Recent Affiliate Projects
I have recently been putting together some simple websites using both the datafeed import plugin for Wordpress and the amazon import plugin for Wordpress. These have both enabled me to rapidly create my affiliate websites like I have never been able to before. These sites have taken at most 2 hours including setting up the sites, adding the content, adding the design and also writing the unique content that is so important.
One of the biggest problems that I have had with my affiliate marketing is dedicating too much time to the design and development of sites rather than the marketing and finding the right affiliates to join and also I have neglected something that I feel is important and that is developing relationships with the affiliate networks.
The sites that I am taking about all have keyword domains, which I am hoping will aid in the SEO of the site and as such improve affiliate sales.
Have a look at the following sites:
http://www.microhifi.net
http://www.walkingboots.me.uk
http://www.miniskateboards.co.uk
http://www.steelwok.co.uk
I have also registered several other keyword domains that I will be developing in a similar manner to these over the comming weeks. I will report back on this blog their progress and any tweaks I make to try and bring in the affiliate sales for each of the sites.
Now I need to do some marketing, to brings in some affiliate clicks and commission.
Thanks for the detailed information tradedoubler!
Hello matthew from XXX,
Your participation has now ended for the XXX program.
You can not generate any further commissions for this program. Any commissions as yet unpaid to you will still be paid.
Best regards,
TradeDoubler
——————————————————————————————————
Well thanks for that tradedoubler… erm, why, what eh?
Some more detail would help, come on tradedoubler…
I think I can guess why, I have not generated any affiliate clicks or leads as the website I applied to this merchant for has not yet been created, still if that is the case I do not know why they would remove me, does it cost them to have dormant affiliates?
Frustrated Affiliate
Datafeed Import Plugin for Wordpress
In recent posts I have been referring to projects that I have been working on for the last few months. One of those projects is the Datafeed Import Plugin for wordpress. This is a plugin that I have developed myself out of a need that I have in my affiliate business.
In Early 2009 I was looking for a way to rapidly create websites from affiliate datafeeds, I tried Datafeedr and they proved expensive, I tried popshops but again expensive, I tried free plugins for wordpress but they never lived up to what the promised so I decided to create my own. I was forever coding and designing affiliate sites, and although they were in different sectors and the sites looked different, the principles of he sites were the same, so I needed some way or re-using the wok I had done on many sites.
With that I started development on the datafeed import plugin for wordpress. At that time it was very basic, but it met most of my needs and as I needed more from the plugin I added additional functionality.
After giving the plugin to an affiliate marketer friend who loved what it did I decided to put the plugin out on the market so that all affiliate marketers could benefit from it, and again since it was launched the plugin has developed vastly from its simple days to the sophisticated premium plugin we have now.
Why Wordpress for affiliate websites?
Wordpress was the obvious platform to use to develop my software around, it has been in use for several years and it has developed and evolved its self into a very sophisticated piece of software that has many features. It is open source and as such it is free to use, but more importantly there are millions of other people using the software and thousands of people working on the code, as such development of the software is relatively rapid and any issues with the software are soon found by the many millions of users,.
Another big reason that I chose Wordpress above developing my own application was that it is already built, and in use and as such there is allot of documentation on the Internet of how to use it and many affiliate marketers are already familiar with its functionality, as I run several blogs it was more of a progression to carry on with wordpress for my other affiliate sites.
History
Initially the plugin was very simple and the affiliate sites it could produce were quite basic, however, over the last few months I have released many upgrades including a major re-write of the plugin to bring it to version 2.0 which I termed the Multifeed plugin. This included the ability to have many datafeeds importing at the same time, each with their own template and the interface was re-written to make it more usable.
What the affiliate datafeed plugin does
On a simple level is it takes an affiliate or other datafeed file and creates a post from each row or record in that datafeed. The user has full control of what and how and what is imported and essentially when it is imported.
The plugin will import any CSV (comma) file, pipe separated or tab separated file and makes posts based on a template that you create, the system imports the datafeed file and tells you what columns are available, you can then use each of those columns in the template, add your own custom content to each post and use the columns to create categories and tags.
