I had a question from Dave this week.  I’ve helped him before getting started doing some PPC campaigns and he now has a steady flow of sales.  Unfortunately he’s not so crash hot on his profit margins!

Ok, at the moment im battling with increasing my profit. I know I can make this work now, its all about increasing my profit. Now I know its not what it should be proably because of my mismanagement of keywords. I know you should wait 100 clicks/1000 imp before you delete if you dont have a sale, but when youve got hundreds of keywords going on at once each costing the 7 - 12 p each, then it adds up doesnt it. So instead of only deleting after 100 clicks has been reached or so, do you go by how long they’ve been going?

I’m averaging about £40 - £60 commsion rate now per day, which is good, im happy about that, but my £20 or so profit can dwindle to as little as £3 or £4 by midnight that same day..So what is it i need to start considering when managing my account?

You definitely need to look at making sure your profit margins are better.  First of all, what is costing you the most money for the least return?  Are there any keywords in your account that have never brought in any money?  It might be an idea to consider weeding those out.  If there’s not a lot that you can discern in your campaign as being “dead wood” or “star performers” that can be worked on, then you may need to take a formulaic approach.

If a campaign is only breaking even or even losing you a bit, work out how much you earn per every click you send to the merchant.  Say you send 100 clicks and earn £15, this means you earn 15p for each click you sent them.  If you’re spending 20p to get these clicks then you need to reduce that.

There are a couple of ways you could approach this.  1. you could work out a reasonably desirable profit margin and reduce your max CPC to reflect this.  i.e. Just knock your bids down to 10p and take whatever traffic you can get. 2. Work out ways to get cheaper traffic to offset your more expensive traffic and bring down your average costs into a profit.

Re: not deleting keywords until you’ve reached X amount of clicks. I think you have to apply common sense to this as you suspect.   If keywords that are closely related aren’t working then you should definitely have a clear out.

Hello once more Ask Kirsty fans!  I had a question that I thought a lot of people might find interesting from Peter earlier this month…

I have a site which has been growing for some time now and I am thinking of negotiating for more commission. I was wondering if you have ever done that and if you have any tips?  Like do you negotiate with the affiliate network or the merchant itself?  Also, I know this might be quite relative but what is a good indicator that you are driving enough sales to warrant asking for more commission?

I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking they have to be earning a certain amount to actually ask for more money. The thing is, if you wait until you’re doing really well with a merchant what you might find is that they then want you to do even more before they’re prepared to give you an increase. The approach can be either made via network or direct to merchant.

There are two scenarios in which I ask a merchant for more money.

1. If I think I could drive decent volume to them (it’s a really good motivator too) and 2. If I am already driving volume to a competitor of theirs and already know their conversion rates are similar (and wish to switch allegiance!).

I think the best thing to do is approach a merchant as soon as you believe you will be able to work well and generate some decent volume with them. Simply ask if they might be open to offering enhanced commission rates for agreed performance targets.

If you have some idea of how much in the way of sales you might be able to push to them that might be a good negotiating tool. If not, just ask what it would take for them to give you an enhanced tier structure or some kind of bonus system.

It might surprise you how many merchants are open to this kind of proactive approach from an affiliate.

Apart from anything else, the worst thing that can happen is you’ll get a polite no!

It’s been a long time since I’ve really had that many Ask Kirstys so I was delighted to get a message via Twitter from a long time blog reader, Chris, which we then followed up with an e-mail conversation.  Here’s his question: -

I have just started to make money on FB but have started using Yahoo with terrible conversion rates. For 5 days I have had 300 clicks on my Yahoo ad and 134 clicks to the merchant with 2 sales!

I’m promoting a very competitive mobile phone offer using general keywords such as “best mobile phone deals”.

Is this normal for PPC? The ad is clear and to the point and so is the web page. Any ideas on how to improve the conversion rate?

I am hoping to follow your lead and be able to jack the 9-5 grind but
it seems I am million miles away at the moment.

*Note: - Chris has asked that his site not be shown here.  To make my response make more sense, his landing page is in a grid type format and features a list of mobile phone handsets, including images,  currently available on a very competitive monthly contract with a major network.  His current Wordpress theme is very basic and is a simple black and white offering with no graphics or colours.

My Ideas on Chris’ PPC Pain
OK. I think there is a fair bit you can do to try and improve the performance of this site. It’s clear from our conversations that you have put a lot of time into researching mobile phone deals and keeping your site information fresh and up to date. You have gotten that very right, so well done on that score.

As you will be aware, mobile phones are incredibly competitive.  However, I do feel that when you have already managed to create a couple of sales from 134 clicks through to merchant that you’re doing pretty well and might just have something that could be built upon.  People often think that because they are losing money a project has been a failure, but this is not necessarily always the case.

In this particular scenario there are two things we can do to try and make it work:-

1. We can attempt to improve your landing page and calls to action to get some more of those punters you’re paying for through to the merchant.

