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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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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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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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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Distraction ruins my affiliate marketing

July 25th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

I’m a very focused person, especially when it comes to work…i can usually focus in the office for hours without flinching…however once i get on the tube and head home, its like a superman clarke kent transformation, by the time i get back i’ve walked about half a mile, been stuck in the commuter train and been focused at work all day. I’m usually warmly greeted by my loving girl friend and cat. and what happens next is what i can only guess is an extreme form of pavlov’s dog theory in conditioning thats totally self imposed…and believe me i’ve tested this, when i get in the door, the TV goes on, shoes come off and i either practice a ‘naked Wednesday’ or get changed into home clothes, I plonk myself on the sofa and turn on the laptop with the intent on working on affiliate stuff…but i get so distracted what should take less than an hour gets protracted into the rest of the night, probably as a result of TV, facebook, emails, msn, checking stats, girlfriend lecturing me about stuff, dinner, phone calls and so on and so on, the distractions are endless. BUT if i keep my work stuff and my shoes on, all the other distractions can still be there but i just work quicker and more efficiently… I’m starting to think in weird, so please drop us a comment below if you experience something similar, or if you’ve got any handy tips on staying focused on affiliate stuff when working from home.

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Voucher codes god long tail

July 24th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

The way people search in Google is one of the key foundations in SEO and affiliate marketing (particularly niche), interestingly there has been a trend over the last few year that users are searching more and more specifically, with 4 word key phrases offering the highest conversions, giving indication that users are looking for very specific information as they search. It was interesting to see some recent Hitwise data that actually backed this theory up, and applied it to the specific demograph of affiliates who work in the voucher code sector.

Essentially what this indicates is that users are now very aware of voucher codes, and actively seek out specific voucher codes and even specific voucher code sites. whilst volumes aren’t growing as aggressively as before, what is clear is that the volume of traffic generates by searches with voucher code related keywords is so significant that merchants can’t ignore the impact on sales even a token voucher code can offer. After all isn’t this ‘bargain britain?

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nice video on viral- see i’m adding to the noise

July 20th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

nice comments on viral videos which might be useful for marketing guys and for affiliates especially as you can now make clickable youtube videos…

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Affiliate marketing is a buzz word

July 20th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

I stumbled on this wonderful viral video about…viral marketing. as an comedian will tell you, comedy has its foundations in truth, and the truth in this viral is how big companies get brain washed in to the latest marketing craze, first it was display, the PPC, then the mysteries of SEO, and oh wait, affiliate next, and lets not forget mobile and so on…its easy for businesses to totally loose the plot and go hell for high water and jump on the viral band wagon, the social media train and so forth, totally forgetting the end point of marketing and that end goal, uplift in sales, yes there’s increased brand recognition, but it all boils down to, getting ppl to buy your stuff to make you and your shareholders money. full stop, no ifs no buts, thats that bottom line reason for any marketing. regardless of ppc seo, social media or viral or even affiliate marketing, ultimately its about selling. all these channels are just that, they are tools in a marketers toolbelt, and each has strengths and attributes, viral is like a grenade, when it works it really explodes, display like a bit of a sledge hammer, if you’re an expert you could in theory hammer a nail with it, but most of the time is a little overkill, ppc is like a sniper rifle honing in on the exact target and affiliate marketing is like a machine gun, lots of effort lots of bullets and more often than not you hit, and when you do, it blows a hole in the wall, ok, when it works it makes a big impact.
the fact of the matter is all these terms a buzzwords, it all comes down to – who do you want to target, how do you want to target them and what result do you want.

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Google Adsense

July 18th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

I just found out (late I know) that google announced that their profits from adsense made $1.68 Billion last quarter, which if you imagine is a phenomenal amount of dosh, it just proves how much of a dominance google have in the marketing and how ‘perfect’ their revenue channel has become as a system, on one side you have adsense, on the other you have adwords, the physical admin time, is only dedicated to the top guys on adsense and adwords, which means that the vast majority of advertisers and publishers (affiliates) don’t even have any real contact with google other than using their system, talk about efficiency.

Given that I make around £100 a month from google, it strikes me as amazing that $1.68 billion could be generated, its not that surprising when you consider that 1. the key publishers will be pushing through some real significant volumes, 2. there are affiliate who work solely with adsense (made for adsense sites) and 3. with the sheer volume of affiliates out there all making a few quid a month, there must be hundreds of thousands of them.

I’m just awestruck that a single entity can generate $1.68 Billion in one quarter… makes my few thousand a year look like peanuts!

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Affilistore

July 18th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

As you’ll have read I’m a big fan of working at speed, my girlfriend often thinks my hands are on fire because of the speed that i type (amongst other things!) and I’ve been banned from drinking coffee at the office before by some old colleagues as I’m wired enough already. Speed and efficency that what its all about, so I’m always looking for ways to do more, faster and easier than anyone else, which is why I’m a massive fan of the ECU, WP-o-matic idea, and literally I can go froma blank domain to a fully optimized completed site (abit without any high quality unique content) in about 30 minutes to an hour, including installing wordpress and optimizing the datafeed in ECU. This basically means the only things left to do on these ECU sites is 1. rewrite the content to be more unique, and 2. linkbuilding, both of these can be outsourced to Content New (keirons little side project), and actually don’t take very long.

as such a review by frostie about affilistore caught my eye, essentially this looks like it does the same thing as ECU and wp-o-matic, but as a single entity rather than two unrelated programs. affilistore seems to work in the same way as wordpress, you download the zip file load it into the server and a template is created, from this, you feed in a datafeed and the site automatically generates a price comparison. Brillant, its free for the time being so I’m definitely going to be giving it a try.

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