Posts Tagged General
I’m Sorry … I Cheated On You …
Posted by LeeMcCoy in Affiliate Marketing on July 26, 2010
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
Newtons Three Laws of Affiliate Marketing
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on July 26, 2010
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
My Affiliate Marketing History
Posted by Fraser Edwards in Affiliate Marketing on July 20, 2010
I’ve been around affiliate marketing for quite a while but I have to admit I’ve recently lost my motivation. It still pays the bills etc but I don’t think I enjoy the work as much as I used to. It’s obvious from my blogging (2nd post of 2010!) that I’m not as engaged with things but I thought I would take a look back over the years to remind myself of the high points and find that original motivation 
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
Outsourcing is The New Black – What a Difference a Year Makes!
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on June 8, 2010
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been going through an exercise to outsource tasks that take up a large amount of my time but could be done cost effectively by someone else. The process itself began falteringly about a year ago and has recently come to full fruition.
As things have gathered pace with project “Just Let It Go Kirsty” I’ve recently read, digested, and implemented some of the principles in…
Four Hour Work Week – The Outsourcer’s Bible
The Four Hour Work Week was written by the inspirational (and hilarious) Tim Ferriss. The sections of his book about outsourcing life were very pertinent and helped me realise that outsourcing should be about ridding myself of just about anything I don’t really enjoy doing if I can afford to do it. The biggest benefit for me in reading this book was realising that my time has a value, and that I should not treat it as a “free” resource.
I loved the mindset I found in this book – there were so many “oh my god, he’s so right I just never thought of it that way before” moments.
From protecting your personal time, to focusing on the 20% of your work that brings in 80% of your income – the book was jammed with inspiration. I know lots of my affiliate colleagues have read this book – but if you haven’t yet taken a look at it I do recommend it. Tim has a highly entertaining and easy to read writing style, so not your average hard to digest business book.
What A Difference A Year Makes..
Since I last posted on this topic a month ago, I’ve spent a lot of time putting the systems in place I spoke about in my last post. The result on my workload has been absolutely transformational. I’ve gone from struggling to progress to knowing things are zipping along with me only being involved a supervisory capacity. In the last 3 weeks this has been particularly valuable as I’ve not felt able to do anything more than give affiliate marketing a cursory glance after the recent loss of my grandmother.
The situation, although very sad for me, has really shown the benefit of the process. It’s meant I’ve been able to take as much time out as I’ve wanted without worrying about the business losing momentum. That concern is often a huge source of stress for me generally for various different reasons – and the knowledge that I’ve finally kicked it to the kerb is very rewarding.
Kirsty’s Outsourcing Honour Roll
I’m really feeling good about all the things I no longer have to worry about and spend time on. So here’s my “Things I Don’t Have To Do Any More Honour Roll”
Personal
- Household cleaning – this may well be my favourite I’ve always hated domestic chores. Time saved – 12 hours per month. Plus another 3 or 4 moaning about it / not looking forward to doing it
- “Boring” gardening – getting out into the wilds of my QLD bush block is one of my pleasures, but the boring stuff such as lawn mowing, lopping, pruning, and carting palm fronds to the tip… I hate doing it, and I hate nagging Duncan to help me to do it. Time saved – 2 hours per month, and Duncan doesn’t get berated for letting our front lawn get embarrassingly long any more so a real benefit to our marriage!
Total Personal Time Saved: 14 Hours
That’s enough time for Duncan and I to have two fun days out together instead of doing tedious chores as soon as our leisure time swings around each week.
Business
- Content Writing – Time Saved 35 hours per month
- Content Posting – Time saved 40 hours per month
- Link Building – Time saved 8 hours per month
Total Business Time Saved: 83 hours
Time saved is one factor, but I’ve not considered the concept of time gained before now. Content Now do way more work on link building than I or anyone else could achieve in the 8 hours or so a month I previously spent struggling away – so the net benefit to the business is actually greater than before. Similarly, I’ve ramped up the amount of content being written by engaging two different writers to work for me. Writer number two (who also happens to be my mother!!!!) is adding a further 20 hours or so of writing time to the business that wasn’t there before.
