On The Allotment Blog - Dabbles in Video Blogging paying results
I have started another blog, On The Allotment which is a blog tracking the progress of my new allotment. I am using this blog as an experiment in many of the things that I have learned about blogging.
I thought that I would report back on a small success I have had with that blog. This weekend I decided that as I was going down to the allotment to do some work I would take some video of the plot and the first bits of work that I did on the allotment. I then uploaded them straight to YouTube and posted the videos on the blog.
I created a youtube channel, on which I put a description of what I am doing, ensuring I used some keywords in the description, and placed a link back to the blog. I also used the tagging facility on all the videos and he descriptions of the videos to provide more links back tot he blog.
I was please with the positive response in the numbers of hits this has generated for the blog. Which in the last few days has seen a ten fold increase in the number of visitors.
Now, this is a new blog and as such only has a handful of visitors at the moment, but it was nice to see the positive impact on the work I had put in.
In addition I was pleased to note that the site now ranks 4 in google for the phrase ‘Allotment Plan’ not bad for a site that is only a month or two old.
Affiliate Applications - pending after 3 months
In another of my series of posts about the length of time it takes for some merchants to review and approve or deny applications to their programs, I have today noticed that an application with Staples on buy.at has now been outstanding for nearly 3 months… good job I do not really want to promote them anyway!
The frustrating thing is that there is no way to cancel that application, or to re-apply if one so wished.
Frustrating… I will be interested to see how long it takes for that application to be reviewed. I will not be promoting a merchant that puts such lack of effort into their program.
It seems that for some having an affiliate program is a cheap way of promoting their company, falsely believing that it can simply run its self…
Is it me? Am I being over critical? inpatient? Let me know what you think,do you have any similar problems?
Suffering from Poor Data Feeds
I am currently facing significant problems with the quality of datafeeds provided by some merchants. I have blogged about this before which from memory quickly became a rant.
Although I feel like having a rant about these current problem I will endeavor to write a thoughtful post about the problems I am having in the hope that we might be able to make some headway to improve matters.
Break Away Cottages is currently suffering due to the quality of the data feed I am getting from the merchant. The merchant has re-arranged the setup of their data, where images are kept and where the booking pages are kept.The link to the images which is held in the data feed should not be a problem for affiliates, as simple re-import of the data should update the links and everything be fine, however the merchant has not corrected their datafeed.
This coupled with the merchant not informing affiliates about these changes has meant that earnings from Break Away Cottages have been zero for the last month.
The whole issue was highlighted by a reader posting a comment on Earning From Affiliates telling me that the images were not loading on the Break Away Cottages site. After investigating I found that these changes had been made.
There are things that I should be doing to mitigate this kind of problem happening, monitoring my sites, either manually or using some form of automated monitors and monitoring income on all sites so that I can use this as an indicator that things are going wrong.
I do monitor most of my stats, however the merchant I am using runs their own affiliate scheme, thus meaning that my monitoring tools (AffMeter pro) can not monitor those stats.
I have similar problems with the datafeeds that I used for My request List, discontinued products remaining in the datafeeds, prices changing on the merchants site while remaining unchanged in the datafeeds.
In my opinion the main issues with datafeeds in general, and I stress in general as there are some that are fantastic are as follows:
- Poor product descriptions
- Poor Categorization or products - sometimes seemingly to fit in with networks categorization
- Poor maintenance of datafeeds
- Irregular updates
Until such time as the merchant corrects the datafeed I will have to either put up with the fact that the images on the site are not loading which is really not an option or write a string replace in php to correct each image link, the problem with that is it will have to be done each place that an image is shown.
Either way a real pain in the bum.
100 Email subscribers to Subscribe to Offers
Although I have neglected Subscribe to Offers while I get the server back up and running, the site has been ticking over nicely. I am back onto adding as many voucher and discount code as I can to the site.
Today saw the 100th Subscriber via email which is a very unexpected success.
One problem is I have no idea how many subscribers I have via RSS as I have no way of monitoring this. Feedburner would not work as the user can customize the feed, deciding what categories they want to appear in their feed.
I have looked into making the RSS feed script log each time it is called, but this would only give me an idea of hits rather than how many subscribers.
Gearing up for Valentines Day
Valentines Day is only a few days away, these things seem to come up quicker and quicker!
If you run a site that is in a niche related to valentines day it is now time to start gearing up those sites to deal with the valentines day rush. Think about reviewing your sites, ensure everything is working, ensure you have the latest products and prices listed, look out for discount codes offered by your merchants. Change any copy or adverts to valentines day targeted ones.
I my case I also have a theme for Great hampers that I bring out each valentines day, I also make sure that the valentines day specific items are listed prominently on the front page.
Twitter hitting the news
This weekend has seen coverage of the ‘New Social Networking site’ Twitter.
Although I have only recently started using it, I was under the impression it has been around for some time, but hey!
