I know you all must be sick and tired of me going on about how important it is to not only work hard but work smart. I also know I’ve been moaning terribly about all the new methods I’ve been working on recently so thought it was high time I actually shared one of them with you.

Working Smarter & Taking My Blogging To New Levels!

I’ve been deeply concerned recently about making more of the time I spend working.  One thing that has really been frustrating me is seeing all these clever guys such as Compare Store Prices ranking for many of my target terms with their sites.  Whilst I’m writing content for each and every brand I target plus oodles of accompanying articles, sites like these are cleverly manipulating feeds, melding it with some unique content, and adding value with a good resource which is created en masse with their clever feed wizardry.

The result is they rank well for a huge range of search terms and enjoy a beautiful economy of scale within their business.  Just look at Compare Store Price’s Alexa ranking – isn’t that a fabulous thing to behold on an affiliate owned site?

Clearly I Lack The Ability To Do All That…

But I did wonder if I might be able to fuse my own content with feed content on a much smaller scale, and create a quicker and more efficient to generate some useful content of my own.

So without further ado here’s what I came up with…

*Click the image to see the page on my mens undies site (opens in new window)

What I’ve done is used the merchant’s feed and one of their short descriptions for each product and then created a second longer description of my own in another field, combined it with their image and price data, and output it into an HTML template I designed.  I used a bulk posting script a kind reader roughed out for me to get my content into a WordPress post in this structure.

This Improves My Efficiency Thusly….

Instead of being able to write up and post 4 reasonably sized product articles in an hour, I can now do the necessary to come up with 10 of these (still perfecting the methodology so may be able to improve upon that a little).

For those of you who like more numbers (as I do) this means that in one hour per day I can create 170 rather spiffing looking blog articles per month.  I’m also pleased to announce that because it’s a “different way” of writing I can still do another couple of hours writing my “normal” articles without getting bored.

I’m Still Not Sure How It’ll Work…

It could be that this is not enough for the search engines to consider it unique and useful content, but I think I’ve re-worked the merchant’s products from the feed, added a good whack of unique text, and created a useful resource.

I’ll be very careful to keep a reasonable balance of this type of content with stuff that is more “traditionally” written, and won’t be posting huge swathes of this stuff all at once – but I’m certainly very pleased with the initial small test I’ve done.  Of course, like anyone who starts to use merchant feeds to help generate content I’ll no doubt find that many merchant’s feeds just aren’t much cop and I can’t work with them terribly easily.

Anyhoo… this is the product of quite a bit of thinking for a good few weeks, so I’ll be interested to hear what y’all think about it.  If nothing else, I think I’d be able to use this method to write content more quickly by simply completely removing the merchant description and using a longer one of my own.

The Next Step…

Is to think up a way to use my current sites and their content successfully in combination with lots of different merchant feeds, creating even more efficiencies of time (Reckon it’ll take me more than a few weeks to work out mind you – few years perhaps?).

P.S. My sincere and abject apologies once again to John Lamerton for yet another mens underwear related example which will no doubt put him off his lunch (sorry John!!)

I’ve been thinking today about the critical ingredients for affiliate success. Why?  Because I’m feeling a bit frustrated and negative right now and considering how hard work and the desire to succeed are simply not enough to really start bringing in the big bucks as an affiliate.

I’m sure all seasoned affiliates will know what I’m talking about when I say that there is most definately an affiliate “X Factor” (My thanks to Martin Warn for that phrase via MSN recently).  There are just some people you meet in this industry and you immediately think “Oh yeah baby! You are definately a rising star in the making.”

So What Is That X Factor?

Well, I reckon if I knew for sure I’d be raking it in because I’d have been able to analyse it all and would be selling millions of “How to Be a Good Affiliate” e-books.

When you meet an affiliate who makes a full time living, they are always an intensely interesting, motivated person to be around.  They have a creative presence that is almost magnetic.

