December Update

Posted on December 11th, 2008 by Jay

Posts on my blog have been a little sparse recently, mainly because I have been working hard on the Christmas season’s selling. Its been a really turbulent time in the UK recently - the housing market is shrinking due to a lack of lending from UK banks (despite a 2.5% drop in interest rates over the last 2 months) and this has been reflected in consumer spending. A 2.5% reduction in the level of VAT from the 1st December has done little to help (whats 2.5% in the whole scheme of things?) and the pound is now at its lowest level against the Euro since the Euro launched. On the high street, Woolworths is now in administration after 99 years (what a shame however I can’t help but feel that their senior management have simply not kept the business model up to date with current markets).

So, what does this all mean for my affiliate sites? Online spending has increased a the expense of tradional over-the-counter sales on the high street. I believe this is the result of a couple of things:

1. Consumers are becoming more internet savvie in respect of making online purchases. Companies like Amazonand Ebay have helped push the concept of online shopping out to the masses. To be fair, this is an obvious extension from the catalogue shopping of the 80s and 90s, but initial worries about security seems to be waining.

2. Consumers are looking for ways to maximise their spending power and are finally coming to the understanding about the power of using price comparison websites to find the lowest prices.

As a result, my two main websites (Find My Best Price and Santa’s Warehouse) have done well, taking into consideration the fact that they are both new websites and have had no money spent on them as far as advertising is concerned. However, the big surprise of them all is my Classic Watches website. I wasn’t sure about this one as it didn’t seem the time to be promoting luxury goods, especially online - how wrong I was! And this just goes to show the power of promoting niche websites. Have had a couple of big sales on there (and by big, we are talking a couple of grand a piece!) and so the commissions have been rather juicy!

As mentioned when I started this project, this is a journey more than anything else and I am constantly learning and reviewing my model. My goal is still to be generating £1000+ per month by next Christmas and I still believe this is more than achievable however I am making some more refinements to my current sites and my future plans as well. These include:

1. I am dropping the affilistore software on all sites after Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, its good however its not the best I have seen and I am now going to install Price Tapestry across all my sites from the New Year because it is just so much more versatile and powerful.

2. Am not going to launch anymore wide range sites but am going to identify further niche sites that I can then promote. Big ticket items seem to be the order of the day - you might not sell as many items however the commission is so much larger - remember, I am looking at the effort vs reward side of things on my project!

3. I will be including blogging as part of all future sites to keep the content fresh and to keep Google interested!

This will probably be the last update before Christmas as I am concentrating all my efforts on maximising income from the Christmas period - more in the New Year!

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Compare Prices To Save This Christmas

Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Jay

The credit crunch is now well and truely here - and that can only be good news for bargain hunters this Christmas. With high street names like Marks & Spencer and Woolworths (allegedly for sale for £1!!!) experiencing downturns, many other high street retailers are now ramping up their online stores. Why? Because online shops don’t cost anywhere near as much as running a high street premise.

This Christmas is going to be a battlefield for the online retailers as they try and outdo each other by releasing short term discounts, pre-Christmas sales and time limited voucher codes. Smart shoppers can make the most of this by using price comparison sites and discount codes to great effect.

Many retailers have been caught out by the rapid changes in high street market conditions and are holding stock levels that were ordered and paid for at the back end of last year and early this year before credit problems really hit home. Faced with the prospect of having valuable capital tied up in stock, many are now throwing caution to the wind and heavily discounting their stock to try and shift it before demand slackens.

This Christmas may not suit many retailers but for consumers, it’s going to be a buyers market.

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Discount voucher code websites

Posted on November 8th, 2008 by admin

A great way to save money is to use discount voucher codes. WIth the credit crunch well under way, retailers are having to work hard to keep their customers coming back and so now is a great time to find a bargain online.

