Hey there my fellow affiliates!  I’ve got a great guest post from a very well known face in the UK affiliate marketing scene  for you all. I’m sure most of my UK readers will either know or have worked with the lovely Hannah Swift who recently left Existem-AM to forge out on her own.

We all know Hannah as one of the best affiliate managers in the UK, but did you know she’s also more than a little bit good at Social Media as well?  Her newly launched business Bright Digital Minds offers social media management amongst other things, so I thought it’d be great if Hannah could show off her knowledge in this area in the form of a guest post.

Social Media And Affiliates

There are a number of good reasons why affiliates should begin to embrace social media, if they haven’t already. Forget the instant sales and start thinking of social media as an extension of your brand, a traffic generator and a direct way of communicating with your users and potential ‘customers’.

There are a number of key social media tools that all affiliates should begin to use, from the oldest form of social media – the blog, right up to the more current channels such as Twitter. I could talk for hours about the many ways in which affiliates can use social media, but for now, I thought I’d pop down a few ideas and examples to get people started.

LinkedIn

Whether for you as a person, your company or the site, LinkedIn opens up a world of opportunity. From finding other affiliates to swap ideas with or maybe the odd link, to creating a buzz about what you do.

Did you know there are over 100 million LinkedIn users? What better people to network with than with these people, like-minded business people or entrepreneurs. As an example, if you have a sports or adventure holidays website, then joining groups like (http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Adventure-Sports-Holidays-3798645?gid=3798645&mostPopular=&trk=tyah) this one, can give you inspiration for articles and new contacts, new merchants to get in touch with and perhaps even new content writers.

YouTube

We have all seen a YouTube video at some point, from replays of our favourite sporting moments to celebrities disgracing themselves for our amusement. However the power of YouTube goes beyond that. YouTube videos are an incredible way of visualising a product, giving a brand a personality and generating traffic.

Getting your readers to upload a video or share it or even comment on one can add an additional dimension to your site. There are a number of affiliates already using YouTube, one for example has a staggering 51,025 channel views, with their videos being watched a total of 132,441 times! Used on site to aid conversions and for viral campaigns, this affiliate has truly embraced the power of video. Despite what you may think, video is actually quite simple to create – with free software such as windows movie maker and iMovie. Why not try it and see what happens!

http://www.youtube.com/user/mydeco

Twitter

Great for having a good old moan at your utility providers, stalking celebrities or keeping in touch with the rest of the world, Twitter is now dominating our lives. It’s not only a way of instantly getting your message out there, but it also provides a great platform for 2-way communication, firstly with your merchants; watching what they are promoting and keeping in touch or sourcing new ones.

Secondly, your readers and site users will have their own thoughts and experiences they want to share, they might have questions about products or more importantly they might become ‘brand advocates’. Re-tweeting and sharing your messages to their followers, they will help to promote you and your site. As an example @chocolatereview has a great mix of tweets to readers, merchants and promotional messages. Easy to read without being bombarded with sales, sales, sales!!!

Facebook

Although not an affiliate, my favourite Facebook campaign at the moment has to be Vinnie The Panda (http://www.facebook.com/vinnie). Not only do I keep getting free biscuits in the post, but you can take lots of useful ideas from it. The first page you land on gathers your data, so not only can you be marketed to by Facebook (in the hope you share the love) but Vinnie can now continue his message to your email.

Carefully handled and well executed Facebook can bring you more than just inactive fans. Facebook can deliver data, brand advocates and of course, high quality traffic.

Blogs

The founding tool of social media, the humble blog should not be forgotten, from helping with on site SEO to giving you the chance to discuss wider topics. Take the Olympics as an example; if you own a site about the Olympics, mainly focused on places to stay. Then your blog becomes a chance for you to discuss London visitor attractions, flights, the clothing the athletes are endorsing, memorabilia (did you know they have Olympics branded tea towels!) It gives you a chance to let those creative juices flow, perhaps pick up a few additional sales without flooding your main site with ‘irrelevant’ content. You might even pick up some links too!

