Posts filed under 'search engine optimisation'
I talked earlier about one of my current projects in affiliate marketing the My Affiliate Store service and outlined some of the special features of this method of getting involved in affiliate marketing.
The more I work on this project the more impressed with it I become and there is probably no easier way of getting a good looking website up and populated with a good range of affiliate products. The products here can be almost anything including a impressive range of even physical products, it’s not just all downloadable digital products either, although it does those as well.
The topic I chose to get into was gardening at www.TheGardenLovers.com as I live on a smallholding which has a large garden and I spend a lot of time working on the garden and have got more interested in gardening as a result. This has the benefit when doing research for the site that it’s an area that I know and in doing so continue to learn more about. This makes adding content such as articles much easier and it keeps it more interesting. It also helps in chosing relevant products and in creating logical department and category indexing.
The built in SEO in the product is pretty good at getting your pages indexed and as content and product numbers increase over time they should climb in the rankings organically. I am seeing this work already and have only had the site up for about a month although traffic does take time to increase. Obviously in addition to leaving it to their system you can employ any of the other traffic generation methods you want, such as pay per click adwords campaigns, article writing, blog posting and trying to get incoming links.
The sites themselves do come from templates but these are very customisable and a number of other members are a bit ahead of me and have improved the visual appearance by steps such as customised banner heading and added more functionality like customer voting surveys and video articles.
Two particularly good examples of what can be done with the websites at My Affiliate Store are www.stylishcoffee.com on a subject which is very close to my heart, as you may know from my earlier posts and www.dreamweddingsource.com which I think is another very attractive site.
So I am planning to emulate some of the features from examples such as these sites by getting a professional banner done first off, which is very important, as the banner is really the first impression someone gets of your website. I also plan to add an “ask us a question” type feature which improves the browsing experience making it feel a lot more interactive.
As well as improving the look and functionality of the site, it continues to just need a steady progressive approach in adding product content and is an ideal type of project to keep just ticking over and growing, in the hope that it will start to pay dividends some way down the line. It and can therefore easily be combined with “juggling” some other more demanding projects.
John
www.TheGardenLovers.com
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
September 1st, 2007
After a nice BBQ at the weekend I got back to trying to do a little work. I concentrated yesterday on methods of generating traffic to commercial websites involving writing pieces of text.
I use the term pieces loosely as, when you start to write for online marketing purposes, it quickly becomes apparent that each different purpose requires at least a slightly different structure and content if it is to serve function that you desire. As I am fairly new to this I thought it would be worth sharing my experience.
A commonly used method of increasing sales is to send prewritten messages in a timed sequence to people who have opted-in to your email list in any given topic. The purpose of these messages is to develop a relationship with potential customers. These generally should contain some informative and useful content with little or no sales pitch and although useful should be partly incomplete as the complete version will usually be one of your products which you hope to sell to them at a future point in time. These are called autoresponder messages and once written require little or no effort as they are sent out by the software as scheduled.
There are a number of providers of autoresponders and the one I have opted for seems to be the most recommended by experienced online marketers that I have spoken to and it is called AWeber. This is a subscription bases service and costs about $20 per month. It is very useful but I have found it has a bit of a learning curve to get used to how it handles email messages and lists. Although it is pretty easy to generate the code for your website for email opt in forms etc.
One of the most frequently used content approaches for these early messages to new list members is brief hints or tips on how to do something that is relevant to the subject of the list.
On writing these messages though in order to maximise the benefits of your time and effort it makes sense to use the information in other ways as well. Examples would include as articles for submission to online article directories or even a web page.
The problem that can arise here though is a straight duplicate will be picked up by the search engines and if the purpose of the feature is to generate traffic it won’t work. The problem being that duplicate content is usually not ranked by the search engines. So this defeats the purpose.
A useful way to try to avoid this is provided by a website called dupecop . This handy little program checks the source and the modified version and rates it in percentage terms for originality. To avoid duplicate penalties you should aim for greater than 50% originality.
In addition to the duplicate content problem the text would usually need altering a little anyway, as an email tip would usually be less complete and comprehensive than an article and would also include some personalised information. So writing a fuller version is usually necessary for this purpose and again a web page has different requirements as well and will require a third slight rewrite.
So for any given topic to write about it can require at least 3 versions! This can make it start to feel a little like hard work. It does make sense though, and I think it can be justified as long as the information is genuinely useful and the rewrites are serving a legitimate purpose.
Obviously online marketers who get more successful would outsource a lot of the writing to free lancers although this does run the risk of losing a large element of the character and personality behind the information.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 26th, 2007
As I mentioned before one way to develop an online business, and probably easier to get up and running with, than developing your own products is marketing affiliate products.
Affiliate sales basically boil down to getting paid a commission for selling other people’s products. In the online arena this usually involves advertising a product via an ad link or feature on your website. These links and code are usually provided by the vendors when you set up an agreement with them and join their program. These arrangements are most profitable when you have a high traffic website and target the affiliate links appropriate to the website content.
Details vary between programs in relation to the level of commission, method of payments and tracking arrangements to ensure that you get paid for the sale.
Things can get pretty complicated pretty quickly having to keep tabs on all of these details and a lot of your web real estate can get used up with other people’s ads.
Choosing which affiliate products to market can be based on your website topics, likely good product sellers, high commission levels and just simply believing in the product. I have chosen this method for certain products which to me seemed likely to sell like hot cakes. An example of this is a piece of keyword research software Keyword Elite, for use mainly by online marketers. I was so impressed with this software that I actually dedicated a whole website as a affiliate link to this product, and you can you can have a look at this site here www.KeywordElite.uk.com.
Another novel and interesting affiliate approach is a project that I am doing at the moment which is called My Affiliate Store. I came across this at a Frank Garon internet marketing seminar in London in July 2007.
This is a subscription based system produced by two American online marketers called Len Thurmond and Bruce Safran. They provide a vast range of products from a host of vendors in a wide range of product areas already with pre-arranged affiliate agreements. They also provide a number of web templates to allow easy construction of a website that simply needs to be populated with products of your choice. It also incorporates built in search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to help get your site ranked.
The themes and topics of the site or sites is entirely up to you. I have developed one site on this system which is in the area of gardening. This has the advantage of being a big market, but on the other hand is a highly competitive market. How niche you choose to go is again entirely up to you. Popular wisdom is that the more niche the better as the market will be easier to dominate.
A key element in this system is keeping the content original including editing the imported product descriptions. This helps avoid search engine disapproval consequences but does make the process of building the site a bit more laborious. I have worked gradually at it spending about an hour every other day and grown the site steadily, which the search engines should like.
Traffic to the site is a major key in financial success and the founders recommend steady organic growth with a heavy emphasis on original content. As it becomes established google adsense can also be added to further monetize it. This though, has the potential disadvantage of taking the visitor away from the site so it is a double edged weapon.
Here is the result of my effort so far www.TheGardenLovers.com. I will post some updates as to how things go over the next few weeks and months.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 23rd, 2007
