Gosh darn it’s frustrating isn’t it?  You’ve been working soooo hard on your affiliate sites, often staying up till 2am on a work night to try and make your big break into affiliate marketing or push your affiliate business on to new heights.

Or have you?

Here’s my top 8 reasons why those hours spent industriously in front of your computer screen might not be as industrious as you thought.

1. Twitter and Facebook. Great places to network with other affiliates and get all important industry contacts.  However, Mafia Wars and Farmville do not count as networking, and nor does spending hours pointlessly retweeting articles you’ve never read in the hope of ingratiating yourself to Jeremy Schoemaker and Shawn Collins so they will DM you everything you need to know about dominating the affiliate world in 140 characters or less.

2. Online Forums. Yes,  A4U is spiffing in every way and is jam packed with useful information (alternatively insert forum name of your choice).  However if you’re spending all your time on there starting (or answering) threads about just about every possible problem you might come up against in affiliate marketing over the span of your career you’re going to start to notice that your business has completely failed to grow despite you asking questions about it till you’re blue in the face.

3. Spending Hours Working Out What Other People Are Doing Isn’t Work! Every single day I have searches to all of my sites from people searching on my company name having a good nosey.  Completely understandable of course, everyone has a wee internet nosey every now and again… but looking at what other people do isn’t going to help you work out what you need to do for yourself to make you some cash.  Take a look around, say “my that’s cool”, and then get on with creating some genius ideas to revolutionise your own business.  Oh, and whilst I’m on don’t use the CTRL+C button to do this.  Particularly if you’ve been looking at one of my sites

4. Does This Sound Familiar? “I was up till 5am last night looking at super affiliates.  I reckon that Amit Mehta must be on at least $30,000 per second or part thereof. Did I tell you he has an American Express Black Card?  It’s so cool.  Oh, oh!  and I read on Twitter that John Chow went out for dinner and had made $9,000 by the time he got back.  Oh man!”  If you have found yourself in possession of lots of facts and figures of this nature recently I have some ill tidings about your career.  You’ve been titting about and not working!!!

5. You Have a Portfolio of 743 Red Hot Niche Domains. How Many Websites? If the number is between zero and none, or you have 7 half finished designs lurking around the internet looking sorry for themselves, guess what?  You haven’t been working at all.  If you’ve been an “affiliate marketer” for 6 months or more and think that’s a good achievement I have some bad news.  You’re not an affiliate marketer, you’re Walter Mitty.

6. Similarly, You Have 10 Websites but every time you start one you get bored after two weeks and start another one before you’ve even given it a chance to work.  You’re always seeking the pot of gold at the end of the affiliate rainbow but you’re not looking at your own two feet which is often where the rainbow starts. Dig for the pot of gold in what you’ve already achieved. You might be surprised at what you find there. The money in this game is in consistency and measured application of your skills.  Put that scattergun away!

7. You’re Not Doing Anything At All… Despite knowing that you should be.  Now this may be obvious but it’s more common than you think.   Suddenly your affiliate mojo has deserted you, shot the craw as we say in Scotland.  It often happens to people who have worked long and hard to go full time.  They achieve their goal and suddenly discover that David Dickenson is their idol and they can’t rip eyes off him on his many daytime TV shows. Solution?  Personally, I usually stop staring at the computer screen blankly alternately stressing  and contemplating my navel, step back for a day or three, have a think about it all, and take another run up to see if I can get back on the work train.  Works about 7 times out of 10.

8. The People Around You Don’t Think AM is a “Real” Job (one for the full timers here) You will therefore be more than happy to be volunteered for all duties at your kids’ school.  Furthermore you don’t mind at all when people call round for coffee unannounced or ring you up to help them solve the trivial emergency of the day.  I’m not sure why people do this.  I’m assuming they think that because it involves computers the process of making money is fully automated and requires no human intervention. Solving this requires assertiveness and in some cases downright rudeness.  This can be fun if you’re not particularly fond of the offender.