2. We can look at ways to find cheaper and more targeted traffic through to your site which will convert better.

OK, so first off here is a checklist for your landing page: -

• Product Features – Although you’ve made a nice and clean looking grid and have clearly stated at the top of the page the what the very attractive monthly contract price is,  you need to cater for what internet savvy shoppers expect to see.   I always tell people that you can liken the state of mind of an internet shopper to someone who is half asleep or is viewing the world through a “haze”. They rarely read things properly and if they’ve been comparison shopping there’s a format they’re going to expect to see.  I suggest a couple of additions to your grid. Pop the monthly contract price in each row and also the contract length.  The reason for this is that people will first seek a phone they are interested in and then look to see if the contract terms are compatible with their expectations.

• Calls To Action – Make them buttons shiny, and make them bright red!  The current grey colour is quite pale and isn’t very attention grabbing.  Also consider “Shop Now” instead of “Buy Now”. Make them feel like they are not yet committing to a purchase. I like to think of this as the affiliate “soft sell”. Get them mobile phone names in bold text also.

• Feel Of The Page – your current page is very clean cut and plain with no colours or decoration at all. Whilst this is a good thing for the area around your product comparison grid, I think the rest of the page could do with feeling a little more like a mobile phone shop and needs a little bit of colour to help people feel they’ve come to an authority site. It doesn’t have to be very much, perhaps you could simply find a more smooth looking Wordpress theme.

And The Traffic….

• Your current search terms are incredibly generic - I’d suggest that first of all, you lower your bids on these terms slightly to bring them closer into line with what represents a profit for you. There’s no way I’d ever launch a campaign on such general terms to start with. I tend to do things the other way round. First of all I…

• Find Some Highly Relevant / Cheap Search Terms – The terms you’re already targeting are ones which I would associate with people who are at the start of the online purchase research process. What you want to do is try to plug in to people who have already decided what they want. For example, go to town on variations relating to the phone models you are featuring.  Swap terms like “best mobile phone deals”  for more targeted ones such as “best Nokia 5800 deals”.

• Really Go To Town On Highly Targeted Term Variations. Work out every possible variation someone might search for a mobile phone contract on and add in your brand name variations. I suggest you do this for one or two phones at a time, monitoring performance as you go. If things are working well, add more phones and if you have a good margin, look at adding more general terms.

Finally

I do think that as well as still chipping away at this site and trying to make it work (quitters win nothing) you should try to find another niche to get stuck into. Mobile phones will always be a toughie to learn the ins and outs of this trade and it can be really hard to find consistent profit. Find something less competitive with a lower CPA or commission and hone your skills on that.

I had another good ask Kirsty question from Karl the other day.  Basically, he’s spent a bit of time putting together a decent content site.  Although it gets a reasonable stream of traffic, nobody’s buying and he wants to know what the problem might be!  Karl very kindly let me see his site statistics, so I’ll be referring to those as I go without giving too much away.

Hey Kirsty,

I’m wondering if I could have some advice, I started a mp3 player comparison website about a month or 2 ago now and I seem to be getting hits (around 40 visitors per day) and people are actually clicking my affiliate links but never seem to be buying anything. I have no idea why L, my site is http://www.top10mp3players.org.uk Can you see anything that is wrong with it? Or is there something is that so obvious that I’m just missing it?

Kind Regards

Karl.

Hey Karl,

Well, you’ve clearly gone to a fair amount of trouble to create your MP3 player site and have put in a fair bit of time with your content.  This has been rewarded with a reasonable bit of traffic.  However, I can immediately see some issues with your site.  I’ll try to break down the reasons into logical action areas.

The Subject Matter is Very Broad

Although you have gone for a niche, you have picked a very broad one.  You have also tried to cover that niche with a two page offering.  One for the MP3 players and one for discount codes and offers.  As a consequence the traffic you are getting to the site is quite general in nature.  In my own affiliate endeavours what I am aiming to do is get hold of a customer and get a cookie onto their machine when they’re about to buy something.  This gives me the best chance of getting the eventual commission and not having my cookie overwritten by another affiliate.

When people buy online, they participate in a research cycle.  In the case of this type of product they’ll begin with general terms such as “best mp3 players”, “yellow mp3 players” “cheap mp3 players” etc.  Then as their research progresses and they have decided what they want, they’ll be searcing for things like “blue ipod nano 8gb” and visiting online stores to look for competitive prices.  If you try to target and capture traffic like this at the end of the buying cycle, you will see your conversion rates increase.

I think the reason you’re not getting sales is down to you having buyers coming onto your site at the start of their purchasing process.  They are still thinking about what they want to get!

