Been a while since I’ve had a good “Ask Kirsty” through, this one is an oldie… but a goodie. It’s the old and still painful niche selection problem!

Hi Kirsty,

I need some advice. Im new to affiliate marketing and have been reading as much as i can for the past few months. While reading, there have been 2 things that seem to be repeated quite often, 1) pick a subject you enjoy and have a passion for and 2)just do it.

So, keeping inline with the ‘just do it’ statement, i started searching for a niche/product to promote early on but i didnt really think about picking a topic that i enjoyed. I thought that once i saw the money coming in then that would motivate me anyway.

So i found a kitchen appliance product that didn’t have a lot of competition and got about 27k local exact search (according to Google keyword tool) ad went about creating the site. Im a web developer/designer career wise so enjoyed the site creation, but now im stuck. I need to write content for it, but i have no interest in this product and find it so mind numbingly boring that i can’t bring myself to do it everyday. When i do write content for the site (reviews for each product) i find myself writing the same thing over and over again for each product. its basically the same thing from different manufacturers! i cant afford to hire content writers so the sites come to a halt.

So, i guess i realised the hard way why its important to pick a topic that you enjoy, at least until you get enough experience and maybe make some money.

But here’s my problem. Everything that i have any interest in is so heavily saturated and overly competitive that i don’t think i can compete and it wont be worth the time and effort to get so little reward. For example, i enjoy playing video games, but thats to broad a market and very competitive anyway. i could dig deeper and go for sub sections of the games market to target a niche, but these niches don’t really get any searches so again, its not really worth the time or the effort.

Do you have a tips or ideas of where i can go from here?

Well, Abbid I can immediately pick up on more than one common mistake that you have made in all of this. Clearly you’ve already learned the hard way about needing to be interested in what you are promoting, so we’ll skip that one! So the areas you need to look at again are: -

• Basing your niche selection purely upon what the Google Keyword tool tells you. It’s great to give you a rough idea, but it often over and under estimates actual traffic you might get from your search terms.  Bear in mind that the data you are seeing has been collated on an automatic basis. Whilst it is a good way to investigate possible traffic bearing areas, I think it is important to also realise that it is often innaccurate.
• Basing your niche selection around a single keyword – it sounds to me like you are subscribing to the “exact match domain” school of affiliate marketing.  Whilst this particular bit of advice has been floating around for a while and has been very useful I think it is a mistake to accept it as gospel, and the thinking of it as a formula to succeed is a woeful over simplification. Remember that on any domain, you will not only get traffic relating to your main search term but on many related search terms if you take the time to put up decent content.  I have a single product domain which Google reckons has 880 monthly searches. I get 2,000 visits per month to it because I’m not only ranking for that term but many other related terms thanks to my decent content.
• Thinking you need an exact match domain – You don’t. Yes, try to get something attractive looking with at least one important keyword in it – but don’t let it be a rod for your back. This mistake wasn’t obvious from your question, I’m just guessing. However a lot of people reading this probably let exact match domain availability rule their progress too much, so I’ve included it
• Letting your pre-conceptions build a wall against progress – You’ve only been involved in affiliate marketing for a short time, but already you have a very rigid notion of what you “have” to do to find your niche. Whilst any bit of useful advice you get in this game should be heeded, do not treat it like gospel. First of all, are you absolutely SURE there’s no search volume around the small and targeted niches you have been thinking of?  If they are interconnected I’d consider doing a site to house say 5 or 6 of these, approach one at a time and add others when ready.  Secondly, how can you know that areas are over saturated without actually trying?  On each and every over saturated niche I’ve ever entered I’ve quickly realised I’m one of the only people knocking about who is prepared to spend time producing quality, unique content.  Choose a small area and don’t take on the big boys, but don’t be put off by a little competition either.

Tips and Ideas

I want to be a little more helpful than picking holes in your reasoning, so here’s where I’d go from your current situation.

• Game controller site?  Any other accessories people might buy that you’re an expert on? Most gaming consoles seem to have a plethora of add ons. If I was doing a site like that I’d create a comprehensive section covering each console brand and review main products. Then I’d also create a section for each major use or type of controller i.e. “flight simulator game controllers”  At first glance, there are an awful lot of authority sites in that area… but as I said before, put out some quality content and you will get traffic. Large authority sites are often unable to break out of a set “mould” in their content and structure. If you personalise your approach to how you would shop for these things yourself, I’m betting you’d get traffic.
• Sit down and list absolutely everthing that you’d enjoy shopping for online, and use one of them. Over simplified advice? Yeah, definately but it does sort of come back to the “just do it” phrase you alluded to at the start of this question. You will have to start somewhere, and even if it turns out not to have been the right place, you will learn something you can feed into your next attempt.
• Do not get disheartened if what you try first does not work. You absolutely must try again. Affiliate marketing is not an easy thing to master, there will be false starts and you have to get over them to succeed. Acknowledge that at the start and you have a good chance of winning!!