How To Get Involved?

The best way to get involved with social media is just to give it a go. Think about what you would like to see as a customer, how would you like to interact with a company? What information would you like to know and most importantly, how often? Shouting ten times a day for a few days and then nothing for weeks is not the best way forward. To quote a dear friend ‘less Billy Connolly, more Billy Joel’ be remembered for the fun things, not the inaudible rants!

I really hope my quick snap shot into social media for affiliates helped! If you have any questions or want to find out more – get in touch!

I’m sure you’re all very much aware of the Google Panda update that’s caused many a heart attack in affiliate land since it was launched 6 long months ago.  My own sad experience has seen me almost completely lose a very large site which was IMHO largely because Google never did work out the difference between my original content and the stuff that had been stolen by oodles of horrid scrapers. I had to remove 1100 pages of a 1300 page site and consign most of it to the internet dustbin. Ouch.

Despite the fact I had other sites with much better EPCs I could have thrown my effort into to replace the income I lost I’ve sweated blood these last few months to go through the painstaking process of rebuilding my site. To date, I’m about 25% of the way there and have a lovely uphill climb over razorblades to look forward to.

However, I decided to persevere with Panda and these are the reasons I think it was the right thing to do: -

1. I Need to Understand Google’s New Way Of Thinking – Yes it’s tempting just to consign an apparently unsavable site to the rubbish bin. But if I don’t take time to understand the fundamentals of what Panda needs to see from me I’m not going to have an affiliate business at all in 2 or 3 years. Working on my hammered site may not be the best short term use of time from a revenue point of view but I’d rather use this experience to improve my business than focus on short term gain.

2. Let Google Get The Better Of Me? Get F**ked! I’d rather stick hot needles under my fingernails than admit to myself that Google took one of my favourite sites. I will fix it, the Panda will not win! Someone mentioned to me the other day that I may or may not have sadistic tendencies when it comes to things like this.  If I do, more power to my elbow.

3. It’s Sort Of Fun Whenever things like this happen I always have a renewed appreciation for my SEO roots, I love the problem solving aspect of algo changes.  To be fair this has been the toughest one to date because it’s had a huge and admittedly depressing effect on Lingerie Brands in particular, and to a lesser extent two of my other main sites.

4. I Can Use What I Learn on My Other Sites – I had two other sites hit by Panda in the June update.  Not badly, but enough to annoy me quite a fair bit.  I used what I’d laboriously learned with my other poorly site to immediately make some key changes I thought could help.  In the August update I recouped about half of what I’d lost. Cheered me up immensely that did!

5. They Might Not be Bloody Done Yet! Like all Google’s wonderful ideas, they’re working hard to refine it.  If I don’t take the time to be up to date with it and they raise the bar again, things could get really gnarly. By working hard to recreate an improved site and passing all I’ve learned into my existing sites I hope to avoid any further traffic upsets.  Incidentally, I really hope we’ve seen all the big changes go through that will affect affiliate content sites – I don’t think I can take any more Pandalisation in my fragile pregnant state, LOL.  MMMM Morning sickness and Panda – thanks for nothing Google

Well, those are my reasons for Persevering with Panda. I could have made this post why “YOU” should persevere but I know a lot of people have just been totally stumped by this. I guess I’m lucky I found a path forward with my sites.

Good luck to all my Pandalised affiliate pals

Greetings!  I’m pleased to report the recovery from the horrors of pregnancy is progressing nicely, I know you’ll all have been worrying about me   I’ve got my 19 week scan on Friday of this week and hope to find out if my little child will be selling princess toys or Bob the Builder merchandise!

In other news, I’ve found the time to do a couple of interviews recently and thought you guys might be interested in hearing from me in a second hand sort of way. I haven’t forgotten about you all honestly, I will get to all my planned posts in the end.

