Well sort of. I’ve been a busy bee and neglected you guys here. It was good for me though!

Most affiliates could fill up their day with three or four times what they actually manage to do. With me, I’ve got my SEO consultancy work to do too. I’ve had my nose to the grindstone giving others the attention they deserve. But now so do you too. So I’m back to titillate your agro taste buds, I’m here to cuddle up to your affiliate needs and to sensuously massage your SEO concerns.

The only thing is that I had to leave my previous lover and change addresses and have a bit of plastic surgery done …

I won’t leave you again … but we were on a break … just like Ross and Rachel.

Image © Marshall Astor

Mr Newton - Unproclaimed Affiliate Genius

Much excitement here at Affiliate Stuff HQ -  I’ve uncovered the original version of Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion.  Must understand stuff for physicists and science types everywhere,  but did you know he originally wrote them about affiliate marketing??

“This’ll be a smash hit” Issac said, and was all up for releasing it to the scientific community until his wife pointed out ” affiliate marketing hasn’t been invented yet Issac, you’ll probably get burned at the stake for being a nut job. You were only just lucky the last time after that business with the apple!”

“Bugger!” Issac proclaimed. “I was really on a roll there. Ah, to hell with it. I’ll make it about motion and change a few of the words around. Nobody’ll notice”

So here’s the original script, recently found by your roving affiliate investigator stuffed down the back of a venerable sofa in the British Library…

Newtons First Law Of Affiliate Marketing

An affiliate at rest will remain at rest unless they act upon a motivational notion.

An affiliate in motion will stay in motion with the same speed and with direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

Or…

Affiliates have a natural tendency to keep on doing what they are doing. If you’re sitting thinking about getting started in affiliate marketing, or have a great new idea that you just keep failing to act upon, you’re likely to keep doing that unless you give yourself a bit of a kick up the jacksie. However, once you get moving on it… you’ll be hard to stop!

Newtons Second Law Of Affiliate Marketing

Acceleration of wealth is produced when an affiliate acts on an idea. The greater the idea, the greater the amount of ingenuity needed to increase the acceleration of wealth.

Or…
Well, we all know that in the “real” world, the more brute force you chuck at something – the quicker you can make it go. However, affiliate marketing is a more subtle beast and is powered by smart thinking and downright ingenuity.  The bigger your idea for success, the more clever you’ll have to be to get it building momentum.  Affiliate marketing is fueled by a combustible mixture of ideas combined with clever execution.

Newtons Third Law of Affiliate Marketing

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Or…

You know what a rocket does when it takes off, right?? It piles an enormous amount of power out of its rear end and the ground pushes back with an equal force sending it soaring in a skywards direction.

Well, the ground is your idea and the rocket is the effort you put in.  The trajectory you achieve?  That’s all down to what you packed the rocket with, innit?

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Newtons Three Laws of Affiliate Marketing

Hi folks, just a quickie post from me – I’m taking a break this week and I’m not meant to be doing any affiliating or even any internetting so SHHHH, you didn’t see me here – right?

I’ve just found this podcast featuring Matt Cutts chatting about WordPress and it’s wily ways. Some interesting hints and tips for would be users as well as useful chit chat about plugins, keeping Google happy with unique content, duplicate content, and more juicy info.

See you all next week for more affiliate thrills and spills

This post is from: Kirsty’s Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Matt Cutts Waxes Lyrical About WordPress

15th March 2001

Earned my first ever commission via DatingDirect on Tradedoubler.

It all started here when I was amazed to earn money this way. Previously I had been running a small web development business but I was always just selling time so if I went on holiday or couldn’t find work etc then I didn’t earn.

Back then I remember getting my advice from alt.www.affiliate, an old Tradedoubler Yahoo Group which I think was started by Andrew Girdwood and of course the very early versions of Affiliates4u when it was on ezboard and still well worth a look for a trip down memory lane. Like when we all got excited about the launch of Google Adsense

Over the next couple of years my business started to shift away from having clients and doing web development and more into full time affiliate marketing and I seem to have been there since.

June 2003

I organised “The Limo Club” where a bunch of affiliates got together and hired a limo to go round London and try to meet all the major networks in one day.

As well as being a great day out it was a series of useful meetings and also a chance to put some pressure on the spyware issues of the day.

