Money-Code » Affiliate Marketing

Start from inside Out

admin — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:10:54 +0000

I’m a guy that likes a process. I enjoy procedures to maximize my time. I love sayings or mantras to help remind me how to maximize my efforts and stay on a path.

I’ve been in the technology sector for a long long time working in various areas – development, networking, server administration, etc. One of the first sayings I adopted was “start from inside out”. Simple saying, but I definitely see it applied in other areas, etc. Basically, the idea is this – you start from the closest point to the furthest point while debugging problems. For instance, your internet is down. I would first see if *all* applications can’t see the internet (browser, email, etc). Then I would see if the network cable was plugged in and link light is there. I would then check the switch.. then the modem.. then ping different areas of the net.. then eventually call the ISP. What happens a lot, is people will just call the ISP and get pissed while on hold to find out their anti-virus is blocking their Firefox application. It’s about eliminating the controllable variables first.

This leads me to the second saying. “Start with what you know”. This is a slight twist on “Start from inside out”. A good programming buddy of mine would lay that on me all the time. It’s so much easier tackling a programming challenge with areas of what you know to gradually get you to where you need to be. Versus saying.. shit, I don’t know how to do that. Break it down and isolate section you do know how to do. Start building a base and eventually the hard stuff.. is the small stuff, and the majority is done. This is a attitude for swallowing a challenge and keeps the thinking clear.. and the fingers typing.

Now, the reason I wrote this post, is the Josh Whitford’s blog posted this great TED speech by Simon Sinek. This talk was awesome and inspiring, but it touched on the same philosophy. The golden circle.. why->how->what which emanates from the inner circle to the outer.. [cough]inside out[/cough].

So why am I bringing this up on my programming affiliate marketing blog? I watch/hear things all the time, and I’m always thinking on how to leverage things for affiliate marketing. This is thinking outside of the box.. I guess, but why -> how -> what might be the outline for my future squeeze pages. Could be the new direction for PPC ads? Could be the direction for blog posts or general web content? Who knows, but the bottom line.. it’s food for thought.

Analysis and Goal Settings

admin — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:41:05 +0000

2010 was an interesting affiliate marketing year for me. I probably spent the least amount of time while having the best year ever. This is largely in part to the foundation I laid in place in the prior years. Sites are aging and content is getting better, etc. The disturbing thing to me, is knowing that I could have made a TON more if I was working it harder.

Areas that I did work on in 2010, analyzing sites and how they’ve performed historically. Basically, find the crappy sites and make them better… or get rid of them. Even though sites might be poor performers, that does not mean they still don’t have potential. I often make test sites to see if a niche has potential with Amazon, EPN, Adsense, etc. These test sites are usually the losers and need tweaking. They might create low traffic and horrible EPC in EPN, so they might be a good candidate to focus the site to Amazon or Adsense or at the very least a *support* site. I also find sites that were good.. and aren’t so good now. What’s changed? Is it a SEO deal? Is it PPC deal? Figuring out how to get it back is a good direction to focus energy.

In 2010 I hardly created new sites.. a few here and there, but nothing like 2008/2009. I know that optimizing my sites helped with my bottom line. I should have maintained a more consistent build schedule to keep the average growth up, but these are items / goals I’m setting for 2011.

I know my decision to scale back came from the obvious data that was looking at me straight in the face. The sites that I spent the most time, that had the best content, and generated the best buyer/reader loyalty…. made the most money. Weird? Not really. My crappy thin, just whip-it-out-on-a-evening sites that I never rework… make the least amount of money. Weird? Not really.

Every year, I set up goals and expectations for my efforts. I exceeded my 2010 goals, but I feel like I left a lot on the table and sold myself short, so for 2011, I’m going to set up a few things to account for this. Normally, I set up a monetary goal figure for the year, and that could be the reason for laziness. This year, I’ve set up percentage increase over 2010 (I’m thinking 30% gain in gross), and divided this across four quarters. This way, I’ll be really seeing how it’s breaking down.. and I want a fluctuating goal to constantly challenge me. If in Q1 I’m looking at 32% gross increase, that will be the new bar, and so on.. but it won’t go down. This will push me in Q2, etc. I’m also getting to focus on Q4 a little differently for 2011. I normally just maintain consistency, and don’t go too hog-wild for x-mas. I’m thinking about adjusting my PPC budget for x-mas this year, also devote some time in Q1 for building sites targeting for Q4. This will be a little test with the Q1 sites – I’m not going to go too crazy (possibly creating 5-10 sites with the emphasis)