Interview 1 – Webtistic

I had a bit of a chat with the lovely Dave Bird of Webtistic fame (for all your SEO, PPC and affiliate management needs – now I want a discount  for that Dave, you know you want to!!!!).

I talked a bit about my current affiliate marketing goings on, what I like and dislike about it, and I didn’t even get cross when they referred to me as a Super Affiliate. As you all know I’m happy being “Pretty Good” but apparently that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it

You can read the interview here.

Interview 2 – Google Panda & SEO Type Stuff

This is basically a rehash of an e-mail conversation I had with someone about my SEO strategies as an affiliate and a bit about Panda recovery related efforts. It was put up after we realised we’d been talking about some pretty interesting stuff! It’s not as detailed as the Panda post I’m planning to (eventually!!!) do, but there’s some interesting content in there that some of you might find interesting or useful. I also mention just how terribly affected by Panda Lingerie Brands really was – get your hankies out because it’s truly bloody tragic.

But will I let Google have the last laugh?  Come on guys, you know me better than that. I’ll get her back in the end

Check out the interview here.

So I’ve been working with the lovely Alex Thompson of Silverbean fame on a couple of programmes recently. He’s a nice proactive chap, always keen, and always popping up to see what he can help with.

With that in mind, and because agencies sometimes get a bad rap, I decided to do a bit of an interview with him so you could all find out more about the human face of a hard working agency type who really does want to connect with all us cynical affiliates (for his sins).

So tell us all a bit about yourself in a Blind Date style of yer own choosing!

Hello everyone! My name is Alex Thompson; I was born in Sheffield but now live in Newcastle. I work for the UK’s leading digital marketing agency, Silverbean.

My job involves talking to affiliates on a daily basis to improve their EPC and liaising with merchants to give Affiliates maximum content and coverage. It’s all about building strong relationships. If you fancy a chat sometime about anything Affiliate Marketing or how I can help you with your EPC then hit me up on Skype “alexsilverbean”

eds note: he was in there quick with the plug eh?  Wage rise for Mr Thompson Silverbean bosses!!

How did you come to be working in the affiliate industry? Was it something you had an ambition to do or did it just sort of happen?!

A bit of both, I have always had a keen interest in the digital sector and at University I studied Marketing. When I discovered Digital Marketing it was the perfect fusion. I was passionate about Digital and had the knowledge in Marketing.

The opportunity to work at a leading Digital Marketing agency was too big an opportunity to turn down. Silverbean has fantastic relationships within the affiliate industry, this has helped fuel my knowledge of Affiliate Marketing and the digital sector.

Tell us about a typical day in the life of an agency type such as yourself…

My primary role at Silverbean is Affiliate Account Management, I work in client services team so I work in all areas of Digital Marketing but my main focus is in the Affiliate sector.

As Silverbean has multiple services PPC, SEO, Email, Social Marketing the office is always busy and is vibrant hub of digital news and information. As an agency we have to stay ahead and be aware of all the latest news, in the Digital and Affiliate industries.

What sort of merchants do you work with?

I work with a wide range of merchants to deliver high quality account management.

For example, I manage the affiliate program for the top underwear retailer Banglads, Luxury Home & Garden retailers OKA Direct & Litecraft, Baby + Toddler retailer TeenyTots and Online football pools Soccer Millionaire. These are just a few of the merchants I look after.

Obviously dealing with merchants every day you work with a lot of businesses and are privy to their perceptions about affiliate marketing. How do the people we work with see us affiliates? Is there still a notion of grubbiness in the air?!

I am going to be as honest as possible here, there is none! All my merchants appreciate and value the affiliates who generate sales for them. This is a performance channel, merchants are aware of the low risk attached with Affiliate Marketing. Affiliates who generate a sale have put in the hard work and deserved to be rewarded.

Obviously some merchants are more positive than others but I have not come across one merchant yet who has given ill perceived perception of Affiliates. In today’s day and age customers are very savvy, they know what they like to see and the kind of information they want to see from a product before they purchase.