Points of Action

• Have a sit down and put yourself in the position of the buyer. Brainstorm some keywords. Think about how you’d behave online when you’re ready to make that purchase.  What type of search terms would you be Googling upon to find the MP3 player for you?  I’d suggest creating a list of search terms around each of the ten products you are featuring, checking which have good search volumes, then creating a highly targeted page for each of them with oodles of keyword-rich content.  This type of landing page will be far more effective than the “catch all” solution you are currently using.  I can see you have tried to create some nice terms with your “white MP3 player” targeting, but I think that is still quite broad. Don’t get me wrong it is worth doing, but I think if you combine it with some more targeted search terms things could improve for you.
• The other thing you can do is create good resources around really targeted search strings. A lot of traffic you get was about MP3 players that are suitable for a certain purpose.  Build a page that explores the key features that would appeal to those searchers.  You could even take it a step further and do some term research around very targeted search terms like “mp3 player 8GB with large screen” etc.

Your Site Navigation is Quite Confusing

Although your content is quite good, I found your site navigation quite confusing.  Your use of named anchors had me shooting all over the place when I really wanted to find out more features of the MP3 players you were featuring.

I’d say that this is reducing the number of people who are actually ending up clicking through to a merchant page.  A bit of a shame when you go to all that trouble to get them to the site in the first place.

Points Of Action

• Get rid of those named anchors!
• Create a more “traditional” site navigation that is clearly accessible and visible.
• When you create additional pages, make sure people can get back to the home page easily from any page of the site.
• Make sure you have decent calls to action on your page.  Big, bold links or buttons with statements like “Get latest prices” or “Shop Now” in prominent positions will improve the amount of traffic you get through to the merchant.  If you need any inspiration, just take a trawl through the search results and see what other sites are doing to get traffic flowing to key sales areas of their sites.
• If you decide to add more pages, make sure the home page gives an idea of the content of each of them.  Use your space to convince people its worth digging more deeply into your site.

I Think Your Optimisation May Be A Little Heavy

Speaking from painful personal experience , I think your pages are a little over optimised at the moment.  You have loads of link text etc with keyword repetitions that look forced.  Now, often when I say this people respond with “But I can see site X, Y, or Z doing it”.  My response is “Well, they might be getting away with it, but that might not stop Google slapping a massive penalty on you”.  I have a site I well-meaning over-optimised that was slapped in July.  It only started to recover from the Google penalty 3 days ago.  You have been warned!

Points Of Action

• Review your copy.  Read it out loud. If it sounds repetitive consider cutting down on the mentions of your key search terms!

I reckon that’s probably enough to be getting along with.  You’re on the right track with this project, I just think it needs a wee tweak here and there, and you’ll be set.

Good Luck

Greetings “Ask Kirsty” fans!  The following is a question I got about a month ago from Chuck.  I thought it was a good  ‘un so I made a mental note to reply when I got back home and got me feet clear.  Here’s what’s getting under his affiliate skin: -

Hi Kirsty,

I have an excruciating headache. Have been reading everything I can find about Google SEO, rankings, indexing, penalties, etc, etc.

My problem is that my main keyword results from Google appear on page 12. Yahoo returns page one results for the same keyphrase. My domain name is my main keyphrase. “VW TDI For Sale” www.vw-tdi-for-sale.com My goal is to rank number one on Google for the key phrase “vw tdi for sale” and of course rank high for as many associated keywords and phrases as possible.

I may have a problem in the way I set up my site. I created categories to get the Revolution Magazine main page to look the way I wanted. The categories are used only for that main page. The site is an ebay site based on the PHPBay plugin.  I used posts for everything. Maybe should have used pages instead of posts. Is it better to use pages rather than posts? I have about 50 keywords so far. Each keyword is presented as a separate post consisting of a .jpg image and a couple sentences describing the keyword. Then each post has a link button to the appropriate ebay sales page. So each keyword is like a very simple landing page with a pushbutton that links to the ebay sales listing appropriate to that keyword phrase.

Google doesn’t like my website. What is very irritating is that a website called http://www.mauigreenenergy.org/dieselsforsale.htm
ranks in the number 1 spot on Google for my keyphrase. That website is about renewable energy. Has nothing to do with selling Volkswagen TDIs except that they have a link to a car dealership. This site has my ranking spot for my main keyword phrase and I want that spot.

As far as I can determine, Google has indexed 3 of my pages and none of them are my keyword posts. I believe my site is invisible to Google. Suggestions appreciated. I am to the point that I’m ready and willing to pay to get this sorted out.

Hey Chuck,

Well, I should start off with some praise of what you have done so far.  Well done on effectively identifying a niche that you can work in and creating a decent looking site to host it.  I know you’re feeling like there’s a bit of a dead end for you, but really you’ve done a lot of the work already.  Things just need a little bit of fine tuning.

So Sit Back, Relax, And Enjoy Kirsty’s Guide To Gettin’ Y’all Some Google Love!!

