So you want to be an exotic travelling affiliate but don’t know how you could take your office on the road with you?  worry no more, for the Lazy Geek has posted up a great guide to how he organises his mobile office when he’s out on the road.

I have to say, his is a lot tidyer than my travelling office.  I don’t think I could have found a spot to stand upright in my camper van and take a picture of my shabby laptop, loads of paper, pens, and the ever-present calculator!

More here on this great insight into all the gear you need to get you on the road!

http://www.qualitynonsense.com/208/lazy-geeks-travelling-office/

You know that feeling you get when you walk back into your house after a really long flight and you look around and say “Thank god I tidied up before I left this place. It’s so nice to get back to a clean house”?

Next time you think that, I want you to think of me. Because that’s exactly what I thought when I staggered into my apartment extremely late at night upon my return from Auckland the other day. I’d just spent several hours crammed into a row of seats with Duncan, and the biggest Pacific Islander I think I’ve ever seen. Not only was he large, but he didn’t know how to work the in flight entertainment. He spent 3 hours variously accidently calling for the flight attendant and switching the reading light on and off as he jabbed randomly at buttons (despite our best efforts to help the poor chap out!).

So when we finally got back home…

“Ahhhh. Thank god.” I thought.

“Look at my nice tidy house” I preened.

“I’ll have a nice cup of tea, perchance a choccy biccie to help me relax” I decided.

So I open the cupboard door. And I just stand there for 30 seconds in the half light (kitchen bulb had blown), looking in. I was too tired to understand what I was seeing as I clutched my teabags absentmindedly. A tiny voice in the back of my head was making remarks like “This isn’t right Kirsts.” “Funny texture there” and the thing that finally awoke me from my stupor…

“What’s that smell?”

Well, ladies and gents… the smell was THIS…

EEEEEKKKK!!!!!!!

Can you believe a single bottle of self combusting Pizza sauce did this? We’d only bought it 3 weeks ago and it clearly sat in our larder fermenting before creating a Damien Hirst on the inside of our larder door! It smelt just like BBQ vomit. Oh, happy days.

What jolly fun Duncan and I had dismantling the cupboard and cleaning it and all its contents the following day. I suppose it was just God’s way of saying “Not been to church for a while? Tired? Irritable? Emotionally exhausted? Good. Now cop this!!”

Setting A Precedent…

And the above picture is a pretty good analogy for how we feel now that we have gotten home. Work is all over the place, we’re staring down the barrel of finalising our house purchase and our wedding… and we have a clue about precisely none of it.

“Splat” - Yeah, that just about covers our state of mind this week – However, panic ye not we are slowly pulling our affiliate and personal socks up and getting organisatory. So coming soon will be shedloads of well thought out affiliate posts and lots of great news about how organised we are with everything.

Oh, and finally we’d like to introduce you to our new family pet. His name is “Sonic Boom”.

Just a quickie by way of a follow up to my post on how to write content at the product level, and get some of that lovely longtail traffic arriving at your affiliate site.

I thought it might be useful for you guys to see some examples of the traffic I got through to the blog after writing that particular article. Now, bear in mind that I wrote about a certain type of swimsuit right in the middle of a page with an affiliate marketing article in it, and without a swimwear relevant page title.

Despite this, I have had around 30 search engine referrals for swimwear and Calvin Klein relalted search terms to AffiliateStuff in the last 30 days.

Some Other Examples I Found In My Stats: -

Halterneck swimsuit 50′s leg

Retro swimsuit

Low leg swimsuit

Retro Swimwear

So Some Surprisingly Good Rankings There!

This incomg traffic demonstrates exactly how you can build up a stream of highly relevant, lucrative traffic to your affiliate site without it being stupidly difficult. Yes, this blog probably has good incoming links and page rank… but it’s also not relevant at all to swimwear! I think any site with a few decent incoming links could rank similarly.

So Here’s Some Traffic Maths..

Think it’s too hard to create a good, free stream of SEO traffic? That article took me ten minutes to write. If you spend ten minutes per day for a whole month and get similar amounts of traffic from each of your carefully crafted articles you’re looking at 930 UV’s to your site. Do it every day for a year… 11,160 UVs per month for ten minutes work per day.

