A quick trawl through my inbound search terms has revealed that lots of people come here with questions.  Not a surprise given the nature of the blog but I thought it might be nice if I answered a few questions here that started with a frustrated search for greater affiliate knowledge on Google and ended on my blog which may or may not have provided an answer!

Now given that I’m a normally lovely girl, I don’t like to be too blunt with all the nice people who e-mail me questions. However this format gives me the opportunity to do some of the plain talking I’m known for at times…

site:http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk “i earn” – how many times do I have to say I’m not bloody well telling youse!  Lets define it as “plenty”

affiliate how to find a christmas niche – Hmmm… maybe try just about anything that’s a gift?  Christmas is one of the only times of the year where you seriously should not struggle for a niche.  If a merchant doesn’t perform then, it is very likely they never will (unless travel related!)

a4u expo 2009 win a ticket – Enter Kierons comp right here>> Entries close 28th September so get yer damned well skates on!

how to calculate potential affiliate earnings? *sigh* I know lots of people really want to know this but the answer genuinely is between £0 and £1,000,000,000,000 – it all depends on your ability and how much work you’ll end up putting in.  End of story.

affiliate niche guns – I think you should remove caffeine from your diet.  And possibly seek counselling.

affiliate marketing is it a rip off? Well, it does sound too good to be true sometimes   But it is a real and bonafide way to make money.  However if someone is saying “Make $$$$ via affiliate marketing by giving me $$” then yeah, that is a scam 99% of the time!

google affiliate slap seo? Google doesn’t slap affiliate sites just for being affiliate sites.  Saying your site has been slapped for being an affiliate offering is merely an excuse for a lack of unique content, poor seo techniques, and use of blackhat tactics that would get any site slapped (unwitting or otherwise).  Google doesn’t hate affiliates – it hates sites that don’t add value!  It  of irritates me that this seems to often be aired as an excuse for a site not working out. If your site doesn’t work out the only person you should be looking at as the reason is yourself.

why doesn’t google like affiliate marketers? It’s only the ones who don’t try hard enough Google doesn’t like.  See above.

can i use free wordpress blog to do affiliate marketing? You sure can, that’s the beauty of WordPress.

can you do ppc for affilate sites? Yes, but for the love of God make sure you know what you are doing first!

have you been paid by tradedoubler september 2009? Yes, I was.  It was even on time this month.  They didn’t feel like answering my important support query re: future payments now that I’m moving my company to Australia though so next month might be a different kettle of fish.

how long into google penalty do you ditch a domain name Not until you understand exactly what it was you got penalised for in the first place.  Else it’ll happen again, see?

i hate online marketing - We don’t like you either, now bugger right off!

kirsty’s undies – Oi!!  What have I said about these kind of queries you disgusting rotter?!?!

max bramwell single – I dunno, why don’t you look it up on Facebook you scary internet stalker, LOL.

why is my ppc not converting – either you are rubbish, or the merchant is rubbish. Or both.

website dropped 200 places in google – That’s looking pretty ominous matey… Maybe think back to any content stuffing or naughty link tactics from recent weeks.

how do i know if i’ve triggered a google filter? See above.

google penalty recovery time – about as long as it takes you to work out exactly what you did wrong, fix it to Google’s satisfaction, plus anything from a few days to a few weeks.  Oh, and you have to do all that without anyone really being able to tell you what you did wrong in the first place.  Good eh?

what can i buy kirsty? Awww…. a new set of gardening gloves would be awesome.  Wouldn’t mind a Mercedes SLK either.

Well, I feel much better for that!  I may even be able to attempt assisting Duncan at re-oiling our back deck in a little while.  Work though?  I’ll answer that with another question: -

will working less help me relieve my stress?

YES - now I’m off to tend my garden and get all thoughts of affiliate marketing out of my head for a few hours

An interesting question from Matt Re: how to organise the different promotional stages of a site!

Hi Kirsty,

I’ve been beavering away building a site and now I have been rummaging
around on the internet thinking about the best way to start promoting a new site.
From what I have read it seems there are 2 distinct approaches – PPC and
SERPS traffic.

