Continue reading »]]> I do a great deal of Affiliate Datafeed marketing, indeed it takes up probably around 80% of my affiliate marketing activity. I am constantly finding problems and issues with datafeeds provided by some very big names, poor quality, incorrect formatting, invalid XML, poorly formatted CSV files, but my biggest issues I have with merchants is the way in which many simply export their product database into a CSV file and think that is enough.

I know that merchants have affiliate schemes in order to off load some of the work involved in marketing their products to affiliates in exchange for commission, but there also needs to be some work put in by the merchant in order to help the affiliate marketer.

A simple export of their database is a good start, but this rarely meets the needs of a niche site. There are many pieces of software out there that help the affiliate marketer product a site, some provide facilities to filter the datafeed content in order that the affiliate marketer can cherry pick content from datafeeds, the software even allows you choose data from a datafeed to create menus and categories, however, this all falls down when the categorisation of the datafeed is simply a replication of the merchants website.

Datafeeds without good categorisation, columns for product brand and model number at the very least cause problems for the affiliate marketer.

With a little more input from the merchant the quality of the datafeed could be vastly improved, providing the affiliate marketer with more information to pick and choose what they want to use In their particular site.

The poor categorisation of datafeeds can be overcome with software solutions, I have just released a plugin for WordPress, Category Master, that allows you to add products to categories based on keywords. I have been using this myself for sometime now, it allows you to greatly improve the categorisation of your datafeed driven site, indeed it allows you to control the categories rather than rely upon those already provided in the datafeed.

I am working on more software that will help extract product information out of a datafeed, but this is a near technically impossible task, it would be perfect if all datafeed providers achieved some sort of standard, some are great and provide you with more information than you will ever need, others seemingly don’t want to invest in their affiliate programme

Continue reading »]]> I have recently written a post on my other blog about how I intend to use the bloggers rule of 24 to improve my blogging out put. I will be using that methodology here on this blog, but it has also got me thinking where else one could or should implement such a methodology.

In very simple terms the bloggers rule of 24 states that after writing your blog post, you should leave it in a ‘ready to publish’ state for 24 hours before you publish it, this allows a cooling off period allowing you to revisit that blog post with fresh eyes, and perhaps a slightly differing opinion on your work, and then make any changes you wish before publishing.

In Affiliate Marketing one of the biggest tasks that I have is writing content for websites. As we all know it is this content that is most critical in our attempts to make a success of our project, it is this content that visitors need to find useful in order to stay on, and buy from your site, it is this content that all our SEO hangs off and this content that Google will index and give us out search engine presence.

The bloggers rule of 24 should also be applied to any content that you write, I will certainly be implementing this methodology in all the content I write, be that a blog post, content for a site, marketing email or anything else. I have also just written a tender for some consultancy work, I have employed the same methedology to that as well.

As I stated in my other post on this subject, there are circumstances when this rule should not be applied, time critical pieces, offers or reactive content, but most of the words you write could be subjected to this methodology.

I am currently writing content for a website selling children’s high chairs. I am about finished with the writing, but, once I am finished, I shall leave it 24 hours and re-read and edit the content.

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 »]]> 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 »]]> At Digitalquill we have decided to discount the Datafeed Import Plugin For WordPress throughout April. You can now get the plugin for just £20 a saving of £5 on its usual price. As they say ‘Every little helps’ especially in the current economic climate.

To take advantage of this fantastic offer go to the Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress site and use the code ‘April2011‘ when asked.

The datafeed import plugin fro wordpress allows you to rapidly create websites from affiliate (and other) datafeeds. It imports the datafeeds and then allows you to choose what content to use from those datafeeds and where to use them in your site. Once you create a template for how you want your product listings to look, the plugin will download the datafeed and create a website from it.

The template designer is a very simple interface to use. If you can use WordPress you will be able to use the template designer.

The plugin also has facilities to automatically keep your site up-to-date downloading fresh copies of you chosen datafeeds and updating the content on your site. You can also set it to drip feed content into your site so that search engines come back often for the new content the plugin has added for you.

All in all we believe it is an essential tool for all affiliate marketers.

Continue reading »]]> Youtube now boasts an amazing billion videos watched every day. In fact, Youtube is now the second largest search engine, just behind Google. If that wasn’t enough, since Google owns Youtube, they place a high rank on videos appearing in their search engines.

Because of these facts, your business could be using Youtube to effectively driving more customers and increasing revenue with a minimal amount of work.

1. Create how-to and instructional videos

It’s no secret that how-to’s and instructional videos are highly sought after on the web. Millions of web users want to learn more about products and services; they turn to Youtube to learn more.

For your online business, take content you’ve already produced, create instructional videos on how to use your products and services, keep it short and sweet – you’ll soon gain more views and more customers.

2. Include your link with every video

In the description area within Youtube, you can place your URL link back to your website. Whenever you release a new video, make sure to include this link so during or after people watch your videos, they will click through and visit your website.

3. Brand your videos

Embedding videos from Youtube is one of the large reasons why it’s become such a successful online video service. Unfortunately, your link within the description doesn’t cross over; this cuts down on the traffic you could be getting to your website.

To combat this, brand your videos with your website address and logo so when people do watch your video, they could still type the URL into their address bar or search for your online business through search engines.

4. Create a viral hit

Viral videos spread like wildfire on the web. A viral video is often funny or downright so amazing that people have to share it with their friends.

Although it can be tricky, try to think of what amazing things your online business provides. Try making an amazing video out of it, do something funny, make people question what the video is about – spread your video like a virus and you’ll have traffic coming to your website.

5. Video sells

Most people don’t want to spend all day reading long sales copy or articles in general – they skip around content.

However, video helps captures people because it’s passive entertainment. Instead of trying to convince people about your product through text, create a video which highlights the benefits, have existing customers provide video testimonials, share content through video – this will keep watchers interested and can lead to new customers.

There’s no denying it; Youtube can be a moving factor for online businesses. Through great content, share-ability and engagement through video, your online business has the potential to drive a flurry of customers through its Youtube.

