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A4U Gold Jewellery Competition – Update

 Author: admin Jun 27

Since outsourcing backlinks last week I haven’t done anything else on my gold locket website. Their are a couple of reasons for this, first being the amount of work I have on developing other domains and second being the weather! It has been really nice each recently (for the UK anyway) so I have been spending as much time outside, either chilling in the sun, messing around in our plunge pool or painting the decking/fence, to make the most of the weather.

In my previous post I said that I had outsourced 120 profiles, 240 links. Out of the 240, 60 of them where “Gold Locket” links. The site was ranking at around the 120 mark (very disappointing – havent had chance to tweak it at all yet). After the Angelas Backlinks, the site now ranks 14th – not a bad improvement! Im going to try and add a few more products this week, take a look at the onsite seo and add the search function. I’ll probably throw another 60 backlinks at it once I’ve added a bit more content, and possibly some “white gold locket” links as well as I have got an even cheaper supplier through oDesk now, $8.89 (£5.90) for 12 profiles!

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 8.5 Hours

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: -£1.75

Category: A4U Gold Jewellery Competition  | 2 Comments

Outsourcing Backlinks

 Author: admin Jun 22

I posted the other day that I had found the joys of outsourcing backlinks. This post is a review of the oDesk experience.

oDesk is easy to sign up to, nothing you wouldnt expect to answer for this type of service. You do need to give them your card details when signing up. Once signed up they charge your card with two difference transactions, both of which add up to $10. It took a few days before I could check the amounts to get my account verified, but you can start outsourcing backlinks or any other work as soon as you create your account.

Once your account is created you can login and post a job. Posting a job is kind of like posting an auction on eBay. You select the category you want the job to go into, in the case of outsourcing backlinks, I selected SEO. You then complete the job title and description. I tried to make the description as easy to understand as possible, but make sure that everything was covered – remember alot of these workers dont speak English very well. You are then able to select the qualifications that the applicant must have in order to apply – I left empty. The final part posting the job is the pay! You can select to pay per hour and tell them how many hours per week you need them for, and how many weeks you will need them for, or alternatively, as I did in this case, a fixed fee for a set amount of work.

Now my job for outsourcing backlinks has been posted and is available for all to apply to. You can either wait for users to apply for the jobs, or select users that you think may be interested in outsourcing backlinks and invite them to apply for the job.

Once you have an applicant/bid you are happy with you simply click a button to hire them and they are added to your “team”. From here you can send them messages with attachments, monitor their work, pay them and plenty more I havent explored yet.

The whole process is about as simple as it could be, and oDesk dont charge you anything. oDesk take their cut from the workers pay (ie if you pay them $10, oDesk take $1 and the worker gets $9).

As for the quality of work…

You would have thought that outsourcing backlinks would have been a simple task, with the right software in place it doesn’t take long and its not difficult to understand – they even have a PDF telling them exactely what to do!!

The guy who applied for the first 60 profiles I tried outsourcing made no effort to contact me, didnt really understand what I wanted him to do and when I eventually managed to explain to him he just disappeared and stopped answering my messages. Since then I have cancelled the assignment and created a new job for outsourcing 120 profiles!

I didnt bother inviting anybody I thought might be interested in outsourcing the backlinks this time and just left it for the workers to apply. Within 2 hours I had 5 people apply, one of which bid $10. Couple of clicks and he was hired! I was just in the process of writing a message to him to say what I needed doing, but before I could finish the message I had an email from his asking for the URL’s and Anchor texts for the links so he could get started.

A couple of hours later  I received a report with the first 30 profiles in, I checked a couple and they all looked ok. Sent him the next batch, again a couple of hours later and I had another report! I have since gave him the final 60 profiles and I am waiting for him to complete these.

This is guy is better and faster than I expected and I will be sure to use him the next time I am outsourcing backlinks. He lists a variety of other types of links he can build so I may try some of them out.

So to sum it up, I got 120 backlinks built to the standard I would have built them myself, for £6.80! 120 profiles (240 backlinks, less than 3p per link!) would have taken me about 10 hours (5 minutes per profile), all thanks to my new best friends over at oDesk. I was paying $5 per month for Angela’s backlinks and doing all the work myself, I can now pay $5 per month and get 60 profiles created for me, and still get the packet (all the links are provided in the report!). So, will I continue outsourcing backlinks through oDesk, I think the answer is a definate yes!

Category: Design/Hosting/SEO, Product / Service Reviews  | Tags: , ,  | 7 Comments

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition – More Products & Backlinks

 Author: admin Jun 19

As promised, heres the latest  update on the A4U Competition. Since the last post the sites have gone live, mine has been indexed and even had a couple of users find it using long tail keywords. I’ve had some nice comments from people regarding my site, especially from Mansoor, both on A4U and over on his blog.