And This Means…
Duncan and I have a standard working week of 4 x 6 hour days equating to 104 hours work in the average month. Recent efforts have removed 41.5 hours from that total for each of us.
Our new working week to get the same amount done? (more actually!) 2.5 days
At the moment we are still going to work 4 days a week and use the extra time to sort out all the things that we had fallen behind with and want to get sorted. For example, Lingerie Brands has been long overdue a re-design and is now sporting an improved look, and has had a lot of the inefficiencies it’s suffered from for ages weeded from it’s structure. The result is that already we’re seeing increased indexing and traffic thanks to us finally sorting out an issue with permalinks that was stopping pagination plugins from working.
But Don’t Worry Tim… The Mini Retirement’s Still On
We will indeed be cutting back our working hours to 2.5 days a week, or most likely 2 days one week and 3 the next, as soon as we have caught up with all of the tasks we need to perform to get our sites ship shape once more.
We will then be taking a series of Mini Retirements just like Mr Ferriss suggests (I’d always called these breaks we take skiving but that’s definately a more glam description!).
First up, we are taking 2.5 months off from September to Mid November. We will be exploring our area of the Australian East Coast with some visitors during September, followed by a 6 week jolly to Europe (with South East Asian hols on the way there and back). After 2 entire weeks of work we will once more abandon our computers for another month of Australian R&R with some friends, culminating in a Sydney new year spectacular.
And you guys thought I’d got boring recently, didn’t ya?
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Outsourcing is The New Black – What a Difference a Year Makes!
Recognising When Your Work System Is No Longer Efficient
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on March 23, 2010
Today I realised it has been just over a year since I cut my working hours and implemented a new work structure. It has been a pleasing success and it has been a massive help in me pushing on my business to new heights and really forging ahead with a series of new sites which I’ve launched over the last 12 months. Taking a structured approach has really been hugely beneficial for me. Until Now.
Scale and Replicate? Well, Up To A Point…
The issue I’m currently having is that a formulaic approach lacks imagination. I have my daily set tasks but I’m starting to lose faith at the moment that they are actually the right ones, or even a good use of time relative to the results that they are producing now I’m entering a “maintenance phase”. By that I mean I’ve set up lots of sites and am now concentrating upon building up the income I get from them.
The truth is, my scheduled 2 hours per day of content writing has started to bore me dreadfully. And so dreadfully that once I’ve done my allocated slog I’ve lost the passion and imagination to do very much else. I think it was workable before because I could focus on the end result – a series of sites to diversify my income. However, now I think I need to step back and take a look at the bigger picture.
Much Like Breaking Up… Letting Go is Never Easy
It’s a bit like splitting up with someone. You get that uneasy feeling that being with them just isn’t working out as well any more. Writing all those blog posts myself enabled me to really boost up the content and traffic on my sites as well as keeping an eye on longtail traffic opportunities. However I’m increasingly not getting all the content I have scheduled for myself done. Because I simply don’t want to write it. Even worse, my avoidance strategy (busying myself with some largely irrelevant bit of analysis or research) then extends beyond the blogging and starts to drag the rest of the day down.
It’s Not You, It’s Me
The thing is I’ve increasingly been realising recently that I need to take a dose of my own advice. Is that two hours every day being spent “working smarter” or am I just doing it because it’s permanently written into my daily action sheets? In the last couple of weeks I’ve realised the following: -
- My many daily blog posts contribute to site traffic, but are less likely to generate sales than other more highly targeted pages.
- It probably doesn’t matter any more whether its me writing the posts or someone else. Despite knowing hee haw about affiliate marketing my mother is managing to do a beautiful job of writing content for my sites. She’s even posting it up into HTML templates with extreme ease despite having no web design skills whatsoever. It takes me about 30 mins a week to create a work list for her detailing which articles I want done.
- Continuing to write my own content of this nature is probably not the most efficient application of my skills.
- If I outsource some or all of my daily blogging I will instantly have 2 hours free each day to use in other ways.
