General | Affiliate Blog Online

General Archives

Spiceypage is a Great Community

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 9:58 am

One of my favourite blogging communities is Spicy page. The site is full of incredibly interesting blogs of all types. Spicy page allows you to submit your own blog, vote on other blogs, and make friends.

I find I have regulars that I love to check out to see what they are up to. And then there are always the new blogs that arrive on a minute by minute basis, so I go and check out what some of them are about.

Of course researching and reading blogs is time consuming so I tend to pick blogs based on their avatar or blog name. Sometimes it leads to a dead end and is something I am not interested in, so I leave and I don’t join their community as I know I will not want to return. Other times I become lost in the story and spend way too much time becoming totally immersed in a blog.

There are blogsites running commpetitions, blogs with personal stories of triumph and some of despair, blogs about travel experiences and blogs about fame and fortune. You name it, it’s there.

Some of my personal favourites are Crunchy Carpets, Ubertramp, The Career Strategist, Life Cruiser, On Line Shopping Bargains, Bhutan Travel, Survival Wytch. Echoes in the Night, Comedy Plus.

There are many others that I also visit on a regular basis, too many to name really. But if you are looking for a laugh, a giggle, some information, or to share in another persons experiences then join SpicyPage and you have the world at your fingertips.

How we increased our affiliate income with just a few simple changes

Saturday, December 6th, 2008 at 10:37 am

Comments (1)

Just recently Wanda and I sat down to discuss how we could increase our affiliate income. Some of the ideas that came up were to create more websites, create more PPC campaigns and landing pages, get heavily into article marketing or add large amounts of content to our sites.

These all involved a good amount of extra effort which although we are both hard workers and were prepared for it, we just didn’t have the time to do this sort of work in a big way as we were already adding content to one of our niche blogs which was taking up a bit of time on its own.

We needed something simpler that wouldn’t require much time to implement.

We then thought about the websites we already have. We have a number of niche affiliate sites and some are making more money than others but we have a few that are making hardly anything at all – maybe a few dollars each a month. Some of these websites have not been touched at all in more than a year which probably explains why they haven’t been bringing in much income. So we decided that it was about time we got them making a bit more money.

Our main income from these few sites is from Adsense ads so we sat down and looked at the stats of each of these sites to find the pages getting the most traffic. We decided we would work on any page that was getting more than 500 hits in a month. We took each of these pages and looked at the Adsense ads currently on the page and found that most were small and easily missed.

So this was an obvious change we needed to make. We increased the size of the Google ad and moved it to a more prominent spot and we did this with each page on our list. We also changed the link color to ‘click me blue’.

Lastly we created URL channels in Google Adsense for each of these pages. This was from a suggestion of James Martell at one of our Bootcamp sessions. We should have been doing this from the start as it is a brilliant way to track where your Google Adsense clicks are coming from and it is really easy to do. Once you have added your Google ad to a page you then grab the URL of that page and then add it as a URL channel in your Google Adsense channel area.

The benefit of this, apart from the fact that you can see where the clicks are coming from, is that if you find that a page gets a good amount of money for each click then you can work on generating more traffic to that page.

Our analysis for this has only just started as we only made the changes a couple of days ago but we can already see an increase in clicks which equates to an increase in income.

Over the coming months we will start testing the Google ads on each of these pages and change the link color and ad position to see which works best and we will keep doing this on an ongoing basis.

The next step was to look at the affiliate websites where we are currently making most of our money. These sites are less focused on Google Adsense and more focused on product commissions. Some of these websites are ranking really well in Google and getting lots of highly targeted traffic. We started with our top website and analyzed each page to see what could be improved upon.

The work here involved moving products to above the fold and creating more prominent links or ‘buy now’ buttons. For those that don’t know ‘above the fold’ refers to any part of a website showing in a browser that a person can see before having to scroll down.

We also reworked the review pages for this site which are what really gets our visitors to buy.

We then started to create SIDs for each and evey affiliate link on our site through any product links we have in CJ. This is something we are still working on as there are a lot of links on the site but what this will tell us is exactly what links are generating sales and from what page on our site they are coming from.

When we get a bit of extra time we will also be making use of Google Website Optimizer. This free Google service allows anyone with a website to test and optimize multiple versions of pages on their website.

This whole exercise has taught us the importance of testing which is something we really haven’t delved into in a big way before.

NEW: SearchWiki – Googles Promote, Remove and Comment Feature

Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 11:40 pm

Comments (2)

As of November 20, 2008 Google have introduced a new feature to their organic results. If you have a Google account and you are logged into it, when searching you will see some new icons against each of the search results. Google are calling it SearchWiki. It is Google’s way of letting the user customize their search results.

At this stage I don’t think it is working for all accounts. When I log in using one email account and search I don’t see the new features but logging in with another seems to work.

As you can see from the image, next to each search result are three new icons. A promote icon (which is the one with the up arrow); a remove icon (the one with the cross) and a comment icon.

Clicking the Promote icon moves the site in question to the top of the search results.

Clicking the Remove icon removes it from your search results. If for some reason you want to get the deleted one back, you can do so by scrolling down to the bottom of the search results screen and click the ADD A RESULT link. Of course, you will need to know the URL of the site you removed as from what I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be a way of seeing the sites that you have deleted. You can also add any other site using this option.

You can also add comments for each search result which is a handy little feature.

I think this is great for the user but how will this affect SEO? This remains to be seen, but providing good quality content is going to be even more important as who is going to promote your blog or website if it is just a spammy piece of work?

Google emphasizes that this won’t affect other people’s search results but you would have to think that this is a great way for them to see what is popular and what isn’t and at some stage they may incorporate it into their search algorithm.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Keyword Usage

Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 10:00 pm

Leave your comment

When you are starting out in affiliate marketing, you will read all about finding the right keywords for the content on your website. You might also be told to make sure that the keywords appear often throughout your content articles.

Unfortunately however, this can be taken too far as new web publishers load the article content with way too many keywords.

This practice was acceptable in the past, well actually, maybe it wasn’t ever acceptable as nobody wants to read an article that is so overloaded with keywords that the whole context is lost.

The emphasis today is to write natural content. If you write naturally, you will find that the keywords slot nicely into the article. Your visitors will want to read what you have to say and hopefully they will be encouraged to go through to one of your merchants to make a purchase.

By writing naturally you may find that a number of different keywords will fit into the article.

A good thing to know is that search engines ignore punctuation marks, so you can break up your keywords with a comma or full stop and the search engines will still read the keywords as one continuous stream.

So rather than write….

My outdoor fireplace is an outdoor fireplace of remarkable design. My outdoor fireplace means I can entertain outside in winter as an outdoor fireplace keeps the outdoor area cozy.

… a more acceptable way would be to write:

My outdoor fireplace allows me to entertain my friends and family, all year round. The remarkable design ensures that the smoke is positioned away from the entertainment area.

Write naturally and the keywords will fall into place without any effort on your part.