I’ve had a bit of an e-mail from a nice chap called Eamon this week. It was a bit of an impassioned plea.

“Oh ho.” I thought. “Here’s a would-be affiliate at the end of his tether and no mistake about it!”

Basically, he’s been asking people for opinions on his carefully crafted affiliate site, and gotten a LOT of negative feedback and absolutely no suggestions about what to bloody well do about it!

Here’s his e-mail: -

Hi Kirsty,

Any kind words of encouragement?

The Site: http://www.dogfightuk.com

Hi Eamon,

Glad you found the blog useful!

The site is at least quite clean looking in terms of design and you clearly know how to manipulate datafeeds. With that as a start, you’ve really done a lot… the rest is just due dilligence and can really be done quite easily…honest!

OK, I will start with a bit of harsh criticism (sorry!). I really hate that domain name. As a web user it makes me wonder exactly what I’ll see when I click that link! OK, from a posh branding point of view it might make a degree of sense, but I think you need to find a brandable name that’s more obviously connected to men’s grooming. Without a multi-million quid advertising campaign I think the trendy-sounding domain you have will put new users off before they even click through from a search engine.

But Criticism aside….

Here’s a bit of a checklist for you to work through. I’m sure you’ve heard all the other criticisms before so instead of demotivating you I’m going to tell you what else you need to be doing to make this site work.

1. Content, Content, Content - Much like the mantra of those irritating TV real estate agents the old adage about content being kind is just sooooo true. You need to put in a whole load of work to create some truly unique content about your products. If you want an ice cube’s chance in hell of ranking for some of those brand terms you will need to write some unique copy about each of the brands you are going to be featuring. I’ve been doing this for a new lingerie site of mine -
http://www.lingeriebrands.co.uk

It is absolutely what you need to do to make the site work. No ifs, buts or maybes. Follow this up with product reviews, how to articles, skincare advice and as much male grooming type things as you can cram in and you will be on a winner. It’s a huge job and no question about it, but if you want to make a go of affiliate marketing you need to be able to provide
good content.

You might consider adding some of this content in a blog format as Google really yums this kind of stuff up and indexes it real quick.

2. Get Some Link Lurrrve!
You need to spend a bit of time getting some nice, relevant incoming links. Again, a blog section can help you to do this as you will be able to submit yourself to blog directories and target other bloggers for exchanges.

I did an “Ask Kirsty” about building links a while ago, perhaps you might find it useful if you’re not familiar with basic techniques.

affiliatestuff.co.uk/getting-started-as-an-affiliate/ask-kirsty-how-to-quickly-build-effective-links/

A few links in combination with some compelling content, and you’ll be up to 150 SEO visitors a day real quick!

3. A Bit Of SEO Jiggery Pokery Goes A Long Way…

Your pages are clean cut and look quite nice, but a few simple SEO Tweaks will make them just as attractive to the search engines as to your Metrosexual site visitors.

- Get some nice relevant text high up on your home page. Part of the box currently containing the picture of that smashing young fella in his jimmy jammies would be favourite. I think the current design looks nice, but could be put to better use. Perhaps leave the chap sitting there and add some nice text and links about your key content.

The reason this is a good idea is that search engines see the home page of a site as the most relevant to your content (hence it’s called the index page). It’s therefore given additional weighting in the search engines, and optimising it gives you the best chance of ranking for really generic search terms.

- Fiddle about with your navigation and move the breadcrumb menus I noticed you were using on some pages. I thought it should be at the top of the page rather than below product descriptions. Very minor I know… but that’s where users will look for it!

I also thought you should extend usage of your breadcrumb menus throughout the site. You seem to have them at individual product level, but not on the actual brand feature pages.

- Your use of the brand logo on each page is good. However, I reckon you need to get that pushed down the page a bit and pop in a nice looking bit of header text saying the same thing. The content towards the top of any web page and the contents of fields such as headers are used by search engines to work out what the page is about. The more text of relevance to your brand names you can get in, the better from an SEO standpoint.

- Improve Your Cross Linkage
Again, the more pages in a site which link to your main areas of content the better. Once more this is because of how search engines will analyse the structure of a site to determine which are more relevant. The more incoming external links to your page, the better they will rank.

Phew! Well, I could say more but I reckon I’ll have given you about 3 months hard yakka with that one.

I did get a follow up mail about this from Eamon as I double checked to make sure he’d realise I might post his query! He says he’s off to have a re-think. I thought the site was pretty savable, but I’m thinking that Eamon has maybe decided to try something a bit smaller for his first attempt. Getting a site with that breadth of content right is a lot of hard work when you’re not sure if what you are doing works.

Good luck Eamon, do let us know how you get on!