A Great Beginners How To Guide to Affiliate Marketing
Posted on June 19, 2008, under Affiliate Marketing.
Kirsty over at Affiliate Stuff has posted a great all-in-one how to guide for getting started in affiliate marketing.
This is some extremely useful information for anyone, like me, who is trying to get into the world of affiliate marketing, and it’s great of Kirsty to put it all there in one place. As usual the post makes for great reading and has some really valuable info.
I’d advise anyone who’s just starting out to read through thoroughly and, if you haven’t already, subscribe to her feed!
Get a .info Domain Name for only 50p
Posted on June 17, 2008, under Affiliate Marketing, Domains.
This might be old news, but I only just stumbled across it. GoDaddy have a sale on .info domains at the moment, just 50p for a year registration (+ 10p ICANN fee)!
Sounds like a perfect opportunity to get in a load of domains. I’m going to have a think about some niches i’d like to set up a site in then try and get a decent keyword rich domain. I’ve registered 3 already, but to be honest those are in an extremely saturated market (video games), but I thought i’d give them a go anyway, not much to lose! My plan is to get an affiliate mashup site on those and see if I can drive some traffic to them. If i’m not getting any return after 6-9 months then maybe i’ll try and sell the domains/sites. The way I see it, they only have to make 60p each to break even, so anything after that is profit, however little that may be.
Time to learn some SEO
I haven’t really touched any of my sites in the last couple of weeks as i’ve been really busy with other stuff. I really want to try and keep up some momentum and try and get things going so i’m going to make some time this week to work on some things.
So, I have a couple of mashup sites up working nicely, but now obviously I need to start getting traffic to those sites. SEO isn’t something i’ve done much of in the past so I think it’s time for me to dedicate some time to get clued up.
From what I’ve read I guess these will be what i’ll focus on to start with:
- Submitting to search engines - so far i’ve only submitted to Google and set up Google sitemaps (using this sitemap script).
- Submitting to directories - i’m not sure how easy this will be for a mashup site. I guess the content can be valuable to visitors (that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?), so hopefully it won’t be too much of a problem.
- Getting links - this is the main thing I need to learn about I think, where to get good links back to my sites.
There’s probably a ton of other stuff I need to do to really help build traffic, and i’m sure i’ll pick up loads of information as I look into this, and i’ll post anything I think could be useful for anyone else who’s starting out. Any advice would be gratefully appreciated.
I’ll attempt to get an hour of reading in now while my 2 year old son buries me in toy cars…
Sitemap Generator for the mashup script
Posted on May 20, 2008, under Affiliate Marketing, Scripts.
Just a quick post to say that i’ve written a script that will generate a valid XML sitemap that can be used, for example, with Google Sitemaps. The script runs through all the keywords in the products.txt file, builds the URL in the same way that they are created when someone browses to the site, and outputs it in XML. Change frequency is set to daily for every URL, and the priority is set to 1.0. You should be able to find and change that easily enough if you want to.
All you have to do with this is download the script (zipped) below and extract sitemap.php to the root of your script directory. Then, assuming you are submitting to Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools, submit http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.php. That’s it! Google will download your sitemap, hopefully daily, and it will automatically contain all your URLs, even if you add new keywords to products.txt.
Download the sitemap script here.
My modified version of the 45n5 mashup script
Posted on May 17, 2008, under Affiliate Marketing, Scripts.
As I mentioned in the last post I have modified the mashup script from 45n5.com so that it now works with the new eBay Partner Network. I also tweaked a few other things to how I wanted it, others may not like those changes so feel free to remove any of that.
From what I could find you can no longer use the GetSearchResults eBay API call (or maybe I just didn’t look hard enough…), so I had a look through eBay’s developer site and found the FindItems call which I think does pretty much the same thing, and it certainly is enough for what I wanted. I also couldn’t find a way of using the new eBay API calls without having an eBay Developer account and App ID (please let me know if anyone knows of a way that you don’t need an App ID), so to use the script you’ll have to sign up with the eBay Developers Program and generate a production app ID.
The script is still very much based on the original from 45n5, and as in the original you still need to modify some variables in the stufftochange.php file, and add your keywords to the products.txt file.