In Other Words… It’s Just Not Worth Me Doing It Any More!
I’ve already got some fledgling ideas about how I’m going to free myself from this task. Getting bestseller lists from merchants to create the areas to write posts about, creating structured spreadsheets for content writers to work from. However I shall consider them more carefully and perhaps do another post when I have it all worked out.
My aim now is to reduce my time spent writing from around 30 hours per month, to just 3 or 4 hours spent managing the writing process whilst I get other people to do it for me. If I can concentrate for long enough in the building site that is laughingly known as my home at the moment I may just be able to come up with something.
I’m off to the mountains today for 2 nights to celebrate my birthday. Perhaps it’ll all become clear then
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Recognising When Your Work System Is No Longer Efficient
Thanks For The Nomination Everyone
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on March 22, 2010
Just a quickie to say thanks very much to everyone who nominated me for the Best Affiliate Blog category at the A4U Awards.
It’s a real honour and pleasure that my thoughts and general affiliate meanderings are continuing to amuse and inform enough people that I’ve made the shortlist once again. The entire list of nominees is as follows: -
AffiliateStuff.co.uk (that’s me – yayy!!)
Good to see so many of my affiliate friends nominated! You can register your votes for the awards from today on.
Alas…
Once again I will not be able to attend the awards. I had to make a choice between the awards and the A4U Expo in October. I eventually decided that the Expo was probably going to be more beneficial as well as coinciding with an excellent time of year for a holiday in Thailand on the way home. Needless to say I shall be very depressed on the evening of the awards at the thought of missing out on such a great night with all my affiliate friends.
You can book a table here, and book me a business class flight from Australia to London here if you need a date. I can promise witty affiliate conversation at the start of the evening and a load of old nonsense and giggles by about midnight
Enjoy the shindig everyone!
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Thanks For The Nomination Everyone
8 Reasons Why Your “Hard Work” Isn’t Paying Off in Affiliate Marketing
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on March 10, 2010
Gosh darn it’s frustrating isn’t it? You’ve been working soooo hard on your affiliate sites, often staying up till 2am on a work night to try and make your big break into affiliate marketing or push your affiliate business on to new heights.
Or have you?
Here’s my top 8 reasons why those hours spent industriously in front of your computer screen might not be as industrious as you thought.
1. Twitter and Facebook. Great places to network with other affiliates and get all important industry contacts. However, Mafia Wars and Farmville do not count as networking, and nor does spending hours pointlessly retweeting articles you’ve never read in the hope of ingratiating yourself to Jeremy Schoemaker and Shawn Collins so they will DM you everything you need to know about dominating the affiliate world in 140 characters or less.
2. Online Forums. Yes, A4U is spiffing in every way and is jam packed with useful information (alternatively insert forum name of your choice). However if you’re spending all your time on there starting (or answering) threads about just about every possible problem you might come up against in affiliate marketing over the span of your career you’re going to start to notice that your business has completely failed to grow despite you asking questions about it till you’re blue in the face.
3. Spending Hours Working Out What Other People Are Doing Isn’t Work! Every single day I have searches to all of my sites from people searching on my company name having a good nosey. Completely understandable of course, everyone has a wee internet nosey every now and again… but looking at what other people do isn’t going to help you work out what you need to do for yourself to make you some cash. Take a look around, say “my that’s cool”, and then get on with creating some genius ideas to revolutionise your own business. Oh, and whilst I’m on don’t use the CTRL+C button to do this. Particularly if you’ve been looking at one of my sites
4. Does This Sound Familiar? “I was up till 5am last night looking at super affiliates. I reckon that Amit Mehta must be on at least $30,000 per second or part thereof. Did I tell you he has an American Express Black Card? It’s so cool. Oh, oh! and I read on Twitter that John Chow went out for dinner and had made $9,000 by the time he got back. Oh man!” If you have found yourself in possession of lots of facts and figures of this nature recently I have some ill tidings about your career. You’ve been titting about and not working!!!