I think I’ll leave it there… plenty to digest as the post approaches 1200 words!

Good luck

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

Ask Kirsty – Niche Selection Isn’t As Easy As It Sounds, Is It?

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.

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

Ask Kirsty – Pros and Cons of Datafeeds?

*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!

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

Ask Kirsty – What Would You Do if You Were Starting Out Again?

Fellow Australian affiliate Zane McIntyre has a couple of questions about making sure he’s doing the most he can to maximise his opportunities for exposure and revenue maximisation:-

Dear Kirsty,

I have a few things that I wanted to clarify. Generally information where I cannot seem to find a definitive answer on the www and would love to have your thoughts.

Question 1: To Ping or Not to Ping?

I have read alot about WordPress guru’s using a wordpress approved ping list. By default pingomatic is used by wordpress, is this sufficient or should we expand our ping lists to ensure all the blog catalogs and news sites out there are being notified of updates to our sites? I attempt at all times to stay within the realms of legitimacy for my sites and my only concern is if I am pinging a plethora of sites out there will I be classified as ping spamming?

When it comes to promoting your site and increasing your visits there is no golden button that says “Click this to increase your traffic” but I have heard that traffic can be increased by pinging a wider variety of sites.

Below is a list I found and was contemplating using.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

Question 2: Sitting back and evaluating the true performance of your site.

Recently I have had a slump in sales to my sites and believe this is only a sign of the times as my hits have not decreased and my content is increasing every day. So I am using this time to sit back and evaluate all of my sites and have them well positioned for when the economy picks up again.

I am evaluating my sites with the use of pretty excel spreadsheets to get a very clear overview of my monthly profits. I start by noting the site, monthly visits, monthly profit and dividing the profit by the visits to get an idea of how much each visitor as an average is spending. This gives me an idea each month to see if I have performed better than the last and use the hits divided by profit to see where I stand. If nothing changes or the profit per visitor is not increasing even though my hits are increasing I know I need to see where my performance is lacking. I do this by checking Google Analytics to see my top 25-50 pages or posts and go through them to see why they may not be converting. With this information I can then edit those pages to have more calls to action or clearly define what I want the visitor to do next.

Am I doing this correctly or do you have any suggestions to how I can better evaluate my sites performance? All of my traffic is purely organic and I do not run any PPC campaigns at this time, this is simply because of the uncertainty of PPC as of late with Google getting sand in their cracks and banning accounts etc so I don’t want PPC to be my be all and end all.

Can’t wait to hear from you.

Regards

Zane McIntyre

Good questions Zane, and thanks for the list of pinging services too!

Question 1. I must confess that with my own sites I simply let pingomatic do it’s stuff. I therefore have absolutely no idea how much traffic value one might expect to get from pinging such services.  However I have no doubt that there will be absolutely no issue with you using as many of those services as you desire as using them seems to be included in just about every “increasing your blog traffic 101″ type post out there.

Speaking of distributing content, if you are investing a lot in adding lovely unique content to your site don’t forget to set your feed settings to “summary” under your reading settings in the WordPress control panel.  This will help prevent nasty old spammy content robbers from purloining your content for evil purposes. Not that Google is usually fooled by this sort of carry on, but its blasted well irritating.  I can also heartily recommend using the RSS Footer Plugin which will mean any posts reproduced from your feed will include a link back to your site.

Question 2.

It already sounds like you are doing a pretty good job of analysing your traffic and ensuring that you are keeping an eye firmly on the bottom line. It’s also a good idea to constantly look at your top pages.

I’m not clear from your question how much you are focusing upon which of those top 25 to 50 pages are actually creating your profit? It sounds as if you may just be focusing on the pages generating the most traffic. If your merchant or network doesn’t have a service in place where you can put a unique identifier into your URLs so you can see which links are bringing in the bacon, this may be the only avenue open to you.

