Continue reading »]]> I will be launching a new version of the datafeed import plugin for wordpress in the next two weeks. I am really excited about this major new version of the plugin as it will bring some fantastic new features to the plugin. I am not going to reveal what those are for now, but keep tuned here for more information as an when I release it.

I am also working on the performance of the plugin, specifically its memory usage. I have managed to make some good steps forward with this, but there is still more work to be done.

Remember that whenever you buy, you will always get new versions of the plugin included in the £25 fee as I provide all updates free of charge.

Continue reading »]]> As many of you will already know, especially if you have been coming to this blog and my own personal blog ‘MattHouldsworth.com‘. I have been dabbling in affiliate marketing for some 7 or 8 years. Prior to the birth of our daughter I had built up quite a good business, earning a modest sum each month, however, with the time constraints of having a young child and some other major projects that we have undertaken (see details about our Orangery Kitchen Extension) at home, and my focus changing to the WordPress Plugin Development side of my business, time has been very limited to dedicate to maintaining the affiliate websites I run.

In actual fact, many of the sites I used to have running are now not live following a major server failure, and due to lack of time I have not been able to get they back up and running.

It has been with this in mind that I have been considering going full time self employed again, and as of last week I have started out on this new adventure. I am now a full time affiliate marketer! I will still split my time between Affiliate Marketing and the Software Development that I do, mainly because the software I develop are tools for Affiliate Marketers, The datafeed import Plugin for WordPress has proven very successful and I am currently working on some exciting new features that I hope will move the plugin forward to an even better product. Those of you that are already users of the plugin watch out for an email in the next couple of weeks announcing the new features.

This leaves me with quite a few decisions to make, where should I take the affiliate business, I have considered just setting up all the sites I previously had and from there working on new projects, but I really do not think that will be a worthwhile investment of time, by now they will have lost any Google ranking or visitors that they once had and as such would need promoting and pushing to be able to bring them back to where I need them to be.

I also had a great deal of sites that just ticked over bringing in only a few pounds per month, I previously took the view that as long as they covered their costs that was fine, however, I now have to consider those sites to be taking up time from the business rather than taking up hobby time and as such all sites must provide a return.

While considering this an over I used phrase coined by a grey suited, grey personality British Prime Minister comes to mind ‘Back to Basics’. John Major came up with the Back to basics campaign in 1993 to re-launch his government that had been hit by scandal and sleaze, while I am not suggesting my business has anything like that I do think that the best way forward for my affiliate business is to get back to basics, don’t try and be clever (because I ain’t all that clever) just get back to the foundation building blocks of affiliate marketing as I know them.

The first thing to do is to consider what areas I will operate in, previously I had fingers in many niches, admittedly ones that I knew a little about but it is also true to say that I was by no means an expert in all of those niches.

I have always preached to others about sticking to what you know and are interested in, it is much easier to write from your knowledge than to have to research every detail, and writing about something you are interested in will come through in your writing, readers will appreciate that and will be more receptive to what you are saying.

I am therefore looking at starting out with two or three main areas that i will operate in, areas that I can legitimately claim to have a great deal of knowledge.

I am not going to rush to get my affiliate sites back up and live (I do still have quite a number still running) I am concentrating on getting the sites right, the content written and all the merchants on board with me before I launch.

I also hope to re-invigorate this blog, back in 2007 this blog was getting 2000-2500 visitors per month, now it is down to as little as 200, I would like to think that with a little effort I can put life back into this blog and use it to discuss my affiliate business and hopefully help others who can learn from the mistakes I am sure I will make!

My ultimate aim is to work a three day week… we will see how that goes!

Continue reading »]]> 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

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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?

Continue reading »]]> 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:

1. Poor product descriptions
2. Poor Categorization or products – sometimes seemingly to fit in with networks categorization
3. Poor maintenance of datafeeds
4. 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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

Continue reading »]]> Here is a snapshot of what I hope to achieve affiliate wise in 2009:

1. Ensure I have a full disaster recovery position which is fully tested
2. 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.
3. Keep a consistent stream of blog posts on this blog
4. Keep up with my niche blogging experiment at ontheallotment.co.uk
5. Move My Request List forward, sort out some of the issues it has and take it from beta to a full launch.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> Watched the Hustle (a uk tv program about a gang of grifters) last night, the main theme was that two new members have joined their gang and they are being taught about the long con and how to be a grifter.

What has this got to do with Affiliate marketing? Well the apparently the first rule of being a grifter is never know when you are beaten.They argued about a word ‘Stickability’ is it really a work.

I think this applies equally well to affiliate marketing, you do need a tremendous amount of stickability, results generally do not come quick or with out effort, if you are serous about affiliate marketing you need to be in it for the long term.

You need a certain amount of not knowing when you are beaten, although one has to make sure that you are not digging yourself a nice big hole that you cant get out of. Don’t ever let someone tell you that you can’t. If you have seen a niche or a different angle to approach a subject, go for it and see what happens.

I love the word stickability… ok it isn’t a word but it really portrays the kind of dedication that you need in order to succeed in affiliate marketing.

Continue reading »]]> How can you recession proof your affiliate business? Well there are several hints and tips that I can think of.

1. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket – If you try to have all your time and effort places in once niche or on one project then, if things go belly  up in that niche you are very much in trouble. Spread your risk, try and open up your portfolio and add new ventures.
2. Target Down-Turn Related niches – Jobs sites, debt consolidation are two good examples, and additionally as noted in a previous post, there may well be people looking to the Internet for opportunities to make a new career. As experts int his field
3. Consider the markets you are in – Investing money and effort in struggling industries may not be advisable, for example with the automobile industry struggling it may not be wise to promote cars.
4. Reduce the risk of fluctuation in the values of currency – Those of you that are risk averse may well want to make sure that you only deal with networks that pay in your home currency. In my situation with the poor strength of the pound against both the euro and dollar, this means that my earnings in euros and dollars are now worth a fraction of what they were 6 months ago. You could decide to simply stop promoting networks/merchats who pay in those currancies or like me you could change settings on your networks so that the money is not paid out, meaning that it will stay on account and you can decide to release it when the strength of your currancy recovers. This of course works in two directions. If you are iin the states and are trading in pounds your earnings will be worth more.
5. Look to the long term – look for opportunities and be ready for when the market turns round. Know your niches, make it your task to find out what is coming up in your niche, new products, changes in regulations and law, changes in technology, swings in public opinion such as the environmental awareness and how this will affect your business.
6. Now is a great time to invest – You may well have heard it said that a recession or a down-turn is the best time to start a business, this is simply because you can get your hands on resources that would otherwise be unobtainable, the unfortunate side of the down-turn is that some businesses will fail, if you can be there to pickup the pieces you may be able to lay your hands on good deals. Additionally if you run your business sub-contracting work out, you may find you can negotiate better deals as the down-turn means less work to go round meaning higher competition.
7. Try and Help others, they will help you back in return – It is time to stick together, yes technically we all compete with each other for market share, but now is the time to stick together, if you see someone struggling extend them a helping hand, if someone asks for advice try and put them int he right direction. You will find that this pays dividends in the end.

Continue reading »]]> I was bought a ‘Laugh on the Loo’ book for christmas, and while paying a visit I found this gem!

Definitions of Marketing

You see a gorgeous guy at a party. You go up to him and say,
‘I’m fantastic in bed’.
That’s Direct marketing

You are at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing to you says,
‘He’s fantastic in bed’.
That’s Advertising

You see a gorgeoous guy at a party, you go up to him and get his telephone number. The next day you call him and say
‘I’m fantastic in bed’.
That’s Telemarketing.

You’re at a party and see a gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink. You open the door for her and pick up her back when she drops it, offer her a ride, and then say,
‘By the way, i’m fantastic in bed’
That’s Public Relations

You’re at a party and see a gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says’
‘I hear you’re fantastic in bed’
That’s Brand Recognition.

Continue reading »]]> Regular readers will know that, I have recently suffered a hardware failure on my Web/Mail servers. This then turned into a disaster due to the time of year, state of backups and other issues.

As an IT Project manager, I am used to having lessons learned reviews and I thought that it would be useful to conduct such a review on the disaster that I have just had.

Many of the things in this review defiantly have the benefit of hindsight, however with that in mind perhaps there maybe more that can be done in addition to the backup processes I have already set in place.

So What went wrong?

1. I am still not sure exactly what the issue was, my web host maintained that the server was hacked, however they then proceeded to replace the hard disks.
2. Time of year meant that my hosting company were on skeleton staff due to holidays, meaning that the response time was slow. I should have chased and chased each email.
3. I took too long to make the decision to start from scratch with a new server.
4. I looked at this time as an opportunity to virtualise my server setup, this was a bad move, getting the server back online should have been priority.
5. My default email address with my web host was one hosted on the failed server
6. Set-up of the mail server took longer than it should have due to inexperience
7. Backups of websites where by no-means comprehensive, I relied on local copies of sites on the development server rather than actual backups
8. MySQL databases were only backed up on a case by case basis rather than the whole server
9. Email was not backed up – I relied on outlook to download copies, which was a fatal mistake as outlook does not work very well with IMAP.
10. Transfer of backups from my home office to the web server was too slow due to broadband restrictions.
11. Server settings and conf files were not backed up.

What Went Well?

1. Setup and recovery of the web server was very rapid once server was back up.
2. Very little was actually lost

Continue reading »]]> I have started another blog! I am moving towards blogging being one of the areas that I want to push further. This being so finding a niche is always important but even more important than that is picking a subject that interests you and one on which you can sit down and write a number of posts on without struggling. I have therefore started a blog about Allotment Gardening. I have recently acquired a plot of land to garden as an allotment. It is something that I used to do at a previous property, but now no-longer have the space especially as now the garden her is reserved for our little one to play in once the weather gets a little warmer!

I do not have any intention to monitize the site at this point, it is more a hobby site. It may come to the time when I put some carefully chosen related adverts on the site, but that really is not the point of this blog.

We will see how it goes!

Continue reading »]]> I have just received a payment from one of the Stock Photo sites that I am an affiliate for and interestingly the figure is much larger than it has ever been.

The payment is for the payment period covering the run-up to Christmas and as such I am wondering if the build-up to Christmas generated allot more trade, however I have not noticed any such increase in the photographs that I sell.

I have looked at the other Stock Photo merchants that I am affiliates for and I can see in the stats similar increases in the sales of people I have referred.

This maybe the very point, when I market Stock Photo merchants I tend not to market at the people buying images, but at photographers. I earn when any of the photographers that I have referred sells a photograph.

This would therefore suggest that one or more of those people I have referred has images which are popular at this time of year.

Alternatively a more positive angle perhaps that increase will be shown in the next payment period!

Here’s hoping…

Continue reading »]]> I have just posted a blog on Matthouldsworth.com about blogging in the bath. It then hit me that it would be a good name for a blog. Surely the domain name would be taken though?

Well it is now! Blogginginthebath.com and bloginthebath.com were both free so I registered them!

I am think I will use those domains as a prize to a competition. The details of which I need to come up with, but check back here soon to see details of how you can win those domain names!

