Launching my first atomic niche site

July 14th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

I’m just launching my very first atomic niche site, i’ve designed this so that it still uses wordpress but it works in such a way that it will appear as a small 3 page deep site at most, whilst using wordpress seems like overkill, its a simple to read and easy to install template which means i can save heap loads of time, not to mention, my copy of dreamweaver seems to have gone missing, I’ve decided to focus on a well know printer from a top brand name as a test, I imagine that the amount of research into a viable niche would be far greater than what I actually did, but I still think the site will rank well and have a standing chance, the big challenge will be trying to get backlinks to the site. more on this experiment later.

Posted in All articles, Niche Marketing | No Comments »

Easy Content Unit Makes life easy for affiliates

July 3rd, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

Easy Content Unit is the ingenius idea of Lammo, from Big Idea media, essentially its an amalgamator tool that allows an affiliate to create datafeed populated widgets from merchants across any network. The Widgets can be fully customized and added to any site or blog that accepts Javascript.

There are two versions of the tool, one is totally free to use but will show their ads in place of yours 20% of the time, which seems reasonable considering the usefulness and massive time saving that such a tool provides to affiliates, especially those who, like me, have to spend loads of time writing content. There is an alternat ‘pro’ version that adds some useful functionality and only costs £19.99+VAT a month, which if you’ve got the right kind of site, this could actually be a real winner. (you can get the pro version here)

the Pro features include -

RSS – this allows you to output easy content units to a blog using RSS, a fantastic time saver and also allows search engines to read the content within the unit.

Call back URLs – for the purposes of collecting statistical information, you can integrate this with Google analytics and use it to understand how well the unit is doing

Custom Descriptions – You can now edit/create your own descriptions for the products you add to your content units, should you wish.

Here’s an example of a unit from the free version, naturally, please feel free to order using this as well, I’m a poor employee and this site is supported on my own meager income, so show some love and buy something via my affiliate link…please?

Now the thing about ECU is that an affiliate has managed to use ECU Pro to populate an entire blog complete with content with some smart use of the RSS that ECU can generate, along with the custom content ability available in ECU Pro and by adding a wordpress plugin called wp-o-matic which converts RSS feeds into posts. You can read the instructions here. Here’s a bit more info from keith Bond, another big affiliate whos developed a feed to post plugin.

Basically what this means is you can effectively write your posts in ECU and your blog will auto update, again, brilliant time saver.

Posted in Affiliate management, All articles, Niche Marketing, SEO, Wordpress | 1 Comment »

Where does this all lead

June 28th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

After a bit of soul searching, I decided to share my thoughts on why i was doing affiliate marketing, for what seems like peanut money.

Affiliate marketing, particularly with true content sites is a long term game, it takes time to get a site ranking, it takes time to research a niche, and it takes time to get enough traffic to get sales come through, but like a mountain, each step you take is a step forwards.

really, what i’m personally hoping to acheive is firstly a supplimentry source of income to save and ultimate invest in property, this is really where I’d like to make a dent and move towards, in addition i’d also like this affiliate income to be more consistent so that it can suppliment for savings for when i eventually retire.

Ultimately the reason i chose affiliate marketing for this is because its a passive source of income that really doesn’t need much time to sustain.

Posted in All articles, Niche Marketing, Other Stuff | 2 Comments »

Useful Tools for affiliate marketers

June 18th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

Affiliate marketing is a fast paced game, you need to constantly be building up your sites with the most relevant content as quickly as possible and be trying to get your site to rank as high as possible in the search engines, I’ve always found the efficency is what makes all the difference, and the quicker and easier you can get things do, the sooner you can go to the park and play with your friends. So, here’s a list of the tools that help me with my affiliate marketing, not just in terms of efficency but also in terms of site construction and so forth.

1. Google.com- Self explaintory really, without google the internet wouldn’t be what it is.

2. Adsense- at least at the moment, adsense gives me the bulk of my affiliate commissions, its not a big earner, but it does offer some stability and continuity and its totally automated which means I don’t need to spend time selecting merchants or installing scripts.

3. Google Analytics- This is googles reporting tool, its incredibally functional and helps you to determine how well your site is performing, where traffic has come in from and all sorts of cool number crunching stuff, its invaluable as a bench marking tool of your sites performance, and it can be integrated with adsense.

