Affiliate Blogger at Affiliate Summit West 2010 a Write UP

February 4th, 2010 Affiliate Blogger

Affiliate Blogger at Affiliate Summit West 2010 a Write UP

I cannot believe it has taken me so long to do a affiliate Summit write up. Well what a show.

Having had time to reflect how was it for you?

Thanks to Shawn and Missy for another great event. How do they do it with 4000 plus people they seem so calm and relaxed at the events and are friendly with everyone.

I was part of a panel called Monetizing Blogs for Affiliate Marketing and SEO. I had a great time on the panel and would like ot thank my fellow panelists for helping me and the audience to lean while having fun. The panel was moderated by Kris Jones of Pepperjam (@PepperjamCEO). The panel members were me, Ben Spark http://twitter.com/benspark) Tim Jones (@TheRealTimJones) and John Carcutt (@JohnCarcutt).

Eric Schechter and I  hosted our second BlogUp event.

What others said?

“Unfortunately, when we arrived on the 50th floor, we were greeted with the bad news that the lounge had been double booked and we were being moved to the iBar. After much confusion, some negotiation and a few tweets we were all on our way back to the iBar to find 5 icy cold bottles of champage awaiting our arrival, a lovely seating area and the most helpful staff…… The tweets were soon going out as #RIOwin as we enjoyed our champagne. ” www.heatherinbc.com

Yes is was stressful when it is not go right at the start but it came good in the end. Few.

Have I made money following the event directly as having attended?

Yes I made new contacts at the summit and we have started to make moeny together! Have you?

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Affiliate Blog Contest by Affiliate.com

February 2nd, 2010 Affiliate Blogger

I am going to be judging the Affiliate.com Blogger Contest along with Missy Ward, John Chow and Zac Johnson.

Get blogging the winner of this competition will be sure to get lots of exposure as well as the cash.

So write to tom@(nospam)affiliate.com get your t-shirt and take a better photo than this one.

Find out more at www.affiliate.com

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Affiliate Blog links

January 25th, 2010 Affiliate Blogger

Affiliate Blog links

Inbound links are the essential fuel for search engine optimisation and there for inbound traffic from search engines. Inbound links from social media sites from users sharing your content on Twitter and Facebook can be just as valuable. The above is true for an affiliate blog such as this one or any other site.

Here are a couple of tips for getting links.

Helping others

Promoting others on your site who in turn promote your site. Conducting an interview or reviewing or promoting a company or product can provide a great PR opportunity for the brand concerned. If you are saying something nice about them why would they not want to promote it on Twitter Facebook and with own website. If you are lucky they might get their friends to do the same. You could also suggest that they do so. You could also write some content suggestion this to them PR interview questions and making the most of your PR interview my top tips.

Guest posts

Guest post on other blogs or submitting editorial pieces or articles to other publications can be a great way of getting links back. It can be difficult to always be self referential, one tip is to have some friends who occasional reference each other slowly sharing links from a wider range of opportunities and enabling link building without being self referential.

You share I share

Have you noticed that some people share your information on Twitter and Facebook, and that they always share others information. Well look out for them, they are the people to connect with.

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Affiliate Blogger bought by Murray Newlands

January 21st, 2010 Affiliate Blogger

I am happy to say that I have bought Affiliateblogger.co.uk and I will be developing it out over the coming months. So look forward to some updated.

 

affiliate blog

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August half time

August 23rd, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

This month has been a rather quiet month, with the new job and some new hobbies, my enthusiasm for my sites kind of slowed, add to this the fact that my hosting has been temperamental with my sites virtually collapsing on a regular basis all month for up to half an hour at a time several times a day, i think i may have ‘missed a trick’ in terms of earning additional commission, which is a real shame, last month i took in £164 at the end of the month, with a target to get £250 this month, given the results, i don’t think i’ll be hitting the target, i might even get less than July, still, apparently august is a quiet month, but it can be disheartening. I’m really hoping to up the ante on my affiliate marketing, if i can earn £2000 a month from affiliate marketing i will be over the moon, that would prove to me that i’ve got what it takes to be and affiliate. anyways, here’s the results for august so far.
aw £7.02
google £95.81
skimlinks £0.42
amazon £2.17
£105.42
based on this my target of £250 a month still stands till i hit it.

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Bing vs Google

August 1st, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

I’ve been mulling over what might happen as a result of the MSN Yahoo merger which basically means that MSN’s Bing will now be powering Yahoo’s search whilst Yahoo provides the ’social media conduit. Essentially this means that MSN and Yahoo are both playing to their online strengths. And means that there is finally some real competition offered against Google.

Whilst on the surface it seems that this might be something that would cause a stir, in reality its an empty vessel, particularly in the UK, Europe and USA, where google dominates, so much so that Google-it has entered out lexicon as a term for searching online. In Asia and other regions however i can appreciate that this move might be more of a threat to Google, but the fact remains, consumers (in this case users searching on the web) will always gravitate towards the best possible product to achieve their desire. And lets face it, Google is amazingly good at its job. Having done several tests and comparisons with Bing versus Google, you have to admit Googles search algorithm is far more sophisticated and considered than that of MSN.

