Well finally I have found a small amount of time to allow me to update the Blog.

So things are still going well, after a bit of a slow month in April (which seems to be the case for most businesses) May has started to see trade picking up again. Steve and I are still working well together and are looking to expand into other areas, possibly non retail and more directly focused around a successful website. We have a couple of ideas for this push forward, but implimenting them is going to take time and that is something we are fairly short of at the moment, with both of us still working on average 15 hour days although we do try and take a few hours off each 3 evenings a week now.

I am still reluctant to divulge the details of the business we currently operate and until we open the shop at the end of this year I don’t think that will change. I will, however, put a link up to our new web based business as soon as it’s complete.

This was a short update just to let you all know I am still here, still working in the affiliate industry (albeit only in a small way currently) and still earning a living online. Now to try and take it to the next level as Steve and I push forward with our plans to try and get multiple income streams an every day part of our business.

I noticed yesterday that MSN has completely altered the format of its CSV and Excel spreadsheets for mass uploading, this is something I will need to address in Keyword Organiser as soon as I get an hour spare to do some coding.

This bring me on to a quick round up of how I see the three main players in PPC advertising and how much competition I believe the underdogs will bring to the might of Google. What I will do is go over how I view each in a mini review below:

Yahoo:
When using Yahoo I get the impression that they are in PPC simply because they feel they have to be, kind of “Google is doing it so we must follow”, there seems to have been little thought put into the design of the interface, and little regard for the user in terms of making it an easy and joyful experience when performing the mundane task of entering keywords for an ad. Having to manually enter body and titles for each and every Ad is simply rediculous: Yes you can choose to use the same ad text and title for every keyword, but as all ads are manually reviewed and add the fact that unless your keyword explicitly exists in either the body or title of your ad it will most likely be declined, this makes the feature of little use.
Next we have reporting, how can the powers that be not see that reporting of keyword impressions and clicks needs to be as near to realtime as possible and that we the people paying for the service need access to that information in detail and as soon as pheasibly possible!
Overall
I think Yahoo is the Bad one of the bunch, they have nothing really going for them at all that I can see, although I understand that what little traffic they do send is supposed to convert quite well, personally I haven’t seen this trend though. The pathetic £20.00 a month minimum charge is amateurish to say the least, why would a company want to factor out the little man or put the beginner off before they even start?
Score: Sorry your score has been declined!

MSN:
Now MSN have definately got better with a little maturity, the process of putting up ads is fairly painless and at least they actually show sometime the same week you submit them! Although it can take almost a week for the page to load in busy periods and even off peak it’s very sluggish to load. I like the bulk upload feature and once you realise that IE is the browser to upload these in (due to Firefox nearly always receiving an error) everything works without too many problems. I personally preferred the old template for uploading of bulk keywords as I liked the fact I could control different prices for different keyword match types fairly painlessly - I’m not even sure of how to do this now, without manual editing!
The feature I like the most on MSN is the ability to see what my nearest competitors are bidding on to get to a certain position, it’s a smart move on their part too as I think it encourages people to push the bidding a little more than they might if they did not see that information.
Overall
I think MSN is the Ugly one of the bunch but with some work could definately turn out to be a swan, the biggest problem they have is supplying enough traffic, but the little traffic I do get from MSN seems to convert very well.
Score: Disqualifed! please learn that there is more than one browser on the market and code for them all!

Google
Obviously the heavyweight of the bunch, can supply massive amounts of traffic and has the most refined and useable interface of them all. The downside is that it’s getting increasingly more expensive to use (thus reducing profit margins even more) and add the fact that there seems to be ever more tyre kickers and / or fraud then I suspect we are paying massively over the top for the few genuine clicks that get through each day (i’m not implying that every click should convert, just that I’d like to know that the powers that be are ensuring I pay for as few fake clicks as possible). The positives of Google other than traffic and the general usability of the interface are numerous, fantastic reporting (although sometimes it takes a little too long to update clicks and impressions), the sheer ease of creating new Ads and the fact you can split test them with pure ease is just so immensely useful, plus many more…
Overall
Personally I like using Google although I wouldn’t say it’s Good it is certainly the best of the bunch and none of the rest come close, I don’t like they way the company uses its power with little regard for the people that helped get them to where they are today. Or the way in which it will happily claim that affiliate ads are of low quality and just get in the way so we will not show the ad - Well unless you pay us X amount more, then we will turn a blind eye for a while, infact until we think we can get away with asking for a bit more!
Score:8 / 10 - Start investing in ways to identify and reduce click fraud, stop penalising those that put the most money in your pockets and start helping them rather than working against them. Result Could do better!

Let me know what you think!

Mark

I’ve put this in the ‘affiliate marketing’ category because recent activities has me thinking quite a lot about whether most affiliates stay firmly within the ‘affiliate’ role (sending traffic to another business for them to close the deal - or not as the case is quite often), or whether they also Drop Ship or even buy items Wholesale and become a merchant. Having recently seen the view from the other side of the fence, I can say with hand on heart I wish I had become a merchant much sooner in my career.

I’ve been trying hard to make a go of affiliate marketing for about a year now, I have some reasonable sites that make some money, however, it is normally barely enough to cover the cost of my server, I’ve worked long and hard (as mentioned in a post below I’m often still found in my office after 18 hours of work), I’ve taught myself new skills such as mySQL and PHP and at times have been so stressed at the lack of sales that I’ve often wondered if it’s all worth it. Then I look at people who inspire me such as Keiron Donoghue and Keith Budden and realise what is possible if I could just find that magic formula, don’t ask me what it is as I am still searching myself!

So that brings me back to the main topic of this post, affiliate, merchant or both? Well as I said in the previous post I have now entered the merchant arena and I’m loving it! We have positive cash flow, we have stock, we have control and most of all we have a business! I cannot speak for other affiliates but personally I’ve never quite felt like a businessman, maybe it’s the lack of income, maybe it’s the lack of control once the visitor leaves my site, maybe it’s just me!

So what do you think, is it possible to be successful at being both an Affiliate and a Merchant or would you concentrate on just one or the other?

Mark

I have created a tool for pay per click (PPC) advertising that shuffles keywords and formats them into phrase / exact and broad matched keyphrases. It also allows you to set the maximum bid in Google and MSN, another neat feature (this was my main reason for creating the program) is that it will output a CSV file for you to bulk upload your keywords / keyphrases to MSN whilst maintaining formatting and will also add any negative keywords you have added.

I will be working on updates for the program on an ongoing basis and things in the pipeline are:
Ability to add dynamic text for keywords in MSN.
Ability to add a URL in Google Ads that is set in the keyword list.
plus one or two other ideas I have on the to-do list

This is part of the Affiliate Challenge competition I am taking part in, and the program Keyword Organiser only costs £10 currently, as new features are added the price may go up! so buy now and get all the updates I release for free forever!

One last thing I would like to mention, if you do buy it and find you would like a feature added, let me know and I will see what I can do… Now go and buy this MSN and Google Keyword tool

Mark.

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.