Hi Kirsty,

Jason Dodd posted a data feed article here last September and I’m curious as to your thoughts about using such.

It does not appear your lingerie site utilizes a data feed. Do you have any sites that do use a data feed?

Pluses would certainly be the quantity of products and possibly an easier setup, plus their would be fresh content.

The negatives I see would possibly be poor product selection, leading to poor CTR, etc. Though you can categorize the products shown, I don’t believe you
could have complete control. Another might be the commission structure. I would bet that you get better commission rates with those product vendors that do not
have data feeds available.

Thanks.

-Scott

Hey Scott,

Actually my lingerie site does utilise a feed, they all do.

I don’t feel though that a data feed provides fresh content. It provides valuable choice for your visitors which I reckon improves your chances of getting a conversion by giving them lots of choice / a sense that the site they’ve arrived on will have what they want. As all the information in the feed is syndicated to lots of other sites I can’t really see it adding “fresh content” type value. However, if you do something clever with your datafeed and combine it with other useful information you would certainly achieve that aim.

I think the trick with data feeds is to choose which ones you use on your site very carefully. Make sure that the merchant has a really good selection of products, or use a fusion of feeds to create your own resource which will add value to your site and users. The only thing you have to monitor when doing that is conversion rates of the various merchants you feature. If you have one or two in your feed section that convert badly you will leak traffic to them that would probably otherwise have gotten you a sale. As for people without product feeds having better commissions – I’ve never seen this anywhere. Feeds are generally provided by most merchants. They’re a valuable tool to really increase visibility of their products and in my experience as an affiliate manager they can have a profound effect on profit levels on your programme. There are some mighty clever chappies out there doing interesting and creative things with feed sites that gives merchants access to traffic they’d never have gotten otherwise.

One of the negatives you’re dead on about is the issues with feed categorisation. This is the absolute bane of most affiliates who use feeds. Often feeds are very poorly categorised with merchants not taking care to break products down into logical sections. It can also be hard to get multiple feeds working properly together thanks to different merchants categorising products in subtly different ways. However, this problem can be used to your benefit if you’re clever enough and take the time to work out a solution. It means you end up with a far better resource than other affiliates who took one look and chucked the task straight on the “too hard” pile.
One good example of something very clever being done with affiliate data feeds is the Easy Content Units system.  They’ve done all the hard work for affiliates and have created a highly flexible system that has helped lots of affiliates do the clever things they’d like to do with their feeds but lack the technical ability to achieve. Definately well worth an experiment.

Whenever I’m talking about affiliate marketing I always tell people I “eat sleep and breathe” my work and am totally passionate about it.  I genuinely didn’t realise how much this was the case until these past few weeks.  I’ve been living on a building site since the start of February and all the noise, mess, dust and general intrusion into my work and personal space has had a huge impact upon my effectiveness and concentration.

Concentration? Sorry?  Eh?  Now, What Was I Saying…..

When I work it’s like I’m immersed in a rather fabulous underwater world.  I spend my workday submerged in a sea of information, ideas, and concepts which captivate me utterly.  Once I’m “under” the day vanishes in what seems like seconds and I’m left at close of play feeling content and empowered.

I’ve always suffered from dreadful concentration so I’ve just spent 10 excruciating weeks floating at the surface amongst all the chaos and noise of our building project watching the faint and indistinct lines of all the things that usually fill my working day whizzing past without so much as stopping to say “G’day” before vanishing into the distance in a blur. As I watch all the things I should be involved in slipping away I feel vague, hopeless and cut off – yet helpless to do anything about it.

Get Out Of My House!

I’m now at the stage where I’ve decided enough is enough. I’m suffering from terrible insomnia, I’m very stressed out, and I don’t feel like I’m in control of what’s going on with my business any more. Affiliate marketing is like oxygen for me, and without it I feel completely suffocated.  So I’ve called a halt to the building  job for now (which was mostly finished inside the house anyhow) and am really looking forward to things getting back to normal.  I’ll be letting the builder return in a few weeks to do some finishing off on the house exterior once I’ve had some time to myself. We will have a plasterer in next week, but he’s a very quiet worker so I’ve decided to let him finish his work

It’s About More Than The Money

As I was lying wide awake last night (yet again) I started wondering if the way I’m feeling, although perhaps extreme, is an indicator of why very few people who do well at affiliate marketing are in it purely because they saw a way to make money and set out to exploit it in a formulaic way.

I love the creative processes involved in identifying new things to market, trying to get inside the minds of the people likely to buy them, designing landing pages that will appeal to them, and working out ways to scale and increase traffic and conversions.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I still get a little excited every time I wake up in the morning and realise it’s time to go back to work.  I arrive at my desk within minutes of waking, clutching that first cuppa of the day and keen to hook up to the oxygen supply to breathe in more of what the affiliate world has on offer.

Does this border on the obsessive? Probably.  Do I care? Not a damned jot!

See You All Back In The Water Next Week…

Now that those noisy buggers are about to be evicted from my space I’ll see y’all back in the deep end on Monday

*shudder* well this is a question that gives me the total willies and no mistake about it!  Ben wants to know how I’d approach things if I were just starting out…

I wondered if I could ask two questions, as I like your philosophy of no-nonsense building content sites, accepting that their is no shortcut or get rich quick.

1 – If you were to start again with no affiliate sites or domains, how would you go about building up an online business?  Would you still do content sites,or maybe look at something else considering the web landscape of 2010?  Would you, for instance, write hundreds of articles before going live?  Would you concentrate on one site or several?   Just any comments on strategy.

2 – If someone got down to building content affiliate sites with SEO, full time, and followed your philosophy of no substitute for hard work, do you think it’s feasible to make a living of AM within a year?

