If I ever wanted to summarise my experience as an aspiring affiliate marketeer, I believe the following paragraph would paint a pretty good picture.

I saw my Bar Stools site rank for a day then fall off the radar, then rank again a few weeks later, make a sale then fall out of grace again. I set up a PPC campaign that lost money hand over fist but learned some interesting things about keywords and the site’s potential. I experienced my first ever server issue because one of my sites was performing beyond all expectations and exceeded it’s monthly bandwidth and I’ve personally been through a rollercoasting tirade of emotions that range from the absolutely desolate to the gleefully optimistic. Oh! and I heard that Affiliate Window Alerts program KA-CHING! for the first time ever…

All that sounds great but show me the money

I don’t know why I even bother with all the preamble up top, this is the bit everyone wants to see and I get the most questions about so here goes:

Income:

• Affiliate Window: £0.92
• Amazon Associates: £14.96
• Commission Junction: £511.01
• eBay Partner Network: £62.49
• Google AdSense: £6.17
• USFreeAds: £25.00
• Others: £0.00
• Total Income: £620.55

Expenses:

• Directory Submissions: £25.00
• Google AdWords: £295.62
• Hosting: £100.00
• Total Expenses: £420.62

Gross Profit:

• £199.93

As you can see, it wasn’t a particularly profitable month and by the time you take your taxes off etc you’re not looking at much money at all.  However, as long as I’m earning more than I’m spending and showing signs of revenue growth (or at least believe that I can grow) then I’m happy to keep my head down and continue working hard at this.  As I said earlier, I feel like August has taught me a few valuable lessons that I’ll be putting into action for September and I look forward to this update next month.

Key Learns:

Here’s a few things that I’ve learned in August that might help you:

• Keep motivated.  Don’t let not ranking or no traffic deter you from your course.  Use your anger like adrenaline and just pump yourself into more link building, article writing or other forms of work.
• All links are good links.  Forum posts, blog comments, articles, directories, signatures, profiles, reciprocals but to make any of them effective you need a healthy mix of all of them. Therefore, when you outsource your backlink building, make sure you don’t just ask for ’120 Profile Links on High PR Domains’ – this is not the answer to your ranking problems – get 30 of each type, for example.
• If you have to pay someone a few quid for a good link, consider it. As long as you spend from the pot you made the previous month, you’ll be OK.
• All content is good content.  Buy some PLR Articles for your niche, take 20 minutes to rewrite one of them and then submit it to as many sites that will give you a backlink as possible (PR Sites, Article Sites, Blog Posts).  Do this once a week for a different article.  Try article spinning if you can’t be bothered to re-write them.

Finally, if you’re wondering why any of this advice is worth following; here’s the reason why.  My Bar Stools UK affiliate site is not ranking at all for it’s own domain name (within the first 10 pages at least) and it’s been online since February. In August I followed the tips above and by the end of September, you’ll see exactly how these things have made my site rank in the SERPs. And, as we all know, as soon as that starts to happen and I get in one of those top 5 organic spots, my Bar Stools site will start making money, I promise!

In other affiliate news:

• Kirsty’s taken 4 months off
• Lammo’s shared one of the most emotional, candid and insightful affiliate journeys I’ve ever read
• Joe’s started posting again (about time )
• Gary’s realising the importance of family life
• Shane’s kicking arse for a noob
• And Finch just opens your eyes on a whole darker side of affiliate marketing

.

Here’s what I did:

• Submitted 2 articles to ArticlesBase.com
• Made 3 comments on ‘bar stools’ blogs (searched for ‘bar stools’ in google and then used the funky nav thing at the left hand side to sort them into blogs. All 3 comments were made on blogs where the comment needs to be moderated and will probably come out the other end of moderation (if they succeed at all) with ‘nofollow’ tags attached to the links. I’m not that bothered about this at the moment, I just need to to mix my link profile up a bit and this is suitable for my needs at the moment.
• Submitted my site to one free directory that required a reciprocal link exchange

I’m currently ranking #136 for my new target keyword in google.co.uk so I’ll be able to measure whether these methods are working are not.

