Continue reading »]]> I am offering the readers of this site the chance to get a massive 20% discount on the datafeed Import Plugin For WordPress until the end of June. This tool has been built specifically for Affiliate marketers and allows you to rapidly develop affiliate sites.

If you want to take up this offer to get the plugin for just £20 then use this link and enter the code ‘june11′ when asked.

Continue reading »]]> This article describes the techniques I use to earn money (affiliate income) from datafeed driven websites in 10 simple steps. It is quite a long article as there is a lot of ground to cover, and even with this length there are things that we will simply skirt across and other things we will not cover at all.

I am working on this article and hope to turn it into an e-book that will hopefully help up and coming affiliate marketers.

The article uses the Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress.

I hope this helps someone who is looking for a simple how-to, keep checking back for the full e-book. I will post about it here when I have completed it.

1. Identify your niche

Identifying your niche is the single most critical step, and the biggest hurdle that you are going to have to overcome, and yes, it is the very first thing that you are going to have to do. Many people fail at this stage, make yourself different and dedicate time and effort to this and you will find that perfect niche for you to work in.

My advice is always look to the things you know, the things you are interested and can write about. You really do not want to work in a niche you have little or no knowledge in, if you do you will need to research every point, when you write you will not seem authoritative, whereas, if you write from your own passion and knowledge it will certainty come across in your writing, your readers will pick up on that and give you a level of unconscious trust based on the feeling they get when they read your pages.

I tend to use mind map software in these cases, but you can simply create yourself a mind map by jotting down some ideas on a page and then feeding ideas off ideas, until you have a number of niches that you feel confident that you could work in with your current knowledge.

Once you have narrowed it down to a maximum of three ideas, it is time to look into those niches and see which has the most potential for development, you need to do some leg work here, get yourself onto the search engine of your choice, and do some research, there really is no short cuts here, you need to put in the time to look and trawl, the likelihood is that if you are interested in your chosen niches  you will already have a good idea of what is out there, but be sure that you are going beyond the usual websites you visit and look deeper into the search results to get a feeling for the market place. The questions you should be asking are:

Who else is operating in your specific niche

• What are people looking for that is not provided by those already operating in your niche
• What are those people already in your niche doing well
• What are those people already in your niche doing badly
• Is there room for another to operator?

I would also, at this point, do some keyword research, for example if you are looking to market pink cars, look at search phrases round the subject of pink cars. The Google Keyword tool can help here. You are looking for all the phrases that people search for that are related to your niche and the types of search volume there is for that niche.

There is no golden rule about what figure represents a good search volume. A search term may have a huge search volume, but also be very competitive, for example ‘Credit card’ has an exact local(uk) search volume of 22,200 (May 2011), which on the face of it looks great, but consider how difficult it will be to break into that niche, every man and his dog operate in that niche, including some big, big players, alternatively, a niche may have a very low search volume of 200 searches per month, but no-one else is operating in that niche meaning it will be fairly easy to rank number 1 for that search term and Hoover up most of those 200 searches, which, if you then turn into sales could mean good affiliate income.

It will also depend on the products that you are planning to promote, what is their value? are they high value items and as such one sale per month will bring in a good affiliate commission, or are they low value items meaning you will need to sell those in volume to get any reasonable return.
Obviously the ideal is a high value product, with a high search volume and little or no competition, however, the likely hood of you finding one that perfect are very slim so we have to work with what is out there.

Don’t let a competitive niche put you off, it maybe that you have an angle on that niche that no-one else has thought of, but be extra sure that you have got your research right and you are going to provide something that is both wanted and missing from the market place.

There are no real rules again about which of your ideas you should choose, which niches you should work in and which you should not, but the research detailed above will allow you to come to an informed decision. Much of it maybe a gut feeling that you can provide something new in that niche or that you will enjoy working that niche and as such the success will be secondary, and ironically, an operator who enjoys working is one that is usually successful.

2. Find some hosting

A fairly easy step, but make sure that you go with someone reliable, remember Google have recently changed their algorithm, to include page load speed, a great deal of this is down to the host, if they put large numbers of websites on a single server and over load it due to cost cutting, the likely result is a slow website.

I would recommend GoDaddy for WordPress Hosting, they also provide a domain registration service and also a ready installed WordPress hosting package, if you go for this you can skip the next two steps, making the process even easier!

