Yesterday Adam from Dead Good Undies alerted me to a handy dandy wee tool that I didn’t even know existed.  I’ve not seen too much about it myself, so my apologies to those of you for whom this is old news.

LinkedTube is an almost painfully clever tool that will allow you to create links from YouTube videos.  You can add a button with the URL of your choice plus 3 different bits of unique selling text to any YouTube video.  Adam let me know about it as he’s aware I quite often use videos related to products to create content for my site.  I think this is amazing as it gives me the ability to have more of a crack at monetising those pages with appropriate affiliate links and calls to action.

Allow Me To Demonstrate…

I’ve selected a beautiful video from the annals of the Affiliate Future trip to Barbados last year.  Here you will see Jlil grooving away like the funkster he really is and entertaining his hordes of late night Karaoke buddies with his rendition of American Pie.  As you can see, I’ve realised that his singing talents will inspire other would-be rock stars to buy some of their very own home equipment and created a nice link to the Argos site on there.

The only issue I had using this is that their HTML generator seemed to produce code twice which mucked up the page on the blog and I had to strip out the excess. Not sure why that’s happening! However, it is a very very interesting little tool and I can forsee it being of great use to me when I write video related content.

Whats that?  Yes… you can all see quite clearly I was very jealous of all those who have just returned from Barbados! Pass the rum

Hello once more Ask Kirsty fans!  I had a question that I thought a lot of people might find interesting from Peter earlier this month…

I have a site which has been growing for some time now and I am thinking of negotiating for more commission. I was wondering if you have ever done that and if you have any tips?  Like do you negotiate with the affiliate network or the merchant itself?  Also, I know this might be quite relative but what is a good indicator that you are driving enough sales to warrant asking for more commission?

I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking they have to be earning a certain amount to actually ask for more money. The thing is, if you wait until you’re doing really well with a merchant what you might find is that they then want you to do even more before they’re prepared to give you an increase. The approach can be either made via network or direct to merchant.

There are two scenarios in which I ask a merchant for more money.

1. If I think I could drive decent volume to them (it’s a really good motivator too) and 2. If I am already driving volume to a competitor of theirs and already know their conversion rates are similar (and wish to switch allegiance!).

I think the best thing to do is approach a merchant as soon as you believe you will be able to work well and generate some decent volume with them. Simply ask if they might be open to offering enhanced commission rates for agreed performance targets.

If you have some idea of how much in the way of sales you might be able to push to them that might be a good negotiating tool. If not, just ask what it would take for them to give you an enhanced tier structure or some kind of bonus system.

It might surprise you how many merchants are open to this kind of proactive approach from an affiliate.

Apart from anything else, the worst thing that can happen is you’ll get a polite no!

Well actually, we’re more than half way through 2009 but I didn’t start work properly until almost the end of January because I was in NZ so it’s only now I’ve really done 6 months hard work!  The year so far has been tough to say the least.  I’ve put in shedloads of work and I’m still not any further forward than I was this time last year so I’m feeling a bit demotivated.

Of course, what I forget is that this time last year the recession wasn’t biting and I was selling circa £45k per month of stock for a large merchant of mine, Figleaves.  Which err… I’m definately not any more!  It’s part of my personality to be a bit too demanding of myself meaning that instead of celebrating the fact I was able to replace that income, I’m punishing myself for not doing better (and you all wonder why I like a glass or ten of vino!!).

So In An Attempt To Get My Head Straight…

I’ve decided to check out my progress with the affiliate new years resolutions I made in early January.  Lets hope this exercise doesn’t backfire cos I didn’t read them before I started this post!