With only a minimal amount of investment in creating the video, the lasting effects will be exponential – don’t skimp out on creating video, it’s the future of the web – be there and your business will strive.

Continue reading »]]> Finding a profitable niche for your affiliate marketing campaign takes work but landing the correct one has the possibilities to earn you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

In a nutshell, a niche is a highly targeted interest for a product or service.

Instead of reaching for a large market dominated by corporations, niches allow you to reach a passionate community without such competition – giving you the added edge to market your affiliate product.

The following are 5 ways you can find profitable niches for your next affiliate marketing campaign.

EBay

Ebay offers one of the largest marketplaces online where millions of users search each day on very specific items within their interested niches.

Many use eBay to buy and sell products related to hobbies and niche interests; this allows you to see exactly what these people are demanding and have an interest for – talk about competitive edge.

Within eBay, drill down within each category to find micro marketplaces. Each of these marketplaces presents you with niche.

Assess each of these categories that interest you by seeing how many products are listed, which sell, past auctions and if there are active discussions related to the category.

If you find a micro marketplace that suits you; you’ve found a profitable niche for your next affiliate marketing campaign.

Affiliate Marketplaces

Did you know the same location you find affiliate products to promote also provide you with incredible insights about niches that are highly profitable?

Within many affiliate marketplaces such as Clickbank, Commision Junction, E-Junkie and Neverblue are ratings for which products are hot and selling.

Do you think you could use this data to find a profitable niche? Of course!

Simply filter your searches to view which products have high amounts of sales, affiliates or gravity and you’re onto the next hot affiliate product to promote within the same niche.

SpyFu

SpyFu is perhaps one of the most powerful tools that is rarely used in affiliate marketing. In short, SpyFu allows you to peer into what advertisers are paying for pay per click campaigns – knowing this, you can easily determine which keywords are highly competitive.

As a test, type in the name of a major competitor featuring a product you may be interested in. Within the results of SpyFU you can see which other businesses bid on these keywords and what price.

If you notice a keyword is doing rather well, drill down deeper to find the root niche of this keyword. If a business is spending a high amount for each pay per click, you can conclude the niche is very profitable.

One final bonus of SpyFu is the top 100 paying advertisements. This list shows the highest paying advertisements which you could use to determine new profitable niches for your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Wordtracker

Wordtracker comes in a free or paid version that tracks the search habits of web users from a variety of search engines.

Wordtracker is great to find highly targeted keywords within a profitable niche but to find the niche begin by typing in the broad word related to it.

For example, “Dog” would be a very broad topic, “Dog Care” would be closer but “Dog Flea Products” has the potential to be a very profitable niche based on the focus and passion of those searching for the term.

Wordtracker is an amazing tool but do take the results with a grain of salt as they display only a fraction of what has been searched upon. However, wordtracker does give you a very great idea for profitable niches and affiliate products.

Twitter Trends

Last, but not least, Twitter trends show you real time results of interests, hobbies and niches people are actively talking about on Twitter.

With millions of users, Twitter gathers many people from around the world that discuss the ins and outs of niche interests.

Not all trends are profitable but if you see an untapped niche topic spring up, you may have yourself the perfect opportunity to make money with your affiliate products or services.

Displayed on the front page, Twitter Trends are constantly changing. Click on a few of these trends to see what questions are being asked by people, see if there is a void of information or products and enter the niche.

In total, these are just five ways you can find profitable niches for your affiliate marketing campaigns. The real power is when you use each of these in tandem to solidify your research before you begin.

Use each of these tools to drill into interests shared by passionate groups of people. Talk to them and find what they are missing, what they need or what they desire.

If you can fill this need for products or services, you will find yourself the authority of a very profitable niche.

Combined with affiliate marketing, niches are the future of making money online. No longer will you need to fear the big budgets of a large corporations – the market is in your hands.

Continue reading »]]> Search engine ranking has been one of the challenges faced by an internet marketer or any web master for that matter. Techniques of search engine optimization have to be carefully adhered to if an affiliate marketer aims at improving search engine ranking of his website or blog.

Search engines adopt certain criteria by which they would rank the websites depending on factors such as the popularity of webpages, quality of content and the number of unique visitors that haunt the site or blog in a given period of time.

What are the techniques that have to be adopted by the website owner or the affiliate marketer in order to get a higher search engine ranking? Traffic to the site is the most important result that is aimed by any marketer. The techniques that promote traffic to the site include selection of keywords by proper research, building a quality content that suits the selected niche, use of meta description tags and title tags, simple URL structure of the site, building up popularity of the site and building up backlinks.

As far as building up backlinks is concerned, care has to be taken to see to it that they are not procured through spamming but obtained through legal methods such as article marketing and forum posting. URL of the website may be included in the signature used in the forums. Blog commenting should be done on relevant blogs only. The concept of reciprocal links can be put to good use in driving quality visitors to the site.

E-mail marketing done with precision will certainly improve the quality of the visitors to a site or a blog. Care has to be taken in e-mail marketing too against the situation of being called as a dreaded spammer. Pay per click programs also assist in the positioning of a website in search engine result pages. This method is of course expensive as it involves cost per click in the advertising service provided by the program.

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 »]]> Anyone can create a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertisement. Sites like Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and 7 Search are just a few.

In many cases these services attach a quality score to an Ad. This among other factors help decide positioning of the Ad.

In order to increase the click rate of your advertisement, craft a superior quality Ad. More visits to your website presents an oppertunity for more sales.

When I say superior, I mean better than a low quality advertisement. I also mean better than the competitions Ad. Badly written Ads can garner high impressions, but under 1% of those people are clicking through.

It doesn’t matter if it’s search traffic or content network traffic. You can tell your Ad is weak when thousands of people view it, and too small an amount visit your site.

If you’re this far along on the marketing path, then you should have a fair idea of howin demand your offering is.

But there is time tested techniques to use that improve the click rate. These have been employed by traditional marketers for decades. It’s hardly any different from todays online marketing.