Signing up is a very simple process, it is a click and buy, they will take you through step-by step how to setup your hosting, and you will be emailed all your connection details

3. Register a domain name

The registration process of a domain name its self is fairly simple, the trick is finding a good domain name.

A domain name can make or break your affiliate business, some of the best affiliate domain names simply say what they do, i.e. moneysavingexpert.com, they are memorable domain names, but they are also built on reputation.

When choosing a domain name, your keyword research that you conducted in the first place will help you. Good keyword domain names will help you in your search engine ranking, Google uses keywords in domain names in their ranking algorithm, so look out for keyword or phrase domain names where the keyword or phrase has a high search volume.

You will have trouble here finding domain names that have not been registered, however, there are two alternatives, buying a domain name from someone else, or ‘catching’ domain name that someone has failed to re-register.

I will blog more about buying domain names and catching domains in the future, but monitor the lists published by DomainLore and use DNViper to catch domains that you are interested in. Both those sites already have the relevant information on what you need to do so I will not re-publish that at this stage, but it is well worth your while getting registered on those sites, you may get that gem of a domain name that will make marketing your project that much easier.

4. Setup WordPress

Why install WordPress its a blogging platform? Well WordPress is so much more than a blogging platform, it is now a CMS, and the developers of WordPress are always trying to push it further into the CMS field with the new features that they provide.

WordPress is Open Source and as such it is free, you simply download the latest version and install it, you do not have to pay a programmer to write you a website, you are in control. It comes with many of the features you need for a good website already built in, menus, categories, tagging, image management, inbuilt search, plugins to extend its functionality and themes to change how it looks.

The setup of WordPress is a very easy simple thing to do, I will not re-post here what others have described far better than I can, follow the tutorial on the WordPress.org website and create your WordPress install.

Once you have WordPress installed you will want to get the plugins that you require to make your site do what you want it to do. There are many thousands of custom written plugins to extend its functionality, so it you have a particular requirement it is likely that there is a plugin to do it.

Make sure you do install the following plugins as a basis to any WordPress install:

WordPress Firewall2
Login Lockdown
WordPress SuperCache
All-In-One SEO

These plugins secure WordPress and make it more efficient in terms of the application. You may also want to read this article about making WordPress more secure. Do not worry too much about this but do make sure that you install the Firewall and Login Lockdown plugins as these will protect your site and your hard work from people who may attack.

There are also many thousands of themes pre-developed, themes change the look of your site so you can make it suit your nice well, for example for our pink cars website, you will want a theme that is pink, probably has a picture of a car rather than the default WordPress theme which is white with pictures of trees!

There are also many premium themes, these are themes that you will have to pay money for, but usually they are a fairly small fee of up to $100 (£50 ish), which is very little for a good looking designed site. I use the following premium theme sites which provide a good range of themes to suit all needs

Elegant Themes
WooThemes
WP Remix
WPZoom

Custom Theme Development

If you can not find a theme to suit your needs you can get one designed and developed by a WordPress Developer. At Digitalquill we do quite a lot of custom theme development for various companies. There are many companies that offer custom WordPress development, but make sure you get a WordPress specialist to do it for you.

You can either have your own designer create static designs what can be converted into a WordPress Theme or a brief can be followed, and the theme created from scratch.

Custom Plugin Development

If you have a particular requirement for your site that is not met by any of the plugins available, you do have the option of getting one written that will extend the functionality of WordPress. This will cost you from as little as £100 depending on the complexity of your requirements. Again make sure that you choose a Specialist WordPress Developer for this task and not just any web developer, as you will find it cheaper to get a specialist who already knows their way around WordPress and its Code. At Digitalquill we develop numerous WordPress Plugins so if you have a requirement please do let us know and we will try and help.

5. Install Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress

This is where the magic starts, he holy grail for Affiliate marketers has always been to be able to create a website rapidly without the need to invest a great deal of money in development costs, this is the very reason why this tutorial has focused around WordPress.

The Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress allows Affiliate marketers to create a website from an affiliate datafeed in a matter of minutes, and not only that it will keep your sites content up-to-date.

The Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress is a premium plugin, but it only costs £25 and you can use it on as many websites as you like, and it includes free updates, meaning that when you buy you will continue to get updates for the plugin for as long as it is developed, ensuring it will work with future versions of WordPress and you get all new features created.

The Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress is very simple to use. I will describe this later in section 7.

The datafeed import plugin will import any well formed datafeed in CSV, Pipe separated, XML or RSS format and create blog posts for each product in that datafeed. Unlike other plugins it gives you control over what data from the datafeed you use.

Typically a datafeed will have a large number of columns with a range of different types of data, title, colour, description, price, weight, size, image, thumbnail to name some. You may only want to use the title, description, price and image. The Datafeed Import Plugin uniquely allows you to select those columns from the datafeed you want and choose where you want them to appear in your site.

The datafeed import plugin for WordPress will create categories and tags for you and insert the post it is creating into the relevant category and add the relevant tags, it also works with the All-in-one SEO plugin so you can improve the Search Engine optimization of your site using the plugin.

6. Find a datafeed

You will need to sign up to the main affiliate networks, I would advise the following:

Commission Junction
AffiliateWindow
TradeDoubler

There are more and you will be able to find them with a simple web search. Once you have signed up you can search for a affiliate merchant that suits your niche. Ideally you will have already done some of this research in step 1 and identified companies with affiliate programs that you can promote.

These days the affiliate networks are generally very good with the quality of their datafeeds, in the early days of affiliate marketing, we struggled with getting quality data from merchants. We do still have some problems with some merchants who do not keep their datafeeds up-to-date, but this is getting less frequent.

Once you have found the merchants you want to promote you will need to apply to become an affiliate with them, I generally drop the affiliate manager an email to introduce myself and let them know what I plan to do with their affiliate program. This way you will have a greater chance of getting accepted onto their program and you will also get the affiliate manager on your side. This is good because they may then provide you with your own discount codes to promote or other promotional material that could be useful for you.

When you have been approved, find their datafeed, select the relevant format (XML is preferred, but CSV or Pipe separated formats are also fine) and copy the URL or Link to that datafeed. You are then ready to start an import into your WordPress site.

7. Setup an import

The datafeed import plugin for WordPress is very easy to use, the interface has help throughout incase you get stuck. In our case, once we have installed the plugin we are going to choose create feed from URL. This allows us to create a site that will automatically update its self.

The plugin allows you to schedule updates, I would suggest that you set it to update weekly, unless you are working in a niche where prices are constantly changing. I know of a colleague who uses this for a websites selling plumbing items, these literally change on a daily basis and sometimes during the course of a day, but the norm would be to set it to a weekly update.

Just to explain what this will do, it will re-import the data from your datafeed, and update posts where required, keeping prices and specifications up-to-date. It will also create new posts for new items added to the datafeed and delete posts that do not exist in the datafeed anymore.

Once you have imported the datafeed, the datafeed import plugin for WordPress will analyse the datafeed to find out what fields it contains, it will then present them to you giving each field a reference that you will later be able to use in the template youa re going to build.

The plugin gives you some options to filter the datafeed, you can choose to only import products that include a keyword, or exclude those that include a keyword. You can have as many of these filters as you like so you can make sure that you only import the products that you want from your datafeed. I have datafeeds that have 10,000+ products in them, but I am only interested in 5-10 of those products for my niche, so I use the plugin to filter those out and only import the ones that are in my niche.

You can also choose to only import a range of products from the datafeed, this was implemented for people who have slower servers, meaning that if your system struggles to import, make it only import the first 1000 of the datafeed, and then 1001-2000 etc. It is unlikely that you will need this if you have a fairly modern server.

You are now ready to create the template, this is the bones of the Datafeed Import Plugin, this is what it will use to create the posts from the datafeed, and it is where this plugin differs from others in that you are free to choose which columns/fields in the datafeed you use. You can choose to use them all, or like I do at times just choose to use the product name and price.

Creating the template is very simple, you just add the #1# reference to the template where you want that data to appear, for example if #5# is price you could add:

Price: £#5#

This will then be replaced for each product post created with the relevant price:

Price: £9.99

You will notice in the example above, I not only used datafeed data in the template but also static text. You can add as much or as little of your own text in the template as you like, this text will appear in all of your posts for all of your products.

The template designer in the datafeed import plugin for WordPress also allows you to add HTML content either visually using the buttons provided, add images, bold, italic, links etc, but also if you are confident with HTML you can go into the HTML view of the template designer and write your own code.