And Finally…

I’ve devoted lots of words to describing the many ways you can waste your time as an affiliate and I’m sure there are many more I could have used.  However the solution is way more succinct. Honesty.  Be honest with yourself  about what you’re supposed to be doing  and what constitutes a good day of progress – you’ll be amazed how much more productive you can be.

I’m sure you’ll all have noted that Affiliate Stuff has remained sponsor free up until now.  However, I’ve decided it was high time this blog started paying its way as I figure all it’s helpful content needs to be monetised to help me feel that it is worthwhile.

So with that in mind, I have decided the blog needs a sponsor.

Introducing… YOU
The thing is, I don’t need any additional money and nor does the blog. I write this blog for pleasure and quite some time ago I decided that getting the blog sponsored was going to be the same as getting paid to do this, which would take the fun out of it!  However, I do happen to know of a few people who are very similar to lots of my readers in that they would like help starting their own business. I like to think I’ve helped a few readers on here with similar aspirations, so in a pay it forward sorta way I’d like to ask you to help them, and have a bit of fun at the same time.

Kiva.org

Through this organisation I’ve been sponsoring entrepreneurs in some of the most deprived parts of the world to help alleviate poverty.  The system is not one of donating but rather of loaning someone money to help them get their business off the ground or expand an existing enterprise. You can loan as little as $25US, and when the loan is repaid you can either take the money back or loan it to another entrepreneur.

If I Have Helped You or Entertained You Even A Little Bit Since This Blog Was Started…

Please join the Affiliate Lending Team on Kiva which was set up by Chris Frost.  So far 32 affiliates have made 172 loans totalling $4850.00 to entrepreneurs in 3rd world countries. It’s great to be able to see our collective efforts doing a bit of good, so do please join our lending team and help us to redistrubute some of our good fortune to people who really need it.  If just a few people join because of this post I’ll be thrilled.

Not Restricted To Affiliates…

I’d really like to see a network or two joining the lending team – come on guys, you sponsor enough of us affiliate idiots to chuck drink down our necks at various events. I think a network logo or two on there would be good PR, show that you’re not all just about the override and branding   At a starting price of just $25 you’d be mad if you didn’t.  Agencies & Merchants too…. come on, get involved – it’ll make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside!

If Nobody Joins The Lending Team…

I might just have to go on strike – you have been warned

(hope the above statement isn’t counter productive!)

Come On!! Join The Kiva Affiliate Lending Team >>

P.S. Anyone good at Photoshop want to do me an Affiliate Lending Team banner for my sponsors section?

Happy Birthday Lingerie Brands!  Well, it’s not the site’s birthday actually I just couldn’t think of any other way to describe the milestone it’s just reached.   Lingerie Brands, a site which I often talk about, broke through the 50,000 monthly visitors mark for the first time ever last month.

I’ve been excitedly anticipating reaching this significant number for the last 10 days and have been continually footering about in my Analytics account trying to work out if I was going to make it or not during one calendar month instead of in the last “31″ days, which isn’t quite as satisfying for some reason.

In the end, good old LB came through on the very last day of the month and this mornings stat check was a very happy one.

The Most Satisfying Thing…

Is that this site was my first real foray into the world of Wordpress and I think it does demonstrate that you don’t need a big design and development budget to create a site which can ultimately have a good healthy traffic stream.  Lingerie Brands only cost me £132.50 to build and although I’m the first to admit its now sorely in need of an update, it works very well as an affiliate site and is now contributing a good wedge towards our monthly profits.

The Only Way Is Up Baby!

This site has not even skimmed the surface of it’s long term potential.  I’ve been paying a lot of attention toit in the last 6 months (after getting a bit disheartened when Figleaves started mucking about with their programme at the back end of 2008) and it’s become clear to me that LB can and will grow a hell of a lot further with the right input from me.  My only regret right now is not working harder on it earlier. That said, despite me sometimes having neglected it, traffic has grown 40% since January last year – a VERY motivational result for me.

What Next?

