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!

I’m about a month behind the times with this I know, but I’ve just seen my first ever example of Google sitelinks in an Adwords ad: -

Seems they are beta testing this at the moment.  That is one massive chunk of online real estate at the top of the SERPS there.  Wonder if it’s just going to be for brand names or if other search terms might be included?

How much would you have to pay for “Mortgage” etc I wonder?  I’d love an ad like that for some of my key terms, it would be really interesting to see what a difference it made in terms of CTRs.

This is a guest post from Jason Dodd from the Affiliate Marketing Training Portal Affilorama.com

Boost your sales with data feeds

Getting a lot of click-through but few sales? The secret to improving your conversion ratio could lie in using data feeds. Data feeds are particularly important for affiliates selling a lot of product from the same merchant. But before you can start using data feeds you need to know what they are, where to get them and how to use them.

Now I know talking about a data feed sounds a bit geeky but don’t let that put you off. When you learn what a data feed can do for you, you’ll embrace its glorious geekiness with open arms.

So let’s spend a few minutes trying to get to the bottom of this and figure out how you can take advantage of data feeds to boost conversions, sales and improve your search engine ranking.

What is a data feed?

A data feed is basically a file that can be imported into a database and contains information that matches fields in the database. When supplied by a merchant the data feed may include information such as product names, product description, image links and prices.

The file is usually tab or pipe delimited and can easily be viewed in most spreadsheet programs.

Why use a data feed?

Increase sales conversions – Data feeds have been proven, in many cases, to double the number of sales conversions. Often this is because it saves customer clicks. Rather than your affiliate link simply connecting the customer to the merchant’s homepage and risking losing the sale, they find exactly what they want on your site and click directly through to the product order page.

Faster site building – Imagine having to manually create a page for every single product you promoted? If you promote a lot of products, that adds up to a lot of work. Now imagine you only have to create one product template page, and the data feed automatically, and dynamically, creates all the product pages.

More search engine love – With a data feed building hundreds of product pages, you’ll get indexed more often and more thoroughly, ranking for lots of product-specific keywords. Long tail product keywords are also known to be an excellent source of sales, since searchers are usually much closer to actually making a purchase.

Up-to-date product information – Say goodbye to dead product pages or incorrect detail. By regularly updating your site using the merchant’s data feed you know that what is on your site is current.

What does an affiliate need?

If you think your affiliate site would benefit from using a data feed, there are a few things you need to do.

Does your merchant supply a data feed? – Firstly, contact your merchant and ask them if they offer a data feed service, and if so how much it is. Most data feeds are free but it’s better to ask upfront just in case. If they don’t offer a data feed there’s no point proceeding any further other than approaching a new merchant.

Request a sample data feed file – It’s good to know what you’re dealing with and exactly what information (data fields) the data feed will give you before you start designing your product page. A merchant may even provide a link to a demonstration site to illustrate how the data feed file can be used.

Build your site – To build a site that uses a data feed requires knowledge of a script language such as Perl, CGI or PHP that can interface with a web database. If you don’t feel up to the challenge, employ a PHP programmer or web designer experienced in PHP, or other database languages. There are also pre-written data feed pages which you could install and customize for your own site.

What does a data feed site look like?

While the same data feed will be provided to all affiliates, this doesn’t mean all the sites need to look identical. The data can be presented in hundreds of different ways. An example of a data feed site is http://www.buy-here-and-save.com/, which makes use of a data feed from Amazon.com.

The example below shows how the data feed file is used to create a web page.

The data called from the database for each product record may include information such as an image link (1), product name (2), product description (3), logo (4) and a product order link (5).

Other information that can be provided includes a product category and keywords.

There are lots of different ways a data feed can be used to create web pages. You could choose to just show all the merchant’s products, perhaps with a search option. Or, using a data filter, only show products that relate to an article on your site.

For example, you might have a site that offers advice to parents and have an article discussing tips on buying shoes for children. On that page you could display just kid’s shoes from the merchant’s data feed.

The great thing about data feeds is that you have complete control over how and where you display specific products. This allows you to maximize your sales opportunities.

Keep it current

Lastly, once you’ve created your site with your data feed product pages don’t forget about keeping it up-to-date. You’ll quickly lose customers if your products are stale or prices are wrong.

Unless your merchant automatically FTPs their data feed to your site and you have created a scheduled import routine, you’ll need to manually update your database whenever your merchant alerts you to an update. Depending on how many products your merchant offers, this may mean transferring some large files so make sure you have a good internet connection.

And remember, updating your product pages regular not only keeps your customers happy but is great for your site’s search engine optimization as the search engines love new and fresh content– just one of the many reasons to use data feeds to build your next affiliate site.