However, if you are able to identify which pages are generating lots of conversions this will be incredibly valuable information to pass back into your campaigns.  Things are rarely spread evenly over every page on your site. Usually the 80:2o rule or something close to that will be at play. Therefore it’s immensely beneficial to be able to look at those pages and the products on them and have a think about why they are converting. Then you can see if you’re able increase what you are doing by creating more pages for similar products or items with similar selling points.

Another thing I tend to do is make sure I’m aware of how different blocks of traffic are performing as well as taking a view of site performance as a whole.  Often a particular type of traffic may not perform as well with a merchant whilst other traffic is a-ok. It is important for me to be able to switch the traffic elsewhere to see if I can better the EPC and conversion rate. I’ve recently done this for some of my underwear related traffic and increased profits by £300. Pretty good for an hours work updating my link file and a few minutes with a calculator!

I hope this has helped, and if anyone knows more about traffic from pinging services please do post in the comments section – I’d value the additional input!

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

Ask Kirsty – Pinging Services & Affiliate Performance Evaluation

Hi Kirsty,

Been following u on twitter and this site for a while, and you certainly know your stuff! I have a number of great domains, and wish to turn them all into affiliate sites. However, I want to start on the most profitable one first.. so do you know, anywhere, where i can get a list of the potential income by affiliate sector at all??

i.e. music, gaming, news, lighting, etc etc .. i thought it would be easy to find, but it certainly isnt !

many thanks,

nigel

Hi Nigel,

Sorry to say that such a resource does not exist! Affiliates are notoriously cagey about such things and besides I think such numbers would be very difficult to accurately measure. The only thing I can suggest is to try to do a bit of research in a few different ways.

• Check out EPCs of merchants in the sectors you are thinking of working in on the main networks. These are of course averages and can be skewed by the presence of things such as incentive sites so it is important to have a really good look at any merchants you think could be decent performers and try to see how you think you will perform. Place yourself in the shoes of a consumer interested in your niche products. Would you buy from them? It may even pay to go as far as placing a few test orders to see who you really rate. After all, it’s a small investment compared to the time you will spend building your site!

• Don’t get distracted by considerations of product values when considering the performance of potential merchants. The main thing you are interested in is getting the most amount of profit from the least amount of clicks, thus making your progress towards a nice profit much quicker. Sometimes lower value products will convert better. I’ve found lots of affiliates get distracted by dreams of wild riches from selling thousands of high end products every month. Focus on conversions and how much you think every click through to a merchant can earn you.

• Check out the competition. One factor I’d consider if I had lots of domains to choose from would be which one I’d be able to get ranking most quickly. With that in mind I’d test a few key terms around each of my domains and see if there was lots of authority sites competing for positions. Also, if any of your domains are keyword based and might attract a good search volume I’d bump them towards the top of your priority list as you will rank them much more easily.

• If you really want to try and come up with a concrete figure I suggest you try to work out what EPC you would achieve sending traffic to the merchants you think you’d work with. Use a combination of the network figures and your own gut feeling, and then look at how much you’d earn from 1,000 visitors sent to them. You also could attempt to work out how much traffic your various sites would get using the monthly search data on a range of keywords from Google and a reasonable CTR based on top ten positions, but I really feel there are too many “what ifs” in this kind of analysis for an affiliate. However it might help you work out potential for growth and longer term profits that you can feed into your considerations.

Finally, my best suggestion for you is that you get at least a mini site up for each and every one of the domains you are considering developing. That way the ones you aren’t working on can be in the index and ageing. This will also allow you to keep an eye out for any link opportunities that may come up. This is advice I really also need to take myself, LOL.

Finally finally, all the above bits of advice are great. But really you shouldn’t spend too long on them or asking yourself lots of questions. Just do it as the clever people at Nike would say. Advice that Tiger Woods really took a step too far

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

Ask Kirsty – How To Work Out Which Domain To Develop First?

Hahahaha – OK the title is a bit strong here but I was a bit pushed for space in terms of making it nice and succinct.  Also, that’s the turn of phrase I couldn’t get out of my head when I read the question so in true Kirsty “I’ve thought it so I absolutely have to say it now” style – I decided to let it out

A better way to put the question I asked would be “Ask Kirsty – Why Does Your Site Not Comform to the “Rules” of SEO and Yet Is Still Somehow Generating Heaps Plenty Traffic?”, but it wasn’t as catchy see?

Over to you Scott…

Hi Kirsty,

I just read your great post on getting to 50,000 visits…congrats!

The essence of your post intrigued me enough to do some research.