There’s a few things I’m going to do to ensure the site keeps pushing on and fulfils its potential: -

• Redesign the feel of the site a little, and modernise the theme.  I’m not going to dick around too much mind you, if it ain’t broke etc but there’s quite a few frustrations with the current theme. For example, I can’t get any of the pagination plugins for Wordpress to work on the darned thing which I know will be affecting my traffic.
• Do some restructuring of categories to try and rank for general lingerie terms, in the same way as I have done with my mens underwear site. I have to solve a rather frustrating issue to do with sub categories creating 404 errors before I can do so though but I think I have found something that’ll do the trick there.
• Redesign the shop section and look at creating a better and more compelling shopping resource.
• Make the homepage have more of a “shop” feel.  The site is getting increasing numbers of people hitting that page first, and it needs serious improvement.
• Stay motivated!

I’ll be having a celebratory glass of wine this evening, and dreaming of my next self-congratulatory post (I learned my humility from Roger Federer).  See you all again at LB’s 100,000th birthday bash

P.S – Disappointed that Andy Murray didn’t win? Me?  I don’t know what you’re talking about!

I was having a chat with my MSN pal Dan (hello Dan!) the other morning, and our conversation made me realise that although new affiliates very quickly get the “target the long tail” message, this is often not matched by a rapid understanding of 1) what one of those is and 2) WHY they should be used.  Although Dan has been involved in the wonderful world of affiliate marketing for 2 years, he confessed that his understanding of the concept has only recently crystalised.

When I realised this, a bit of a light came on in my head about this being one of those “buzz words” that a lot of people use, and only a percentage of them understand.  It got me wondering….

What Exactly Might Someone Visualise The First Time They Hear About Long Tail Keywords?

Some kind of exotic reptile?  Perchance a magic fairy who deposits cash in your affiliate account?  I think the latter of those two is probably how I’d see it, for the long tail is often presented as a sort of holy grail of making money online and effectively channelling relevant traffic to your site.

So What is a Long Tail?

Well, the officially correct definition of a Long Tail keyword would be  that it is a keyword phrase made up of 3 or more words that are more specific than a one word search term.

How Do We Use Them?

Well, the first way I think we should use them is to disregard any rigid definition about  them.

For me the key part of the definition is “more specific”.  Getting the targeting of your words right will define whether or not your site sinks or swims so targeting outranks Long Tail in the Kirsty McCubbin book of affiliate priorities.

In conclusion – I think “target the long tail” is a bit of red herring and I apologise to everyone I’ve used it on.  I think “Highly Targeted” keywords is what I should have been talking about.

Some Examples…

Here are some examples of pairs of non targeted and targeted keywords (I’ve made them seasonally relevant): -

Valentines Keepsake > Silver Last Rolo

Sexy Lingerie > Agent Provocateur Lingerie

Romantic Night Out > Thames Dinner Cruise

Naughty Game > Nookii

Romantic Weekend > Champneys Spa Weekend

As you can see, most are indeed 3 words but I’ve also used one that is a single word and also highly specific.

Why Target Them?

All of the above keyword pairs have one thing in common.  I would never, ever target the non specific ones at the start of a new venture. Why?  Because as an affiliate I want to put all of my energy into grabbing people when they are as far along the sales journey as possible.  I’m not interested in visitors when they’re still researching which valentines keepsake they want to buy their significant other. It’s a waste of my energy and resources.  However, once they’ve narrowed down the field to a very specific choice I really want to grab them and get them through to a merchant – I have a much higher chance of grabbing a conversion and the traffic is much easier and cheaper for me to get.

That’s not to say that more general keywords don’t have a space in my marketing mix, they do!  However, by starting highly specific and then working my way backwards towards more general keywords I will be able to get a feel for when the more general stuff is not worth my effort.  With PPC, I’ll also be able to use the highly targeted keywords that generate better revenue to help subsidise my more generic terms which might just get me onto a higher commission tier.

Keywords Are Well…. Key Really

There is absolutely no point at all to being top of the search engine or PPC pops for terms unless they actually earn you money.  It’s vitally important to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer when coming up with your niche keywords and getting them as close to the end of their purchasing journey as possible.