• Your Posts - You’ve done the right thing creating pages around search terms.  However, you’ve probably done a few too many of them.  For example, Your Diesel TDI and VW Diesel TDI pages could actually form a single post.  The terms are similar enough that one page will cover both.  I suggest you go through and see which of your pages you can “aggregate”.
• Your Internal Link Structure - is quite weak.  I assume the intention is that the posts mentioned above are where you intend the real revenue generation to be at.  You need to make your posts appear pivotal to the site content so that Google knows they are relevant.  I suggest you make sure these posts are linked to from every page.
• Cross Linkage Generally - is weak over the whole site.  You might want to consider using a plugin that will stop your pages being buried a few levels deep because of Wordpress’ weak cross linkage between posts.
• You Need Way More Content - as you already know your pages built around those search terms are very weak.  You need to write more useful content about the car models.  I wrote a general article about coming up with content ideas a while back, perhaps reading it will help give you some ideas. More specifically in your case, look at writing 300 words on each of your post pages.  Talk about specifications, fuel consumption, colours available, interiors, anything you think someone looking to buy one of these cars might possibly want to know.
• Optimise Your Selling Pages Around Buying Terms - Well jeez, that’s an obvious one Kirsts!  But to really monetise your site you’re gonna want to be attracting the type of traffic that might just be in danger of registering on e-bay with a view to putting in a bit of a bid!  With that in mind, i’d put my efforts into “Buying search terms” “buy volkswagen”  “tdi for sale” etc.
• Be Careful Not To Over Optimise - Looking at your home page, I’d say you’ve gone way overboard with mentions of VW search terms. The popular searches list down the side does verge towards keyword stuffing.  Adopt a natural writing style, and don’t labour to get mentions of search terms in there.  Just let them happen naturally. If in any doubt, read your copy aloud to yourself.  If it sounds repetitive you probably need to pare back a little on the search term count!!
• Get Yourself a Little Link Love - Although I can see your indexing has improved since your original question, your rankings will improve if you can get some relevant sites to link to you.  If you provide some decent, useful content this shouldn’t be an impossible task.
• Keep On Churning Out The Content - I can see you’ve already written a few articles of Vee Dub interest.  Keep at it.  The more ways you find to talk about your subject, the more chances there are to rank for some niche terms and get some traffic in.  Why not consider expanding and covering VW TDI Spares or maintenance tips?  There’s bound to be bags of potential content there!

I think I’ve covered some good basics there… I could say more, but I’ve just given you one hell of a “to do” list.  The main thing about creating any site is that there are no shortcuts.  If you work to make a site useful and relevant and have a reasonably SEO friendly structure… you should get that traffic.

Good luck Chuck!!

OK, so I recently had a bit of an e-mail from Dave who has been working really hard at affiliate marketing for around nine months.  He’s put in a huge effort, but he’s still not really earning that much.

I’ve had to alter his question a little as he doesn’t want to publish his sites, so I’ll add in some descriptive info to give you the rough idea of what he’s been up to!

Dear Kirsty,

I’ve done 50 sites up to now, i get a couple of hundred quid a month, which is nice, don’t get me wrong.
But as you well know this is something I want to do full time, SO i’ve got up the game a bit. I think its down to be not hitting the right products.

All of my sites are based around a price comparison model. They do bring in a trickle of money, but its consistency Im after, because Im trying to do this as a full time career. I can go days without anything then, maybe I’ll pull in 10 or 20 pound in. Its nice but with the amount of sites I have I would have thought I’d be close to matching my current salary so I can quite my day job. I started these in January, so I am fully aware its only been a few months for some of these sites, maybe i’m being too impatient?

**Kirsty’s note.  Dave has created a series of sites based around product groups with domains such as Brand-Name-Product-Group.co.uk.  They’re all decent looking sites, and he has put in a mammoth effort creating unique content.  He has also spent a bit of time building links to some of his sites and has a small but promising inbound link count.  All of this work has resulted in very low traffic and not a lot of sales!

Well, Dave… this is a most odd happenstance but it is one which I am sure many affiliates can identify with. So I’m going to try and take you through where I think things may have gone a wee bit wrong. I’m thinking that somewhere along the line you’ve missed out a fundamental step in understanding exactly how the revenue generation process in affiliate marketing really works.  If you’d really gotten a grasp on how to identify revenue bearing niches and followed a solid process, you should really be doing very well at the moment.

I’m inclined to think that what is happening is you are using a scattergun approach. I don’t really think this is a terribly good idea for someone trying to learn how to make money.  I can see why you’ve done this mind you, as just about every wealthy and successful affiliate you read about speaks of their many hundreds or thousands of affiliate sites.  However, every one of those sites will be about a product or group of products they already either knew or had a very good idea would bring in money. I think it is very important for an affiliate to make sure they have learned the revenue generation process through completely before they start to replicate their site and revenue generation technique.

I’d say that is probably the fundamental issue that is hampering your own efforts in this case.  Rather than working out how to identify a good product, structure a landing page that will work, and effectively hone your revenue generation process, you are simply creating site after site in the hope the money will come in.

It is clear you are prepared to put in the hard yards getting your affiliate empire set up your sites and content are a testament to that, so perhaps it would be a good idea to get back to some affiliate basics. Here’s a handy dandy guide to honing your affiliate craft!