• I will focus my marketing activities with networks who have taken the time to know who I am. Yep, I have done this and continue to do so.  In fact, all of my new revenue streams in 2009 have been with “friendly networks”.
• I will use my time more effectively- I’ve definately achieved this.  My new working system means procrastination has not been a big feature in my working day this year.  It’s still going strong and has meant a LOT of progress in my organic traffic endeavours.
• I will get better at not working on my days off. I have also done this, still not perfect but lots of progress.
• I will focus my activities in areas I know I can make money. Check.  It’s been going really well too, particularly my mens underwear offering which has turned into a nice earner with plenty of scope for improvement!
• I will get better at asking for enhanced commission rates. Yep, I’ve done this a couple of times with good results… but should still bear it in mind a bit more!
• I will outsource some activities rather than trying to do everything myself. Yes, although to my shame the link building activity I mentioned previously is only just getting started!  I have also taken someone on to do a bit of content here and there for me.  This has been particularly good recently when I’ve not been too well, takes pressure off.
• I will take my own advice and start some mini sites about new areas that interest me.
  Only one…. and solar panels site didn’t get far. It gets good traffic but not many conversions.  Conclusion: interest is all very good but profit is also interesting!!
• I will venture into new countries to make me less vunerable to changes in the exchange rate. Fail.  Still not done anything more on this beyond fiddling with an existing Aussie site.  I bought MaleFashion.com.au recently so will be doing something with that. Eventually!
• I’ll try and encourage Duncan to feel the same passion I do for affiliate marketing I’m trying, but alas my dear hubby just isn’t quite there yet He is keen to try to get more involved in the business though, so we will try a new angle just as soon as I’ve worked out what it is.

Personal Resolutions

• Finally learn to cook something beyond my one-pot specials from my student days. To My Surprise – success!!  Cakes and ummm… things in one pot.  But they’re new and more complicated things!
• Introduce myself to all of my new neighbours.  Then invite them over for a drink! Fail.  I eventually resorted to leaping out on one of my neighbours after I detected him doing maintenance to the boundaries between our properties a few days ago and then making him think HE had to invite ME for a drink.  hah!!
• Employ a gardener so Duncan doesn’t spend every weekend mowing and weeding. Much to my own (and my mum’s) surprise the new gardener is… me!
• Get better at sending birthday cards to my friends children. Check.
• Offset the carbon from all the flying I do. Hmmm…. well I got a compost bin?
• Compost things rather than sending them to the landfill. See above!
• Plant a vegetable garden. It died
• Not shoot the local Bush Turkeys when they dig the above up. It died because they dug it up
• Be less afraid of spiders. Success!  Aversion therapy is the key I now realise. Not difficult in these parts.
• Get better at saying “NO” to people.  Even if it upsets them a bit. (If you see me in 2009 and you think I’m smiling too much, ask me the reason for this one. I can guarantee you’ll soon be telling me to “turn that frown upside down” or, in extreme cases, passing me a box of tissues.) Progress, but I’m still too nice.
• Buy myself a new car.  It won’t be a BMW or a Porsche so don’t expect a “look at my new bling” post.  I don’t drive enough to justify a “super affiliate car”! Yes, it’s white, its big, and its a V6 (thanks to fellow affiliates Rich & Sue for selling me their beloved Pathfinder!)
• Take some time out every week to do a bit of art and craft. Fail.  I garden lots though and am making a new fern and succulents garden outside the office window.
• Count to ten more often To Duncan’s relief, success!
• Eventually get around to changing my name to “Mrs McKenzie” on bank accounts and similar. Partial success, because Duncan marched me round to the bank with marriage certificate, lol.
• Pay off 20% of my mortgage. Pfft!  Once the pound rebounds I’ll give that one a shot.

Anyone else make resolutions?  How are they going?  I’m actually quite pleased with my progress.  I’m not perfect but my strike rate is pleasingly low and this post has put my aims back into my mind again.

Onwards and upwards (but I’m still annoyed I’ve not improved on last years profit!).

I know you all must be sick and tired of me going on about how important it is to not only work hard but work smart. I also know I’ve been moaning terribly about all the new methods I’ve been working on recently so thought it was high time I actually shared one of them with you.

Working Smarter & Taking My Blogging To New Levels!

I’ve been deeply concerned recently about making more of the time I spend working.  One thing that has really been frustrating me is seeing all these clever guys such as Compare Store Prices ranking for many of my target terms with their sites.  Whilst I’m writing content for each and every brand I target plus oodles of accompanying articles, sites like these are cleverly manipulating feeds, melding it with some unique content, and adding value with a good resource which is created en masse with their clever feed wizardry.

The result is they rank well for a huge range of search terms and enjoy a beautiful economy of scale within their business.  Just look at Compare Store Price’s Alexa ranking – isn’t that a fabulous thing to behold on an affiliate owned site?

Clearly I Lack The Ability To Do All That…

But I did wonder if I might be able to fuse my own content with feed content on a much smaller scale, and create a quicker and more efficient to generate some useful content of my own.