4. Wordze- this is an awesome keyword research tool, which is similar to google keyword except its more extensive and designed for use by PPC professionals and Affiliates, it offers some real indepth analysis which is great for finding new niches and understanding how people are serching. it costs around USD$40.oo a month, but if you’re big into niche marketing or PPC this is a really good tool to use.

5. Hitwise - Hitwise is the mecca of all research tools, it rocks, but it costs an arm and a leg, if ever get a change to look at it, take full advantage of it, the insight tenfold that of any other research tool.

6. Google Keyword tool – this is a free tool that google provides for PPC to estimate traffic volumes and costs, but its useful for affiliate and niche marketing as well for research and estimates. Its great for finding new niches as I explained here.

7. Easy Content Unit – I’ve only recently started using this, despite being aware of the potential of datafeeds for years. ECU basically allows you to automate the process of creating content widgets on your site, good for creating top ten product lists, best seller lists and comparison tables, with little effort, one of the big headaches is you still need to wait to get approved from th networks, as I’ve mentioned before. But its the closest we’ve come to something like this and I have to admit, as a total dunce at anything techical this is a fantastic tool.

8. Easy Co-reg – this is similar to ECU but for CPL (Cost per lead) campaigns, great if you’ve got an email collection form of some sort.

9. Google Alerts – getting the latest news is a big challenge for affiliates with content heavy sites, google alerts is one of the top tools to get the most relevent news as quickly as possible on relevant subjects.

10. sqworl – another tool, i’ve just started using, its bascally a bookmarking tool that you can login to anywhere, great for the mobile affiliate, just for keeping tabs on all those important URLs you have, including these ones on this page.

11. Wordpress – this is a CMS (content management system), my personal favourate, its dead easy to install and gives a fantastic and highly customizable blog platform, which, with a little creativity can be made and structured to fit as a normal website, the multitude of plugins and themes means that no two wordpress blogs are alike.

12. A4U forum – this is the UK industry forum, i find this one of the most useful resources on the web for anything affiliate marketing related, and its still small enough that you don’t get swamped with information and spam like you do with other forums, they also host the annual A4uAwards which is an awesome black tie event with affiliates, networks, merchants and agencies, not to be missed, and they run the A4u expo, another great affiliate event.

13. Twitter – I haven’t used this for affiliate marketing yet, but I’ve tested it and seen some very successful uses of twitter in affiliate marketing, the main reason for my lack of use is the time and frequecy twitter needs to be maintained, which is a real turn off when I’ve got as much as I do on my plate, still it is still a new and innovative tool and worth using, basically its micro-blogging, that allows you to post small paragraph length comments to your followers.

14. FileZilla – filezilla rocks, its a free ftp solution that allows you to manage all your files on the server, it makes uploading plugins and themes to wordpress dead easy and its really clear, of course, best of all, its free.

15. FireFox – Firefox is awesome, its a free browser with the functionality to add add-ons, giving it a wordpress like freedom to customize and improve workflow and functionality, its long since replaces safari and internet explorer as my browser of choice and its not failed me yet!

16. Outlook – as an affiliate you’re sure to get millions of emails a day, litreally hundreds and thousands of them, its insane, being able to keep track of multiple email accounts and not rely on yahoo or gmail is a real lifesaver.

17. Skimlinks – I’m pretty lazy, it takes time to get approved for merchants, write articles and build up an affiliate site, and time isn’t something I have a lot of, and the little i have i need to use as efficently as possible. What this means is waiting for a merchant to approve me is a waste of time, having to look on the 20 odd networks in the uk is a waste of time. and this is where skimlinks comes in, its a tool that amalgamates all the major networks and affiliate programs in one place, you don’t need to worry about tracking links, you just install a little javascrpt and link to merchants as normal, all the technical leg work is done for you.

18. youtube – this is an unsung hero of affiliate marketing, you can get information from there, post videos for backlinks on there, and best of all use the videos as part of your content, under explored in my opinion.

19. wikipedia another great source of information content and sometimes even traffic (if you’re lucky) its a great site and whilst non-commercal and totally anti-affiliate its great for information.

20. Yahoo answers – awesome for finding information, getting backlinks, building your own profile and helping others, again, not widely used and under explored.