What’s your favourite 3 letter word? I know what mine has been this past year, yep that’s right SEO!  Although 2009 was a bit gnarly for me in places, the little thorns in the usually sweet-smelling affiliate ointment galvanised my determination to insulate myself from margins that were on the wibble.  This is a process I first began just over 2 years ago when I was a 100% PPC affiliate.  The first year saw some small progress and I managed to get myself to 80% PPC and 20% SEO.

However, once the dust from our nuptuals had settled and the credit crunch had really bit, I applied myself to the business of garnering organic traffic like a woman posessed. The results?  An absolutely brilliant increase in my profit margin and turnover.  I will leave the explaination of why combining PPC and SEO can be so powerful to Nadeem Azam – he did a great post on that a while back.

Now I’m Not Letting Any Numbers Slip But…

I can show you how the impact on my bottom line looked!  I keep monthly stats on all of my sites and do love a good graph.  So here’s my monthly income and expenditure graph (numbers removed!!)

The distance between my profit and expenditure (green and red lines) which you can see in January is a pretty accurate reflection of how it had been for the whole of the previous year.  As you can see, throughout the year the amount I’ve been spending on PPC has not increased that much whilst the green and blue lines (profit and turnover) have adopted a pleasing upward trend, followed by a terribly exciting spike around the festive season.

In 2009….

Investing time into writing content and building quality sites reduced the percentage of my turnover I was spending on PPC from 49% to 25%.  Given that a good chunk of my new income has come from sites which are only a few months old I’m incredibly optimistic about consolidating my success further in 2010 and reducing my reliance upon Google Adwords (because I’m starting to get alarmed about how they view affiliate landing pages).

How Will I Capitalise On My SEO Success?

I think I’m going to play the same numbers game I did in 2009 to keep myself motivated.  Every day I set myself a target to get 8 new pages written and live.  I give myself 2 hours to do this.  I set aside a few hours a month to link build for my sites and am using the Content Now Link Building service to garner links for my lingerie site.  I’m seeing some rather pleasing results from that and my rankings are improving all the time.

Where Will My Little Green Line End Up At The End Of This Year?

Well, after a rather sad drop in January I’m hoping it will resume its gentle upwards climb. It’s taken me 2 years to get to this point, and I feel I really know what to do this year to really secure my various sites in the SERPS and insulate Duncan and I from any more recession-esque income fluctuations.

I’ll let you know how I went in January 2011

Happy New Year Guys!

Well, 2009 can best be described as having been an “interesting” year for me and my affiliate business.  The recession and some issues with key merchants took quite the gouge out of my bottom line in the early part of the year – but I managed to work through that and I feel I’m finishing the year with my business in pretty good shape and in a great position to reach new heights in 2010.  Before the shit really hit the recession fan I made a few resolutions about what I hoped to get out of this year – you can see them here.

How Did I do in 2009?

Well, all in all I managed to meet most of my resolutions. I’d estimate my success rate at 80% to 90%.  My failures were as follows: -

• I didn’t manage to create much in the way of revenue with Affiliate Future and Linkshare. Of the two networks I think Linkshare has the most merchants that are a good fit with my sites, so I hope to correct my omission in 2010 and will keep an eagle eye on Affiliate Future for inspiration!
• My vegetable garden hasn’t really eventuated. However, I have 6 tomato plants in the garden. These are still alive and seem to be fruiting.  Baby steps!
• I didn’t change my name to McKenzie! I had planned to be Mrs McKenzie in my personal life, however I got unaccountably agressive when the bank said I couldn’t have one name on my personal accounts and another on my business accounts.  Who is Kirsty McKenzie anyway?  She didn’t make that money, and I was buggered if her name was going on it.  I got a name plate for the front door in the name of “Mr & Mrs McKenzie” – that almost counts
• I didn’t pay off 20% of my mortgage – 2009 was a year of  stupidly big bills.  Not a month went by without someone sending Duncs and I a comedy bill of gargantan proportions.  Oh, and the GBP nosedived against the dollar. I’ve got the equivalent of 10% sitting in a Sterling account though, and with a following wind I hope the value of that will increase to 13% (if the exchange rate improves eventually).  Not a runaway success, but given the challenges we’ve had this year I still think that’s pretty good.