But This Isn’t A Post About Affiliate Star Spotting

Many would be affiliates desire the flexible lifestyle, the money and everything else.  But who doesn’t?  Lots of people want it and then simply can’t be assed to do anything about it or want it handed to them on a plate.  A handful of people are incredibly motivated and will do just about anything to succeed.  OK, that’s 80% of the battle but I’ve met plenty of people with 50 content rich websites who were making a pittance in comparison to the work they’d been putting in. Why?  Well, its usually because they’re simply following a mindless formula and churning out a lot of stuff that may never work for them on the grand scale they have in mind.

People Who Succeed Have Something In Common…

The Affiliate “X Factor” is what lets you find that niche that will actually work.  I believe that involves a huge amount of creative and lateral thinking, as well as the ability to empathise strongly with the mindset of the online consumer, and predict upcoming buying trends.

Ideas?  Ideas?  If you have too many of them and have to keep a notepad beside your bed and have recently had to invest in a waterproof one for when you’re in the bath, then you might just have that X Factor.

BUT

I’ve also met a lot of people with the affiliate mojo who didn’t have the ability to do the hard graft to bring all their wild and wonderful ideas to fruition.

So If You Wonder Why The Market Isn’t Being Flooded With New Affiliates….

Not only do you need to be one of the lucky few have that fabulous ability for hugely creative entrepreneurial thinking and be able to see that highly lucrative niche from a mile off – you also need to be one of the handful the inclination to do all the hard graft to make them work.

Do YOU have the affiliate X Factor? Do you have what it takes to make it work?  Think about it.

Ahhh… so its the end of my working week and I’m just back in from doing the gardening (relatively incident free 1 x mozzie bite on the ear and one spider plus web in the face).  I always like to round the day off by immersing myself in my Google Analytics account and trying to learn something about the way people are searching to come to my sites.

Today, I decided to find out what the hell everyone who came here actually wanted when they arrived.  Very interesting stuff.  Here’s a few choice picks that interested me….

• 58 People have arrived after searching for Kirsty McCubbin *shudder* I hope that was all my nice friendly blog readers and not any half crazed axe murderers / ex boyfriends I’ve inadvertently offended in the past.

• 44 People were looking for Big Scary Spiders – Clearly I am an SEO genius as I’ve somehow managed to rank first in Google for that one.  I do wonder why?
  Also many other spider related referrals including Australian spiders, scariest spider in the world, big spider, etc etc etc.
• 30 people were desperately trying to understand Tradedoublers 90th epc – and no bloody wonder in my humble opinion.  I only wrote that article to try and work it out myself.  I still don’t have any clue whatsoever.
• 50 People wanted to know what the average affiliate earnings were.  Let me take this opportunity to clear that up for you all right now.  It’s £3,000,000 per second.  Happy?  Are you going to earn that now?  No you’re not, because you still don’t know how to earn it!
• 57 People were looking for help on finding affiliate niches.  Hurahh and congratulations!! You came to exactly the right place – more niche info right here.
• 5 People were searching for fanny magnets - This is my favourite number one Google ranking ever.  Who on earth goes looking for them?  What do they think they’re gonna buy?  An actual device to attract them in?  *could be a hot niche tip there*
• 2 people were clearly hacked off, they searched for “Affiliate Window Sucks“. You won’t find that particular moan on here though, cos I quite like them!
• 2 people were looking for “Kirsty’s Undies“ and 2 more “Kirstys boobs“ – ewww behave, I’m not that sort of affiliate!!

All in all, it was an interesting way to spend a half hour.  Other than those ones I discovered lots of people find my ramblings about niches, wordpress, and google penalties particularly helpful so that’s good to know.  Lots of people are searching for my name too, so now I’ve gone and got a big head and think I’m an internet celebrity

It does strike me it’d be good to find some new areas to harp on about, but as this is a “stream of consciousness” type affiliate blog (posh way of saying I’ll write what I damned well please) I shall have to wait for inspiration to turn up in its own good time!

Well, I was surprised anyway!