Affiliates are meeting these requirements and are constantly building/redesigning their sites to meet them. Affiliates have a demanding job keeping up with the consumer.

When I started out in affiliate marketing it was all bedroom affiliates and it was relatively easy to get your foot in the door with a website and make some cash. What does an average affiliate site look like these days? What’s the spread of affiliates like? i.e. corporate, your weekend wonders, and in betweeners like me?

As mentioned above, the average customer is always evolving and their needs are becoming more and more demanding. Obviously there are different types of affiliates but on the whole the quality of affiliate sites is very high. As you are aware Panda has been a major blow to some affiliate sites. Google is making is harder for new affiliates to enter the market.

Is there a standard type of person you see turning up as a successful affiliate?

I wouldn’t say there is a standard type of person, the main types of affiliates who I see generating successful sales are Content, Vouchers, Cashback and Shopping Portals/Comparison, all of which make up a successful affiliate program.

What do you love most about your job?

Building those all-important Affiliate Relationships! Without them in place I couldn’t do my job. I consider myself to be pro-active and approachable. Finding new affiliates and asking them to join the program and then to see them generate sales is a great feeling.

Client relationship is also important and something I enjoy – if you have a good relationship with the merchant the information you can pass onto Affiliates will be higher quality. Poor relationships mean you can’t properly communicate to affiliates what the merchant is promoting in a given month.

There must be frustrations in your role as a bit of a “middle man” between merchants and affiliates. What are those and how do you deal with them?

I can’t lie; there are frustrations from time to time. Being the middle man can have its downsides, especially with quick turnarounds.

Merchants are very busy and asking them to jump on a task can be a big ask sometimes. Planning ahead, setting key times in a week to speak with a merchant are ways around this. Having constant communication with the merchant at a fixed time helps avoid this issue.

I’ve worked with affiliates (and still do!) and they are often difficult to communicate with in terms of catching their attention and getting them promoting a programme. What techniques do you use to open a dialogue with affiliates you want to work with?

I have several, Affiliates are very busy and I am fully aware of this. I always start with a non-intrusive email. Of course it depends on what you are asking for, affiliate recruitment emails must outline the benefits of the program and also have a short introduction about myself and how I fit in with the program. It is important to let the Affiliate know of all the tools at the their disposal (product feed etc)

Affiliate Relationship building – when an affiliate is on the program and you want push more sales for them they can be contacted in many ways. Standard emails, Social Media works well, Twitter provides an excellent way of getting in touch, Skype calls build instant rapport with the affiliate and shows you are willing to go that extra mile for them. It is all about caring and not being ignorant. I approach every affiliate as equal.

If you had the ability to call into existence one thing that would help you with your day to day work and make your job easier, what would it be?

Again going to be honest, if every affiliate I contacted came back to me! Sounds a daft thing to say but if every affiliate I got in touch with came back to me my job would be a lot easier.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand affiliates are very busy and this isn’t always plausible. In an ideal world it would be great. Would like to stress I am not being negative on affiliates!

Eds note: Don’t worry Alex, we know what you mean!

Any aspirations to be an affiliate or do you dabble already?

I have not got my toes wet just yet – Affiliate Marketing takes time and effort. It is something that has to take a lot of planning to get it right. Understanding your visitors, understanding the merchant’s customers, understanding Google. So many factors to be successful, it will be a while yet before I feel I can get involved.

If anyone is interested in a full list of all the clients the lovely Alex works with you can drop him an email on alex.thompson@silverbean.co.uk or visit www.sbnaffiliates.co.uk

So there I was on Sunday morning, dribbling bacon grease all over my keyboard and checking out a few stats as is my usual ritual, when to my joy I discovered 3 of my sites had gotten stonking great traffic increases in the region of 30%.

“Oh Deep Joy!” I thought, “Perhaps something to do with the foreign language Panda Update they’ve rolled out” followed a little while later with “Hmmm… deep concern. Why have I not seen extra traffic through to merchants?”