The following day was an affiliate get2gether at the Kensington Roof Gardens. This event was a big step up from the previous pub based events but no one could have imagined the a4uexpo in the future.

My Sites

Over this time I had expanded with a few different sites but my most successful was FullSteamAhead which is now a shadow of it’s former glory. It was a general shopping directory, list everything, datafeed & more site. I can’t track it down now but the Alexa graph showed a steady ascent with loads of traffic followed by a cliff drop on the graph when Google kicked me out. I think it just ended up being too successful and the overuse of datafeeds meant I ranked for every random product that was going. Lesson learned and time to move on.

Around this time I seemed to be doing well for Euroffice, Dabs, Figleaves & ASOS but the fields I worked in changed so much over the years. For example I’ve had a good few years of doing well from gift experiences with buyagift and also a good spell of ranking number 1 for ‘ghd hair straighteners’ which was nice. These things come and go for example I don’t think there will be an old timer in the industry that doesn’t remember jumping on the Britannia DVD Club program when it launched on buy.at

When I look back I know I should have worked harder in one field to dominate and built a brand but instead I’ve always jumped about a bit getting tempted by the next new project to work on and moving into a different field.

For a spell I did well from adsense alongside the affiliate stuff as many people did but over time my sites and interests changed again. On my best Adsense day I sent 1,457 clicks earning a couple of hundred pounds at which point I probably put my feet up for a few months and paid the price again Yesterday I earned £2.10

Spyware

Around 2004, 2005 spyware was really at it’s peak and the affiliates of a4u did a great job of working together to get some regulation in place by the networks. I remember taking an old laptop, getting it infected and recording just what was going on. Slowly the networks adopted some rules against this and to date I don’t think it’s as much of a problem here as it is in the US.

2006 The Podcast Years

In June of 2006 I started recording podcasts with various people in the industry. To date I think I’ve recorded 34 podcasts but haven’t added to them in the last couple of years. It was a fun way to learn and share more about the industry but the time involved just became a bit too much and had to give way to real work that had a financial return. I enjoyed speaking to everyone involved but a few of the more popular ones in terms of comments were Doug Scott for some straight talking, Kieron Donoghue about how he got started & a group discussion on discount codes. Here’s one from 2007 that’s topical now.

Recent Years

I got married in 2004 and then in 2007 my daughter was born and my business week changed completely. Very much like John Lamerton’s recent post I’ve been kind of part time since then. I don’t really work outside of Monday-Friday 10-5 and spend a heap more time with my daughter including regular half days here and there. In the early days I would regularly have been working at 2 or 3am but it just doesn’t fit with life now! Leaving the world of affiliate marketing and entering the world of mother & toddler groups has been a good change and my wife and daughter always come first for me.

2008 saw me get along to my first a4uexpo and it was amazing to see the change in the industry. It’s great to see the growth and the recognition that the industry gets and to have things on a professional footing but I confess I do miss the atmosphere in years gone by. No one would ever dream of sharing this kind of information in a post like this these days. What’s changed? I’m not sure I guess it’s inevitable as things grow that it can’t have that small team feeling where we all know we’re doing something new.

Now I’m working on a number of hopefully good quality content sites and slowly trying to build brands around them. I’ve learned that I can’t have all my eggs in one basket and I can’t keep starting new things. I don’t have as many working hours so I need to be careful with how I spend them and accept I can’t do everything. I’ve accepted that I don’t need to earn millions but I’d rather enjoy life. Like Kirsty I want to be a Pretty Good Affiliate and don’t wish I was ‘Super’. Slow and steady is the way forward even if it is a little dull these days!

Sorry for the self indulgent trip down memory lane but if you’ve read this far you must have some memories to add in the comments about the last ten years or so

Theo thinks that together “we can do a lot better” and “make more money” and that the new website will help to take the Ryman affiliate programme to the next level. In typical Dragon’s Den style, he even manages to get in a mention about his kid’s inheritance. Theo’s main message though is about commission and in order to motivate affiliates to start to work with Ryman there’s a fixed 10% commission rate for the next four weeks.

OLD wonders though if this could this have gone one step further?