Continue reading »]]> Following on from my frustrated post about the length of time taken for merchants/networks to accept affiliate applications I have just got an acceptance by a merchant more than two months after I applied.

I could name and shame but I am feeling in rather a better mood than I did when I last posted about this issue. However I will not be using that merchant on the project I applied for.

In my opinion this demonstrates the level of effort that the merchant is willing to dedicate to the affiliate programme, a level whcih is clearly lacking. I will therefore allocate the same level of effort into promoting their goods and services.

Continue reading »]]> I have started a new backup and disaster recovery process. I still want to do more work on it to make it even more belt and braces, for example I am looking at Ghost for linux which can do a ghost of a remote machine, the only thing with that is I do not know how one would re-image a remote machine if there were a disaster.

What have I got in place?

I have a Western Digital My Book World NAS drive at my office which I have hacked and opened up the linux operating system. I have setup a CRON job that runs daily. This CRON executes a bash file that executes Rsync for several folders.

/var/www/

/var/vmail/

/etc/apache2/

/var/lib/mysql/

This therefore makes a local copy of my websites, virtual mail boxes, apache conf files (including virtual hosts), mysql data files.

I want to add to this all my config files for postfix, amavisd, courier, php etc

These all get backed up to a Backup folder on my NAS drive which I have then shared using Samba.

MemoPal on line storage

After searching for sometime and looking at the many online storage options, I have signed up for MemoPal. I started with the free trial, but after a day of using it I took the plunge and bought some space. This gives my 150GB of storage.

The two main reasons I went with MemoPal was that they have a Debian client, which allows me to put an get files directly from my server to MemoPal and they keep versions of files, if a file changes you can still get back an old copy.

Although I want to create a cron script running on my web server for the interim I am using the windows client for MemoPal to backup the shared Backup folder on my NAS drive.

This all seems to be working well, indeed I have selected several other folders to be backed up to MemoPal, my digital photographs (totaling 60GB so that will give it a good test!) and some of my other work files.

Problems with the backup regime as I see it

I still see problems with this backup process, or not so much the backup but the recovery process. The backup of the server data is currently running at around 10GB, this is only going to grow with time. Therefore the recovery position is tricky.

Pushing the files back to the server from my office is not an option, I only have standard Broadband, which has good download speeds but has the ever present problem with broadband of a lousy 256k upload speed. Therefore transferring 10gb of data would take days.

This has been one of the most time consuming aspects of recovering the servers and it is something that I have yet to solve.

I will be looking at the speed of recovering from MemoPal direct to the server using the Debian Client and see how fast that is. I am hoping that that will be the solution.

What I still want to do

1. Look into setting up SVN for all my websites
2. Look into using Ghost for Linux to periodically Ghost the whole system
3. Add all config files to the backup process
4. Backup files to MemoPal directly from the server

Continue reading »]]> As you will know I have been sorting out the debris of a server failure. I have now almost got everything back up and running. Some of my sites are still down, for example I put allot of effort into entering all my domain names into Domain Name Portfolio of my Quill Internet site, however this was in the week before the disaster and was thus now backed up.

The other thing that I am smarting about loosing is the Google Page Rank Software (see earlier post) which I wrote using VIM directly on my production server and thus did not get a local copy. I usually work locally and then send the files to the production server once I have finished. I am now looking into using SVN as this is something that we use at work, although I am not sure if this would be an overkill for me.

I still need to sort out the themes on my blogs, especially this one. I neglected to back up the wordpress files as I thought I could simply download them again, however I did customize the themes and I did have files in the uploads folders sucha s images and other media which has all been lost, so althought I know I can get the wordpres files I have added the whole site to the backup scripts.

Continue reading »]]> Regular readers of this blog will know that I wrote a bit of software that monitored your sites google page rank and recorded the results in a database, presenting them to the user…

Unfortunately this is the only big thing that I lost in the recent Server Failure that I do not have a backup of.

If anyone out there downloaded it (I know that several thousand did) still has a copy and would nto mind emailing it to me I would be very greatful.

Continue reading »]]> I have been doing allot of thinking about how the economic down-turn will affect our affiliate and web marketing industries. The one thing that this industry as with all others will feel the downturn.

However, I am always looking for opportunities, and perhaps the very down-turn that will cause so much trouble and pain could also bring those new avenues.

One closed door is another opened door

An unfortunate side affect of the economic down-turn is an increase in the number of people unemployed. This presents opportunities for the astute affiliate marketer.

People looking for jobs

There will be an increase in people looking for work, therefor at this time,  jobs sites affiliate programmers may provide good rewards for those who wish to invest time and resources into marketing them. Indeed I would venture to say that it maybe profitable to invest more into these at this time.

Turning to the web to earn income

When people become unemployed they may well be looking for other sources of income either as a new career or as a method of tiding them over until they find a job. If these people knew about affiliate marketing and has useful resources to help them, they may turn to the web to earn their income.

This presents opportunities to tutor these people in affiliate marketing. If you have the time to dedicate to creating an affiliate marketing course, you could earn both from that and reffering those users to the networks.

Continue reading »]]> Only one day late but with everything that has been going on with getting the servers back online I don’t think that is bad.

I would like to wish everyone, friends, family and my readers a very happy and prosperous new year.

With the economic down-turn I am sure that this next year will be a tough and challenging time for everyone, although I have not seen a decrease in my affiliate earnings, I am sure that as the recession deepens and people become more and more reluctant to spend, we will see that reflected in affiliate commissions.

What has happened is that one of the mail merchants that I deal with has gone into receivership, Wittard of Chelsea were one of my biggest affiliates, contributing to several of my projects and direct marketing of their products. Although they have now been bought, I am unsure as to where this leaves the affiliate programme so to be safer than sorry I am removing them from my sites until the picture becomes clearer.

I am sure that there will be other big names that follow Wittard, thus leaving us affiliates with the risk that commissions will remain unpaid. It is a difficult choice to make, risk your investment or batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. There is only one option for me, however I am not risk averse so I will continue to promote my merchants, but what I will do is monitor the news networks for any signs that any of them are struggling.

I am setting up Google alerts on keywords of my major merchants providing me with an additional information steam, allowing me to monitor the current situation constantly.

Looking back at the year just gone, it has been clear to me that there is a direct correlation between effort and success. This year has been a busy one for me and my family, with the arrival in March of our first child. Eva has blossomed over the year and is doing very well, learning all the time, enjoying all the new things in her life that we take for granted.

Those of you who read my blog regularly will know that this has meant that time to dedicate to my affiliate business has been very lacking. Even the time to post blogs on here has been hard to find. This has shown in the yearly income which is significantly down on 2007. This is not due to any factor other than me not being able to dedicate the time and resources to keep the business moving forward.

I am however very please that even when left ticking over, the projects I have running still managed to keep going, and still brought in a significant sum of money. 

 Having said that I have not had the time to dedicate to the affiliate businesses, I have managed to launch two new projects. The first early in the year, with the launch of My Request List, and later in the year Subscribe to Offers. Both of these sites are generating sales and income, however they are really only covering their costs as I have done absolutely no marketing for them what-so-ever.

Looking forward to next year, and given the economic climate, my goal will be to consolidate my position, work on the projects I have live. Putting effort into marketing and improving those projects will hopefully show good results.

This next year will see me getting married to my beautiful fiancé Cheryl. I can not wait for August to arrive, there is a great deal of panelling and organising to be done between now and then, so I am sure that this next year will be just as busy as last! I will be trying to ‘Work Smart, rather than work hard’ although working hard will be needed!

I hope that this next year will be a fruitful and successful one for you, but most of all I hope that it will be a happy and safe one.

Looking forward to 2009 with great expectation and excitement.

Continue reading »]]> If you have tried to get to this blog or any of my sites in the last week you will have noticed that they have all been down, this was due to a major hardware failure on my server, thus meaning I had to re-build the servers, not only that, but once I had done this the performance of the server has terrible. It turned out that there was another hardware problem and I had to get new disks put onto the server for the second time in a week and set the whole server up yet again.

This whole episode coming over the Christmas period was very frustrating, the only blessing for my affiliate business was that it did not come a week earlier, which is of course the busiest period for internet marketing. However having said that seeing my earnings from all my sites turn to zero for a week has certainly cost me a considerable amount in lost income.

Added to my woes was that the backups that I had of the sites and database left something to be desired, the lack of organisation and the fact that much of the backups were out of date meant that recovering the sites was a difficult task

We can all make excuses for the lack of a good solid disaster recovery position, however, it really is something that one should dedicate time to, as the costs of a small disaster such as the one I experienced ran into the thousands of pounds.

The truth is, sorting my backups has been on my list of jobs to do, but it has continually been pushed down that list due to other pressures. It is now very much at the top of the list.

I am not sure what tack I will take with my disaster recovery plan, however I will post here with the details of whatever I decide. The number one priority of the plan I to get the sites and mail servers back online within hours rather than days

Lesson learned!

Continue reading »]]> It is beginning to frustrate me waiting to be approved (or denied) on merchants affiliate programmes. With the many projects I am working on, I make daily applications to different merchants for different things, this evening I have gone through my four main networks, Trade Doubler, Affiliate Window, Affiliate Future and Buy.at and reviewed how many pending applications I have.

As I look down the long list I note that many of those applications date back months. When I am trying to build a business, I need to know either way if those merchants are going to accept that project as something that they want to work with.

I find it strange in the current financial climate that there seems to be a distinct lack of effort on the merchants behalf to push their programmes and get them rolling, after all marketing and putting your products and services out there at the fore is the only way to survive a tough market. Indeed if you have people offering to do that marketing for you perhaps a little more effort from the merchants side would not come a miss.

All I am asking for is clarity, if the site or project I am working on does not suit what the merchant has in mind simply deny the application and let the project move on rather than stalling it due to lack of effort.

Rant over!

Continue reading »]]> 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

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> I have just written some software (with some help from a friend!) which goes away and checks Google ranking for a given URL and records this ranking in a database. I have set this system up to run each week and loop through a table of urls meaning that each week I can record the Google ranking for each of my sites.

I then have a html view in a table and each week the results are emailed to me.

I can then see progress of ranking changes over time for each page I am monitoring.

Its a useful little script and one that i hope will help me monitor performance, admittedly only in one small discrete area of performance but useful none-the-less.

What I now want to do is publish a sum of all my page ranks on this site somewhere… now how would I go about doing that?

Continue reading »]]> Within the affiliate marketing business we often get hung up about online marketing, paying for clicks, adverts, comments on blogs, twittering, digging and SEO, however there is a very large area of marketing that is often neglected and that is what I call offline marketing.

Offline marketing techniques

What am I talking about when i reffer to offline marketing? by this I mean printed media, leaflets, adverts in newspapers, magazines, posters and of course business stationary. It can also relate to radio and television marketing, however this is generally the resserve of the big boys!

Does offline marketing work for online projects?

Offline marketing can yield as much if not more business than the online approach. Think about it in this way, online the effort taken to absent mindedly click on an advert out of curiosity rather than a real need to buy is all too little, now compare this with the effort taken in seeing a URL in print, and taking the time to go online, go to the url and visit the website, clearly the user is oly going to do this if they are genuinly interested in your product. Therefor you might argue that traffic generated inthe way is of a much higher quanlity.

