After hoping that this was going to be my best month ever again for my earnings, Im starting to feel that I may be on for my worst month in a while! My main site just hasnt been converting! Traffic levels are higher, Its sending the visitors through to the merchant, but nobody is buying. This seems to becoming more and more regular, with my seeming to start each month with a post complaining about my earnings (see here, here and here).

Hopefully things will start picking up now though! I’m currently working on my first PPC site which will also be my largest site so far (hence the reason for developing the Adwords Keyword Tracking Tool), The average commission value will be anything from around high £x, up to low £xxx, although I think the average will be around £15.

The site I completed at the start of the week is still sending an average of 10 clicks to the merchant each day, so im hopeful that it will turn at least a couple of sales this month, which will give me a decent chunk of commission. The problem is that the landing page I am sending them to had a handful of links to different products, around 40% of the links are broken! I told the merchant a week ago now, but they just dont seem interested in fixing it. One of my single product sites is due to get some TV coverage within the next week so hopefully that will give me a push in commission as well.

Oh well, onwards and upwards…

A couple months back I registered a new domain name for a new niche and did my usual ‘new domain’ routine…set up the hosting, installed wordpress, added one article, had 30 profile backlinks made pointing to it, created a custom image for the header in wordpress and then left it. It wasn’t until last week I decided to check the stats for it and noticed that it was already ranking 7th for the main keyword and had around 300 uniques last month! I hadn’t even changed the wordpress theme (other than a more suitable image for the header), let alone added any affiliate links so I decided to push this site to the top of the pile for developing.

I managed to design the site and create a new wordpress theme in a couple of hours on Monday night with the hope of pushing the website up the rankings over this month and creating a few sales from it. This morning I checked the ranking for the main keyword again…5th! It may have been a coincidence, but I like to think its more to do with the onsite SEO of the new custom theme compared to the standard theme

Unsuprisingly when I loaded Analytics up there was a ‘massive’ spike in traffic yesterday. The site had averages around 8 uniques per day during the week and 14 uniques per day at the weekend over the last month, yesterday there was 25 uniques, all from Google. I’m hoping this will translate to around 800-900 uniques per month at 5th, and I had originally guessed at around 2000 uniques per month once I hit first, although Im starting to think this may be even higher.

So by changing the theme, I’ve (hopefully) trippled the traffic to the site! I also managed to push 17 clicks to the merchant! According to the affiliate network, this merchant has around a 9% conversion rate, however Im hoping to convert 1% of the traffic I send them as they are high priced items. Providing I can reach the top commission tier (which would only require 3 sales per month), I’ll be making high £xx per sale. Combined with the fact the site could realistically get 2000+ visitors per month (from which I would expect at least 10-15 orders) without spending a penny on PPC, and this little niche starts to look like it might be worth expanding on!

Since last Friday (a week ago today), I have made a massive total of ……£0.00! After my best ever start to the month (almost as much in the first 6 days as the whole of last month) I was really excited about how much I could earn this month, but as I said, the last 7 days made me a grand total of zero!

I know Affiliate marketing will have peaks and dips, which is why Im not too bothered about it, however what is a bit concerning is that out of the 4 sites that regularly make sales (plus the A4U compeition), not one of them made a sale in an entire week!

The reason why the Gold Locket site didnt make any sales, was because it didnt have any traffic. Google decided to drop me for a week. I THINK the reason this happened was a massive surge in backlinks. I had done around 10-15 blog comments, however on 3 of the sites I ended up with site wide links due to “recent comment” blocks, resulting in around 2000 backlinks in a couple of hours! The day after placing these comments, guess what…the site dropped from the rankings! Last night I removed some of the duplicate content and replaced with unique content, and removed some of the keyword stuffing I had done. Today the number of backlinks dropped from 2000 to 1500 as the site wide links start to disappear and as if by magic, the site is now ranking back at 12th!

As for why the other sites have made no sales, I have no idea! One sites had the best month ever (again) traffic wise – but dropped from a 10% conversion rate over the last couple of months to 0% for a whole week. Normally the amount of traffic I sent the merchant would have resulted in around 20-25 sales, and a nice low £xxx in commission for me, but it didnt make a single sale, or penny in commission! The other sites are the same, decent traffic, but no sales!

Today however, the site mentioned above has made 2 sales from 3 clicks, another site has made a decent sale, my Gold Locket site is now back in the rankings and I have the next week off work – everything is looking up…again…for now!

Ok, so while the title is true…its not as good as it sounds. I finally got around to registering as self employed at the back end of last week. There was a couple of reasons for this. Despite the fact I have been earning money from affiliate marketing for nearly 6 months (only a decent amount for the last 2 though), I havent actually had any of the money. Its all been sitting in the networks accounts and thats were (most of) it is staying!

However last week I received a check from my Amazon US account which I had made some money through before Christmas so I need to cash that, and I also took my first step into domaining. I snapped up a dropped domain for the usual price of £7.03 from 123-reg (minus quidco of course ) and within 5 hours had sold the domain for £150!

I figured now I had random 3 figure payments coming into my bank I best let Her Majesty now so she can take her perfectly reasonable slice of my hard earnt money (dont get me started on tax!). So I am now officially a self employed affiliate marketer! The negative side is that its only part time and not full time

The other reason I hadn’t registered as a self employed affiliate before was that I wasnt sure if I would make any money from it, or if I would stick at it. Registering myself as a self employed affiliate has kind of set a new mindset for me. Im not “playing around” with this anymore, its a serious, sustainable income!

