Recently I have started looking into ways of improving each of my affiliate sites, how I can get as much traffic to them as possible and how to convert as much of that traffic as possible. The main thing this has involved is actually putting affiliate links on some of my domains! Believe it or not, I have a handful of sites which are ranking number 1 for a selection of terms and are receiving traffic, but they do not have any affiliate links on them! My plan has always been, buy domain, add 1 piece of content, throw it up, drop another article into a blog network to get some backlinks and then leave it until its ready for me to develop properly. This means that when I come to develop them they have normally settled on the first page and have a little age in Google. The problem is I have too many domains

Anyway, yesterday I was looking through Analytics tyring to pick the next site to beef up a bit and noticed one of my sites stats had flat lined…nothing…dead for the last week. Straight away I went to the site and noticed the site was down as I had changed a password on a MySQL database. The database powered 2 sites and I changed it on one but not the other! I fixed that within a few minutes and the site was live again. The site doesn’t receive much traffic (around 150-200 uniques per month) as it was one of the very first sites I made before I started researching keywords properly, however it makes a sale every month or two of around £50 commission so I’ve been happy just leaving it for now.

While I was on the site I decided to check the page rank and alexa rank as well. As I said, this was one of the first sites I made and the only link building I did was 1 x 30 Angelas profile links – all done by me, by hand…OUCH! and link exchanges so I wasnt expecting anything special. Unsuprisingly the Alexa rank was 11million, however the thing that did suprise me was the page rank! PR3!! The site only has 3 pages to it (hand coded HTML site!) – each one has around 500 words of unique content. The other two pages are both PR2! The best thing is that according to Google I have no links to the site and according to Yahoo I have 11 links – most from website stat sites (how much is your site worth etc)

The site targets one product range within a large market. According to Google there are two larger keywords which cover my product range and also a range of similar products. Think along the lines of a site selling socks and then changing to selling clothes. According to the GKT the phrase I am number 1 for gets 390 searches per month (matches with my Analytics results), the other two terms receive 3,900 and 34,000!

Looking at the front page I could take the 3,900 page quite easily, 2 authority sites ranking on 1 & 2 – neither mentions the full term anywhere, 3rd is a keyword.org domain which is poorly optimised, everything below that is also poorly optimised. The 34,000 keyword looks more difficult. The top 8 slots are taken by retailers and are also the companies I will be promoting on the site! The bottom 2 are quite poor though. One is an retailer who has hired someone who doesnt really know what they are doing to do the SEO – Onsite SEO is poor and offsite SEO appears to be just profile links. Most of the sites are PR2 with the top one being PR4 and the second being PR3. Again, Im pretty sure I can get at least half way up this page quite easily.

As most of you know, most of my sites are exact match domains, however I have been working on some sites for other people using their brand name websites and had good results for them all, so Im pretty sure I can transfer this small niche site into a large affiliate site! Im planning on leaving the content largely the same, just adding the extra 2 keywords into the title and then another 500 words of text to cover the extra keywords. That way hopefully wont notice the site’s purpose has changed. Anyway, Im not in the top 200 for either of the terms Im targetting at the minute, so I’ll keep you updated!

Has anyone else tried anything similar? Any tips? Anybody have any recommendations for building sites with RSS feeds from multiple retailers?

Incoming search terms:

• large affiliate

Wouldn’t it be great if you could create a page for your product, targetting your selected keywords and instantly go into Google on the first page without doing any/much SEO on it?

This technique isn’t anything ground breaking and most people that do SEO will already know about it (as I did), however I had never thought of using it in this way before, but its not to say others arent doing it.

Firstly, I have been pushing a few clickbank products recently just to see what sort of money I could make from it and I noticed that a lot of the pages ranking for keywords relating to the products I wanted to promote were articles or web 2.0 pages hosted on third party sites. Obviously someone had created an article, thrown loads of links at it and got it ranking for the keywords they wanted. Thinking it would be easy to outrank them I started creating lists of keywords and looking for possible domains. I created a list of 10 keywords for each of the 5 products I had found on clickbank, searched for each keyword and on every single set of results – at least one of the top 5 (in most cases top 3) terms was an article or web 2.0 site.

This got me thinking…Google will automatically “pair up” 2 results from the same site on the same page, so if I created my articles on the same site, made the content even more targetted to the selected keyword and then managed to get it onto the front page, Google will automatically lift it up to (hopefully above) the existing article.

I set away creating 5 test articles, one for each product and created web 2.0 accounts on the relevent sites and submitted articles to the same sites as the highest ranking site for that term. After a few days when everything was live I dropped a handful of links to each article, then waited a few more days. I didnt even bother checking the rankings, I just has dropped a few more links and waited a few more days.

I then decided to check where my articles were ranking…

Article 1: I checked the first article and found it was ranking 16th – not the best start to my cunning plan, but it was the most competitive term and worth the most.

