Posts filed under 'affiliate marketing'
I really enjoyed a nice round of golf with my son this morning, having a day off work and making the most of a sunny morning before getting down to some of my own work this afternoon.
It brought home to me the the importance of taking some time away from work and enjoying some leisure time, particularly with your kids, if you have any. Although, from the numbers on my score card you can tell that I haven’t been doing this often enough lately 
The main reason being, like many other people starting out in business, I still have a job. I am lucky enough that it is part-time and shift work, which leaves me plenty of remaining time to spend any way I chose. As I have chosen to use most of this time developing my own business at the moment, it is highlighting some dilemmas and issues in the early stages of a business startup that I am sure I won’t have been the first to face.
The first is the time commitment. Working in two different “jobs” the hours can soon add up, and even part-time employment can still be fairly tiring, especially if it involves night work and then fitting in some work on your own business projects whenever you can, gets pretty wearing at times.
This can leave very little time for leisure, sleep and the more relaxing things in life. Which brings to mind two famous sporting phrases which although now cliched still hold a fair degree of truth “no pain, no gain” and “how much do you want it?” The answer to the latter in my case being - a helluva lot! So I am willing to put up with a period of “pain”. As getting the lifestyle you want and to be able to only work if and when you want to, and even then only for yourself, doesn’t come easy, if it did everyone would be doing it.
This leads me on to the next dilemma, which is that you get to a stage in a business where you have learned the methods and have the tools and you begin to see where it could possibly go. Yet, you are limited while there is only you working on it and things can progress slower than you would like.
In internet marketing a lot of the most effective methods to improve performance of websites and sales are to generate more traffic to them by putting a lot of quality, relevant content on your sites as well as out on the net, to link back to where you want the traffic to come. This content takes a lot of time to generate as it has to be higly original to be effective, as I discussed in an earlier post, and therfore is very time consuming to produce.
Like most people there are only 24 hours in my day, so you get to a stage where you know that to really take off you have to start outsourcing a lot of the content generation, particularly the writing, to freelancers. This, of course, costs money which in the early stages you ain’t making a lot of yet. I find this more frustrating than the time issue, because at least you have more control over how you spend your time and when you really need a day off….just take it. But you can’t spend money that you don’t have, well acually you can, but who wants to be indebted to the banks heavily from the outset? Certainly not me! Although obviously looking for some good term finance is a step that most businesses have to do at some point to get the boost that they need. Or even, if the press are to be believed, to very poor term finance. As rumour has it that a very famous panel member on Dragons Den was maxed out on 3 credit cards and nearly lost his house before it all came good!
John
www.TheGardenLovers.com
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
September 3rd, 2007
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
Bank holiday weekend and as usual lately it seems I’m always working. The family have gone off to a local beach leaving me to do a little business, before having a BBQ this evening as at last it’s a sunny day in the north east of England.
I started the day, like every day, with a double espresso with added milk frothed to perfection, to make a beautiful latte. It’s not much of a breakfast I know but when coffee is this nice who needs food?
It’s taken me a long time to get the equipment right to do a “proper” coffee at home which equals or betters any of the chain or independent coffee shops that have finally taken off in the UK. I’ve spent a small fortune on manual grinders, automatic grinders, espresso machines and all in one bean-to-cup machines and I have now settled on a combination of two devices.
The first of these is a freshly ground coffee pod based espresso machine from the Nespresso range. I only recently got over my coffee connoisseur snobbery and finally gave in to the convenience of these devices after tasting a sample espresso in a retail outlet. This was produced in about 10 seconds and tasted fantastic. No messy coffee grounds around, no using the grounds before they go stale and no tamping with just the right pressure and still a perfect cup! I was impressed and thought to myself that I no longer need my finely tuned and self taught barista skills and I bought one straight away.
However good the espresso is though the mild frothing is equally important in getting a latte that is just right. Again I’ve tried all sorts of machines for this and disappointingly something called and aeroccino again from Nespresso, which was supposed to revolutionise milk frothing for convenience and quality, was a bit of a letdown which is a shame considering I got two of them! It did the milk not too badly but produces far too small a volume for a decent sized latte. Leading me to the second machine, a 700 quid bean-to-cup Gaggia Titanium, this with the use of small add-on device automatically draws the milk out a container and froths it into the coffee without any mess.
With another latte for lunch and by mid afternoon a single espresso to keep me going I’ve been toiling with java scripts and various codes to add some function to some of my web sites. I came across a very cool little program called MyContactStation which adds some forms to your website for contact, feedback, opt in to mail list and refer my site to others if you like it. This is very neat but I have to say it was not the easiest to install. Installation required editing two php scripts, a theme css file and manually inserting 4 to 5 code links on your web pages and adding the aweber opt-in code to another php file. It did work however and if you want to take a look at it in actions it’s at the top of my home page at www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com . I’m still toiling trying to get it onto one of my other sites which is on my “My Affiliate Store” site www.TheGardenLovers.com . This is a bit trickier as the site is produced from a template that they provide so I am still trying to work out how to access all of the appropriate files that on a locally produced site would be straight forward.
The rest of my afternoon was spent again meddling with code with google analytics. This was relatively simple in comparison and involved simply getting the code from google and inserting it into the right place on the web pages. It was a little trickier installing it to my Wordpress blogger page and this required a plug-in which was a little tricky to get going but eventually worked.
So quite an intense days work all in all for the start of a bank holiday weekend. No proper work really in terms of developing the business although, I guess if the opt-in buttons work I may at least get a boost to my lists. I certainly learned a lot anyway about codes of various types, drank a lot of coffee and now I’m off to fire up the BBQ and start to smell the beer.
John
www.ObtainSolutionsLtd.com
August 24th, 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