For background, I’m a good writer and know my stuff re building websites.  I also know the theory of SEO and Internet Marketing, though have only ever really made pocket money in return for my very part time efforts so far.

Any comments really appreciated!

Ben

Really good questions Ben!

1. I would definately still go down the content route although without any existing sites to run I might well experiment with marketing via things that interest me at the moment such as Twitter and Facebook groups. I haven’t really yet found the time to really play around with those, but I still feel that the majority of my online strategy would be around the creation of quality content.

I would take a micro approach to building and developing any sites. Rather than trying to create a whole big site and everything that went with it offline I’d sort of section it off into managable chunks. You can create a site that for all intents and purposes functions well using just 10 to 15 pages and add on more as you go. This means you can get search engine traffic trickling through the site quicker and use what you learn from it to shape future efforts.

The question of concentrating on one site or several is a difficult one. From a resources point of view, only doing one as a newbie makes a lot of sense. However, from a “progressing your business and testing lots of niches” point of view it makes less sense. One of the things I think I’d find difficult if I had to start out as a newbie in 2010 would be niche identification. With 90% of content sites I’ve created I’ve already known I was going to make money with them, what some of the bestselling products were to get me kicked off, and which merchants I should concentrate my efforts upon. This is a huge benefit, and means I’ve only really put effort into writing content I already knew would yield profit. Huge advantage for my business.

Before you get all excited and ask me for my big secret method, I’ve got this advantage because in the past I’ve been able to promote merchants via direct PPC. None of the merchants I currently promote allow this any longer (or if they do I’m not in their closed group!). Having been around affiliate marketing for a few years has definately given me an advantage as the barriers to entry have risen behind me with various new rules from both search engines and merchants about how we can promote our affiliate wares.

I think if I were starting out now and having to deal with not being able to use my old testing methods I’d probably do bags of research and start up 4 or 5 sites using the micro approach above staggering launch for each (say one every 4 to 6 weeks), sending PPC to test the products, and then giving priority for further development to whichever one showed most promise whilst also still moving forward with the others. In all good conscience though, I’m not at all sure I can advise anyone to jump right in and do that. I’d do it, but should you? It could just be a recipe for a lot of time wasted if the effort is not correctly applied. So if we want to talk about what YOU should do rather than me, I’d say… do one site first and see what you learn from that.

2. Shorter answer here – YES. But (and you had to know that was coming) that really does depend on your abilities as a marketer. Your skills in writing and site building mean you’re off to a good start. However there are so many variables that come down to your own mindset that it’s difficult for me to give and answer you can rely upon. Some people make a good living within a few weeks, others take a few years. Where you fall is entirely down to your own levels of effort and intuition about what people might buy and how you can effectively target them when they’re doing it.

One thing that is guaranteed: – People who work hard at anything rarely walk away empty handed. Keep focused, keep trying, and do not give up when you have your first disaster!

“Arrggh!!!  F***ing WordPress!!!  Why won’t it just leave my damned formatting be????”

Sound familiar? Then you may be suffering from a well known affiliate affliction known as “WordPress Formatting Rage”.  Commonly experienced right after you’ve spent an age carefully positioning text or images to create a landing page that is the very epitome of perfection – right up until you hit the save button.  At this point WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor code cleanup thingamyjig springs into action like a lithe gazelle and proclaims “Oh ho!! Look at all those line breaks. We don’t want those cluttering up the place do we?”

The result is often less than pleasing and results in a frustrating few minutes spent laboriously re-entering those line breaks (It just must have been a mistake after all. What system would be silly enough to remove them?).  This then brings us back to the first line of the post with a few extra profanities added to reflect the increase in general frustration levels.

Fortunately There is a Fix

Tiny MCE Advanced (download & more info here)

Simply install this wonderous little plugin, and select the “Stop removing my damned well line breaks” option which is located in the big red box on the plugin admin page.

You can then enjoy the bliss that is being able to add line breaks wherever you please as well as having access to some other cool additions such as emoticons, search and replace functionality whilst editing,  support for tables, and heaps more.

“Ahhhh…. that’s better!!”

Ever wondered just how effective cookieless tracking technology really is? Wonder no longer!  I do love a good metric and got a lovely end of month surprise when I logged into my POR account this morning.  For the first time ever you can now see just how much of the revenue in your affiliate account would have been lost to deleted cookies if it weren’t for the alternate tracking methods deployed by the network.

I Have To Say I’m Seriously Impressed…

Upon checking out my revenue report I was presented with a very swish pie chart showing me what percentage of my sales was tracked by one of the secondary methods.  It looked like this: -

A whopping 23.04% of all the commissions I earned with Paid on Results in March were credited to my account using this technology. I put a reasonable amount traffic through this network and the amount of revenue I would have lost is very significant. Certainly enough to give me a bit of a light headed moment when I saw it in black and white!

My New Best Mates…

For me this metric being made visible really reinforces my trust in the Paid on Results network.  I’ve now been shown the cold hard facts of how they help me to make bigger profits, and I’m REALLY liking what I see. I was already a big fan of the more personal service I enjoy with them.  As a case in point they told me to look out for a new feature coming in a few hours whilst answering a support ticket at some ungodly hour of the night, and asked for feedback on their new affiliate interface generally.

Not every affiliate network has implemented cookieless tracking just yet. If you’ve ever thought to yourself “gosh, it’s funny that my traffic with Network X does much better than what I send to Network Y”, maybe it’s time to consider it might be more than just a coincidence.  This new report has reinforced to me the importance of weighing up more than just the merchants I want to promote – it’s clearly important to also look at how robust the tracking platform appears to be.

A+ to Paid on Results for transparency. Anyone else going to step up to the plate?

Read more here.