Stressed? Me? Well, I’ve never been one for melodrama but the Oxford English Dictionary rang up yesterday and asked me to write next years dictionary definition of “anxiety”. Apparently I’m an expert.

To my frequent detriment, I do have an extremely high stress personality. When I go off, its a little bit like a cross between the Cuban Missile Crisis and The Sinking of the Titanic going on inside my head.

Now, in a previous life when I used to work for a marketing agency I had a really great way of dealing with the old stress. It involved at least 5 double measures of some kind of evil alcohol and in cases of severe misjudgement would duly invoke a hangover from hades. Possibly even a spectacular outbreak of vomitisitis. Not a cure I’m considering this time.

I’ve not really had much in the way of stress in the last 3 years. My new lifestyle has seen to that! But this week the old stress monkey on my back has returned - and this time it’s personal! The stress of organising a certain wedding and having to completely re-work all my sites before the end of this month, staving off possible Google death has left me with that familiar old feeling.

I can’t sleep. I can’t think about anything else but weddings (specifically that perfect tiara that is STILL eluding me), and Google filters and their wily ways. I’ve got chest pains (see? I told you it was bad!). Finally, I’ve got insomnia.

Affiliate Stress - The Perfect Solution!

In the hope that it will have an effect broadly similar to vomit-inducing quantities of alcohol I’m going to deal with my stacked out schedule by…

Sacking it off!!!!!!!!!!

Bugger all this for a lark, I mean honestly who do I think I am trying to cope with all this stuff? Sir Alan Sugar? I don’t even have the beard for it!

So here’s my stress cure and I’m doing it first thing tomorrow: -

I’m going up to Hervey Bay for the weekend to go humpback whale watching. Basically I need to do something that will help me regain a little perspective, and I can’t think of a better way to do it than watching these magnificent creatures migrate.

Basically, I’ve a damned cheek being stressed out. What have I to worry about in the grand scale of things. Really?

“Oh woe is me, I can’t take a second longer of living in this awful year round sun!”

Hmmm.

So there you go… all you need to get rid of affiliate stress is a “bugger all this for a lark” attitude. Easy.

Finally…

I must apologise for a lack of decent posts this week. My ability to come up with creative and interesting stuff is hampered by my preoccupation. Tell you what, if you guys shout out some suggestions and it might help inspire me.

Note: things like “give us a comprehensive guide to affiliate feed sites!” and “tell us your conversion secrets!” are unlikely to help

See Y’all after the weekend.

I’m sure many of you read my the post I made a while back as I was delighted I’d sorted out my Google Duplicate Content issues. My traffic rose nicely, and has remained at a reasonable level. However, after a few weeks of waiting for all of my pages to return to the index, I’ve been forced to an unfortunate conclusion - there was more than one problem!!

Doctor, Doctor… I Think My Site Has A Terrible Illness, It’s a Shadow of its Former Self!

*sigh* Many of my site pages are still being filtered out. Basically, for some of the site pages Google is ignoring my nicely crafted brand specific pages, and choosing to rank another less relevant page from the site in it’s place. A sure fire sign that Google is not happy with you. Here’s a really good example for the search term “Odille Swim“.

I’ve spent the last 3 days solid doing test searches, looking closely at on page content, and analysing the difference between those pages that had recovered and those that had not. I’ve drawn some conclusions based upon a few consistent result behaviours and a generous helping of Google intuition. I thought it would be useful to share my thoughts on the issue with you guys so you can…

1 ) see my process (right or wrong) of working through a situation like this

and

2 ) so I can update you on how my efforts pan out!

So here’s Dr Kirsty’s diagnosis of her latest bout of algorythm-itis. A particularly nasty strain in my opinion!

The Symptoms

• Many pages are being filtered and have less relevant counterparts ranked in their place.
• Some unfiltered pages are sitting around result 50 when they should really be in the top ten.
• Some pages rank fine for their target search terms. These are generally the ones appearing in the results in place of the filtered pages. This results in traffic getting to the wrong sections of the site, and reduced CTR.
• My blog posts are no longer indexed instantly.
• Just to make it interesting, some pages I’ve been monitoring have been penalised one day and fine the next.
• The homepage cache date frequently “rewinds”.
• I’ve written oodles of product-specific content around each brand on this site. They are included on the page via a wordpress plugin. The pages that are unaffected tend to have fewer brand relevant articles on them. They are more likely to have a few “irrelevant” articles about other brands.
• Ouch.

My Initial Diagnosis (if these Google malaises actually exist!)