I’d just like to say thank you so much to everyone who voted for the blog in this years awards.  I can’t tell you how surprised and excited I was when I learned that I’d won.  In the face of so many other talented nominees I never really considered that I might actually take the top spot this year.

I Was Gutted Not To Be There…

Although Chris Frost did transmit a little of the fun and games to me when he phoned Duncan and I at 7.30am this morning, rousing us from our bed and sending us on a mad dash around the house as we tried to find the place where we actually get a mobile signal. This led Chris to accuse me of being a “miserable bastard” because I wasn’t quite excited (read:awake) enough for his liking.

So just for Chris….

Wooooohooo!!!!!  Yeah!!  Yipee!! Get in!!  You Dancer!!  etc etc etc

On a more serious note, thanks for ringing Chris.  It made the whole thing seem a bit more real and it was great to hear from someone who was there.  Thanks also for sending me this “live action” pic of you and Jane – it really made me feel a little closer to the action – I could almost taste that very nice bottle of wine

Congratulations Also To…

Chris Clarkson, Hannah Swift, and all at Existem for very well deserved awards (apologies if I’ve missed anyone else I know who won something last night – I’m getting my information from that well known reliable source of info, Twitter!).

It’s Not Really Sunk In All The Same…

I think winning hasn’t really sunk in.  I’m not as excited as I would have been if I’d been there.  I think this is one of the only times I’ve come close to wishing I didn’t live in Australia so I could have been there to see all my friends and enjoy the party.  Note I said “close” not “I wish”

Duncan and I will have a quiet bottle of bubbly by the fire tonight. I’m considering asking him to give me a round of applause or something, maybe it’ll sink in then!

P.S. Thanks to everyone who has sent me lovely e-mails and twitters, it means a lot!

So I’ve been a little quiet on the blogging front recently.  The main reason is that I’ve been busy preparing and launching a brand new site.  Whenever I’m involved in a new project it seems to consume all of my brains runtime.  I do think about other things i.e. things to talk to all you great people about on this blog, but they never seem to make it into print.  There’s just too much going on in my brain for them to make it out into the real world in a format that makes any sense at all.

God, I’d Forgotten How Bad Unknown Territory Can Be!

This most recent site has been particularly bad for my blogging because its in a completely new niche for me.  I’ve been absolutely wracked with anxieties about whether or not my ideas on landing page structures will work in the sector.

I’m feeling a lot of sympathy for all you guys out there who are trying to work out what niche to pursue and how to pursue it.  Forget swine flu.  it’s old hat. I’ve been showing symptoms of stress related “new niche-itis”  for some time.  It’s hideously infectious, hard to beat and might just kill off anyone’s attempt to build an affiliate business.

The worst of my recent symptoms have been: -

• Constantly doubting that what I was doing was any good at all.
• Regularly deciding that this site was definately going to fail.
• Regularly dismissing thoughts of failure and deciding the site was going to ROCK!!
• Spending too much time thinking about how much my site would rock and not enough time doing something about it.
• Agonising over how to structure landing pages, then not doing much about it.
• Conniptions directed at poor Duncan because he was singularly unable to read my mind about how the pages I was getting him to design should look.  I knew exactly what I wanted but would those damned words get out of my mouth and make sense?  Why couldn’t he work it out? The eejit!!
• Yawn…. I’m so tired.  Where will I start today’s work?  Hmmm, must just do yet another “to do list”.  Colour coding wasn’t right on the last one.  Procrastination, procrastination, procrastination.
• What’s that over there?  Where will we go for our first wedding anniversary?  Should we buy a new rug for the livingroom?  Distraction, distraction, distraction.

But Now….

The worst is over.  We finally managed to push through and get our site finished. Duncan has forgiven my frequent outbursts of bad temper (I bought him a Satnav today too – just for good measure!).  I started my first stream of PPC to the site 2 days ago. Then, in a shock relapse the last of my niche-itis symptoms manifested themselves with a parting shot.  Oh the horror!! The agony and rejection – when that long awaited first click bounced straight back off the page, never to return!  Failure!!