People have used Pay Per Click to drive visits to their website for years. More often than not, it’s the quality of the advertisement that determined the amount of people coming back to their website.

At that point, it was up to the Advertiser to convert them into sales. This puts the control back into their hands.

With countless testing on variations, their now capable of writing high converting Ads. Some now offer this as a stand-alone service.

Do you want to know what these methods of improving quality score and click rates are?

When targeting a specific keyword or phrase, that’s what needs to be in the first line. Using the exact word the person is searching for. Thisshows precise relevance.

But just including the search word is not enough. It must be included properly in the Headline. The headline of course being the first line. It must sound like a normal sentence.

The description is usually two lines of text. Use these wisely to communicate the benefit of your offering. Clearly outline the features or value of your product or service. Again, use normal sentences.

Tell the person viewing the Ad what to do. Use a call to action. This is classicadvertising. Command them to click, call or visit. Directing the next action is the most powerful use of your advertisement. This should only be done on the last line of the description.Give them a price. Don’t make this a mystery . What do you have to hide? If you don’t, then you’re not confident in the pricing. It means you wouldn’t pay that for your own product. If the price is not right, you need to fix it.

Use these techniques however you want. Test various Ad layouts to see which brings the most clicks. Not only will it improve the quality of your advertisement, but it will surely boost the amount of interest in your product or service.

Continue reading »]]> Search engine rankings are extremely important for any web master. For a majority of the blogs and websites, search engines are the biggest source of traffic.  To get a good ranking in search engine rankings especially of Google, there are a lot of factors that come into play. However, there have been continuous increase in our knowledge on what are the factors that are important for a blogger to improve their search engine rankings.

Here are five important factors that affect search engine results placement of a site:

External Links: The number of sites linking to your site is the most major factor of your search engine rankings. But you should always go for high-quality links rather than focusing on the quantity of links you get. If you are getting two to three links from PR6 and PR7 blogs it is much more valuable than a hundred links from PR1 and PR2 blogs. So always focus on getting your blog as many links as you can from high page rank sites. Also remember never to get linked from link farms or bad neighborhoods as Google and other search engines will blacklist you.

Domain Age: Google loves aged-domains that have been in use for years. It has been seen by experience that Google trusts domains that are aged. So you can either buy domains which are old or you can get links from aged domains that will help you improve your worth in the eyes of search engine bots. It is always observed that older domains rank higher in search engine results.

Frequency of Posting: The frequency at which you post on your blog can be more important that you thought. Google is always in the look out for fresh contents. Google generally gives you a lot of authority if your blog is updated regularly. But this does not mean that you begin to post short or unoriginal content on your blog as it will only make you rank lower. Update regularly, but with unique and useful content. A posting frequency is important not only to keep your readers engaged but to maintain a good position in search engine results.

Page Load Time: This is the latest factor which Google has become to consider in their search engine algorithm. Senior engineer from Google, Matt Cutts has already confirmed that the page load time of a site will also be considered in the search engine rankings from now on.

Research Content: It is also known now that research related content to any topic is preferred by Google. Meaning long articles will always be ranking better than short articles that only last between 100 to 200 words. Keep your articles long and keyword rich. This will help you rank really well for a lot of keywords for Google’s search engine results.

So these are among the most important 5 factors that Google has begun to consider for placing your site in its search engine results. It is important that a blogger focuses his efforts to improvise on these factors so that he can get more traffic out of strong search engine results placements.

Continue reading »]]> A blogger is always is in a dilemma about which niche to choose for his blog. A good niche can make or break his dreams of making money online. Niche blogging is a great way for you to ensure that your blog gets a loyal readers base and has a firm footing in a particular topic. Unfortunately, most bloggers make poor judgements while choosing niche for their blogs. This is where intelligent thinking is required, so as to select a niche that will reward you well.

Here are 4 secrets to select a money making niche for your blog:

Your Interest: this is the point of paramount importance before you select a niche. Are you interested in what you are blogging or are you simply typing meaningless words on your blog without any passion? Always choose a niche which you are interested in – it need not be something always that you are very passionate about, but it should be something that you would like to give attention. Your interest is important in any niche you choose because otherwise you will lose interest in writing on your blog – which will be a big loss to you.

Trending: You must make it a point to study the trending of the niche. Because not all niches are evergreen, furthermore, there are also a few niches that are seasonal. So you must be sure to understand what is the trending of the niche. Is it a niche that will be able to provide sustainable income in the future as well or will it just be a temporary asset for you. You must carefully ponder upon this and then choose the niche.

Income Sources: Everything is based on this fact – what is the scope for money making from a niche. There are various monetizing techniques of a niche – such as PPC campaigns, text link ads, affiliate products, banner ads etc. Keep in mind that all niche cannot make use of these monetizing strategies. Some niche perform well in affiliate products while other perform well for PPC campaigns. You must do the required research on this parameter before deciding any niche.

Competition: All smart bloggers take this point seriously before jumping into any niche. Even if you find that the niche has an evergreen value and that there are lots of ways you can monetize it – you might want to reject it. The reason is – competition. If the niche you plan to enter is a hyper-competitive market then you might want to think again. Creating your own set of readers or simply getting noticed in a crowded niche can become cumbersome for you and can affect your enthusiasm adversely. This is a major reason why many bloggers fail in few niches – it is because of the sheer competition in those niche.

No doubt that selecting a niche is not an easy task. There is a lot that goes behind the thought-process. No one should finalize any niche before a thorough research on the market demands and its trending is performed.

Continue reading »]]> Great search engine optimization is a very important goal for any website that lives on the traffic it generates. There are many factors when it comes to search engine optimization, one of them being correct usage of url links.

An optimized link will help direct search engines to their correct destination while providing you with greater search engine placement based on your chosen keywords.

It’s not difficult to develop an optimized link habit but many people still neglect this simple trick that is costing them thousands of visitors each month.

Here are 3 ways you can create highly optimized links that search engines love.