Once you have created the main body for the template you will need to tell the plugin which categories to post those products to, you can use either datafeed data or static data in te categories field, for example, if #7# is the merchant category, you could use:

#7#, Ford,

This will then put each post in what ever category is in the field #7# and in the category ‘ford’. The plugin will create categories if they do not exist.

You can do the same with tags, either add a datafeed reference and/or your own static text.

The final part of the template designer (if you have followed my advice from step 4) is the All in one SEO plugin fields, these can either be populated using static text or they can use datafeed data using the reference the plugin has given that field.

Once you are happy with the design of your template, simply click the process button and the Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress will then process through the datafeed that you have imported and create posts for you in your site. It will do this in the background and give you a counter on the screen so do not be alarmed if you go to your site and the posts are not immediately viewable. Also if you have followed my advice from step 4, and you have installed the SuperCache plugin, be aware you maybe seeing a cached version of the site and you may need to force a re-build of that cache.

8. Write some unique content

Writing unique content is the most critical thing you can do with your datafeed driven website, anyone can follow these steps and create a website, but the chances are that would just replicate what is already out there. The Datafeed Plugn for WordPress has done all that hard work for you, but there is no shortcut to you adding value to the site.

This content maybe reviews of the products that you have listed on your site, tutorials about using them. Don’t forget that content does not have to be just words, images and videos are also useful for users of your site, if you can add value to the content that has already been automatically imported yourself you will be onto a winner. Customers want to know what you think, people buy from people so be friendly, avoid the trap of just writing ‘This is a great product’ type reviews, give a genuine opinion, better still give a glimpse of your experience with that product.

Adding unique content will not only please your customers but it will also please the Google Gods, who hate sites that simply duplicate content from else where, after all what value do they have for the internet user?

9. Promote your site

Promoting your site should be what you spend the majority of your time on. It is something that really gets people running scared, but there is no real magic formula or magic wand to promoting your site, you need to do the leg work yourself.
There are many options open to you to promote your site, I will briefly describe some of them below.

Google Adwords

I have started with Google Adwords as this is the only shortcut you can make. If you have some cash to throw at your project then Google Adwords or similar Pay Per Click advertising maybe the right solution for you. I am not going to go into details here about how you should manage that process, but make sure you know what you are doing before you go headlong into an adwords campaign as this could result in you spending money hand over fist without any rewards.

It goes without saying, no-one minds spending £100 on advertising if you earn more than that on commissions, but you need to be sure that you get your sums, adverts and keywords that you are biding on right.

Link Building

Link building is the single, only way to build up the reputation of your site and to build traffic. If your site has not inbound links, no-one will find you, Google will not see you as being authoritative. However, if you have hundreds of in-bound links then you will not only generate direct traffic from those links but you will also be seen by Google as someone that people want to link to and as such someone who is authoritative in the subject.
It would be very easy to go out and get 1000 link backs from random sites that are here today and gone tomorrow, there is absolutely no use in doing that at all, no use in paying for link building services unless they are reputable and are going to create good quality links.

The only link-backs that make any difference both for your generating traffic an in the eyes of Google are those from relevant sites, sites that are already authoritative and have a good reputation.

How can you build links? There are many ways, I always advise participating in forum discussions, and blog discussions, monitor the web for people talking about your niche subject matter and join in with the conversation. Don’t post ‘Come to my site’ style posts, but engage people in conversation, give them advice after all we have already established that you are knowledgeable about your subject otherwise you would not have chosen this as your niche in the first place. Link backs can come in the form of signatures, or pointing people to relevant products or advice on your site. Make sure you build up a good reputation on the community otherwise you will be in danger of being a spammer.

Engaging in this type of activity can also beneficial to you, it will allow you to talk directly to potential customers, find out what they are wanting, what they want to know, what they need and you can add those things to your site.

Social Media

Social media has become very, very important to your marketing strategy, twitter, facebook, linkdin all provide you with opportunities to promote yourself and your blog, tweet about new products, new reviews, new content, again engage with twitter users who are posting tweets relevant to your subject, follow others in your niche so you can stay on top of your subject.

Make a facebook and Linkdin page for your site and post information to it, you will find that all these pages will rank highly in Google and you will generate a great deal of traffic from them.