An interesting Ask Kirsty this week from Patrick who has spent a fair bit of time recently setting up an affiliate site in a niche that is of strong interest to him.

Well i finally got my first website finished last week after accidentally stumbling upon the area of affiliate marketing a few months back and being hooked on it ever since. My first site is something small and of personal interest to me: – www.manchester-united-shirts.com

The site is simply selling the manchester united football kit in its various forms. Once it was finished i went to the add url section of google and submitted the site. After a few days it then appeared on google when i searched site:manchester-united-shirts.com. I also submitted an article on digg as i had heard that would also help with getting it indexed. My problem however is this; it doesn’t seem to appear on google when i do a search for any of the keywords, such as manchester united shirts, manchester united kit, or michael owen manchester united shirt. Its not even on page 20 or less! I haven’t tried ppc yet as i was hoping on getting some organic traffic first. I know i need to try and get some back links to my site so my question to you is this; why is the site not appearing on google for any of its keywords, and how can i get some decent backlinks?

Patrick then sent another mail saying…

I tried my hand at PPC as this was the obvious way of getting the site noticed for my chosen keywords. I achieved great success with this method as i made my first sale and had a click through rate of about 14%, with an even higher conversion rate. However, what became apparent was that although my ads and site converted well, the cost of getting traffic there in the first place, ie, the keyword cost, meant that i was only actually breaking even in terms of profit.

Thanks a lot for your time and keep up the hilarious yet informative blog posts. Kind regards, patrick.

Hey Patrick,

First off, congratulations on putting such a great looking site together.  I think it’s pretty good looking and would definately be attractive to Manchester United fans.

Why Isn’t Your Site Ranking?

Although your domain is keyword rich that is not going to be enough on its own to have your site ranking.  Hyphenated domains don’t seem to have the same strength as those without hyphens.  However, that needn’t stop you ranking for your desired search terms.  Going forward I’d suggest you do a bit of work trying to get some backlinks (which I’m assuming you already realise as you’ve also asked about that!).

You will need to put a bit of time and effort into getting your site where it needs to be.  With that in mind, I suggest that you try and add a little bit of Manchester United related content most days.  Being seen as a good information resource on the club and in particular their shirts and strips will help you no end.

I think the reason that you are not seeing much in the way of rankings is that there’s so much buzz around the club.  Do a search for “Michael Owen Manchester United Shirt” and the search results are absolutely stacked to the brim with authority sites.  I think to get traffic you will need to sit down and have a real brainstorm about some less competitive search terms that might bring in some traffic.

Avoid the big names like Owen and Rooney, perhaps try to concentrate on building some content around phrases that don’t mention names and topics all the newspapers are likely to be reporting on.  For example, if I were the owner of your site I’d write about: -

Manchester United retro shirts or Man U retro shirts

Manchester United 1977 shirt

Man U 1977 FA Cup Final shirt

If you take a gander at the search results for these terms you’ll see affiliate sites popping up here and there and not a lot in the way of your Daily Telegraph and Wikipedia type stuff.  Targeting the long tail when a site is new can bring in some much needed traffic and revenue early on.

How Can You Get Some Backlinks?

I think in this case the best thing to do would be to try and locate fan sites and perhaps other affiliate sites.  I’d start looking by making highly targeted product related searches like the ones above and looking at who was blogging about them and featuring them on their sites.  Drop them a line and ask if you can have a bit of an exchange, you could also widen this activity out to other teams.  Also, add a post to the A4U Link exchange thread and see if you can locate some people with sites relevant to yours.

Link building takes a lot of time and effort, but you’ll reap the rewards handsomely if you put some effort in.

Making PPC Work

I reckon that you need to be targeting the long tail.  Clearly your site does a good job of pre-converting if a good proportion of your visitors that actually got through to the merchant made a sale.  However, 14% of traffic getting through to merchant is a little too low.  This means your search terms are either too general or your landing page is rubbish (and I don’t believe its the latter).

On my own sites, I manage to push through around 80% of the traffic that hits my PPC landing pages to merchant.  Often more.  I do this by sending highly targeted traffic to highly targeted pages.  Of course this reply is largely guess work as I don’t know what keywords and products you are targeting.

I hope all this helps you out Patrick, and if anyone has anything to add that might help Patrick please do leave a comment as the more people we have talking about the Ask Kirsty’s the better resource this site will become.

Whaddya mean “you’re a bit early Kirsty!”.  My seasoned affiliate marketing chums will know exactly what I am on about – rejoice for it is September 1st and if you are an affiliate, Christmas is starting.  In fact, Christmas should probably already have started.