My 2010 Resolutions

• I will consolidate the success I’ve created in 2009 – I created several new sites last year and these have been pleasingly successful.  In particular I’m happy with my Mens Underwear site. It was only started in February last year and has created some impressive fledgling results.  I have loads of ideas in new areas I know will work. However, a trap it is all too easy to fall into is to always be starting new projects and not doing your existing sites justice.  My current sites have the potential to really create a significant turnover boost this year if I devote a block of time to developing them further.
• I will increase my organic traffic and decrease my reliance upon PPC. I’ve already made vast inroads in this area, in fact the results are so impressive I’m going to do a separate post showing the effect of organic traffic on my bottom line in 2009.  Also, given recent “mass banning” outbreaks over at Adwords HQ I’m keen to insulate myself from such an eventuality. Paranoid?  Maybe.  But always preparing for worst case scenario isn’t a bad thing!
• I will keep investing into the growth of my business – it’s too easy to just grab all that lovely affiliate cash and get it spent.  However, it is well worth setting aside a good proportion to invest into promotion, content, and site development.  I see lots of people who make a small amount of affiliate cash, and just keep on spending it. This can lead to turnover stagnation.  It’s so important to nurture the vehicle of your success.  In 2009 I invested heavily in content and it has paid off big time. I wish I’d done it ages ago!
• Add 20% to my profits. I’ve crunched my numbers based on a 5% monthly traffic increase to key sites and it seems this is achiveable.  In fact, my calculations suggested I might well manage to add significantly more than that – but as affiliate number crunching is nebulous given all the variables outwith your control I’ve decided to try to “keep it real”.  Time will tell and I’m not counting any chickens, but its good to have something to aim at!
• I won’t spend too much time affiliate number crunching. It’s all fantasy till you actually get the work done and its too easy to spend time you could be working setting out yet another growth forecast.
• I will pester my merchants more. Goddammit Kirsty but you don’t ask merchants to do enough. Particularly the ones you are driving strong volume to. Get it sorted girl.
• I’ll definately go to the A4U Expo in London this year. I can’t go 2 years running without seeing all my affiliate pals I might even bring my Mum for y’all to meet if she’s up for it.

Personal Resolutions

• More effort at NOT working. Harder than you’d think.
• Plenty of weekends away. We live in a tropical paradise. More sightseeing effort required.
• I’ll spend a chunk of cash getting the house ship shape. Despite the shit exchange rate, it’s time to unleash the moths as this house in its current state is starting to drive me bonkers.
• I will get better at spending my money on myself. Funny thing I have.  I find it really hard to spend cash on myself.  Any purchase over $50 and I get “the guilt” in the pit of my stomach.  I think nothing of spending money on nice things for Duncan, or the house, holidays etc.  But stuff only for me?  I can’t do it.  Whats the bloody point of all this work if I can’t get some goodies for myself? LOL.

OK, I think that’s enough resolutions for one year.  What are your resolutions? Personal or affiliate it doesn’t matter. Record them below so that I can see how mine compare!

Apologies for radio silence readers – I have been completely preoccupied with Christmas related affiliate stuff and the rising mercury here in Queensland isn’t leaving me with much energy at the end of the working day which is usually when I talk to you guys.

Anyhoo… Christmas trade is over for another year, and as the dust settles most affiliates will be taking stock of what worked for them, what didn’t, and what information they have gathered that they can use either next year or to help them identify new niches in 2010.  Christmas reveals a lot about peoples buying habits and popular products, so I’ve been making feverish notes and analysing everything to within an inch of its life recently. Time consuming, but incredibly revealing!  If this is your first affiliate Christmas, or the first one where you’ve done well it will definately pay you to take a few hours to reflect upon your stats!

Merry Christmas!

Hope you all have a great Christmas Day and that all you UK people aren’t too fed up with all that snow and ice.  For the record, it’s 33 here today and I am not feeling in the slightest bit festive.  I’m looking forward to my pressie from Duncan tomorrow and a taste of the giant cheesecake he’s just made though, so that at least is a start!