• Several pages around result 50 to 60 does sort of point at a -50 penalty on some pages.
• When I looked at my pages with fresh eyes and looked for a reason for a penalty / filter I realised the pages looked quite over optimised. Although people argue its existence, I’ve theorised this may be the over optimisation filter.
• Alternatively, based on the fact that many of the worst affected pages had a lot of brand specific link text I wondered if Google might take umbrage at 1 ) there being too much link text on a page or 2 ) too high a proportion of link text being tightly aligned to a set of related search terms.
• The plugin that places related posts on my pages repeats one article on each page twice, and the same excerpt is likely to appear on other site pages. This could trigger an additional duplicate content issue that has not manifested on the pages that have bounced back into the index.

Dr Kirsty’s Treatment

This is the list I will be working through step by step. In an attempt to identify what the issue really is, I’ll be altering a reasonable proportion of my site pages stage by stage to see what effect each alteration has. Therefore, the following steps are in order of “gut suspicion”!

• The excessive link text is first up for alteration as it is the most consistent signal I’ve seen on affected pages. I’ll be reducing this on every page, but making sure the relevant articles remain associated with those pages.
• The duplicate article excerpts will have to go. I’ll take steps to ensure that any article is only mentioned once on any given page and does not turn up in more than one place within the site.
• Finally, I’ll go through each and every site page and reduce the “keyword density”, making sure the mentions of product brand names look natural and fall within a reasonable percentage range.
• After that, who knows? Is it me? Is there an issue with Google? Have my 301 redirects to sort the previous problem caused some other mysterious issue? There will only be questions!

Phew! So there you have three days of my life. A lot of it has been conflicting and contradictory, but I hope I have pinpointed where the issues are at. I have to say this site was developed with a focus on Adwords traffic. My main concern was adding significant value. Which I am pleased to say has worked extremely. My pages have excellent QS. However, I now want to get the SEO sorted on these pages as they really had been bringing in a good amount of traffic (10K visitors per month and rising when they were slapped). Like any affiliate who gets what they want… I now want more!

I won’t be beaten Google, but why is it so difficult to keep both sides of the algo happy when you’re an affiliate?

Strangely though, I have sort of enjoyed the last few days. My once excellent SEO skills are terribly rusty, but SEO was my first passion before affiliate marketing. It has felt sort of good to re-immerse myself in it. At the same time, it has made me feel horribly inadequate - I have fallen behind with the Google times.

Any insight or observations would be welcomed from anyone who has had similar issues, or greater SEO knowledge than I.

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”.

Been missing me?  Sorry!  I’m immersed in family matters at the moment.  However, below is a guest post from Sam who has had some very good results from following my advice in a Recent Ask Kirsty.

Here he describes in his own words how a few really simple steps helped him “get it on” with that fickle mistress we all know and love, Google….

Now, in my experience it takes a lot longer than 5 minutes to win over any lady (unless, of course, they are heavily inebriated), but with Kirsty’s help, I did just that, to a teetotal girl called Google (my parents would be so proud of me). Let me explain…

Kirsty has very kindly given me the opportunity to provide feedback, following the advice I received for my Lawn Mower Review affiliate site. In the original ‘Ask Kirsty’ post, I outlined some of the fundamental problems I was having, and received some great answers.

I’ve since put some of Kirsty’s suggestions into practice, and had some fantastic results, which I’d like to share with you all.

One of my biggest frustrations was with indexing. Despite being very nice to Google, giving her a beautiful site map, providing her with delicious incoming links from Digg, and even waiting weeks for her (I didn’t want to rush our relationship), she still refused to sleep with me fully index my site. This was a big problem, as without my site fully indexed, I was missing out on serious traffic.

This is where Kirsty (relationship councillor extraordinaire) came in. Kirsty suggested one of the reasons why Google didn’t love me, was because of the internal cross-linking between pages on my site. Now, I hadn’t really thought about this before, but after improving the sitation (linking to every page, from every other page), and giving Google what she really wanted (the cross-link diamond ring, if you will) my site and Google really hit it off.

I basically achieved this by including a footer on each one of my pages, this literally took 5 minutes to do, and ensured I had good cross-links throughout my site. Now, it should be noted that there are better ways to do this. I used this quick-fix method just to test Google, a bit like treating her to a new Mini-Cooper test drive, before actually buying it for her. Now that I’ve seen she likes the new Mini-Cooper, I may well develop more graceful cross-links (next/previous buttons for example, to navigate through each lawn mower review).