“Well that’s it.”  I thought .”The site’s shit.  I’m shit, its all shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit!!!!!!”

*ahem*

Of course having now given it a reasonable amount of time I’ve realised things are, in fact, looking quite promising.  it has a low bounce rate and I’ve even had 2 sales off a very, very, very small amount of traffic.  So thats OK then

So What I Really Want To Say Before I Forget What This Has Been Like….

Guys, I know how you feel!  It’s painful, its very nearly fearful.  But if you just keep going and apply common sense you’ll get to the end of your niche journey.

I’m not saying you’ll succeed every time, but if you fall victim to the symptoms of niche-itis you’ll most probably never progress and the disease will kill your affiliate dream. Forward is the direction you need to take to beat this terrible affliction. If you don’t get something up there you won’t ever learn those vital lessons you need to understand how affiliate marketing and your own mindset work together.

Meanwhile…

I’m off to detox.  New niches are very bad for my liver and my recent affliction culminated in the consumption of too much wine last night as I celebrated the completion of the site.  My head is an owie.

Can You See It?

Not just yet, I’m not happy enough with it, sorry guys!!

Paul’s site vanished from Google over a month ago.  Dropped like the proverbial hot stone into the cold abyss of Google-blivion.  Is it a penalty or is it just a natural phenomenon?

You seem to have had plenty of experience of dealing with penalised sites in the past, so I’m hoping you might be able to provide a little bit of advice for me regarding one of my sites – http://www.preschooltoysandgames.co.uk/

I started the site late November 2008 and it did okay over the Christmas period, then around late February early March virtually all traffic from Google stopped. The site is still indexed in Google but it doesn’t seem to appear in the serps till at least page 4 for any keywords.

It used to be on page one of Google for a number of phrases such as -

Charlie And Lola Toys
postman pat toys
postman pat special delivery service toys
Sylvanian Families Willow Hall

Now you can even do an exact search for the domain name “Preschool Toys And Games” and the site doesn’t appear till the bottom of page 3 – and with only 8,760 competing sites surely my site should be on page one given that the words appear in the domain, title, and on the page itself? It used to be on page one for that phrase even without doing an exact search.

Iv’e only been building affiliate sites for about a year so there’s a good chance one of the following newb mistakes has led to it being penalised -

I did pay to have the site submitted to about 50 social bookmarking sites, it turns out that some of the sites it was submitted to aren’t the best quality in the world. My understanding was that Google devalued these types of links though rather than penalise a site though.

It’s a wordpress based site and I was unaware that every time I made a minor change on a page I was pinging the site, but that was early on when the site was still ranking ok. I’ve since disabled pinging using a plugin.

Of course theres always the chance that it’s just not ranking very well, but do you think my site has been penalised?

And if it has, would it be worth putting it under another domain?

It’s not the end of the world if I can’t get the site ranking again, but more than anything I want to make sure I don’t make any mistakes with other bigger sites.

I’ve had a look through your site and can’t see anything wrong with the content or WordPress structure. Google is behaving mighty oddly towards your site though. I can’t get it to rank for your own unique snippets of text without quotation marks around the phrase.  Grab any bit of text from your Postman Pat page and you should generally be on page one.  Here’s what’s happening with your site: -

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Originally+set+in+the+gentle+but+busy+village+of+Greendale&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB249GB249

As compared with a similar sized snippet from my mens underwear site, BlokesUndies.co.uk:-

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Latino+men+are+well+known+for+their+love+of+underwear+&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB249GB249

Based on my own experiences, that’s pretty ominous from a Google penalty point of view. You’re absolutely correct when you say your site should be ranking better for its own name. You’re currently hanging out at result 63 from the term “Preschool Toys and Games” without quotation marks: -

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=preschool+toys+and+games&hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB249GB249&start=60&sa=N

As for your supposition that Google will ignore low quality links, that’s right but alas they sometimes don’t ignore what they see as spammy link building techniques.