So how do they work? Basically, the retailer is saving money on running and staff costs by promoting sales through their online shops. By using affiliates to promote their goods, they are only paying out on sales, rather than paying upfront costs encurred by tradional high street shops. By cutting their margins further, many retailers also offer discount codes that are valid for a short period of time. These codes can represent substantial savings and so it is well worth keeping up to date with them.

Sites like Valid Discount Codes offer a free email alert system where you can sign up to receive regular emails when new discount codes are released.

Discount code sites have recently been featured in the national press and other money saving tips sites as great ways to grab the best price for Christmas shopping.

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End of week 4 and the money has started coming in.

Posted on October 21st, 2008 by Jay

Just to recap, over the last 4 weeks I have been focusing on uploading several affiliate websites and then starting to SEO their content and submit to Google. With all the sites apart from one (http://santas-warehouse.find-my-best-price.co.uk/) having a sitemap (will explain this one is a minute), pages are being indexed in Google within a couple of days and some of the pages are starting to do well for rankings as well. I plan to leave these for another fortnight to let more data come in before I revisiting the sites to make some tweaks. In the meantime, as per the previous article on “relevant content for SEO“, I have been adding relevant content pages to a couple of the more recent sites as well as finishing off a watch price comparison site: Classic Watches Online.

Ok, a bit ago I mentioned that all sites apart from the large Christmas Price Comparison Store had sitemaps created and submitted to Google. This is because the inbuilt sitemap in Affistore cannot split sitemaps up into smaller files and Google does not accept sitemaps of more than 50,000 lines. The website in question has upwards of 200,000 items so I am going to have to let Google spider it the old fashioned way unless I figure something out. Its not a problem for this site - this one is a ’slow burner’ and I need to work on links throughout the year to get this site ready for 2009.

Anyhow, as an example of relevant content adding to your affiliate websites, take a look at these pages I have done on the new watch site - I have many more to go however these are a good start. The pages are stuffed full of relevant content on high value watch make Omega - however, the text scans well and is genuinely interesting to somone looking for more information on Omega Watches. Also look at the sub links, that expand on topics mentioned in the main Omega Page - in particular the Omega Seamaster 007 page which will hopefully pull in some page rank as well as a sale or two - got to remain an optimist.

Once this batch of sites are online I will revisit the SEO work on them and find a host of highly focused keywords and phrases and then create a second batch of SEO pages. By working like this, each site will slowly grow into a well-linked hive of information that is attactive to search engines and human visitors alike, while also being very well monetised.

Like I said at the start, this is a 2 year project and the bulk of the money making should revolve around Christmas 2009, not this year although it would be nice to pull in some cash by the end of the year. So far we have had two sales which is not bad from a standing start just over 3 weeks ago.

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Using relevant content to boost SEO

Posted on October 15th, 2008 by Jay

If you have done any reading on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) then you’ll have heard the term “relevant content” being bandied about. “Google loves relevant content” is the new mantra - lets all chant together and our pages will magically rise up the searches … or maybe not.

The more reading I do on SEO (and I have done alot over the last 2 years!), the more I see people confusing “content” for “relevant content” - you see, there IS a difference!

For my affiliate sites, SEO and relevant content are extremely important because I am using datafeeds that are also being used my countless other affiliate marketeers. In theory, if we all used the same data in the same way we should all be ranked in exactly the same place in the search engines - but this doesn’t happen so why?

Part of the answer is including relevant content in your site to make it stand out from the competition. Google increasingly uses algorithms that try and guage how relevant the content on your site is as well as checking the quality of the links in and out of the site itself. In otherwords, if you have a well-stocked website with focused material that is all relevant to the theme of the site itself AND you have links to and from several other websites of similar quality, Google is going to LOVE you! And if Google loves you, then you get lots of lovely traffic.

So, lets take a look at a real life example - I recently launched a football boot price comparison website and submitted a sitemap to Google. 1 week later and it is starting to show in the google index (51 at the time of writing) and lists 2nd on page 1 of google already! Its a lucky hit on a misspelling (cheap football boots vapours) however at this stage we’ll take what we can!