1. Avoid String URLs

Many ecommerce websites use dynamic page generation for product pages and articles.

These pages often look like http://www.example.com/?=9821_Article.

This type of link structure, although still possible to index, is highly troublesome and irrelevant for search engine spiders.

Most CMS systems provide a method to change dynamic links to keyword rich strings. Modification through the htaccess file is also possible but does require additional technical knowledge.

To build a highly optimized url (without strings) you should focus on the main keywords you want your page to rank for.

Omit unwords such as:

•    the
•    and
•    of

Converting your string url structure to a keyword rich url will help with your search engin optimization, placing you higher within search results, driving you a fair amount of traffic.

2. Use Keyword Rich URLs

The previous example touched on the use of keyword rich urls but to further explain the importance of these urls here are a few more reasons.

Search engine optimization is often broken down to:

•    Off Page Optimization
•    On Page Optimization

When you provide a link in a blog comment, author byline or anywhere within your previous articles, using a descriptive and keyword rich url string instead of the traditional “click here” helps tell the search spiders what the next page is about.

Instead of using “Click here to jump to page 2″, you could use “View Additional Information About Bicycles” if you happen to write about such topic. This method can be applied across any niche or topic, simply substitute out the words.

The point is to create a link that users want to click that also provides additional information.

3. Go For The Long Tail

The long tail keyword is simply a search phrase instead of one or two keywords internet users type when searching for information in search engines.

It’s very difficult to rank for a single keyword because major businesses pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to rank high for the term.

The more practical way to rank well in the search engines and improve your search engine optimization is to target long tail keyword phrases users type.

Instead of “bicycle” you could narrow down your urls to include phrases such as “how to ride a bicycle”. This method of optimizing your urls will be much easier and give you more relevant traffic as you know people are searching for specific information.

Adopt An Optimized URL Habit

Once you become accustomed to creating keyword rich urls, you’ll be able to interlink, back link and develop your url structure that converts sales and gives you better search engine placement.

Apply these tips across your website to give search spiders an easier time to find your content and rank it for the correct terms you aim for.

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 »]]> Everyday thousands of blogs appear on the net, giving each writer a voice and a platform for readers to share their opinions.

The fundamental difference between a blog and a static website is the interaction. Blog commenting gives readers the ability to continue a topic of discussion while simultaneously promote their own links.

Proper and respectful blog commenting is a very simple and effective way to drive traffic to your website.

With millions of niche websites and blogs on the net, becoming an authority and being active with blog commenting will put you right in front of the same rabid visitors that are eager to learn more – by directing them to your own website.

The following is a few ways you can use blog commenting as a way to increase your search engine optimization and drive wild amounts of traffic to your website.

1. Use Correct Etiquette

Blog owners use their precious time to write articles for their readers. Commenting is a natural way for readers to extend the topic but there are certain guidelines you should obey when leaving your own comment.

First off, you should never spam comments. Comment spam is detrimental to both the blog owner and blog reader. Spamming links will place a negative image within the minds of people interested in your niche while being promptly deleted by the blog owner.

Second, you should try to keep the topic flowing. Derailing the topic with hateful speech or drama is a quick way to break proper blog comment etiquette – don’t do it.

Lastly, don’t leave a comment that doesn’t fit within the scope of the blog. If a blog is talking about tech news, it doesn’t make a bit of sense to leave a comment and link about a diet product, it comes across as spam and is very rude.

2. Provide Helpful Insight

Blog commenting is utilized to keep a discussion going. Although a writer will do the best to their ability to cover the topic of the post, blog commentors will be able to pick up from where it left off, lending helpful and insightful information.

To drive traffic to your website, comment on blogs within your expertise, continue the discussion and give more than you take. When users come to know how helpful you are, they will follow through your provided link, landing on your page.

Likewise, a reader which provides excellent comments can sometimes be highlighted by the blog owner. As appreciation for your interaction on the blog, they may talk about you in later posts, giving you additional links and spotlight to drive traffic to your website.

3. It’s All In The URL

Common blog format calls for:

•    Name
•    Email
•    URL

The URL is your opportunity to share additional websites that fit within the scope of the blog or blog post. Readers will be eager to seek out additional information and when you are on the forefront with your link, they will follow through, driving free traffic to your blog.

Why Blog Commenting Matters Most

When you provide helpful, respectful and informational comments, you capture readers that are already hot on topic.

These “hot” readers are now emotionally driven to find additional information or products. Being active on blogs within your niche will help add authority, branding and traffic to your website.

Not just random traffic, but highly motivated readers that will devour your content.

Continue reading »]]> Here is a major problem we all face as business owners: generating more revenue. You may own a successful business but you always feel there is more your business can accomplish, this is the sole reason why you decided to reach the mass market of the web.

Unlike traditional marketing plans that apply to offline marketing, the web has introduced a new set of guidelines for marketing on the web. If you don’t know these new guidelines, you will be left in the dust.

To take a moderately performing business into a great business, website owners need to know how to correctly use the web for their marketing needs. There are many products and services available online that will teach you how to make an impact within the web but the ABC’s of marketing detailed in this post will easily get you started today.

There is no magic solution for internet success. It takes years of learning and implementation to truly understand how you can make an impact online. This is why I’ve created this post, so you can learn the ABC’s of marketing on the web.

Awareness
Awareness plays a large role in marketing on the web.

To conduct your business blindly on the web means you are missing out on the chance to find additional revenue and gain valuable feedback about real world customer satisfaction.

Companies that strive on the web are ones that are aware of their business. They are able to know when people are talking about their business and respond to customers which may not always be directed at you.

The web has allowed us consumers to actively voice our opinions about companies to the masses. In a split second a business could errupt in termoil from a single bad review or customer experience.

We are all listening to each other, the web is one giant word-of-mouth platform.

To be aware of your business and successfully market on the web you must take the time to learn new applications.

Applications such as Google analytics gives us insights on how our customers interact with our business. Twitter also allows us to monitor chatter about our business – giving us valuable customer interaction opportunities to build a better relationship or mend a broken one.