Now Lets Talk About The Money…

OK, what would that equate to in earnings? Lets take a really conservative example and say £8 per hundred clicks. £892.80 would be your bottom line.

Look, I know this isn’t a terribly scientific example, but what I am trying to demonstrate is that if you just spend a very small amount of consistent time each day putting something out there that will make you money…. that’s what will happen! You’ll build a successful income stream.

Would You Like £892.80 extra to spend every month?

Well, you know how to do it now don’t you.  So get into it and write that content! There’s loads of longtail traffic out there to be captured, you just have to step up and do the necessary to get it.

Easy eh?

Never mind all them hugely popular White Car posts by the UK’s very own Kieron Donoghue, those are so last week man! I mean come on… we’re educated worldly people, it’s time for affiliate land’s very own David Attenborough to tell you all about the fascinating, nay terrifying world of the white ant!

What On Earth Are You On About Kirsty?

Ah, well you see I’m now a world expert on “White Ants”. These demonic little buggers are otherwise known as Termites and are bewilderingly destructive.

Yes, OK Kirsts… Why Are YOU Going On About Them?

Well, I recently discovered my New House had a wee termite issue when it had its building inspection done. Very fortunately the termites had only been there for around 6 weeks. Even MORE fortunately, it was still the property’s current owners’ problem to get rid of them and fix the damage. In those 6 weeks though, the hungry wee beasties did a surprising amount of damage!

So I got interested in termites and now I’m telling you about them – ok?

Termites and Their Wily Ways… A 60 Second Guide

Termites get their nutrition by absorbing cellulose, a plant based material. What are houses made of? Wood. What are trees? Yep, you’ve guessed it – plants!

So this is where the conflict with these guys comes about. They love your house. They want to live in your house. They’ll also eat it from the inside out, and you quite likely won’t realise it until something in your house Ummm… disintegrates.

Termites totally wreck the superstructure of a house, indulging in a gourmet experience on ceiling joists and other important structural bits. It can cost thousands to repair if they’re missed.

So now you know why I took such an interest when I heard my new house had some unwelcome guests! Fortunately the house superstructure is made of Cypress Pine – which termites simply won’t touch (phew) so that’s why our damage was limited to two doorframes.

I’d have hated to have been doing some renovations and found behind a wall something like THIS

<< Arrghhh!!!

Termites will quite literally turn wood to dust. Is the dust termite poop I wonder? Talk about adding insult to injury!

Kirsty, Why Are You Buying A House With Bloody Termites In?

I know someone will ask me this. Well, because 1 in 3 houses in the suburb I’m buying in have termites. It’s a problem in this part of the world. If we’d passed on the house we might have simply bought another one that would have the same problem at some stage down the line (when we’d have to pay for it!).

Besides, they’re dead now. Our horrified house vendors dragged round their exterminator – the bloke who’d given the all clear to the house 4 WEEKS previously – and got them treated.

Finally…. a Termite Information Video

We should think ourselves lucky really. Apparently there’s a dreadful new breed of Termite in the States that will not only eat the wooden bits of your house – but will also sing at you during the process.

Only in America….

I had a great Ask Kirsty from Sam a couple of weeks back. He’s spent a whole load of time, created a really rather nice site with heaps of unique content and a nice clean look. The problem? No real sales and a dribble of traffic! Where’s he gone wrong then?

Hi Kirsty,

At 26 years old, I’ve been working in a company for nearly 4 years, and despite getting paid a good salary, and having plenty of office banter to get me through the day, I’m not really content.

My latest site: www.LawnmowerReview.co.uk took me a good few weeks of part-time work, and has shown little signs of success. It averages about 50 visits per day, from organic Google traffic. Last month it made about £45 profit, from Adsense and affiliate commission.

Nothing to write home about, I know it’s a classic, and you no doubt get asked this question many times per week, but could you share some of your experience with me, and have any immediate suggestions on how to improve traffic to my site? are there any obvious things I am doing wrong?

I think I need to create more backlinks as a priority, could you advise me on the best way to do this?

