released a new version of the Google Rank Monitor Software to correct a bug in the addSite.php file. The location of the script file was wrong meaning that you could not add sites. I have now corrected this.

If you have already downloaded the software and are using it you must have either corrected this yourself or are getting round it some other way. Either way all you need to do is download a new copy of the zip file and extract the addSite.php and use it to replace the one on your server.

Progress on the next release of the software is currently well under development. I have included monitors for Alexa and BackLinks in Google and Yahoo. I am struggling with the speed of these new scripts at the moment, although this might be a function of how many sites I monitor with it so I am working on that before I release.

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The Google Rank Monitor Software I launched a few days ago has raised some discussions as to what page rank to monitor. The software actually allows you to enter the exact URL that you wish to monitor, therefore if you want you can monitor several sections or individual pages on a site.

This has lead to deeper discussions as to how your link back strategy should work. In my opinion consistency is the key. If I am building link backs to Earning From Affiliates for example I will always use http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com and not http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com/wp/?p=183 unless I want to refer to a specific post.

More over I will also always use the www and on sites where I have two or more domains I will focus all my marketing strategy on one domain while the others just cover miss-types and the odd incidental visitor.

I wonder what others opinions of this is. Are you consistent? Indeed does it make a difference?

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I have packaged up the scripts that I have put together, modified and written that check an record the Google Ranking of a list of sites in a database. It then presents you with the results in a table view allowing you to monitor then changes occur. I have uploaded them and they are available now for Free download.

The script is not perfect, I know there are style issues in Firefox and there are probably better ways of doing things but I thought I would release it so that you can all try it out and see if it is of any use to you. Please do email me or post a comment and tell me what you think. If you have any ways to improve it please also let me know either with your ideas or with code improvements.

Future improvements

I do intend to do some more work on the software and the following enhancements would be nice if I can get the working.

1. Highlight changes to ranking on the results view
2. Send an email alert when there is a change
3. CSS improvements
4. Add Alexa and other ranking systems to the monitor tool
5. Add a total page rank for all entered sites (useful as an overall performance monitor)

Please do let me know what you think and if you can offer any improvements or find any bugs ect. then please let me know.

Download

Download the Free Google Page Rank Monitor Software

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Yesterday an email came through from one of the affiliate programs I market. You know the ones, changes in terms, changes in commission structures, more often than not reducing the amount of commission they are giving. The have the right to do this as much as we have the right to stop selling their products if the numbers don’t add up.

This was not the most interesting or worrying aspect of this email. This was an email from a dating site, and they had added to their terms that you must provide them with a certain number of female leads to male leads. A task which in my view is next to impossible.

N.B. Affiliates must ensure that the traffic sent to ******** is made up of less than 30% female leads per calendar month. Failure to do so will result in all leads being canceled.

Could all affiliates running promotions for ******* please ensure that the above is adhered to.

The question in my mind is in an open medium such as the Internet how does one control this? I accept that some sites are targeted at a specific demographic therefore a larger portion of that sites users will be within that demographic meaning that a higher number of referrals will be from that group. However with no restrictions on the types of site that you can market their services how does you ensure that you achieve their determined percentage.

At any rate, I would have thought that these dating sites attract far higher numbers of males than females, so their statement confuses me. I woud have thought that they want you to reffer more female leads than male, but that is not what it says.

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Following the recent Google rank review it seems that many of my sites have dripped by one ranking, and none of them have risen, perhaps this is due to not really doing anything pro-active on any of the sites for several months due to baby.

I don’t see this as a big issue and I am sure that I can pick things back up and move all the sites forward with a little bit of effort.

Re. my recent post about Google rank recording software that I have written. I am re-factoring it so that i can make it available as a download from this site as I am sure others will find it useful.

I just need to test it now and it will be up within the next day or two.

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I thought I would write a post about questions I get asked.

Q. How much do you earn from Affiliate Marketing?
A. Erm… enough to make it worthwhile!

Q. Why don’t you post earning summaries on your blog?
A. I tend not to post about my earnings as I do not see this as relevant to my blog. I want to concentrate on what I am doing, what I have learnt and found out rather than how much money I have made.

Q. Which is your highest earning site?
A. Great Hampers followed closely by Break Away Holiday Cottages, however I am sure this will change when I start to market My Request List.

Q. Why do you do affiliate marketing?
A. Due to my current job (IT Project manager) I very rarely get my hands dirty in code, therefore I like to keep my eye in with some development work of my own. I also like the challenge of developing something new, finding a niche and exploiting it. I am not really in it for financial gain, although as and when my affiliate work becomes successful enough I will take it up full time. I guess really the simple answer is that I enjoy it. It gives me a challenge a sector of the web industry that I had previously been unaware of meaning that it was/is something new to learn. The skills learnt here can also be applied to all other aspects of the web business.

Q. You seem to have your fingers in alot of pies how do you manage to find the time to do your affiliate work?
A. Your right I do have my fingers in allot of pies, Employed full time as a Project manager, dabble in property development, still run Digitalquill my multimedia and design company, run a web hosting company Quill Internet, and as you will see from my portfolio of affiliate sites my affiliate interests are wide ranging.

Q. Which of your sites gets the highest number of unique hits?
A. SuperProxy is by far the most visited site I run, it gets around 15k uniques per week on average, but at times this is up to 30k in a week. Unfortunately due to the nature of the site I do not earn a great deal off these visitors, maybe £200 per week, but still this pays for the servers and lets be get on with other projects without worrying about having to cover any costs anywhere.

Q. Which site are you most proud of?
A. Without doubt My Request List. I am proud of the idea and how the site has come together. It still needs work as there are some bugs and then it needs marketing, but I really think that this will become my biggest and most successful site and perhaps even more than that.

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Recently I have been forced into a change in web host. Some of you may have heard the chatter on the web about Layeredtechs hike in prices for all dedicated servers. A hike of 30% or more for all servers meant I would have been paying out near enough $100 more per month.

I therefore took the decision to move and in doing so consolidated several servers into one. This was rather a large task but it is something that I have come to the conclusion I have to accept on a cyclical basis if I want to get the best prices for web hosting.

Interestingly enough when i researched I not only found I could beat the new Layeredtech price but also the price I was paying before the price hike. I am now using UltraHost which are based in Canada, and after two months I have yet to have any problems with the servers or their service.

After ordering the new server, they say your server will be up and running within 48 hours, however mine was up in more like 12 which is impressive given the fast I ordered on a Friday.

One small issue that I need to keep my eye on is that they seem to measure used bandwidth in a slightly different manner than Layeredtech used to, meaning that I am running close to the 1500Gb per month allowance. This should not be an issue as data costs are relatively small but it is something I will be keeping tabs on, and if I start to use a substantial amount of additional bandwidth I will move proxies to a dedicated box.

The only other issue I had was that the server only came with 1 IP address, however you pay an extra $1 per month for additional addresses which means cost wise this is not a problem.

A major benefit of UltraHost is that the contract is month by month so you are not locked into a 12 month contract, however if you do pay upfront for 12 or 18 month contract you do get significant savings.

The move over is now almost complete, I have a couple of MX records to move across but these are pretty much for parked domains.

As with all these things I will attempt to keep you informed of how it goes and the level of service, but as of now I would be happy to recommend them.

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