This is particularly useful for me because my site has been online for 6 months now and has gained no sustainable rankings. I’ve had a few suggestions as to why this could be the case but I still remain stuck in my ways that the reason for no rankings is because the site does not have a strong enough quality profile and that includes the incoming links and the content (pages) these links link back to. With this new keyword, I have focussed on one particular niche within ‘bar stools’ and am building an SEO campaign up around that. If this works, I can move into other niches such as chrome bar stools, designer bar stools or leather bar stools for example.

Wish me luck!

.

I’ve written articles and submitted them to ezine articles, I’ve written press releases and submitted them to a handful of press release sites, I’ve exchanged links with other webmasters in my niche and I’ve even paid for someone to build me high pr links through oDesk but despite all of that, 6 months into my affiliate site’s life, I’m still nowehere to be seen in organic rankings.

Obviously after such a long time, despite getting lots of encouragement from other affiliates, the hopelessness creeps into your body like a slow bitter syrup, smothering your hopes and dreams in a thick shroud of endless blackness, only to feed on your tortured soul, lost somewhere in the empty shadow that remains – actually, it’s not that bad but it really kicks you in the balls to say the least.

I’m Sure This Road to Nowhere Is Getting Longer…

So, this painful road to nowhere forced me to take a decision that I had really been trying hard to avoid for so long. Something I really didn’t want to do because I was pretty sure it would cost me more than I’d make. Yep, you guessed it, I threw common sense, reason and GCSE maths aside and PPC’d it anyway!

You may have seen my past post about starting an adgroup in google adwords; well, I started another one and this time went for some more competitive terms. The problem with competitive terms though, is that they’re generally more expensive to start off with and my new adgroup was no exception. Nevertheless, my starving soul needed some validation (some proof that my site could work if…) so I was willing to pay to see if my bar stools affiliate site would actually make some money if it was receiving [organic] traffic.

I paid £15.00 on the first day for 47 visits (yes, I know, crazy price, way too expensive but I had to see if my site had potential) and I was pleased to see that by the end of the day, I’d sold 4 items with a conversion of almost 10% which made me a total of about £11.00 in commission. Yes, yes, I know it made a loss but the point here is that if my site was getting traffic, it would make money!

After seeing this little exercise bear some fruit, I tweaked the PPC campaign for the following day, turned broad matches into exact matches and reduced the min CPC to see how that fared. I got less visitors but paid less and still made some commission (only about £4.75) this time on a total cost of £6.00. At least it was a little better…

Ok, so you’ve proved you can lose money on AdWords I hear you say, so what? Well, the AdWords campaign has given me a great starting point for a proper organic SEO campaign. Rather than try and rank for ‘bar stools uk’, I’m now going to try all of the organic SEO methods mentioned above (link building) to try and rank for a different term – the one which resulted in great conversions from the AdWords campaign. So despite losing me money, it proved the concept and now I’m absolutely positive all I need to do to make money out of this site is get some traffic to it!

Oh, I forgot to say too, how did I know which keyword turned into the sale? Well, I used a free WordPress Plugin developed by fellow affiliate, Shane Brown, whose Keyword Tracker plugin takes care of all of that for you!

I guess the underlying theme here is that we can all make money if we do this, or if we do that, or if we’d done this or that but the undisputable rule is if you don’t keep working on new things (and old things like link building) and if you don’t keep trying, or taking small risks, then you’ll never get out of the what if phase and you’ll be stuck at your day job FOREVER!

.

1. Kirsty’s WordPress for Affiliates Guide
2. Yoast’s Awesome Complete Guide to WordPress SEO

I am following both of these guides to make my Bar Stools affiliate site as tight as possible for SEO. I’m leaving nothing to chance….

Oh! I forgot to say; I got a .92p commission yesterday on this site too – rock on!

.

• 292 Pages indexed in Google’s index (typing the command ‘site:www.yourdomain.co.uk’ into google)
• 66 Yahoo Backlinks (See them here)
• A link profile that contained links from: ezinearticles.com, high PR profile links, A4u forum and approximately 10 small individual site reciprocal link exchanges.

I am pretty sure the bouncing SERPs are due to a lack of good quality link profiles due to a fairly restricted number of sites.