5. You Have a Portfolio of 743 Red Hot Niche Domains. How Many Websites? If the number is between zero and none, or you have 7 half finished designs lurking around the internet looking sorry for themselves, guess what? You haven’t been working at all. If you’ve been an “affiliate marketer” for 6 months or more and think that’s a good achievement I have some bad news. You’re not an affiliate marketer, you’re Walter Mitty.
6. Similarly, You Have 10 Websites but every time you start one you get bored after two weeks and start another one before you’ve even given it a chance to work. You’re always seeking the pot of gold at the end of the affiliate rainbow but you’re not looking at your own two feet which is often where the rainbow starts. Dig for the pot of gold in what you’ve already achieved. You might be surprised at what you find there. The money in this game is in consistency and measured application of your skills. Put that scattergun away!
7. You’re Not Doing Anything At All… Despite knowing that you should be. Now this may be obvious but it’s more common than you think. Suddenly your affiliate mojo has deserted you, shot the craw as we say in Scotland. It often happens to people who have worked long and hard to go full time. They achieve their goal and suddenly discover that David Dickenson is their idol and they can’t rip eyes off him on his many daytime TV shows. Solution? Personally, I usually stop staring at the computer screen blankly alternately stressing and contemplating my navel, step back for a day or three, have a think about it all, and take another run up to see if I can get back on the work train. Works about 7 times out of 10.
8. The People Around You Don’t Think AM is a “Real” Job (one for the full timers here) You will therefore be more than happy to be volunteered for all duties at your kids’ school. Furthermore you don’t mind at all when people call round for coffee unannounced or ring you up to help them solve the trivial emergency of the day. I’m not sure why people do this. I’m assuming they think that because it involves computers the process of making money is fully automated and requires no human intervention. Solving this requires assertiveness and in some cases downright rudeness. This can be fun if you’re not particularly fond of the offender.
And Finally…
I’ve devoted lots of words to describing the many ways you can waste your time as an affiliate and I’m sure there are many more I could have used. However the solution is way more succinct. Honesty. Be honest with yourself about what you’re supposed to be doing and what constitutes a good day of progress – you’ll be amazed how much more productive you can be.
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
8 Reasons Why Your “Hard Work” Isn’t Paying Off in Affiliate Marketing
Welcome to Affiliate Stuff’s New Sponsors – YOU
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on February 12, 2010
Happy 50,000th Birthday Lingerie Brands!
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on February 1, 2010
Happy Birthday Lingerie Brands! Well, it’s not the site’s birthday actually I just couldn’t think of any other way to describe the milestone it’s just reached. Lingerie Brands, a site which I often talk about, broke through the 50,000 monthly visitors mark for the first time ever last month.
I’ve been excitedly anticipating reaching this significant number for the last 10 days and have been continually footering about in my Analytics account trying to work out if I was going to make it or not during one calendar month instead of in the last “31″ days, which isn’t quite as satisfying for some reason.
In the end, good old LB came through on the very last day of the month and this mornings stat check was a very happy one.
The Most Satisfying Thing…
Is that this site was my first real foray into the world of Wordpress and I think it does demonstrate that you don’t need a big design and development budget to create a site which can ultimately have a good healthy traffic stream. Lingerie Brands only cost me £132.50 to build and although I’m the first to admit its now sorely in need of an update, it works very well as an affiliate site and is now contributing a good wedge towards our monthly profits.
The Only Way Is Up Baby!
This site has not even skimmed the surface of it’s long term potential. I’ve been paying a lot of attention toit in the last 6 months (after getting a bit disheartened when Figleaves started mucking about with their programme at the back end of 2008) and it’s become clear to me that LB can and will grow a hell of a lot further with the right input from me. My only regret right now is not working harder on it earlier. That said, despite me sometimes having neglected it, traffic has grown 40% since January last year – a VERY motivational result for me.
What Next?
There’s a few things I’m going to do to ensure the site keeps pushing on and fulfils its potential: -
- Redesign the feel of the site a little, and modernise the theme. I’m not going to dick around too much mind you, if it ain’t broke etc but there’s quite a few frustrations with the current theme. For example, I can’t get any of the pagination plugins for Wordpress to work on the darned thing which I know will be affecting my traffic.