Commission increases are lovely, but sometimes it’s what can’t be bought that’s often more desirable or more valuable. Imagine if the above message concluded with “at the end of September, we will be selecting one lucky affiliate to come to London for an all expenses paid lunch with Theo, where you can chat about your business and affiliate marketing before taking a trip to Dragon’s Den”.

Would that be more motivational?

For me personally I’d say yes. I’m not a Ryman affiliate and I’m afraid the video doesn’t really get me wanting to head over to Tradedoubler and get promoting. I was almost won over by the mention of the great zoom feature though, but for now “I’m out”!

Staying with Dragon’s Den this poses an interesting thought!

Now that we know Theo is fully behind affiliate marketing it’ll be interesting to see how he reacts if any affiliate companies appear on the programme in the future and what he says about them. He’s invested in an affiliate company before, having offered to spend £200,000 on Gaming Alerts. Perhaps not the best use of his kid’s inheritance!

Anyway, it’s great to see a household business name giving a boost to affiliate marketing and maybe Theo’s message will spark a trend of similar videos! Perhaps Theo will be manning the Ryman stand at A4UExpo or better still appearing in a regular “Ryman’s Affiliate Video” bulletin?

All I’ll say is “thanks Theo” for choosing to talk about Ryman and not La Senza. Trying to fit in the Duran Duran “Rio” inspired title would have been much tougher.

Given the economic climate it’s perhaps not a surprise that a network has hit this point. Even so, it’s a sad day for affiliate marketing and for those who have been involved with DGM and it’s previous incarnations of UKAffiliates. For many affiliates, including ourselves, it used to be their number one earner and despite a few issues around the “Pro” era there’s always been affiliate affection towards the network.

In fairness the road has always been uphill for DGM since they moved from DGM2 to the ill fated DGMPro. In essence this has been the albatross attached to the millstone that’s been round their neck, whilst a (Cheeky)monkey played on their back. The affiliate system wasn’t the most user friendly and whilst DGM tried to sort things out, Awin and Buy.at emerged like Seb Coe used to do having sat behind Steve Ovett for 700m and leg it to the finishing line to grab the gold.

After a management buyout – at least on the surface it looked like New DGM were moving forward. They introduced new innovative ideas, like the mobile and broadband comparison units as well as travel maps. New clients, including The National Trust, were appearing too and with the merger of Buy.at/Awin there was opportunity for them to continue that climb and establish themselves as a network of choice for affiliates.

Sadly, for whatever reasons, that climb has now been halted by the grim reaper of administration. The knock on effect to affiliates is as yet unknown. But, it’s a stark reminder to us all how the fall of one business to which we are somehow linked can have an impact on our own. Affiliates do need to make sure they have several eggs and several baskets!

DGM’s administration though has, as you’d expect, resulted in some lively and interesting discussions on Twitter about networks and their future.

Are the days of the affiliate network numbered? Will there be other casualties? Do networks need to adapt their business models? Will agencies take to the space and remove the need for networks?

Perhaps there are more questions to be asked – like were the clients won really ideal for affiliate marketing or more intriguingly are there the affiliates in situ willing or able to promote new wins, not just for DGM, but other networks who as yet haven’t been absorbed by Affiliate Window? Has affiliate marketing hit a critical point, where as a discussion ensuing on affiliates4u suggests, that it’s now simply voucher code marketing?

Who knows the answers to these questions and how these events will effect AM in the months to come?

In the meantime, let’s hope there’s minimal impact for those effected by this administration.

One of my readers brought this plugin to my attention recently (thanks Chris). Basically, there is a plugin that will override the function in WordPress that’ll strip out all but the most basic tags from your category descriptions. Allow HTML in Category Descriptions means you can add a nice content unit or similar and take advantage of and monetise any traffic your blog categories may be getting.

This Plugin Hasn’t Been Tested by Me!

Usually I’ll thoroughly test anything before I mention it on the blog, but I’m very short on time at the moment and it’ll likely take me several weeks to have a play with it.  I think this plugin could be a juicy one so I didn’t want to make y’all wait to hear about it.

But I Think I Can Put It To Very Good Use If It Works Well…

As you all might know, I add descriptions to my WordPress categories to get a chance at some additional search terms.  I also use the Thumbnails for Excerpts plugin to display nice product images at a category level so visitors hitting those pages have something to browse through.