If you didn’t read it then, here is last Christmas’ festive poem.  I’m too hot to write anything creative this year so in true eco friendly style I’m recycling!

Have a great Christmas, and I’ll see you all in the SERPS for the January Sales.

Festive love and hugs,

Kirsty xxx

P.S. I’ve just re-read a post I wrote on December 12th last year about how un-festive I was feeling and how I was having my best Christmas ever (it came up as a related post when I previewed this one!).  Clearly doing much better this year as I’m not displaying any of the scroogy symptoms as per last year.

Well, its that time of year again – Mega Monday is upon us and todays papers are full of tales of seasonal spending excess.  Apparently £4,000 a second has been forecast as the golden sum that will be spent on interweb shopping today.  John Lewis has had a record breaking week, selling £102.4 million in the week to 5th December, beating their previous 2007 record by over a million quid.

Online forums, Twitter, Facebook and every other electronic communication medium will be filled with the shouts of thrilled affiliates seeing those shopping pennies whizzing into their network accounts.

But at this time of year there is a bit of a danger.  Introducing…

Commission Envy?

I think if Sigmund Freud was still around he’d definately be adding commission envy to his list of ills.  The theory of the Phallus would be revised, and  he’d be chatting on about how all of us deal with the absence of Shoemoney-esque commission cheques from our lives and the devastating effect of that missing symbol of power.

The trouble with this time of year is that we’re surrounded by tales of people making insane amounts of cash.  It can often only take the reading of one tale of thousands of pounds earned in a single afternoon  to turn a feeling of elation at a good innings in Christmas trade into a deep and nagging feeling of inadequacy.

Being “Pretty Good” is Also Acceptable

I say this often, but today I reckon should say it again.  It’s absolutely fine to be a “Pretty Good” affiliate.  Although all those huge commission cheques, the fast cars, mansions, and impossibly glam lifestyles are great motivation I think they can be counter productive at times.  Who doesn’t compare themselves with their peers?  And with money being the measure of success in this industry, a lot of people can start to feel a little bit inadequate when there’s really no need.

Although I have always gone on about not needing to be “super”, I’ve definately fallen into the trap a few times.  (I can see the headlines now: “Scandal, Shock Horror, Kirsty’s Not As Perfect As She Lets On!!!!”)  Sometimes I find myself grumbling about a month or day that’s really been below my expectations before I remember that in terms of my hopes and aspirations when I started out in this industry, I’ve outperformed my early imaginings about my potential earnings by a huge margin.

What Do YOU Think is Good?

In affiliate marketing success is a self defined thing.  If its an amount you are pleased with, you are doing great. Getting caught up with how other people are doing is a completely counter productive process.  Remember this: -

The roots of true achievement lie in the will to become the best that you can become.  (Harold Taylor)

I’ve been meaning to post this Ask Kirsty for positively ages.   I’ve really been suffering with heat and humidity this week and have a head full of cotton wool to contend with and I’m going wheel it out so you all don’t think I don’t love you any more.  Panic ye not, the airconditioner is in the post as we speak and the office will hopefully have a better climate next week!

This particular “asker” had a lot of very good questions about many aspects of affiliate promotion.

1. In your post “Is There Still Mileage In Affiliate for PPC?” you say that most of your income comes from PPC, however, that post is about a year old.  Bearing in mind the crisis and everything, is that still the case for you and do  you feel PPC may still be a way to go in AM (particularly for new sites)?

I must say that this is no longer the case for me. Although PPC remains a big part of my marketing efforts my affiliate profit margins have been rescued in these troubled times by the addition of some SEO traffic. On some sites I now get 40 % to 50% or more of my traffic from organic search and estimate 30 to 40% of my overall sales come from free traffic.

That said, if you pick the right products and laser target your traffic there is no reason why you can’t have a perfectly good campaign on PPC alone. However I do now feel that SEO is essential to each and every one of my profitable sites. There are only two merchants I now work with driving PPC traffic alone and I’m currently working on an organic site for those also!