One consistent goal that I seem to have problems with is diversity. For 2011, I really want to improve my Amazon/CJ sales. Amazon has definitely improved, but is crap in the big picture. CJ has been consistent and I want to improve that as well. So for 2011, I set up dollar goal amounts for these networks. By separating them and analyzing their growth by quarter should help gauge where I need to focus on.

One other goal I have for 2011 is getting back to basics. I feel like my lack of time on affiliate/internet marketing took away from some of the basic SEO strategies and traffic generation. For me, it’s often hard to justify the time spent creating backlinks, commenting, etc. The basic rules for traffic generation. I know the sites I spent time on this… get good traffic. Weird? Not really. But, I remember the work is difficult, tedious and takes a while to propagate. I know that’s the game, and I need to do it, but when PPC is so quick, it’s some times hard to justify. But by going back to basics, and diversifying traffic generation methods with PPC – is a good thing. I know that. So I’ll try to be better with it.

Goals are important for staying on track, but to successfully goal set, you need to understand your history and not to extend past your potential. You don’t want to get discouraged either – so find the right balance that works for you.

Pay Attention to your Roll-Your-Own EPN sites

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:44:38 +0000

Yesterday I noticed that my EPN sites were having trouble with their searching capability. It appears that eBay changed some things related to their RSS feed on my searches, luckily my category RSS were okay, for the time being. This recent change affected my parser that extracts the Auction ID for my SEO links (internalized links to eBay). I also noticed that they named a few new variables (this could be old news for many, but it was new to me)

icep_item=xxxxxx
ipn=psmain
icp_vectorid=xxxxxxx
kwid=xxxxxx
mtid=xxxx
kw=rss
icep_ff3=2

I was able to restore search functionality, but I only updated my rover redirects on one site to verify that this change did NOT impact my click counts for that site, and I’ll be migrating my rover code to this new style. I know I could pull this rover URL directly from the RSS result, but I’m not passing extraneous info via the querystring on my redirect. I may reconsider this though.

Today, Dave at BuildANicheStoreBlog.com had a post stating that if you have BANS sites that have Cloak Affiliate Links in box #4 you may be experiencing problems. This seems awfully coincidental to my issues noticed yesterday. Apparently, those users are directed to a ‘Page Not Responding’ at eBay. You can read Dave’s full post here.

Issues with CJNiche WordPress Plugin

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:36:27 +0000

So I’ve been working with the cjniche plugin. Overall, it’s a pretty good plugin, but I definitely have some issues with it. I noticed that a few of my requests were getting the dreaded PHP warning:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in
/var/www/wouldnt/you/like/to/know/wp-content/
plugins/cjniche/cjniche.php on line 79

Want to see if it’s a wide spread problem on the interwebby? Check out this Google search on the topic.

The line number may vary with yours, I added some extra special customizations to the plugin. Googling around on this, I see constant references to this error relating to this plugin. I also see crazy recommendations like deactivating and reactivating the plugin. Reminds me of the ‘did you reboot your computer’ and if the answer it ‘yes’, you follow up with ‘how many times’. Odd how some things just go away. Well, I wasn’t buying it.

It is true if you add a space to the advertiserIds or dork up your CJ Key you’ll get the same error, but I was experiencing intermittent errors. It would work a few of the times, then not work the other times. That would have NOTHING to do with variable values stored in the database. I did some digging (which is hard with this particular plugin since they encode everything.. really?). I was able to get to the root of the problem.

If you’re getting this error every time, the plugin is not receiving a proper XML response CJ and that is why the foreach is blowing up. Unfortunately, the plugin is not checking for a good product set return from CJ and just explodes. Now, if you’re getting this error some of the times, the problem is very similar. I was able to echo the XML returning during a failure and this is what I saw:

[error-message] =>; The server is currently at
capacity or down for maintenance. Please try again later.

