Posted September 22nd, 2008
If you haven’t already been there then you should definitely head over to NicheToRiches and take a look.
The idea behind the site is that affiliate marketers can all get together there and participate in some friendly competition to help motivate them to getting their affiliate sites up and running.
I think this is a great idea, especially for a newbie affiliate marketer like myself as you can get some really invaluable tips along the way through posts and comments by other people there.
Empress (who runs the site) also allows members to publish their own posts, so you could share your own experiences with the other members. To me, in theory, this could turn into an excellent resource as you could see what people have tried, whether or not that worked, and what they’ve learned along the way. In practice people might not be that willing to share too much info for fear of giving their top secret ideas away. I still think that people could share their experiences without giving too much away, and it could still be very helpful.
I’ve joined up and I’m currently in the early stages of putting together a site as part of the recent Real Estate challenge. Already the posts by Empress have helped me alot in figuring out how to go about things and get the ball rolling.
Again, I think the idea of this is great and if people would just share a little bit about what they’ve learned, what worked, what didn’t etc. then the site could turn into a little gold mine of information for affiliate marketers.
Posted July 29th, 2008
I’ve been thinking for a little while now about putting in-text ads on some of my new sites. I didn’t spend too much time looking for who to use before I came across Kontera, as they seem to be one of the most popular out there.
So, I signed up and as soon as my account had been approved I applied the code to a couple of pages. Now, while I do like these ads and think they could probably be a good compliment to affiliate links and adsense, I have one issue with Kontera… it just takes soooo long to actually show the links on my pages. It can take 10 seconds or more before any of the text is turned into links. Now maybe that’s not so much of a problem, but it does bug me a little bit and I wonder whether that delay can mean missed clicks.
Then I came across this post about Infolinks. Paul seemed very impressed by Infolinks so I figured I’d give them a try and signed up. Yesterday my Infolinks account was accepted and so I swapped the Kontera code with the Infolinks code on the pages I’d had it applied on. The first thing I noticed is that the links are applied extremely quickly, within about 1 second (so much faster than Kontera). The only trade-off as far as I can see so far is that when putting the mouse cursor over a link the ads take a little while to load (about 1 second) compared with Kontera’s ads which show instantly when you hover over a link. Both solutions seem to offer relevant ads for the keywords they link from, so apart from the speed there doesn’t seem to be too much else between them.
From my limited experience of both systems so far, I am definitely going to be trying Infolinks ahead of Kontera. I think that the fact that all the links appear very quickly after the page has loaded is so much better and I hope will lead to more clicks than if I was using Kontera. You never know, I might find that they don’t convert very well and then maybe i’ll give Kontera a try.
Do you have experience with in-text ads? Care to share your thoughts?
Posted July 23rd, 2008
This is a follow on to my last post about where to get good quality content for your affiliate sites.
These are a couple of tools I’ve found which I think could be very useful if you are using free articles, or content from sites such as Wikipedia, to check how similar your pages are to others.
- Similar Page Checker by webconfs.com
This tool allows you to compare two pages and gives you a percentage of how similar they are. So if, for example, you’ve taken a Wikipedia article and modified it with some of your own writing (or even mashed it up with free content from elsewhere I guess…), you can check your new page against Wikipedia’s page to see how similar they are.
Hopefully the lower the percentage, the less likely you will be penalised by Google for duplicate content.
- Copyscape
This tool allows you to enter your page URL, then searches for other sites which have the same/similar content. You can then click through to those sites and Copyscape will even highlight the blocks of text it sees that is the same as yours.
I can see this being useful for deciding whether to use a particular free article or not. You can stick the URL of the article into this tool and see how many others out there are using the same thing on their site.
If you have any experience of the above tools, or know of any similar ones then please post a comment.
Posted July 22nd, 2008
OK, so I’ve been messing around with the mechanics of how my affiliate mashup sites will work, but have come to the point where I think I need to start getting some static content (articles, info pages etc.) on to these sites too, in order to get more hits from the search engines for search terms related to my sites.
This may be obvious to most people, and I have heard the term “content is king” mentioned by pretty much every blogger I’ve read in the make money online community, but I think I was maybe slightly naive in thinking I might still get some decent traffic to my sites without having to write lengthy articles or setup a blog for each niche site.
