In the August bank holiday of 2009, I had my first £100 day. Good weather + bank holidays = more time spent online looking at my products. I logged into my CJ account today to find an extra £50 in there…and the day (or the weekend – has only just begun). I have high hopes for a strong performance this bank holiday and hope the rain stays off. Because my product is essentially an outdoor product (as you can imagine, I’m not talking about my bar stools affiliate site here), when the weather is nice it gives people that hedonistic feeling of ‘if only…’ and it seems to directly contribute to people buying on the spot.

If the weather stays nice and the sun stays out I think I could have a strong weekend. In the meantime, I’ll keep adding my content and building my links for this site so that next year, it does even better – no matter the outcome for this year.

As an aside…it’s interesting to see how common sense and actual ‘real life’ buying patterns affect online sales too. I know that sometimes I am guilty of assuming that ‘if I build it, they will buy’, but its just not the case. Buying patterns exist online too and you’ll never escape seasonal trends….time to start thinking about my winter sites I think…

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I actually cleared £100 yesterday for the first time in one day. I’ve been looking at my stats for the last week and for all intents and purposes the site has been performing exceptionally well, it just hadn’t made any sales. This particular site had experienced it’s highest volume week ever, clearing 100 visitors every day – it’s only a new site about 4 months old – and everything was right about it. Users were viewing on average 3.5 pages per visit, staying on the site for about 3 minutes and has managed an improved bounce rate from 45% in April down to 25% last month.

I put this down to the addition of more content and a change in the way page structure is setup. I used to direct users from the homepage to the merchant’s site (which increases the bounce rate), but have now adopted a more ‘presell’ strategy in that now, I direct users from the homepage to a more in depth page about the product on my own site and then to a merchant’s site. This gives me every chance to presell and means that when my user does click through, they’re mouths are watering for the offer/product. The other advantage of course is that it gives me the opportunity to add content to my site – which I actually like doing and this, as I’m sure you’ll know, is contributing to a healthy SEO strategy for the site.

I am seeing the fruits of this change first hand in this last week’s traffic stats where organic traffic has slowly increased every day. Although a very small number, it is up from less than 5 organic searches to almost 30. These are all very targeted, relevant searches too and I am expecting this trend to continue. It will continue because I will be writing at least 1 new content article each week, always offering up more for the search spiders to eat.

Anyway, all that aside, the whole point of this post is that all the work of the last few weeks has paid off because today, when I logged into my CJ stats, I’d cleared £100 for the first time in a single day. Ka-Ching!

What do I think contributed to this success?

• It was a Bank Holiday here in the UK yesterday – more people off work means more people surfing the net.
• It was a shitty, rainy day yesterday which means people weren’t out playing rounders or having picnics, they were on my site considering buying my merchant’s product(s).
• I’ve increased organic traffic over the last week by 30% – there was no magic trick to this, it was just that my site is now just over 3 months old and google is starting to pick up and rank my rich content pages that are highly targeted to my [merchant's] target market.
• My merchant has good products.

Affiliate Marketing is the process of marketing products and services from other companies (known as ‘merchants’) and getting paid by those companies (merchants) for each sale or lead you generate for them. It is particularly effective in the online marketing world, where webmasters like yourself can set up a website and promote the products of merchants in order to send your website visitor to the merchant’s website where the user can actually buy the product. The user that you sent will then hopefully buy a product or service from the merchant and if that’s the case, you will get paid.

Now this just doesn’t work with any company and any product, so you cant just setup a website and throw up links to other websites and get paid for it. The company whose products you want to promote must run an affiliate program. Affiliate programs can either be ran in-house by the company themselves or through an independant, 3rd party company such as Affiliate Window or Commission Junction. Of course there are many more 3rd party affiliate companies out there and I’ll include a full list in an appendix at the end of this series. It makes more sense to me to use 3rd party companies because, for example, with Affiliate Window, they have access to over 700 merchants who all want you to promote their products or services and their independantly monitored so there’s little risk of ‘losing’ commissions, which used to be the case when companies kept their affiliate programs in house. Anyway, 700 merchants with websites….that’s a lot of products you could choose to promote and a huge market to tap into.

How Much Can You Earn as an Affiliate?

How much you can earn is unlimited. Really, it is. In Affiliate Window, for example, there are currently 755 merchants to promote. Lets use an example and say that each merchant has 100 products (the real average figure is probably more into the 1000s), thats 755 x 100 = 75500 products that you could promote to website users. How much you earn is only down to how much time and effort you want to put into the job at hand. There’s stories online of people earning 10s of thousands per month through affiliate marketing and probably just as many people out there offering you products or services that TELL YOU HOW TO DO IT. I’m not so sure if all of the so-called gurus have actually made as much as they claim but one guide I really do recomend is The Black Ink Project by Jeremy Palmer – this pretty much strips affiliate marketing bare and is the blueprint that allowed me to build my own affiliate marketing business up. I for one however, do like to rely on my own history and stats rather than take someone else’s word for it and I can say that, to date (as at july 13th 2009), my monthly earnings through affiliate programs are averaging £3500.

