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!