This immediately improved the indexing situation, I went from having just 42 pages indexed, to 200, in a very short space of time:

And thus, with more pages indexed, I caught more keywords, and approximately doubled my organic traffic:

…and all in the space of a day (ok, so she needed some time to think about it, but fell for me in the end). We’ve since lived happily ever after, and she’s even started giving me gifts, by putting me in the #1 spot for certain keywords!

So, for any love sick folks out there, wanting to improve your indexing situation, be sure to not overlook the cross-link diamond ring!

It would be great to hear your comments on this.

Comment from Kirsty: -

Gosh darn it, I think that was a fab post! From my POV it really is fantastic to hear that my advice has helped people achieve such great results.  Well done to Sam for a really nicely worded and laid out bit of affiliate blogging.  Really enjoyed reading it!

This is a really interesting question I had from Alex the other day. He has loads of ideas for sites based around his interests, but is just a bit vague on what to do with those to proceed with his affiliate efforts. His question caught my imagination a bit so I decided to brainstorm his areas of interest and show him the process I use to work things out.

Hi Kirsty,
I have recently stumbled upon your site and it has proved extremely helpful so far. Great Job!!!
I would just like to ask you a few simple questions that may get me a few steps closer towards a successful affiliate site.

I have many hobbies that I would like to explore from my love for chillies (plants and fruit) to UK fishing locations and many in between. However, I do realise that there are obvious affiliate limits to the subjects that I’m interested in no matter how niche they may be.

I guess the question that I’m asking is ‘How do I decide on a new affiliate subject to pursue and how would I go about it? I have been working in IT for the last 8 years and am confident in my ability but am a complete beginner in the affiliate world. Any help you would be able to give me would be gratefully received.

Regards, Alex

Hi Alex,

Welcome to the blog! I am glad that you found it useful.

You’re absolutely right to pick a subject that interests you, so in deciding to pursue that avenue you have taken your first steps to success.

Your first job to get your niche picked out should be to have a bit of a brainstorming session to yourself. Grab a bit of paper or a whiteboard and write all of your hobbies and interests down, regardless of whether you think there are products or affiliate programmes related to them or not. You might be surprised what you come up with.

When I’m doing this kind of stuff I play a bit of a “word game” for want of a better descriptive term. I then describe as many connected subject areas or product areas as I can think of for each niche. By doing this, I can identify which areas will be easy to come up with content for and which have a variety of products that could be sold in association with them. Once this is complete for all your areas of interest you should be able to further research merchants and see which one strikes the best balance of good content and monetisation potential!

OK, so to give you a working example I’m going to brainstorm the ideas that you have given me. The format I tend to use is content ideas followed by monetisation ideas!

Chili Plants & Fruit

• How to grow them

• Recipies and household uses

• Chili variety guide

• Where to buy seeds and propigation materials

Monetisation

• Recipie books

• Cooking equipment

• Gifts for the Chili enthusiast

UK Fishing Locations

• As it says on the tin. Where are the best places to fish in the UK? User generated reviews?

• By technique i.e. fly fishing, coarse fishing, sea fishing etc

• By fish type i.e. Trout, Salmon etc

• Equipment guide

• How to create your own flies

• Bait guide

• Fishing techniques

• There’s a good prospect for a forum in this subject matter - monetise with adsense?

Monetisation

• Equipment

• A plethora of fishing books

• Magazine subscriptions

• Hotels & accommodation in fishing areas

• May be some scope for a suppliers directory with paid advertising? If the site was structured by region advertising could be structured and sold same.

The next step is to then match up affiliate programmes with your chosen area. You’ll have to evaluate the sites and programmes that are out there. Do you think they’d convert your traffic well? What are the network stats like on the merchant? It might also be an idea to contact the merchant and ask them what their average baskets and conversion rates are for reasonably relevant traffic. Armed with that info you should be able to make a relatively educated decision.

I don’t think the above ideas are exhaustive as I obviously don’t have the same subject knowledge as you do, but I’m sure you get the idea! The next step is to decide which has the best prospect for monetisation versus the expenditure of your time. There are two ways to think about this. The Chili example would probably be relatively quick and easy to set up to one extent or another and would probably be a good way for you to “cut your affiliate teeth”. There’s always a danger in taking on a huge project straight out of the affiliate traps!

On the other hand, I think a fishing guide has the prospect of being very interesting and perhaps the relationship between your content and a product sale. My feeling is that this kind of traffic would convert better than food related traffic. What I’ve mentioned above is a huge undertaking! However, there would be nothing to stop you from buying a general UK domain and starting it as a guide to perhaps one popular fishing area. As you progressed you could simply widen the scope and target of the site. I’d recommend this step by step approach as it would help you get a site out quicker without your product looking half finished.