- Do some restructuring of categories to try and rank for general lingerie terms, in the same way as I have done with my mens underwear site. I have to solve a rather frustrating issue to do with sub categories creating 404 errors before I can do so though but I think I have found something that’ll do the trick there.
- Redesign the shop section and look at creating a better and more compelling shopping resource.
- Make the homepage have more of a “shop” feel. The site is getting increasing numbers of people hitting that page first, and it needs serious improvement.
- Stay motivated!
I’ll be having a celebratory glass of wine this evening, and dreaming of my next self-congratulatory post (I learned my humility from Roger Federer). See you all again at LB’s 100,000th birthday bash
P.S – Disappointed that Andy Murray didn’t win? Me? I don’t know what you’re talking about!
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Happy 50,000th Birthday Lingerie Brands!
Defining The Long Tail & The Importance of Targeted Keywords
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on January 19, 2010
I was having a chat with my MSN pal Dan (hello Dan!) the other morning, and our conversation made me realise that although new affiliates very quickly get the “target the long tail” message, this is often not matched by a rapid understanding of 1) what one of those is and 2) WHY they should be used. Although Dan has been involved in the wonderful world of affiliate marketing for 2 years, he confessed that his understanding of the concept has only recently crystalised.
When I realised this, a bit of a light came on in my head about this being one of those “buzz words” that a lot of people use, and only a percentage of them understand. It got me wondering….
What Exactly Might Someone Visualise The First Time They Hear About Long Tail Keywords?
Some kind of exotic reptile? Perchance a magic fairy who deposits cash in your affiliate account? I think the latter of those two is probably how I’d see it, for the long tail is often presented as a sort of holy grail of making money online and effectively channelling relevant traffic to your site.
So What is a Long Tail?
Well, the officially correct definition of a Long Tail keyword would be that it is a keyword phrase made up of 3 or more words that are more specific than a one word search term.
How Do We Use Them?
Well, the first way I think we should use them is to disregard any rigid definition about them.
For me the key part of the definition is “more specific”. Getting the targeting of your words right will define whether or not your site sinks or swims so targeting outranks Long Tail in the Kirsty McCubbin book of affiliate priorities.
In conclusion – I think “target the long tail” is a bit of red herring and I apologise to everyone I’ve used it on. I think “Highly Targeted” keywords is what I should have been talking about.
Some Examples…
Here are some examples of pairs of non targeted and targeted keywords (I’ve made them seasonally relevant): -
Valentines Keepsake > Silver Last Rolo
Sexy Lingerie > Agent Provocateur Lingerie
Romantic Night Out > Thames Dinner Cruise
Naughty Game > Nookii
Romantic Weekend > Champneys Spa Weekend
As you can see, most are indeed 3 words but I’ve also used one that is a single word and also highly specific.
Why Target Them?
All of the above keyword pairs have one thing in common. I would never, ever target the non specific ones at the start of a new venture. Why? Because as an affiliate I want to put all of my energy into grabbing people when they are as far along the sales journey as possible. I’m not interested in visitors when they’re still researching which valentines keepsake they want to buy their significant other. It’s a waste of my energy and resources. However, once they’ve narrowed down the field to a very specific choice I really want to grab them and get them through to a merchant – I have a much higher chance of grabbing a conversion and the traffic is much easier and cheaper for me to get.
That’s not to say that more general keywords don’t have a space in my marketing mix, they do! However, by starting highly specific and then working my way backwards towards more general keywords I will be able to get a feel for when the more general stuff is not worth my effort. With PPC, I’ll also be able to use the highly targeted keywords that generate better revenue to help subsidise my more generic terms which might just get me onto a higher commission tier.
Keywords Are Well…. Key Really
There is absolutely no point at all to being top of the search engine or PPC pops for terms unless they actually earn you money. It’s vitally important to put yourself in the shoes of the buyer when coming up with your niche keywords and getting them as close to the end of their purchasing journey as possible.
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Defining The Long Tail & The Importance of Targeted Keywords