I am not suggesting in any way that one should purely use offline marketing techniques nor am I suggesting that it would suit every situation, but it does work in many cases.

Break Away Holiday Cottages

Take one of my project Break Away Holiday Cottages as an example, a large part of my marketing campaign for this site is offline. I have A5 full colour double sided flyers which are in tourist information centres around the UK, I also distribute them to cottage owners to add to their welcome packs.

I also place adverts in walking magazines and free papers you can pick up in Tourist Information.

Yes there is cost involved here so if you are looking for free marketing then maybe this area is not for you, but believe me this does actually work.

Clearly it all depends on what you are marketing, Holiday cottages are ideal for offline techniques.

I would be interested to hear if anyone else uses offline techniques to market their online projects and how successful they have been.

Continue reading »]]> Assuming that you are not earning a full time income from affiliate marketing, and any earnings you do make is extra cash in your pocket (after the tax man gets his hands on it of course) what do you spend your money on?

In my current position, any money I earn from my affiliate projects is an added bonus to my income, it is not something that i currently rely upon for paying bills or living on, so this being so for me it is extra cash.

I spend this money on dining out, holidays and buying gadgets, I also invest in my daughters trust fund, hoping that one day she may use it wisely! I also use it to re-invest into other new projects with the hope that one day I will have built up enough momentum to be able to generate a full-time income from my affiliate projects.

I was wondering out of those people who do affiliate marketing as more of a hobby than a career, assuming that you do not use it for general living expenses, what do you spend your commissions on?

Continue reading »]]> Over that last few months I have been tackling a rather large project, and now My Request List is there or there abouts and is ready for its first public outing.

Due to circumstances (see last post about my First Child being born) the work on this site has been a little stop start so and therefore there is potentially things I have overlooked. That combined with the complexity and nature of the project I have decided to do a beta launch of the site.

What is My Request List?

My Request list is a service that allows people to create wish lists or present request lists, be that for Christmas, Birthdays, Wedding lists or any other present list. The user simply creates a list and then shops for presents that they are requesting from the shop, adding each item to their present list.

The user can then email their friends from the site telling them about their list and allowing them to purchase items from their list, and in doing so removing that item so that they do not end up with the same present from different people.

Currently the site is solely aimed at the UK as it only has UK merchants in the shop, but it is hoped that once the site getg going it will be able to be launched internationally, changing the merchants to suit where the user is visiting from.

Beta Launch

Although this is a beta launch it is available to be used, user registration works, it is all secure and you can create lists and shop for items.

I would appreciate any constructive comments about the site, if anything does not work, layout/CSS issues on different browsers etc.

Continual Development

I have many ideas up my sleeve to enhance the site and these will be brought online when I have the chance to develop them. At the moment development is limited to fixing any issues and adding more merchants as the site gets approved.

Take a look over at MyRequestList.com

Continue reading »]]> I would just like to announce the birth of my first child Eva Lilia Houldsworth. born on the Monday 31st March 2008 at 5:35 am (yes I know its taken me three weeks to write this post! Lack of sleep and more pressing things to deal with!)

Eva is perfect in every way, a little bundle of joy bringing meaning to our lives, she will be much loved, and when old enough I am sure she will be sitting on daddy’s knee and tapping away on this very keyboard!

Continue reading »]]> I have been asking myself the question recently when the right time would be to do this affiliate marketing full time. This is defiantly something that I am seriously considering doing. I am currently in a very stressful but well paid Project Managers position, the only change that i would make from that position is to go self employed doing this affiliate marketing.

The decision when to do this is based on a number of factors, each month I complete my accounts for my affiliate projects. compiling all my earnings from each site and each network into a database and of course how much I have spent on marketing, domain names, hosting etc. I then take the profit figure and work out an average earning per working-day over that month. It is this figure that I use to see how well my projects are doing, over the last few months there has been a steady improvement in this average daily earning.

The main reason I take this average is that I know my current daily rate and therefore I can compare my affiliate earnings to my salary. Although many days I earn more from My affiliate marketing, I need to be sure that the income will be sufficiently secure before taking this up full time.

Another thing that I throw into the pot is that if I were doing this as a career, I would have greater time to dedicate to the projects, thus hopefully resulting in greater success.

It is clear to me that now is not the right time, as I have a baby on the way and that in the next few days is and will be my priority, however I am very sure that such a move is distinctly possible and with every month that passes by, and the more I learn about what works and what does not, the prospect of becoming a ‘Super Affiliate’ becomes more real.

As a project manager I am very used to making long terms plans, I am therefore going to set out my stall and plan the progression into full time affiliate work. I will then be able to see how soon it is possible to make this move.

I would be interested to hear from anyone else who is currently considering this sort of a move, and also from anyone who has successfully moved from a salaried position to earning their whole income from affiliate marketing.

Continue reading »]]> My latest project involves the use of datafeeds from a variety of merchants, these merchants are at the moment all selected from Trade Doubler simply for easy of formatting the datafeeds.

While working on this project have become very frustrated by the varying quality of the datafeeds from the merchants. It appears to me that many merchants overlook the importance of the datafeeds, perhaps these are the merchants that invest less time and effort into their affiliate marketing.

Today it is not good enough to simply setup and affiliate program with a few links and graphical banners. Affiliate marketing has cot allot more advanced than that, price comparisons, niche store sites and more mean that the importance of the datafeed is utmost.

With the affiliate industry and affiliate marketing getting more advanced, the investment by affiliate marketers producing more and more advanced software and websites to promote merchants products can at times be astronomical.

When merchants provide poor quality datafeeds they only prove to alienate people who are working hard, investing money promoting their products.

In the past few days I have dropped 4 merchants from my new project because their datafeeds are simply not up to the desire quality.

Where actually is my complaint? Well for me there are multiple factors that have me frustrated:

1. whole datafeeds lumped into one to two categories when they should be in many sub-categories
2. images missing even where an image url is provided
3. spelling mistakes
4. product urls missing or invalid (how are we supposed to send traffic?)
5. datafeeds being out of date
6. poor quality copy such as ‘bottle of wine’ or ‘table’ as a description is not good enough

To give Tradedoubler their due, they are attempting to grade the quality of the datafeeds, with premium datafeeds being of a better quality, however with a project such as mine I am relying upon a wide range of products in aorder for it to be a success and if I can not rely upon the datafeeds that drive it my not inconsiderable amount of financial and time investment will prove to have been wasted.

At the moment I am thinking if the Merchants themselves can not be bothered then why should I?

Frustrated…

Continue reading »]]> I have never had a problem coming up with new ideas or identifying niches, a majority of the time I document those ideas and work them through to find out their viability. The ones that the research suggests could be successful go through to the next stage of developing that idea.

Most of the time these are fairly simple projects, some larger than others but all well within a few days or weeks worth of work, however sometimes you hit on an idea, for which all signs are positive, the research is good, there defiantly seems to be a market and you have worked thoroughly through the idea on paper and area ready to go-ahead with that project but when it comes to the crunch it starts to look like a daunting proposition.

I am currently in that position, I have a great idea which I have been working on for some time now doing research and paper design, I have even done some prototyping but now that the time has come to actually develop the site related to the project it seems a whole different kettle of fish, don’t get me wrong it is still a viable idea and I am sure it would be worth the amount of work it will take to get it off the ground, however it is still a daunting prospect.

The way I see it I have four options:

1. Scrap the idea
2. Outsource the work
3. Find a Partner for the project
4. Try and split the project down into more manageable chunks.

The first option is out of the question, it is too good an idea to throw on the scrap heap, the second is also unfortunately out for the question as this would take significant cost, s I am left with either finding a willing and capable partner for the project or trying to start the idea small and grow it over time.

Anyone else been in this situation? any advice?

Continue reading »]]> I have just found out that the RSS feed on Earning From Affiliates is not working. It seems like this stopped when I changed the theme some months ago, so new posts since then are not included in the RSS. Strange!

Anyone any ideas? I have yet to have a look myself. I will try and sort it this evening!

Sorry All!

Continue reading »]]> Following on from my little mini seris on earning from your parked domain names, i have noticed that Fasthosts and Regnow and probably other hosts already earn from your parked domains.

The way that Fasthost are earning is by having a Sedo parking page on all parked domains. This allows them to earn from clicks on the text adverts that appear on those pages.

Have a look at Realissues.net below:

This shows that there is money to be had from parked domains, so why not earn that money for yourself and not your web host?

Continue reading »]]> I have recently been sent a funny complaint letter by a friend, it seems that this is one that is unreleased to the net, but believe me when I say its a gem! Not only had me but the whole office in hysterics reading it!

The thought struck me that this is the perfect opportunity to test out some viral marketing, put it on a website and release it to the net and see if we can make it go viral. Of course adding in some nice PPC adverts and links some affiliate projects.

This I have done for the Complaints letter to Orange.

What Have I done to try and start it going viral?

1. blogged about it on my personal blog

2. submitted it to digg and other similar sites

3. submitted the page to search engines

4. emailed a link out to my address book

5. added a link to it from several of my other sites

6. blogged about it here!

I will probably think of some more things to do to try and make it go viral, I wil keep you all updated to see how it goes.

Continue reading »]]> As a follow on from the last post about using domain names that you have parked. I have been running through my portfolio of domains, in doing so I came across a domain name I have been holding onto for several years Broadbandlocal.co.uk.

While with most of my portfolio of parked domain names I have being simply adding a couple of adverts, I decided that Broadband Local would be perfect for a quick exercise to see how quickly I could put together a very simple affiliate site. The result was Broadband Local. A very quick site I have put together to compare broadband prices in the UK.

I chose a template from OSWD and modified it to suit a broadband site, then created a simple database with two tables, one for suppliers names and one for offers, with relationship between them based on supplier ID.

Then in the PHP page i created a simple SQL query joining the two tables getting all the offers and formatted the results in an easy to view HTML table.

The I signed up to some broadband merchants and entered the details of their offers into the database, and hey presto a working site.

All in all this took about 2 hours including finding a template, modifying it, setting up the database, writing the php and entering the data into the DB.

One could argue that this is not the greatest site in the world, it does not automatically update its self, but for 2 hours work I am pleased!

I will not be heavily marketing the site, again this is not one of my main affiliate projects, I will concentrate my efforts on those, but I will submit broadband local to search engines and I will create links from my Web Design company and Web Hosting Company websites, all I need is one sale and that is better than having the domain parked doing nothing!

Have a look at Broadbandlocal.co.uk

Continue reading »]]> Unfortunately this blog seems to have attracted the attention of spammers, each time I check the site I have to filter through 100′s of SPAM comments. None of these will ever see the light of day and I am not interested in the products they are trying to sell so what is the point?

I am sure there are a handful of people who have heir blogs set to automatically publish comments, however those blogs will soon lack readers if they are inundated with spam comments, it therefore does not work as a link building tool as those sites have little or no credibility, so therefore I say yet again why do it?

 If it comes to it I will simply turn off comments, this will in my view be an unfortunate step as the genuine comments I have received have been useful and insightful helping both myself and other readers of this blog.

