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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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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Converting CPM to CPA

July 24th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

I was chatting to a sales lady at upmystreet today, now normally i wouldn’t want to name and shame, but this lady’s sales skills were tragic, no surprise when the head of display advertising at the agency i work at warned me she’d be useless.

basically there’s been a lot of noise about how CPM display advertising has come under fire particularly in this recession, with affiliate offering a significant threat, due to its model of paying only for actual sales.

Given that Upmysteet is a CPM business, there are ways that a CPM network can work on CPA, its as simple as understanding the various measurements CTR, and conversion rates, if you’ve got the number of impressions, and you know the CPM (both from the CPM network) and you know what the Conversion rate and commission is (both from the affiliate network), its a simple case to calculate what the likely CPA gains are, heres an example:
100000 impressions x 0.12% = 120 click; 120 clicks x 4% conv. = 4.8 sales x £5 commission = £24 in commission

given this equation is extremely simple, i was surprised at 1. how long it took me to explain this to the sales lady who clearly didn’t get it. and 2. i was awestruck at how much they were charging on CPM (£6!) at this CPM the same volume of traffic that converted equally as poorly would have cost a client a whopping £600! when (at least from an affiliate prespective) that traffic could be worth more than £24 due to the low click through rate.

I was totally appalled that despite the entire wasted conversation this lady was still adamant the quality of the traffic was worth £600 despite me pointing out that because of the above equation, that traffic was pretty much…worthless.

and whilst there will be those ‘brand monkeys’ out there who will argue its all about brand and brand presence, yes this might be the case but what is marketing about? Sales, increasing sales, so when you try to predict and forecast, you need to be able to do so as accurately as possible. Whilst we can’t measure whether a user has actually looked at an as whilst the are surfing a site, the next best measurement is how they respond to the ad, the click through rate, and given that up my street quoted me a CR of 0.12% i would personally say that was appealing, given i’ve seen CTRs around 5% and above in affiliate marketing for specific true conent affiliate sites.

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PPC Trial

July 22nd, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

I’ve recently setup an atomic niche affiliate site in very much the same way as seamaster did, selling 1 product with a .co.uk URL with only the model number, i selected a few ‘exact match’ keywords all containing the keyword (the model number) and i set the ads to run for a specific 5 hours of the day 7 days a week and its been going since sunday, overall there’s only been a trickle of clicks and even impressions and the cost despite a max. spend of £5.00 a day has added up to a whopping £0.80 since sunday, with CTR being around 1.5%

this is my first proper and detailed look at PPC as an affiliate so hopefully this test will result in a sale or two and pave the way for a more aggressive experiment.

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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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Mid-july update

July 19th, 2009 Affiliate Blogger

here’s a quick update for july.
google -£63.34 estimate – £109.08
amazon – £12.08
linkshare – £6.45
skimlinks – £0.19
total -£82.06 (actual), £127.80 (estimate)

not bad, but not as high as I hoped…

my test sites have been setup but as yet, i’ve not done any linkbuilding so I’m unsure how effective they will be, certainly traffic to these sites isn’t there yet and google seems to be taking age to pickup the sites, next month will be a hardcore month of linkbuilding.

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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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