Affiliate Musketeer

If you read my latest post about being totally disenchanted by the prospect of having a couple of affiliate sites making no money, chances are you’ve experienced that very same feeling. My new affiliate site has been online approx 6/7 weeks now, has dropped completely out of the SERPs and has only made £49. This has completely wiped out my enthusiasm for the site however I have remained determined to see it through and tonight I put my head down and just started writing…

I didn’t really have an idea for any content to create today but I resolved to get something on the site. I eventually settled for some ‘best selling deals of March 2010′ posts, where I highlight a couple of favourable looking deals, write a pragraph or so about why they’re doing so well and then link out to the merchant’s site. After completing the post for my new affiliate site, I decided I’d do the same for my older PPC-powered site with no real goal of content in mind.

I ended up writing two posts for the older PPC site as this historically has been my biggest earner and is coming into prime season. This time it was a lot easier to think of content. I simply logged into my google analytics account to see what traffic the site had received and to my surprise the PPC-powered site had experienced its highest traffic day ever yesterday – 174 unique visits with a 45%/45%/10% split between PPC/Organic/Directs-Other. I checked the organic search terms and found a couple of visits from google for the search ‘product type deals’…(where product type = my actual product type but I won’t reveal it yet!) Having tested the search myself on Google, I am ranking #2 in organic SERPS for this term but it seemed easy to hit up #1 spot.

So, after seeing this, it was an easy job to knock up a post highlighting some ‘product type deals:March 2010′. Again, I highlighted 3 of my products for this month and wrote about a paragraph or so about each one with a ‘Buy Today for Only £XXX’ link to my merchant in the post. All my SEO semantics were spot on, H tags, italics, bold, internal links and relevant content and I imagine I’ll take over the #1 spot for this term (it’s not very competitive) in the next couple of weeks.

After making that post I felt pretty good about things and just kept going and wrote another post about one of my products in specific. I highlighted some key (unique) features and made the post. We’ll see how it goes but in short, I managed to write 3 healthy, unique content pages tonight in about 3 hours (they required some minor research and images) – 2 for my PPC site and 1 for my new affiliate site which you’ll have seen mentioned in earlier posts.

I am happy with this work and feel like I have succeeded in something tonight because despite my lack of earnings and my failing enthusiasm, I have gutsed it out and just got down to business. Deep down inside, I know it was worth it.