Also, this week I have had my best day/week ever which I think will lead to my best month ever But I’ll post about that separately.

The site I posted about in my previous post hasnt made a single sale all day today, despite me sending 30 clicks to them. I thought I would check that everything was working correctly, website is up and working correctly, the links are working, the merchants site is working, ahhh, OUT OF STOCK!!!

No wonder the clicks arent converting! Luckily for me there is another merchant which sells the same product but for 20% more! As the item costs more, obviously the conversion rate isnt going to be as high, but it will be a hell of a lot better than the 0% I will get from an “OUT OF STOCK” page.

Rather than manually changing all the links on the site which would have taken 10 minutes I decided to create a small PHP script which will check the merchants site, see if the product is in stock and then update the file to point to the correct site and display the correct price. The script will now automatically check the site every hour and display links to whichever merchant has the item in stock.

So rather than monitoring what difference the voucher code makes to the conversion rate, I will be seeing what difference a 20% increase in price. I have also noticed that the merchant which has the items in stock also has a 10% conversion rate and an average EPC of 31p compared to a 4% conversion rate and an EPC 12p! Looks like it might not be a bad thing that my links have changed!

I’ll update in a couple of days once I have a few days of stats.

One of my product specific sites I developed at the start of the year is making decent sales each day, and traffic is also increasing each day. The merchant has given me a £5 discount voucher to promote on the site (and several other sites which point to the same merchant) which works out at roughly 10% discount.

Now the problem I have is that my traffic has been, and still is converting at approximately 9% without the voucher. By adding the voucher Im going to need to hope that the conversion rate increases to at least 10% to make up the loss in commission that I have made on the other orders.

I’ve never pushed discount codes before, so im not sure what percentage increase I can expect, but I have put the code live for a week and will see what difference it makes. If its not benfiting me I will remove it again. In theory, by putting the code on there I SHOULD get a higher conversion rate (who doesnt like a 10% discount??), hopefully high enough to not only cover the loss in commission but also increase the amount of commission I am getting.

Anybody else had any experience with discount codes on single product sites? I know my 9% conversion rate is already pretty high (merchant average is around 4%), Im going to need a 10% conversion (10% increase) to match without the voucher and preferably at least an 11% conversion (20% increase!) to make it worth promoting the discount voucher.

Is a 20% increase realistic given that all my traffic is targeted and looking a specific product? I guess only time will tell! I’ll update in a week or so.

Procrastination refers to the deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. – Wikipedia

I havent posted for a while, I’ve been busy doing, erm, checking my stats and reading other peoples blogs. I was starting to drift again, convincing myself that I was working when I knew I wasnt.

Fortunately one of my sites I had developed a few months ago whirred into action last week as the product was eventually released – after a month of being delayed! Since launch date I have sold quite a few – which isnt suprising as I am ranking number 1 & 2 for all my main keywords! Later in the week I had an email from my account manager at the merchant I am pushing the traffic through to telling me they have just sent one of the items to “This Morning” and also “The Telegraph”, so I’m hoping that this will bring in some extra traffic and increase sales even further.

The increase in sales helped get me out of the rut I was falling into and I started working on updating prices on one of my sites. After updating about 50% of them I decided there must be an easier way. This one site had about 30 products and was going to take the best part of an hour to update and ideally needed doing every week! So I set to work creating a PHP script to scrape the prices from Amazon.

I now have 2 different scripts, one which will trawl a WordPress install, check the custom fields for URL’s and grab a new price for them, and a second script which I designed for the sites which dont use wordpress. This basically has a table behind it which stores a URL, Price, and a couple of other pieces of information, the script runs through the whole table, updates all the prices and saves them. All I need to do on the site is insert a variable now where I was the price to insert and it pulls the price from the database, which is updated every day! It took me about 5 hours to put the whole thing together but it works well and is now implemented across all my sites, automatically fetching prices from all the merchants I promote and updating my sites for me – no more manual updating!

Now, the final task I had set for the weekend, which was also the task I had set myself to complete in the week before, and the weekend before, and the week before that….(you get the picture!), finish the design for one of my sites! I dont know why I had been putting this site off for so long but I had managed to put it off for near on a month. I decided before I moved on to any more work I had to get that site finished! So I spent the best part of Sunday designing the theme, turning it into a wordpress theme and writing some more copy. The design, along with affiliate links went live at around 5pm…done…finished! Just need to do some offsite SEO now to push it up the rankings (currently sitting 6th for the main keyword and in the top half for several long tail keywords).

This morning, much like every other morning I checked my earnings at Amazon, Affiliate Future and Affiliate Window. The site I had just finished uses PaidOnResults, which I didnt see the point in checking after about 12 hours of the site being live. Next on the list, check my emails (yes checking earnings now comes above checking emails!). Halfway through deleting all the spam I noticed a “Daily Summary” from PaidOnResults. A bit confused at never receiving one before despite the fact I had been signed up for a month I thought I would have a check and see what was actually in their summary. Pending Commission: £9.60! After just 12 hours of being live the site had already made me a sale, and a decent amout of commission!

Now, if only I had finished that site a month ago… Lesson learnt, stop thinking about doing things and get on and do them!