Why do the few spoil it for the many?

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> I have been using AffMeter for some time and have it set to automatically update its self when new versions are available. Imagine my surprise this morning when loading up the software to find a totally different interface.

What is AffMeter

For those of you that do not use or know about AffMeter it is a bit of software that sits on your local machine and automatically gets statistics, and commission information from a range of Affiliate networks, meaning that you do not have to log into all the networks to monitor your performance you can see them all in one place. Not only that but you can also compare the performance of merchants from different networks.

In addition you can also monitor a Google Adwords account or multiple accounts, and use this information to compare against the resulting commissions from a merchant whose product or service you are promoting.

I am a big fan of this software, it does have its faults and limitations, there are some networks that are not included and you can not include independent merchants who run their own affiliate schemes but it does cover the major networks.

AffMeter currently works with:

• Commission Junction,
• Linkshare,
• Performics,
• Google Adsense,
• Clickbank,
• LinkMo,
• Linktrust,
• Zanox,
• Affiliate Window,
• Affiliate Future,
• Tradedoubler,
• Buy.at,
• DGM Affliates,
• Webgains,
• Reporting.net,
• PaidonResults,
• Clixgalore

Visit AffMeter Website by clicking here

Whats new in version 2.0?

Having has a bit of a play with it, the new interface seems to work well, there are a couple issues I have with the usability, such as when you click on the menu in some instances a sub menu appears in a section above the main menu which can be quite confusing until you get used to it, however the overall impression of the new layout is good, it seems to now present more information to you on a single screen while remaining easy to read and analyze the data presented.

The new Comparison tool allows you to compare how a merchant is performing over time, interesting to use this in January and see the difference that Christmas makes (see earlier post about December performance)

The Update notes state that there is a dramatic increase in the performance of AffMeter when getting its data from the Affiliate network, and after using it for a few hours it does seem to be working quickly. I have it set to automatically check the networks every 15 minutes which works well, however I never had a problem with the speed of the last version so time will tell if this improvement makes a difference to the way I use it.

The other improvement has been made in the Merchant monitor section which is now easier to use and setup monitors for merchants performance.

Visit AffMeter Website by clicking here

Useful links:

Web Hosting

123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> Having a mini-clear out of domain names and website, I am selling GpCare.co.uk by auction on SitePoint

This is a great little domain, well aged as first registered in 2001, but been parked for the last few years.

Domain could be used for a site directed at Doctors or perhaps you have another idea for it.

Either way if you are interested go over to SitePoint and bid:

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]>

This week I have launched another Affiliate project DIY Journal. This is a site the brings together many sources for all things DIY, Tools, Decorating materials, Home Improvement, Furniture and Gadgets.

 It is based on the superb Affilistore which is working well although the site does seem rather slow at times so I will have to see what I can do about it.

It uses datafeeds from 5 different merchants and combines them, it was running with another two merchants however the shear number of products in the store made it too slow. If I can find a way round it or if I can find the SQL in the Affilistore code I may be able to optimize it a little, however for now it is launched and out there.

The great benefit of using Affilistore is when you add datafeeds you can use feed pipes, this the need to do any work to update the sites is very limited, I am simply holding a monitoring role leaving me free to work on marketing the site.

The early signs are good, there have been a handful of sales, which will hopefully increase once the marketing kicks into action.

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> Well I have not posted in a while, there have been many changes in my personal life in the last 6 months, I have got engaged to the most fantastic and beautifl Cheryl and we are now expecting our first child! So what with wedding plans (now put on hold for some time!) and getting ready for a baby time has been limited to do my affiliate work.

In all honesty in the past few months I had become disheartened with the progress I had been making, although I have managed to more than break even with my projects such as Break Away Holiday Cottages and Great Hampers, they had not set the bank managers heart racing, the amount of work I had put in was not reflected in the amount of return I was getting.

Then in November things started to pick up. I targeted Halloween with Great Hampers which increased sales greatly and then changed the focus onto Christmas. As I said earlier due to time constraints this consisted of adding more focused projects and customising my Adwords.

I was pleasantly surprised that during December there were only a handful of days in which I did not earn as much if not more than I do for my salaried position. As this was my first affiliate Christmas i did not really know what to expect, and the results I must say have been stunning.

 My Interest is therefore again sparked, don’t get me wrong, I am very prepared to put in the time and effort to get the rewards, but I do have to see some of those rewards. I will continue to target my sites such as great hampers to key events, valentines day seems to be the next one on the horizon so I will see what results I get from that.

I have come up with what i think is another great little project to get my teeth into. I will post more details soon, but I want to get my head round it first.

In addition following the recent review of Google rankings, all my sites have improved or indeed been ranked for the first time, this has in turn meant a huge increase in hits on many of my sites, hopefully this will lead to increased sales and commissions.

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> The last few articles I have posted have extended the scope of this site outside the ‘Affiliate’ sphere to a wider subject of earning money online. I have been pleased with the success of those articles, which have generated a good level of interest and have rapidly become both the most read and the highest earners for me.

With this in mind I have to consider the structure of this site. Should I stick with the affiliate marketing focus or should I extend it into earning money online. Will this dilute the content of the site too  much, perhaps I should start another more general sister site about earning money online, with both sites supporting each other.

Questions Questions Questions!

With my earnings from the Bigstockphoto affiliate program adding to the earnings I already make on their site from selling my photographs online. I am sure that writing ‘how to’ articles about earning money online would be successful especially if they focus on some of the niche areas that are generally not covered well elsewhere.

I do not want there to be too much scope creep on this site, so I am reviewing if this is the right place for these articles or to create another site for those.

Let me know what you think. Your input is always appreciated.

Continue reading »]]> What with the current storm over Googles changes to their page rank system I have been getting rather worried about what sort of page rank I would get for this site. As the site has only been going for a few months I have been working with a zero page rank.

Today i have checked my page rank and found that after Googles latest review I now have a page rank of 3/10 for which I am rather pleased. Ok these is still improvement to be had, but for a site of this age I am very pleased with that.

On with the work… there is improvement to be had!

Continue reading »]]> It seems that the problem was a vulnerability in wordpress 2.1.1, the advice if you have had a similar attack is to do the following:

Upgrade to the latest stable release (currently 2.3)

Check your logs for access to theme.php or feed.php with query strings of ix= or iz=

Report the IP addresses of those using these hacks to their ISP’s

Continue reading »]]> Sorry to anyone that subscribes to my RSS feeds or who has been on the site in the past 24 hours. It seems that this site has been the victim of a hack. I created a category yesterday called Alexa and looking in that category today I find 14 posts about mobile phone ring tones pointing to a site “ringtones-top.info” there is no site there.

A Whois comes up with:

Domain ID:D20274359-LRMS
Domain Name:RINGTONES-TOP.INFO
Created On:17-Oct-2007 12:13:32 UTC
Last Updated On:17-Oct-2007 13:08:31 UTC
Expiration Date:17-Oct-2008 12:13:32 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R126-LRMS)
Status:TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:A73F200DAE57EC01
Registrant Name:WhoisGuard Protected
Registrant Organization:WhoisGuard
Registrant Street1:8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 -
Registrant Street2:732
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Westchester
Registrant State/Province:CA
Registrant Postal Code:90045
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.6613102107
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:4648f2c48efd4542a673de6b8b59afed.protect@whoisguard.com
Admin ID:A73F200DAE57EC01
Admin Name:WhoisGuard Protected
Admin Organization:WhoisGuard
Admin Street1:8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 -
Admin Street2:732
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Westchester
Admin State/Province:CA
Admin Postal Code:90045
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.6613102107
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:4648f2c48efd4542a673de6b8b59afed.protect@whoisguard.com
Billing ID:A73F200DAE57EC01
Billing Name:WhoisGuard Protected
Billing Organization:WhoisGuard
Billing Street1:8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 -
Billing Street2:732
Billing Street3:
Billing City:Westchester
Billing State/Province:CA
Billing Postal Code:90045
Billing Country:US
Billing Phone:+1.6613102107
Billing Phone Ext.:
Billing FAX:
Billing FAX Ext.:
Billing Email:4648f2c48efd4542a673de6b8b59afed.protect@whoisguard.com
Tech ID:A73F200DAE57EC01
Tech Name:WhoisGuard Protected
Tech Organization:WhoisGuard
Tech Street1:8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 -
Tech Street2:732
Tech Street3:
Tech City:Westchester
Tech State/Province:CA
Tech Postal Code:90045
Tech Country:US
Tech Phone:+1.6613102107
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email:4648f2c48efd4542a673de6b8b59afed.protect@whoisguard.com
Name Server:DNS1.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Name Server:DNS2.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Name Server:DNS3.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Name Server:DNS4.NAME-SERVICES.COM
Name Server:DNS5.NAME-SERVICES.COM

What the hell is WhoisGuard? They seem to be a company that allows hackers/Spammers to hide their identity… ok, not so fast… I have full logs and will be going through them with a fine tooth comb and will report anything I find out.

 I am unsure on how the hack was performed, but it was posted under my admin username. I have changed all passwords, and will be upgrading wordpress to the latest stable release.

So just a warning to all you bloggers out there, check your wordpress blogs

Continue reading »]]> Photography is a great passion of mine, a hobby which I try to engage in as much as I can. Unfortunatly due to work and Business commitments my time for photography is limited to holidays.

Never the less, recently I have identified a way to combine, my making money onine word with my photography hobby. This article is a ‘How to earn money online from your Photographs’. It gives you some pointers where to start earning money from your photographs and suggests some hints and tips along the way.

As with all things this assumes you are willing to but the time and effort into your project, you do not have to be interested in photography but it sure helps! You dont nessiceraly need a camera that costs thosands of pounds, but an eye for a good shot and a creative streak will help you.

Selling your Photographs

There are two ways that you can sell your images online, firstly by doing it yourself, creating a website and marketing it, and secondly selling your images through a commercial online gallery.

Why would anyone want to buy my photographs? 

As a designer this is not a difficult question to answer, in graphic design we are always looking for an image to best illustrate the artwork we are creating, very often we are looking for somethign very specific and will trawl through thousands of images to find the perfect one. Why should that perfect one not be your image?

Ok people wont want to buy pictures of your latest party, but if you have some aptitude for photography you will have something in your portfolio that someone might want to use.

How to Sell – Own website

Creating your own website has the advantage that you cam have the look and feel of the site exactly as you want it, visitors to your site will only have a choice of your images and you will keep the all of the sale price.

If you are not a web designer and do not want to  employ a web designer to create your site, you can get open source web designs that will get yo started.

The difficulties with this method is that you need to market your site yourself, you will need a budget for this or you will need to find a target market or niche for your images.  You will also have to work out a method of charging for your images, this might simply be a paypal system or you may want to develop an ecommerce site with a shopping basket. Either way this starts to get complicated.

How to Sell – Commercial Galleries

There is another way, many of the large online commercial galleries will sell images on your behalf, once you have signed up you will be able to upload your images. The prices will either be fixed by the gallery or you will be able to set your own prices from which the gallery will take a cut.

The advantages of selling your photographs this way is that you need no worry about the website, or the marketing of your images, or how to take payment, or control copyright, you simply upload the images and away you go.