Another problem I seem to have – is that only about 50% of my site is indexed in Google, when I type ‘site:www.lawnmowerreview.co.uk’ into the Google search field. It’s been there for a couple of months now, not sure why it’s not indexed yet.

Thanks for your time, Kirsty.

Hi Sam,

I have to say your site is a rather impressive effort with all that content and the comparison tables. I think it can do much better though, so here are some basic pointers: -

Your Indexing Issues
I’m not sure how many pages your site has. I’m seeing 113 at the moment, and I can also see you have a good sitemap linked to from every page of the site.

I think that leaves us with a couple of options as to the cause.

1 ) lack of incoming links. If you can get some decent incoming links not just to your home page, but also to your internal content pages and even your individual mower pages it will help Google to “find” your site from many different directions.
2) Site cross linkage. Google makes determinations of which pages are most relevant within a site in much the same way as it does via a search engine. If a page is linked to from many different places it must be key to the site content. If its not, then the big G-meister just can’t be assed and may not index your page!

Make Sure As Many Pages As Possible Link To Each Other…

To improve the cross linkage between all your pages, you could implement “previous” and “next” links between all the individual lawnmower pages. If you do this, make the lawnmower name the anchor text as Google will also use internal anchor text to determine what a page is actually about. i.e. if you use the anchor text “qualcast lawnmower” Google will know that’s what the page its pointing to is about and make it more likely to rank in the SERPS for that term. Simple, eh?

Your other option might be to alter your menu structure slightly so that every page has a full list of all menu items listed in the code, but use a drop down functionality so that users only see the sub menus they are interested in.

Alternatively, use both!

Improving Traffic To Your Site: Well, I must be starting to sound like a broken record to some people… the key to more traffic is generally more content targeting more search terms (and incoming links, but I’m getting to that!!).

Content, Content, Content..

If I were you I would look at your keywords at the product level. How are people searching for the lawnmower models? How could you build some additional, useful content around those search terms?

Page Titles

I also notice that your page titles are not as optimized as they could be. I would alter these and make them a wee bit stronger. i.e. here is one of your model pages: -

http://www.lawnmowerreview.co.uk/Qualcast/PowerTrak3400.html?pth=2

Currently the page title for this is “Qualcast Power-Trak 3400”

I would make it: -

“Buy Qualcast Power-Trak 3400 Lawnmower : Qualcast Lawnmower Reviews : Power Trak 3400”

That’s probably a wee bit too long for a really effective page title length, but you get the idea of how you should repeat things and include other terms around it to make as many search term combinations as you are able to in a relatively small area.

Make Better Use Of Your Traffic
You’ve not asked about this directly, but I think you should improve on page calls to action. Make the images into clickable links going through to your main merchant (the one with the cheapest price). People tend to browse pages on Auto Pilot and will often get frustrated if they don’t see links where they expect them. I would also make all the elements in your price comparison tables clickable for the same reason.

Finally, make a big text link at the bottom of your review saying something like: -

Check Out The Best Price On a Power Trak 3400>>

Possibly re-include your review table at the bottom to make your navigation out to your merchant accessible to those who scroll to the bottom of your page. Don’t miss a single sales opportunity!!

Get That Link Love Sorted…

Finally, the thorny issue of incoming links. I did a whole Ask Kirsty on this a while back, so I think I will simply round off by referring you to that!! There were some good suggestions from others in the comments of this post too, so don’t forget to read them.

How To Build Effective Links

Good luck, and let us all know how you get on. I reckon if you can put together a site like that, you’re pretty close to getting things right

Well guys and gals, another week as an expat affiliate is drawing to a close. I’d wanted to take the time to do a really good meaty affiliate article to round things off. But there’s a problem. I’m knackered!!

It’s 4pm, I’ve just cleaned the apartment (yes, international jetsetting affiliates do chores too), and I can hardly keep my eyes open. The thing is, this has been one of the most exciting weeks of my life. Not only are a lot of my wedding preparations starting to really come together – two other huge things have happened.

1. Kieron Gave Myself & Duncan A Holiday To Use As A Mini Moon.

What a guy! I’m pleased to confirm Duncan and I are all booked up to leave for a fabulous trip courtesy of Sunshine.co.uk – Chris Clarkson of “UK Affiliate Manager of The Year” fame has been great and made all the arrangements for us after 2 late night MSN travel consultations!