Here’s an example of what’s happening on searches conducted on your content: -

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_enGB249GB249&q=%22Children+will+especially+love+acting+out+stories+with+Peppa+Pig%22&btnG=Search&meta=

As you can see, a scraper site is ranking and yours only shows up when you ask Google to show omitted results. This is something I’ve seen before on my own sites when an automated filter had been applied. This is not widespread however, in most cases it’s your site turning up which does sort of rule out the scrapers being to blame.

I do think a penalty has been applied to your site.  You should be showing up for unique snippets of text from your own pages, and you’re not. Your site is still showing for those searches with quotation marks around them and will eventually turn up for its own name, albeit on the 3rd page of results, which suggests it is some form of automatic filter rather than the dreaded manual penalty. The fact that your site has now been down for over a month makes it look like this may not be a blip as a result of a mistake when Google updated (although you can never rule that out!).

You mentioned pinging Google every time you updated your site – this will not negatively impact your rankings and wouldn’t have incurred a penalty.

Given that you have said you paid for link activity and had this penalty befall you soon after I think we should focus on that as the most likely cause. It seems like your site is being suppressed in the rankings rather than being blown totally out of the water. I’m reluctant to use terms such as -30 penalty or similar though, because these penalties / filters are never straightforward and don’t seem to have any hard and fast rules.

I think the best thing to do is to see if you can get the links to those naughty sites removed, and submit a reinclusion request. If you can’t, you can always try to submit a reinclusion request and tell them what you did, say sorry, and that you’ll be good from now on. It certainly won’t do you any harm.

Other than that, I’d add some more unique content, get some decent quality links and see if the situation improves with time. Alternatively, you could start again with a new domain – the choice is yours!

I think it would be a mistake to participate in any kind of mass submission scheme in the future with new projects. The general rule of thumb you have to follow with SEO is that if it seems to easy or good to be true – it is!

Greetings Google penalty fans, and welcome to another thrilling update on my all too frequent tangles with the Google algo cops!

So on March 30th I wrote a post complaining that once again I’d fallen victim to the whims of dear old Google and had been handed a right old royal slapping on my new mens undies site.  Refresh your memory here if you need to.

My site was so badly slapped it wasn’t ranking for it’s own name    The hunch I spoke of in that post proved to be correct.  As soon as I removed the plugin that was causing oodles of hidden text to be displayed on each and every page was removed I saw an immediate “bounce back” in organic traffic.

This Told Me A Few Things: -

• The featured content plugin was definately to blame – the other scraped content was still alive and kicking at that time.  NB – for users of this plugin I believe there are settings to prevent this, I’m just a lazy affiliate who never reads instructions.  What can I say?!
• The penalty might have been for the hidden text, but could also have been for dupe content.  Now it seems that sometimes when I talk about duplicate content penalties someone jumps up and tells me there’s “no such thing”.  However, I contend that there is… but not for single incidences of dupe content. Not even for the odd wee issue here and there.  In my experience, Google tolerates this to a certain extent and does what it says it will.  It chooses the “right” content to rank. However, should you go beyond what Google thinks of as acceptable you’ll soon find yourself winging your way to Google-blivion.   As with all things algo related there will be a threshold over which you really should not go! Worth bearing in mind.
• This penalty is taking a while to lift. Despite a return to search engine visibility, there are still many pages of my site affected.  You can see this from the gentle increase in search engine traffic over the months of April and May despite me not having added much at all in the way of content.  Pages are only ranking again once Google has been around and spidered them again.  Hence I deduce if you have had a penalty of this nature it is a dashed fine time to start posting fresh content like a madman and thinking up as many ways as possible to get Google respidering your entire site to speed up your recovery process.

I hope this update has helped.  As always, I didn’t like it but I certainly learned something from it!  Will it be the last time? Probably not, but I’ll tell you guys this here and now, I will NEVER let a Google penalty get the better of me.  Come hell or high water I will ALWAYS solve it.

