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!

I had a bit of an interesting e-mail from Mike recently asking for some guidance on whether his affiliate income aims were realistic or not!

Here’s his question…

Kirsty,

Thanks!

I think aiming to earn $100 a day is a good aim to have BUT (and lord you must have known there was a but coming). If you’re still at the stage of trying to refine your niche ideas and really work out where you will make this money from, you may be getting a little bit ahead of yourself. Don’t get me wrong here it’s absolutely correct to set yourself financial aims, something which has been a huge motivator for me. I don’t want to put you off, but you have to consider that lots of affiliates have been trying to make money online for a year or even two and still haven’t reached the goal you’re talking about. The thing with affiliate marketing is that it is all very much down to the individual. One persons ability to make $100 a day is very much different to another person with the same aim. So you might get $100 a day in your first month, it might also take 2 years.

Some of the reason for potentially taking a while (or never) to make affiliate cash is EXACTLY what you are facing right now… Where the hell do you actually make this money?! The other part is the really important bit of what I’m going to tell you – people set themselves these kinds of aims, fail to meet them because they can’t find their “affiliate mojo” and they get disheartened. However, in my opinion it can be overcome and your earning power speeded up if you deal with things in the right way.

So keep your $100 a day in your mind, but don’t focus on it. First of all….

Find Your Affiliate Mojo!

LOL. The first thing you need to do is find that product that’ll make you go “Yeah Baby, Yeah!” I always tell new affiliates its SO important to find an area that you are passionate about and try to find something in that area you think you can make work. If you try to do something you don’t give a toss about just because you’ve been told you’ll make a killing, you’ll get bored and most likely fail. It’s basically because you can’t identify with your buyer (something you get better at as you go).

A couple of things I’ve written about that might help you: -

How To Find Your First Affiliate Niche
http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/getting-started-as-an-affiliate/ask-kirsty-how-do-i-find-my-first-affiliate-niche/

There’s a fair bit in there that will try to give you insight into how you should think to find that first place to make yourself a bit of cash.

Top tips from Super Affiliates – I went to the Meet the Super Affiliates Panel at the A4UExpo last year and took a note of the success tips the 4 panelists were handing out.
http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/general/top-success-tips-from-super-affiliates/

Then…

Start Small And Build It Up From There…

One of the most pertinent points in the articles above was that you should start small and build your expertise around a small area. I agree wholeheartedly. Once you’ve perfected your technique in your small niche you will be able to re-use the same method to build traffic and drive sales in other areas – and scale up your income. Find one thing that has really worked for you and then use that to find lots of other little things that’ll line your pockets.

So, this has been an incredibly long winded way of saying this to you – Don’t focus on getting $100 a day. Focus on getting your first sale, then focus on how to get another one, and another, another, etc. Compartmentalise your aims. First of all aim for a sale a week, a sale per day, 3 sales per day, 13… and the $100 will take care of itself. The main thing is that you should always be setting yourself small goals and working towards them constantly. They work so much better than one big aim which is designed to achieve all your aspirations. Forgetting to take account of the small achievements can really drag you down.

Its really important to get your mindset right to do affiliate marketing. I know a LOT of people who could make bags of cash as affiliates and they know too. But they just don’t… because their mindset is wrong. They can’t motivate themselves to get to where they need to be with things.

So yeah, that’s how all the above can be summarised. “Yeah, $100 is no bother at all. BUT you need to make sure you motivate yourself to get it!”

Hey hey guys… yet another of the Ask Kirsty questions I’ve been trying to catch up with! Mike recently sent me a question about promoting make money online e-books as a first niche option. I thought it was a really interesting question because these kinds of programmes are the first things a lot of would be affiliates hear about when they try to find out how to make money at this game.

Hello Kirsty

Best regards
Mike

Hello Mike.

Now, I think what you are asking here is a really good question. The reason being, a lot of would-be affiliates get drawn into this area when the start out. This is because the first time they tend to search for something like “make money at affiliate marketing” they have hundreds of e-books thrown at them as examples of how to make money online.

What these schemes basically want you to do is sell their product to other people in exactly the same position you are in right now. Now, ask yourself this… how many e-books have you bought? I bet its not many! E-books are actually very difficult products to market (affiliates are also least likely to buy via an affiliate link).