The following are online galleries who will either buy your photographs directly or will give you a cut of the sale price of any of your images they sell. As with all the recommendations I make on this site, these are all people I have used or am using.

SmugMug Pro – Not really a commercial gallery but allows you to have your own space, share and sell your photographs

Big Stock Photo – A very simple to use photo gallery

Fotilia - I find this site not as easy to use, however it is well worth persevering with as you will get the results.

DreamsTime - A good site, easy to use and seems to be the quickest to upload pictures to.

IStockPhoto - One of the best sites, the user has a control panel on whcih they can manage all their account.

How much money can you make?

How much money you can make is very much down to the quality and quantity of images that you have for sale. The variety of the images could also affect the performance of your earnings, getting your images into a wide variety of different niches will increase your market.

Really what we are saying about how much you can earn from selling your photographs online is how long is a piece of string.

In the short time that I have been selling my images online, I ave uploaded probably about 150 photographs to the various galleries listed above, where possible I have uploaded the same photograph to multiple galleries, however you do need to check the terms and conditions and ensure that they don’t have an exclusivity clause.

Although int he very early days sales were very slow, they have begun to pickup. With the number and types of photographs that I have for sale I am not about to pay off the mortgage, but it h given me enough cash to upgrade my camera!

I have spoken to several photographers on photography forums who make their living exclusively from this type of work so depending on what your targets are, you can archive either a nice hobby that pays for its self or a good living.

Its up to you to make it work, put in the time and effort and you will reap the rewards.

Continue reading »]]> I currently have several projects marketing products from Amazon, indeed in the past this very blog has promoted books that I have read and recommend. with the recent success of Great Hampers, many of the sales are via Amazon, and looking back at the stats it seems that users are very interested in a specific line of products.

Those of you who have read my blog regularly will know I like to keep my fingers on what is happening to all my projects in real time. Indeed this is what I do, as a professional I am a Project manager.

Amazons Affiliate program frustrates this, their stats are not only delayed until next day, you do not know what commissions you have earned until the items have been shipped. Amazon claim that this is because buyers can cancel their item until it has been shipped, however this also applies to many other merchants, what is wrong with the unapproved/approved commissions system run by other networks and merchants.

At least then I can monitor the sales that I am generating in real time and tweak PPC and Adwords campaigns to suit. Not only this, if it turns out that there are any trends in buying patterns I and re-enforce the products in that line, by adding more of the same to my affiliate site or by adding more details and better copy to those winning products.

Don’t get me wrong, the Amazon associates program is well worth joining, it just frustrates the way i like to work.

Continue reading »]]> Last night I changed the design of this site, I hope that this one will prove to be more flexible for me to do with what i want. The idea is that it is clean and simple while giving me the opportunity to promote my sponsors better.

There are still a few little bits I want to work on but let me know what you think, good, bad or indifferent!

Continue reading »]]> If you have been a member of a networ and an affiliate of any merchant for longer than a couple of hours you will have no doubt got numerous emails from the merchant telling you how great they are!

These emails are worth paying attention to, recently Whittard released a 15% discount code that affiliates could offer to their customers. Ok in the first email they got the code wrong but quickly updated it.

When I placed this code under the header on my World Coffee site, I noticed that the affiliate sales through World Coffee doubled over night, and hense my commissions doubled.

 So it is worth paying attention to those emails even if you just skim read them to keep youself up-to-date.

Want some Coffee? Go to World Coffee for a 15% discount.

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> I applied to join Google Adsense for this site and what do you know I was rejected. Apparently this site does not meet their approval criteria… no other information than that. Seems to me rather a silly decision, firstly this is a site that looks at affiliate and online marketing, and reviews and recommends services which include the types of services Adsense offer.

My advice to you therefore can only be to recommend alternatives to Adsense, whom I can verify, and whose service I can test. Services such as:

Bidvertiser – Text ads

ClickSor - Text ads – $20 of free clicks when you sign up

Auction Ads- Earn from Ebay Auctions – they will give you $25 for simply signing up

Text-Link-Ads - Buy and sell text ads on your site, join now for $100 worth of free links

Adbrite - Text and Image ads

Adversal - Text Ads

Continue reading »]]> So you’ve got a great idea, you’ve researched it, created a site, promoted it, given it all you love, care and attention, yet still it does very little, when is the point that you decide to bin that project?

Indeed do you scrap it altogether or do you as I tend to do, just leave the site as it is, drop promotion and any further work on it and leave it to its own devices, after-all it may bring in some income.

A strange article I guess. I am really just posing the question in the hope that others might have some insight, please do comment if you have an opinion.

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> Some of you may already know but in my ‘spare’ time when not at work and not doing my affiliate work I do some Property Development. As with my affiliate work this property development really is a hobby, it is not my full time job and it is something I enjoy doing.

Recently I was faced with a big problem, in July in the UK we had quite severe flooding, one of my properties that was just about to be put up for sale after several months worth of renovation and decorating, was fairly badly affected. At the time there did not seem to be anything good about this situation, the house needed re-decoration, new carpets, new kitchen, new floor in the kitchen and loads of other work, so it would not be going on the market for some time.

However after insurance claims and some hard work it seems that every cloud has a silver lining (no pun intended!). The property is now back to its very best, actually probably better than it was before the flooding. This has meant that I have been able to get tenants in the property, so there is income covering the mortgage, so that I have time to consider my next move.

Why am I writing about this on a site about Affiliate work? Well firstly I was so impressed with the way that my mortgage company handled my claim that I have started to promote their service. I have created a landing page and started an Adwords campaign. The other positive thing is that I have decided to do Property development as a rather more serous part of my working life, in doing so I have to find more properties suitable for property development, this is when I came across Renovate Alerts who email you when they find a property that matches your search criteria. While signing up I noticed that they had an affiliate programme so I signed up and again created a landing page and started a PPC campaign.

The lessons that I have learnt from this is that always look for the positive angle. Trying to make good come out of every situation can be a very annoying personality trait, but if one keeps a lid on it and calmly works through the problem, I find that there are always opportunities to move forward.

The second is not really a lesson learnt, but an lesson re-enforced, you will have greater success on your affiliate projects if you are knowledgeable about them. It has been noticeable that these two campaigns have been far more successful than other similar campaigns that I am less knowledgeable about. In the future I will be carefully considering what types of affiliate work I do, making sure that I either am already knowledgeable about them or I can easily gain the relevant knowledge needed to successfully promote that merchant or product.

Continue reading »]]> Today I have made a change in focus in my affiliate work. I am consolidating the projects I have currently underway, rather than working on any more of my ideas. This is not a long term change, but just a short period where I focus on the projects I have at market, tidying them where needed and putting in a concerted marketing effort.

 My plans have been thwarted by Google Adwords being down… I login and get the message:

“We apologise for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it. Please note that using your browser’s back button in AdWords can increase the likelihood of errors. If you think this was the cause of your error, please try again without using the back button.”

This is very frustrating as I want to work on my ppc campaigns… ah well I am sure I will find something else to do.

Continue reading »]]> With tensions on the streets of Burma rising over the last few days, it provides food for thought. As we affiliate marketers chase that extra sale, that extra click and extra dollar, think for a moment that a majority of people in Burma live on just $1 per day.

Tongiht, for me this brings a clear perspective to the work I do. I consider myself fortunate that I not only live a comfortable life, but also have the right to connect to you the global audience without censorship or threat and speak whatever words I choose.

Continue reading »]]> Just a very quick post, I want to give some exposure to an interesting site for those of you in the UK. Blogstorm.co.uk and specifically the ‘Big List of UK Marketing Blogs’ which is a blog/website by Partic Altorf.

The ‘Big List of UK Marketing Blogs’ is a great resource for anyone who is interested in Internet or affiliate marketing, it uses Google Maps to list many UK marketing blogs. I have spend many hours today reading the blogs that are listed there.

 Great Stuff, very useful resource

Continue reading »]]> In many of the articles on this site you will have seen me banging on about the quality of traffic or the importance of getting quality traffic. It is about time that I wrote a little about what we mean by quality traffic and how we can start generating that quality traffic.

What is Quality Traffic?

Depending on who you talk to or where you read, you will find that people have differing definitions for the quality of traffic, this can be based upon many factors such as the source, demographic, length of time that person spends on your site or if a conversion to a sale is made from that person. In reality it is probably a combination of these factors.

In the early days of my affiliate marketing, I purchased traffic from a company who placed adverts for your site on expired or expiring domain names; they sent me 2500 unique hits in one day, for the cost of $25, great! Or so I thought, the graph on Google Analytics flew up and everything looked fantastic until I looked at the time on site and bounce rate which said that on average those visitors spent 0.001 seconds on the site, clearly they did not stay about long enough to read anything on the site, so it was a mistake which I will never make again!

Having a huge amount of traffic may be impressive, but it it does nothing for your sales or profits then what is the point, your efforts have been wasted.

My definition of quality traffic is that the user is interested in the content of my site and eventually participates in the sites discussion. On this site I would not include anything about converting any of those into sales of any form as that is not that this site is about, on other sites converting to a lead or a sale would clearly be in the definition of quality traffic.

Generating Quality Traffic

Lets first consider the source of the traffic, clearly word-of-mouth will generate a great quality of traffic, personal recommendation, from one interested party to another has a high chance of generating good leads or sales.

If we compare this to search engine traffic or traffic from banner or text adverts all the user really knows about your site is what information you have included in your advert or in the description of your site that has been picked up by the search engine.

This is not to say that advertising can not generate good quality traffic. Placing your advert on a specialist site directly related to your own site is clearly going to generate a better quality of traffic than if your advert is on a general site. The reason for this is that the user is already interested in the subject and is more likely to be interested in your content.

Commenting on blogs which are in your niche is a great way of getting targeted traffic, again here the users are already interested in your subject matter and are firstly more likely to click the link, and secondly more likely to convert to a lead or sale.

Demographics is also important, if your site is selling goods directly targeted at the older generation, you want to try and generate traffic with a majority of people in this demographic. Although this may not always be the case, take a gadget site, one would immediately assume that the key demographic here would be 15 – 35 year old males, however although targeting this traffic would certainty be a good idea, you may also get good quality of traffic outside this demographic, women or older males would also be interested in this type of product.

The message I suppose is to consider where you are getting your traffic, especially if it is traffic that you are paying for, make sure that the traffic you are buying is targeted, interested in the subject of your site. Don’t be infatuated with the traffic graph; concentrate on the income/profit graph! This is much more interesting; after all, you can convert profit to beer!

Poor Quality Traffic is ok for Pay-Per-Click

No, no, no, no, no, It is a common misconception that if does not matter about the quality of your traffic if you are earning your money from pay-per-click campaigns as the user does not have too buy anything for you to earn. Remember that they still have to be interested in the subject of the ppc advert in order to click on it. For a long time with Super Proxy I struggled with PPC and earning from them, and more recently I have struggled with earning from AuctionAds. Although this is a slightly different point these failed because too small a proportion of the users were interested in the adverts content. This was not strictly quality of traffic but more a specific problem for Super proxy in that it attracts a very wide and varied user base who are all using the service for different things.