I hate search engines getting the better of me

It’s been a long time since I’ve really had that many Ask Kirstys so I was delighted to get a message via Twitter from a long time blog reader, Chris, which we then followed up with an e-mail conversation.  Here’s his question: -

I have just started to make money on FB but have started using Yahoo with terrible conversion rates. For 5 days I have had 300 clicks on my Yahoo ad and 134 clicks to the merchant with 2 sales!

I’m promoting a very competitive mobile phone offer using general keywords such as “best mobile phone deals”.

Is this normal for PPC? The ad is clear and to the point and so is the web page. Any ideas on how to improve the conversion rate?

I am hoping to follow your lead and be able to jack the 9-5 grind but
it seems I am million miles away at the moment.

*Note: – Chris has asked that his site not be shown here.  To make my response make more sense, his landing page is in a grid type format and features a list of mobile phone handsets, including images,  currently available on a very competitive monthly contract with a major network.  His current WordPress theme is very basic and is a simple black and white offering with no graphics or colours.

My Ideas on Chris’ PPC Pain
OK. I think there is a fair bit you can do to try and improve the performance of this site. It’s clear from our conversations that you have put a lot of time into researching mobile phone deals and keeping your site information fresh and up to date. You have gotten that very right, so well done on that score.

As you will be aware, mobile phones are incredibly competitive.  However, I do feel that when you have already managed to create a couple of sales from 134 clicks through to merchant that you’re doing pretty well and might just have something that could be built upon.  People often think that because they are losing money a project has been a failure, but this is not necessarily always the case.

In this particular scenario there are two things we can do to try and make it work:-

1. We can attempt to improve your landing page and calls to action to get some more of those punters you’re paying for through to the merchant.

2. We can look at ways to find cheaper and more targeted traffic through to your site which will convert better.

OK, so first off here is a checklist for your landing page: -

• Product Features – Although you’ve made a nice and clean looking grid and have clearly stated at the top of the page the what the very attractive monthly contract price is,  you need to cater for what internet savvy shoppers expect to see.   I always tell people that you can liken the state of mind of an internet shopper to someone who is half asleep or is viewing the world through a “haze”. They rarely read things properly and if they’ve been comparison shopping there’s a format they’re going to expect to see.  I suggest a couple of additions to your grid. Pop the monthly contract price in each row and also the contract length.  The reason for this is that people will first seek a phone they are interested in and then look to see if the contract terms are compatible with their expectations.

• Calls To Action – Make them buttons shiny, and make them bright red!  The current grey colour is quite pale and isn’t very attention grabbing.  Also consider “Shop Now” instead of “Buy Now”. Make them feel like they are not yet committing to a purchase. I like to think of this as the affiliate “soft sell”. Get them mobile phone names in bold text also.

• Feel Of The Page – your current page is very clean cut and plain with no colours or decoration at all. Whilst this is a good thing for the area around your product comparison grid, I think the rest of the page could do with feeling a little more like a mobile phone shop and needs a little bit of colour to help people feel they’ve come to an authority site. It doesn’t have to be very much, perhaps you could simply find a more smooth looking WordPress theme.

And The Traffic….

• Your current search terms are incredibly generic – I’d suggest that first of all, you lower your bids on these terms slightly to bring them closer into line with what represents a profit for you. There’s no way I’d ever launch a campaign on such general terms to start with. I tend to do things the other way round. First of all I…

• Find Some Highly Relevant / Cheap Search Terms – The terms you’re already targeting are ones which I would associate with people who are at the start of the online purchase research process. What you want to do is try to plug in to people who have already decided what they want. For example, go to town on variations relating to the phone models you are featuring.  Swap terms like “best mobile phone deals”  for more targeted ones such as “best Nokia 5800 deals”.

• Really Go To Town On Highly Targeted Term Variations. Work out every possible variation someone might search for a mobile phone contract on and add in your brand name variations. I suggest you do this for one or two phones at a time, monitoring performance as you go. If things are working well, add more phones and if you have a good margin, look at adding more general terms.