I have many, many doubts about the ethics of a lot of e-books and make money products. Now, don’t get me wrong there are guys out there selling bonafide useful information, but there are also a lot of products which make promises that are basically lies. Promises such as “6 figure is easy” and “fully automated” are just there to milk the unwary of their money. They actually make my blood boil, so if you did choose to market e-books I would hope you’d only promote genuinely useful tools. I believe It’s important for every new affiliate to know and accept that they have alot of hard work in front of them.

I think it would be far better to go down the product related route. Make money products are hugely competitive and you would most likely struggle with making SEO and PPC work(if you dared open your wallet!). If you find a niche without a great deal of competition you are much more likely to have some success and also to hone your skills as an affiliate.

Here are some previous Ask Kirsty’s about finding a niche and setting up your first site that might help you out: -

http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/getting-started-as-an-affiliate/ask-kirsty-how-do-i-find-my-first-affiliate-niche/

http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/getting-started-as-an-affiliate/what-size-of-affiliate-site-effective-content-ask-kirsty/

Take care

Well, time for me to go back to work guys. If anyone out there is awaiting a response to an “Ask Kirsty”, I have saved all the mails and am working through them… don’t worry I still appreciate y’all!

I’d a really pertinent question from Dan a few days ago. I’ve answered it in various different posts, but I really thought it was worth publishing it all as one question to give a really coherent, cohesive guide.

Here is Dan’s question!

Hey Hey, Love your site. Lots of good information all over. I have a few questions for your “Ask Kirsty” series.

Cheers!
Dan

Hi Dan,

OK, here we go…. when you send PPC traffic to your site it is very important to send them to the page that is most relevant to what they are searching for. For example, if you are buying the keyword “frilly thongs” that had better be the first thing the user sees when they hit your landing page, because if they don’t… they will leave immediately! So on the Lingerie Brands site, i have set up a page for each brand and direct traffic related to those brands there.

As the site develops I will create sections related to different categories of lingerie products to direct more generic lingerie traffic
to. So there will be a “frilly thongs” section etc (well, probably not but it’s a decent example).

As for how to work out those keywords… I tend to employ a slow build technique with a new campaign. First I concentrate on the cheap longtails, and as I get a feel for how profitable my earnings per click are I gradually expand the scope of my keyword to include more general “short tail” terms. That way, I can get a feel for how different sets of keywords are performing and I know what direction I should be developing my activity in. Here are another couple of Ask Kirsty’s related to this topic: -

This one is about how many keywords you should put in your first PPC campaign

http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/getting-started-as-an-affiliate/ask-kirsty-how-many-keywords-for-my-first-campaign/

And this details how I go about actually researching my keywords… sort of!

http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk/getting-started-as-an-affiliate/my-keyword-research-techniques-are-just-a-dream/

As for your question regarding cookies, I’m not sure what you are asking there. Cookie tracking is looked after by the network. I think over a third of my sales take place out of session. You can see what keyword was used by using any network’s in-house keyword tracking system. These work by allowing you to pass a unique variable through your link which will help you identify where your sale originated.

I hope all this helps!

I’ve had quite an interesting from Rich. It is yet another question regarding the selection of niches, but with a twist… is it really OK to try to compete where there is already one or more established sites within the same niche.

Here’s his question: -

Kirsty, first of all, some brownnosing – I love your blog and the help that it gives people like me who are newish to affiliate marketing. Instead of “chest beating” you give some really helpful advice and I remember voting for your blog in the A4U awards last year, you should have won!

Rich

Well Rich,

Wonderful compliments, thanks… I must get you to drop me a line the next time I’m feeling sorry for myself!

Of course, I don’t know which particular niche you are talking about. Lets face it, you don’t want me publishing that info or you’ll have 100 shiny new competitors by this time next week! Therefore I’m going to have to generalise and cover a few bases with this.

So long as what you have identified really is a niche I don’t really see any issue with you going up against an already established site. However, if you have chosen a “genre” instead of a niche then think twice about setting yourself up for a huuuuugggeeee task. To clarify for anyone who thinks I’ve gone barking mad, a “genre” would be something like shopping, whereas a site such as my Lingerie Brands site is a niche within that area. Geddit?