Though I have been around web page building for a decade, I am relavitely newto Internet/Affiliate Marketing, and when you mentioned about how to focus on the next niche, it started me thinking.

If many noobies are like myself, we learn SEO/SEM along the way, so by the time its time for the next niche project, there are changes to be made because of what has been learned (the good and the bad). It is funny that we tend to maybe
not do what made the previous site successful, though it may just be an attempt to do SEO/SEM better, not knowing the consequences.

Take for instance lingeriebrands.co.uk…per the SEO ‘experts’ point of view, your home page is not properly configured- you have 302 META keywords (the ‘experts’ say you should be limited to 25 max), no META description, only 1 external link, no H1 titles, limited content per keyword throughout the site, and yet your site does extremely well.

I’m kind of analytical, which can be a negative at times…of your site’s 302 KWs, 202 rank in the top 100, 59 are on the first page of Google UK, and 9 are in first position, and your site has a PR2 ranking.

So what is it then that has made the site successful?

You have 658 backlinks, and looks like you have used a variety of tactics, including backlinking from many of your other sites, and other created blog sites.

May I inquire if you presently use or had subscriped to a backlinking service?

Another plus here is probably the 2,100+ pages of content and age of your site.

So if this was my niche site, I would be confused, based on SEO/SEM guidance I have read, etc.

I am curious how you would focus on your next project, knowing the above. Maybe the secret formula, however, is…

Proper niche research
Take ACTION!
Add content, continuously
Be PATIENT

Hahahaha – great question Scott!

I used to be a full time SEO consultant and spent lots of time doing titles, meta keywords, and descriptions with mathematical precision. Keyword densities were calculated as were things like volume of link text, headers etc etc etc. To my annoyance lots of people who were ignoring these “rules” seemed to be doing really well.

In the end I concluded that I could keep up my knowledge of all the exact intricacies of SEO or I could adopt a new and more basic set of rules that would allow me to “just get on with it” in terms of providing quality content and concentrating upon the broader spectrum of things an affiliate has to be good at to run a successful business.

* Add good quality content, and lots of it.
* Make it natural but still write it with half an eye on using lots of different descriptive terms around the products I’m writing about and remembering the content is supposed to be on a certain theme.
* Make sure I don’t overstuff keywords (I’ve done this by accident at times when concentrating too hard on page design and things like Adwords QS).
* Create good page structures both for SEO and the user. By focusing on the user I can maximise the amount of traffic I get through to merchant (around 80% for that site).
* As for all the meta stuff… I’ve not found much benefit to spending time on it any more. Google largely ignores it and I’ve found if I have good, compelling prose on my pages the description displayed by Google is A-OK anyhow.

As for why my site is successful, I think it is simply because I’ve put a lot of effort into good page structure, decent navigation (it could be better on that site TBH) and targeting lots of relevant traffic. I think you can have all the analysis and precise SEO in the world, but there is never a substitute for good content.

Do I use a backlinking service? Yes, I use Content Now (Note to self: I must start invoicing them for the links I give them on this blog). I’ve also started to get a fair few good quality “spontaneous links” from sites (which again goes back to decent content). I think your analysis of the secret formula is dead on. Particularly the “be patient” bit. It’s taken the site 2 years to get to the stage its currently at and its frequently gone through long periods of non growth regardless of the content I’ve been adding. Lots of people get discouraged when that happens but perseverance pays off and you tend to see a reward for your content efforts in the end.

Hope this helps

P.S.  I’d like to thank Scott for all the facts and figures in that question.  I think it was one of the most thoroughly researched questions I have ever gotten since the blog started.

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

Ask Kirsty – How Come Your SEO’s Shit and You’re Still Getting Loads of Traffic?!?

This is a question I answered a while ago and then forgot to publish when my parents were here (note to self, use the WordPress scheduling tool!). Someone needed help making their cake tin site a little more sweet and I was glad to help!

Hi Kirsty,

Am an avid follower of your blog and thought I would drop you a quick message to ask for some feedback on a website that we have. www.caketins.org.uk is the website and I’m looking for your feedback on how well you feel the site works?

We are getting a steady stream of visitors now the site has been live for around 5 months.

Most days we make a sale so I’m just looking for hints and tips on where you think we could improve, especially around increasing conversion?

That is a pretty nice looking site, so well done on putting it together. A sale a day is steady progress as well.

I think there are probably a few more things you could do to polish your offering and improve the performance of the visitors that you are getting as well as attracting in more. I’ll try to create a list here for you to action!

