I have just launched my latest project Subscribe To Offers it allows users to subscribe to the very latest offers, discount codes and discount vouchers via email and RSS feeds.

There are a few offers in their already, but these will grow as I get approved on more merchants.

In a new strategy I have written a CURL php script to update Twitter each time I enter an offer, I will monitor this and see what effect it has on traffic and page rank. I will be looking at automating the posting to other similar sources in the future.

Take a look and see what you think

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My Great Hampers site which finds hampers of all types and prices from many different suppliers and presents them in a single place is once again starting its Christmas rush.

Last year in the 3 month period up to Christmas the site was very successful with 1000’s of sales. This year I am hoping that it will match or even surpass that success.

Visit Great Hampers

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I have been working with a friends band with an idea they have come up with for spreading the word about their band Circus Envy. Essentially their idea is to mimic traveling books, where one person reads a book, then puts comments in the cover and leaves that book in a public place for someone else to find and read.

Their idea is to do a similar thing with a CD of their music. Hoping that this will spread the word about their band, get them noticed for something new and innovative.

I have been helping developing some software for them, which allows users to enter flags on Google maps where they have found one of the CD’s along with a comment. This software is growing (as all these things do) and now it calculates the distance that the CD’s have traveled. At writing this post their CD’s had traveled 9033 Miles! Have a look at their Traveling CD Map here.

Basically with Google Maps API you can get the longitude and Latitude of a point clicked by the user, which means I can then enter this into a database field and then present it as a marker on the map.The user can locate where they found the CD using the search function which can search place names, street names or post-codes.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
//<![CDATA[

var map = new GMap(document.getElementById("map"));
map.centerAndZoom(new GPoint(10.107421875,49.89463439573421), 14);
map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl());
map.addControl(new GScaleControl());

GEvent.addListener(map, 'click', function(overlay, point) {

if (overlay) {
map.removeOverlay(overlay);

} else if (point) {

map.recenterOrPanToLatLng(point);
var marker = new GMarker(point);
map.addOverlay(marker);

}

});

// Recenter Map and add Coords by clicking the map
GEvent.addListener(map, 'click', function(overlay, point) {
document.getElementById("latbox").value=point.y;
document.getElementById("lonbox").value=point.x;
});

// bind a search control to the map, suppress result list
map.addControl(new google.maps.LocalSearch(), new GControlPosition(G_ANCHOR_BOTTOM_RIGHT, new GSize(10,20)));

//]]>
</script>

I have secured the page that allows users to add markers so that a correct CD Reference is required, thus hopefully meaning the map will not be Spammed.

It struck me that this was essentially a viral marketing exercise, and that there are some essential points that can be learned from this exercise for future attempts in viral marketing.

1. Viral Marketing does not have to be always online, but creating links between the physical world and the virtual world do work.
2. New and innovative ideas do work. At the outset we did not know if this exercise would work, but all concerned were prepared to gamble some money and time to try it. I guess this is the key, many ideas will not work, but you don’t know that until you try it. The very nature of viral marketing means that if the idea catches on it rapidly starts to fly and spread.
3. If you have a unique idea that starts to spread, there are opportunities for marketing in addition to the viral side. Getting the press involved with something you can demonstrate (in this case the number of miles that the CD’s have traveled, gives the press something that they can hook into and lead with.
4. Allow people to get involved in your viral marketing. People love to interact, in this case the Map allows users to find where the CD they have been listening to has been, who has listened to it, and what others thought about it.
5. give something away as an incentive. When a user registers a point on the map, they can download an un-released track. This is something that was relatively easy for the band to do, but something that fans will fall over each other to get.

The Travelling CD and Circus Envy are well worth watching. There is no way of telling how far the idea will go, no way of telling if it will get them noticed, but it certainly seems to be starting to take off.

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For those of you looking to register a domain. GoDaddy are currently offering a discount which allows you to pick up a domain for just $2.19

Use this link and then the discount code of: 199TEST

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As many of you will know, I have recently had a little introduction to my family…! Eva is now 6 months old, Mummy is back at work and we are gradually establishing our new normality if that makes sense.

During the last year or so, I have had very little time to dedicate to my affiliate business. However, now that we are getting to grips with parenthood I can start looking at where I am in terms of the performance of my live projects, where I got to with some of the on-going projects and where I want to be going in the short term.

It is clear that there is a direct correlation between effort and earnings, if you put the effort in you get the rewards. As i have not had the time to dedicate, earnings on all my projects have suffered, however, having said that they are still ticking over and are in a good position to be picked back up with a push for Christmas.

I think that it would be unwise at this juncture to attempt to move any of the on-going projects forward as this will cause me to spread myself too thinly, however, now is the time to start pushing for the Christmas trade.

Great Hampers will be my focus as this is the perfect site for the Christmas trade, last year making several thousand pounds per month in the three months to Christmas. Gearing it up is a relatively easy job, I have the site setup template based so all I do is switch a banner and a Style Sheet. I do also want to try and refresh some of the content and re-create some of the ppc ads as a result of lessons learned last year, what worked best. I suppose this is another lesson I have learned, keeping records of your campaigns proves to be very useful. I have kept all the stats for Great Hampers from last year, the clicks, conversion rates, numbers of visitors/viewers and sales of each product and which were the best merchants. I will use this information this year to focus my efforts on the areas that were most sucessful.

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I am currently having problems with one of my affiliate merchants. They run their own affiliate program, and have often been a little suspect about the accuracy of their tracking, however, yesterday I noticed something rather more worrying.

Usually I am a IE7 user, however I had cause to log onto my admin control panel on their site using Firefox3. This gave a large red alert

Reported Attack Site

The website at xxxxx has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked on your security preferences.

Attach sites try to install programs that steal private information, use your computer to attach others, or damage your system.

Some attach sites intentionally distribute harmful software, but many are compromised without the knowledge or permission of their owners.

See the screenshot below.

Reported Attack Site

This worries me on several levels;

1. The company is either not as kosher as I thought, or they are not as competent at their web development and server security as i would like.
2. My users are seeing these messages and associating them with my site, this is never a good thing.
3. Users that I am referring are being lost, those users cost me money.

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Last weekend I had some serious problems with my server due to the bandwidth that Super Proxy was transferring. In the month to-date it is transferred 100gb short of three terabytes of data… Yes you have read that right! This is mainly due to unscrupulous webmasters (although it pains me to call them webmasters) link all their images and videos through the proxy in an attempt to make their sites available in blocked countries.

I therefore took the decision to take Super Proxy private and make it a members only server. I have developed a monthly subscription system through PayPal so people can pay a small sum of £2.50 per month for access to the server.

As this is a premium service, it has no adverts and I will limit the number of users on the server to a small number of 100 or so, thus ensuring that the server is ultra-fast and that bandwidth costs are kept down.

It does however mean that the affiliate side of this project is now no-more, all adverts and affiliated links have been removed. However I am considering setting up an affiliate scheme for selling memberships to the server. Not sure at present how to go about this and would gladly take advice from anyone who is prepared to comment however I think this would be a nice challenge.

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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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