YouTube

I have already commented that content in your site doe snot just have to be text, more and more these days video content is becoming a great draw to people. Not only does it give you the chance to do something more dynamic than you can in text, it allows you to sell yourself, but it also gives you the chance to get a good ranking in Google. Remember those ‘Video results’ in the search engine results, your YouTube video could be there.

What is the use of all this other than to give information to your customers? What if they find my video from searches on YouTube its self? Well you can embed links into your video, and as we discussed above in the link building exercise you can engage with your potential customers.

Post video reviews of products, video tutorials and simple introductions to your site and what you are all about, these add to your site and give it a richness that otherwise could be lacking. Remember people buy from people.

Off-line promotion

Remember that just because your site is online and your service virtual, you can still do offline advertising, moneysupermarket.com spend millions on TV advertising, ad when you break it down all they are is an affiliate site.
I am not suggesting you start trying to product a TV advert, but local advertising, letter heads, business cards and the like all help to promote your site.

10. Keep updating and working on your site

As an affiliate marketer your work is never done, the fatal mistake that many make is not to have longevity with their projects, they do not see immediate rewards so abandon the project or simply flit from one project to the next, never bringing out the potential of any of the work they do.
If you have this mind set, my advice would be simply don’t bother, you will just waste your time. You have to b in this business for the long run. No rewards will not come immediately, and yes you will no doubt become disillusioned, but rest assured, you will start to see rewards if you continue to work at it.

Do not think that I have done all this work so I will leave the site to tick over, even if it is bringing in good affiliate income. You need to continually update, develop the content, add new products and offer a better service to your customers. Do this and you will be assured a happy future.

Continue reading »]]> I have just written an article over on my other blog, MattHouldsworth.com about how I promote each blog post after I publish it. Much of what you read on the net about promoting your blog takes a holistic view point, however, in my opinion you also need to look after the finer detail, if your manage the promotion of each blog post well then you will not go far wrong.

I have uploaded the check sheet I use to prompt myself on the post so if you are an affiliate blogger you may find that useful, either way if you have any more ideas on this please do leave a comment.

Continue reading »]]> I have today managed to get the Live Demo for the datafeed import plugin for WordPress back up and running after a server failure which has meant it has been down for some time. You can now try the plugin on our Live Demo site.

Please be aware that the demo site re-sets its self every hour so you may find that it reverts to its saved state while you are working on it, but hopefully it will allow you to play with it and see how it works. I have also limited the size of uploads allowed as people were uploading gigabytes of Datafeeds up to the demo server!

Continue reading »]]> If you are looking for a great way to get an affiliate site off the ground quickly and easily, you can use the Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress and its sister plugin The Amazon Import Plugin for WordPress.

They are both usually proced at £25 but if you use the discount code of ‘nov12′ until the end of November 2010 you can get the plugins for just £20 each.

£40 for a total affiliate website building solution, which allows you to rapidly build websites without any technical knowledge.

Get those Christmas affiliate sites up and running before it is too late!

Continue reading »]]> I have released a new version of my datafeed import plugin for WordPress. This version includes a couple of minor bugs but also includes tow new great features which are link cloaking which is great for masking affiliate links and also click tracking.

If you would like more information on the plugin please visit the Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress website.

This release comes as I work on other WordPress plugin projects which will soon be released. Version 2.0 of the Amazon import plugin for WordPress will be released very soon, I have a few issues I need to iron out first, but I hope to have it released sometime over this weekend.

I have also been working on a new plugin WordPress Advertiser. This is not specifically targeted at affiliate marketers, but it does have a market for all WordPress users. It manages the whole process of creating advertising slots on your WordPress blog, and then selling adverts via paypal subscriptions.

The WordPress Advertiser plugin can also be used by affiliate marketers who wish to manually add affiliate adverts to their WordPress blog without the sell advertising side.

I hope that this plugin will complement the other plugins I have.

Continue reading »]]> I have recently been putting together some simple websites using both the datafeed import plugin for WordPress and the amazon import plugin for WordPress. These have both enabled me to rapidly create my affiliate websites like I have never been able to before. These sites have taken at most 2 hours including setting up the sites, adding the content, adding the design and also writing the unique content that is so important.