So I’ve been looking into whether it’s possible to get some good content related to my niche for free. There are a couple of methods I’ve come across that i’m interested in:
- Free Articles
There are a number of sites where you can get your hands on articles on pretty much any subject you need. These can be used free of charge, as long as the article and byline (with any credits to the author and even any links they want to stick in there too) remains as is.
A couple of examples of sites you can get these free articles from are Articles Base and Ezine Articles, but a simple search on Google for “free articles” show that there are many other sites out there.
- Wikipedia Content
You can find articles on Wikipedia for pretty much any niche that you’re interested in. The beauty of Wikipedia content is that you can take it and modify it before putting it on your site. So you can start with the base Wikipedia content, then edit it as you like and essentially end up with some semi-unique content for your site.
Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia license (see the full license/copyright text here):
“Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement).”
Out of the above two methods for gaining content, I’m leaning towards modified Wikipedia articles. This is for a couple of reasons.
- To at least have some uniqueness.
- I’ve heard that Google and other search engines can penalise heavily sites/pages that they deem to be duplicates of other pages on the web. I would imagine a direct copy of a popular article from one of the free article sites could get used by many other sites out there, and so there would be a high risk of your page being penalised as a duplicate. At least with modified Wikipedia articles you have some chance of avoiding this, if you modify it enough.
Does anyone else use either of these to get content for your affiliate sites? Do you always write your own? If so, even on niche subjects you may not be an expert on? Do you use another method/resource?
I’d love to hear any comments on this subject.
Posted July 18th, 2008
I’ve been looking more at the Pepperjam Network, and I think I am going to try out one of their features… PepperjamADS.
“pepperjamADS is an affiliate marketing widget that you can use to serve customized contextual ads from one or multiple Pepperjam Network advertisers at the same time. The ad units come in various shapes and sizes. You can mix and mash ads from any of your merchant partners. For instance, you can create a fashion widget by selecting various ads from multiple fashion merchants. Likewise, you can create a specific widget with ads from any one merchant.”
These ads look quite similar to Adsense ads, and apart from the Pepperjam logo in the bottom right corner they could me made to look practically identical (although I think you could get in trouble with Google if you did make them look exactly the same and used both on the same site/page). The big differences between Adsense and PepperjamADS (as far as I can see) are that; a) you choose which ads you want to be shown; and b) they are not pay-per-click, but instead you are paid whatever you would normally be paid for that particular advertiser, ie. on a sale or lead.
Pepperjam have also created this video tutorial to help you get started with PepperjamADS.
I may try a PepperjamADS unit on this blog, and i’m also going to test it out on a site or two I have setup - once I actually get round to finishing them off! I want to concentrate a little bit more on finishing off some affiliate sites and try not to get distracted by constantly tweaking code to do clever things that could wait until another time.
Don’t forget that Pepperjam are offering a $10 Sign On Bonus for All New Pepperjam Network Affiliates.
Posted July 13th, 2008
This is a quick guide to getting up and running with my modified version of the 45n5 mashup script.
Some of the steps are probably quite obvious but I thought if i’m going to do a guide for this I may as well include all steps, hopefully this helps some people out there who might not be so technically minded.
- Get your domain name and webhosting
This is probably quite an obvious step, but before you can use the script you need to have your domain name and web hosting. One thing that you do need on your hosting is PHP. I won’t go into too much detail on how to go about getting hosting, but if you aren’t sure then feel free to contact me and i’ll do my best to help out.If you don’t already have hosting then I would recommend eUKHost. This is who I am hosted with and they have some really good features and decent prices.
- Download the mashup script
Get the script from here. Put this somewhere on your PC and unzip it.
- Edit the script
Don’t worry if you’re not comfortable with changing code… you just need to change a couple of values in a couple of the files. Easy.
- Open the stufftochange.php file in your favourite text editor. Here are the variables you can change here:
- $siteurl - self explanatory really, just put your own domain name in
- $TrackingID - put your eBay Partner Network campaign ID here. If you’re not yet signed up eith ePN then go to https://www.ebaypartnernetwork.com/ and join them.
Once you’ve signed up log in and go to the Campaigns tab and you’ll find your default campaign ID there.
- $TrackingPartnerCode - You don’t need to change this, this should always be set to 9 so we use the ePN.
- $CustomID - You can set this to whatever you like, this will be useful for tracking if you use this script on multiple sites.