Branding
All great business need a brand at their core.

Branding, unlike the traditional sense, does not necessarily mean having a strong logo or flashy website. You could pay thousands of dollars in designer services to create impactful images but branding is what truly builds your online business.

Branding goes beyond the idea of setting your self image. On the web, you must always strive to keep your brand relevant and interesting to your customers and prospects.

Building communities through Facebook and a following on Twitter gives you an early start but there are many other options for each business.

A great brand will be able to win you customers but more importantly, to keep them.

A brand swells up emotional response from customers and prospects. It keeps your name on the tip of their tongues.

The main aspects of a great brand are:
•    Emotion
•    A strong logo that conveys your values
•    A consistent image
•    An online presence which drives a great user experience

These aspects should be applied to every party of your online real estate from your website to your social media campaign.

When your brand become synonymous with your products and services, people will fall in love with you which will lead to greater customer satisfaction and more revenue for your business.

Care

The rules of marketing have changed and not just for the web.

Unlike mass media marketing which is cold and far too broad, marketing on the web allows you to personally interact with your leads and customers.

People have become jaded by marketing because it fills their daily life to the point of exhaustion. Large companies have outsourced customer relations, only infuriating customers with the hassle of trying to get help.

Part of your marketing campaign should be dedicated to caring for your customers and prospects. Mass marketing cannot convey the same devotion to solving problems as a direct connection to your customers.

A caring company will meet the needs of each and every one of their customers. With such high competition within your market, every customer counts – especially in this downed economy.

By caring for your customer’s problems and answering their questions and comments, you will begin the path of a long term relationship. This long term relationship is built just like you would a friend, legitimately caring and interacting with one another.

When a customer knows you care for them and can voice their opinions with ample feedback from you, you will win them over and keep them for years to come.

Continue reading »]]> Out of all the promises of how to make money online, there is really only one way that the average web user can truly make a living and that’s by finding a niche market.

Wouldn’t you love to write about a topic you love and make money online from selling products to others that are just as interested?

It’s a very enticing thought but there’s one MAJOR problem, how do you find a niche?

If you are passionate about making money online and gaining passive income, continue reading to find out how to find a niche market.

What is a niche?
To learn how to find a niche, you have to understand what a niche is.

A niche is simply a highly focused interest in a product, service or idea within a larger market. The easiest way to understand a niche is to think of it as a hobby, something that people place a lot of their time discussing and, if it’s a product, using.

For example, ‘Shoes’ is a large market, something that everyone will generally search for and buy. Running shoes is a micro market, it’s more focused but still has a broad consumer market. Women’s orthopedic running shoes, that’s a niche market.

See where I’m going with this?

A niche is singling out a single product or service and providing a solution to the problems within the niche.

How To Find A Niche Market

So let’s try and example to understand how to find a niche market.

Open a tab on your browser and type in ‘Shoes’ within Google, what do you get? Nearly 200,000,000 million results!

200 Million searches sounds like a fantastic idea to aim for a market but the problem is that your competition is very fierce and aiming to monetize on such a large market is virtually impossible for the average user interested in making money online.

So, let’s try typing in ‘Women’s Running Shoes’ into Google, what do you get? Over 17 Million results, we’re getting more focused.

However, we still have the same problem with this micro market. The competition is still high and the costs would be too far out of reach for the average web user.

Finally, let’s do a search for “Women’s Orthopedic Running Shoes”, what do we get now? A little over 92,000 search results.

We’ve hit our niche market!

Understanding a niche market

Okay, we have an idea of what a niche market is, we are using the example of ‘Women’s Orthopedic Running Shoes’ but you may be asking:

Only 92,000+ searches? I surely can’t make a profit selling to so few people?!

But you can.

When you choose to enter a niche market, you are going up against few few others, meaning your costs to market and dominate the niche is miniscule compared to the mass market.

Imagine if you only pulled 1,000 customers from our example ‘Women’s Orthopedic Running Shoes’ and say you sold a pair to each for $30 a piece. You’ve just made $30,000!

You see where I’m going with this?

You don’t always have to reach a mass market because we already know that people searching for ‘Women’s Orthopedic Running Shoes’ are highly targetted and highly interested in obtaining them.

Solving a problem within a niche

Up until this point I’ve talked about how to find a niche market and gave a great examples but what do you think you could actually sell to the people within the niche?

Was your first thought shoes?

Well, step back for a second and think of what else the people within the niche are intersted in or have a problem that needs to be solved.

What about if you sold an ebook or video series about:

How To Develop The Perfect Running Schedule To Lose The Most Weight?

Now we’re getting to it!

A niche doesn’t necessarily need to be a physical product, it can also be information.

The example above solves a problem with the niche. When people buy running shoes what is their intent? Generally to lose weight and to be fit. What’s another problem? Time management because who has enough time to dedicate their valuable time just for running?

Now, because we’re so focused within a niche, we can also conclude two additional details:

•    The people in the niche need orthopedic support
•    They are interested in their health and their body

Just these two examples gives us a whole wealth of knowledge of what we can do with our niche.

How To Sell To A Niche

Now that we’ve identified the problem, let’s talk about a few ways you could sell to people within your niche.

One of the easiest ways to make money online within a niche market is to sell info products such as ebooks or video series.

Another idea, and a larger step, would be to find a manufacturer or wholesaler which sells specific products within your niche.

The easiest method of making money online within a niche is to create a blog and post valuable content for those interested. After the blog has become established and you’ve built authority within your niche, you are primed to release an info product to those that are eager to have their problems solved.

These sales could be through email marketing, direct sales, affiliate marketing and so many other methods available online.

Finding Your Niche Market

Now that we’ve run through a general example on how to find a niche, ask yourselves these few questions:

•    Do I have a hobby or am I passionate about a product or information?
•    Could I create enough content to build a following?
•    Do I know enough about my subject to build authority?
•    Can I find products to sell to my niche community?

