Amazon’s recent commission changes have somewhat crushed Greg’s affiliate plans!

I started off in AM with a website running through the Amazon Associates programme, I was able to build an income from this one site upto a peak of £2,200 profit in May & £2,300 in June of this year, solely using PPC for traffic. All was going really well and I was improving my PPC knowledge and optimising the site well. Then Amazon decided to cut it’s % referral rates and drop their direct link bonus (2.5%). This effectively wiped out my profit margin on my PPC campaigns, and has left me struggling to gain an income from the site. I was very aware that ‘all my eggs were in one basket’ and was working hard to branch out to other sites in the Summer.

So far my new sites have failed to bring in any profits, they are based around PPC traffic again, as I felt utilizing my skills in this area would be the best bet. The sites convert traffic well, but it’s the high CPC that’s preventing me from creating any kind of profits. The markets I have entered are very competitive, and I’m struggling to find any profitable long tail search terms, so my question is, how do you find profitable long tail keywords in an already competitive market?

Or would I be better off forgetting these sites and focusing on a smaller niche?
Did I just hit beginners luck with my first site?!

Thanks,
Greg

Well, I think the first thing I need to tell you is that making that kind of money isn’t really to do with beginners luck. You clearly found a group of products that really worked for you and fell victim to the eggs in one basket syndrome that’s bitten most affiliates on the bahookie at one stage or another.

You’ve obviously been working hard on that site, and one answer to the issue you’ve had with Amazon cutting their commissions and effectively wiping out your profit margins is to introduce some nice free SEO traffic into your promotional mix. Your site looks really great, so you clearly know how to put a decent offering together. I think it’s worth giving the site due diligence, adding some nice content, and seeing what can be done with it. It’s certainly a great domain.

Again with your other sites, if they are converting well but you can’t get the traffic cheaply enough I do believe the answer to making them work is to add in some organic traffic to help that PPC budget go a little further. Read this recent article by Nadeem Azam to see just how effective SEO traffic can be in revolutionising your affiliate campaigns: -

http://www.azam.info/combine-seo-ppc-marketing-dominate-search-engine-rankings/

That all said, SEO is not the entire solution to your revenue stream woes. I have loads of landing page sites that do great from PPC traffic alone. One thing you might do is have a think about what might be selling well this Christmas and give some of those things a push using some landing pages. Keep an eye out in the press for “buzz products” you see being spoken about and keep an eye on GMTV and This Morning. If they mention a product as being ace, it can pay you nice dividends to get a PPC landing page up as quickly as possible. I recently saw a massive sales spike on a site of mine because a product had been featured on a Channel 4 show about embarrassing illnesses. I’ve also capitalised on TV shows such as Gok Wan’s How to Look Good Naked in the past.

I can’t really give you more specific niche advice than that (sorry!), finding and making money from new areas can seem like a near impossible Zen art at times… but spending time keeping on chipping away and trying new things is so worthwhile.

A while back I made a post about a new technique I was using to bulk post shop-like pages to my Mens Underwear Site.  You can refresh your memories here.

I promised then to come back and do a follow up re: how the pages have performed.  I think the results can safely be described as “mixed”.   I’m really happy to report that Google seems to consider them adequately unique to keep in the index and rank them well.  As with all site pages some seem to be performing better than others in terms of rankings which I’ve put down to: -

1. Competitiveness of search terms / cleverness with which I identified groups in the merchant feed niche enough to rank and popular enough to actually get me a bit of traffic!

2. The bloody mindedness of Google which often behaves oddly when ranking site pages / determining relevance.  Particularly with newer sites such as mine.  Old posts often start performing months after they have been put up for reasons best known to the G-meister.

3. The fact that they were probably not targeted in the same way as they might have been had I used my instinct / market info about what styles and collections would sell well.

Conclusions?

I think the most interesting thing to have come out of that particular exercise for me was less about creating blog posts en-mass and more about landing page structure.  Having monitored the performance of those pages I now realise they are far more likely to convert traffic to a sale and are also good enough to send PPC to – great if there’s a hot product that’s had media coverage or is simply selling well. That is a real positive and has resulted in me starting to use a more refined template based upon the one I used in my test for any blog content that goes up for the site.  It takes a little longer to create the pages by hand, but they are way more effective.

Will I be using bulk posting going forward?  At this stage, no.  Not because it wasn’t great at creating nice looking pages in bulk, but because I felt I was putting my effort into something that ended up being very “hit and miss” in nature.  I think my quest to find ways to improve my user experience and get lots of useful content up there in the SERPS without the “long and laborious” manual process of posting up content will have to focus elsewhere.

The other issue is that I’m in a quandry about the effectiveness of churning out blog post after blog post generally. I’m increasingly finding that the posts are very hit and miss to get rankings for (probably due to the blog structure). Although I’m sure writing lots of blog content is beneficial because it keeps the site fresh, I’m currently having a good think about whether or not I should divert this time into some other activities that might have the same effect with less effort.  Currently I spend 2 hours most days engaged in this, which seems like an awful big chunk of time.

As always, my quest to make sure my time is spent most effectively for best results goes on!

A quick trawl through my inbound search terms has revealed that lots of people come here with questions.  Not a surprise given the nature of the blog but I thought it might be nice if I answered a few questions here that started with a frustrated search for greater affiliate knowledge on Google and ended on my blog which may or may not have provided an answer!