How do I know all this information by the way? Well, like any clever affiliate marketeer, I use Google Analytics to track traffic in and out of all my sites. Its free, very simple to get started but incredibly powerful as well. Highly recommended :)

Back to the football boots site then - I have started adding content pages on the major types of football boot makes and models. Each content page is well inter-linked and I plan to throw a couple of external links out from this site to another football boot site and bring a couple back, just to add to the relevancy of the overall site. Check these pages for examples:

Nike Tiempo Air Legend II

Adidas Predator Football Boots

Notice how the pages link back and forth and all end with a link to the relevant product pages? These pages are called landing pages and are specifically set up to attact targetted keyphrases and keywords entered into Google. See if you can spot the keyphrases I am aiming at!

What this means is I now have a site that has several landing pages that are unique to my site and that set me apart from all the other affiliate marketeers using the same data feeds as me. By using Google Analytics, I can monitor the effectiveness of these pages, making tweaks if necessary as well as adding more landing pages down the line.

And thats the benefit of using relevant content as an integral part of your SEO plans. Good luck!!

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Credit Crunch and Affiliate Marketing

Posted on October 7th, 2008 by Jay

A downturn in the economic cycle is the ideal time for internet marketers and affiliate sellers to up their game and focus on these new opportunities. It is easy to make the assumption that, with people starting to think about recession and the economic downturn, no one will want to spend any money but is this the case?

I don’t think so. I see it rather differently in fact - I see a whole generation who are used to spending freely, use the internet with alot more confidence than previous generations and who now expect a very high level of living. In addition, they have never experienced a serious economic downturn before and so have little experience to draw on.

Lets go through that one more time:

1. SPEND FREELY

2. EXPERIENCED INTERNET USERS

3. HIGH LIFESTYLE EXPECTATIONS

Looks like an ideal market to me! Whereas previous generations made cutbacks in their day to day lives through practical steps, todays generation are starting to look for ways to maintain their lifestyles but also by paying less money. And at this stage, I’m thinking online price comparison sites!

Seriously! This is the “Ask Jeeves” generation - when they have a problem, they are turning to their internet browser for solutions.

Lets add the time of year into the mix and what have we got? We have a young, motivated customer base who are looking for ways to save money on Christmas!

And if that isn’t a market you can make money from then you are in the wrong business. Check the previous link for one example of how to appeal to this market - its a simple idea however also a perfect example of a text-book affiliate price comparison site.

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SEO Tips

Posted on October 7th, 2008 by admin

I’ve been designing websites for close to 10 years now and have learned alot in all that time - from clawing my way through website site design using Dreamweaver, to coding them by hand in notepad. I’ve also learned alot in my ‘day job’ about running successful businessess and how to market them.

In many ways, optimising your website is EXACTLY the same as marketing a business - it doesn’t matter what your website is about. You are still wanting to get your message across to a targetted audience.

I still like to go over old ground on a regular basis as I find there is always something I have forgotten or overlooked and this applies to my SEO knowledge - I have loads of high-end technical tricks and wizardry in my arsenal however it pays to go back to basics every now and again to recapture the essence of what you are trying to achieve.

Anyway, long story short, this blog captures the essence of successful SEO activity - at least in regards to the first steps. Got it bookmarked so hopefully it will develop into a decent series.

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2 More Affiliate Websites Live

Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Jay

Its been a busy weekend - not only did we go live with the first football price comparison site last week and make moves to SEO the content, but on Saturday I started playing with some new affiliate store software that allegedly produces quality sites from the datafeeds of a number of affiliate companies.

Cut a long story short, I installed Affilistore on Saturday and within 3 hours had a completely new price comparison store live and running:

Compare Football Boots Online
Find MP3 Players Online

I’m in two minds about using bespoke software for affiliate stores - on the one hand, its extremely quick with sites being online within a matter of hours, not days or weeks so on a sheer volume basis I can now work much quicker.