Overall structure of pages – I think this could be better. There’s an awful lot of text floating around and not enough in the way of images that will immediately show your visitors that you have some pretty darned attractive cake tins to sell them.

Calls to action – I think these could be improved dramatically. Get some nice looking graphic buttons or include a big bold link with Shop Now >> or More Info >> If you do use a link, make it bigger and bolder than the surrounding text. People don’t read internet pages properly so you really need to hold their hand when herding them through to the merchant.

Traffic Funnelling – When I clicked on your side menu (which is quite nicely done and visual) I expected to immediately see some more cake tins. However I was instead presented with a series of hard to see text links requiring me to drill down 3 levels. I believe you’re probably still working on this section right now, however I think you’d be hard pressed to keep people’s interest after the first page, so this needs some work. I suggest no more than 2 clicks within the site before you are ushering them on to the merchant.

The actual menu structure you’ve created for your shopping sections makes a lot of sense, so well done there. However I’d add some more unique content to try and get in some additional traffic around these areas. Write at least a couple of hundred words for each section and team them up with the nice images and calls to action mentioned above.

The Home Page – needs to immediately offer some great product options and have a nice strong structure. Create some nice offers and buying options that visitors will immediately see. The homepage should be showing the best selling products that you know a lot of people are interested in buying, or be showcasing top site sections.

Navigation – It would be great if you are able to offer people a shop-like navigation either on your top or one of your side bars. People do look around for these and they can help make your site look a lot more polished.

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

Ask Kirsty – Please Review My Niche Affiliate Site

Hi Kirsty

I’ve been reading your blog pretty much since the start of 2009 when, encouraged by Smingle’s a4u posts, I started my first affiliate sites. One of my sites, which I started before the summer, is the one entered above, for 8 ft trampolines with enclosures. I did my research, found it gets a reasonable amount of exact searches, it’s a fairly large item making delivery a sensible option, the .co.uk domain was available and the competition weak.

It started well, and climbed to near the top of page 1 for the main search term in Google. It generated a few sales through Amazon until about 4 weeks after launch it suddenly dropped. It now ranks about page 4 or 5 for its main term, yet ranks better for some of the secondary pages.

Would you be able to have a look and see what you think please?

I have my concerns that it is over-optimised and Google has penalised me for being a thin affiliate site. I didn’t intend updating it really, as the market for trampoline is just for a few months over the summer. It still ranks #1 in Yahoo, and it gets 10-20 UVs a day from which I get the occasional sale, but more than anything I want to learn what I have done wrong so I don’t make the same mistake again!

Thanks

Tom

Website: http://www.8fttrampolinewithenclosure.co.uk

I don’t think you have over optimised this site at all, I reckon you need to put a bit of time into some link building for this site. I also think you need to add a small amount of content on a regular basis.

You do usually see a site getting an initial boost in the rankings when it is first launched. It then “Settles” into the index. Sometimes in a less competitive area it’ll gradually bubble its way back to the top. I’ve had domains do this and take anything from a few months to a year. Clearly though, its desirable to get some results quicker than that!

If you do a little work on getting some links in you should see an improvement. Also, sites that are updated regularly will often be able to achieve better rankings not to mention the all important benefit of some additional organic traffic. It would take you ten minutes a day just to add a quick post of a couple hundred words. I don’t think that’s too much of an additional drain on time to get the site you worked so hard to prepare into the SERPS and doing what you wanted it to do!

I know you said it is a limited market, but I think it is important for me to highlight that very few affiliate sites created on a “chuck it up and leave it” basis will reach their full potential.

I believe that by not putting the time and effort into a little “follow up” promotion lots of affiliates are effectively penalising themselves.  Google doesn’t want to rank sites that people put up and then leave to do their thing, they want fresh relevant content.  If we as affiliates don’t provide it our sites will often fail to reach their full potential.

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

Ask Kirsty – Has Google Penalised My Site?

An interesting and very to the point question from Dave who is struggling with his new affiliate site!!

As in the title, I’m really pap at affiliate marketing, I just don’t get it.

I’m obviously doing something seriously wrong since I have a few sites that just don’t seem to generate any sales at all, so I wondered if you might be able to tell me where I’m going wrong.

The Insurance Groups site is a good example – it’s now 4th/5th in Google for the main term, commissions are great, but I make zero sales, just a few adsense clicks.

What should I do to make it work better?

Many Thanks!

Website: www.insurancegroups.org.uk

Well, there are a number of thing that probably aren’t helping your cause much!