He has got us sorted for an all inclusive week’s holiday in the gorgeous Roca Nevaria Hotel, Tenerife.

The fact that we’re going to be spending the few days after we get married here just makes it all the more special.

I’ve never been on a holiday in a place like this before, so I am really looking forward to blimping out beside the pool and taking full advantage of all the free booze and snacks!

As if winning a great holiday weren’t distraction from work enough…

2. We Bought A House On Tuesday!

Woohoo!! Its a done deal, and its a dream home. We went and finalised our mortgage yesterday and gave the real estate agent a $25,000 deposit cheque. After a rather nailbiting day of negotiations between ourselves and the vendors on Tuesday we agreed our price and signed a contract.

We are now the proud owners of a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom Queenslander style house on a gorgeous rainforest block.

So yeah… we’re absolutely thrilled about that now, but boy did we get ourselves nice and wound up during the housebuying process. We’ve not been worth five minutes work this week and just feel absolutely wrung out. The various stresses, anticipations, and endorphin type highs have knackered us. We also can’t sit down to work for five minutes without one of us starting a conversation thusly: -

“Hey hun, do you know what would look cool in the new house?”

So I apologise for not having had time to look at some meaty affiliate issues. I also apologise to anyone who has e-mailed me with Ask Kirsty questions this month. I’ll get to them in the end – I promise, so please be patient with me, lol.

Perhaps next week will be more normal – I can’t see how we could top this

Well, as many blog entries and forum posts will attest the A4U Awards was (literally) a blinding night with many a sore head and tuxedo-clad work appearance the following day! I was thrilled to discover that I had gotten a “highly commended” in the Blog section (Kieron won as per last year).

As The Dust Settled…

Imagine my surprise when I was sat in my jim jams this morning and I got a mysterious cloak and dagger MSN message from the winner himself, suggesting that I might like to just read his latest blog post as there was something there about me.

Hmmm… What’s Kieron Been Blogging About?

“Cool!” I thought, and jauntily took off to read the latest goss. I knew it wasn’t bad, as I’d not been at the awards to disgrace myself! I thought it was perhaps a nice word for the runner up. I was delighted and overwhelmed when I realised Kieron had kindly arranged for me to have the prize that went with the award!

Sunshine.co.uk provided a week’s all inclusive holiday in Spain for the lucky winner of the top prize. They have very kindly agreed that we can use the prize immediately after our wedding as a “mini moon” whilst we are waiting around for the A4UExpo.

Cheshire Cat Put To Shame

I’ve not been able to wipe the smile off my face all day. What we were going to do immediately after our wedding was turning into a bit of a headache for us. We’d already sorted a great honeymoon, but we simply couldn’t just go back to the spare room at my parents house the day after we got married.

So Thanks Kieron & Sunshine.co.uk, we are thrilled, greatful and right now we genuinely love you for doing this for us.

The Only Downside…

Is that my jokey post about second prize being an autographed picture of Kieron and a weekend in Butlins at Bognor Regis has now been cancelled!!

So a couple of weeks ago I was happily performing my morning routine. Tea, Jim Jams, and Stats (Oh what bliss!). I was starting my day with a quick potter around Google Analytics.

“I’ll just check yesterdays traffic on my lingerie site” I muttered.

I was confronted with this: -

“Goodness.” I remarked. “Where the hell has that come from?” This site usually gets 800 to 1100 UV’s a day, of which 600 to 700 is from PPC so I wondered what had ocurred.

“F***!!” I remarked.

“F***!! F***!! F***!!” Shouted my friends three year old son from the spot where he’d sneakily concealed himself in one of my oversized beanbags *oops*

After a short bout of de-programming for the child I was back at my computer. It transpired that it was not in fact paid traffic (thank god) but that I’d gotten a bit of a namecheck and link from a really huge Finnish site for one of my pages.

MTV3.fi

As you’ll see, my link was at the bottom of the page and they’d linked to the Adwords click ID also. (If anyone can tell me what the hell this site is about I’d appreciate it – I gathered the page was about Miraclesuit swimwear!)