The ‘pay off’, however, is that the store software is also being used by an unknown number of other affiliate marketeers who are, in effect, my competition. However, weighing it all up, I believe the pros exceed the cons and I’ll stick with the store software but spend much more effort in SEO activities to push my sites higher up the search engines. In addition, I am not convinced that my own websites are substantially better than Affilistore in regards to SEO activity so I’m changing tack now and am going for the volume route.

Goal is now changed to having 100 affiliate stores live by the end of this year - its a challenging target given that it takes me about a day a site at the moment however even if I fall short, I’ll still have dozens of highly monetised websites, all stuffed with relevant content to feed the spiders.

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First Affiliate Website Now SEO’d - On To The Next!

Posted on October 4th, 2008 by admin

The first site is now fully live and tested - I’ve also started to apply some SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques to some of the key landing pages.

I’ve tried alot of different SEO programs and websites and the one program that consistently works for me is iBusiness Promoter (now on version 10). I’ve known about this software for a few years and used an older version a couple of years back on a couple of sites I launched. I was impressed at the time that I managed to get a couple of sites onto page 2 in Google within a matter of a couple of weeks - however, Axandra have now included a guarantee on iBusiness Promoter that says if you do everything they recommend and your site hasn’t hit Google’s top 10 within 45 days, you get your money back.

Have run it against my first site and have SEO’d a couple of landing pages:

Cheap Football Boots

Replica Football Shirts

I have a three more landing pages that I am currently preparing and then this site will be practically complete. One of the difficulties I have with creating affiliate sites is that I am too much of a perfectionist and will happily spend a couple of unnecessary weeks tweaking a site cosmetically whereas I need to remember that if the site is functional and well coded then its time to move on to the next one.

As Christmas is on the way, the next site will be based on consumer electronics - the games machine, mp3 player type of goods that have high ticket values (and therefore commissions!) and are also high traffic sites in the months leading up to Christmas. Time to start applying to some new retailers on my affiliates!

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Using Stopwords to Boost Search Engine Ranking

Posted on October 3rd, 2008 by admin

Search engine ranking algorithms are more or less complex depending on the search engine in question. Google is, without question, the Daddy of them all. With over 90% of all UK searches going through Google, it makes sense to understand their algorithms best.

So what is a stopword? Put simply, a stopword is a common word in a sentence that adds no additional value to the content or meaning of that sentence. Lets consider an example:

“The Cat Sat On The Mat”

The basic meaning of that phrase can be summed up using the following words:

“Cat, Sat, Mat”

The subject of the sentence is “cat”, the subject’s action is “sat” and the object of the action is “mat”. All the other words in the sentence are stopwords. They add no additional meaning to the sentence and are, in the eyes of Google, of no merit with regards to searches.

Ok, that makes some kind of sense however how can this be used to boost search engine rankings? With regards to our project, it has a big impact in my opinion and here is how:

In running affiliate marketing websites, I update the data in the database from spreadsheets supplid by the retailer. So do the thousand or so other affiliate marketeers who also advertise that retailer’s products!

I am guessing that a good 80-90% of my competitors will do the exact same thing with that data - they will upload it to a database and then call it exactly as it stands from that table into their websites. The net result is that there will be hundreds of identical or near-identical websites vying for attention and rankings in Google. This causes a couple of issues:

1. No one site differentiates itself from its competition.

2. They risk being sandboxed for identical content

So, how to avoid both traps? One method is to remove stopwords from the page title and metakeywords. This has the potential to benefit you in two ways:

1. Your content differs sufficiently from your competitors to reduce the chances of being penalised for identical content.

2. Your search results may also appear more relevant in Googles search algorithms. By removing stopwords like “a” and “the”, your page title may become more keyword rich and show higher in search returns than your competitors.

Like anything in search engine optimisation, this technique is only one in a large number of ever-changing criteria however it is a valuable technique to embrace early on, especially in affiliate marketing where websites tend to have several thousand database driven pages that you cannot possible SEO individually.

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