After also noticing a nasty old drop in user session times, new visitor rates, and pages per visit combined with increased bounce rate I knew something was badly wrong somewhere so got my internet investigationing hat on and did a spot of research.

Introducing The New And Improved Analytics Data Roll Out

It transpired that Google Analytics had made some improvements to the way user sessions are counted.

Of course they had anticipated a slight skewing of data mentioning in their post that, “Overall, this change may slightly increase the number of visits. Based on our research, most users will see less than a 1% change.”

Well, I can only speak for myself but I think they’ve gotten it a teeny tiny bit wrong. You only have to read the comments on their post to see I’m not alone there!

I’m no analytics expert – I confess to being a basic user so if anyone knows of a fix please let me know! Although I *think* the absolute unique visitor data is pretty much correct it’s totally humped my ability to look at things like organic traffic stats and see which terms are doing well or just work out how many “real” organic visits I’m getting from particular sources.

No comment from Google yet, but I sure do hope there’s a workaround or they can fix things up

It does seem that recently for me a blog post without some kind of excuse about why I’ve not been able to keep the content coming to you guys is a rarity.

My dog ate my affiliate website. Matt Cutts and his team of evil search engine genius’ kidnapped my mojo. It’s been too hot. etc etc etc.

However this time I’ve got an absolute cracker, a bona fide iron clad “I’ve just not been well enough” excuse. What is more I know that you’ll all understand exactly where I’m coming from!! I can sense you’re all on the edge of your seats here, so without further ado let me show you what has kept me from the loving bosom of my blog readers this time.

Introducing My Latest Affiliate Project…

Definately my most time consuming and exhausting project to date. Introducing baby affiliate, due for launch February 5th 2012!

Like a Lead Duck To Water

Without boring you with the gory details it’s probably fair to say I initially took to pregnancy like a lead duck to water. Lets just say I’ve not been this slim since my early 20′s and I hope never to repeat the extreme crash diet plan I’ve just been through It’s not been a walk in the park for Duncan either, he’s had to listen to me complaining these last few weeks and let me assure you I’m going to be writing next years Oxford English Dictionary definition of “Moaning”.

Getting My Affiliate Mojo Back on Track…

However, before you all get sick of the deafening sound of violins I’m happy to say I’m much better now and have most of my old mojo back again. In the last few weeks I’ve been able to think more clearly and have been having lots of Google Panda related fun (and some very early encouraging results from my efforts) so expect a post on that soon.

I’ve also been tinkering with social media and having some general Twitter fun so I have in mind a post about how affiliates can use Twitter and actually engage with potential customers and key influencers. And some of my very own tinpot theories about how Google might use data from Twitter as quality signals. Of course this will be very inexpert compared to what true social gurus could tell you, but I think a lot of affiliates find it hard to really work out how they should interact on that medium – so I hope to be able to give some basic help.

Oh, I’ve also got a bit to tell you about affiliate marketing in Australia and the lack of competition around affiliate content sites thereof.

So in short: Sorry I’ve been crap this year, insert excuse here, please let me off, I really do miss blogging and chatting with you all.

You Can Help Inspire Me…

Something else that’d help get me blogging again. What do you want to hear about right now? If you have things you’re interested in that aren’t being covered in other blogs please tell me in the comments below or via my Contact Form.

Hearing from y’all would really, really, help me build a bit of momentum again so please if you have anything at all in mind – tell me about it!!

I hope to be talking to you all a lot more often in the next half of the year

It can’t have escaped your notice that I’ve not been updating this blog as often in recent months. Not only have I been very busy immersing myself in all things Google Panda, but I’ve been finding solely concentrating on being an affiliate has become a little one dimensional for me. I still love being an affiliate and working on my sites but have been feeling the need to add another string to my internet bow.

An Exciting Announcement

I’ve been thinking about this for several months and have decided to take the plunge and make the exciting return to my affiliate management roots. Therefore I’m excited to introduce my new Australian business Venture, Blue Indian Affiliate Management.

