Last month I finally got around to giving the Easy Content Units system a proper road test on one of my websites and wanted to share the results.

So What is Easy Content Units (or ECU)?

It does exactly what it says on the tin!  It makes it easy for you to create and customise attractive content units for your site.  You specify size, number of products, and you can apply all sorts of customisations to integrate it beautifully into your site.

Some examples of how ECU can be used: -

• Price Comparison
• Creating “Product Range” Info
• Monetising YouTube Videos

And many more!

Kirsty’s ECU Test

What I decided to do was see how much better a page with really basic images, text, and buttons did when I applied an integrated content unit into it.  I’ve recently started to find old blog posts on Lingerie Brands have started to rank well for generic search terms they were never designed to target.

The page I chose was one that I had written to promote a tankini sale at Brastop. It looked a lot like this.

You can see it in it’s new post ECU makeover form here.

For reasons best known to Google the page ranks very well for terms including DD+ swimwear, panache tankinis, and tankinis for big busts.  This meant it was one of the most viewed pages on my site with around 1,700 visits per month.  To my distress, those 1,700 visits only equated to 7 sales during a 31 day period during April & May this year.

ECU To The Rescue

Since taking a few minutes to apply some content units I’ve seen a healthy increase in sales being generated from that page over the last 31 days. Sales generated have risen from 7 to 23 – an increase of 229%

It’s not making me a fortune considering the traffic volume the page gets, but the general nature of the search terms it ranks for means it’s way more difficult to convert.

How I Implemented My ECU

As you’ll see on the page, I created content units around the 3 general traffic themes that the page was getting to maximise my chances of converting the traffic, and have tried to make the unit look as much as possible like it belongs there.

The only thing I haven’t done (which I was told I should!) is to go through and replaces any “odd” looking ones with bendy images either with images of my own or cropped versions of the merchant images.

Will I Use ECU Again?

Definately. It’s going to be a great tool for my business to help me make the most of old and outdated pages that are generating traffic and no revenue.  I loved the fact that you can alter your unit from within the ECU interface, and also that the system will mail me if any of my units happen to have old products on that are no longer in the merchant feeds.

I think in time I’ll be able to improve upon the sales levels as I go through and weed out products from merchants who aren’t converting as well.  I’ve also been delighted to discover that a side effect of using ECU has been that I’ve easily been able to test traffic streams with new merchants I’ve not worked with before.  So not only have I increased the profitability of my page, I’ve found a new merchant I will work with in the future (and at least one I’ll avoid like the plague!).

The units themselves are mind bendingly customisable and once you get used to the management interface they are incredibly easy to manipulate. You can do pretty much anything you can think of to make the units fit your site and content. Substitute your own images, alter descriptions, fonts, borders, and layouts. Definately powerful!

The Only Con To ECU

Is something that’s completely out of their hands. The quality of merchant feeds. When I was putting together my swimwear units I tried to find products from a merchant I regularly work with as I knew they had a great selection of cup sized swimwear.  Alas, try as I might I could not get the appropriate products to come up – even if I searched for them by name!

Come on merchants – is it really that hard to put a little thought into your feeds? Product descriptions even?

I Got Back To John With My Results And Asked For A Comment For My Readers…

“Without a doubt the best performing ECUs are those that are really well integrated into the affiliate’s site as Kirsty has done above. The units are totally customisable, and by taking the time to ensure that font colours and sizes match, using the correct layout for your site and perhaps creating a custom “shop now” button, it is possible to increase performance immensely.

If your ECU looks out of place or stands out (for the wrong reasons), then you’re losing sales. Take 5 minutes to customise it to fit your site, and maybe you could see a 300% increase in sales too! If you would like any help at all customising ECUs (or indeed help with ANY aspect of Easy Content Units), then please give me a shout at john@easycontentunits.com – That’s what we’re here for!”

Find out more about ECU and sign up for a free or pro account at: -EasyContentUnits.com

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Kirsty’s Easy Content Units Test – Great Tool To Integrate Products In Affiliate Sites

Apologies for the longer than usual radio silence by the way. I went on a holiday to celebrate the end of the destruction of my home!

