Visuals of profits & costs are way more revealing than lists of numbers!

This post will probably be of most use to affiliates just starting out who haven’t yet given much thought to measuring their success!

Even if you have a very small affiliate business it’s really important to make sure you know exactly how it’s progressing.  I’ve found a few simple Excel spreadsheets to be invaluable in charting the progress of my business and planning how to move forward.

I decided to make available for anyone who wants to use them 3 spreadsheets (with graphs) that are altered versions of the ones I use to keep an eye on things.  Here’s a list of what they keep tabs on, I’ve populated them all with mock figures so you can see how they chart things.

1. Monthly Sales

This spreadsheet tots up: -

• Income from each network.
• Expenses.
• Expenses as a percentage of turnover so you can keep an eye on your margins.
• Breaks results down into average daily profit ( I like to know how much I earn a day!)

The spreadsheet outputs the turnover, profit, and spend into a nice graph so you can see business progress at a glance.

I’ve found it useful for seeing the seasonal trends in my business and planning to iron them out with other revenue streams, charting the ebb and flow of income with different networks, to plan / forecast annual growth, and just downright reassuring when I’m unsure exactly how things are going.

2.Profit Targets

Just a simple spreadsheet featuring: -

• Target V’s actual profit (with graph).
• Percentage above / below target.
• Tot up of progress, average monthly profit, projected profit & target v’s projected increase for the year.

Good to keep an eye on progress, and also good to stop yourself moving the goalposts mid year. I like to sit down and work out what I’m happy with over the next 12 months. Once its in the spreadsheet it’s set in stone!

Individual Site Profits

For monitoring the progress of individual sites.  This looks at: -

• Turnover broken down into individual merchants.
• Expenses.
• Monthly profit (and that average per day metric again!)
• Percentage of marketing spend of turnover (again to keep an eye on those margins)
• Monthly traffic.
• EPC per visitor to site.
• Visits through to merchant / CTR.

This one is probably the most useful of all. It’s really incredibly important to monitor which sites are contributing good profits and keep an eye on the ones that aren’t.  I find that working out my CTR is really important – it lets me see any issues and address them quickly. Also, the site EPC is a fantastic metric. I use it to motivate myself and also to forecast how much I can increase my earnings by going out and finding similar traffic. I usually know how much work it is to put out X pages that bring in £xxx, so this is a great way to plan and effectively move forward to increase that cashflow.

I hope these help and if you have any questions on them please post below. No doubt I’ll have left some silly bit of Kirsty-esque maths in them that make sense to nobody but me. What can I say? I’m unique!

File Is Here>>

Contains all 3 spreadsheets. Right Click & Save Target As should get you a copy.

Mr Newton - Unproclaimed Affiliate Genius

Much excitement here at Affiliate Stuff HQ -  I’ve uncovered the original version of Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion.  Must understand stuff for physicists and science types everywhere,  but did you know he originally wrote them about affiliate marketing??

“This’ll be a smash hit” Issac said, and was all up for releasing it to the scientific community until his wife pointed out ” affiliate marketing hasn’t been invented yet Issac, you’ll probably get burned at the stake for being a nut job. You were only just lucky the last time after that business with the apple!”

“Bugger!” Issac proclaimed. “I was really on a roll there. Ah, to hell with it. I’ll make it about motion and change a few of the words around. Nobody’ll notice”

So here’s the original script, recently found by your roving affiliate investigator stuffed down the back of a venerable sofa in the British Library…

Newtons First Law Of Affiliate Marketing

An affiliate at rest will remain at rest unless they act upon a motivational notion.

An affiliate in motion will stay in motion with the same speed and with direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

Or…

Affiliates have a natural tendency to keep on doing what they are doing. If you’re sitting thinking about getting started in affiliate marketing, or have a great new idea that you just keep failing to act upon, you’re likely to keep doing that unless you give yourself a bit of a kick up the jacksie. However, once you get moving on it… you’ll be hard to stop!

Newtons Second Law Of Affiliate Marketing

Acceleration of wealth is produced when an affiliate acts on an idea. The greater the idea, the greater the amount of ingenuity needed to increase the acceleration of wealth.

Or…
Well, we all know that in the “real” world, the more brute force you chuck at something – the quicker you can make it go. However, affiliate marketing is a more subtle beast and is powered by smart thinking and downright ingenuity.  The bigger your idea for success, the more clever you’ll have to be to get it building momentum.  Affiliate marketing is fueled by a combustible mixture of ideas combined with clever execution.

Newtons Third Law of Affiliate Marketing

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Or…

You know what a rocket does when it takes off, right?? It piles an enormous amount of power out of its rear end and the ground pushes back with an equal force sending it soaring in a skywards direction.