I’ve only been doing this full time for 6 months now but I did have a background in Internet Marketing (SEO) and used to work for a web design company based in Sunderland, UK, so I didn’t start from complete scratch with this. Even still, it’s taken me quite a while to pull things together and no short amount of hard, hard graft and lots of trial and error. Its my aim to share some of those experiences with you to try and help you start making a living online too. Now, don’t expect anything formal with this, it really is just a place to catalog my own experiences and hopefully offer advice to people that genuinely helps them in their own affiliate marketing endevours.

I think that pretty much covers it, come back soon where you’ll find regular progress reports and open book explanations of exactly what I’m doing, how I’m doing it and how much money I’m making!

Like everyone else looking for the solution to this problem, I googled it. I eventually found my way to a popular software program that you’ve probably heard of already called Xtreme Conversions. This was the first method I tried to successfully monitor my conversions.

This software basically generates a piece of code that you paste into your affiliate landing page which then records all the keywords users searched for. The trick with this software though is that it automatically appends either a TID (for clickbank products) or SID (for CJ products) to the click through. How this works is it gets the keyword from the AdWords ad, passes it through its software, records the keyword and assigns it a numerical ID. This numerical ID becomes your TIDs and your SIDs. When you make a sale via CJ, the SID numerical value will be assigned to the sale and will show up in your CJ sales reports. To find out which keyword generated that SID, log into your Xtreme Conversions page and it will show you a list of every keyword and its assigned ID. From this table, you can see that SID 45 for example, came from the AdWords keyword ‘Blue Widget’.

Each time a sale is made, an SID is appended to the sale and you can reverse track that to the keyword level to see which keywords are performing for you. Obviously you can cut the ones that arent.

Working with WordPress

For my affiliate sites I like to use WordPress. I like to use wordpress because its easy to update, has thousands of available free themes online and has a virtually unlimited stream of plugins and extras to help give my users a more comprehensive experience. Anyway, I found that if I used Xtreme Conversions (the none Pro version), that although it was tracking my keywords well, I couldn’t quite figure out how to set it up so that the code that it generates only needed to be pasted into my header.php file. If I only had one static landing page then the XC code and setup would have been perfect but because WordPress uses the same header include to generate every page, I found that it was generating an extra ‘frequency’ each time a page was loaded, even by the same user, and this distorted my stats. If you go and have a look at the Xtreme Conversions page, you will see some screenshots that will make more sense of what I’m talking about.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the only way I could get it working properly with my wordpress pages was to either upgrade to the Pro version or install a php plugin to wordpress that would allow me to insert php code directly to posts. I tried the php plugin but it still did not work as intended and by that point, I was fed up with faffing around so looked for another alternative.

Simple, Free, Effective Way to Track AdWords Keywords via CJ

I went back to google and tried again. This time I found an old thread on the Digital Point forum that showed me what I needed to do in a nutshell. Now although this didn’t work for me right out of the hat, it did lead me to the location where I was finally able to put the whole thing together and this is how I did it:

1. Log into your AdWords campaign and setup all of your different ads so that they pass the exact keyword search typed in by the user to get to you. With Google AdWords, you can use the Dynamic Keyword Insertion to achieve this goal like so:

Your adwords destination url:

http://www.yourdomainhere.com/yourlandingpagehere.php?kw={keyword}

You can see the bold at the end. This is what you need to append to the end of your destination url in your adwords text ad/ad. What this does is it will add the {keyword} the user searched for to the end of the string so that the url passed to your page will be:

http://www.yourdomainhere.com/yourlandingpagehere.php?kw=your keyword

Now what we need to do is set up a way to pass that keyword to CJ by adding an SID to the end of all of our outgoing CJ affiliate links. So that the outgoing link would look like this:

http://www.cjlinkwouldgohere.com/cjlandingpageorproducthere.php?SID=keyword

This can be achieved with the following php script:

<?php
$keyword = $_GET[’q'];
if(!strcmp($keyword, “”))
{
echo ‘<a href=”http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2412142-10482525?sid=Default”>Anchor</a>’;
} else {
echo ‘<a href=”http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2412142-10482525?sid=’ . $keyword . ‘>Anchor</a>’;
}
?>

You should re-write this code because if you copy and paste some characters such as the ‘ or ” can get mixed up by your browser/my page. If all of your links are being generated in this way, then you will be able to track your keywords via CJ and see which ones are making you money.

If you are using wordpress like I do, then the plugin you need to be able to insert this code where your link needs to go is called phpexec. Just write the code inside a blog post or page but make sure the code is inside some <phpcode> </phpcode> tags.

My thanks go to Jim Karter who helped me track my adwords conversions with CJ on his original post here.

Hopefully it will help you too!