“Ohhhh!!” I thought. “Wrong language, but maybe I’ll have hundreds of sales. Woo hoo!!”

My head full of dreams about riches beyond my wildest avarice, I off trot to check my sales stats. And guess what the massive figure was? NADA!! ZIP. HEE HAW! In total I got about 4,500 visitors through that link over the next 2 to 3 days. Not a sale in sight. I was SO disappointed!

*sigh* I suppose the moral of the story is that high traffic volume doesn’t always mean huge sales. It has to be relevant traffic, right market etc. Oh well, maybe one day I’ll get that link from a major UK site and score thousands of sales. Until then…. back to the internet coalface to do it the hard way!

Well, along with many other “tail end” types, I’ve just gotten myself and Duncan sorted out to go to the Expo just before the early bird discount rate was cut off. I am so excited, it’s going to be absolutely great!

As many of you will know, we are so keen to attend Matt & team’s great event again this year that we have postponed leaving on our honeymoon to Thailand and Malaysia on our way back to Australia for 3 weeks to make sure we don’t miss it.

We’ve booked our hotel, tickets, and flights so we’re locked in and ready for another great round of networking and informative conference sessions.

Not Booked Yet? Here’s Some Good News!

The early bird rate of £199 (instead of £299) has been extended for another month! You can still save £100 on your ticket and come and meet with myself, Duncan and loads of other affiliates and merchants for what will most definately be the “not to miss” event of the year.

Highlights include:

- 3 parties, including a Thames riverboat cruise (sounds lush!)

- Lunch everyday included in the price.

- Chill out area with refreshments laid on.

- All the usual conference freebies, giveaways, and competitions.

If You’re Not Sure About Going…

I have to say I could not recommend this event more for total beginners and experienced affiliates and merchants alike. If you’re shy or don’t want to come alone… don’t worry! By the end of the conference, you will know dozens of fellow affiliates. Everyone is very friendly and I personally guarantee I’ll gladly talk to anyone who wanders up for a chinwag about all things affiliate. Particularly if you turn up with a refreshing Whisky and Coke for me

You can still register for the affiliate event of the year Here. Don’t delay. If you don’t, you’ll regret it!!

See you all there

NB – The logo above is an affiliate link, the text link is a nice plain one. It’s your choice!

At last my shiny new blog design is complete, and I absolutely love it! I was so fed up with my horrid old look that it was actually putting me off adding new features and developing my blog further!

I still have a few things to tinker around with, plugins to add, fiddling around with the order of the menu items etc… but I think it looks 1000% better than it has done. Some new features I think I will add…

• Most popular / useful posts for people who’ve just found the blog. I’ve written a whole heap of beginners info now and the best of them should probably be put in some sort of logical order.
• A photo gallery for my various travels and networking events (My mummy even reads this blog to see my pictures – hi Mum!!).

There’s also the thorny issue of blog sponsorship. I’ve been considering this for some time now, my work schedule means that I can’t post as much as I’d like simply because I am totally restructuring my affiliate business this year. I’m missing posting though, so I have reasoned that if I could monetise the blog just enough to get a little back for the time I put into it, I’ll be able to justify putting out more quality content.

As you’ll see, there’s now a “Sponsors” section in the menu which I will move to a more prominent position once I have found a relevant set of supporters for the blog. If anyone is interested in sponsorship they can Contact Me for a chat. No purveyors of MLM or shitty e-books, I’m not having that kind of stuff on here!

Finally Kudos To The Blog Designer…

Dan Cregin of Baltic Blog Design has done a great job on this theme. I particularly loved how he incorporated the strong theme of travel into his suggested designs. He was recommended to my by Kieron - whom he has done a fair bit of excellent work for, so thanks to him for the heads up.

Dan charges a very competitive £300 for custom blog designs, but because he is such a lovely chap he has offered readers of Affiliate Stuff a 10% discount. If you are interested in his services, simply Contact Him via the form on his blog with an outline of your requirements and tell him Kirsty sent you to get your discount!

Its a good, cheap way to get an affiliate site on the go.

If anyone has any suggestions for features they’d like to see on here, do give me a shout. I hope to add in some new bits and pieces in the coming weeks.

Hurahh!!