When I first arrived in Australia I really didn’t feel that there was a lot of scope for offering such a service as there wasn’t a huge number of well developed merchants and the networks weren’t exactly crash hot either. However with improvements in existing networks such as Commission Monster, and new arrivals on the scene DGM and the soon to be launched Commission Factory and my own increasing awareness of some strong ecommerce offerings I think the time is right to offer some real affiliate expertise to the market here.

Given time I think it could be a scalable business for me and a great opportunity to share my passion and expertise about all things affiliate. Initially though my plan is to find myself a very small number of clients and use my experiences with them to work out just how such a business could be effectively scaled with an eye on both high quality and good profitability for everyone concerned.

Generally speaking this will be an Australian targeted business, but of course if any of you UK chaps are interested in having a chat about procuring one of the small number of spots available for my affiliate management services do please drop me a line via kirsty at blueindian.com.au

Hopefully a new project will give me back that injection of enthusiasm for this blog and help me feel more connected with the affiliate scene. I’m definately more excited about this new challenge than I have been for quite some time – a very good sign!

I’ve never reviewed an affiliate marketing book before, so when Geno Prussakov offered to send me a free copy just a few hours after having buttered me up immensely, I was putty in his literary hands.

I must confess I’ve never read an affiliate marketing book before at all, but as a former affiliate manager I was really interested in what Geno had to say about doing it “the right way” and whether or not it was going to be as dry as a box of crackers without a glass of water!

Affiliate Management Brain Fodder

To my surprise, when I started reading this book after work one evening I couldn’t put the darned thing down and burned my way through 200 pages before bedtime!

It’s so well written and is absolutely jam packed with useful facts and figures to back up the “why” of all the great information on “how” a programme should be effectively managed. The process was broken down into tasks which I thought was a great approach for what can seem like a very complex and involved job. One of the most striking things for me was how Geno had managed to keep the language simple and the tone personal and warm. There was a lot there that really cued you to think about how you personally would fit into and take on the role of affiliate manager.

It was brilliant affiliate brain fodder for anyone in affiliate management – and not just beginners. The volume of information is such that I’d be very surprised if managers of every level didn’t get at least something out of it to add to their knowledge base.

Buy This Book If You…

• Want or are considering whether to start an affiliate programme but don’t know how to do it or what skills in house staff would need to do it.
• Are looking to move into a career in affiliate management. In fact if you have an interview for your first ever AM job you should absolutely read this book first – it’ll save your life at the interview!
• Are an existing affiliate manager. No Matter how good you think you are you’ll learn something from this master of the world of affiliate management. Even I learned a few things and as we all know I’m absolutely perfect and was the best affiliate manager ever
• Are looking at hiring an outsourced affiliate management company and want to know if they’re any good!
• Run an affiliate network and want something to give or recommend to new merchants.

In Conclusion

Affiliate Management Gold – It’s £19.99 (£11.99 at Amazon) bloody well spent!

Down with King Content – long live user experience!!  The new focus on user experience is coming ever more sharply into the everyday lives of webmasters – and you could be forgiven for thinking that the world of image compression, CDN’s, and theme optimisation is well beyond you.

However, it’s easier than you might think to give your site a bit of a “superspeed” makeover!

Super Easy CDN and Website Protection

We’ve all heard about Content Delivery Networks and cloud servers and similar and many of you may think that implementing one is beyond you. However fear not, the good people at Cloud Flare are riding to your rescue with their FREE CDN.  This system has a five minute install that just about anyone can implement and will not only superspeed your site but also protect it from internet bastards and vagabonds (as I like to call them).

Using data from Project Honeypot it protects your site against spammers, hackers, and other ratbags. I have implemented Cloud Flare on one of my sites and it has halved the download speed. So far this month it has saved my users on one small site 20.7 hours waiting for my pages to load, which also saves me bandwidth.