It’s A Good Idea, But It Looks A Bit Pants!

You can see an example of this on my mens underwear site, here.  It’s not the smoothest looking solution in the world, but as I was putting out so many posts at the individual product or collection level for this site I thought it’d be a shame not to take the time to write a few hundred words and jam them into the category descriptions to try and get some extra traffic in. This has been very successful on Blokes Undies and I now rank very well for most terms around my categories.

The only issue is that the categories have a relatively high bounce rate. Previously I’ve always just figured it’s worth having the traffic going to those sections till I work out a solution. If this plugin does what it says on the tin I think I might have found it! I think it will create a very nice, integrated looking blog structure that’s very efficient with no page going to waste for either SEO purposes or traffic channelling.

I’ll probably try it out in the next few weeks. I’ll let you guys take a look when I’m done (I should really tidy those category images as well – I’m sure we can have them looking better than that!).

If you try this plugin please let me know how you get on

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Kirsty’s Affiliate Quick Tips – WordPress Plugin To Allow HTML in Category Descriptions

Last year the earlybird was £249 for affiliates, although if you were quick off the block you could have picked up a pass for just £149 (A4UExpo Blog). This year, to take into account the new venue, new opportunities and format – and quite probably the rate of inflation, credit crunch and sundry extras the early bird for affiliates is a mere…. £395!

That’s a 58% increase from last year or a 165% increase if you got the cheap deal. Blimey!!

In fairness the pricing is inline with other events, such as Bingo Bullet, and in fact it’s still a bit cheaper and probably better value.

However, I’m not rushing for the early bird – not just yet.

I did enjoy A4UExpo 2009 and did get some exceptional value from attending. However, a large bulk of our time was spent doing meetings rather than being in the seminars.

Taking into account ticket cost, travel, hotel and also time off for two people that was fine. However, at the increased rates this year I’m starting to question whether we need to rethink a little. Paying out almost £800 for two tickets (£700 if you pick up a discount code on Twitter) to then go and have a few pre-arranged meetings sounds expensive, even more so if it’s at the expense of missing sessions.

The increased cost means that there now needs to be increased value in attending. That means that before parting with cash I’ll be scrutinising the sessions when published a lot more closely than normal. Also coming under the microscope will be what’s on offer during the event. An extra few quid not to suffer that club at The O2 again may actually be worth it (personally I’d prefer The Thames boat trip again… that was cool).

It may well mean that this year we have to cut down on meetings and perhaps attend more seminars. If that’s the case then they better be good. Whilst A4UExpo is great for the social aspect, there has to be more value in attending than just supping a few beers with mates. We can do that down in Plymouth. The alternative is to consider not going to Expo and perhaps spending a cheaper few days in London meeting merchants/partners etc instead.

Fortunately we’re in a position to be able to afford to attend, and perhaps still will as it’s an event unlike any other for affiliate marketing. However, for new entrants to the industry or those struggling to get a foothold the price, plus of course travel, hotels and maybe even time off work, may feel they’re being priced out of things and that’s a big concern.

The best advice if you’re after a free ticket is look out for giveaways, like this one on Affiliates4U, and discount codes which are already appearing on Twitter. There may even be some blogger passes available too!

The “earlybird” rate will expire at the end of August, although if A4U’s previous is anything to go by, it’ll get extended.

Dartmoor by day

I was going to do a Half Marathon, but that seemed a little easy. So instead I chose the “Midnight Madness: on the 17th July I shall be trekking 14 miles across Dartmoor in the middle of the night, armed only with a pair of walking boots and a torch!

I’m doing this to raise money for the Fishermen’s Mission, a charity that provides emergency welfare and support to Deep sea fishermen and their families.

Dartmoor by night

Please give whatever you can afford to spare to help this charity, and I’ll try not to fall down a gorge!

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Lammo on the scrounge (for charity)

No related posts.

G’day folks and welcome back to my mammoth getting started post! You can catch up on part 1 here.

Building Your WordPress Affiliate Site

Now that you’ve identified your host, bought a domain, found a niche with good merchants, and worked out your content it’s time to build that site.  Well. Where do I begin.  An absolute age ago I wrote my WordPress 101 post, and its follow up – WordPress 102.  I think WordPress is the absolute dogs danglies where affiliates are concerned.  Both of those posts are fairly out of date, but most of the points about finding suitable themes and customising them to your needs still hold true.

