Affiliate Musketeer

A couple of good things are happening at the moment for me but I’ve been here before, writing pretty much the same things, so I’m going to be cautious with this one, just in case I jinx myself out of the luck – again. My affiliate site may just be starting to turn a corner.

As you know, I’ve been running an open case study on my affiliate site and since it went online in February, it has earned me maybe £5 in commission (if I take out one anomaly of £45 commission). This, I believe, is primarily down to the lack of traffic the site gets – averaging about 2 or 3 visitors per day. However, since february, the site has experienced a couple of spikey days, where traffic shoots up past the average to around 25 visitors per day. These are the days that Google ranks the site on the first page for its own name. Have a look at this screenshot from analytics:

It’s a little condensed here so you might want to click the image to view a larger version, but you can see that except from the first couple of weeks, where Google gave the site an early ranking boost, the site’s visitors dropped substantially. Every so often, a spike of traffic would come through and that is attributed directly to the early rankings boosts returning for a day only.

Up until today, these spikes had lasted a day, maybe two at most, before they dropped back to oblivion. What excites me today, is that I’m into my 3rd day now and the rankings are still there. It’s also been a smaller gap since the last spike this time round, which suggests that maybe I’m starting to pull out of some kind of filtering system.

Like I said in the title of this post, I’m not holding my breath that these rankings will stick and I’m not writing about how this could be the turning point – I’ve done all that before and it just seems to antagonise the mighty G who banish me to limbo the following day. No…this time, I wait…

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