Identify Your Affiliate Niche Effectively
Now, I can see you’ve identified several (50 actually!).  But how have you done this?  What was your research process, and how did you determine that here was a product which is popular, and which would convert at a good rate.  A fundamental misconception that many new affiliates fall into is that a product or product group has to be high value to make a profit on.  This isn’t really the case.  Often cheaper product areas have  much, much higher conversion rates… particularly if you have taken the time to research and identify a very strong merchant in this sector.

I’ve written a few niche identification guides, perhaps they will help: -

How to Find Your First Affiliate Niche

Use Your Passions To Find A Niche

How To Brainstorm Interests To Find Your Affiliate Niche

I think the best single bit of advice I can give you in this scenario is to perhaps have a better idea of where the money is before you put considerable effort into building a site.  An ideal way to do this is to try a bit of direct to merchant PPC within areas and on products you think can work.  Loads of people seem to think that this isn’t allowed any more since Google changed those display URL rules - but it is!  Sure, some merchants don’t want you to use it, and you will have to compete against other affiliates and the merchant themselves.  However, I often find that niche terms at the product level are easy to get enough traffic for to let you see if your hunches about a red hot affiliate niche are on the money or not!

Build Your Site
I know that you already have a site building method in mind, but have you considered that darling of all affiliates, Wordpress?  This has the added benefit of being blog based, a medium which Google seems to love. It also gives you the ability to create a very smooth, professional look for an extremely low cost.  Check out my guide to building a Wordpress site and applying effective SEO to it: -

Wordpress 101
Monitor Your Stats
It’s really important to ensure that your site is working as you think before you write it off as a dud.  Grab yourself a Google analytics account and make sure that your site is in fact ranking for search terms that are really relevant to the product you are pushing.  If you’re getting loads of traffic and it just ain’t converting… it might not be the fault of your site, product, or merchant. It could in fact be that the terms your ranking for are a little off target - and this can really impact your ability to make those visitors convert to affiliate cash.

What to Look for in Your Stats

Check out where your traffic is coming from.  What search terms have people used to arrive on your site?  If your site is selling apples, and you’ve somehow contrived to rank number one for “citrus fruit” but are nowhere to be found for “apples” it might explain why your site is not performing.  In this case you’ll need to…

Work At Your SEO
I suspect something you may be doing is not following a traffic generation process that is actually effective before moving on to your next site.  This might explain why you’ve created so many sites and so little traffic and sales.

Don’t get me wrong, I know you have been trying hard. A strong SEO site can generate good traffic, but it takes time.  Up to 6 months sometimes.  This might seem like an awful lot of effort, but if you have effectively identified your niche you should be pretty darned sure that your effort will pay you handsomely!

In Conclusion…

• Use a solid process to work out which niche is worthy of your sterling efforts.
• Create a site, and use it to create your iron clad revenue generation method.
• Work out how to effectively drive traffic to that site, and really use it to hone your SEO skills.
• Once you have done this, you can repeat your winning formula as much as you like, and your income will grow.

I think what this “Ask Kirsty” illustrates is that affiliate success is really about understanding every step of the revenue generating process fully before you move on and replicate a business model. Getting a solid basis upon which to build your effort is the key to the often mysterious affiliate world.

Good luck Dave!

I had a very intriguing mail from Ray Theakston earlier today letting me know he has a bit of a question for me about how to monetise his increasingly popular site. Uniquely, he’s asked me the question by posting it publicly on his blog. However, I’ve reproduced his post below for your reading convenience.

Dear Kirsty,

I’ve just relaunched a site that was badly neglected. It regularly had thousands of visitors daily peaking at 125,000 and I didn’t think anything of it but only recently that figure dropped to a lowly 200.

I’ve removed all of the original content of the site and I have spent the first few weeks of August re-building up the pages based around my previous most popular keywords and images.

After it’s redesign launch four weeks ago, I’m now attracting 1,000-4,000 unique visitors daily looking at between 5,000-22,000 pages and this figure is climbing daily.

I’m not quite sure of the traffic as Servage, Statcounter and Google Analytics are all giving me different results. This may be down to how I am presenting the content. The graph above displays the lowest figures of the three, so it’s looking promising.

Speaking of Google, they have been in touch to say that I can’t promote Google Adsense on the site. You see the content is a bit risque, as you’ll soon tell from my most popular pages:

/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-upskirt/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-see-through/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-flashing/
/drunkcelebs/drunk-celebs-nipple-slip/

I’m wondering how I can monetise the site. I don’t want to fill it with full adult porn adverts, so is there anything more subtle I could do?

I’m sure many merchants in the affiliate marketing space won’t want to be associated with a site that focuses on drunk celebrities and includes the odd not-safe-for-work image. The site has profited in the early days though from promoting the likes of Figleaves and JackpotJoy with traditional banners.