As you rightly point out with your voucher code sites example, Affiliate Marketing is an industry defined by its competitiveness. So long as nobody is ripping off anyone else’s site or content, it is all fair game. Any affiliate with a shred of common sense has no problem with this. It is the competition in this game that makes us all push on to achieve greater and bigger things every year.

You are an individual. As such you will probably find you deal with your subject matter differently to the owner of this other site, and create something with your own distinct touch to it.

If I were you, I’d sit down and try to actively think of ways to differentiate your site. Get a notepad out and have a real old brainstorm. First off, sit down and write out all the features you can see on the existing site that you think are really working. Once you’re really familiar with it, you will find all sorts of ideas to improve on their offering popping into your head. If, as you say, it is an area you are interested in you should find this happens really naturally (which is why I’m always harping on to people about following their interests in this game).

You might think you can’t do this right now… but seriously… you will surprise yourself. This will have the added bonus of giving you different avenues from which to extract search engine traffic

To close, the best thing for you to do next is a bit of advice I’ve heard loads of bloggers give to new affiliates: – You KNOW what you want to do. Stop thinking!!

Do it Now!

Hey hey everyone, and greetings from beautiful Coffs Harbour, NSW. I am currently answering Ask Kirstys from the back of my smashing wee camper van over a nice beer at the end of a days driving.

Now, the above title isn’t the only question I was asked for this particular ask Kirsty, but I’ve decided to feature them together as they are all related to that time when you are choosing your very first niche and working out what offers you should feature, and how you should present them.

Now, I must apologise to Nick H who asked these questions. It’s taken me over two weeks to get around to answering. Sorry Nick, but I got there in the end

Hi Kirsty,

Nick H

OK, I will answer these in turn!

When do you decide to call it quits on an offer or niche?
Generally speaking, I tend to give a niche 500 clicks to cut the mustard. However, that depends on how much I am paying per click and whether or not any sales are being generated at all. If there’s been absolutely nothing after a couple of hundred clicks (and where I’m convinced I’m covering all bases) I tend to call it quits. I do imagine this is much more cautious than a lot of affiliates… but its never done me any harm.

If some sales are happening, but you aren’t making a profit, it’s important to analyse what has been selling.

One thing I do always say to would be affiliates is that it is VERY important to track which keywords are converting when trialling a new niche. I don’t think I have ever found more than 4 or 5 niche areas where SOMETHING didn’t make me a profit. Sometimes a single search term can convert and provide a good EPC whilst the rest of the campaign, possibly hundreds of key terms, is a dodgy load of old poop.

It seems like you promote most of your offers through bigger sites with plenty
of content and several pages, is that right?

Hmmm…. yes you do need a reasonable amount of content to create a site that Adwords will like. However, that does not necessarily mean you need to spend huge amounts of time creating a site that really works. I’ve created sites in a single day around a small range of products (or even a single product) which are perfectly acceptable for Adwords and bring in a decent EPC.

I would recommend that a newbie try to identify a single product that they feel would convert well and creates a mini site around it. An old site of mine http://www.vaginaldilator.co.uk converts really well, has a decent amount of info and works fine for adwords. It was quick to make, ranks well in search engines giving me free traffic, and didn’t take much longer to create than a single page Yahoo effort.

Admittedly Yahoo can be a reasonable way to test things. However, I rarely do this and I think you’d end up spending a lot of time working for very little traffic. I’d recommend spending a wee while extra on your content to get a few hundred percent more visitors from Adwords. I’ve also found that not all niches convert well on Yahoo, probably due to their slightly different keyword matching techniques.

Do you find that the EPC that the Networks report is accurate enough to base
your max bids on?

Gah… no, not really. EPC is an average, and like all averages can be skewed by many factors. EPC can be artificially inflated by heavy presence of discount code and cashback sites. Also, if the merchant is allowing brand name bidding that can also make things look healthier than they will be when you give their products a whirl.

Similarly, the EPC can be lowered by the presence of one or two low quality affiliates who are sending less relevant traffic in high volumes to your target merchant.