If you can answer these questions, you’ve found your perfect niche market. I don’t want you to get caught up with all the technical details on how to set up your niche market just yet, these are answered in other posts but gaining a sense of how to find niche markets will start you off in your goals to make money online.

Once you’ve developed your ideas and know how to find niche markets, the sky is the limit, think of what you could do with an additional niche market, why not 5 or 10! You’ll soon see the power of niche marketing and how great your life is once you earn passive income from making money online.

Continue reading »]]> Youtube has now become one of the most used websites in the world, rivaling Google in terms of search traffic and website usage. But what does this mean for a website or business owner? One word: traffic.

If traffic is the lifeblood of the internet, than more traffic to your website or ecommerce stores simply means more revenue.

Youtube has many opportunities to drive traffic to your website, this article will take a look at 3 of the most powerful ways.

1. Demonstrate Your Products or Services

When web users begin their search to learn new skills or catch up on particular hobbies and interests, they often turn to Youtube. It’s a no brainer, many more people would rather watch a video than read an article.

With Youtube, you could easily create a video on-the-fly to demonstrate your products or services. This visual approach to showing what you offer can better display the benefits you can give to viewers and potential customers.

If a pictures speaks a thousand words, a video must be millions.

How-to videos are some of the hottest and most searched after videos on Youtube. By doing just a little work converting your copy to video, you’ll be able to capture viewers while using Youtube.

Google, with its caffine update, has begun placing video within top search engine placement. If a keyword is too expensive or difficult to obtain, video will help you land in that prized spot – just remember to include a link back to your website.

2. Voice Your Opinion About A Product Or Service

On the opposite end of using Youtube to promote your own products or services, you could turn the tables and use video to highlight others.

Product and service reviews are highly sought after by many web user. Traditional write ups by marketing teams are quickly ignored as they come across as too “salesy”. A honest video review will help users decided wither or not a product or service is worthwhile.

Think about it for a second, how many times have you bought a product or service simply because a friend or family member raved about it? That’s the power of video.

If you can tell an honest story and review to your viewers, you’ll easily be able to convert them to sales. Be sure to add a call to action within your videos, telling the user to visit the destination website, click a link or subscribe to your channel.

3. Go Viral And Build Links

The greatest benefit of video is the ability to go viral. Viral video spreads across the net at an incredible speed.

Often enough, these videos are created by average users however many companies have tried their hand at crafting viral videos – with great success.

As your video spreads across social media, blogs and websites, people will be able to identify your brand, click your link, visit your website and drive massive amount of traffic for next to nothing.

You’ll be the talk of the net with the correct video hit, it just takes a little bit of massaging to create a video that is viral worthy.

As you can see from these 3 powerful examples, Youtube gives website owners many great options to drive massive amounts of free traffic to their websites.

Video production is becoming easier each day with simpler programs and outsourcing. The cost of an ad campaign could easily cover the costs for a handful of great videos.

The web is transforming from a dominant text medium to multimedia, video is the future, how are you going to harness this powerful way to drive free traffic to your website?

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 »]]> 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 »]]> I have started another blog, On The Allotmentспални комплекти which is a blog tracking the progress of my new allotment. I am using this blog as an experiment in many of the things that I have learned about blogging.

I thought that I would report back on a small success I have had with that blog. This weekend I decided that as I was going down to the allotment to do some work I would take some video of the plot and the first bits of work that I did on the allotment. I then uploaded them straight to YouTube and posted the videos on the blog.

I created a youtube channel, on which I put a description of what I am doing, ensuring I used some keywords in the description, and placed a link back to the blog. I also used the tagging facility on all the videos and he descriptions of the videos to provide more links back tot he blog.

I was please with the positive response in the numbers of hits this has generated for the blog. Which in the last few days has seen a ten fold increase in the number of visitors.

Now, this is a new blog and as such only has a handful of visitors at the moment, but it was nice to see the positive impact on the work I had put in.

In addition I was pleased to note that the site now ranks 4 in google for the phrase ‘Allotment Plan’ not bad for a site that is only a month or two old.

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 »]]> Although I have neglected Subscribe to Offers while I get the server back up and running, the site has been ticking over nicely. I am back onto adding as many voucher and discount code as I can to the site.

Today saw the 100th Subscriber via email which is a very unexpected success.

One problem is I have no idea how many subscribers I have via RSS as I have no way of monitoring this. Feedburner would not work as the user can customize the feed, deciding what categories they want to appear in their feed.

I have looked into making the RSS feed script log each time it is called, but this would only give me an idea of hits rather than how many subscribers.

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 »]]> This weekend has seen coverage of the ‘New Social Networking site’ Twitter.

Although I have only recently started using it, I was under the impression it has been around for some time, but hey!

I have also been reading some ‘black hat’ online marketing methods exploiting Twitter, this has brought me to thinking where is the line between legitimate online marketing and Spamming.

I send an update to Twitter each time I post a blog post, I also send an update of each offer I add to Subscribe To Offers, although my curl scripts are not working at the moment. Is this Spamming?

I have read about affiliate marketers using datafeeds sending each item in the datafeed to twitter, effectively sending mass updates to Twitter, clearly this is Spam. Twitter themselves call this spam, which is why people are coming up with systems to drip feed these posts to twitter.

I am not sure where the line is. However, I would prefer not to wreck another good social networking tool by Spamming it. It seems to me that this is the death of all new opportunities on the Internet. Sooner or later they are exploited.

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 »]]> Whenever I have posted about how to blog I have always emphasised the importance of regular posts, indeed how critical it is that you are able to come up with a decent list of posts before you even setup your blog. However there is something that until recently I have not considered. That is Blogger burn out or writers burnout.

I have been reading on a couple of the blogs I subscribe to, that the writers are becoming disillusioned and fed-up with their blog, debating whether they should continue the blog. These blogs up to now, have been very regular, informative with good content and interesting reads and therefore tick all the boxes for a successful blog. However, these recent posts are the classic sign of blogger burn out and I suspect that there maybe several reasons for this.