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> A quick post… I have just purchased the domain name makedoshonline.com from eBay and had it transferred to my account. I found it on eBay while looking for something quite different and thought it was something a little different.

Not sure what to do with it yet, I may give it away on here as a competition prize sometime in the future if I can dream-up something interesting!

Useful links:

Web Hosting

Fasthosts Internet
1&1 web hosting
123Reg Domain name Registration

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> I have just had a slap from Kieron Donoghue over at Here.org.uk… A gentle criticism of my about us page, he has sighted my about us page as being an example that does not tell you who is writing. I have therefore updated my about us page to give some more details about me! No I have not put a picture up! That would just scare everyone! Although If I get more than 10 comments to this post I will add a picture!

I have posted in the past a post about me, but I guess that it might be time to add another.

About Me

Name: Matt Houldsworth

Age: 28

Location: Hessle, East Yorkshire, UK

Occupation: IT Project Manager

Bio: After graduating with BSc Hons in Earth Sciences from Staffordshire University, I went self employed creating websites, soon after this I setup my company Digitalquill Multimedia and Web Design, much of the work I completed was educational multimedia websites, CD-ROMs and Kiosk Multimedia terminals. During this time I was fortunate enough to work with clients such as the UK Home Office, Department for Education and Skills, United Nations and Rwandan Government.

I also studied part time for a Masters Degree in Multimedia Computing, more as a hobby than something to extend my career.

I am now employed as an IT Project manager for a construction Company, I am managing the development of a large scale enterprise system comprising of Intranet, Document Management, Accounting functions and reports, data mining, and centralised database for company administration.

In early 2006 I discovered affiliate marketing, much by accident. I had setup a Proxy Server called Super Proxy so that a friend could access the BBC website in a country where it was blocked, I decided to market this site and researched monetizing it, Soon it started making money, only £50 a month to start with but soon this grew and is now earning upwards of £500 per month, this enabled me to purchase dedicated web servers which I now use for my other affiliate projects.

The main Issue I have is time, I have so many ideas, but what with everything else I do such as property development which takes up a majority of my weekends, time to work on those ideas is sort.

That’s me in a nutshell!

Useful links:

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]> Landing Pages Part 1

This article is the first in a series of articles on everything to do with Landing pages, what they are, techniques for creating them, marketing them and using them to pre-sell your affiliate products.

A landing page is a page that welcomes your visitor. It should be able to make the best impression at the very first instance because you may not get a second chance. The landing page must have all the relevant data regarding the particular product or service and must be your true representative online in every way. 

You must create a landing page that is informative yet impressive enough to make your visitor feel they know more about the product, yet it should leave them wanting more or wanting to buy. It must provide a guided tour of the product in question, explaining the various attributes of the product while making any kind of offer you intend to make in order to generate interest from your prospective customer. This is called the Pre-sell and it is what affiliate marketing is all about.

The landing page must be suitably designed so as to not only catch the attention of your visitor but also retain the interest generated. 

What Should The Content Be Like?

There are a few things that you must be clear about before starting with designing your landing page. The issues like the target audience, the product to advertise, and the reaction expected from the visitor must be clearly laid down.

• Your landing page must be so skillfully designed and written that the visitor would take a positive action towards buying the product.
• The content should be precise and to the point but should be able to drive home the idea and generate your visitor’s interest.
• The general queries that a prospective customer has must be dealt with in the landing page so as to clarify doubts if any. 
• The flow of the content must be well maintained or else it would fail to hold the interest of the prospective customer.
• It is important that the content be divided into various relevant sections with subtitles and be well organized.
• Every visitor is important and so must be handled tactfully so as to make him a customer for life. The content and the landing page should be so designed that the visitor is convinced and encouraged enough to take some positive action. 

Why Images Are Important

Images play a very important role in a landing page as they are the first object to draw the attention of the visitor and also convey a lot. The images placed in a landing page must be a smart selection so as to make a good impression and generate interest from the visitor at the very first look. 

Another thing that must be kept in mind is the time taken for the page to load. Online customer has got a short attention span and little time to give you. You must keep in mind that the Internet has several options to offer. So, your landing page must maintain a proper balance between text and images so as to ensure fast loading. With so many websites offering similar products and competition being very tough, every small detail counts and so the design and layout of the landing page, thus, makes all the difference in determining if a visitor would turn a customer or not. 

Your Landing Page Says It All

You could have one or more landing pages depending on the products you decide to advertise. If it is an affiliate program that you plan to advertise then the landing page must contain information pertaining to the respective product. 

Your landing page must be so designed that it does all the talking for you, it should be a smart salesman who is able to persuade the visitor to take the decision to purchase the particular product. So let your landing page be the mirror of your identity and speak what you want to convey!   
 

Useful links:

Affiliate networks

TradeDoubler
Affiliate Window
Affiliate Future

Text and Banner Advertising (for affiliates and publishers)

Text-link-Ads – free $100 worth of advertising for signing up
AuctionAds – $25 for simply signing up!
Bidvertiser - $20 in free clicks

Continue reading »]]>

When you read the articles on this site or any similar site you will always see that everything we do surrounds getting traffic, not only that but getting quality traffic, by quality traffic we mean getting visitors to your site who are interested in the subject of your site, you are reading this very article because you have found it in some way and are interested in its content. If you were not interested you would immediately go elsewhere, low quality traffic is useless and just takes up resources, sure it looks great on the stats, but for what? I would far rather have a lower number of visitors with a high conversion rate.

This is where BlogRush comes in, BlogRush is a free service that allows bloggers to have their blog titles shown on other relevant blogs via a widget that members of the network install in their blogs, you can see on the right hand column of this site what the widget looks like.

Over the last few days, I have been reading good things about BlogRush from some of the big bloggers, they are reporting a rush of ‘Targeted’ traffic, I am hoping that this means quality traffic, people who are interested in the subject of the site, so I am trying the service out to see what happens.

I will report back in due time with the success, if you have tried the service why not comment and let us know how it is going, if you have not signed up why not give it a try and comment back on your success.

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]>

I have used GetAFreelancer.comseveral times in different projects, and it occurred to me that it maybe of interest to people in the Affiliate industry.

Lets admit it right from the start, we cant all be an expert in every aspect of our industry and there are times that it may be prudent to get a little expert help.

I myself have not only used GetAFreelancer.comto help fill the gaps in my skill-set but also to relieve some of the pressure of the amount of work, for example, although I am a designer, I have just started a project for a logo design for one of my affiliate sites.  It is costing me $40, when I compare this figure to what i judge my time to be worth it is well worthwhile and it gets the job done and off the list enabling me to launch the site and start earning.

What skills can you get from GetAFreelancer.com?

GetAFreelancer.com is focused on technical freelancers, Graphic Designers, Programmers, SEO experts copy writing and project managers. Over the last year or so I have used most if not all these skills and made some good contacts with freelancers which I then use regularly again and again.

Payment

Payment is made after the Freelancer completes the project, and is made through the site, which is where my only criticism comes with the service, it did take me a while to work out how to pay my first freelancer, but once you work this out you will be ok. You can then post reviews of each other, which incidentally is a good way to verify how good the freelancer is, I also ask for examples of other similar work they have completed.

There are other Freelancer networks out there, but I have found that GetAFreelancer.com has been good.

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]>  

I have taken the decision to put Super proxy up for sale… I have chosen Sedo as my method for selling the site, this is mainly because I have used them in the past buying and selling some domain names. I have no idea what to expect at this stage, I have not set a figure, I will just see what sorts of bids come in. I have an idea of how much I want for the site. I know the amount of marketing that has gone into the site which is paying off, with its Alexa ranking dropping a further 50,000 places over the last month to 188,000. I also know the sorts of traffic and income that I am getting from the site.

I am sure that in the right hands this site could generate even more income for someone who could dedicate more time to its running. I am currently concentrating on other projects and am happy to let it tick along, but it the right offer came in I will sell.

The main users of the site are people wanting to access MySpace, Bebo, facebook and Ebay from work or school. The site would therefore be of interest to anyone who is an expert or is interested in the social networking scene.

If you are interested let me know, the link to the sedo listing is http://www.sedo.com/search/details.php4?domain=superproxy.co.uk

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> Building links to your web site is a key task when promoting your online presence and you cannot expect to thrive in the virtual internet community without good quality, relevant links to your site.  Links to your site help generate traffic in two key ways, firstly by attracting traffic that clicks on the link and is carried through to your site and more importantly, indirectly by getting you a higher rank with the search engines.  Search engine ranking is determined by a number of factors and the number of links pointing to your web site is one of the top two methods of achieving a high ranking with interesting SEO optimised content being the other.

While this is simply restating what has been written about by the bucket load,  how to go about finding good link partners and completing the process is a topic upon which a deafening silence falls.

What Are We Looking For?

Sites that you are looking for to create inbound links for your own site need to be:

• from web pages that are relevant to your web pages
• should contain keywords and phrases which your own web site is looking to rank highly for
• should not have the same link text as other inbound links – this replication of the same link text does you no good with the search engines
• should have varied but relevant link text to show the search engines that your site does in fact have content that is relevant and worth ranking

The key thing to bear in mind is that quality by far beats quantity so concentrate your efforts and don’t just link with anything.

Inbound Links Come in Different Flavours

Having different types of inbound links is thought to be a good idea though we don’t know for sure because the search engines do not tell us what they are looking for exactly so it’s hit and miss.

Common types of inbound links include:

• links that have been obtained in exchange for a link from your site
• links from users who find your site interesting
• links from internet directories such as DMOZ
• links created by including them in articles, Press Releases and blogs that you may or may not have a hand in producing.

How Do We Find Sites That Will Link to Us?

The inexpensive way to find sites that are relevant and will link to you is to look within your own business sector.  That may seem strange as why would one of your competitors consider sending traffic to you?  The answer is simple, as though you are in the same business you may in fact not be competing directly.  Someone selling widgets in John O’Groats can safely refer traffic to a widget supplier in Lands End with no loss of business to themselves.  That would constitute a good inbound link and you can easily find dozens of potential link partners in this way.

Another tack to explore is by looking at providers of complimentary but non-competing products in your own area as well as more widely.  A mortgage broker linking with an estate agent makes good sense and also would constitute a good inbound link.

These methods require no expense except some time on your part, but there are service providers who can take the sting out of all of this for a moderate fee and who use professional SEO software to manage link building campaigns.  We’ll continue to focus here though on cost effective link building i.e. free.

We’ve Found a Site We’d Like to Have Link to Us.  Now what?

First check to see if they have a “link page” which will tell you how to go about asking for a link. If they have a link page then follow those instructions.  If there isn’t a link page then you will need to contact the webmaster with the request and how you want the link to be set up.

You can email any webmaster simply by using “webmaster@thesite.co.uk” and that should get through and place “Link Request” or similar in the subject header.  Better still, do a little digging to find out who is behind the site and again this is not a big issue.  I use www.dnsstuff.com as this will give you an email address and a named contact for whoever administers the web site and possibly you will also find the owner of the site and their email too.