Finally

I do think that as well as still chipping away at this site and trying to make it work (quitters win nothing) you should try to find another niche to get stuck into. Mobile phones will always be a toughie to learn the ins and outs of this trade and it can be really hard to find consistent profit. Find something less competitive with a lower CPA or commission and hone your skills on that.

Just a short post from me to say thank you to everyone who has been kind enough to nominate me once again for this years A4U Awards.

As you all will be totally fed up with me saying, I love the world of affiliate marketing and sharing my thoughts with you about it on here.  It’s really just the icing on the cake that other people find my internet meanderings enjoyable enough to give me the nod in the form of a nomination. It really does mean a lot.

As always, big up kudos must go to the other nominees.  These chaps all have excellent blogs that should be in the RSS of everyone in the industry: -

Jason – Onelittleduck.co.uk

John – Lammo.net (at last John!!!)

Kieron – Here.org.uk

Lee – Leemccoy.co.uk

If you’d like to vote in this year’s awards for the blogging hopefuls or any of the other categories You Can Do So Right Here.

(NB – Vote Hannah Swift For Publishers Choice Account Manager!!!!!)

Finally

To all of you who have let me know you enjoy this blog, or that its helped you in some small way, from the bottom of my heart – thank you. Every time I hear that I feel like I’ve just won something.  It’s your enjoyment of this blog that really keeps me enthusiastic about writing it!

Good luck to everyone nominated and I hope all those attending the awards have a great time.  I deeply regret I won’t be able to attend and enjoy the shindig of the year

It’s been a funny old week you know.  I don’t think I’ve ever suffered with jetlag quite so badly.  Perhaps it’s a sign from the great affiliate gods that I need to calm down my travelling ways and stay put for a wee while!   I’ve languished the week away in my jim jams, sat like a poor wee waif hunched over my keyboard in the hope that some kind of notion to work would strike.

It’s hard to get back to reality and work after such an awesome trip.  Once more I find myself in the difficult position of trying to get my affiliate groove back on after a hiatus.  I’ve written about this quite a few times, and I still think it’s the most difficult part of our job.  After all, the vast majority of us have nobody expecting us to do very much – and so at certain times that’s what happens… NOTHING!!

Onwards & Upwards Rodney…

So this time my “getting back into it” checklist is as follows: -

• Tidy house to within an inch of its life and make sure everything is where it should be once more. Although this actually sounds like an avoidance strategy, it’s very important to me that my house and surroundings are perfect before I can work.  Mess stresses this affiliate lassie out big time.
• What on earth was I doing before I left? Yep, first thing I need to do now that I’m actually able to do more than sit and look at my stats is to try and work out where I’d gotten up to with my projects at the point I left for the UK.  I hope you’re not looking to an answer to that one… I tend to just sit and scroll through my sites until unfinished tasks jump out at me and make their way in a notepadward direction!
• Motivate myself to jump back into work on Monday. Errr…. ok, this is where the problems might just start, LOL.  Personally, I’m motivated by the potential for results, so on Sunday evening I’m going to sit down and work out what I’ll achieve when I sit down and do 3 months hard graft.  Hopefully this will get me pumped and mean I start the week running.
• Motivate Duncan to jump back into work on Monday. Answers on a postcard

Was It Worth All This Schedule Havoc?

Oh god yes!  There’s no job like this in the world and who else honestly can just nip off for a month and still earn a full time wage.

Hopefully I’ll get back into the swing of things soon and be blogging away like a mad thing. If anyone has any Ask Kirsty’s to help me get going again, please drop me a line… you’ll be doing this affiliate blogger a big favour.

Finally, We Have A New Team Member To Help Us Out

Meet our newest employee.  For once, he’s not a poisonous spider!

This is Lazlo and his self appointed role here at Affiliate Stuff towers is keeping my lap warm when I’m working, and making sure to savage my fingers whenever any important phone calls that I really need to concentrate for are on the go!

Every affiliate should have one of these important organisational tools, here’s hoping he’s going to help ease me back into work.  He sure does make the office a much more pleasant place to hang out!