Well, the ground is your idea and the rocket is the effort you put in.  The trajectory you achieve?  That’s all down to what you packed the rocket with, innit?

Hi folks, just a quickie post from me – I’m taking a break this week and I’m not meant to be doing any affiliating or even any internetting so SHHHH, you didn’t see me here – right?

I’ve just found this podcast featuring Matt Cutts chatting about WordPress and it’s wily ways. Some interesting hints and tips for would be users as well as useful chit chat about plugins, keeping Google happy with unique content, duplicate content, and more juicy info.

See you all next week for more affiliate thrills and spills

One of my readers brought this plugin to my attention recently (thanks Chris). Basically, there is a plugin that will override the function in WordPress that’ll strip out all but the most basic tags from your category descriptions. Allow HTML in Category Descriptions means you can add a nice content unit or similar and take advantage of and monetise any traffic your blog categories may be getting.

This Plugin Hasn’t Been Tested by Me!

Usually I’ll thoroughly test anything before I mention it on the blog, but I’m very short on time at the moment and it’ll likely take me several weeks to have a play with it.  I think this plugin could be a juicy one so I didn’t want to make y’all wait to hear about it.

But I Think I Can Put It To Very Good Use If It Works Well…

As you all might know, I add descriptions to my WordPress categories to get a chance at some additional search terms.  I also use the Thumbnails for Excerpts plugin to display nice product images at a category level so visitors hitting those pages have something to browse through.

It’s A Good Idea, But It Looks A Bit Pants!

You can see an example of this on my mens underwear site, here.  It’s not the smoothest looking solution in the world, but as I was putting out so many posts at the individual product or collection level for this site I thought it’d be a shame not to take the time to write a few hundred words and jam them into the category descriptions to try and get some extra traffic in. This has been very successful on Blokes Undies and I now rank very well for most terms around my categories.

The only issue is that the categories have a relatively high bounce rate. Previously I’ve always just figured it’s worth having the traffic going to those sections till I work out a solution. If this plugin does what it says on the tin I think I might have found it! I think it will create a very nice, integrated looking blog structure that’s very efficient with no page going to waste for either SEO purposes or traffic channelling.

I’ll probably try it out in the next few weeks. I’ll let you guys take a look when I’m done (I should really tidy those category images as well – I’m sure we can have them looking better than that!).

If you try this plugin please let me know how you get on

G’day folks and welcome back to my mammoth getting started post! You can catch up on part 1 here.

Building Your WordPress Affiliate Site

Now that you’ve identified your host, bought a domain, found a niche with good merchants, and worked out your content it’s time to build that site.  Well. Where do I begin.  An absolute age ago I wrote my WordPress 101 post, and its follow up – WordPress 102.  I think WordPress is the absolute dogs danglies where affiliates are concerned.  Both of those posts are fairly out of date, but most of the points about finding suitable themes and customising them to your needs still hold true.

I’ve noticed a lot of affiliates are using magazine style themes these days. These are great for creating static looking websites. What I tend to do is create a category structure that looks a lot like the menu structure of a standard retail site. I have found this works well in combination with adding a couple of hundred words of unique content to my category descriptions.  Do watch out for the themes that will use category descriptions as link titles though, not good!

Once my sites have a few posts up and running I then feature some of the posts from my key categories on the theme home page and voila! My site has a relevant and regularly updated home page with little to no input.

If you want to create nice looking landing pages check out this post to get all my trade secrets on laying out a landing page. It’s really not as hard as you’d think to create and customise your own affiliate landing pages. You just need to be handy with pen and paper plus a pinch of imagination and basic HTML. It’s very worthwhile and increases your click through rates to merchant. Your visitors like to see an attractive landing page when they arrive. It’s worth spending some time messing around with these even if you don’t implement them immediately.

Now Install Some Essential Plugins

Great plugins that are a must install for an affiliate site? This is the bit that’s probably out of date in my WordPress posts, so here goes!