Now given that I’m a normally lovely girl, I don’t like to be too blunt with all the nice people who e-mail me questions. However this format gives me the opportunity to do some of the plain talking I’m known for at times…

site:http://www.affiliatestuff.co.uk “i earn” – how many times do I have to say I’m not bloody well telling youse!  Lets define it as “plenty”

affiliate how to find a christmas niche – Hmmm… maybe try just about anything that’s a gift?  Christmas is one of the only times of the year where you seriously should not struggle for a niche.  If a merchant doesn’t perform then, it is very likely they never will (unless travel related!)

a4u expo 2009 win a ticket – Enter Kierons comp right here>> Entries close 28th September so get yer damned well skates on!

how to calculate potential affiliate earnings? *sigh* I know lots of people really want to know this but the answer genuinely is between £0 and £1,000,000,000,000 – it all depends on your ability and how much work you’ll end up putting in.  End of story.

affiliate niche guns – I think you should remove caffeine from your diet.  And possibly seek counselling.

affiliate marketing is it a rip off? Well, it does sound too good to be true sometimes   But it is a real and bonafide way to make money.  However if someone is saying “Make $$$$ via affiliate marketing by giving me $$” then yeah, that is a scam 99% of the time!

google affiliate slap seo? Google doesn’t slap affiliate sites just for being affiliate sites.  Saying your site has been slapped for being an affiliate offering is merely an excuse for a lack of unique content, poor seo techniques, and use of blackhat tactics that would get any site slapped (unwitting or otherwise).  Google doesn’t hate affiliates – it hates sites that don’t add value!  It  of irritates me that this seems to often be aired as an excuse for a site not working out. If your site doesn’t work out the only person you should be looking at as the reason is yourself.

why doesn’t google like affiliate marketers? It’s only the ones who don’t try hard enough Google doesn’t like.  See above.

can i use free wordpress blog to do affiliate marketing? You sure can, that’s the beauty of WordPress.

can you do ppc for affilate sites? Yes, but for the love of God make sure you know what you are doing first!

have you been paid by tradedoubler september 2009? Yes, I was.  It was even on time this month.  They didn’t feel like answering my important support query re: future payments now that I’m moving my company to Australia though so next month might be a different kettle of fish.

how long into google penalty do you ditch a domain name Not until you understand exactly what it was you got penalised for in the first place.  Else it’ll happen again, see?

i hate online marketing - We don’t like you either, now bugger right off!

kirsty’s undies – Oi!!  What have I said about these kind of queries you disgusting rotter?!?!

max bramwell single – I dunno, why don’t you look it up on Facebook you scary internet stalker, LOL.

why is my ppc not converting – either you are rubbish, or the merchant is rubbish. Or both.

website dropped 200 places in google – That’s looking pretty ominous matey… Maybe think back to any content stuffing or naughty link tactics from recent weeks.

how do i know if i’ve triggered a google filter? See above.

google penalty recovery time – about as long as it takes you to work out exactly what you did wrong, fix it to Google’s satisfaction, plus anything from a few days to a few weeks.  Oh, and you have to do all that without anyone really being able to tell you what you did wrong in the first place.  Good eh?

what can i buy kirsty? Awww…. a new set of gardening gloves would be awesome.  Wouldn’t mind a Mercedes SLK either.

Well, I feel much better for that!  I may even be able to attempt assisting Duncan at re-oiling our back deck in a little while.  Work though?  I’ll answer that with another question: -

will working less help me relieve my stress?

YES - now I’m off to tend my garden and get all thoughts of affiliate marketing out of my head for a few hours

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

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

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

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

Boost your sales with data feeds

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

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

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

What is a data feed?

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

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

Why use a data feed?

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

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

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

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

What does an affiliate need?

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

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

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

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

What does a data feed site look like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep it current

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

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

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

It has!

It was our first wedding anniversary at the weekend and we can’t believe we’ve now been married for an entire year!  I’ve been a bit quiet on here as I got stuck into as much work as possible over the last couple of weeks to make some room in the old affiliate schedule for a nice 3 day mini break.

As I’ve been neglecting all you lovely readers a teeny bit, here’s a few snaps from our short trip to the mountains above the Sunshine Coast.

Beers and sunset on our balcony, what could be better?

Beers, sunset, dinner, and a long suffering expression from Duncan!

Glasshouse Mountains, and arty tree!

My wedding anniversary gift from Duncan, isn’t it cool?!

From our hike in the rainforest!

It was a lovely break, and we managed not to let it disrupt the progress with my various Christmas sites too much (whose idea was it to get wed in September?!).  I must confess I did take my mobile internet with me so it wasn’t an affiliate-free weekend, I just had to check my stats.

Better luck next break Duncan

An interesting question from Matt Re: how to organise the different promotional stages of a site!

Hi Kirsty,

I’ve been beavering away building a site and now I have been rummaging
around on the internet thinking about the best way to start promoting a new site.
From what I have read it seems there are 2 distinct approaches – PPC and
SERPS traffic.

Since you seem to be one of the few that uses both I was
wondering how you decide which to focus on during the lifecycle of a site?
From my (newbie) perspective it would seem that PPC initially then shift
focus to the SEO/linkbuilding is the way to go…is this how you approach it?

Many thanks,
Matt

Well, the reason I moved into SEO was that I was sick of having to churn
and burn my PPC domains because my affiliate content was too thin and
kept getting slapped by Google. I sat down and worked out what I
thought the landing page algo would need to keep my pages up there long
term. I realised that it’d be hard work, but that as I was going to
write lots of unique content and provide good information resources
anyhow I might as well go for SEO and PPC traffic at the same time.

So in answer to your question, I always try for both right from the
start. The PPC gets things kicked off whilst I’m getting inbound links
and the search engines are doing their stuff. I also use SEO data to
feed new keywords into my PPC campaigns and PPC data to direct my
content strategy as that tends to reveal very quickly “where the money
is at”. Usually SEO traffic turns up quite quickly too, it doesn’t take
you more than 4 to 6 weeks to bring in 20% of your traffic in this way
which if you have targeted things properly makes a huge difference to
your profit margins.

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.