You can find out more about all the features offered by Cloud Flare on their comprehensive Tour Page.

Get A Speed Monitoring Plugin For Your Browser…

The Firebug plugin lets you use a whole wealth of web development and debug tools as you surf the net using Firefox. On it’s own I find it very handy to nosey around other people’s source code. If you’re interested in how someone’s done something or want to check out an element of your own site without trawling through code, it’s great. You just right click on the bit you want to look at and select “inspect element”. It’s a great everyday timesaver for me.

You can then grab the Site Speed Addon from Google. Given that these are the guys we’re all trying to impress it seems sensible to refine site performance by their standards. There’s also a Chrome Addon. You can access their widget directly through your browser without any addons here.

This cool little tool gives your site performance marks out of 100 and a great big “to do” list. It also has a feature to show you versions of your images which are “losslessly compressed”. You can just save these and upload to your site for improved performance.

My own worst site had a rather dreadful score of 44 / 100 – which we very quickly got up to a 93 / 100 with the help of the Firebug site speed addon.

WordPress Site Speed Plugins and Wizardry

If you have a WordPress site you can do all of the above… and also make use of some handy WordPress resources!

First of all, read Yoast’s Guide to Speeding Up WordPress. He mentions you should install a caching plugin. I use W3 Total Cache which was recommended to me by my hosting company, Clook. I’ve found it to be excellent and regularly updated. It’s recently been updated for better compatibility with Cloud Flare and Yoast’s SEO Plugin. Whilst you’re giving your site a bit of a makeover do download and use this if you haven’t already – I think it’s the absolute dogs danglies and it does all the little SEO tasks that are too easy to forget about when setting up a site.

Don’t forget to grab an image compression plugin – Smushit is from the same guys who created W3 Supercache and is a great tool to squeeze that extra efficiency out of your web pages.

That’s pretty much everything I’ve personally used recently – if any of you guys have anything to add to this resource please post in the comments below – I’d love you to add your own hints and tips!

Welcome to part two of my series of an unknown length looking at my exciting adventures recovering one of my affiliate sites from it’s Google Panda woes!

The first thing I did after returning from New Zealand and getting over the huff that I’d been in was formulate a recovery plan.

Here’s The Plan Stan!!

• Removing all site content except the core pages around which the site is themed and rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up. In a site of almost 1,300 pages this leaves me with around 150 to play with.
• Increase average page views per user, time spent on site, and general visitor happiness by not having any core pages that redirect straight out to merchant.

• The core pages (which feature individual fashion brands) will be completely redesigned to form decent information resources about the brand beyond the current description and “shop now” type links. Things like sizing guides, information on the types of product they specialise in etc. I’m also going to have a special offers widget created for the site that’ll allow me to present information on sales, discount codes, and offers for each brand or by specific category.

• Investing heavily in site functionality. I have an early version of a plugin that’ll let me take merchant feeds, grab and save all their images, resizing and renaming them automagically (Oh how I’m coming to love that word). The plugin also creates masked affiliate links and will allow users to browse all the products in ways they wouldn’t be able to on a single merchant site. Each core page will have a small widget which will display the latest products on the site for the brand. I started organising this back in January when I realised that we had a problem.

• Thin “product reviews”  which were really only rewritten product overviews and whizzed people straight back out to merchant will be replaced by newsy items and how to articles.  These will not be monetised.

• I’ll also start doing real product reviews under some kind of nom de plume.  We’ll be setting up a mini photo studio to take detailed pictures of bras. I will not be modelling these . These  reviews will also form part of my shiny new social media strategy. I shall be trying to get the merchants and brands to bestow some retweetage upon me for my efforts. Again, these will not be monetised but I’m holding out real hopes of scoring serious amounts of free underwear and link love once I get it going.

• Competitions – again around social media to try to get people retweeting, liking, and generally engaging with the site.

• I’ll be going through and re-optimising the core pages, well de-optimising them really. I’ll also be rewriting anything that isn’t clear and concise and where there’s too much repetition of terms closely related to the page content.