1. Posting too frequently – a balence has to be struck between posting regularly and what you can actually cope with
2. The blogger feels that they are not getting the successes that they hoped for, this maybe numbers of subscribers, numbers of comments or income, it depends on what the blogger views as achievement.
3. Other external pressures for the blogger as an individual – I know this affects me greatly, when things are extremely busy it is very hard to find the time to blog. I hope to mitigate this problem by generating an archive of un-published posts that can be published quickly and easily to keep a steady stream of posts comming.

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 »]]> 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 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 »]]> Affiliate window have this week launched what they are calling a ‘Payment Status Traffic Light System’

It is a system designed to indicate how good a merchant is at paying out commissions. Which in these troubled economic times is a vital bit of information for an affiliate.

The traffic light colours have the following meaning:

Green

• Merchant has an up to date payment record and no payment restrictions.
• Affiliates will be paid for all approved commissions regardless of when the merchant pays Affiliate Window.

Amber

• Merchant has longer than standard payment terms, is overdue on some invoices or has little or no credit insurance limit.
• Affiliates will be paid for approved commissions only when payment for corresponding invoices has been received by Affiliate Window.
• It may take longer for affiliates to receive money from amber rated merchants.

Red

• Merchant has no credit insurance limit, a series of overdue invoices and may be in financial difficulty.
• Approved commissions will only be paid when Affiliate Window have been paid in full for all outstanding invoices.

My current view is that this is an excellent idea, giving the information to the affiliate about the risk involved with dealing with a merchant.

I also did nto realise that in many cases the Network will actually payout commissions to affiliate before they actually recieve the money from the merchant.

Continue reading »]]> I have been looking at the Analytic stats for this blog and my other blogs (Matt Houldsworth.com and our wedding blog) and I have noticed that there is a clear correlation between visitor numbers and new posts.

This may be an obvious observation, however this has got me thinking about how I can achieve a steadier consistent stream of posts on all my blogs.

I recall reading somewhere advice that one should not start a new blog unless you can sit down and write 20 or 30 posts there and then, and indeed before you even setup a new blog you should sit-down with your word processor and do just that.

My blogging habits really follow this trend, of go through phases of writing several posts all around the same time and then none for a period of time. This makes the blog very active for a short period and then the activity tails off until the next batch.

The problem I have is that I struggle for time to dedicate to blogging, so when I have an idea or a subject that i want to blog about I jot it down and then when I  get a few hours I write up those into blog posts.

I have recently discovered wordpresses Schedule facility. I only really noticed it in version 2.7 but I guess it was in before. This allows me to write a body of posts and have then drip into the blogs, meaning that I can ensure that I have at least one post every day or at worst every few days.

I am hoping that this will mean that even though my writing habits will stay the same, the posts are more regular.

I do need to increase the number of posts if I want the blogs to grow and become more successful. This is somethign that I am working on improving and indeed is one of my targets for this year.

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 »]]> 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 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 »]]> Subscribe to Offers has been live for about a month now and this last week saw its first sales. Only in the 10’s of pounds bracket, so a fairly moderate start, but reasonable none the less. Due to time constraints I have yet to really market the site, so I am happy with it ticking over for a while, if it brings in £100 per week or so then I am very happy with that until I can dedicate the time to growing the project.

Continue reading »]]> The 3 monthly Google page rank updates are scheduled for sometime over the Christmas period. Although Google tracks your site continually in terms of back links and other SEO, they make the changes to the Page Rank every 3 Months.

Although it maybe a bit late to start working on your SEO for this review, it may not be too late to do some simple things. Ensure that you have some up-to-date content, remove yourself from some things such as Text-Link-Ads and paid blog post services.

Having said that I earn quite allot of money on this blog from Text Link Ads and as such I will be retaining them on the site and taking any page rank hit that Google give me.

I am hoping that this review will see the page rank of some of my sites improve as I have put quite a bit of work into the SEO of the sites.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I wrote some software to keep a track of my Google page rank and other rankings over time so that I can see the affect of my efforts. Each week I record the page rank for each site in a data base, if it goes down I mark it in red, if it goes up I mark it green. I am therefore hoping that sometime soon after Christmas I will see a line on my report with a lot of green numbers in it.

If you are interested in getting a free copy of this software you can download it here

Continue reading »]]> I took some time this evening to analyze the keywords that people have been using to find this site and I was interested to note that Google has picked this site for definitions of several keywords.

For those of you that done know, in Google if you do a search for ‘Define: keyword’ rather than doing a search for that phrase it will look for definitions for the keyword that you entered.

I use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic and have been please to see that this site is being used for definitions for:

‘Banner Advert’
‘Data Feed’
‘Paypal’
‘Affiliate ID’
‘contextual link’
‘deep link’
‘banner advert’
‘cookie length’
‘affiliate link’
‘associate’
‘unique click’

These keywords or definitions have been found in a ‘Glossary of terms’ post I wrote early in the life of this blog.

The number of visitors coming to the site from those definitions is quite considerable and is making up over half of the search engine traffic to this site.

As this is something that you can not buy, or get onto yourself I am please that my site has been chosen as a source for the definitions of those words.

This is a great tip for anyone else who has a blog or any site, a little SEO tip, write a page with relevant definitions of keywords. Make sure that what you write is your own content and then monitor your stats to see if you get any hits on those keywords.

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

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

Visit Great Hampers

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 »]]> 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 »]]> The Google Rank Monitor Software I launched a few days ago has raised some discussions as to what page rank to monitor. The software actually allows you to enter the exact URL that you wish to monitor, therefore if you want you can monitor several sections or individual pages on a site.

This has lead to deeper discussions as to how your link back strategy should work. In my opinion consistency is the key. If I am building link backs to Earning From Affiliates for example I will always use http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com and not http://www.earningfromaffiliates.com/wp/?p=183 unless I want to refer to a specific post.

More over I will also always use the www and on sites where I have two or more domains I will focus all my marketing strategy on one domain while the others just cover miss-types and the odd incidental visitor.