Article 2: 3rd! I couldnt believe it – my article had gone in at 3rd – above the article I wanted to leech off which was now 4th!

Article 3: 5th! Again, straight onto the first page. This time I was below the leech article but still top half!

Article 4: 27th For some reason this one didnt shift! Not sure why. Maybe its the site I was hosting it on. It wasnt an article site so wasnt linked to by “similar articles” etc like some of the other sites

Article 5: 6th! This one kind of worked. The site I wanted to leech off dropped from 3rd to 5th, but I still managed to jump up to 6th!

As you can see – there are some good results there, and I think with a few more links I can make it so that each of the articles jumps above the original article I wanted to “leech” off. All of the articles where on article sites except number 4 which had the most disappointing results.

Now the question on everyones minds…did it make me any money…YES! This is what caused me to create this post. The articles have now be live for just over 3 weeks and I have made 2 sales! 1 @ $15 and one at $40! Not a massive amount, but $55 (£35) in 3 weeks for articles that have taken very little work is pretty good! The articles also have links in them to sites of mine so not only have they made me money but I have extra links to my sites! I’ll definately be doing some more!

###UPDATE###
Just a quick update to say that all, except 1, of the articles have now disappeared from the rankings (well first 2 pages – couldnt be bothered to check any further). As I said, I would have written and submitted these articles anyway for the links, so the fact they made a little cash is a bonus, but it looks like you would need to do some work to keep them on the first page. Im not sure if this is part of the new Google update, or the article just dropping back the ranks on the article directories.

###UPDATE###
All of my articles have now disappeared from the front pages.

After writing in a previous post that I was having the best month ever despite being out of the country, sunning myself in Tunisia (wouldn’t recommend it to anybody – preferred Egypt much more!) I was starting to remember one of the reasons I had got into Affiliate Marketing again – to make money while I slept! Basically the fact I could build some websites and they would make me money without me directly working on them each day.

Over the last month, I must be honest, my motivation had been slipping as my sites weren’t performing. I am getting more traffic than ever before, but this month was looking like the worst month ever, with earnings sitting at around 25% of last months! I think the problem was that I came back off holiday and I was sooooo happy with the amount I had made I had a few more days out (worst idea ever!), then started working on the SEO for a few site which weren’t mine which I am extremely happy with – as are the site owners! During this time my sites made no sales, which totally sucked my motivation as the they weren’t making any money.

As a result I decided to carry on with the SEO on some other sites and spend way too long reading different bits and pretty much wrote this month off as a “learning and working for others month”. Over the weekend though I kicked myself up the arse and made myself do some work on my own sites. One of the sites which had made £xxx last month was sitting at low £xx this month, with all traffic coming from 1 keyword (an exact match on the URL) so I decided to work on the SEO for another 3 keywords (both singular and plural, plus the singular version of the main keyword). The site now has all 8 keywords on the first 2 pages, around 5 or 6 on the first page and despire only making 2 sales so far this month, made another 3 this week which has more than tripled the amount that site has earnt.

One of my main sites from through the summer, which is a very summery product is getting even more traffic now which is strange. It is a gift which could double as a Christmas Present, but I didnt think it would INCREASE in traffic after summer. One of the problems is that one of the merchants was advertising the main product at 20% less than they were selling it at in Google shopping, which appeared right above my result – which had the price listed in the META description!It resulted in traffic dropping for a bit, but they have gone now and traffic has increased, however I’ve only just noticed that BOTH of the merchants I promote (there is a script which checks stock levels at the first merchant, if they are out of stock, changes all the links to the second merchant.) which has meant that I couldn’t convert the traffic…however, yesterday the more expensive merchant got them back in stock and I sold another 4!

A few of my other sites have now started converting again which is strange as they have all been “dead” over the last month, but I guess with the “big day” not far away I needed this kick up the arse to get myself out of thinking that I could sit around all day and make money without doing anything! It’s not directly proportional by any means, but I’m definately in the mind set that the more I work, the more I earn (at the minute!).

My gold locket site hasn’t made me any more sales yet, but it is still ranking number 1 for “Gold Locket” and number 10 for “Gold Lockets” – I just need to boost the plural rankings and hope it stays there and hopefully it will make a few more sales before Christmas. I THINK I am still winning the competition, but must admit, I haven’t looked at the forum recently as it seems to be turning into a bit of a spammers paradise/noob asking the same questions over and over again (I’ld be happy for LiquidLunch to come back – at least his posts were funny – even if they weren’t meant to be!).

On a side note, I’m off to see Al Murray on Friday! Went last year and absolutely loved it, by far the best comedian I have seen so hopefully this years will be good! Oh, and if anybody wants 2 tickets to see Jason Manford in Nottingham next October I have 2 available (at cost price), about row 8 or 9 I think.

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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.

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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.

Incoming search terms:

• MARKETING SINGLE PRODUCT