- $AppID - This is your eBay developer ID and is needed to access the eBay API. You first need to join the eBay developer network here http://developer.ebay.com/. Once you’re signed up, log in then go to My Account, then under Application keys click on the Generate Production Keys link. Once you’ve done that, click on Key Set 1 and you’ll see your App ID.
- $CurrencySymbol - This is the currency sign used for eBay prices. By default it’s set to the £ sign (although I had to set it as £ because it wasn’t working). Just set to $ if you want to use eBay US.
- $amazonid - This is your Amazon Developer Access Key ID, and this is required to use the Amazon API. To get your Access Key ID go to http://aws.amazon.com/ and sign up. Once you’ve logged in, go to your web services account then AWS access identifiers. Here you’ll find your Access Key ID.
- $amazontag - Your Amazon affiliate ID. Sign up here https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/ (or https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/ for US). Your tracking ID is what you need here.
- $searchindex - This is the area of Amazon to show results from. By default this is set to Blended which will display from the main areas of the Amazon site. Take a look at http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/2007-04-04/DG/SearchIndices.html for all options.
- Open inc\ebaysearch.php, then scroll down to the ebay section. The only variables you need to worry about here really are:
- $SiteID - This tells the eBay API which site to get results from. Set this to 3 for eBay UK, or 0 for eBay US. You can get the full list of site IDs here http://developer.ebay.com/DevZone/XML/docs/Reference/eBay/types/SiteCodeType.html. This variable also determines which Amazon site is used. If it’s set to 3 then the script will use Amazon UK, any other setting will use Amazon US.
- $EntriesPerPage - Pretty straightforward, just change this to however many results you want returned. Maximum is 50.
- Open products.txt. This is where you’ll enter all your products/keywords. Simply type out your list and this is what the script will use to build the menu and search eBay, Amazon and YouTube.
- Upload the script to your site
Grab your favroutie FTP program and upload the whole script directory. The only real requirement here is that you upload to the root of your site, ie. www.yourdomain.com, or the root of a subdomain, subdomain.yourdomain.com.
After setting this up I would highly recommend uploading my sitemap script to the root of your site, then submitting that to Google.
Hopefully that covers everything. As always if anyone needs any help setting this up, or if you come across any errors then feel free to contact me.
Posted July 10th, 2008
As you may well have already noticed i’ve changed the blog theme! I think this new design is much cleaner and easier to read, and just generally looks better than the old one. This new look is based on the Corpo Geek theme, which i’ve changed a little bit to how I want it. I’m still tweaking it so don’t be surprised if you find that something changes quite suddenly.
Other updates
I’m still working on my own mashup software which I hope to have ready for at least a free release in the next couple of weeks (i’m also considering a paid “Pro” version). I seem to be working on this software more than actually trying to put together affiliate sites, but i’m enjoying it and hopefully it will make setting up those sites easier and be more profitable in the long run.
I’ve decided to try and post more often here, for this month i’m aiming for at least 12 posts (average of 3 a week), which I then would like to build on in future months once I get some momentum going.
I’m also starting to get a bit of cash in from my online endeavours, so I think July might warrant my first monthly earnings report! Ooh, getting exciting now!
Posted July 7th, 2008
On my travels around various blogs over the last few days I have come across this great affiliate network - Pepperjam! Dubbed the “Next Generation” in affiliate marketing, this network boasts some pretty big name advertisers (eBay, Playboy, Cartoon Network and Text Link Ads just to name a few), and a web 2.0 experience for affiliate marketers.
They also have some pretty nice looking incentives for signing up, referring others to the network and even just blogging about them! Here are the details:
- $10 Sign On Bonus for All New Pepperjam Network Affiliates
That’s right, get $10 put straight into your Pepperjam account just for signing up and becoming an approved publisher! How easy is that?
- Earn $5 for every new publisher you refer
That’s not bad in itself, but for the month of July that’s increased to $7, so get referring!
- Earn up to $50 a month for just blogging about the network
This, for me, is probably the best of the three. You can get $10 per blog post that promotes the Pepperjam network or any of it’s network tools (more on these later), up to 5 posts per month.
Join Pepperjam Network and Receive a $10 Sign On Bonus
So there you go, all sounds very good to me. I was accepted as a publisher within a day or so, this is quite a bit quicker than other networks i’ve joined in the past.
I’ll definitely be taking a look through their list of advertisers over the next week or so, and will also post some info about the other affiliate marketing tools they provide. Watch this space!
Posted June 19th, 2008
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!
Posted June 17th, 2008
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.
