Today saw one of the biggest days with regards to SERPS traffic to my site ever with 171 UVs, unfortunately not one converted into a sale, even though I passed well over 50 percent onto the merchants. I cannot understand quite whats happening at the moment, everyone is reporting huge climbs in traffic but most people also seem to be reporting only poor to moderate sales, too much window shopping going on by the looks of things.

On a similar note but the main reason for the title to this post, I have been pulling what little hair I have out today, Affiliate Window have in place some kind of aggregated Tracking technology, that basically means all tracking is put on hold or delayed when in busy periods and somehow batch processed later on when the load on the server is lower. However today it took almost 10 hours to see clicks being displayed, had I been using a pay per click campaign to drive traffic this would have been a major set back as I would not have been able to monitor how well (or badly) things were going, in the current climate I think I would have been tempted to pause all PPC activity (if I did any) as I stated above the poor lead to sale conversion ratio would be crippling to a paying campaign (well it would in my main sites sector as the average sale only generates about £4 commission).

Google continue to add 2 pages and remove 10, so I guess shortly I wont have any pages left and traffic will dry up completely (having said that the pages I do have in G.co.uk are fairing very well and that is where all my current traffic is coming from). I am hoping to see the 2000 odd pages it has put into the supplementary index back in the main index early in the new year, as I start to link build and SEO the pages plus add some decent content around them.

I have entered a small competition over on the a4uforum where I frequent a lot these days, the competition is about creating a new site (from January) and seeing how far you can get with it (how much money one makes) in 6 months. There is a limited budget allowance for driving traffic and all domains must be newly registered from 1st January, it should be an excellent learning experience and also a lot of fun, the £200 cap on PPC is about the figure I had intended to give this area of affiliate marketing a go at early next year anyway, so this will hopefully prove a very worthwhile experience.

More soon
Mark

The last few days I have been working hard on my main site, I have updated it as stated below to a database driven site, and it has been really well looked upon by Google and suddenly my UV (Unique Visitors) has shot from 20 - 25 a day to well into the high 100s, I am ranking well (first page) on lots of good terms within the big G made 3 sales in a couple of days and things are generally looking really good.

Yesterday and this morning however, I have been working on a new script to parse the datafeed of one company (Who shall for now remain nameless), it’s been a fairly tiresome job anyway as they have no category identifier and the only way to detect the category of a product is to search for the term in the product name. Well finally today the script was ready to parse the products I wanted from the feed into my database, the script worked really well (fortunately) and the products were successfully added, correctly placed in their respective categories and subcategories Yay!….. Hmmm no not Yay! but “Hey! these links are all bloody dead” yep that’s right a feed that was updated yesterday and every single product URL led to an Error page.

Now obviously mistakes can happen, however, the question needs to be asked “Was a cookie set?” the error landing page had a search facility on it, now if that person went on to make a purchase and no cookie was set then I do not get paid. How many other affiliates have updated to this feed and are having customers seeing this same error page? I contacted the Network concerned and informed them straight away and fortunately I have a simple system in place to stop showing products with one quick SQL command, so none of that companies products are showing, the problem as I see it is that I could have been earning from those links. Grrrr

On another note, I have a different site that is pet related, I had really good intentions of promoting this site, infact I still do as it has great potential, has made a couple of sales since being created and sold a link. However with all the work going into my main site recently it has been a bit neglected. Yesterday I decided to take a quick look at the stats, and was amazed to see it getting about 15 UVs a day, so my next project is to get that converting. Seems it’s going to be a busy Christmas period

More soon….
Mark.

Well hello again and welcome back.

The last couple of days has seen me do some fairly extensive work on one of my sites, this work has involved some difficult php coding (difficult for me at this stage anyway) but I think the site is much better for it - I will check my logs and see if anyone uses the feature over the next few days, and if they do I will post the idea and some code for it. Unfortunately sincea major update of my main site 4 days ago, I have not made any sales at all, and although I am still getting traffic it does seem to be slowing down somewhat, I can only hope that it will get back to what it once was and then some more as well once the search engines fully index and update my pages. Considering I have gone from 74 pages and about 120 products to well over 3000 pages and 1600+ products I should hope the visitor count should rise

I’m thinking of doing a small tutorial on here for complete novices (those that are only just thinking about starting in Affiliate marketing) whilst most of the pitfalls are still very clear in my mind. I certainly think I can steer someone in the right direction so that they gain an insight into some of the problems I faced in the very early days of my new venture. More on this in a few days as I think it over some more…

Some good news is that today I got some new sponsorship from a DVD / Music company that will be sending out some FREE DVDs for me to review and another one to give away in a competition on the site. I am extremely happy about this as it gives me fresh focus for that site, and another reason to push it forward. The only thing is I need to sell about 30 films a month to sustain the deal and at this stage the site has yet to make any sales. A massive campaign to get the site noticed is in order I think. The fact it is already listed in all of the major search engines is an added bonus so all I need now is to tighten up the SEO (search engine optimisation) and then give people more reason to join up for membership (which is free).

More soon,
Mark.

Hello World!

This is the first post on my new blog that will follow my ups and downs as a new player in the extremely challenging world of affiliate marketing. I will detail problems I face along the way, I will where possible document as many pitfalls and work arounds as I can when I face them. I will document what is happening to my earnings as they (hopefully) start to grow, the only caveat to this is I will no jeopodise any earnings by going against ToS (Terms of Service) agreements, what this basically means is that I will not disclose any amounts I earn through the Google Adsense service as this would put my account in danger of suspension.

So anyway a little background:
My name is Mark, I live in Kent in England, I am married to Liz and we have two lovely girls by the name of Charlotte and Rebecca. I have dabbled in Affiliate marketing for the last 4 or 5 months but nothing serious (although I have put in lots of hours) recently I worked very hard to learn php and mySQL and now feel it is time to step up my affiliate marketing drive and see if I can make a decent living form this fantastic industry.

I will be posting snippets of code as I find ways around some of the common problems facing us noobies in both php and affiliate marketing. Please feel free to comment and improve my code, but do bear in mind that I am no professional coder, so if you use my code and it breaks your site don’t come shouting the odds, as I did warn you! Use any code and / or advise on this site at your own risk.

Well thats it for this post, I will be updating regularly so feel free to drop in anytime you like

Mark.