• Lots of social media type fun, all totally new and nosebleed inducing but I think essential for the longer term.

• Theme update.

• Site speed overhaul.

If you read the above carefully you’ll see it caters for an awful lot of things Google could use to tell you are an unoriginal site.

It Is Alive!! The Early Results

I’ve already put in two solid weeks of work on pulling my site apart and starting to reconstruct it and am seeing some early, but limited, results.  Here’s a list of what changes I’ve made, when I made them, followed by some results and observations.  Hope you’re still awake by the time you’ve gotten through ‘em!

First of all, here’s the Google referral data from my Analytics account: -

Encouraging hey?

The upward trend is all the more pleasing when you consider that the increase in traffic is being countered by the removal of all the pages that were generating 90% of the traffic we’d regained as at April 25th or so. In a twist of fate only Google could engineer the only pages left ranking were complete and utter spammy shite which I’d accidentally let get indexed – they were old PPC pages and had no unique content whatsoever.

What Have I Done So Far From My Plan?

I hear you ask. Here’s a list of what we did, and when.

• April 3rd. I changed all the brand overview pages so that rather than the user going straight out to merchant from my “view whole range” button, they were directed to my internal product feed section which I thought would increase the average page views per user that Google was seeing happen on the site.
• May 2nd. I removed all the content from the site except my main pages. This took my 1,300 page site down to a whopping 169.
• May 4th. New site design and structure is put in place. For now, I’ve based the site completely around the core content. Replacing the old feed content in the top bar with links to categories containing all my brands.
• May 6th. I began the process of deoptimising my pages and rewriting content where needed.
• May 12th Finish the deoptimisation and rewriting. I can assure you alcohol will be taken this evening!

Observations

• Like Site B I found some pages on Site A where my SEO plugin had let me down. A significant number (but not all) of them were quietly ranking away. Not enough to alert me by producing much traffic, but high enough to cheer me up significantly.  This reinforced the idea that softening the SEO on the site was looking like a winner.
• As I went through my pages on I also did test searches and discovered that many pages that were previously totally buried or around page 5 were now mid page 2.  Another trend was that in many cases “softer” site pages that perhaps mentioned the brand name once were ranking relatively high in the serps i.e. within pages 2 to 5.
• The cached date on the majority of the pages returning to the rankings was initially around April 14th to 18th.  So either my change to the way people flowed through the site early April was something Google liked, which has resulted in some pages at least appearing within the first five pages (they weren’t before!) or I’m simply benefitting from an algo adjustment and this information is meaningless.
• Many of the pages I adjusted on were reindexed immediately. Some of them were suddenly looking a lot sunnier on the rankings front. Others still nowhere in sight. An oddity with this is that the new titles and meta descriptions are showing in the index but the cached version of the page is still old.  Another thing I’ve seen is that pages I’ve adjusted will often be catapulted back into the SERPS but it’ll be the old page version ranking rather than the new one. I’ve seen this repeatedly in the last two weeks.
• Average time spent on site and visitor page views have more than doubled and are now in line with my other sites.

Wow. Well this post has got a bit on the long side but it’ll hopefully be useful in this form.

Before You Get Jealous Of My Recovery…

Green eyed SERPS monster bothering ya? Never fear!

Because I still have a very, very long way to go.

With having made the decision to take the site back to it’s core I’ve lost a large number of pages that previously brought traffic and income to the site. I decided that for my site there was no quick solution because when I looked at it and asked “does this add value and could it stand alone without the affiliate content?” The answer was a resounding no.

I think it’ll probably take me at least 6 months to get back to where I was but I honestly believe it’s more than worth the effort. I know I’ll end up with a much stronger resource that really does add value in the long term – which will put me streets ahead of those not prepared to put in the work.

Good luck to everyone out there who has been Pandalised – and remember the road to recovery isn’t an easy one but it is worthwhile!