Blogging as an affiliate

July 7th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

as an affiliate there are millions of ways to generate affiliate commissions, some affiliates build thin one-page websites, whilst other affiliates create massive generic sites, there are affiliates who only work on discount codes and affiliates who work only on PPC, ultimately, its important that any affiliate understands the priciples of affiliate marketing and how these different methods work.

personally, I’ve chosen to focus on creating niche blogs, i decided to use this method as I’m pretty good at spotting niche markets and with limited tech skills, setting up a blog and the related ‘bits’ is something I can just about manage on my own, as a result my commissions haven’t been as high as other affiliates and the process of getting sites up and ranking in google is a little slower, but what it has meant is that I can be really focused and have the freedom to work on subjects that interest me.

Using a blog allows me to add content and link to merchants with out the hassle of digging into code and using wordpress means that i have a pretty broad select of themes and plugins to add to my blogs saving me time on setting up sites and giving me more time to focus on the marketing of the site.

as far as niche marketing is concerned, by allowing me to work on specific niches at a time, i can really do my research a focus on one subject at a time, this save me time as I can often just drill down on one subject, create a blog and leave the blog to work on a new blog.

Whilst my techinque might not be to everyones tastes and may not earn as much as the big hitting affiliates, its a proof of concept and does allow me to earn a little extra pocket money on the side.

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July expriments

July 6th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

I spent the weekend running experiments rather than watching the tennis, and I have to admit it was a very successful weekend from a learning perspective.

First I tried the ECU wp-o-matic technique, and it took me about a hour to setup the site, figure out how to work a cron job and build a feed in ECU, after this stuff had been sorted, i tested the site and it worked amazingly well. I did a second test on another exisiting site and it took me 20 minutes including setting up a cron job and building the feed. The only down side was whilst there was content in each post, it was standard and I still needed to add more to these posts, but this was easily solved and a longer term part of optimising the site, overall, this is one technique I’ll definately be using, and definately work the £19.99 a month on ECU Pro, which you can get here. I’ll be watching the performance of the sites closely to see what happens however given that this is a technique for populating a site and isn’t related to SEO or the performance of an affiliate site, i would suggest this was a success.

Next i setup a small site to test a theory based on the conversation I had with a Black hat made-for-adsense affiliate. The main reason for me doing this was to see if there was anything that could be learned that could be used to improve the performance of a legitimate affiliate, initially this strategy looked like an amazing way of filling out a blog in a matter of minutes, once the blog was made, it was literally – fill out a for and press a button and your entire site would be content full. amazing, however, the content was no doubt duplicate and would only really benefit niche marketing. Still it was a worthwhile test.

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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 »

Cool linkable youtube videos

July 1st, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

Linkedtube is a new tool that allows you to append a clickable link to any site, yes, you can you affiliate links from a youtube video displayed on your site, this kind of technology means that you can now create youtube videos that are clickable as a form of creative for a specific product or service allowing users to cick through, via an affilaite link to a specific page, this gives affiliate more freedom and an extra source of interactive content which both builds their site and helps generate interest. Whilst this seems like a great idea, i think time will tell if it actually becomes a pratical and highly converting form of advertising.

Posted in Affiliate management, All articles, Other Stuff, SEO, Wordpress | 1 Comment »

Affiliate domain buying strategies

June 29th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

Affiliate marking is all about prescence on the web, and the biggest part of SEO is the domain, the relevancy of the domain name is a major factor in the success of the site. So it makes sense that you invest in a good domain that will help support both SEO and conversions. You can find affiliate tools help find good niches here, and you can read more about finding niches here, and here.

if you consider that Google is like a libary and you search for a given subject, the title of the book, ie. the domain URL, will give you the biggest clue about how relevant the book/site is on your given subject.

Based on this theory it makes sense that your domain name is relevant to the search your users are going to perform to arrive at your site. No point selling bikes on a domain called freetheelephants.com right?

This is really the simple basics and we’ve not considered brand for example, so, here’s a list of domain buying stratagies for affiliates:

Atomic Niche – this is pretty obvious – you’ll want to get domains with the exact product names in it.

Micro Niche (my own self invented term based on my variation of the Atomic Niche theory) – you’ll want a more generic domain name that contains the niche terms and allows you to alter the URL string in such a way that the atomic niche terms are included.

Niche – again you want terms related to peoples search behaviour

Generic – this is more difficult, i would term freebies and discount codes here, and as such your domain would need these terms within it.

Brand- there are some affiliates out there who have developed brands for themselves, for these affiliates you’d ideally be looking for generic names that aren’t associated with anything but the most generic of terms, allowing your domain to be used for any purpose.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting, as the the affiliate marketing industry grows, the number of available domains at all levels is going to be diminished, you’re going to find it hard to find avalible single word domains, two word domains are around but pretty rare depending on the product or niche. So here are some tips on getting keyword strong domains:

1. include a call to action as a keyword – eg. Buy/compare/cheapest/free+your keyword

2. try and go for the .com and .co.uk but if these aren’t free you can consider the .org or.org.uk

3. don’t forget you can use ‘-’ within a domain eg. xyz-xyz.co.uk which can help keep the keywords in your url.

4. you can even use ‘–’ within a URL e.g. xyz–xyz.co.uk (double dash)

5. if your site is fairly generic but has lots of permutations, you can try and buy all the permutations and link them together, e.g. redipod, blueipod, greenipod.

6. you can use the same strategy on the actual url, buy having subdomains and good url structure e.g. xyz.ipod.co.uk or cheapipodsin.co.uk/london

The key thing to remember is that with a decent URL that has well searched for keywords you can greatly improve your chances of ranking well organically in google.

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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 »

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 »