Greetings copy and paste fans!  Here’s something I am messing around with this week – I want to see if I can get my categories to rank on one of my blogs.  The reason I’m trying to do this is that I’ve realised they have created a good shopping resource, gathering together hard to find products which I am reviewing and categorising as part of the broader content strategy on the site.

I have already found the categories ranking in a few different places without any input from me so I figure what the hell.  I won’t lose anything and I’ll only learn something!  With that in mind, i’ve decided to create some unique text in each one describing the type of products within them.

To Do This is A Simple Cut and Paste Job

1. Go to “Categories” which you will find located under “Posts”.

2. Add in your desired description in the appropriate box.  Basic HTML markup will work, so you can make your text look all nice

3. Locate the file controlling your categories – most likely archive.php

4. Pop this code in wherever you want your description to turn up: -

<?php $description=category_description(); echo $description;  ?>

And You’re Done!

I’ve popped mine in after the post and gone through the category page titles using my SEO plugin and given them a quick optimise as well.  I think I’m going to try to make the description a nice robost 250 to 300 words.  I’ll be interested to see if I get any additional traffic from this.  I’ve already fiddled around and created thumbnails of each post image contained within the category so in theory it should be an attractive page for users.

As always, I’ll let y’all know how I get on!

I had a very interesting chat with the lovely Julia Nisted yesterday.  She is one of the 5 strong team who runs the eBay affiliate programme throughout Europe in partnership with a variety of local agencies (including our very own R.O.EYE).

My apologies for being slow out of the blogging block on this, but I find it almost impossible to make any sense after 5pm these days.  Just ask anyone who has spoken to me on MSN in the Aussie evening!  The announcement that they are to scrap their current commission structure and introduce a shiny new CPC model was made at 1pm yesterday afternoon. Now, before you all dust off your ads for bizarre products such as used loo paper, fanny magnets, and blue bums (I have old screenshots to prove these existed), this is no ordinary CPC model.

Quality Click Pricing (Or QCP – affiliates do love a good abbreviation and eBay have obliged)

What is it & How is the CPC Defined? Understandably enough, eBay shan’t be making the exact nature of the algo used to determine click quality public.  However being an expert on just about everything (no sniggering at the back of class please!) I shall endeavour to explain.

In a nutshell the CPC eBay are prepared to pay will depend on traffic quality.  If your traffic brings in the goodies in the form of healthy sales and the provision of long term repeat customers, then you’ll get a higher CPC than people who simply scoop up every bit of random traffic they can find and shove it in eBay’s general direction.

In typical affiliate style my first question to Julia was, “So is this about eBay saving money on their affiliate programme?”  However, she assured me that this is, in fact, all about rewarding affiliates who drive good traffic and they hope it will ultimately result in eBay paying more out to them.  They don’t want to lose the affiliates driving “bad” traffic either – but they do want to encourage them to improve their traffic quality.

The new system will be implemented on 1st September 2009 so there’s plenty of time to get your heads around it.  You can read more about it on the eBay Partner Blog and also grab some handy tips on how to improve your traffic quality.

From My Point Of View…

It sounds like an incredibly positive change to the programme structure.  Regular blog readers will know I always view any change that asks affiliates to raise the bar as a good thing for the industry and the way affiliates are perceived.  To me, paying for the quality of traffic seems like a very fair way to apportion commission and it certainly makes eBay a more attractive affiliate proposition.

The changes seem incredibly innovative and it will be interesting to see how they develop!

As an aside… My year to date earnings for a niche site of mine on the eBay affiliate programme are a whopping £17.32 – however it may make an interesting case study later as it’s for a product / products that I know people in the UK can only purchase there.

So more from me on the changes and their effects later this year

I’ve not been getting many bona fide “Ask Kirsty’s” recently, was it something I said?!

I do get quite a lot of questions via mail, and I try to answer as many of them as possible (currently working through a backlog dating back to mid-july so please excuse me if you’ve mailed me and are hurt at my silence!).  However, recently the Ask Kirsty’s have slowed up considerably.