So without further ado here’s what I came up with…

*Click the image to see the page on my mens undies site (opens in new window)

What I’ve done is used the merchant’s feed and one of their short descriptions for each product and then created a second longer description of my own in another field, combined it with their image and price data, and output it into an HTML template I designed.  I used a bulk posting script a kind reader roughed out for me to get my content into a WordPress post in this structure.

This Improves My Efficiency Thusly….

Instead of being able to write up and post 4 reasonably sized product articles in an hour, I can now do the necessary to come up with 10 of these (still perfecting the methodology so may be able to improve upon that a little).

For those of you who like more numbers (as I do) this means that in one hour per day I can create 170 rather spiffing looking blog articles per month.  I’m also pleased to announce that because it’s a “different way” of writing I can still do another couple of hours writing my “normal” articles without getting bored.

I’m Still Not Sure How It’ll Work…

It could be that this is not enough for the search engines to consider it unique and useful content, but I think I’ve re-worked the merchant’s products from the feed, added a good whack of unique text, and created a useful resource.

I’ll be very careful to keep a reasonable balance of this type of content with stuff that is more “traditionally” written, and won’t be posting huge swathes of this stuff all at once – but I’m certainly very pleased with the initial small test I’ve done.  Of course, like anyone who starts to use merchant feeds to help generate content I’ll no doubt find that many merchant’s feeds just aren’t much cop and I can’t work with them terribly easily.

Anyhoo… this is the product of quite a bit of thinking for a good few weeks, so I’ll be interested to hear what y’all think about it.  If nothing else, I think I’d be able to use this method to write content more quickly by simply completely removing the merchant description and using a longer one of my own.

The Next Step…

Is to think up a way to use my current sites and their content successfully in combination with lots of different merchant feeds, creating even more efficiencies of time (Reckon it’ll take me more than a few weeks to work out mind you – few years perhaps?).

P.S. My sincere and abject apologies once again to John Lamerton for yet another mens underwear related example which will no doubt put him off his lunch (sorry John!!)

I’ve been thinking today about the critical ingredients for affiliate success. Why?  Because I’m feeling a bit frustrated and negative right now and considering how hard work and the desire to succeed are simply not enough to really start bringing in the big bucks as an affiliate.

I’m sure all seasoned affiliates will know what I’m talking about when I say that there is most definately an affiliate “X Factor” (My thanks to Martin Warn for that phrase via MSN recently).  There are just some people you meet in this industry and you immediately think “Oh yeah baby! You are definately a rising star in the making.”

So What Is That X Factor?

Well, I reckon if I knew for sure I’d be raking it in because I’d have been able to analyse it all and would be selling millions of “How to Be a Good Affiliate” e-books.

When you meet an affiliate who makes a full time living, they are always an intensely interesting, motivated person to be around.  They have a creative presence that is almost magnetic.

But This Isn’t A Post About Affiliate Star Spotting

Many would be affiliates desire the flexible lifestyle, the money and everything else.  But who doesn’t?  Lots of people want it and then simply can’t be assed to do anything about it or want it handed to them on a plate.  A handful of people are incredibly motivated and will do just about anything to succeed.  OK, that’s 80% of the battle but I’ve met plenty of people with 50 content rich websites who were making a pittance in comparison to the work they’d been putting in. Why?  Well, its usually because they’re simply following a mindless formula and churning out a lot of stuff that may never work for them on the grand scale they have in mind.

People Who Succeed Have Something In Common…

The Affiliate “X Factor” is what lets you find that niche that will actually work.  I believe that involves a huge amount of creative and lateral thinking, as well as the ability to empathise strongly with the mindset of the online consumer, and predict upcoming buying trends.

Ideas?  Ideas?  If you have too many of them and have to keep a notepad beside your bed and have recently had to invest in a waterproof one for when you’re in the bath, then you might just have that X Factor.

BUT

I’ve also met a lot of people with the affiliate mojo who didn’t have the ability to do the hard graft to bring all their wild and wonderful ideas to fruition.

So If You Wonder Why The Market Isn’t Being Flooded With New Affiliates….

Not only do you need to be one of the lucky few have that fabulous ability for hugely creative entrepreneurial thinking and be able to see that highly lucrative niche from a mile off – you also need to be one of the handful the inclination to do all the hard graft to make them work.