I have been accepted for 2 more merchants, which has pushed the number of gold lockets up from 30 to just under 100. I have decided that rather than adding them all in one go, I am going to add a few a day over the next 20 days or so. It takes me about 10 minutes to add 3 new products, including editing the image to fit my site design. So I am expecting to spend about 3.5 hours on adding products which I will add to the timesheet now rather than 10 minutes each day.

I have also spent an hour this morning doing a little bit of onsite SEO on the homepage, adding the content I wrote a while ago, spinning lots of unique versions and submitting to 10 different article sites (will do some more at a later stage). I have set my outsource worker onto building 60 links for the site as well, which isnt taking up any of my time, but cost £3.50 so I will record this below as well.

I think I will end up going over my 10 hour ‘limit’ as I had only expected around 50 products, obviously 100 products has added another 3 hours of work – although it also gave me some inspiration for a new script to write which would mean I could have added all 100 products in a few minutes :)

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 8.5 Hours

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: -£3.50

Category: A4U Gold Jewellery Competition  | Tags: , , ,  | One Comment

Outsourcing…Why The Hell Didnt I Do It Sooner!

 Author: admin Jun 18

I decided yesterday that my time was much better spent doing pretty much anything else rather than link building. I had decided I would try and get the other half doing link building for me, but she got bored after the first 2 or 3 links and gave up. I remembered a while ago someone commenting on one of my Angelas backlinks posts that they outsourced 120 of Pauls links for $5.60 ($0.56 per hour).

After doing a bit of digging it looked like the poster was infact trying to promote an eBook where they would explain this to you. Always one for trying to get something for free, I emailed them anyway and asked as they had commented on my website and got a backlink from it, could they please tell me where they outsource to. Within minutes I had a reply saying they use oDesk.

Now I had heard of oDesk before, just never used it. So I signed up, posted a job for someone to create 60 of Angelas Backlinks for me and left it over night. This morning I have about 10 bids on the job for around $5 (£3.50). One of the guys has clocked up around 1500 hours of work on oDesk and has decent feedback from similar jobs so I have hired him to do this for me. To start off with it will be 60 links per week, but if this guy works as well as Im hoping I’ll start putting more work his way.

So 60 backlinks would have taken me around 4 or 5 hours to do myself, and I would have been extremely bored by the end of it. So in effect I am paying someone 70p per hour to do this for me and freeing myself up for 5 hours a week to do other things, which is a hell of a lot of time when you already work fulltime and then do AM in evenings and weekends!

I’ll post an update once the first week has been completed!

Category: Affiliate Marketing  | Tags: ,  | Leave a Comment

Officially A Self Employed Affiliate!!

 Author: admin Jun 17

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.

Category: Affiliate Marketing  | 2 Comments

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition – Products & Automation

 Author: admin Jun 08

I had hit a bit of a stumbling block with my A4U competition site, I had the design in place, I had a decent chunk of writing, but I had no products! Luckily I was accepted to F Hinds programme yesterday so last night I spent an hour selecting the products I wanted from their feed and adding them to wordpress. For now I had copied the feed descriptions in, but these will all be rewritten at some point.

I had previously written a script which checks product prices by scraping the web pages (ideal for sites without feeds!), however as most of the jewellery merchants have feeds I figured I may as well use them so started writing a script for that. So far it reads the in the feed file from AWin, unzip’s it and updates all the prices for the products in wordpress with the new prices. When I get a spare few minutes I will put a little bit of code in which will check the feed for any products with the word “gold” and “locket” in, if it finds any emails me the details for me to add them to wordpress.

One problem I have at the minute is that one of the categories on the site is price. If a locket changes from say £55 to £45, it would need to change the category it is in. Now I can code this so that when it updates the price it updates the categories table as well, but it would be easier if I could create a custom page which rather than showing all the products in a certain category, shows all products with a price custom field value of between £x and £y. If anyone knows a way of doing that it would be much appreciated.

I have also got quite a long list of longtail keywords which I will be trying to cram into product descriptions and write a few blog posts for. Im still confident that I’ll get the whole site built from scratch, including adding all the products, writing quite a bit of content and a little bit of link building in under 10 hours. Im trying to get to the point where I can knock a site like this out in a day including some basic offsite SEO. I know people that are outputting a handful in a day, but I like to create custom themes for each and every site and write decent unique content for it.

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 4 Hours

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: £0.00

Category: A4U Gold Jewellery Competition  | Leave a Comment

Voucher Code…

 Author: admin Jun 04

So last week I put a voucher code on one of my sites to see what difference it made to conversion rates. For the 3 weeks before putting the voucher code live I had averaged around a 9% conversion rate. I was hoping that adding a voucher code would increase this considerably as it was about 10% discount on the item I was selling. So I left the voucher code on the site for 1 week.