In essence this Bing ‘threat’ only really applies to PPC and paid search, which represents the revenue streams for Both Bing and Google, and even here, Google is the dominant for based on its sophisticated Adwords tool. In reality, even here, I doubt much will change in terms of googles dominance other than we might keep more of an eye on future developments on the Bing arena.

As far as affiliates are concerned, this might give raise to a group of affiliate who focus solely on Bing rather than Google, whilst the margins and reach might be smaller, equally the competition might be less aggressive…now thats a thought!

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July Results

August 1st, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

July was a funny month, but it actually ended well, i’ve started PPC to my strongest site and the launch of my first ‘atomic niche’ site has been interesting, I’ve also invested in articles from content now, when at first glance look pretty good, but i need to find the time to put them up on site soon. Easy Content Unit and WP-o-matic was really stressful so i’m going to have a long hard look into how i can get that resolved, its very frustrating.

so heres the round up:
Google: £135.91
Awin: £4.63
Amazon: £15.44
Linkshare: £8.18
Total: £164.16

all in all a good result, but not enough to retire on i don’t think! I reckon the target for August will be a hefty £250, if i reach £200 I’ll be very happy.

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All the small things

July 27th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

After what ended up being a rather frustrating weekend, I managed to salvage some decent results, setting up two more traditional sites, and focusing efforts on my main site. lucky for me, this months commissions are looking promising with commission coming in on Linkshare, Amazon and affiliate window, adsense has already exceeded last months results at the time of writing as well so it seems the end of this month should deliver on my targets.

Its small wins like this that really keep me motivated and working on affiliate stuff despite the rather pathetic looking income. still money is money and I can only hope that it grows with both time and effort.

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Setbacks and a new plan

July 26th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

after sleeping on my massive setback yesterday, I’ve decided to take a step back and reassess my affiliate marketing.

currently I have over 80 domains. and around 17 sites up. of which 10 are now broken. my strongest site however hasn’t been affected likewise with the site that generates most commissions from amazon, which is a bit of a saving grace, my third large site (which is actually a partnership) is going well too, with content now generating the bulk of the content its good news.

so rather than redoing the 10 sites from scratch right now, i’m going to focus on the existing sites that are performing, then focus on some ‘atomic niche’ sites i’ve already got, this will mean i need to design a landing page template. After this, its all hands on deck for christmas. and after all this is done, i’ll start to go back to the 10 sites that have been affected, at least this way I’m playing to the strengths of my portfolio.

another thing Im going to be doing is, aside from ECU and content now, i will not be spending any more money on affiliate marketing moving forwards, its time to stockpile some of the income i’m taking in from affiliate marketing.

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The most frustrating day of my life as an affiliate

July 25th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

After discovering the wp-o-matic, ECU trick, i thought my workflow would speed up and I’d be able to work on more sites quicker. once ‘d discovered this trick, in quick succession i created around 9 sites, which i would eventually get round to rewriting the content get ranking, hoping that i’d make a little more commission. This was a month ago.

Today, however proved to be the worst day ever for my affiliate marketing, I’d been checking links on some of these ECU sites, and noticed a large amount of the links were redirecting to a page on ECU that stated “page not found” at first i thought these were isolated instances so i’d delete the post, and carry on checking. I also checked the comparison table that you copy the php/java script for and all the links there seemed to work fine.

as i checked more and more links and more and more sites, i began to realize that the number of, what i can only assume are broken links began to grow, to the point where hundreds of posts had to be totally deleted, in all, I’ve had to totally write off 10 sites and will now have to totally start from scratch…

worse yet, i was running some PPC tests to some of these sites,…no wonder there were no sales coming its all totally F**Ked!

I don’t know if its the fault of ECU, or if its a problem with merchants screwing around with their feeds, but all i can say is..for a small part time affiliate like me, its no wonder so many ppl give up, if it wasn’t for the fact that i work full time in the industry and see how much larger affiliates make i would have give up a long time ago. Now all this proves is that the odds are stacked against affiliates, merchants, most agencies and certainly quite a few networks (i can name names but they all read this blog) are totally in capable of supporting smaller affiliates they only focus on the top few affiliates, there are several campaigns that i’ve been waiting months to get approved for. I can provide pages of information to a network/merchant and I’ll still get declined, and the sheer number of feeds i’ve seen that are totally screwed makes me wonder why a merchant bothers to provide a feed in the first place. and as for the IAB…thats one big farce that has got no other agenda other than to protect the interest of an elite few.

I’m totally demoralized, disillusioned and exhausted with having to constantly re-do things on my affiliate sites, just to earn a little more so that I can hopefully have a better life…its all a joke.

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