I know those people over at Affiliate Doctors are good and that they set lots of experts to answer your questions (including me!) but come on… I’m ever so nice and still fairly competent! I was here first too

So if you have a site you’d like me to review and you’re prepared to share the URL, give me a shout. You’ll even get a lovely link from this shiny PR4 blog for your troubles. Perhaps you have a burning question you’ve just not been able to find an answer to, or your site or PPC campaign has gone awry and you don’t know why?

Contact Me if you don’t mind everyone else sharing your woes and I’ll do my best to help!

Bit late with this one, we had some visitors last week and I didn’t have much time for blogging.  However, without further ado…

This is, in my opinion, just about the best occupation in the known universe and here’s my top ten reasons why!

1. No boss telling you what to do, no office politics because of what got said at the Christmas party, and definately, definately no blinking well commute to work.  Instead Kirsty is the boss, the only office politics is over how many cups of tea I’m allowed in a day and whether or not Duncan has been getting too much of our cats attention.  The commute to work?  Up 5 steps from the kitchen to the office and the work uniform is my trusty PJs!

2. Only working WHEN you want to. If I really don’t feel like working, I simply don’t.  On those days in life when I wake and discover I feel dreadful and can’t face the screen – I don’t.  “Today is a holiday”  I say.  And off Duncan and I trot to do something fun instead.

3. Only working ON WHAT you want to. Ahhh… this is a truly glorious aspect of our beautiful occupation.  I only set up projects that interest me.  If its boring, it’s not in my life. Hence I enjoy every second of my working day and get to immerse myself in promoting lots of really cool, weird, and wonderful things!

4. The Excitement. Every single day I wake up and I am immediately excited.  I’m still lying there with my eyes closed and already I am visualising myself up and in the office, tea in hand, stats on the screen and planning the day ahead.  It really is like Christmas each and every day and the gift is affiliate marketing!

5. Economy of Scale. One person really can create a business with a wonderful economy of scale.  You can set a project up, leave it running and maintain it in a few minutes a day freeing up more time to find the next income stream.  My new Australian accountant was absolutely blown away that one person could create so much turnover with so little in the way of manpower and resources.

6. The feeling of having found something I’m really “pretty good” at... All through my school days I was a good student, but just “average” and often struggled.  I excelled at nothing and failed at quite a few things.  Not a good feeling, as I really was trying very hard!  I now realise that structure and I don’t get along very well.  The more unstructured things are, the better I do!  The often bizarre world of SEO was right up my street, and as for affiliate marketing with all its bewildering twists and turns?  Well, I felt like I’d come home

7. The sense of achievement. Sometimes, when I sit back and regard what I’ve done with my life, I get a beautiful feeling of contentment.  All that I have done and acquired in life has come from the odd little nooks and crannies in my brain where affiliate niches are born.  This is not because I work for a company that has done well ergo I do well – it has all come from me.  It’s a lovely feeling of strength that boosts my self esteem and makes me feel incredibly comfortable in my own skin.  Also reassures me that having a slightly off the wall mindset is A-OK!

8. The people I can honestly say that the people I have met and befriended in this industry are and incredibly interesting and cool bunch.  Even without numbers 1 to 7 just meeting them and hanging out with them would have been a life enriching experience.

9. Hard work – yep, for some odd reason there really is nothing I enjoy more than knowing that I have worked incredibly hard for everything that I’ve done with my affiliate business.  A good day for me is one where I’ve crammed in as much work as humanly possible within the hours I’ve decided to work (note I’m not doing 18 hour days – that’s a different thing!!).  Working hard is a great feeling.  And being honest guys and gals there are very few affiliates who have not worked hard for their money at some stage – even if they’re saying they don’t work all that hard now.

