Affiliate Musketeer

I’m at that time in my life where my friends are all starting to settle down and build families. Fortunately, it means there’s lots of opportunities to go away on stag dos. This weekend saw me hit the shores of spain for a suitably refreshing couple of days in the sun with not a computer in site. I never thought being ‘disconnected’ could feel so good! Strolling along the marina and paddling in crystal clear water, all my affiliate woes were well behind me (although I must admit, I couldn’t help but sit and watch the yachts at anchor in the bay with some degree of longing that made me think of how wonderful it would if my affiliate sites were making me enough money to let me do that….), so I was pleasantly surprised when I returned home this evening to find money in my CJ account..commission!

Unfortunately…it was not from my bar stools site – again – so my struggle with this site continues. I did however, log into my analytics account to see that searches for bar stools on Yahoo are starting to increase. This is a great sign for the health of the SEO campaign, and I still firmly believe that in a couple of months this site will be out of Google’s sandbox and delivering some good quality long tail visitors to the site. It’s my strong belief in this fact that will make me continue to add content to this site for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, I’ve had a few fellow affiliates contact me and suggest I start working on a related niche site to fill in the ‘limbo’ period. I think this is a great suggestion and one which I would like to follow up on, however I do worry that by splitting my focus onto more sites will dilute my ability to keep things fresh and moving forward with the bar stools site…this is, afterall, still only a part-time thing for me.

I don’t want to outsource anything just yet because I want to get some level of consistency into my earnings (and therefore some confidence in the site itself) before I feel comfortable with the idea of ‘formulaic’ replication by freelancers – but this is definitely in my roadmap for develpoment – just not right at this moment.

Wow, now that I read over the last two paragraphs it sounds like a lot of excuses…it’s not, I promise! I won’t be sitting about idly in the meantime, that’s for sure. Until my bar stools site ranks for ‘bar stools uk’, I will not stop my focus on this site and that means more of the same old same old.

Writing content and adding links.

The site has been live now since February 1st. That’s 10 weeks and £51.70 in commission from two sales (one ‘accidental’). So far I have over 50 pages of content (powered by wordpress) and 17 incoming links from related sites giving me a PageRank of 1…

Clearly there are not enough links registering yet so my focus for the remainder of this month is to build more links.

On the other hand, by starting to build my next site I do add a greater depth of potential to my longer term strategy…it would be an interesting discussion topic to raise – whether to continue to remain focussed on 1 site until it starts to rank or to build another site in the meantime…
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