Experience has shown that when emailing a webmaster for a link, following some basic rules will help you get a positive response:

• Do not ask too much of the webmaster and remember you are the one asking for the link not the other way around;
• Don’t teach Granny to suck eggs by telling them all about SEO – they probably already know why you’re asking for the link;
• Keep your email short;
• Don’t bother webmasters if the site has no relevance to yours;
• Provide a link to their site first and tell them you’ve done it with a hyperlink to show it;
• Be polite;
• Offer an incentive if they link to you such as a blog post reviewing their product or service offering; and
• Include your contact information including a telephone number as well as your email, and try not to use a free email account such as hotmail – it makes you look like a spammer.

Guaranteed to have your link request rejected is emailing the webmaster a couple of days later asking why they haven’t set the link up yet.  Don’t!  Leave it about a month and then drop them another email and I find that bringing to their attention something on your own web site that may be of interest tends to elicit a response.  Tact and diplomacy are the way forward in these instances.

While You Are looking for Link Partners Others Will Be Looking for You

I’ve already mentioned that you should check a possible link partner website for a link page with instructions on how to ask them for a link.  It’s easy to do and simplifies the whole process so why don’t you set one up for your own website?

Cheap and easy to arrange and if you want inbound links it makes sense  to simplify the process for link partners.  Provide clear instructions on what needs to be done together with a contact email for the webmaster or whoever will make the decision.

The Holy Grail – Links from Higher Ranking Sites Than Mine

This is not as hard as you might think!

You are looking for sites that will link to you and who enjoy high ranking because this makes them more authoritative as far as the search engines are concerned.  Such links provide you with a greater boost in search engine ranking as well.  Getting a link with them may be as simple as following the process outlined already but there are other ways you can get links from higher ranking sites.

Take a look at these two sites – www.Zimbio.com and www.Squidoo.com – both have very good rankings and are considered authoritative by the search engines.  Both also allow you to post articles and blog style posts on their sites with links back to your own web pages as well as the ability to leave comments that also include linkbacks to your web pages.  These count as inbound links that are one-way and count towards your link rating as well as being completely free.

Using Press Releases with links to your web pages achieves the result in a similar fashion and taking it further with social bookmarking sites such as reddit.com, del.icio.us, MySpace and Technorati.  These sites are all high ranking and provide numerous opportunities for growing your links.  You can establish a blog off your main site which covers what you do and every post is linked back to your web pages where relevant and appropriate but it may take some time to gain a high rank on it’s own account.  That does not mean you cannot find a high ranking blog and ask them to feature your business or products and in some cases, a blogger may actually do so for a fee.

Leaving comments on other peoples posts and articles is an excellent way of driving traffic to your web pages and it is easy to find a relevant topic thread that dovetails with your own business.  Using this practice of linkbaiting to place flattering comments on someone else’s work is a sure fire method of getting the attention of the writer and who knows, maybe they’ll feature you in their next post or article.  This may sound corny but it works and it’s how it gets done in the real world.

Summary

Link building is not something that can be just done overnight.  It takes time to build up good links and it takes planning and preparation to maximise the benefits from gaining relevant links.  Don’t go for quantity with your links, instead go for quality links to sites that are relevant to your own.  Manage your link building efforts and get yourself organised in terms of how you perform link building and following up link requests. 

We’ve covered some of the common methods for building links but there are many more techniques that can be used.  These methods as described here do not cost you money but there are many SEO service providers who do this on a professional basis and can achieve impressive results but you must manage them carefully.

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> I have just been playing with Amazons UnSpun site which creates lists that can be voted on, when looking under the list for Make Money Online, I find that Earning From Affiliates, yes this very blog is currently outranking John Chow, who is in many people’s opinions Mr Earn Money Online! I am sure this will change very soon, so I thought I would take the glory while I could!!!

By the way, JohnChow.com has just had a re-design and it looks great!

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> I am starting to use Tradedoubler more and more, so much so that it really is my network of choice… let me tell you why.

You may think that the biggest reason would be the choice of merchants, and yes you would be right in a way, but for me this is not the number one reason why Tradedoubler is my number once choice of network.

My biggest gripe against many of the other networks such as AffiliateWindow, Commission Junction and others is purely how their sites work, for me Tradedoubler have it right, easy to use, all the information you require at your finger tips for finding merchants, reporting and account management.

That is not to say that I don’t use the other networks as you have to when you are looking for a merchant to fit your niche, but I find more and more that when I have a new idea and I am researching available merchants my first stop is always Tradedoubler as I know that within seconds I can navigate to find the information I am looking for.

 The other network that pushes Tradedoubler close is Affiliate future , however their body of merchants is not as large and the facilities they offer are not as great.

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> Questions and things to do before starting an email marketing campaign 

1. Have the users agreed to receive your mail? They must opt in, they must want and expect your email.
2. Be targeted, don’t mass mail, target to those interested in the specific subject, don’t ever buy databases of email addresses, these are far too general and you don’t have permission to send email to these people, besides the success rate is lower than 1%. Target those people who have willingly signed up to a newsletter or those who are existing customers.
3. Subject is essential, the subject brings the user into the email, a bad subject means it goes in the Deleted items with all the other junk.
4. Personalise the mail, this is relatively simple to do but making the recipient feel like you have emailed them specifically improves your chances of success
5. Make the email interesting, don’t waffle, get to the point, you have a chance to pre-sell here, use it wisely, make your user want to read more.
6. Make the email attractive, think about layout. HTML emails are good but think about how it will look in other email clients. Be sure to have a plain text alternative. Remember to think about size, don’t send out massive emails this will frustrate your potential customers.
7. Make it clear, be blatant about where the link back to the site is, after all this is the point right?
8. Ensure you provide an opt out system within the email that is clear and simple to use, spamming will lose your credibility
9. Read your email before sending it out, read your email before sending it out, yes, read it again, and again, be sure you don’t get egg on your face. Once that send button is clicked you cant get them back!
10. Ensure you have some method of tracking your campaigns success (we will discuss some methods to do this in a later article)

If you have yor own list or any other golden rules that should be considered please do add them to the list.

Market your site with Text-Link-Ads and get $100 worth of free advertising while earning from referring others. The text link ads are a great way of both marketing your site and generating yourself income by referring others to the Text-Link-Ads program, Text-Link-Ads are both my number one choice for advertising and my number one earner. Sign up for Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> If you get in quick Text-Link-Ads are running a 15% off promotion if you place your order with them before the end of August. Simply put “August” in the coupon code. If you read my recent article about Text-Link-Ads and were wondering if to give them a go, now would be a great time to do so.

Click here to claim the 15% off Text-Link-Ads

Continue reading »]]> After reading a post some time ago by John Chow about the percentage of the income from his blog coming from text-link-ads, I decided to give them a try.

I am now using their publisher and referral programmes on several of my sites including this one, and as they give $100 worth of free adverts when you sign-up I am about to try the advertisers programme.

As many other people have said the referral programme of text-link-ads is very generous. They give $25 for a referred sign-up. Simply by putting the small link on the right hand column of this site I have referred 12 people in the last month, that is $300 (about £150).

Ok so I am not making as much as some people out of it, but it is turning into one of my biggest earners. If you have a website or blog it is very much worth your while signing up for text-link-ads even if you just use their referral programme without the text link service.

Having said that, I do earn from the text service as well, I am selling text links on on a article by article, monthly basis, this way as the site becomes more and more popular the advertising cost can be raised, not only that the more articles on the site, the bigger the potential income. This given the fact that I tend to prefer text links to banner or AdSense type adverts as I think they are less obtrusive to the site yet still earn for the webmaster.

Continue reading »]]> If you have ever researched the affiliate and earning money online industry you will have no doubt come across blogs and websites promising the earth. Telling tales about people who managed to earn £10,000 in 7 days for only 30 minutes work… most of these sites sell guide books or reports on how they did it.

Think about it… firstly if you had the magical formula why would you sell it to others? and secondly why do you need to earn £50 selling some tutorial?

Take my advice, get yourself on Google blog search and look for information on blogs like this and others such as:

http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/

http://www.keithbond.co.uk/

http://www.here.org.uk/

http://www.johnchow.com/

There are many, many others. It is on those sites, reading about what other people have done, what they have found and questions others have posed and answered is where you will learn, trust me, I am currently in that learning process, over the last 12 months the amount of knowledge I have gained in this manner is amazing.

Ok so its not just about being like a sponge and absorbing all this information, you have to do something with it, and I am afraid there is no short cut, you just have to knuckle down and graft, fortunately if you get it right the rewards are well worth it.

Having said there are no shortcuts, there are tools that can help you rapidly create websites for example, in an article that I hope to get finished in the near future I will be discussing how to use wordpress to rapidly generate affiliate sites.

Continue reading »]]> Ever been frustrated when you have a great idea that you know is a niche, you are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about and want to start affiliate marketing but one problem, you cant find a merchant? Well that’s the position I am in at the moment.

I don’t want to disclose the details of my idea as that would give away what I think is a market that is waiting to be tapped, however I will say that due to the recent flooding, I have been forced to replace much of the tools to do with a hobby of mine. On Saturday when I was stood admiring my new shiny toys, it hit me that this would be a great product to market on the web, I am knowledgeable and enthusiastic about this product and I have a brand new example that I can photograph and review, therefore creating hopefully fantastic original content.

This is where the problems begin! I was convinced that looking through each of the networks for a merchant that stocks these products, I would easily find one, I mean come-on there are thousands of merchants on the networks, but sadly no, I could not find any.

The way I see it is I am left with two options:

1. Forget the whole idea… trust me, this ain’t going to happen!
2. Contact the manufacturer directly with a proposal.

I will keep you all informed how it goes, as this is again something that I have never done before and is therefore a learning curve for me, but I also suspect others may find themselves in the same boat and wondering what the options are. I have no idea how it will go, they can either say yes or tell me to get lost!

I have read in many places about contacting your merchant directly, I suspect it is all in the approach, that first letter, how it is structured and how credible it is.

Has anyone else had any experience with this, if so how did it go?

Continue reading »]]> Many of my readers are beginning to ask me questions, not only about the posts and the information I write about but also general questions about the whole affiliate subject.I have to say that this surprises me! Please Please Please do not think that I am some kind of expert as I am very much far from being such!

This blog really tracks my learning process, successes and failures and things that I have found out or useful information that I think maybe of use to others in the same position as myself.

Who am I?

A common question that is asked is who I am and what do I do. I am not earning a full time living from Affiliate marketing like some of the true experts in the field (sometimes known as super affiliates) During the hours of 9am-5pm I am an IT Project Manager, I also run a company called Digitalquill Multimedia and Web Design and between the hours of 6pm – 12:30am I try and learn more about Affiliate Marketing and develop some of my affiliate projects.

My background is one of Multimedia Design, mainly educational multimedia, mostly comprising of websites and CD-ROMs, this time was spent developing sites and systems for clients, during which time, I had many ideas of my own which; a. I did not have time to work on, and b. I could not workout a method to easily monetize these ideas.

This is where the interest in Affiliate marketing has come in as it has enabled me to develop some of these ideas into workable projects, ok many of these need more work, some have been face down in the mud failures, but those failures have been part of a steep learning curve.