I’ve noticed a lot of affiliates are using magazine style themes these days. These are great for creating static looking websites. What I tend to do is create a category structure that looks a lot like the menu structure of a standard retail site. I have found this works well in combination with adding a couple of hundred words of unique content to my category descriptions.  Do watch out for the themes that will use category descriptions as link titles though, not good!

Once my sites have a few posts up and running I then feature some of the posts from my key categories on the theme home page and voila! My site has a relevant and regularly updated home page with little to no input.

If you want to create nice looking landing pages check out this post to get all my trade secrets on laying out a landing page. It’s really not as hard as you’d think to create and customise your own affiliate landing pages. You just need to be handy with pen and paper plus a pinch of imagination and basic HTML. It’s very worthwhile and increases your click through rates to merchant. Your visitors like to see an attractive landing page when they arrive. It’s worth spending some time messing around with these even if you don’t implement them immediately.

Now Install Some Essential Plugins

Great plugins that are a must install for an affiliate site? This is the bit that’s probably out of date in my WordPress posts, so here goes!

1. Sitemap Generator Plugin – not the XML kind, one that’s actually part of your site.  Helps search engines find your content and index it. Kinda pivotal.
2. XML Sitemap – creates a lovely Google compliant XML sitemap of your site. (I’m not entirely convinced this helps you any, but it sure doesn’t hurt!).
3. Robots Meta – Absolutely essential. Helps you stop Google indexing uneccessary content and also eliminates some of the problems WordPress can throw up re: duplicate content.
4. RSS Footer – Ha ha!! Those naughty RSS content robbers will shoot themselves in the foot with this one (geddit?). If someone publishes your content from your sites RSS feed on their site, this neato little plugin will add a link back to your site making sure you get credit and they don’t – denied!
5. Search Meter – Find out what your blog visitors were a cravin’ when they came to visit your site. Handy dandy little tool that will give you additional information on how your visitors are thinking and searching. Great to use to create extra content and can reveal some search term gems that Google won’t.
6. Contact Form – When you set up your Contact Us page, you’ll need one of these. It’s handy to make sure people can contact you via your site… you never know what you’ll miss out on if you don’t!
7. Similar Posts Plugin – Great to help give your readers a view of some related products or information. I use this plugin because it’s very customisable.  I’ve added a thumbnail to all related posts on my sites which really creates an attractive looking page. I think it also gives my visitors a sense of “choice”. As soon as they arrive on one of my pages they immediately see lots of products and navigation options, giving them confidence this is going to be a good site to have a nice look round.
8. Thumbnail For Excerpts – I use this to create nice looking images on my category pages.  Because I started noticing visitors often landed on category pages as my sites got stronger in the SERPS I figured I might as well give them some nice images to look at as soon as they arrived rather than a boring page of text that might result in them clicking away.
9. Link Exchange Plugin – If you want to set up a link exchange page on your site, this handy dandy little plugin will help you manage the process and keep an eye on your link partners to make sure they’ve not pulled the old trick of removing your link back a few weeks after exchanging.  Sneaky eh?!
10. Pagination Plugin – Do not build a blog based site without one of these.  These will help keep your posts in the index by creating a good cross linkage structure in your site.  Google doesn’t like orphan pages and as time passes old blog posts look an awful lot like that.  This plugin convinces Google that your older content is still very much loved and part of the family!

And Your Shiny New Site is Complete!

All you need to do now is get some inbound links (OK, I know… not so easy but we’ll save that for another post I think!) and follow your ongoing content strategy to keep adding new and relevant pages for Google and other search engines to chew on.

At this stage, your journey to a profitable affiliate site is really just beginning.  From now on you’ll have to master the finer and more subtle points of SEO, learn to identify new ways to monetise your traffic, and find new and exciting merchants and products to promote to keep your affiliate business rolling. So not much then

Finally…

Good luck with your new site. Affiliate marketing is hard, hard work. There are no easy wins, but when you do get there it is incredibly satisfying.

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Getting Started in Affiliate Marketing Using WordPress – 2nd Edition Part 2