Do YOU have the affiliate X Factor? Do you have what it takes to make it work?  Think about it.

Ahhh… so its the end of my working week and I’m just back in from doing the gardening (relatively incident free 1 x mozzie bite on the ear and one spider plus web in the face).  I always like to round the day off by immersing myself in my Google Analytics account and trying to learn something about the way people are searching to come to my sites.

Today, I decided to find out what the hell everyone who came here actually wanted when they arrived.  Very interesting stuff.  Here’s a few choice picks that interested me….

• 58 People have arrived after searching for Kirsty McCubbin *shudder* I hope that was all my nice friendly blog readers and not any half crazed axe murderers / ex boyfriends I’ve inadvertently offended in the past.

• 44 People were looking for Big Scary Spiders – Clearly I am an SEO genius as I’ve somehow managed to rank first in Google for that one.  I do wonder why?
  Also many other spider related referrals including Australian spiders, scariest spider in the world, big spider, etc etc etc.
• 30 people were desperately trying to understand Tradedoublers 90th epc – and no bloody wonder in my humble opinion.  I only wrote that article to try and work it out myself.  I still don’t have any clue whatsoever.
• 50 People wanted to know what the average affiliate earnings were.  Let me take this opportunity to clear that up for you all right now.  It’s £3,000,000 per second.  Happy?  Are you going to earn that now?  No you’re not, because you still don’t know how to earn it!
• 57 People were looking for help on finding affiliate niches.  Hurahh and congratulations!! You came to exactly the right place – more niche info right here.
• 5 People were searching for fanny magnets - This is my favourite number one Google ranking ever.  Who on earth goes looking for them?  What do they think they’re gonna buy?  An actual device to attract them in?  *could be a hot niche tip there*
• 2 people were clearly hacked off, they searched for “Affiliate Window Sucks“. You won’t find that particular moan on here though, cos I quite like them!
• 2 people were looking for “Kirsty’s Undies“ and 2 more “Kirstys boobs“ – ewww behave, I’m not that sort of affiliate!!

All in all, it was an interesting way to spend a half hour.  Other than those ones I discovered lots of people find my ramblings about niches, wordpress, and google penalties particularly helpful so that’s good to know.  Lots of people are searching for my name too, so now I’ve gone and got a big head and think I’m an internet celebrity

It does strike me it’d be good to find some new areas to harp on about, but as this is a “stream of consciousness” type affiliate blog (posh way of saying I’ll write what I damned well please) I shall have to wait for inspiration to turn up in its own good time!

Well, I was surprised anyway!

I’d just like to say thank you so much to everyone who voted for the blog in this years awards.  I can’t tell you how surprised and excited I was when I learned that I’d won.  In the face of so many other talented nominees I never really considered that I might actually take the top spot this year.

I Was Gutted Not To Be There…

Although Chris Frost did transmit a little of the fun and games to me when he phoned Duncan and I at 7.30am this morning, rousing us from our bed and sending us on a mad dash around the house as we tried to find the place where we actually get a mobile signal. This led Chris to accuse me of being a “miserable bastard” because I wasn’t quite excited (read:awake) enough for his liking.

So just for Chris….

Wooooohooo!!!!!  Yeah!!  Yipee!! Get in!!  You Dancer!!  etc etc etc

On a more serious note, thanks for ringing Chris.  It made the whole thing seem a bit more real and it was great to hear from someone who was there.  Thanks also for sending me this “live action” pic of you and Jane – it really made me feel a little closer to the action – I could almost taste that very nice bottle of wine

Congratulations Also To…

Chris Clarkson, Hannah Swift, and all at Existem for very well deserved awards (apologies if I’ve missed anyone else I know who won something last night – I’m getting my information from that well known reliable source of info, Twitter!).

It’s Not Really Sunk In All The Same…

I think winning hasn’t really sunk in.  I’m not as excited as I would have been if I’d been there.  I think this is one of the only times I’ve come close to wishing I didn’t live in Australia so I could have been there to see all my friends and enjoy the party.  Note I said “close” not “I wish”

Duncan and I will have a quiet bottle of bubbly by the fire tonight. I’m considering asking him to give me a round of applause or something, maybe it’ll sink in then!

P.S. Thanks to everyone who has sent me lovely e-mails and twitters, it means a lot!