Wow, now that helps shed some light on the problem for sure. Looks like CJ is having problems. This is my biggest irritation dealing with CJ’s datafeed. I’ve mentioned that in the past that it’s just not reliable. This plugin is nice for something quick and if you’re working with small data sets or small merchants, this probably works really well. If you’re dealing with larger product catalogs, the keyword filtering is obviously going to take longer and probably cause issues with many requests. Now this is an assumption. I’m not sure if yesterday and today are the only two days having problems.. who knows. What I wanted to do with this post was shed some light with the PHP error and this plugin. I definitely see mention of it in many places.

I’ve written some error handling in the plugin to catch vs. explode when this occurs, but I might need to work on a caching solution to fall back on a stored data set if it has trouble.

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Update WordPress!

admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:37:14 +0000

Okay, looks like WordPress released a ‘hardened’ release for 2.8 which will jack your release version to 2.8.5. It’s very important to stay upgraded to ensure that your sites will run properly, but more importantly to maintain security. You don’t want your money-making sites to go down, or to have your account suspended due to your site being compromised. As they say, “A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.

Details of the release can be found here: http://wordpress.org/development/2009/10/wordpress-2-8-5-hardening-release/

The headline changes in this release are:

A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

Are you distracted by earning stats?

admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:24:19 +0000

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post. Maybe it’s a personal observation and something I need to work on. I guess I should start out…

“Hi, my name is Hank… and I’m addicted to stats”

I would be embarrassed if I counted how many times I log into CJ or EPN’s control panel to see my numbers. I’m particularly most annoyed with my habit to login to EPN, since that updates (earnings) once a day. I think I find myself checking to see if earnings had posted, but even after they post, I still login often.. I guess to see what my click counts are doing. It’s quite silly. With Amazon, I only check once a day (in the morning) since earnings/clicks only post once. CJ, I check continually (same time as EPN), but at least earnings trickle throughout the day.

What I’m not liking is the time I waste doing this. Add this to my email and IM/Twitter conversations, and various mailing lists alerts, I know I spend a lot of time where I could probably save a lot by doing it once at set time. This is where the addiction is identified. The thought of doing it once a day, seems ‘weird’ to me. It’s like I need to do it all day long?

Am I alone here? Or are there other internet marketers wasting time on earning stats? What’s the cure? Is there a patch of some sort?

GoDaddy’s Discount Domain Club

admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:20:26 +0000

Today I wanted to bring up GoDaddy’s Discount Domain Club. If you own a lot of domains at GoDaddy, you need to join this club!

Over the months, I’ve heard people mention this, and I have one friend that has told me in the past that I needed to be a part of this. Basically, you pay a yearly fee to be a part of the club, but the club offers some sweet discounts that add up! In my case alone, I’ll be saving several hundreds per year.

Prior to my joining, I’ve been purchasing domains at regular price (sometimes on sale, etc) and then setting them to auto-renew. Pretty simple. You can get a discount by manually renewing your domains, but I feel that is trouble waiting to happen (for me anyways).

By joining the Discount Domain Club, your renewals (automatic) are discounted. You purchases on new domains are always the lowest price at GoDaddy, that alone is great deal, but the renewals is what is going to save me some serious yearly dough.

Joining the club is not free though, it cost’s $89.99/year, so you need to do the math and figure out if it’s worth it for you based on the numbers of domains you have in your account. If you have lots of domains, this is a no brainer. I think 20 domains is the break even point.

So what types of savings are we talking about?

.com is $7.29/year (31% off)
.net is $5.99/year (53% off)
.org is $7.29/year (51% off)

You also get free Premium CashParking and get to keep 80% of the revenue generated. You get fre membership to GoDaddy Auctions. You get discounted Domain Buy Service (this is for negotiating domains that are already taken).

It takes the headache out of the mix. No longer waiting for ‘weekend specials’ or looking for coupon codes to get a deal on domains, just auto-magic, which saves me time… and I like saving time and money.