1. Sitemap Generator Plugin – not the XML kind, one that’s actually part of your site.  Helps search engines find your content and index it. Kinda pivotal.
2. XML Sitemap – creates a lovely Google compliant XML sitemap of your site. (I’m not entirely convinced this helps you any, but it sure doesn’t hurt!).
3. Robots Meta – Absolutely essential. Helps you stop Google indexing uneccessary content and also eliminates some of the problems WordPress can throw up re: duplicate content.
4. RSS Footer – Ha ha!! Those naughty RSS content robbers will shoot themselves in the foot with this one (geddit?). If someone publishes your content from your sites RSS feed on their site, this neato little plugin will add a link back to your site making sure you get credit and they don’t – denied!
5. Search Meter – Find out what your blog visitors were a cravin’ when they came to visit your site. Handy dandy little tool that will give you additional information on how your visitors are thinking and searching. Great to use to create extra content and can reveal some search term gems that Google won’t.
6. Contact Form – When you set up your Contact Us page, you’ll need one of these. It’s handy to make sure people can contact you via your site… you never know what you’ll miss out on if you don’t!
7. Similar Posts Plugin – Great to help give your readers a view of some related products or information. I use this plugin because it’s very customisable.  I’ve added a thumbnail to all related posts on my sites which really creates an attractive looking page. I think it also gives my visitors a sense of “choice”. As soon as they arrive on one of my pages they immediately see lots of products and navigation options, giving them confidence this is going to be a good site to have a nice look round.
8. Thumbnail For Excerpts – I use this to create nice looking images on my category pages.  Because I started noticing visitors often landed on category pages as my sites got stronger in the SERPS I figured I might as well give them some nice images to look at as soon as they arrived rather than a boring page of text that might result in them clicking away.
9. Link Exchange Plugin – If you want to set up a link exchange page on your site, this handy dandy little plugin will help you manage the process and keep an eye on your link partners to make sure they’ve not pulled the old trick of removing your link back a few weeks after exchanging.  Sneaky eh?!
10. Pagination Plugin – Do not build a blog based site without one of these.  These will help keep your posts in the index by creating a good cross linkage structure in your site.  Google doesn’t like orphan pages and as time passes old blog posts look an awful lot like that.  This plugin convinces Google that your older content is still very much loved and part of the family!

And Your Shiny New Site is Complete!

All you need to do now is get some inbound links (OK, I know… not so easy but we’ll save that for another post I think!) and follow your ongoing content strategy to keep adding new and relevant pages for Google and other search engines to chew on.

At this stage, your journey to a profitable affiliate site is really just beginning.  From now on you’ll have to master the finer and more subtle points of SEO, learn to identify new ways to monetise your traffic, and find new and exciting merchants and products to promote to keep your affiliate business rolling. So not much then

Finally…

Good luck with your new site. Affiliate marketing is hard, hard work. There are no easy wins, but when you do get there it is incredibly satisfying.

If a “best of” montage episode is good enough for the Simpsons, it’s good enough for Affiliate Stuff. We’re now entering Season 3 of my career as a blogger so definately time to pull together a few good posts for the beginners and try to create a good reference point. I’m going to link to the various different guides I’ve written that are still relevant and fill in any gaps where things have changed or there’s an area I realise I haven’t covered properly.

I originally thought this would fit in one post, but it looks like it’s going to be a series… so stay tuned

First… Get Yourself A Good Domain Registrar and Host

There’s a surprising disparity between what lots of different people charge for domains and hosting so make sure you shop around and get a good deal. For the record I use Clook who I recommend and Fasthosts who I don’t.  If you plan on making use of WordPress to build your affiliate site, do make sure that your host supports the platform and makes it easy to use. Be aware of any additional charges for hosting the SQL databases WordPress runs from. Clook has a good wordpress setup that is easy to use. I’ve recommended you do the above for one good reason. So you feel like you’ve actually broken dirt on your new project.

Oh, make sure whatever domain name registrar you choose will actually allow you to change nameserver details via their interface.  Most do these days, but it’s best to double check.

Now Decide Upon Your Niche

The next bit is fun, but it is also very hard. Yep, it’s time to decide on that niche! I’ve written various posts on finding that first affiliate niche (post is quite old so things mentioned such as keyword tools etc may no longer be current), brainstorming, and using your own shopping interests to work out if a niche is worth pursuing. Identifying viable merchants at this stage in your research process is very, very important. Make sure there is someone out there who you feel can effectively convert the traffic you will ultimately send them. The only thing that is worse for an affiliate than a site not ranking is a site that ranks, gets traffic, and fails to sell anything. Very disheartening!!

The following are key points in your niche selection journey: -

• Make sure you are interested in what you are trying to sell. I can never, ever say this too often. I can’t work out why so many people don’t believe me and decide to do a bingo site, or car loans because “the commission is £50 a sale”.  Yeah righto. Do you REALLY think nobody else thought of that??  At the very core of your ability to create a site that really works should be a strong sense of empathy with the people you are trying to attract to your site and push through to merchant to make that sale. The best way to do this when you’re starting out is to make sure it’s something you can see yourself buying. This will better enable you to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer and work out what you’d want to see on a site devoted to it. More importantly, you won’t die of complete boredom trying to create and update your site content.
• Keep the product area you are targeting fairly tight.  Personally I’d go for something a little broader than a site looking to sell a single product as it’ll give you the chance to add additional content and experiment with growing the site further as you move down the affiliate marketing path.  It also gives you the chance to test the market within a highly targeted product area. When you do this you’ll see that some products convert, and others don’t. It will offer good practise in identifying what sells and taking steps to modify your traffic stream to better target your “hot products”. That’s not to say single product sites aren’t valid – they are. It’s just that they can be very hit and miss for the unseasoned affiliate.
• Don’t target something too broad either. Try to do a general site about fashion for example, or even dresses and you might find your site is a huge task to complete and subsequently ranks nowhere. It would in time, but I feel its very important for a first site attempt to get traffic early on to keep you encouraged and interested. Something like Maxi Dresses, or Bodycon Dresses would be far more appropriate.  Plenty of scope for quality content, and the site will attract traffic that is easier to convert thanks to its more precise and targeted nature.
• Once you’ve decided, I recommend you do some keyword research within your niche.