I have also been reading some ‘black hat’ online marketing methods exploiting Twitter, this has brought me to thinking where is the line between legitimate online marketing and Spamming.
I send an update to Twitter each time I post a blog post, I also send an update of each offer I add to Subscribe To Offers, although my curl scripts are not working at the moment. Is this Spamming?
I have read about affiliate marketers using datafeeds sending each item in the datafeed to twitter, effectively sending mass updates to Twitter, clearly this is Spam. Twitter themselves call this spam, which is why people are coming up with systems to drip feed these posts to twitter.
I am not sure where the line is. However, I would prefer not to wreck another good social networking tool by Spamming it. It seems to me that this is the death of all new opportunities on the Internet. Sooner or later they are exploited.
What Is an Affiliate Niche
When you read about affiliate marketing, the general advice will be to find a good niche, this is great advice but what does it mean. Many people write this without actually thinking about what is involved and how one can go about finding your perfect niche.
What is a niche?
A niche is a word that is often used, possibly even miss-used. A niche is not just any market that you work in, it is more than that, it is a focused discrete market.
A niche market is not ‘cars’ as this is too wide, this is the general market, but it is ‘echo friendly cars for the family’
Although wikipedia is not always the most reliable source of information I think that the definition there is rather simple and straight forward
‘A niche market is a focused targetable portion (subset) of a market’
Wikipedia
Its interesting to note that when applied to a person a niche means a ‘position particularly well suited to a that person’ i.e. ‘he found his niche in web design’
In terms of affiliate marketing the latter definition suits rather well, a niche should not only be a discrete market, but it should also suit you, your knowledge, interests and skillset. Indeed that is the first key to selecting a niche market for yourself, it should suit you, if it does not you will be quickly out of depth and you will spend your time learning the market rather than promoting and exploiting your niche.
Research is the key, try monitoring the media, looking at the magazine rack at your local newsagent, listen out and see what people are talking about, and of course look at yourself, what are you doing now, what are you reading, what are you buying, what have you seen out there that you would like to buy.
This is all good material when looking for a niche, jot each of these down as rough ideas and then do some research into what is already out there, if a niche is saturated with people already marketing that area, then probably that niche will be difficult to break into, on the other hand if there are is no-one marketing in that niche then there are two possible reasons, either you are a genius and have found a gem that no-one else has thought about or more likely there just is not the market in that niche for you to make any money.
The real niche that will be successful for you is one where there is a balance between, not being too competitive and still being a market to exploit
Look out for a post in the near future about researchin and selecting your niche
Five Affiliate Aims for 2009
Here is a snapshot of what I hope to achieve affiliate wise in 2009:
- Ensure I have a full disaster recovery position which is fully tested
- Start an affiliate programme for Super Proxy - this will be a first venture into actually running an affiliate programme myself, rather than being on the other end of being an affiliate.
- Keep a consistent stream of blog posts on this blog
- Keep up with my niche blogging experiment at ontheallotment.co.uk
- Move My Request List forward, sort out some of the issues it has and take it from beta to a full launch.
Direction of this blog seems to be changing
The direction of this blog seems to be changing. I have recently been blogging allot about blogging, this has not been an intentional conscious decision, but one that is possibly related to my reading ProBloggers book, Secrets of blogging your way to a six figure income.
I have therefore had blogging on my mind, I have started some more blogging projects, about which I will post more on here. They are experiments to test the things that I have learned from the book to see which methods work best.
While reading the book I have learned some great new things, but also somethings that concern me about the way I do things now.
My Matthouldsworth.com blog is a very much scatter-gun blog, where I post everything about anything, this is one key point that is raised in the book that this is a very bad thing and something that should be avoided, however, my issue with this is that I like that blog and the way that it is forming. Although having said that, after looking at the analytic stats, I have recently been thinking of moving the recipies off the site onto a dedicated blog or site of their own as they seem to be generating allot of interest, so perhaps this point is actually correct.
Blogging Burnout
Whenever I have posted about how to blog I have always emphasised the importance of regular posts, indeed how critical it is that you are able to come up with a decent list of posts before you even setup your blog. However there is something that until recently I have not considered. That is Blogger burn out or writers burnout.
I have been reading on a couple of the blogs I subscribe to, that the writers are becoming disillusioned and fed-up with their blog, debating whether they should continue the blog. These blogs up to now, have been very regular, informative with good content and interesting reads and therefore tick all the boxes for a successful blog. However, these recent posts are the classic sign of blogger burn out and I suspect that there maybe several reasons for this.
- Posting too frequently - a balence has to be struck between posting regularly and what you can actually cope with
- The blogger feels that they are not getting the successes that they hoped for, this maybe numbers of subscribers, numbers of comments or income, it depends on what the blogger views as achievement.
- Other external pressures for the blogger as an individual - I know this affects me greatly, when things are extremely busy it is very hard to find the time to blog. I hope to mitigate this problem by generating an archive of un-published posts that can be published quickly and easily to keep a steady stream of posts comming.