At the moment I have no less than 4 sites newly completed for Christmas trade and one big ‘un is well underway.  If you want to really make the most of your revenue opportunities this year you’d better damned well get those promotional skates on because Affiliate Christmas waits for no man.  Before you know it, it’ll all be over again and you won’t get another opportunity to experience the adrenaline rush of the silly season for another year.

If you have never experienced this joy – it can be a beautiful thing to behold.  I love it, although alas it does rather put me off shopping for gifts and my family tend to end up with gift certificates, any old DVD that was near the door in HMV or whatever Amazon has on special offer.

Ho ho ho everybody!!

I had a very interesting chat with the lovely Julia Nisted yesterday.  She is one of the 5 strong team who runs the eBay affiliate programme throughout Europe in partnership with a variety of local agencies (including our very own R.O.EYE).

My apologies for being slow out of the blogging block on this, but I find it almost impossible to make any sense after 5pm these days.  Just ask anyone who has spoken to me on MSN in the Aussie evening!  The announcement that they are to scrap their current commission structure and introduce a shiny new CPC model was made at 1pm yesterday afternoon. Now, before you all dust off your ads for bizarre products such as used loo paper, fanny magnets, and blue bums (I have old screenshots to prove these existed), this is no ordinary CPC model.

Quality Click Pricing (Or QCP – affiliates do love a good abbreviation and eBay have obliged)

What is it & How is the CPC Defined? Understandably enough, eBay shan’t be making the exact nature of the algo used to determine click quality public.  However being an expert on just about everything (no sniggering at the back of class please!) I shall endeavour to explain.

In a nutshell the CPC eBay are prepared to pay will depend on traffic quality.  If your traffic brings in the goodies in the form of healthy sales and the provision of long term repeat customers, then you’ll get a higher CPC than people who simply scoop up every bit of random traffic they can find and shove it in eBay’s general direction.

In typical affiliate style my first question to Julia was, “So is this about eBay saving money on their affiliate programme?”  However, she assured me that this is, in fact, all about rewarding affiliates who drive good traffic and they hope it will ultimately result in eBay paying more out to them.  They don’t want to lose the affiliates driving “bad” traffic either – but they do want to encourage them to improve their traffic quality.

The new system will be implemented on 1st September 2009 so there’s plenty of time to get your heads around it.  You can read more about it on the eBay Partner Blog and also grab some handy tips on how to improve your traffic quality.

From My Point Of View…

It sounds like an incredibly positive change to the programme structure.  Regular blog readers will know I always view any change that asks affiliates to raise the bar as a good thing for the industry and the way affiliates are perceived.  To me, paying for the quality of traffic seems like a very fair way to apportion commission and it certainly makes eBay a more attractive affiliate proposition.

The changes seem incredibly innovative and it will be interesting to see how they develop!

As an aside… My year to date earnings for a niche site of mine on the eBay affiliate programme are a whopping £17.32 – however it may make an interesting case study later as it’s for a product / products that I know people in the UK can only purchase there.

So more from me on the changes and their effects later this year

I’ve not been getting many bona fide “Ask Kirsty’s” recently, was it something I said?!

I do get quite a lot of questions via mail, and I try to answer as many of them as possible (currently working through a backlog dating back to mid-july so please excuse me if you’ve mailed me and are hurt at my silence!).  However, recently the Ask Kirsty’s have slowed up considerably.

I know those people over at Affiliate Doctors are good and that they set lots of experts to answer your questions (including me!) but come on… I’m ever so nice and still fairly competent! I was here first too

So if you have a site you’d like me to review and you’re prepared to share the URL, give me a shout. You’ll even get a lovely link from this shiny PR4 blog for your troubles. Perhaps you have a burning question you’ve just not been able to find an answer to, or your site or PPC campaign has gone awry and you don’t know why?

Contact Me if you don’t mind everyone else sharing your woes and I’ll do my best to help!

Bit late with this one, we had some visitors last week and I didn’t have much time for blogging.  However, without further ado…

This is, in my opinion, just about the best occupation in the known universe and here’s my top ten reasons why!

1. No boss telling you what to do, no office politics because of what got said at the Christmas party, and definately, definately no blinking well commute to work.  Instead Kirsty is the boss, the only office politics is over how many cups of tea I’m allowed in a day and whether or not Duncan has been getting too much of our cats attention.  The commute to work?  Up 5 steps from the kitchen to the office and the work uniform is my trusty PJs!

2. Only working WHEN you want to. If I really don’t feel like working, I simply don’t.  On those days in life when I wake and discover I feel dreadful and can’t face the screen – I don’t.  “Today is a holiday”  I say.  And off Duncan and I trot to do something fun instead.