Fixing The Problem

Today I spent about 5 hours searching google for Bar Stools related sites and individually checked each site to see if they had an individual link exchange program. About 60% were listing ‘links’ or ‘resources’ on their site so in each of these cases, I added a link to their site on my own ‘extras’ page and then sent them an email asking if they’d be interested in exchanging links and showing them I’d already added their link to my site. Although many were in the same vertical, I explained how the links would be more beneficial for us than detrimental. So far I have had no responses but I am hopeful for at least 50%.

These links will add some good quality to my backlinks because they will sit on very specific, niche, related sites and I’m pretty sure that’s what google’s missing from me.

In addition, I also paid £25 for a directory listing on a home improvement site that allowed me to add in the title of my website and a link back.

When It Works

When I have good proof that this fixes the problem, I’ll write some detailed instructions down on what to do and then outsource the work to someone for about $10.

.

1. An email list service
2. A nice, catchy ‘subscribe to email’ image
3. Some text that encourages people to subscribe

Signing Up to An Email List Service

I’ve used Aweber before (you can sign up for $1) but after taking the advice from a colleague about how to set up an email list, I thought I’d ask him to tell me what program he uses as his campaigns sounded pretty successful. He recomended a very cool looking email program called Mad Mimi. Signing up was quick and easy and it’s a very intuitive website that makes setting up email newsletters and creating sign up forms very, very easily. Once I had an account, I was able to use the interface within the site to create a form that I was able to customise to suit my site with very little stress.

A Nice, Catchy Image To Support The Campaign

I already had an existing site but when it had originally been designed, I didn’t really think to cater for an email subscription box. This means that I had to create brand new images for this. Now my initial reaction was to go for a colour that fit the theme of the site in question which just happened to be sort of a dark red:

But, after speaking to my fellow affiliate, Mansoor, he suggested that his own campaign performance was improved when the call to action was actually blue. I’ve researched colours a little in the past and blue is actually considered a ‘trustworthy’ colour so I thought I’d give it a go:

I changed the text a little too, just to make sure. Now the problem I’m experiencing is that the red fits into my site really nicely but the blue stands out like a sore thumb. I tried the red for two days and got 1 sign up, I’ve had the blue online for 2 days and so far have no sign ups. My data is too little to make any judgements yet, but I’ll keep you posted on the outcome.

Some Text That Encourages People to Subscribe

I confess I’m still working on this and intend to run a few variations of this over the next few months. The immediate plan here is to use similar kinds of call to actions (CTAs) as used in AdWords Text Ads, with a clear call to action (CTA) such as: ‘Subscribe’, ‘Get’, ‘Receive’ etc. As you can see from the images above, I’ve tried two variations so far with little change.

The trick here, I assume, is to combine the response CTA with a reason. I keep mentioning this but I’ve frequently been told in the past that ‘benefits sell better than features’, so my philosophy here is to combine a CTA with a benefit of subscribing to the list, such as ‘Subscribe Now To Receive Discounts’ or something along those lines.

This is not too far from the truth actually, because when I have my list of several hundred subscribers, I’ll frequently be sending out emails with discount codes and voucher coupons to the merchants I’m promoting.

This is my plan, anyway…I’d be happy to hear everyone’s thoughts on what works in email marketing for affiliate sites and whether or not colours that integrate well with a site are better than psychologically reassuring but sometimes out of place colours…

.

As all regular readers of my blog will know, the bar stools site has been bouncing around the SERPs since February when I launched it but for about the last 3 or 4 weeks (since it last bounced out of existence) it has maintained a steady 2/3 visitors per day.

Up until this last drop, I’d always maintained that the reason for the bouncing was that there simply was not enough ‘quality’ indicators related to the site. When I say ‘quality indicators’, I am referring to domain age, backlink types, backlink age, on page SEO, internal linking structure and just a general ‘trust’ perception of the site.

During this last 3 week drop, I’ve really been left reconsidering all my beliefs about why this page was not ranking but today, all my fears were put to rest when the site resurfaced at position #6 in google.co.uk for it’s domain name. This has always been an indicator of other longtail searches showing up too and a quick search in google for ‘john lewis bar stools’ will show you what I mean…

So as of right now, I’m back in the top 10 and sending clicks to my merchants (33 today, in fact – and that’s not counting the ones to amazon so all in all, it looks very positive right now (9pm Friday night) but I’ll have to wait and see stats tomorrow to see how the full day looks.