Phew!  So there you go folks, a handy dandy guide to niche brainstorming.

It’s never quiet round here is it?  Well, I’m sitting with a splitting wine headache contemplating speedily packing my bags for our extremely early morning flight to Auckland tomorrow.

Surprisingly, my hangover is directly related to my unexpected impending travel.  Unfortunately Duncan has had some sad family news, and we are flying over to attend his Grandmother’s funeral after she passed away yesterday.  So last night Duncan was understandably having a bit of insomnia, and I decided to sit up with him. I know it’s those 3am moments that can really get you at times like these, so I made sure I was there when 3am came around!  Rather foolishly I passed the time by drinking wine.  Lets just say we were both up till extremely early this morning drinking and talking about things. Heavy handed measures abounded.

As usual, Duncan seems to have gotten away without much of an after-effect and I’m recoiling from bright lights, sudden movements, and loud noises. We’re up at 5am tomorrow to drive to Brisbane Airport.

We’ll be gone for a week, so there may or may not be posts from me depending on what transpires.

So just in case… I’ll catch y’all in a few days!

So many people have asked me if there is a plugin which will allow them to pop affiliate feed content into the Wordpress format, and now I’m able to say… “Why Yes, there is a plugin that will do that!”

An old internet friend of mine, Jason Hulott, has just developed an excellent paid plugin (there’s a free trial version too) that will make bulk posting into Wordpress a breeze. He’s developed an easy peasy interface that makes uploading content based around a feed, and creating bulk time delayed posting a breeze.

I think this plugin could be very powerful if used in the right way (i.e. alongside unique content placed within the feed). Here’s a few details about what looks to potentially be a really powerful affiliate tool.

CSV Import - A Wordpress Plugin For Affiliate Marketers!

Features:-

• Imports large CSV files of up to 10,000 records to be posted immediately or on a time delayed basis.
• Assign posts to different categories. If the category doesn’t exist, the plugin will create it.
• Post to multiple categories.
• Add custom fields.
• Supports addition of video content and images.
• Incredibly easy to use.

Having had a look at the plugin, it couldn’t be more simple to use. If you have basic Excel and HTML tagging skills you should be able to easily alter a merchants data feed and use it to populate some posts. The plugin runs on a very basic feed format. Once you have uploaded the plugin, You simply need to create 5 columns within the spreadsheet: -

Then simply browse for and upload your file in Wordpress, and click submit.

Seems pretty easy to use to me!

A Plea From The Author - Do No Evil With My Plugin

Jason is a very ethical and thoughtful chap. He wants me to make it clear if you’re a spammer - please don’t buy this. Your scurrilous activities will break his affiliate heart. He very nearly didn’t release this plugin into the public domain for fear of what lazy spammers might do with it. He has written a very detailed “Ethical Usage Guide” to go along with this plugin. It’s 2,500 words packed full of hints and tips about how you can use the plugin to create easy, unique, useful content.

In his words,

You could just find some datafeeds and upload them and make huge sites of just product data. Now this is a quick way to build a big website but it won’t rank, it won’t get read and more importantly it won’t make you any money.

Couldn’t have put it better myself!

Further Information: -

• You can get detailed information and buy this fully supported plugin for $99 from Jason’s website.
• Want to try before you buy? Jason has an older and more clunky version of this plugin available to download for free here. A word of warning though, it is problematic in that the date field is a nightmare to operate. It also does not have all the features of the paid plugin. It may be buggy as it lacks the polish of the final version (so don’t base your judgement of the paid product on it), but it will probably give you an idea of how it all works.
• Finally, the link to the plugin page above is an affiliate link. Plain old link here if you can’t stand giving other affiliates commission on things

Man the lifeboats, it’s official - I’ve just looked at a calendar and totally crapped my load! What’s happened? Where has they year gone since my first post about arranging my nuptuals? What’s happened to having bags of time to get it all done?

Oh No, We’ll Never Be Ready In Time!!

Apart from feelings of being ready for marriage (are we really old enough for this? lol), we’ve somehow still got loads to do after a very strong start last November. In case anyone didn’t know, we had to change venues late last year after some licensing issues - basically meaning the whole do had to be re-organised from start to finish. Not a good feeling!!

So after all that, and in case y’all want to offer to drop everything and come and help us, here’s a list of things we’ve not yet done.