One of the biggest problems that I have had with my affiliate marketing is dedicating too much time to the design and development of sites rather than the marketing and finding the right affiliates to join and also I have neglected something that I feel is important and that is developing relationships with the affiliate networks.

The sites that I am taking about all have keyword domains, which I am hoping will aid in the  SEO of the site and as such improve affiliate sales.

Have a look at the following sites:

http://www.microhifi.net
http://www.walkingboots.me.uk
http://www.miniskateboards.co.uk
http://www.steelwok.co.uk

I have also registered several other keyword domains that I will be developing in a similar manner to these over the comming weeks. I will report back on this blog their progress and any tweaks I make to try and bring in the affiliate sales for each of the sites.

Now I need to do some marketing, to brings in some affiliate clicks and commission.

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 »]]> Probably my best move ever in terms of my WordPress installs has been to install Blogspam on my blogs. This has taken a huge amount of work out of managing my blogs particularly this one which gets 100′s of SPAM comments each day.

I can not concentrate on writing content and moving the blog forward rather then dealing with those who would seek to undermine the web.

I can thourghly recommend this plugin, it works a treat and as yet I have not had either any genuine comments place in SPAM or any SPAM comments gettting through.

Continue reading »]]> I have been meaning to sign up and get my blogs using feedburner for sometime now. The recent server failure and the need to re-build all the sites has given me that opportunity.

If you were subscribed to my RSS feed you will need to re-subscribe by clicking on the RSS link

Feedburner gives me the advantage that i can monitor the number of subscribers to the feeds, this is a stat that I can currently only guess at based on Apache Log analysis which as we all know is as clear as mud!

I will report back when i get an indication on how many subscribers I have.

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

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

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

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

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

Future improvements

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

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

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

Download

Download the Free Google Page Rank Monitor Software

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 »]]> Some days a go I found (and i forget where… sorry) a blog post about the AffiliStore software, and thought that it was just the thing I was looking for. An out of the box package that creates a website from a Datafeed or any comma, or tab separated database and best of all Free!

So having downloaded the software and played around with it a little, here is my review.

The first thing to talk about is the speed at which you can create a store, if it wasn’t for that fact that the website for the merchant that I chose happened to be down, from a standing start I had a fully working store within no more than 5 minutes including downloading Datafeeds, creating databases, virtual hosts on Apache etc. Impressive, well yes definitely.

As I mentioned I then struggled for a good half an hour, with what i thought was a fault with the Affilistore software, when I clicked the link to the merchant site from the store, the merchants site said it did not recognise the product. It was only when I went to the merchants own website and found it down that I realised that I had been wrongly accusing Affilistore!

 So what does it do?

Once setup you are presented with an interface that allows you to upload a CSV or Tab Separated file, or even give it the location of a datafeed pipe, the software then looks at your uploaded datafeed and asks you which fields in your feed you want to show in each field on the site, so which is the product title, price, description etc. Once you have done this you click go go go and there you have it a fully working shop.

The system then allows you to change text, create static pages, create product groups and of course change the theme. Probably the best feature is it allows you to upload multiple datafeeds from different Merchants, which then allows you to create a sort of price comparison site, or at the very least as store that has a wider choice for your users.

Problems?

I did experience problems when trying to create a shop from a large datafeed, however that might be to do with the server I was trying this on as it is under quite a bit of load due to other popular sites it is hosting, perhaps if anyone else has experienced this and knows exactly what the issue is and a way to get round it they could comment on this post.

The only other limitation is that you are limited to the number of fields given you by the software, title, merchant, make, description, price, image, link. Where sometimes I would like further fields, such as postage and packing, specifications etc. Perhaps for a future version Affilistore may have some sort of User defined fields that you can use for whatever data you require.

It is worth remembering that if you are going to use datafeeds to create a site, you are using the same content as everyone else who is using that datafeed. It is worthwhile considering how you can include your own content into the site. With automated software such Affilistore that creates your site you have control over the content, unless you hack the templates to include your own content.

On the technical front, you do need some limited technical knowledge of Apache, MySQL and setting up your web hosting, but there are instructions on the Affilistore website.

Overall thumbs up, for rapidly creating simple stores from datafeeds this is perfect and best of all free… good work!

Are you using Affilistore? Why don’t you post examples or your site and your experiences with the software.

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 »]]>

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