A good niche can often be staring you in the face amidst a seemingly crowded marketplace. Here’s a post I wrote when I was feeling all smug about beating the crowds at an iconic Aussie location. Just because an affiliate space looks crowded, doesn’t mean there aren’t things in there people have missed. Most people look at the obvious. I urge you to be different and think different

Now Register Your Domain

Feed your keyword research into registering a domain with the company you’ve identified in step 1.

A domain that has relevant keywords will really help you out in the search engines. It can also help if you find an available domain that is an exact match to a traffic bearing search phrase. This isn’t always a good thing though – I’ve seen lots of affiliate sites formatted like REALLYPOINTLESSLYLONGANDSILLY.CO.UK – just don’t do it to yourself, it looks ridiculous!

As an aside, a nice short domain name also helps you to create more compelling looking Adwords ads.  The shorter your domain, the more space their is to add a brand name or unique identifier to your display url i.e. LingerieBrands.co.uk/Calvin_Klein. At the very least make sure your domain meets the Adwords display URL maximum length of 35 characters to prevent complicating your life should you decide to give PPC a crack down the line.

Create a Site Structure Plan

There’s really nothing worse than trying to complete a site without a plan. Not only will it lack decent structure, it’ll probably be a bit of a pigs ear and overall waste of time. I suggest using the keyword research you’ve already completed above combined with a look at a few merchants in your chosen niche to sit down and rough out what your main site sections will be.  Choose up to 20 main site areas where you’ll showcase your wares. Any more than that and you may fall by the wayside because you’ve given yourself too large a site to put together.

One of the reasons I recommend you target a narrow product group is that in a well defined niche the main pages you define here will have a much better chance of ranking. Good for those motivation levels.

Now its Time to Get Busy With Some Content
And I mean actual, meaningful content.  Not slapping up a whole load of products and a two line intro that’s exactly the same as the one on every other page of your site bar two or three key words that have been changed, and then acting all surprised and bewildered when your masterpiece sinks without a trace.  The amount of thin affiliate sites I see along these lines is totally ridiculous. Well here’s a newsflash guys – it’s just not good enough!!  Without content your site just won’t have a chance to rank.  This is the point at which a huge number of would be affiliates fail, but never fear – it’s not rocket science.

I suggest at least a couple of hundred words on each page. I usually structure my own pages so that the first 50 to 100 words are at the top (depending on the template) and tuck the rest neatly away after what I’m actually trying to sell.

Forward Content Planning

When you’re sorting your content for the main sections of your site, write out a plan of what additional content you will add to your site once the initial structure is in place.  I feel I have to clear something up here. When you finish an affiliate site, it’s umm… generally speaking not finished!!  Unless you keep adding quality content to your site there’s a fairly good chance that Google will lose interest in your site and your traffic will drop off.  It’s important to keep adding to your site on an ongoing basis. Believe me it really will help you no end to build traffic and a quality site that converts well.

How Do I Decide What To Write About?

I hear you ask. Well, there’s a few tips in the article I’ve referenced above. Apart from that I’d base some articles around any search term areas you weren’t able to include in your main site structure.  Product review / highlight posts can work great for attracting the long tail.  Going back to my maxi dress example above, I might look at writing about maxi dresses featuring particular patterns i.e. geometric or floral, fabric types i.e. cotton or satin, particular shapes i.e. strapless, spaghetti strapped, colours, and finally particular brands or online stores i.e Motel or Miss Selfridge.  Product copy 101 is here, I’ve given a specific example of how I’d write a short article about a single product.  I followed that post up with an overview of the sort of traffic I got in from it.

Phew!

That was quite long, wasn’t it? Now you know why I had to split it up.  Tune in for next time’s exciting installment on getting that site built and marketed. Or just built if I keep on going back and adding stuff like I did with this post LOL.

Questions?

Please if you have any questions on this, pop them in the comments field below and I will do my best to answer them for you. If there’s any glaring gaps in the above I’d like to go back and fill them in. I will be linking to the finished result of this endeavour site wide so that when someone new to AM hits the site they can go straight off and read this.

Comments and discussion will also enhance the resource so please, please, please jump on in – it really does help!