As you are likely to be looking at promoting a small group of merchant products the EPC data won’t be terribly accurate. The best thing to do is follow these steps: -

- Work out what you think the average basket size for your product grouping would be.
- Ask the affiliate manager for a rough idea of the conversion rate. If this isn’t forthcoming… sit down and ask yourself if you think the EPC data you are seeing really is accurate. If it seems to good to be true – it might be.

What I think I’m getting around to here is…. yes, there is an element of “finger in the air” with this one. Unfortunately the only thing that will help you with this is trial and error and the application of some common sense. Eventually, you will get a “feel” for what is going to work and which sites will convert.

The most important question to ask yourself is “Would I Buy From Here?” If it’s a no – stay away!

I hope this helps…. good luck!!

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

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

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

Here’s his e-mail: -

Hi Kirsty,

Any kind words of encouragement?

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

Hi Eamon,

Glad you found the blog useful!

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

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

But Criticism aside….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*guffaw* *snort* *chortle*

OK, I think I’m OK. Maturity levels are rising *snigger*, oops.

*Deep Breath*

OK, I had a really interesting e-mail today from Grant who is wondering about a campaign where he’s managed to optimise his direct to merchant ads well and is achieving some really good CTR’s. Unfortunately, despite his effort the product isn’t converting for him.

Here’s his question : -

Hi Kirsty

I wonder if you could shed some light on my PPC campaign.

I have been marketing a Clickbank product for about 3 weeks now tweaking the
ads and keywords so that I get a good CTR. I have been linking direct to the
Merchant to see if the product converts. Now being the beginning of the year I
thought a weight loss related product would be in demand.

I opted for this product www.nomanboobs.com this is my domain but with the
redirect to the merchant. I managed to get the following CTR with my 3 ad
groups:

1. Man Boobs – Rid: CTR = 10.58%, Clicks 98, Avg Pos 2.4, Sales None
2. Man Boobs – How CTR = 15.92%, Clicks 61, Avg Pos 2.3 Sales None
3. Man Boobs – Lose CTR = 5.71%, Clicks 24, Avg Pos 3, Sales None

Now the above Keywords were targeted as per the Ad groups ie Rid, How & Lose.
Would you say the Sales page is poor quality or my approach is lacking.

I had another campaign running that targeted Chest Fat with the same stats but
no sales.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Love the Blog

Grant

Hi Grant,

Well, first off congratulations on being able to optimise your ads to get such excellent CTR’s. You have obviously done a great job with your optimisation. I don’t think I’d advise relying on this kind of URL redirect in Adwords as a long term strategy, as they’ll probably catch up with you in the end. However, that’s not really the issue here!

If I’m reading your e-mail correctly, I think you were bidding on terms such as “lose man boobs”. I don’t think there has been anything wrong with what you have done. If you were getting any conversions at all, but couldn’t make them pay I might be inclined to advise you to try and find some more niche search terms in your area and try to get them at a lower CPC.

However, I really think what this is down to is the merchant landing page you are sending your traffic to. First of all, pages like this really turn people off. They are so 1999! Secondly, place yourself in the position of the unfortunate soul who needs rid of his manboobs. Just how far down a page full of ugly text and exclaimation marks would you scroll to find out what you needed to do about it? Obviously consumers want information, but there’s definately sales overkill at play.

I think the merchant page is really awful, and I’m not surprised you haven’t had any conversions. Usually, I might encourage you to send a few more clicks to give your new campaign time to “bed in”. For this merchant though, I tend to feel that these kind of offers will probably suffer from such dreadful conversion rates that you’d be best to cut your losses and look for something else.

Next Steps To A New Merchant

Firstly, don’t be too disheartened… at least you’ve perfected your ad optimisation skills.

I think they key to finding something to promote is to look at something you might buy personally. Sit down and and have a bit of an internet brainstorming session and write down a list of products that appeal to you. Things that work well are obviously higher value items, and perhaps things you can’t buy from too many retailers.

I wrote another Ask Kirsty article a while back that you might find useful… How To Find Your First Affiliate Niche

Also, I’ve no experience with them myself, but I’ve read a few rumblings about Clickbank not being suitable for newbies. The link is there, I’ll let you make your own mind up.

You’re on the right lines… so the best of luck to you!