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Bookmarking Demon 5 is out!

admin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:16:54 +0000

Just got the email today that Bookmarking Demon 5 is official out and available. This is absolutely great news since BMD4 was having all sorts of trouble as of late. I’ll post a follow up post on my thoughts of the new features, and how the migration of accounts went (basically, I’ll put together a full review of Bookmarking Demon 5). I’m particular excited about the scheduler feature where you can drip submit to bookmarking sites, and the inclusion of phpDug sites.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bookmarking Demon, it’s a great piece of software where you create social bookmarking accounts and submit sites to them. You can create many accounts, and also submit ‘filler’ RSS feeds to make your bookmarking submissions seem more natural. By creating a level of bookmark backlinks you can help increase your rank in the SERPs and eventually gain more traffic. Granted this quality of traffic seems pretty poor in general, but the SERP position is the greatest benefit of the tool… and that’s the traffic you want in the long run.

A word of warning, if you do not make this look natural and are clearly self-promoting your ‘money sites’, then you could be de-indexed from Google or have specific social bookmarking accounts banned. The trick is to promote pages relating to your site, not your sites directly.

The bottom line, it’s a great tool for generating backlinks and search traffic to your sites. It’s awesome tool for the fact that it saves you a ton of time by doing things for you vs. manually doing it by hand. You should really check out the promotional video.. since is shows some of the features.

- Browser mode. You get to see what is happening right in front of you.
- Multi-threading for both account creation and bookmarking.
- New open source bookmarking script PHPDug added.
- Added a Scheduler.
- Email verification system added.
- A better project management system.
- Visual aid (coming soon)

If you already have a licensed version of BMD4, this is a free download.

Incoming search terms:

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If I had to start again today….

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:37:53 +0000

I read “If You Had To Start Over With $0 Budget” at Deneil Merritt‘s blog (great blog by the way), and it got me thinking about how I would start again. I don’t think I would start with a $0 budget, and if you’re interested in affiliate or internet marketing, you should try with a hearty effort, or don’t try at all and save yourself the misery of making $0 on your $0 budget. I think I do have some different opinions now for starting in internet or affiliate marketing.

Start with what you know..?

Seems like the common suggestion is to pick a niche that you’re familiar with. It definitely makes sense, and that is definitely the direction I started a few years ago. If I was to start over now, I would through that logic out the window. I think you should start with what can earn can earn decent commissions. It’s easy to be comforted with areas of interest and feel there is a level of knowledge or expertise related there, but reality says.. it doesn’t matter. It can be helpful, it can make things easier, but not worth the lost commissions.

I would start with products, services and/or niches that earn and learn about them. Spend a few hours understanding categories, trends and values and grow from there. The energy and time devoted here will reward you more in the end.

One site or many sites?

I see this question often, and there really isn’t a ‘right’ answer here. Is it better to have a few or one great site vs. many mediocre sites? Initially, I started with one ‘community’ site, then started branching out from there, tweaking, waiting, tweaking, waiting, etc. If I was to do it again, I would start with my current regiment of a minimum of 2 sites per month. Either creating new ‘test’ sites in new niches, or using the 10 degree separation with sites that are earning. All other down time is spent in blog posts, or tweaking and improving existing sites. I really believe creating new sites is the key to success to finding what you’re good at, what sites produce earnings and enhancing new traffic strategies.

What types of sites?

I’ve always broken down my earning sites into three basic categories. Community Sites, Store Fronts and Blogs. Each are good for different things, but it’s somewhat important to generate all three types, especially when starting out.

Community Sites are sites that are based on a common interest to a group of individuals. Once the site starts and grows, it will basically grow from the content provided by the community itself. Forums is a good example of a community site. These sites are great, once they go, it’s basically set-it-and-forget-it since the content is always evolving and growing without your involvement. You’ll still need to admin the site, etc. These sites are great for AdSense, product placement, etc. But the hard thing is developing a site and getting users and achieving that momentum needed for it to grow itself. Lots of time, lots of effort with very little return in the beginning.

Store Fronts are basically product stores utilizing product feeds. EPN sites and CJ sites using categorization is a example of store fronts. To me, these are by far the most successful. You’ll be targeting buyers vs. readers and conversion is much much higher. I like to promote these sites with PPC to even target better traffic than organic search traffic.

Blogs are blogs. You can blog about products, news, etc. I’ve always been ‘down’ on blogs, thinking the work is to high vs. the return and they’re hard to maintain over the long haul. I’ve changed my opinion on this.