In that week the site received about 200 uniques, of which I sent 96 clicks to the merchants. Now I would have expected 8 or 9 sales from this based on my previous conversion rate, preferably a bit more due to the loss in commission due to the voucher code. So how annoyed do you think I was when I only made 1 sale! Thats a drop from 9% to just over 1%!!! Everything was working properly, links all correct, voucher code worked, item was in stock. I have since removed the discount code and made a few sales and had around a 6% conversion rate over the last few days (although its usually higher on a weekend so it should balance back out).

I have contacted the merchant and the affiliate network and theres no problems anywhere. It just doesnt make any sense. I may give it another go in a couple of weeks but for now the voucher code is staying off!

Category: Affiliate Marketing  | Tags:  | 3 Comments

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition – Design & Copywriting

 Author: admin May 29

In my previous A4u Gold Jewellery Competition, I covered the process I went through to select the niche and domain name. In the same night I created a design for the site, converted it to HTML and wrote an article, including at least 2 variations of each sentence for spinning.

Design & HTML Creation – 1 Hour

Firstly when creating a design I like to look at other sites in a similar niche and see what I like and dont like. Usually I will find 2 or 3 designs which I like and will create a mashup of them in Photoshop, taking the best parts from each design. I dont like to use existing themes, this is just my personal preference, I like to buid everything from the ground up (although the theme for this site is one that I found on the net, I’ve done a few tweaks to the source code here and there to optomise it a bit more, however once I get time I will redesign it from scratch!). By designing it myself I dont need to make any compromises on content or layout, and by coding it myself I can make sure the SEO is effective as possible. Once I have the design created in Photoshop, I’ll create it all by hand in dreamweaver as a standard HTML page. Once I have the complete HTML page I then chop it up into a wordpress theme – job done! The whole thing so far, except turning it into a wordpress theme has taken me 1 hour, and I imagine it will take another 15 minutes to convert it to wordpress.

Copy Writing – 1 hour 15 minutes

I had to take my car for its MOT this morning so thought this was the ideal time for me to put my new netbook to use! I grabbed a few articles and resources from around the net, saved them on my USB key and off I went. While I was waiting for the car to have its MOT (it passed by the way :) ) I managed to get a 600 word article written out in just under 45 minutes. When I got back I copied it over into The Best Spinner and set about rewriting each sentence, one at a time, at least two variations of each. This took another 30 minutes and now I have my original 600 word article, and 2 variations which can be spun together and combined with the auto feature in The Best Spinner to give me plenty of unique articles for publishing elsewhere and article submissions.

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 2 Hours 30 Minutes

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: £0.00

Category: A4U Gold Jewellery Competition  | Leave a Comment

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition

 Author: admin May 29

After missing out on the previous A4U competition, several affiliates including myself have decided to start a new competition.

This time the niche is Gold Jewellery and at the minute there are 11 of us taking part, although as the competition doesnt start until the 15th June feel free to join in! There’s no prize, just a bit of friendly competition. The winner is whoever has made the most profit by the end of the year.

Unlike all my previous websites and domains, I will be blogging about the site in detail and (hopefully) how much it has earnt! So, the first step in entering the competition…picking a niche!

Im not sure how everybody else goes about selecting a niche, personally for me I loaded up a few jewellery merchants with a decent conversion and commission rate and had a quick browse through each for product ranges of items with an average value of £100+. First one I found was gold lockets. Prices start at around £50 and go up to £350+, most costing around £100+.  So with a 10-15% comission rate that most jewellers offer I should be able to earn an average of £10 per order quite easily.

The next step for me is checking the search volume with the Google Keyword tool, “Gold Locket” gets 9,900 exacts per month, with “Gold Lockets” bringing in about 4,600 exacts. Now normally I would do a bit more digging on exact traffic, including setting up a PPC campaign to see how many impressions I get for the selected keywords, but I dont have time to do that for this competition.

The penultimate step is competition, looking at the existing SERPs, the top spot is taken by a large site which is fairly well optimised and has quite a few backlinks to that individualy page, however all the links come from 2 different domains which are part of the same network. In second place its ebay! That sold it for me, and looking down the rest of the results there was no real competition at all. Im confident that I can get second easily, it will take a little bit more work to topple the top spot, but it shouldnt be a problem.

Now the final step, the domain name! Obviously goldlocket . co.uk was gone, hmmm, where from here, solidgoldlocket, whitegoldlocket, then the other half chirped up with, “why dont you just get ‘agoldlocket.co.uk’”, a few minutes later it was registered :)

Next step, the design…

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 15 Minutes

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: £0.00

Category: A4U Gold Jewellery Competition  | 3 Comments

Single product site…product out of stock!

 Author: admin May 25

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.

Category: Affiliate Marketing  | Leave a Comment
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