I wonder what others opinions of this is. Are you consistent? Indeed does it make a difference?

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 »]]> 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 »]]> I’ve recently advertised for a freelancer to generate some links for Break Away Holiday Cottages, I have asked that these links be on sites with a page rank of above 3. I have also asked for some blog posts and comments to include a link back to my site. I have given details of the types of site and site content that I want links backs from so hopefully in terms of Google they will be quality links.

Having never done this I will see how it goes, my concern is that there is a danger of the freelancer spamming on my behalf, however I have made it clear that permission should be gained and proof of that permission be given along with proof of the link before payment is made.

I will keep you up-to-date on how this goes and what sort of impact it has on visitors and in turn commissions.

Has anyone else gone down this route? if so how successful was it?

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 »]]> Yet another of my affiliate projects has launched today. Wow Factor Templates is a site that sells website templates, WordPress templates, flash templates, osCommerce templates, phpBB templates, php-Nuke templates, logo templates, and Zen Carts templates.

These can all be purchased and then downloaded online, via the simple interface.

I decided to do this project after using the templates from this merchant a number of times on various affiliate and non-affiliate web projects. Usually you get not only a HTML template but also the source PSD or flash file so that you can tweak the design to suit.

I am also pleased to announce that I can offer an affiliate scheme, so if you want to create your ownsite selling these templates simply sign up via the link on the site. Once you do you will either be able to create your own site from scratch or simply download one of the affiliate ready sites that you upload and start selling.

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 »]]> Following the launch of broadband local last week, I can report that I have had three sales already, at nearly £20 commission for each sale that is a total of £60 commission in a week.

This was the last thing I was expecting, if you read my earlier posts about making use of parked domains by either adding some affiliate banner adverts or as in the case of broadband local quickly creating an affiliate site, all in the hope that they may make one or two sales in a year and therefore helping to pay the domain registration costs. With all these projects I have decided that the only marketing I will do is simply submitting them to search engines, no paid advertising, no effort in link building simply quick and easy.

It is with this in mind that I am very pleased with the success of  broadband local. Admittedly this is a domain that has been used before for a similar product or service, but not for many years. Getting three sales in the first week is more than could have been expected.

This also makes me think that this is a site that could really go somewhere if I were to market it properly, however at the moment I will not be tempted as I have other larget projects on the go (and a baby on the way!).

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 »]]> This last month I have seen record earnings from Text Link Ads, both from referrals and from sold links. This has not only been a one off month but a trend of increasing earnings over the last few months. I am now up to about $400 per month from TLA alone.

This shows that Text Link Ads are not dead after Googles decision to penalise sites selling links. With the new Word Press Plug-in TLA have allowed you to customise how the links show on your site.

In light of this I have decided to run a competition, if you sign up for a free TLA account, I will give create a link from Earning from Affiliates to your site. TLA control panel allows me to view the names of people who have signed up. So if you sign up through the link below, then email me on office@earningfromaffiliates.com with the name you signed up with and the details of the link (URL and text) I will create a link for you on the links page.

This offer is worth over £50 ($100) per month as this is what I charge others for links on the site. In addition TLA will give you $100 worth of free links, as signing up for an account costs you nothing, you are getting $100 of paid links and a free link from this site.

Sign Up for a free Text Link Ads Account and win a link!

Continue reading »]]> If you have been in the Internet business for as long as I have I am sure like me you will have built up a whole range of domain names that you have parked away.

Some will have been bought for that brilliant idea you just haven’t got round to as yet, some will be domains you have bought speculatively in the hope they might be worth something, some maybe ones that clients no-longer wish to continue with and you have decided to keep hold of.

Perhaps more embarrassingly if you are like me some will have been bought when surfing while drunk, you wake up in the morning and that brilliant idea you had last night after a couple of bottles of wine just does not seem so good in the morning, but when you check your email through the fog of a hang over you can just about make out that invoice for the domain name you bought for your not so brilliant idea!

In all seriousness, I have built up a portfolio of domain names reaching into the thousands, some good and some not so good, most of which are just parked, so I thought why not make these pay? Even if that is only a few pounds per year at least they would pay for themselves covering the registration costs. This got me thinking about possible ways to monetise them, so here are my ideas, if you have anymore please do post a  comment. Indeed if you have a funny story about one of those not so great ideas please do post those too!

 1. Sedo or other Auction site – The option that sedo provides is actually a way of selling domain names, however many people use it simply as a parking service, you see you point your domain at sedo, add some details about a price you are looking for and then Sedo put pay per click adverts on the domain name, you get a cut of that revenue. The service is intended to sell the domains, however you can simply reject any bids and earn from the PPC. If that great bid happens to come in you can always decide to let it go.

2. Create your own ppc or affiliate landing page. Simply creating one static html page, put some PPC adverts or banner adverts related to the domains subject and leave it alone. You may want to track with Google analytics to see what people are searching for and custom your banners to them, but all I am doing is setting up those pages and leaving them. The aim of this is not to generate myself extra work, but to do something quick and simple that might drip some money in.

3. The final option that I can come up with requires some additional work but not much. If you have a merchant that provides a product data feed related to your domains subject, grab yourself a copy of AffiliStore (setup takes minutes), setup a data feed from a URL (which updates automatically). This will create an online store with all the products of the merchant. This advantage here is you are more likely to make commissions, but the disadvantages are that it takes a little longer to setup and also takes up more server resources if that is an issue.

With all of these I have decided to simply setup the sites or holding pages. I will not market them in anyway other than submitting them to search engines (which in most cases is already done). Then I will leave them until such a date that I decide to use the domains for something more productive.

In the mean time if each domain earns £5 per year, and yes my expectations are very low, then on the 2000 parked domains I have this will earn  10,000, this will cover the domain registration fees. If they earn any more then that will be great.

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 »]]> 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 »]]> The Super Proxy Project is now up for auction at:

http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/18581

If you are interested go over and place a bid. It has been a great project for me over the last couple of years bringing in good money however it is time to let it go so I can move onto other projects.

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