Yep, that’s right…  Today was my first proper day back at work after all the general noise and mess of our renovation project. During the 3 months of utter chaos I found it unbelievably difficult to get any actual work done but I was determined to at least do something with the time that I could look at and say “that was really a worthwhile achievement”.

Kicking Office Boredom into Touch…

Back in March I realised that the way I’ve been working just isn’t jiggling my affiliate mojo any more. With that in mind I set about analysing how we use time and what it would cost to significantly reduce the amount of time spent engaged in repetitive tasks that aren’t particularly specialised.

So What’s Been Drinking Up Our Working Hours?

I decided to look at two key things: -

• Writing Content
• Posting Content

Short phrases, but these two things are a huge part of what keeps our business moving and growing.  For the last 15 months Duncan and I have done a tremendous amount of this as we’ve shifted the business away from reliance on PPC and put a lot of effort into making the sites we do send PPC traffic to unique and filled with added value for the site user.

It’s Been Great, But Dear God It’s Boring!

We had a sit down and worked out how much time we were spending on average doing this important, but frankly simple, task. You ready?

Time Kirsty Spends Writing & Posting Content: 35 Hours Per Month

Time Duncan Spends Posting Content: 40 Hours Per Month

Total: 75 Hours Per Month

Thats An Awful Lot Of Hours!

Not only is that a mahoosive chunk of time, I realised that it also represented a bottleneck. I’ve been outsourcing some content writing for quite some time now to increase output.  However, Duncan had no more time he could devote to posting up said content without going mad with boredom and letting other important tasks slide. In fact, for a long time now he’s struggled to keep up with all his tasks and I’ve started “slacking off” because I was getting fed up.

It Occurred To Me That All of This Was Work That Someone Else Could Do. So…

• I got a friend to write me a WordPress script that will post all our content for us from a CSV spreadsheet.
• I increased my order with my content writer(s) so that output was the same as previously, and then added 20% for good measure. All content is now output into csv format by the writer all ready for posting.

This means that not only have I freed up 75 hours that Duncan and I can do something else with every month, I’ve removed a bottleneck that was stopping us from growing the business more quicky.

How Much Has Freeing 75 Hours Cost Us?

Content: £800 per month

Script: £0 (excellent mates rate eh?!)

This means that to free up no less than 5 days per month each (and bearing in mind we only work an average of 17 days per month) we are paying the roughly £10 an hour to have someone else do  tasks we really have grown to hate and therefore have started to do badly.  30% of our workload has now been lifted and at a cost that represents a *lot* less than 30% of our business profits.

Obviously I will have to spend some time every month sorting out who is writing what, but I’m hoping to get that down to about a morning’s work at the start of each month.

I Feel Great!

It’s a great feeling to have finally sorted this out. Words can’t express how good I feel so I shall leave y’all with a picture from my recent wee break that really sums it all up.

Ahhh… that is SO much better

P.S. I’m hoping to now have a little more time to spend on here engaged in writing I really do enjoy

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Today Is The First Day Of My New Affiliate Life…

Well, it’s time to get back to work folks… and what better way to start your new year than by getting organised with your keyword strategy?

A nice chap called Ian Fernando dropped me a wee line recently to see if I might be interested in taking a look at a tool he had created to help work out which keywords are converting within your PPC campaigns. He’s created this tool with newbies in mind, but I reckon a lot of people would find his excel-based solution useful.

Whilst I was fiddling around on his site I found another great video tutorial in which he explains how he uses Google’s Keyword Research Tool to identify potential keywords and then uses excel to analyse them to work out which search terms are likely to deliver traffic at a reasonable CPC.

They say you learn something new every day… and I must say I liked how he was using the Google data. I’m a bit more of a seat of the pants gal myself (but then you sort of get a “feel” for keywords after a few years!). I think this tutorial is an excellent look at how to get your keyword strategy organised.

Once you’ve gotten your keywords into a nice PPC campaign, you’ll be needing to analyse them to see how your precious PPC spend has fared. Ian has come up trumps again with this great video tutorial on how to work out which keywords are bringing in the bling: -

Even better, Ian has uploaded his great spreadsheet to Google Docs so that you can log on in there, have a good old fiddle about with it and chat with other users (possibly the man himself as well) about how to use it.

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

A Couple Of Great Affiliate Keyword Analysis Tutorials