Posted in All articles, Niche Marketing, Other Stuff, PPC, SEO, Wordpress | 1 Comment »

Searching for Niches

June 17th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

Niche, I personally believe is the only place online where there is still a reasonable amount of competiton to be had, particularly as an affiliate with little budget. In my previous post I mentioned why Niche was actually a really good opportunity, and in all honesty, I still believe this to be true.

The hard part about niche marketing in the context of affiliate marketing is ‘how niche is niche?’

you could create a niche site but get no traffic, or you could create a niche thats got loads of traffic, but none that convert to sales. and in this way, Niche affiliate marketing is as much an art as it is a science.

Lets just go over the basics once more – niche is esstially the variation on the generic, the longer and more specific the query sting, the less sites ranking and optimised for it, the closer into the buying cycle the customer is and the more likely the customer will convert to a sale. Red car is a niche of car, but red aston martin 2009 is the niche of red car.

So, lets look at finding a niche. first things first, loads of research has been done into the depth of a search, and it was found out that typically the searches that resulted in the best coversions contained 4 words, this gives a relvealing clue into the fact that as an affiliate you need to focus on these terms.

Using the google keyword tool and something to find domains like 123reg,  we can make educated guesstimates as to the likely potential of a given Niche.

Lets focus on finding the niche first-

1. inspiration -

you need an idea first, the easiest way is to think about the things you are interested in or are easy to find information on. Read the news and check magazines, if you’re signed up to network affiliate program usually send out mailers these can contain all sorts of great niches if you’re willing to think laterally.

2. searching -

lets say you decided to focus on cars, enter this into the google keyword tool, once the list appears you need to switch the control to show the ‘match type’ as ‘exact’, the tool will spit out a list of keywords based on your inital search along with other information, the most important is the green bar, which shows likely competition (in PPC) and the ‘global monthly search volume’

3. being selective

what you’re aiming to look for is a very low green ‘competition’ bar, and a very high ‘global monthly search volume’, this is the mecca of niche, a keyword related to the products you’re trying to sell (via affiliate marketing) with very low competition and really high volumes.

you need to fiddle around, try a few different keywords, even different combinations of keywords, and you’ll always find there is some competition. Its really about compramise. I’ll usually settle on a keyword/phrase with half a bar to 70% bar of green and around xx,xxx search volume, in terms of search volume, i’d go no lower than x,xxx. you can also reveal the average CPC using the google keyword tool which can help you to estimate the performance of the niche as well.

4. competitor research -

Jump into google (.com) and chuck in the keyword/phrase you’ve settled on, now check how many sites are listed for that search, and open new windows with the first three results in google. what you’re trying to do here is assertain if the niche is a viable and potentially easy niche to penetrate. What you’re trying to look out for is, 1. low number of sites in the search, 2. low number of PPC ads (although this isn’t too important, just a bonus), 2. in all the top three sites you want to be checking their SEO to see if the competitor sites are targetting the same keywords as you and if they know what they are doing when it comes to SEO. Assuming theres low competition then this is a viable niche. There’s no easy way to estimate this, and its very much down to expierence, but if wikipedia or amazon are in the top three thats an indicator its viable niche.

5. finding the domain-

now lets jump to 123reg. by now you’ve got your keywords and you’ve got an idea of how competative the niche is. enter the keywords into the domain tool and look out for .com, and .co.uk domains (or the domain of the country you are targetting) first look for domains with no spaces eg. redcards.xyz if that isn’t available try with a dash eg. red-cards.xyz, you can also try double dashes eg. red–cards.xyz if none of these are free you can try to add a call to action term such as ‘buy’; ‘cheap’; ‘free’ as a prefex to the keywords. Asides from this you can try and flip the keywords around but this may alter the performance of the site.

And…thats it. Simples.

Posted in All articles, Niche Marketing | 2 Comments »

Find a Gap in the market

June 17th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

One of my biggest challenges as an affiliate is finding a gap, if you look at the internet landscape there’s alot of opportunity, but you’re also playing against some very big and experienced players, as such lots of these players are focused on the bigger more competative areas  and verticals, and it would be foolish and a massive waste of resource time, sweat and tears trying to compete.

If you consider how people search in search engines, they enter specific words that relate to what they are looking for, this is the generic search, i.e. they are looking for a topic e.g. cars. with each additional adjectives and other descriptive words help to refine the users search and display more targeted sites. Once you start looking at product codes and model numbers you’re well within the niche.