10. Being smug – yes, we all have to feel smug sometimes, and as you’ll see from numbers 1 to 9 I’m indulging in it right now.  However,  I feel particularly smug when I wander through the streets of a big city and see all the well dressed office workers rushing to their daily grind.  I walk on, dressed in my usual clothes that constantly have me mistaken for a backpacker or student and ensure salespeople blank me in shopping malls – smiling my insufferably smug smile

*gasp* Shock horror murder polis!  Yes folks it’s time for one of my rare negative posts!  However, as the title suggests it does lend itself to a follow up post with 10 things I love about this industry so never fear, balance will be achieved in due course

1. Affiliate managers who contact me dead keen to “work more closely with you and build a great relationship” and immediately ask “is there anything we can do to help you?” Upon taking delivery of my modest request for bestsellers info and regular contact re: new products I promptly never, ever hear from them again!

2. People who are rude / sarcastic to newbie affiliates on forums in situations where they really don’t need to be.  What gives with that?

3. Merchants who re-jig their databases putting in place new cutting edge technology which will not only revolutionise your conversions but will break every single image and link you’ve ever previously created for them. They are then mysteriously unable to implement URL redirects and contact you wondering why your conversions have turned to poop and asking you to pull your jolly well socks up.

4. When you have to complete an online assault course and answer 5 fiendishly difficult riddles that’d make a sphinx go cross eyed and head on back home – just to get a deep link from a network (OK, I exaggerate but you know what I mean!)

5. Affiliate managers who schedule a conference call with you and then don’t listen to a word you are saying, constantly interrupting you to get their point over.  Look, if you mean you want to schedule a monologue call with me – just send a tape recording and I’ll swear at it at a more convenient time for me!

6. People from outside the industry thinking I’m a pornographer when I say I market things online.  I dread that knowing look and the “Ahh… I SEE.”

7. Still not being able to switch off from work sometimes.  For all that I harp on about how fab it is only working 4 days a week, I often make up most of that time when I “nip on” to the PC for a wee while “just to check things out” on evenings and weekends and leave Dunc sitting wondering where the hell I’ve gotten to.

8. Little known fact: – Affiliate Marketing causes time dilation.  Why else can I plan enough work in a single hour to last Duncan and I a bloody year?

9. The “I’ll make you rich if you buy my course for just $4,000″ brigade.  What a bunch of arseholes – they make us all look dishonest, rip off people who can least afford to lose money, and I for one sincerely wish painful bowel complaints and a host of embarrassing and smelly illnesses on the lot of them.

10. Meeting people at networking events who think I work for an agency.  Because I own a pair of boobs.

11. Being so far away from all my affiliate pals

Yeah OK, I know that’s 11 but the last one is just a moan not a real “hate”.

Anyone got some other affiliate marketing grudges they might like to air?

Hey there guys and gals, and greetings from your newly rejuvenated affiliate blogger.  On the weekends I usually spend a bit of time working out a couple of things that might be kinda fun to write about on here.  This weekend it didn’t happen and I thought I’d explain why!

You See Doctor, I’ve Been Feeling Kind of Rotten…

After developing no less than 4 sites recently and then having the flu, or “death lurgey” as I called it, I was feeling like my affiliate mojo had sort of deserted me.  I have 2 more new projects I need to start as well as keeping all of my sites fresh and updated and I just couldn’t get going properly.

So I Decided What I Needed Was… something diametrically opposed to the virtual world of affiliate marketing.  Yes, it is a creative discipline but in the end I was left feeling it was just nebulous and that perhaps there wasn’t much point to it all.  At this stage Duncan suggested an ambulance as I’d clearly lost my mind  – but I had a better idea.

Doing Something “Real”

I decided to spend 4 days with minimal internet time (one of my issues is I never take a break from long internet sessions – regardless of whether its my “day off” or not).

Without banging on too much about it, if you feel jaded I suggest taking a total break from the online world. Go and do something real to get it all in perspective.  My solution was to spend 4 days procuring and then distributing 8 cubic metres (half a tonne) of bark mulch on my front garden.

I started work again today and feel totally revitalised.  I was able to pick things right up and tie off loads of niggly loose ends. Tomorrow I start the next two projects and I feel great about it.  All it took was 4 days backbreaking garden labour, ha ha ha!

Try it

P.S.

Here Are Some Piccies Of My Endeavours… Welcome To Affiliate Gardening World

Before

After