1. The niche you’ve chosen – You have clearly worked hard on creating lots of content and pages for this site. I don’t want to belittle your effort there, the way you have approached it and created all the different site sections for different types of insurance is absolutely dead on, so well done there. BUT (and you totally knew that was coming, didn’t ya?!) this is an extremely competitive area.

Your pages targeting things like “Motor Cycle Insurance” simply have no chance of ranking for their search terms, you’re up against too many other sites. Taking that as our example, you have no less than 27,100,000 competitors. Given that people very rarely go past the top 10 results – 20 if you are lucky, perhaps the issue here is that you’ve set the bar a wee bit too high for yourself?

2. Your page structure / calls to action – is very poor. Although you’ve jammed the pages with good content, I just can’t see anything there that would compel your visitors to click on a link. Looking at your page, the strongest call to action on there is most definitely provided by those Adwords links. I see you have 4 insurance company choices on your motorbike pages, but those just fade into the background with all the other links you have placed on the page.

If you want to continue with insurance I suggest you take a good look around at how successful sites structure their sales pages. This might perhaps help you come up with an alternative design.

However, I would also strongly suggest that you dip a toe into some other niche waters to help you learn about affiliate marketing. Of course I am biased because I don’t do insurance, but I think if you go for a smaller niche you might find traffic and sales much easier to get which will keep you motivated and help you learn about what works.

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

Ask Kirsty – I’m Crap at Affiliate Marketing – Help!!

Amazon’s recent commission changes have somewhat crushed Greg’s affiliate plans!

I started off in AM with a website running through the Amazon Associates programme, I was able to build an income from this one site upto a peak of £2,200 profit in May & £2,300 in June of this year, solely using PPC for traffic. All was going really well and I was improving my PPC knowledge and optimising the site well. Then Amazon decided to cut it’s % referral rates and drop their direct link bonus (2.5%). This effectively wiped out my profit margin on my PPC campaigns, and has left me struggling to gain an income from the site. I was very aware that ‘all my eggs were in one basket’ and was working hard to branch out to other sites in the Summer.

So far my new sites have failed to bring in any profits, they are based around PPC traffic again, as I felt utilizing my skills in this area would be the best bet. The sites convert traffic well, but it’s the high CPC that’s preventing me from creating any kind of profits. The markets I have entered are very competitive, and I’m struggling to find any profitable long tail search terms, so my question is, how do you find profitable long tail keywords in an already competitive market?

Or would I be better off forgetting these sites and focusing on a smaller niche?
Did I just hit beginners luck with my first site?!

Thanks,
Greg

Well, I think the first thing I need to tell you is that making that kind of money isn’t really to do with beginners luck. You clearly found a group of products that really worked for you and fell victim to the eggs in one basket syndrome that’s bitten most affiliates on the bahookie at one stage or another.

You’ve obviously been working hard on that site, and one answer to the issue you’ve had with Amazon cutting their commissions and effectively wiping out your profit margins is to introduce some nice free SEO traffic into your promotional mix. Your site looks really great, so you clearly know how to put a decent offering together. I think it’s worth giving the site due diligence, adding some nice content, and seeing what can be done with it. It’s certainly a great domain.

Again with your other sites, if they are converting well but you can’t get the traffic cheaply enough I do believe the answer to making them work is to add in some organic traffic to help that PPC budget go a little further. Read this recent article by Nadeem Azam to see just how effective SEO traffic can be in revolutionising your affiliate campaigns: -

http://www.azam.info/combine-seo-ppc-marketing-dominate-search-engine-rankings/

That all said, SEO is not the entire solution to your revenue stream woes. I have loads of landing page sites that do great from PPC traffic alone. One thing you might do is have a think about what might be selling well this Christmas and give some of those things a push using some landing pages. Keep an eye out in the press for “buzz products” you see being spoken about and keep an eye on GMTV and This Morning. If they mention a product as being ace, it can pay you nice dividends to get a PPC landing page up as quickly as possible. I recently saw a massive sales spike on a site of mine because a product had been featured on a Channel 4 show about embarrassing illnesses. I’ve also capitalised on TV shows such as Gok Wan’s How to Look Good Naked in the past.

I can’t really give you more specific niche advice than that (sorry!), finding and making money from new areas can seem like a near impossible Zen art at times… but spending time keeping on chipping away and trying new things is so worthwhile.

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

Ask Kirsty – Amazon Has Humped my Only Campaign. What Now?