I’ve also spotted that a link from my Befuddle home page to an rss feed of my shopping site ShopCodes is ranking highly for some voucher code related keywords. So whilst that page was created as an experiment, I think the site has the potential to exploit the retail market.

Google certainly seems to like the influence of it’s status, being eight years old with a PR4 and it’s Wordpress formatting.

My pages are being indexed within hours of posting. The quickest I’ve spotted is two hours between page creation and the page to be indexed by Google on page 1 and for someone to search for a celebrity and land on my site.

The site is on page 1 of Google for the following terms if not the #1 spot itself.

# drunk celebs
# drunk celebrities
# celebs
# uk celebs

Who or what can I promote? You’ll see there’s an advert on there for an adult dating site but that is merely a place holder as I want to see what click-throughs it receives. (At the time of writing, it’s got a CTR of 1.02%)

I also know I’ve got a worldwide audience. Visitors from 147 different countries have visited just recently and this is broken down as such …

The UK appears low at 8% but Analytics says the UK accounts for 33% of my traffic and the visitors spend an average of 4.5 minutes viewing content. They seem to stick around

All the best. Cheers,
Ray

Greetings Raymond!

What an interesting site. I saw it prior to your re-launch and the new design definately makes it way more user friendly and “sticky”.

I suppose the issue that you have is as Adsense says - the content is a little on the “naughty” side. It’s tabloid naughty though, not terribly XXX adult. It probably is just risque enough to put a few merchants off, however it clearly brings you in a lot of traffic. Getting rid of it is therefore not an option!

I could agonise over who will and won’t let you promote them, but lets do this from an optimistic point of view. In an ideal world where anyone and everyone you apply to accepts you with open arms.

There Are A Lot of Obvious Product Areas of Appeal To Your Users

For every one of your celebrity names, I’d create a shopping section / category. Link to it from your drunk celeb categories and make “shop for celeb gear” part of your main menu structure. Given your varied demographic, I might create a page or pages that features offers from your top 2 or 3 countries. If it became worth your while later on you could use some IP detecting technology to send your visitors to the right pages for their country of origin.  You can then use these pages to punt the following: -

• Any products your celebs are currently putting their name to. All the usual things celebs get involved with, perfumes, aftershave, own brand clothing labels. David and Victoria Beckham are an excellent example of celeb branding gone mad.
• Any products they have been seen to be wearing.  Or products that look a lot like some controversial / popular outfit a celeb has recently been papped in. Merchants are always quick to talk about when something they’re stocking has been seen on a celeb or featured in a glossy. Sign up to their newsletters and use their info to help you quickly and efficiently place up to the minute, relevant products on your pages.
• Any products celebs have said they use.  For example, loads of Hollywood types are squeezing themselves into SPANX knickers to make themselves look slim on that red carpet.  Also celebs are often dropping names of skincare products such as Zelens (Cat Deely and Thandie Newton use this product).
• Products celebs are being paid to advertise. Beyonce is currently advertising L’Oreal products, David Beckham is or has been on Nike products, and lets not forget Dita Von Teese being the current face of wonderbra.
• Less excitingly, there’s always the old biography and autobiography book sales plus any albums currently on release by your featured celebs.
• Push subscription offers to celebrity gossip and style magazines.

Less Directly Related:

• Add a general shopping section with offers and product articles of interest to your demographic.
• Use your advertising space to promote particularly irresistable discount code offers and current merchant sales.
• As you’ll have already worked out, a bit of bingo type stuff is a decent fit for your audience.  I have no idea what the conversion rates would be like.  I’m suspecting less than stellar.
• Start gathering newsletter subscribers as soon as possible and push the odd irresistable offer at your members.   Could bring you in a nice dump of money every now and again if you choose your offers wisely and don’t pollute the subscribers with too much marketing rubbish.
• General designer clothing offers could be a good fit.  Merchants like Yoox give a good opportunity to help wannabe celebs find some discount designer bling.

Equally, anything and everything from the above sets of ideas could simply be added into a fully integrated shopping area of the site without cluttering your celeb pages at all.  Adding quality, unique content relating to these product areas would probably lead to some pretty fine search engine positions given the trustrank your domain probably has.

Loads of people online search for products they’ve seen on TV and celebs.  If you get your SEO right and make sure you keep up to date with what Oprah is talking about or what bra GMTV have just recommended, you could get some really sweet sales.

Whilst We’re Here, You Can Further Develop Your Traffic Through The Addition Of: -

• Celebrity news articles focusing on your users’ area of interest. Mainly documented drunken antics (of which there are many), gossip about what they *might* have done, and also celebrity trainwreck type stories. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan could probably populate a site all on their own. Stories such as the hilarious Ralph Fiennes incident involving a Qantas air hostess and an airplane toilet would have your users returning again and again.

I hope this has given you some ideas Ray.  To be honest I sort of envy you this site, I’d really love to have something like this to have a bit of a play around with.  I think that with the right content, product placement, and SEO you will have an extremely valuable bit of internet real estate on your hands.