So, if I was to start today, I would focus on getting a network of store fronts initially, maybe start a community site, but a site that I have good confidence that I can gain interested users. I would then work on a few product oriented blogs or review blogs and associate all these types of sites with Twitter. Once I saw some earnings, I would begin light PPC campaigns on the store fronts. Then work on building more sites and diversifying across affiliate networks.

Use Twitter?

Wow, Twitter. This is one of the biggest things that have changed my position in affiliate marketing over the last 6 months. I would DEFINITELY get Twitter accounts for my sites if I was to start today, and I would definitely buy Bird Feeder to grow those Twitter accounts. I cannot believe how useful Twitter is for getting consistent traffic to my product blogs or store fronts. Using Twitter Tools in my WordPress blogs to auto-Tweet posts is a must, and using the TweetMeme plugin for others to re-tweet posts is another fantastic way to get traffic back to your site.

Initially when creating new sites, I would do the normal, submission to search engines, do a few backlinks, post to a few directories, then wait. If I think it’s a hot site, I’ll fire up a PPC campaign, but overall the initial launch is slow going. Now with Twitter, I can get immediate traffic to the site, and traffic that seems to convert. Not super great like PPC traffic, but WAY better than low organic traffic or Stumble traffic.

Use Tools?

This is something I was a little behind on. For some reason, I could never justify the expense for buying tools. I’m also a web developer by day, so I always felt I could write some of these things. Now, I’m starting to value my time more. The time it would take me to write a plugin costs more than purchasing the plugin itself. The time I would be spending writing a plugin or platform, I could have spent on writing new sites, reviews, researched new niches, etc.

I’m a total believer of software tools now. The amount of time these tools save and the amount of work these tools accomplish throughout the day is incredible. If I was to start over again, and after getting some earnings coming in first (I like to roll my earnings back into the pot for tools, domains, etc initially). I would buy the following tools for sure:

ReviewAZON product review plugin for Amazon products
WPReviewSite Review plugin for ranking across your blog
BirdFeeder awesome tool for getting targeted Twitter followers
SEO Elite excellent suite of tools for determining where you rank, find backlinks, research competition, etc.
Blog Comment Demon excellent tool for finding WordPress blogs related to keyword search. Great way to find quality sites for potential comment backlinks

In conclusion, I think the most important thing is consistency when it comes to production. Make sites, keep making sites, keep improving sites, keep moving forward. The earnings will trickle and drizzle in, but it’s important to create the foundation of sites where you can always research with analytics and determine what sites work for you. The other item to pay attention to is diversification, remember to diversify across different niches, affiliate networks and sites. Things change ALL the time so you want to make sure your eggs are not all in one basket. Lastly, remember to be flexible and learn to adapt to situation. Don’t let your network crumble because of a ‘change’ to policy or TOS, learn to take the punches and adapt with the new trend, and be ‘okay’ with letting something go if you need to.

Well, I hope this was useful to someone. I really wish I could have a time machine, I would definitely do some things differently, but at the same time, the path I took gave me the experience I needed for where I’m at today.

Twitter Alliances

admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:08:27 +0000

Over the last few months, I’ve been creating new hub blogs as well as new store fronts using (ReviewAzon and WPReviewSite). Along with these sites, I’ve been creating support Twitter accounts and building followers using BirdFeeder. The benefit of this to promote offers, posts to potential customers very quickly. It’s hard to beat Twitter for getting quick quality traffic to your sites.

The other important thing that I’ve been realizing, is the importance of networking with others. So many of us are all trying to do the same thing, generate traffic and to hopefully make a few bucks off of our sites. Twitter is a great platform to make those connections. Many of us are just starting out with our support Twitter accounts, so when I meet someone that seems cool, I’ll offer to ally with that person. What does this mean? Basically, we agree to RT and to mention each other on #FF of FollowFriday announcements. Hopefully, by doing this we can help generate more traffic and followers by combining our current followers. I also try to comment on their sites as well as RT (ReTweeting) their posts. Some of you that follow my blog here already know what I’m talking about.

On a few of my sites, I’ve seen fantastic results by allying with a few similar Tweeters. You should give it a try. Working with others is a great way to increase your traffic.. which in turn, raises your earnings.

If you’re interested, follow me on Twitter and look me up!

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