You do not need to edit any datafeed before you import it, the plugin can handle all the importing, the plugin has filters so you can choose to either conditionally import records based on a keyword or exclude rows based on a keyword.
The plugin will also allow you to schedule the posts that are created with the plugin to be published over a set time. You can also set the plugin to re-import the datafeed from the affiliate network.
You can also use custom fields to use the imported data in innovative ways.
The Future for the Affiliate Datafeed Import Plugin
Over the past few months the plugin has moved on drastically from what it was originally, I do not intend that to be the end of development. I have many features planned for the plugin, the ability to import XML feeds, SEO improvements, content re-writing and affiliate URL masking.
All users get the chance to request features so the development of the plugin is now very much controlled by the people who are using the plugin day-to-day so any suggestions that are made benefit everyone.
What You get
Other than the plugin you get free upgrades to any future release of the plugin and you will also get free email support which I aim to answer within 24 hours.
Online Demo
I have created an online demo of the plugin and a dedicated site for the plugin. You can view more details of the datafeed import plugin for wordpress by clicking here.
Long time out of affiliate marketing
The last six months have been very busy for me, we were married in August and since then I have been concentrating on some software development, more of which to come in the coming weeks as I am sure it will be of great interested to Affiliate marketers and readers of this blog.
As a result of this I have not had the time to dedicate to my affiliate business and as such the earnings and success of all my projects has taken a nose dive. I have posted before about the correlation between effort and success and this is a clear example of this. Not that there is always allot that one can do about it. Trying to run an affiliate business while having a full time job, family life and working on other non-affiliate projects simply eats up your time. Spreading ones self too thinly is always a big mistake.
I have been spending much of my time producing some affiliate development software which will allow you to quickly develop affiliate website. I will write a post all about what I have been up to in the next few days. I am sure that everyone will find it interesting and a useful addition to their affiliate toolkit.
Now that this blog is back to the googles view of the world, and now that I have developed the software I have just referred to up to a standard that can be used, I am working on several sites and I have many domains lined up waiting to be developed. I am determined to make sure that I do not spread myself too thinly but I also want to build my affiliate business back up to the state that it was 6-12 months ago when the earnings from it looked like with a little more effort moved up to a state where affiliate marketing can be my full time occupation.
Over the next coming weeks I will be posting a series of posts about using wordpress as an affiliate tool along with the software I have developed to rapidly create affiliate websites from datafeeds.
Earning From Affiliates – Recovering from hack and Google sandbox
Well it has been some time since I last posted, this was because both earning from affiliates and my Matt Houldsworth.com blogs were both hacked. Following which they were both binned by google. I have spent many hours writing to google (and others) to get both sites off the black list as the hack was sorted as soon as it was discovered. Until now that has been to no avail. Email went unanswered and no action was taken.
I can now report that both Earning from affiliates and Matt Houldsworth.com are both back to google’s view of the world.
I am dissapointed however as the length of time it has taken to sort this out has effectively set both blogs back to the beginning again. Earning From Affiliates had a page rank of 4, it now is not ranked. Matt Houldsworth had a rank of 3 and again it is not ranked.
I am hopeful that I can bring both blogs back to being a success again, both blogs have good unique content and allot of water has passed under the bridge since I last posted so I have a great deal to write about.
I have been frustrated and disillusioned with how things have gone for my blogs, I have put allot of effort into working with them, charting what I have learned in affiliate marketing and in particular earning from affiliates was bringing in some good money. Nothing that I was about to retire on, but still covered the costs of the site and made it worth while. Now the earnings have dropped right off and work on this will have to begin again.
As I said I have allot of news, especially some software I have been working on that is of great use for affiliate marketers, especially affiliates that use datafeeds. I will post more about this and other new projects shortly.
On The Allotment Blog – Dabbles in Video Blogging paying results
I have started another blog, On The Allotmentспални комплекти 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.