It’s been a couple of weeks since I last dropped a post on here and there’s a few reasons for it: 1) I was seriously de-motivated by affiliate marketing 2) I’ve been trying to fix the problems with my existing bar stools affiliate site and 3) I’ve been working on my new, 3rd affiliate site
Now I have absolutely no problem pointing you in the direction of my new affiliate site but you’ll have to send me an email to find out where it is because I’m afraid that just by mentioning (and linking to) my new site on this blog will somehow flag up some kind of ‘affiliate’ warning for google which will prevent my site from ranking. Call me overly suspicious, paranoid or naive if you like but after the great difficulties I’ve had trying to get my bar stools site to rank after frequently mentioning it on here, I’m not going to take the risk.
- It’s worth slipping in the note here that the bar stools site has hardly made any money at all yet as a result (so I believe) of too little traffic.
Leaving my new affiliate site off the reservation, as it were, will remove any paranoia I’m feeling about how G is out to get me and anything connected to affiliate marketing.
About My New Site
My new site is based on wordpress and has largely been created using the theme for the bar stools site except with a different logo, in a different colour and a slightly different layout. I think I’ve learned from some early mistakes with the bar stools site most notable being:
- Make sure category links do not have the catageory descriptions in the link titles to cut out duplicate content. I resolved this issue by adding the [ use_desc_for_title=0 ] to my wp_list_categories () call. So my actual template string here looks like this:
<?php wp_list_categories(‘depth=1&title_li=&exclude=8,9,13,10&use_desc_for_title=0′); ?> - Make sure that when I do add my category descriptions that I can add HTML into them without WordPress stripping out tags. This plugin helped with this. I was originally pointed on this trail by Kirsty’s WordPress Affiliate series.
- Do not duplicate product content on the homepage, use ‘excerpts’ instead.
- If I’m having a beast of a work ethic day where I muster up the effort to add 15 products in one day – don’t be foolish and cram them all into one days’ worth of posts, make use of WordPress’ ‘schedule’ feature and set the site to automatically post 2 or 3 new products a day for the next week or so instead.
- Add in more non-affiliate-related content such as genuine FAQs, Brand Profiles, Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policies, Delivery Questions etc.
- Make sure that every single product post is written with 100% unique content. No more copy and pasting straight from merchant’s sites.
- Pick a niche that has a healthy stream of real-life news around it so when all else fails, it’d be easy to re-write a recent related news article from the BBC website to flesh out the site.
- Opt for a more natural link building method which consists of fewer articles on more sites (spread the article distribution to more sites rather than just everything on ezinearticles), more blog comments on closely related sites, 2 and 3 way reciprocal link exchanges with sites that are very closely related and content exchanges with other webmasters. The above methods are in direct comparison to the method I previously used which was more brute force Angela’s and Paul’s backlink packet method.
Ok, so these are the few things I’m actively doing different with this new site. The other thing that is immediately different from my bar stools site is that I’ve had this new domain registered for a couple of years, so the domain has some degree of age behind it although it has never really had any content. I believe that this is one factor that is affecting the bar stools site.
Harder Than Ever Before
In closing here, I have to say that the last few weeks have proved harder than I’d imagined in terms of my affiliate motivation simply due to lack of performance on all fronts. I’ve found that when my sites don’t make money, I start to lose motivation on my sites for a few days and I’m pretty sure that every successfull affiliate has gone through this phase and unless they got very lucky first time round, I can only appreciate and respect how much time, effort and persistance a successful affiliate has to put in before they start to see the fruits of their labour.
I only hope I have the strength to push on through these tough times too.
.
July 27th, 2010 at 1:03 am
Interesting read, I have added you to my blogroll please do keep up with posts like these – I’m not aware of anyone who has charted their affiliate journey from start to success. It’d be really good if you did
Incidentally, it’s not affiliate sites Google doesn’t like – it’s sites that don’t add value. I reckon the issue with your barstools site may be one of competition. Given time, a few links, and loads of unique content I think you’ll do A-OK
July 27th, 2010 at 3:00 am
The first site I am having problems with bouncing around in the SERPS is my gold competition site – which is also the first site I have had links to from my blog. At the same time, Google seems to love my blog…every post I write is spidered within a few minutes and they seem to be ranking quite well, bringing in quite a bit of traffic now.
July 27th, 2010 at 5:13 am
KirstyM – Thanks for the kind comments – especially those around my bar stool site. Any glimmer of hope with that one is a good thing. Also many thanks for the blogroll, glad you found it useful and I hope your readers will too. Chartering the journey is easy…making a success out of that journey is proving to be way more difficult!
Shane – Interesting how your site is bouncing after being linked to from your blog. I think this is a coincidence in both of our cases and may have something to do with us posting links to our sites the second they went live from our blogs.
I really think the bouncing around is due to quality of links, age of site and not enough content yet.
Having said all that, I’m still not going to link to my site from this blog – yet, at least!
July 29th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Here is something that will help your site rank…
Use the search term “bar stools” at most 28 times (right now you use it 42 times)
Use the search term “bar” at most 50 times (right now its 88)
Use the search term “stools” at most 31 times. (right now its 42 times)
Use the keywords “bar” or “stools” at most 79 times. (right now its 130 times)
with your h2-h6 tags…
Use the search term “bar stools” at most 2 times (right now its 6)
Use the search term “bar” at most 2 times. (right now its 18!!)
Use the search term “stools” at most 2 times (right now its 6 times)
There are other things wrong with your seo, but fixing the above will definitely have a positive impact. Right now as far as i can see your site is seen as keyword stuffing. Oh the reason why i said maximum of this many times, is that that the the maximum number of times your competitor (urls in top 10) have used.
hope this helps any questions you know where to find me
Mansooor
August 1st, 2010 at 9:29 am
Mansoor – thanks for that very comprehensive advice post. If I could ask one question; was that SEO check relevant to my homepage? So for instance, I need to reduce the number of ‘bar stools’ related phrases on my home page?
I will endevour to do as you advise with the site and make a blog post about how the changes affect the site.
December 7th, 2011 at 2:48 pm
What WordPress theme did you use for the Bar Stools site? Is it doing any better a year later?
December 7th, 2011 at 3:26 pm
The Bar Stools theme was a custom one.
A year later, it is doing better, yes, about £40 a month now. Not much I know, but it goes straight into the Amazon gift vouchers account and we use that for the little things we buy for ourselves
December 7th, 2011 at 3:28 pm
What do you mean a custom one? You coded it yourself or you paid someone for it?
December 7th, 2011 at 3:30 pm
I had an ‘ecommerce’ website design done for me and then paid someone to turn THAT into a WordPress Theme.
Cost me about £200 all in.
December 7th, 2011 at 3:31 pm
Woah – that’s a nice chunk of change. Did you ever get any more use out of it than that and the recycling bins site?