As well as getting the eBay stuff working with the new affiliate network the other tweaks I have made are:
- Added time remaining, current price and current bids to the eBay listings
- Aligned the eBay images and text a bit more neatly
- Removed the bottom AdSense text banner
- Added an AdSense box underneath the “Auctions for…” section
- Put a bit of vertical space between the different sections (ie. between “Video for…” and “Shop for…”) just so they’re not so bunched up
There’s probably alot more that can be done with this script and I will work some more on it in the near future, although I have alot on for the next week or so, so i’ll have to wait a little while before I can have another play ;).
If anyone notices any problems with this version the please contact me and i’ll try my best to fix it. Also, if anyone digs through the code, please don’t laugh at my amateur coding skills… but i’d be happy to hear of any tips or improvements I could make.
I’ve put a up a quick demo here for you to take a look at.
Update on my first mashup site
Posted on May 14, 2008, under Affiliate Marketing, Scripts.
I worked today on modifying the mashup script I mentioned in my last post to work with the new eBay Partner Network and I’ve got it into a working state and tweaked a few other things to how I want it to look. I threw together some keywords and have put up an initial site using the script, and I think it works very well! I am on the road all day tomorrow so won’t be able to touch it anymore until Friday, but i’m hoping to get some time to tweak it a little more and maybe work on a few design elements and think through my keywords a bit more.
I’m really excited about the potential for this script, once i’ve modified it to my needs it will make it extremely easy to throw up similar sites in future.
I’ll tidy up my changes to the script before the end of the weekend and post it here so anyone who is interested can use it themselves.
My First Experiment
Posted on May 13, 2008, under Affiliate Marketing.
I’ve decided that for my first real try at making money online i’m going to experiment with an affiliate site, or to be more precise, an Amazon/Adsense/eBay mashup site!
I’ve only just heard of mashup sites in the last few days or so when I came across this post at 45n5.com where Mark explains what they are and how to use them to make money.
As a quick overview, a mashup is a site/page that is made up of content pulled from different places. So, for example, you could pull in videos from Youtube, eBay listings, Amazon affiliate links and Adsense ads all into the one page. Because the content is all relevant, and essentially new, Google sees it as a new page and you have some pre-made keyword rich content.
I think that this week i’ll be working on modifying Mark’s script to work with the new eBay affiliate program and also tweak it to fit in with what I want to achieve. I already have a domain name I bought (rather impulsively) about 6 weeks ago which I think this could work well on and I already have hosting, so I should be set to get a site up in the next week or so. Then I get onto learning how to get traffic in!
I also found that a fan site I started a couple of months ago but didn’t get very far into has made some Adsense money! Well, when I say some I actually mean it got one click and made $0.40, but still, it’s more than nothing! Anyway that got me to thinking that maybe I should put a little bit more effort into that one as well seeing as it’s started to get some traffic (not alot) and that I only had a couple of pages up so far with hardly any content.
I’ll follow up with some posts on how I am getting on with these sites and anything I learn along the way.
5 Top Free WordPress Plugins
As well as being new to making money online, I am also a newbie blogger and I am still in the early experimental stages of using WordPress. For the last few days or so I’ve been playing with WP plugins, and here are 5 great plugins that I think could be very useful for any WordPress site, but especially if you want to monetise your site.
Best of all, of course, is that all of these plugins are absolutely free!
Win an already profitable niche site at pimpmypagerank
Posted on May 1, 2008, under Affiliate Marketing.
I came across this post at pimpmypagerank.com a few weeks ago, and now i’ve got this blog up thought i’d post about it!
The idea is this:
Stuart at pimpmypagerank.com has setup a pasta machine niche website, mypastamaker.com. To enter the competition all you need to do is visit mypastamaker.com and follow the instructions on linking back with specific keywords. You place a link on your website/blog and then click on it. That’s it! Stuart will gather all the entries his logs and one lucky winner will win the entire site on August 1st 2008.
Obviously this is potentially a very good opportunity for people like me who are trying to get a foot on the ladder in this business, as the winner gets a complete site in a potentially high earning niche which already has many links back to it using great keywords.
Got to be worth a try, right?
Wordpress 2.5.1 Released
Wordpress 2.5.1 was released yesterday. The release includes bug fixes, performance imporvements and a security fix.
Here’s a list of some of the main changes:
- Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
- Better performance for those who have many categories
- Media Uploader fixes
- An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
- Widget Administration fixes
- Various usability improvements
- Layout fixes for IE
However, I came across this post at XFEP.com which says that 2.5.2 might not be too far because of an issue caused by this latest release, so I think i’ll hold off from upgrading for now.
You can read the full 2.5.1 release post on the Wordpress blog.