• Chosen the menu.
• Sorted out how the ceremony will be performed.
• Chosen the music for the ceremony and for us to arrive and leave to.
• Chosen or practised our first dance.
• Sorted out a wedding gift list. Or thought of anything to put on it.
• Sorted out a beautician or decided on hairdos.
• Bought the jewellery and accessories for the bride and bridesmaids (Including Bridezillas tiara).
• Groomsmen. Hmmm… we’ll need some of those!

OK, that is but a small sample of what we need to get done. My poor old mother is having to take a week off her work to get the wedding invites mailed out.

Procrastination Syndrome…

And us? We can’t bring ourselves to do a damned thing. Between affiliate marketing and buying houses we find ourselves feeling stacked. The thing is, it’s the fine details we’ve not sorted yet that can make or break a wedding.  But I’m so damned busy with affiliating I don’t know where the time to arrange it all comes from?

Any words of motivation, advice, or offers of free wedding planning services in exchange for exposure on my blog (which is not at all relevant to weddings) would be much appreciated.

SOS!!

So recently I had cause to do a hell of a lot of research into Google penalties after my lingerie website got booted from the SERPS during the May update.

For one reason or another, it took me about 5 weeks to work out what the issue was and fix it. Actually, “penalty” is probably the wrong way to describe this issue. It’s more of a “filter” which is much less problematic to deal with!

So I thought it would be dashed nice to point out what I think went wrong for me, why, and how you can make your Wordpress blog duplicate content proof.

Wordpress Category Arrangements Are The Villans Of This Piece!

As I’m sure y’all know, the way that Wordpress stores your carefully crafted posts can be problematic. Often this leads to the same information being displayed under more than one URL. In my case, I created a category for each product brand and populated it with a single post. This meant the same post ended up being indexed twice thusly:-

SiteName.com/BrandName

SiteName.com/BrandName/BrandPost

Although this particular issue happened because of my particular site structure, it can happen to pretty much any Wordpress blog due to your content being indexed from many different directions.

Causes Of Wordpress Duplicate Content

• Monthly Archives
• Tags
• Posts By Author
• Trackback URLs
• Next / Previous Entries Links
• RSS Feed Content
• Wordpress Permalinks adding in A /category/ directory to URLS accessed from certain parts of your blog.

Lots of Potential Woes There Hey? And Google Might Not Like It AT ALL…

Phew, so as you can see… there are lots of opportunities for Google to see your site content twice. They quite specifically say they’re not too keen on this, although they do also say it shouldn’t be a problem if its non-malicious. BUT if you’re unlucky enough to be flagged up as having dupe content for less than pure reasons, this might happen to your organic traffic stats: -

Ouch.

But Fear Not, It Can Be Fixed - Even Better… There Are Plugins To Help You!

So here it is, your handy dandy guide to eliminating duplicate content in your Wordpress blog!

• First off, lets stop Google indexing all those pages from lots of different directions. I used Joost De Valk’s No Follow Plugin. I liked this because he’s very carefully explained why you might want to take some of the options within the interface. Whilst you’re on his site, grab his RSS Footer plugin. It means you can insert backlinks to your site within your RSS feed so that anyone reproducing your hard-earned content on their site rewards you with a backlink, and doesn’t claim credit for your work!
• If it’s an issue, get rid of that cumbersome /category/ in your permalinks with the Top Level Categories plugin.
• Sort out your Robots.txt file to make sure Google doesn’t index that RSS or other content in Wordpress that can cause dupe content horror for you and your blog. Shoemoney said it better than I can here.
• If like me, your category structure might cause something to be indexed twice but you still want your categories to be indexable - try a 301 redirect as Google suggests. Don’t know how to do that? Panic ye not - I found an amazingly simple to use Wordpress 301 Redirect Plugin. It’s got really cool stats on it too. It was this particular plugin that sorted my own issues right out. I’d already used most of what I’m chatting about above, it just wasn’t quite enough!
• Finally, just to be totally belt and braces about things, give your posts individual meta tags with this Great Meta Tag Plugin. I doubt you’d get a dupe content issue from these, but while we’re doing the 30,000 mile Wordpress service I think it’s a great addition for a whole lotta reasons.

Phew. Finished? Here’s The Effect Of My De-Duping Efforts…

Within about 3 days of applying these principals to my blog, the traffic began to return and is still steadily increasing every day as Google sorts its way through my site.

I think that’s a fairly good example of just what a massive effect duplicate content can have on a site, but also just how quickly the changes you make can improve things.

Finally…

Well, this has been a long guide but I hope really worthwhile in helping people deal with dupe content. If I have missed anything out or if anyone knows a good plugin for this type of issue, please do post it in the comments field and I’ll add any interesting ones to the bottom of this post.

Happy De-duping guys!!