Don’t be fooled, despite the site sapping me of all motivation or desire to work on it, I have not been idle and I have stuck at it, continuing to add one or two articles, built a few backlinks and reorganised several on page SEO factors (added unique category descriptions, removed duplicate content category posts to show only the excerpts, removed category descriptions from link titles and changed product links so that instead of the product title linking straight out to merchant, it is now a text link to it’s own product page).

I am hoping that the combination of all of these things, plus the increase in ‘trust’ and ‘quality’ value google is applying to my site (as a result of all of these things + link and domain age) has contributed to today’s massive swing and reappearance in the top 10.

Now, if this can just stick, finally, I think the site will have turned it’s corner. Interesting, seeing as though the beginning of August marks the site’s 6 month anniversary.

I must proceed with caution, however, because I’ve been here many, many times before….

.

I’d been pondering it for a few days and at about 3am one night came up with a new site idea. I registered the domain(s) .co.uk and .com a few days ago and setup hosting on my dedicated [and some would say, overpriced] server and am now going to start the design.

Here’s how its going to look!

That’s probably the last you’ll ever see of this site but I may just tell you about it when it earns £Xxxx per month

I’m planning on PPCing it in it’s early days whilst building an organic SEO source of traffic in the meantime.

You can’t really tell from those pictures what it’s about, can you?

.

With that in mind, here’s how July faired for me – I did have one surprising source of revenue in July:

Income

• Affiliate Window: £4.45
• Amazon Associates: £0.00
• Commission Junction: £409.87
• Ebay Partner Network: £49.00
• Google AdSense: £2.82
• Independant Sources of Commission: £214.00
• USFreeAds: £25.00
• Total Income: £705.14

Expenses

• Server: £100
• AdWords: £256.00
• Total Expenses: £356.00

Gross Profit: £349.14

As you can see there was a surprise revenue stream in there from ‘Independant Commission Sources’ – these are sources of commission from retailers directly and not through a network.  In this particular case, I had a couple of sales of a very highly paying product.  Needless to say, this was not from my bar stools site.  In fact, the bar stools site’s only contribution to this month’s revenue figure was a £4.45 commission that is still pending. On the plus side, it was actually a bar stool

All in all I’m dissapointed with this month’s earnings. I now have 3 sites and although I was not expecting any income from the new third site (and won’t for a couple of months yet), if it wasn’t for my PPC-powered site which I really do not want to mention in public, I’m not sure that my attempts at affiliate marketing are going particularly well.

Having said that, I am making a profit but, of course, this is not taking into consideration my own time – which, if I charged for it, the whole thing would be running at a loss or just barely breaking even.

I am encouraged by my increase in motivation, spurred on primarily by surprise commissions and some encouragement from fellow marketeers musketeers, and I really want to transfer this increased motivation level into cold, hard cash (well, cash on the screen anyway).  My full time job is OK but it’s not really the life I want and so I will continue on this course and just keep digging in, getting my head down and taking the advice of other, more successful affiliates to make this work.

I hope you’ve all had good months too and one fellow affiliate, for sure, has had a positive month.

Let me know how it’s going for you and especially so if you’re finding it as hard as I am to break through the few hundred quid plateau.

.

There’s not much to say in this post other than this is the second and final part of my first attempt to show you how I set up my AdWords PPC Campaign for my affiliate site. There’s lots of things I’m not happy with after watching it back again and I feel like I’ve made some serious blunders with regards to structure but hopefully it’ll offer some useful tips for those new to AdWords PPC for affiliate sites.

I’m going to follow the progress of this campaign and will regularly blog about it as I go. Once I’ve got the full campaign up and running (maybe 50/60 AdGroups?), I’ll lift the lid off my AdWords account again so you can see the entire structure of the setup.

This will be even more valuable if the bar stools site actually starts turning a profit in the meantime!

Set Up an AdWords PPC Campaign for Your Affiliate Site – Part 2

.