You may even be able to give me back that fiver you whipped out from under my nose in Newcastle!

Been missing me?  Sorry!  I’m immersed in family matters at the moment.  However, below is a guest post from Sam who has had some very good results from following my advice in a Recent Ask Kirsty.

Here he describes in his own words how a few really simple steps helped him “get it on” with that fickle mistress we all know and love, Google….

Now, in my experience it takes a lot longer than 5 minutes to win over any lady (unless, of course, they are heavily inebriated), but with Kirsty’s help, I did just that, to a teetotal girl called Google (my parents would be so proud of me). Let me explain…

Kirsty has very kindly given me the opportunity to provide feedback, following the advice I received for my Lawn Mower Review affiliate site. In the original ‘Ask Kirsty’ post, I outlined some of the fundamental problems I was having, and received some great answers.

I’ve since put some of Kirsty’s suggestions into practice, and had some fantastic results, which I’d like to share with you all.

One of my biggest frustrations was with indexing. Despite being very nice to Google, giving her a beautiful site map, providing her with delicious incoming links from Digg, and even waiting weeks for her (I didn’t want to rush our relationship), she still refused to sleep with me fully index my site. This was a big problem, as without my site fully indexed, I was missing out on serious traffic.

This is where Kirsty (relationship councillor extraordinaire) came in. Kirsty suggested one of the reasons why Google didn’t love me, was because of the internal cross-linking between pages on my site. Now, I hadn’t really thought about this before, but after improving the sitation (linking to every page, from every other page), and giving Google what she really wanted (the cross-link diamond ring, if you will) my site and Google really hit it off.

I basically achieved this by including a footer on each one of my pages, this literally took 5 minutes to do, and ensured I had good cross-links throughout my site. Now, it should be noted that there are better ways to do this. I used this quick-fix method just to test Google, a bit like treating her to a new Mini-Cooper test drive, before actually buying it for her. Now that I’ve seen she likes the new Mini-Cooper, I may well develop more graceful cross-links (next/previous buttons for example, to navigate through each lawn mower review).

This immediately improved the indexing situation, I went from having just 42 pages indexed, to 200, in a very short space of time:

And thus, with more pages indexed, I caught more keywords, and approximately doubled my organic traffic:

…and all in the space of a day (ok, so she needed some time to think about it, but fell for me in the end). We’ve since lived happily ever after, and she’s even started giving me gifts, by putting me in the #1 spot for certain keywords!

So, for any love sick folks out there, wanting to improve your indexing situation, be sure to not overlook the cross-link diamond ring!

It would be great to hear your comments on this.

Comment from Kirsty: -

Gosh darn it, I think that was a fab post! From my POV it really is fantastic to hear that my advice has helped people achieve such great results.  Well done to Sam for a really nicely worded and laid out bit of affiliate blogging.  Really enjoyed reading it!

An interesting question from Rod that I’m sure I’ve touched upon before, but this is one of those topics that does bear regular revisitation - is PPC still the go for new affiliates?

Here’s his question: -

Hi Kirsty
I stumbled on your blog while doing some initial research into affiliate marketing and was very impressed the writing is refreshingly clear and actually pointing to one of your niches (the lingerie site) is generous - I haven’t found many people who actually give examples of their sites.

If you have time (I’m sure you get plenty of questions from latecomers to AM) I wonder if you could tell me if there is still any mileage in doing PPC campaigns
- I read so many different accounts on the web and it’s pretty hard to be sure of getting current information, any advise you could give to a struggling newcomer would be appreciated.

I’ve been following Jeremy Palmers Blackink seminars in the states
http://www.theblackinkproject.com which has a lot of good information but the course is aimed mainly at people developing affiliate sites and for me at the moment this seems like biting off more than I can chew - I thought running a some PPC campaigns might be a better way to get a feel for things - do you think this is realistic?

Hello Rod,

There’s Still Money In Them Thar Hills

PPC can still make you good money. Most of my income comes from this, although I’m using landing pages and diversifying into SEO again also. I guess what you are asking is “Does direct to merchant still work?”

I say… yes it is!! If I were you, I’d be looking to try out dipping a toe in with a few direct to merchant campaigns on Google and perhaps a few simple landing pages on Yahoo.

The good thing about direct to merchant activity is that it gives you the ability to test out a market before you go spending your precious time building a site around a particular merchant or niche. Although many merchants no longer want affiliates competing on their URL in Adwords in particular, that doesn’t always mean you can’t give MSN a whirl. Also, there are plenty of merchants still out there very happy to allow direct to merchant activity.

Don’t Take A Scattergun Approach…
I will caution you though. Please, please, please be careful what you bid on!! Think before you bid 50p on the word “chocolate” or something, lol. It’s sad but true that quite a few newbies chuck traffic at a merchant and hope for the best. This is not the way to go. Really sit down and have a good old think about what you might search for if you wanted to buy your target products… base your campaign on very tightly defined terms for very specific things, and make sure you send your traffic right to the spot on the merchant site where they will find what they seek. Therein lies the holy grail - conversions!!