So there have been failures, but there has also been successes, Super Proxy, Premium Proxy and Daily Proxy List have all become successful in their own right, I am not about to retire on the proceedings, but they comfortably pay for the Dedicated server and therefore allow me to work on the other projects that will take a little longer to bring to market.

You will see a list of my affiliate project sites on the right panel, hopefully these will give the beginner an idea of the range of different aspects of affiliate marketing, from PPC, through to full ecommerce sites using datafeeds and of course not forgetting Drop Shipping projects.

The Future

I know not what the future holds; I can say some things with confidence:

1. I have at least 10 new articles lined up for this site
2. I will continue to learn more and gain more success in all aspects of Affiliate marketing
3. I will no doubt fail miserably with some future projects – but hey if it were easy everyone would be doing it!
4. I have an endless list of ideas to try and bring to market, some more complex than others
5. Affiliate marketing if my future, many people make good money from it, so I will aim for this, but no illusions on how hard and how much work is involved.

Continue reading »]]> I have in the past couple of weeks started some initial investigations and tentative steps into direct marketing of affiliate products via pay per click (ppc) adverts.

What is direct PPC marketing?

Direct PPC marketing is when you the affiliate take one or more merchants products, create adverts for those adverts and pay for traffic to be sent to the merchant via your affiliate encoded link. The most common method for this is to use Googles adwords, however there are many other ppc services (Adbrite for example)

Levels of success

Although I am only in the first steps of my marketing, there are some things that are becoming clear, some lessons that I have learned that I should share with you.

After two weeks the figures are not staggering, indeed I have only just about broken even, and thus I have sat back to consider the position, what has gone wrong, what has gone well and where can I streamline or focus to make my campaign profitable.

The first mistake I made was choosing the wrong product, I started advertising dedicated web servers for a web host who I am an affiliate for. It rapidly became clear that there is no space on the advertising networks for any more people in this field. Although the returns are high if a refferal purchases, the PPC cost is driven up to such a level that it is impracticable to compete. In this campaign I had to drive up the bids for clicks to 75 pence per click, which with the limited budget was not generating enough traffic to make reasonable returns from those click that made a sale. This being said, sales were made and thus this inspired me to re-focus and try again with other products.

The second mistake was being lazy! I simply setup PPC adverts on Google, putting the affiliate link into the advert direct, this sending traffic directly from he advert to the merchant. You maybe thinking, like I was, What is wrong with the? This is where the key to all affiliate marketing comes in, Preselling. I intend to write a full article on this subject in the near future.

In simple terms pre-selling is what all affiliates should be looking to do, it is warming up your visitors and getting them ready to buy. As mentioned above, an article on Preselling will be posted soon, but in this case preselling means rather than simply creating a PPC advert that sends traffic directly to the merchant, and therefore loosing out on that traffic and those visitors, you create a web page that contains your presell. You will direct your PPC traffic to your Presell page, and warm up your visitors making them much more likely to buy from your affiliate.

The third mistake was not tracking the keyword performance, Google have created great tools for this. Googles Analytics is a fantastic piece of software that I am not utilizing to its full potential. My plan is to do some work on this, see how it performs, see what it can do for me. I will post about this int he future.

Plans for the next steps

I have found a very good merchant for whom i have been accepted as an affiliate, they sell fine wines, and have 5 shops in the UK. They are new to the net and are looking to expand their business in this area. I will be creating presell pages, not only for the whole range but also for individual wines within that range, I will then setup PPC adverts for each of these presell pages, set budgets and cost per clicks (CPC) and after researching Google Analytics I will track the performance of each keyword so that I can modify those words and CPC’s where needed.

Continue reading »]]> This post was going to be a review of a web host that I have used for a long time for both my Affiliate sites and other sites for clients; however I have recently become very dissatisfied by the level of service provided by Fasthosts.

I currently have an issue with one of my clients sites that is clearly an issue to do with something they have changed on their servers meaning that all the scripts are very slow and time not before they are completed. Emails to technical support have gone un-answered and following a very stiff letter and telephone conversation they blamed the problem on one of the scripts in the site. I know this not to be the case as 1. the site has been running fine, unchanged for 12 months, 2. the local copy of the site i have on my servers works fine without a problem.

This is very frustrating, but as I say, thankfully this is not the normal situation. If I had posted this a week ago it would have been a glowing report and I would have recommended my readers to use Fasthost, however I am now not so sure. Perhaps this is a one-off problem, something specific to this site and the way it works, but it does not help ones relationship with your client when you are helpless to get their site back online and support from your web host seems to be patchy.

The Fasthost package

Fasthosts do offer a very wide range of web hosting, dedicated servers, shared hosting and domain name registration services at a great price, with great performance and thankfully as discussed above problems are rare and thankfully a majority of the time these are short lived and soon get sorted by their ‘Xtreme support team’.

For the affiliate, Fasthosts can provide you with a flexible choice of options to suit your need. I use many of the Fasthosts services throughout my businesses, although I am now moving towards dedicated servers, I started out and still use Fasthosts reseller programme that offered me the opportunity to customise hosting packages to the needs to the current project.

As discussed above I still use Fasthosts for may of my projects and will be doing so for the foreseeable future.

Services Offered by Fasthosts

Domain Name Registration – From £2.95 per year
Email Hosting – Including Microsoft Exchange Mail Boxes
Web Hosting Packages – ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, Python, Perl
Dedicated Servers – Linux and Windows – From £49 per month
MySQL and MSSQL Database Hosting
SSL
Reseller packages with the ability to host unlimited Domains
SiteBuilder Software
Traffic Driver Software
MatrixStats
Windows Media Streaming Servers
and more

Click here to visit Fasthosts Website to see if they suit your affiliate projects needs.

Continue reading »]]> Affiliate Boot Camp is the first weekend Affiliate Marketing Conference to be held in the UK.

“An event not to be missed” – Jess Luthi, Affiliate Program Advice

The Affiliate Boot Camp is being held at the luxurious Ettington Chase Conference Centre, near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire from Friday July 13th until Sunday July 15th 2007.

Conference registration fees include all education seminars, accommodation, meals and evening entertainment.

Delegates will also have full access to the leisure facilities at Ettington Chase, which include a spa, jacuzzi, steam room, gym, tennis courts, golf facilities, archery and clay pigeon shooting.

The packed seminar programme includes sessions on the following topics:

Understanding Affiliates and the Affiliate Marketing Space
Managing Affiliates and Pay Per Click
Optimising Affiliate Commissions and Incentivising Your Affiliates
The Agency Perspective
New Technologies
Top 10 Do’s and Don’ts of Managing an Affiliate Programme
Working with Incentive Sites

There will also be case studies from established merchants in the retail, travel and finance sectors.

The event is being supported by all of the top UK affilate networks including Affiliate Window, Deal Group Media, Online Media Group, Commission Junction, Tradedoubler, Buy.at and Affili.net.

Online marketing agency R.O.EYE and reward site rpoints are also playing a key part in the weekend proceedings.

There will be an opportunity to ‘Ask the Experts’ with a panel that reads like a who’s who of UK Affiliate Marketing, featuring well known affiliate marketing personalities including Keith Budden, Nicky Iapino, Matt Reid, Matt Bailey, Kevin Edwards, Zak Edwards, Pete Norwood and Richard Yendall.

The conference is also about fun – there will be a gala dinner on the Saturday evening with a guest speaker famous for his appearances in the hit BBC TV series ‘Allo Allo’.
After dinner on the Saturday there will be a table football competition, a snooker competition and a giant Jenga competition, with prizes for the champions.

Booking is open now and there is an early bird discount of £70 per person until 31st May 2007.

Continue reading »]]> I am currently looking for a coffee related affiliate for a project I am working on.

It needs to be UK based, have a extensive stock of coffee and related products and if possible have a datafeed or downloadable database of products that can be used in a site.

If anyone knows of any information on such a programme or any smaller coffee related affiliate programmes would you please let me know.

Read here for updates and information on this latest Affiliate project.

Continue reading »]]> By: Kevin Sinclair

What should you consider when choosing an affiliate program? You need to think about two key things: what business are you in and what can the affiliate program provide to your customers.

No matter what business you are in, the largest investment you make will be customer acquisition. If you have your own product, and have acquired a base of satisfied customers, then single product affiliate programs could work very well for you.

However, if your business is acquiring customers for other businesses, that is, purely affiliate programs, then a better choice for you could be affiliate programs with multiple products or services. This will help you to capitalise on your investment in customer acquisition.

The key to choosing successfully is to ensure that the affiliate program offers products that meet the needs of your potential customers. Coupled with this is the need for the products to be high quality and for the supplier to provide excellent customer service. Remember, your credibility is on the line every time you refer someone to buy through your affiliate relationship.

Some of the other factors I consider when evaluating affiliate programs include:

Is the affiliate program a reputable business? You can check out a business you are considering a relationship with in variety of ways. Talk to the Better Business Bureau in your local area or a similar body. In addition, I find web sites that monitor affiliate programs to be worth looking at. The best I have found is Associate Programs www.AssociatePrograms.com. Allan Gardyne pulls no punches and tells it as it is.
Does the program enable you to share in the lifetime value of the customer? Great programs will give you commissions on all future purchases of the customers you introduce. This is where the real profits are. These types of programs, in effect, allow you to partner with the supplier.

Does the program reward you for introducing other affiliates? This type of program is commonly referred to as a two-tier program. Often your customer may become an affiliate also and you will be rewarded for this.

Is the supplier interested in your success as an affiliate? The top affiliate programs engage in a process of coaching or information sharing to help you succeed. Affiliates are provided with regular newsletters outlining what is working for successful affiliates and providing updates and details on new products.

Is the commission reasonable? Commission rates on commodity products such as books and CDs are low. This is because there is very little margin in the products due to competition. Look for products that have a commission rate of 15% or more that are not commodities – that way you will be better able to recoup your customer acquisition investment.

Are statistics provided? The higher the level of statistics provided, the better off you are. This will enable you to measure the success of your marketing efforts and to determine the best places to invest your marketing dollars. Insufficient statistics is a sign that the affiliate program is not sufficiently interested in your success.

Are new products being developed regularly? To get the full value from lifetime commissions, new products need to be introduced on a regular basis. Without this, lifetime commissions can be worthless. Also, look for consistent high quality in new products introduced.

How frequently are commissions paid? The more frequently commissions are paid, the better off you are. Good quality affiliate programs will pay you monthly. In some situations, commissions are not paid until a certain level is reached. If the program you are considering has this requirement, check how many sales need to be made before the level is reached.
Have you read the affiliate agreement? This is a key area that you should look at. Some affiliate agreements are totally in favour of the supplier. Others are more balanced. Some agreements restrict your ability to promote similar products from other suppliers. Most agreements have anti-spam provisions. Look for agreements that are fair and that do not stack everything against you as the affiliate.

While there are other factors that can be considered when choosing an affiliate program, following the suggestions above will help you to make superior business choices that will lead to long-term success.

Author Bio
Article by Kevin Sinclair, CPA, of Personal & Business Success Resources. Visit his website at www.business.ksinclair.com.

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