As the search becomes more specific, the users ‘buying cycle’ also changes, its safe to assume the more concisely someone is searching, the more likely they are to be interested in buying that product.

Now, in response to this theory, most merchants (retailers) and large affiliates focus on the generics, this is where the volume of users is and as the search gets more niche the volume of searches begins to dwindle, but this is inversely proportionate to the conversion rate, afterall if I’m looking for Cars, I’m doing research, if on the other hand I’m looking for Red Aston Martin car dealers in london, I’m most likely looking to buy a Red Aston Martin, it’s logical.

So, whats an affiliate to do? You can’t fight with the big boys inthe generic, but this is where the bulk of the traffic is. If you go too niche, there’s hardly anyone looking. But, right in the middle there is a Sweet spot where smaller affiliate can still gain some ground.

Here’s where it starts to get a little complex, every affiliate has a different method and techique, so there isn’t a right way or a wrong way, and it can’t really be replicated, all you can do is follow the theory and principles.

For me, i focus on  a  more generic niche such as one with two- three keywords, eg. red sports cars, from here I then use the site structure and page structure to target the niche-niche e.g. red sports cars aston martin. Other affiliates will only focus on red sports cars aston martin and create a seperate site for each, and thats totally fine, I just don’t have the time, technical expertise or money to be buying and setting up millions of domains like that.

The golden nugget of all this is keywords govern everything online, and finding and using the right keywords is what makes affiliates millionares. Ultimately the silver bullet for any affiliate is understanding how consumers search, what consumers search for and how to get your site to position one, page one for that term, and thats really the game of affiliate marketing in a nutshell.

first, you look for a subject, find the niche terms, pick the ones which have good volume and low competition and thats the gap where money can be made, its the kansa city shuffle, everyone else is looking at the generic.

Posted in All articles, Niche Marketing, SEO | 2 Comments »

Why I got into affiliate marketing

June 16th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

I’ve always been entrepreneural even from a young age when i got caught selling baseball cards in school. Leaving Uni with not much of a degree in graphic design i was at a loss as to what to do with my life, it dawned on me i wasn’t much of a graphic designer and my design skills were best left to gather dust. It was at this point I fell into affiliate marketing, I was an avid fan of the internet anyways having been a moderator on  a fairly large internet forum, so I knew my way around and in my youth i had created a geocities site before. So I jumped at the chance of a Job when an opening at an affiliate network became available. (I’d got this job through a friend).

After over 9 months learning the ropes and understanding affiliate marketing I was also looking at how much some of the bigger affiliates were making and seeing their sites it seemed like such an acheivable opportunity. I found myself wishing that instead of worrying about dating, instead of worrying about skateboarding and music, I should have been doing this affiliate marketing thing-a-ma-jiggy.

It wasn’t until I moved to another agency and discovered Squidoo that I really began being a part-time affiliate. At this new job I was in control of an affiliate site, so my understanding of SEO and PPC grew from here, without this knowledge I would have been gropeing around in the dark. Using Squidoo, I ended up creating quite a few test sites, none did really great, but i did get some google adsense commission which proved the concept and allowed me to understand the basics of what it was like to be an affiliate.

In October 2008 I started my real adventure as a part-time affiliate, I’d discovered Wordpress by this point and acquired top-notch webhosting from Netmotivated (a company I heavily recommend by the way),  and I’d started to understand SEO and Niche marketing, an area that I’ve decided to focus on. It seems strange but every thing prior to October 2008 was testing and learning.

My first big break came when I discovered a niche as a result of an article in The Sun, what began as a small blog has now become the authority site on the subject and now earns me a consistant income every day of every month, totalling £xxx each month. This was the proof of concept, whilst this blog was fantastic it still needs constant updating and traffic has begun to reach its limit. Furtunately I’ve dedicated more resources to aquiring new domains and exploring SEO further, this has ment that I now have a portfolio of over 70 domains and over 8 active sites.

My second renaissance was when a niche site i created ranked in google in 6 hours, and made a sale worth £xxx within the week i set it up.

My hope, now that I have the knowledge and experience as a result of my professional life and my hobby, is that i can begin to grow this success to earning me a substatial passive income i can use to fund my retirement, or better yet allow me to transition from being a part-time affiliate to a full time affiliate…that would be nice.

Posted in All articles, Monthly Goals, Niche Marketing, Other Stuff, PPC, SEO, Wordpress | 2 Comments »