3. Only working ON WHAT you want to. Ahhh… this is a truly glorious aspect of our beautiful occupation.  I only set up projects that interest me.  If its boring, it’s not in my life. Hence I enjoy every second of my working day and get to immerse myself in promoting lots of really cool, weird, and wonderful things!

4. The Excitement. Every single day I wake up and I am immediately excited.  I’m still lying there with my eyes closed and already I am visualising myself up and in the office, tea in hand, stats on the screen and planning the day ahead.  It really is like Christmas each and every day and the gift is affiliate marketing!

5. Economy of Scale. One person really can create a business with a wonderful economy of scale.  You can set a project up, leave it running and maintain it in a few minutes a day freeing up more time to find the next income stream.  My new Australian accountant was absolutely blown away that one person could create so much turnover with so little in the way of manpower and resources.

6. The feeling of having found something I’m really “pretty good” at... All through my school days I was a good student, but just “average” and often struggled.  I excelled at nothing and failed at quite a few things.  Not a good feeling, as I really was trying very hard!  I now realise that structure and I don’t get along very well.  The more unstructured things are, the better I do!  The often bizarre world of SEO was right up my street, and as for affiliate marketing with all its bewildering twists and turns?  Well, I felt like I’d come home

7. The sense of achievement. Sometimes, when I sit back and regard what I’ve done with my life, I get a beautiful feeling of contentment.  All that I have done and acquired in life has come from the odd little nooks and crannies in my brain where affiliate niches are born.  This is not because I work for a company that has done well ergo I do well – it has all come from me.  It’s a lovely feeling of strength that boosts my self esteem and makes me feel incredibly comfortable in my own skin.  Also reassures me that having a slightly off the wall mindset is A-OK!

8. The people I can honestly say that the people I have met and befriended in this industry are and incredibly interesting and cool bunch.  Even without numbers 1 to 7 just meeting them and hanging out with them would have been a life enriching experience.

9. Hard work – yep, for some odd reason there really is nothing I enjoy more than knowing that I have worked incredibly hard for everything that I’ve done with my affiliate business.  A good day for me is one where I’ve crammed in as much work as humanly possible within the hours I’ve decided to work (note I’m not doing 18 hour days – that’s a different thing!!).  Working hard is a great feeling.  And being honest guys and gals there are very few affiliates who have not worked hard for their money at some stage – even if they’re saying they don’t work all that hard now.

10. Being smug – yes, we all have to feel smug sometimes, and as you’ll see from numbers 1 to 9 I’m indulging in it right now.  However,  I feel particularly smug when I wander through the streets of a big city and see all the well dressed office workers rushing to their daily grind.  I walk on, dressed in my usual clothes that constantly have me mistaken for a backpacker or student and ensure salespeople blank me in shopping malls – smiling my insufferably smug smile

It might be the last of my fever wearing off after yet another dose of the lurgey, but i’m feeling incredibly generous and helpful today.  Yes, that’s right folks I’m going to reveal to all you loyal readers the stunning cutting edge technology I use to design my rather nice (if I do say so myself) affiliate landing pages.

Regular readers will remember that I showcased a design I’d come up with in a previous blog post.  For irregular readers here’s a refresher (and remember to visit more often in future – I’m not always going to be this kind with my catch up information!)

*Click image to visit the page this is situated on, my apologies for the distorted image I don’t have that much space to play with here!

Get Ready For A Massive Revelation – Here’s The Tool I Used To Create This Design…

Click Here To Reveal >>

Whaddya mean “What the f**k is that?”  That’s my patented mystery landing page construction method! Ahh, come on you guys know me by now.  Cutting edge technology? Pfft!  Pen and paper rules!

The point I’ve somewhat laboriously been making in this little bit of affiliate prose is that it doesn’t take a high tech solution to put out something that looks really good in WordPress, or any other platform for that matter.  Once you have a page structure drawn out, it genuinely takes very little HTML knowhow to create a framework that you can use again and again to create beautifully structured pages to display your carefully crafted content in.

It Really Isn’t Rocket Science

The above design really only requires a very basic bit of HTML which I think most people new to HTML could learn in a few hours. All you need to do is just draw out the boxes you need to create on a page and use it to work out what table elements you need to create the perfect page structure. Once I have a template set up I save it in a text file, I then utilise high tech cut and paste skills to pop in the appropriate image URL and written content.

The beauty of the above example is that the vast majority of it never changes.  Instead of a quick product post I can easily create a lovely optimised landing page that gives users a good range of choices that’s relevant to the product they’re looking for.

You can too… now get your pen and paper out!

P.S. I made this post because I found the original drawing for the page in amongst some paperwork and thought some people might find it interesting.  I hope it helps