2. In addition to PPC and organic SEO, what other promotion techniques you find working for you and how efficient and time-worthy they are compared to the first two?

I’ve tinkered with Twitter, but I’m not aware of having gotten much revenue from that. It’s something I’m still learning about and monitoring though as I think it could be very important in the future. Other than that – there is the essential link building. It seems time consuming and is often frustrating but really pays dividends both in terms of traffic and improved rankings. I recently got one link that delivers me 800 very relevant visitors per month – just by asking nicely. Well worth the 5 minutes it took to write the e-mail!

3. Which of the common affiliate systems (e.g., Datafeedr, Easy content Units, others?) do you use on your sites (if any), and what features you like about the ones you use?

I don’t use any of the affiliate systems on my sites, I work with my own content and my husband creates feed magic for me in the form of shopping sections which I integrate into my Wordpress blogs to make them look / feel more like a standard e-commerce offering. If I was going to use one though it would be Easy Content Units – its an incredibly clever system developed for affiliates by affiliates. Highly recommended.

4. I heard (but never tried) that affiliates can get deep links from the merchants they advertise. Do you think those are worth the effort as a way to build links for improving site SERPs and/or getting some traffic?

I don’t have too many of these (one in actual fact!) however that’s probably because I don’t ask very often. It’s definitely worth asking via e-mail particularly if you have a good relationship with the merchant and they have a blog or similar where they might be able to provide you with a link. “He who asketh not getteth Hee Haw” as we say in Scotland

5. And the last. Many affiliates have lots of links to merchants on both their home and internal pages. Those links, however, may strip site of link juice and thus worsen its SERPs. My question is – do you practise nofollowing for the merchant links or any other way to go about that issue?

I use php redirected links on all of my sites. I do this for no other reason than ease of management. I suppose this is something you should give due diligence, but being a bit lazy I’ve not done much about it and still seem to earn a decent amount of money / get good traffic!

A while back I made a post about a new technique I was using to bulk post shop-like pages to my Mens Underwear Site.  You can refresh your memories here.

I promised then to come back and do a follow up re: how the pages have performed.  I think the results can safely be described as “mixed”.   I’m really happy to report that Google seems to consider them adequately unique to keep in the index and rank them well.  As with all site pages some seem to be performing better than others in terms of rankings which I’ve put down to: -

1. Competitiveness of search terms / cleverness with which I identified groups in the merchant feed niche enough to rank and popular enough to actually get me a bit of traffic!

2. The bloody mindedness of Google which often behaves oddly when ranking site pages / determining relevance.  Particularly with newer sites such as mine.  Old posts often start performing months after they have been put up for reasons best known to the G-meister.

3. The fact that they were probably not targeted in the same way as they might have been had I used my instinct / market info about what styles and collections would sell well.

Conclusions?

I think the most interesting thing to have come out of that particular exercise for me was less about creating blog posts en-mass and more about landing page structure.  Having monitored the performance of those pages I now realise they are far more likely to convert traffic to a sale and are also good enough to send PPC to – great if there’s a hot product that’s had media coverage or is simply selling well. That is a real positive and has resulted in me starting to use a more refined template based upon the one I used in my test for any blog content that goes up for the site.  It takes a little longer to create the pages by hand, but they are way more effective.

Will I be using bulk posting going forward?  At this stage, no.  Not because it wasn’t great at creating nice looking pages in bulk, but because I felt I was putting my effort into something that ended up being very “hit and miss” in nature.  I think my quest to find ways to improve my user experience and get lots of useful content up there in the SERPS without the “long and laborious” manual process of posting up content will have to focus elsewhere.

The other issue is that I’m in a quandry about the effectiveness of churning out blog post after blog post generally. I’m increasingly finding that the posts are very hit and miss to get rankings for (probably due to the blog structure). Although I’m sure writing lots of blog content is beneficial because it keeps the site fresh, I’m currently having a good think about whether or not I should divert this time into some other activities that might have the same effect with less effort.  Currently I spend 2 hours most days engaged in this, which seems like an awful big chunk of time.

As always, my quest to make sure my time is spent most effectively for best results goes on!