Since you seem to be one of the few that uses both I was
wondering how you decide which to focus on during the lifecycle of a site?
From my (newbie) perspective it would seem that PPC initially then shift
focus to the SEO/linkbuilding is the way to go…is this how you approach it?

Many thanks,
Matt

Well, the reason I moved into SEO was that I was sick of having to churn
and burn my PPC domains because my affiliate content was too thin and
kept getting slapped by Google. I sat down and worked out what I
thought the landing page algo would need to keep my pages up there long
term. I realised that it’d be hard work, but that as I was going to
write lots of unique content and provide good information resources
anyhow I might as well go for SEO and PPC traffic at the same time.

So in answer to your question, I always try for both right from the
start. The PPC gets things kicked off whilst I’m getting inbound links
and the search engines are doing their stuff. I also use SEO data to
feed new keywords into my PPC campaigns and PPC data to direct my
content strategy as that tends to reveal very quickly “where the money
is at”. Usually SEO traffic turns up quite quickly too, it doesn’t take
you more than 4 to 6 weeks to bring in 20% of your traffic in this way
which if you have targeted things properly makes a huge difference to
your profit margins.

I had an e-mail from the lovely Nicola recently following up a previous plea for help with a note to let me know how she was going and to ask me to take a look at her new site and give her some thoughts.

Hi Kirsty

Well since I first emailed you I have got my first AM site up and running.  www.babychamtrainers.co.uk it has been up since 21st August
and I have made my first sale with a massive commision of 88pence, but still was very excited to see a sale and I’ve got to start
somewhere (won’t be giving up the day job just yet though).

I’m spending around £1.50 – £2.50 a day on ppc which seems to keep me at the top of google most of the time.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Nicola

Hi Nicola,

That’s a really good niche site to hone your skills on for a first  effort.  I think too many people try to do a massive website about lots  of products and that ultimately slows down the learning process.

And congratulations on that first sale – it’s a bit of a buzz eh?!

I think you need to make your home page look a bit more like a merchant  product page, I think the “click to see products” text will increase the  number of people who land on the site and then leave immediately.

Here’s an example of a product landing page I’ve recently completed: -

http://www.personalisedgiftsuk.com/personalised-football-books/celtic-football-club-book/

(site is not quite finished yet, but you get the idea!)

I use pages like that a lot of the time and they have an excellent click  through rate.  I’m not suggesting that you have to come up with  something like that to make your site work – but a little bit of HTML  popped into the WordPress framework can go a very long way!  If you can  work at getting good “calls to action” on your page that will encourage  people to click through to the merchant that will also help.  A nice  product picture, linked through to merchant with a bit of link text  beside or underneath that says Browse More Babycham Trainers >> will  also work.

Alternatively, Easy Content Units look great and can create a nice  professional looking product area.

http://www.easycontentunits.com/

I’d also start doing some posts about some of the product lines you’re  covering, describe what they are and why you think people would want to  buy them.  I tend to do this in my blog post titles and it works really  well for getting in free traffic.

For example: – Multicoloured Canvas Trainers by Babycham Footwear

Or

Black Trainers with Pink Laces by Babycham – Hot 80s Style

Or

Babycham Basic Strap Trainers – Cool Velcro Fastenings!

What content like that does is draw in traffic both from people who  already know they want to buy Babycham Trainers but also from people who  know they want shoes with Velcro fastenings.

If you can, do some link research or ask around in forums and see if you  can get some backlinks to help the site bring in some organic traffic.

I’d also get your side menu populated, as it’s currently looking a bit  bare.  The more navigation / information options you give your visitors  the better chance you have of converting to a sale.

Finally, change your home page title from Babychamtrainers.com to Buy
Babycham Trainers UK : Designer Trainers – or similar.   Your main
product title as all one word will weaken the SEO strength of the page.

One thing you have done that could cause you issues later is buying a  domain with a trademark in it.  I’ve known a few affiliates put a bit of  work into such domains only to have them whipped off them by the brand.  Some brands seem very worried about this whilst others don’t pay any  attention.

I hope this helps you in your affiliate efforts!

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.

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!