My Best previous posts in the keyword research area were about Keyword Research Techniques and also a bit in a broader post about Where To Send PPC Traffic & Identify Keywords.

I Wouldn’t Dream Of Creating A Site In An Untested Market…

I have based every single site I’m developing this year on a direct to merchant PPC campaign. I use them to gather information about which merchants work in which sectors. Once I know a merchant or niche can cut it, I am safe to spend my time creating a good site around them… so I think your idea is a good one.

Let us know how you get on Rod, the next thing you need to do is… something! Get into it mate!!

Just when I was starting to think I had answered most of the “types” of questions I’m asked via e-mail, I got a bit of a cracker from Christopher, who I’d previously corresponded with about the need to add good SEO content to your site on an ongoing basis. He came back to me with a thorny issue. The backside had fallen out of his conversion rates after he had just started to think his new affiliate site was a right wee goer!

Here’s his question (his niche and site have been removed as he really has found a totally cracking area to work in and I don’t want him getting 100 competitors because of my blog.)

I’m getting a bit worried now and thought i would ask for some advice. I’ve
been adding articles daily to my website, i added 7-8 yesterday and 5 the
day before to try and increase visitors. At the moment it’s sitting at
around 80 visitors from search engines but conversions are hitting rock
bottom now - this may be normal but here’s some stats to paint a picture.

Thanks for any help Kirsty.

Well Christopher…

It’s Way Too Easy To Have A Knee Jerk Reaction…
Generally speaking, I think the best advice is don’t worry at all about the variations in conversion rates. Its way too easy to over analyse these things. Sometimes there is a reason for conversions turning to shit. Towards the end of the month for example people have less money and are browsing ahead to see what they’ll buy when they get paid. Conversions always surge after the last Thursday / Friday of the month (for my niches they do anyhow!).

Also weekends can be dodgy, public holidays, good weather days, major sporting events. Even when your traffic is the same, conversions drop. Seems only window shoppers stay at home on special days.

Its important when you see a drop that you don’t overreact and totally re-jig your whole site. There are lots of external factors you should take a look at first before you start to blame your own handywork. If it worked fine up till now, why should that change?

Here’s a few things to think about.

Affiliate Serendipity
However, sometimes you are just unlucky for a few days!! I had a day recently where for no apparent reason I LOST money. WTF? I mean come on! Nothing had changed, just serendipity.

The Best Thing To Do Is Wait And Collect Data…
I’d give it a good couple of weeks before you go changing anything. Sometimes as an affiliate the best thing you can do is to just sit tight and wait. Of course, the less positive way to look at this might be that those few days of ace conversions were the exception rather than the norm. If that turns out to be the case I’d analyse what happened in those few days that might have made the difference.

Where Did The Increase In Conversions Come From?
Were you suddenly ranking for a term you’d not previously cracked? If so that might be a good one to try out some PPC on, or orientate some good SEO content towards.

Check Your Other Data…
- If you are really worried, check your “bounce rate” on the days your conversions have sucked. i.e. how many people visited the site v’s how many went through to the merchant. Has that changed? If so, something might be up somewhere.

- Broken links, a merchant site down, or merchants tracking being broken can all also be causes of sudden loss of conversion rates too. Have a link audit, check the merchants site and look for any notices about site maintenance and downtime that might have slipped past your radar.

If you see a drop in conversions and just can’t find a reason within your own site, drop the merchant a line. Ask how things are for their traffic. Quite often I do this and the merchant comes back telling me their site has seen the same type of conversion reduction as mine and can give me some more insight into market conditions causing this.

- If you have a feeling tracking has been wonky, politely ask for a tracking test or two to be done through one of your affiliate url’s by the merchant. You’ll either be reassured or help them discover they have an issue!!

- Check what keywords people came in on during those days when conversions dropped. Were they relevant? Had they changed? That might explain a drop in conversions too.

Analysing what has been happening before, during, and after any issues can really help you to see what was going on with your site. If you just can’t see anything wrong… there’s probably nothing to change. Sit tight and keep analysing your data. Most of the time, checking your data will show you where the issue lies.

Christopher Says…
Thanks for info on analyzing - i would never of thought this but i suppose thats why your own data is so important. I think i’ve pinpointed the keywords and the reasons why it was so high in comissions. My conversion rates and EPC for certain merchants are really good still but the surge in sales i think was due to an offer Merchant X where having as well as being #3 for a very good term, which im number 10 now.

So there you go folks. I think this particular Ask Kirsty shows the importance of analysing your sales data, search engine rankings and merchant activity as much as possible. I do this on a daily basis and the valuable information that gets thrown up is unreal.

If you have an Ask Kirsty Contact Me using my contact form and I will do my best to get back to you!